[QUOTE=even sven]
In most of these theoretical cases, the “shy but otherwise decent-looking” guy is forty pounds overweight, showers every other day, and won’t date “fatties”. But the “shy but otherwise decent looking girl” is one of those “take off the glasses and lose the ponytail” jobbies. Well, yeah, of course their prospects are unequal. Take a look at most of the guys you know. Would they date girls with beer bellies like theirs?
[/QUOTE]
Wow, sven, I am sure there are cases of guys with unrealistic expectations, but there are also plenty of damaged-goods single moms who want Brad Pitt crossed with Warren Buffet. The broad brush is not helpful.
Yes, the OP also used a broad brush of a sort, but it was not such a put-down as the one you posit.
Without trying say who is a fat loser, etc., let me give you a personal example that supports the OP, sort of. When I started my job, I was fresh out of school, energetic, optimistic. I read a lot (no friends in a new city). I worked out about four nights a week at my all-night gym (no friends in a new city). I went home and ate chicken breasts and hard boiled eggs and wheatgrass shakes (part of the working out regimen, and living alone in a new city with no friends). I had what one calls a “spiritual life.” I was optimistic, considerate, patient, and always up for a social outing with anyone who (rarely) asked – including some kind of annoying or not-my-type people as to whom I bit the bullet and said, well, going to a String Cheese Incident concert or Kansas State basketball game can’t be that boring (these are not, to put it mildly, my true interests). If a girl asked if I was seeing anyone, I would truthfully respond, “No,” thinking that would make me more attractive because of the lack of complications. There was no danger of my dogging a girl’s footsteps, even due to my lack of friends, because I was working a fair amount (though not a crushing amount).
And I dated . . . 1.5 women in two and a half years.
It’s not that I wasn’t putting myself out there. I went out every time I could. With the few casual acquaintances I had, I went . . . not to anything you would call a “singles function,” but we/I certainly did not spurn any function at which single women would be present. But they certainly never wanted to seek me out, and when I sought them out, were politely lukewarm, for the most part.
Fast forward to now. The important thing I need to emphasize is that, unlike in the late '90s, when I was 155 pounds of reasonably well-hewn sinew, today I am something of a desk jockey with far less lean muscle. Several years of subsidized gorging and swilling have made me physically and morally (if gluttony is a sin as we’re told) more degenerate. Work has made me impatient and sometimes harried. My spiritual outlook is significantly more jaundiced and less charitable or idealistic. Life in my city and my business has left me jaundiced. I’m kind of cynical. Sometimes harsh. Certainly more impatient. More likely to decline an invitation to hang out with people I don’t have much in common with. In sum, it could be argued that I am an objectively worse and less attractive person than I used to be.
And . . . women in the past five years are an order of magnitude more interested in me than in the late 1990s. A few women have spontaneously approached me and tried to strike up conversations even when I’ve had/have a GF. Others, when I was single, responded at a fairly high rate to my conversation and invitations to join me on outings.
What’s changed (other than the negative changes I chronicle above)?
*I have male and female friends. A pretty fair number, and they are pretty cool or could be seen as having a decent level of status.
*At any given point over the past five years, I’ve been likely to be dating or seeing at least one woman.
*I make more money than I did 8 years ago.
*I’m more established in my career.
*I guess I have more confidence in the fact that if one woman doesn’t like me, another eventually will.
That’s it. So this is not the situation of the self-proclaimed nice guy bitching that some hypothetical jerk getting the girls. This is the case of the comparative jerk/slob who used to be a nice guy and who can objectively testify that he’s enjoyed a lot more female receptivity since getting a circle of friends/inamorata and other indicia of status, even at the same time some of his “inner qualities” or things that would seem to have made the old me a better friend/BF have deteriorated or gone sour.
None of this is a condemnation of women or a gripe (I’ve got things pretty good now, so the system works, right?). It is just testimony to the fact that I think the OP has some truth to what he’s saying.
You seem to be invested in insisting either that men and women have identical, commensurable problems, or that there is absolutely no basis for generalizing about “women’s approach” or “men’s approach” (even though you then fall back into positing a pattern of fat slob guys seeking swimsuit models, which is a generalization in itself). Women and men have, I think, generalizable, but distinct, patterns of behavior/misbehavior, biases, and expectations/preferences, in the dating marketplace. The one the OP posits on behalf of women seems not implausible to me.
