Sue Arnold: Where are the men who want to get married?

This is the inevitable result, I suppose, of girls now in their 20s agreeing to become shag buddies - my daughter's expression not mine - rather than permanent girlfriends or even (this is a long shot) wives.

It's only uncheery, ominous and depressing, of course, for women old-fashioned enough to still want a monogamous relationship with a few kids to show for it and, as the report suggests, this is not the immediate goal of most young women in Britain today. Then again, they may just be putting a brave face on things, having discovered they've been lumbered with a generation of young men who just don't want to settle down.

The truth is that young men never did want that sort of responsibility. It was society that forced them into it, and now society is preoccupied with far more important things than stable relationships and children - things like supporting West Ham and playing video games.

The key word is young, with the goalposts of youth getting moved further forward every year. A generation ago a woman in her 40s was reckoned to be middle aged. Now 40 is when a successful career woman decides it's time to have a baby.

"That's when the trouble starts," said my Harley Street doctor friend. "They come to me weeping because they aren't getting pregnant, so we go through the whole IVF thing and eventually they have the baby and then a year later they come to me weeping because they can't cope with having a baby at 40. They'd rather be back in charge of a multinational corporation."

Youth is even more elastic for men but not if they're saddled with permanent appendages like a wife and children. Unlike us, men don't have a biological clock. They have role models, usually sporting role models. That's why you see old men with senior citizens' bus passes wearing jeans and trainers and baseball caps. If they're so damned athletic why are they taking the bus at all?

But it's the footloose and fancy free Hugh Grant role model that so many men aspire to these days, which is proving to be the most insidious for women with nesting instincts. And let's face it, despite everything you may hear to the contrary, even from their own mouths, most women are Bridget Joneses at heart.

So where does a young woman go to find a man who wants to marry her if there's nothing doing here? China, that's where. They're 100 million women short in China thanks to the ban on families having more than one child and everyone wanting a boy. All the girl children were chucked into wells.

The good news in the wake of that depressing report from the Office of National Statistics is that right now there are at least 50 million Chinese men of marriageable age desperate for wives.

I mentioned this to Cathy, a friend of my daughter's, whose boyfriend has just dumped her for a younger model. Cathy is 23. Chinese men are too small, she said. Not all of them, I said. Look at karate fighters like Bruce Lee and those dishy blokes in Crouching Tiger. Chinese men are too fierce, said Cathy. She was beginning to sound like Goldilocks assessing the three bears' chairs. It was only when I reminded her that a lot of young men in China are incredibly wealthy, being single children and having all the spare money from two parents and four grandparents lavished on them, that she began to look interested.

It's perfectly true. I met a businessman who's just come back from China where he'd been promoting a fabulous new range of mobile phones. The other three cities he had targeted were New York, London and Paris. There was more disposable wealth among the young generation in Shanghai, he said, than in any other city he'd visited.

For those who don't speak Cantonese the next best place is the Australian outback. There are more single men on sheep stations in Australia dreaming of wives than there are toys in the Beckham nursery. A Melbourne travel agent is running tours especially designed for women fed up with vain, irresponsible urban poseurs. You'd better hurry, though - stocks are running low.