Yeah, that’s verbatim from the text, but I can see it reading funny. I think they’re saying for most of the population of woman, the rate of favorable swipes is about 5%. Why the carve out “the majority of women” is a little hazy, now that I read it again.
Ya beat me to it!
Women being more picky than men is well known and well established, and even has a quite obvious reason why: pregnancy. It’s quite predictable that women would develop both instincts and a subculture that leads them to be pickier when they are taking a bigger risk than the men are.
I’ve never used dating apps. But in my mind there is something inherently “unmanly” about the concept of just being able to “order” a date like you were ordering take-out on Grubhub. It seems very transactional and superficial and unlikely to facilitate forming anything like a real connection.
In my mind, the way you meet someone is you randomly encounter someone through the course of your day to day interactions. You muster up the balls to actually go over and introduce yourself and strike up a conversation. And then you have to go through a messy trial and error processes where you get to know each other and determine how much time you want to spend together, if any.
That’s what I thought, too, prior to using dating websites, but in practice, there are maybe 1% of people on those websites who will write very long, thought-out, highly detailed bios of themselves that let you quickly resonate with them and think, “Hey, I share a lot more in common with this person than with even many people I’d meet in daily encounters at church or in the neighborhood.”
Now, 1% may not sound like a lot. But when you scroll through several dozen or hundred profiles in a short time, that already means 5, 10, or 20 highly compatible people in a matter of days or weeks. I was pleasantly surprised.
I dunno. One of my sons met his wife the old fashioned way, while the other met his through an app. Both women are wonderful and none of the four act like they “settled” for whatever sandwich was on the menu.
How do you feel about being “set up” with someone via a mutual friend?
My daughter and all nieces and nephews who are married met their spouses online. I think for their generation it is a normal thing.
IMHO the major advantage of the dating apps is that you know everyone else is looking for a partner. In the offline world, that can be a tricky thing to determine, especially if you’re relying on “randomly encountering someone through the course of your day” as opposed to asking out an acquaintance of some sort. My guess is that relying on random encounters is probably a quick way to be labeled as creepy, especially for men. The main caveat is that there are probably two distinct groups on the dating apps, those looking for a relationship and those looking for casual sex, which can lead to mixed signals initially. That can be solved, however, by having separate apps for each group.
FWIW I met my wife on eharmony 16 years ago. Things have worked out well for us.
I wish I’d seen this thread when it first started. I don’t have as much time for the board as I used to, so I’ve been gradually catching up. I don’t want to post to it until I’ve read to the end. Maybe by next weekend.
I suppose my thoughts on that are at least when you get set up with someone in your social circle, you have to be cognizant of the potential consequences for your behavior. That is to say, you don’t want to get a reputation for being a jerk, womanizer, blowing people off, or any other negative behaviors. Online dating sites allow you to get away with sort of behavior because it’s so transactional. And I think that social media and the “digitization” of everything has enabled those behaviors on a variety of arenas because it makes everything easier and enables people to not have to deal with other people.
Which is sort of my point. Somehow most people managed to meet and date before the internet without being labeled as “creepy” (unless they actually were creepy). These days it seems like people are so uncomfortable interacting with other humans without a digital interface that they can’t help but be creepy.
As to creepy …
Yeah, I expect people are generally less IRL socially adept than before. So easy for a guy to inadvertantly (or uncaringly) drift into creeper territory.
A second, and IMO larger factor, is the change in women’s attitudes that they expect to go through their day not being talked up by random men. In 1960 they’d put up with it suffering in silence or maybe welcoming it depending on the particular woman and man involved. Now for many women it’s a blanket “No talking to me” zone.
Well, there was a whole lot more actual social-group IRL socializing than there seems to be these days. You went to social events hosted by people you knew or organizations you belonged to, and you met people that you were introduced to by a mutual acquaintance.
It has never been socially straightforward or non-problematic for two complete strangers to spontaneously make each other’s acquaintance, with an eye to a possible relationship, in a public place. Yes, throughout (most of) human history there have been some couples who have done that, but there have also been etiquette conventions that strongly discourage striking up acquaintance with strangers.
