For Japan’s ‘Stranded Singles’, Virtual Love Beats the Real Thing

For Japan’s ‘Stranded Singles’, Virtual Love Beats the Real Thing

(Link): For Japan’s ‘Stranded Singles’, Virtual Love Beats the Real Thing

Excerpts:

Multimillion-pound industry caters for young people enamoured of fictional computer characters

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Japan’s apparently waning interest in true love is creating not just a marriage crisis but a relationship crisis, leading young people to forgo finding a partner and resort to falling for fictional characters in online and video games.

New figures show that more than 70% of unmarried Japanese men and 75% of women have never had any sexual experience by the time they reach 20, though that drops to almost 50% for each gender by the time they reach 25.

According to Professor Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist at Chuo University in Tokyo, who has coined the phrase “stranded singles” for the phenomenon, the rise in virginity rates is matched by a rise in the lack of interest in having any kind of “real” relationship.