The establishment of some men’s expectation that they’re entitled to talk up random women without being frozen out as rude or creepy is a LOT more recent than 1960. Traditional etiquette has always been pretty categorical about it being intrusive for a strange man (or, to a somewhat lesser extent, a strange woman) to expect a “respectable” woman to converse with him in a social manner if they haven’t been properly introduced. That is, every “respectable” woman had a blanket “No talking to me” zone operating at all times in public places, except for people she was already acquainted with or had some kind of “roof-introduction” connection with (high school students at the same football game, for example, or singles at a singles-mingle event).
Sixties-era counterculture explicitly rejected a lot of those conventions as constraining and artificial, based on conscious idealism about being “natural” and not “uptight” and so on. But there were some people who took advantage of that to normalize the idea that a man is automatically entitled to at least a modicum of social attention and courtesy from any woman he feels like striking up a conversation with.
Hence the current widespread Catch-22 situation where a woman who won’t engage in conversation with a strange man gets scolded for being “rude” and “insulting” him by “assuming he’s a creep”, but if she does talk to him she gets accused of “leading him on” or “jerking him around” when she politely tries to get away from him.
Maybe we need to bring back the freezing “Sir, I do not know you” rejoinder, or its descendant, the chilly “I’m sorry, do I know you?”. But many people nowadays are so unused to the idea that trying to “scrape acquaintance” with a stranger in a public place is something of an impertinence in and of itself that they simply wouldn’t get the point.
Did they? I was always under the impression that historically our society was prudish and paranoid enough that it was basically impossible to speak to a non relative or spouse of the opposite sex without being considered “creepy” if you were man, or a “slut” if you were a woman. Because simply showing potential sexual interest in someone was considered immoral.
Besides the already mentioned rebellion in the 60s agaisnt that, I suspect that digital dating have ameliorated the lingering remnants of that issue by allowing people to meet without being physically close or alone (and thus, assumed to be either a rapist/murderer or a “slut”), while not being watched by the control freaks.
What hellscape did you grow up in?
I can’t speak for your impressions but there were certainly societal conventions for various interacts with people, including dating. Men had certain standards they were held to so as not to appear “ungentlemanly”.
America. Which has always been weird and oppressive when it comes to sex and gender. And yes, a “hellscape” to anyone not a sexually repressed, straight white Christian male.
Yet somehow men are still expected to be interested in fatherhood being all but forbidden in showing any interest in children they aren’t related to. 
And smaller families sizes mean fewer opportunities to be an uncle or big brother.
I wonder if this applies to certain professions more than others, or if being married or with a kid inoculates men somewhat from this paranoia. My husband is very good with kids, works with kids, frequently expresses interest in other people’s children and hasn’t received any negativity about it. He’s far more comfortable with children than I am. He even likes to hold babies. No thank you.
Yes, but all those conventions and standards were built around a baseline expectation that respectable people didn’t try to start conversations with complete strangers of the opposite sex, in the absence of any form of introduction or shared social environment.
According to those conventions, a woman simply saying “hello” to a male stranger in the street would indeed likely be assumed to be a prostitute (which is used as a plot device in the classic Dorothy Sayers 1933 murder mystery novel Murder Must Advertise, for example). And a man saying “hello” to a female stranger in the street would generally be assumed to be some kind of predator. It was not considered rude in either case for the person addressed to simply ignore the stranger who’d had the impertinence to address them.
(No, as I said, this didn’t always apply to people in an acknowledged shared social environment, such as guests at the same party or co-workers in the company cafeteria. And no, it didn’t apply to addressing strangers with remarks like “Help! Police!” or “Excuse me, madam, is this man annoying you?” Etc.)
Over the decades, those conventions relaxed considerably, but not entirely. It’s only within the last couple decades that significant numbers of men have started to assume that it’s socially permissible for a man to try to strike up a social conversation with a female total stranger, with no existing social connection between them whatsoever, in any public setting at all. And that if she responds by giving the male total stranger the cold shoulder, she’s the one being rude.
Personally, I’d recommend that men who wish to become acquainted with female strangers without a significant risk of appearing “ungentlemanly” should ditch that expectation of universal approachability. Seek out shared social environments where talking to your fellow participants is expected, and/or let friends and acquaintances introduce you to strangers, and/or outsource the introduction function to dating apps.
But just “going over and introducing yourself and striking up a conversation” with a female total stranger whom you “randomly encounter through the course of your day to day interactions”, without the excuse of any prior introduction or shared social environment in any form, has always carried a fairly high risk of outcomes where women get scared and men get shamed.