Well…yes. I would like to have sex with your friend, if she wants. I thought I was pretty up front about that.
It’s been awhile since I’ve been in a room full of single people. But yeah, in any sized group some people will likely not be flirting with anyone for one reason or another (too shy, no one they are interested in, rather hang out with their friends, maybe starting a relationship, whatever). Some people will just be going around chatting up everyone. Some people will "couple off’. Some will get bored or frustrated or perhaps a bit too drunk and make an ass of themselves.
From what I’ve read and heard talking with friends who own bars, drinking and generally going out is significantly down among young people for various reasons. Online dating has become one of, if not the most popular ways to meet people. So what I wonder is if that is contributing to the “male inequality problem” in serval ways:
Before, you would form a social network where you would go to parties, bars, events, and other locations most likely with people of a similar background and interests. You would be in a smaller “room” of say 10-20 choices, most of which who already have some connection or context for being there. Now it’s shifted to an online model where everyone has near infinite “choices”. Sure you can filter on interests and preferences. But that just turns everyone into a set of stats, of which everyone is looking at the top 1%.
So where a woman might meet young me in a bar and find me funny, relatively good looking, well dressed, professional, good education, etc. these days she might not meet me at all because I’m only 5’11" and she’s filtering out for 6’.
Though they might know that she wants a long term relationship, possibly with a significant delay before sex, and think that you don’t. Or they might think there’s some other serious mismatch. Or they might think that you treated someone else badly.
I think that is an issue. In practice, people are very often attracted in person to people who don’t match the qualifications they’d give if asked to list what attracts them.
Yes. And i don’t think people really know, entirely, what they find attractive. This is why i think the best online dating strategy is to set up as many short, low-stakes coffee dates as your schedule allows, rather than trying to filter too aggressively online. Not that I’ve ever done online dating, but the people i know who’ve been successful checked out a lot of people, first.
When I was online dating way back in the day, I could spend 10 hours on a dating website in order to get a couple of women to respond via message. The problem wasn’t that I was too picky and refused to go out on dates with women who weren’t perfect, nor was I only choosing to reach out to perfect girls.
@Crafter_Man had the general dynamic correct. The men put out the vibes in a wide scatter pattern. The women receive vibes from tons of dudes, so they tend to be choosy.
Here’s a question I’d like to put out there, although I’m not sure there’s a definite answer. Is one gender or another more likely to blame themselves when they aren’t successful in the dating department? My suspicion is that men are more likely to blame others, although I reached the point where I strongly believed my lack of success with dating and relationships was due to my own shortcomings. At the same time I had people telling me that there were tons of women who would be glad to date me (my closest friends kind of got why I was striking out). That even happened during group therapy sessions. I realized that the women telling me how easy it should be for me to date were always in relationships themselves, so they didn’t have to worry about me asking them out. Are women more likely to blame themselves, or is there no correlation between gender and tendency to blame oneself?
I desperately want to know more. I can picture everything from the entire group standing uncomfortably apart from one another while staring blankly into space to the most unimaginable levels of raucous debauchery. Do tell.
Well, let me tell you. First, a little context. In the early nineties a whole bunch of new librarians were hired by the three New York City library systems (New York Public, Brooklyn Public, and Queensboro Public). It was a thirtieth birthday party for two librarians; I was friends with one and the future Ms. P was friends with both. It was mostly a bunch of twenty-something and thirty-something librarians who wanted to experience living in the big city. Pay was terrible, so everyone either lived in a tiny studio apartment or with roommates unless they were married. And urban public librarians are a different animal. We dealt with the characters you might see on the streets of New York on a daily basis. Imagine a score or more young librarians crammed into a back yard in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Most of the folks there were from the New York Public system, which covers Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island. There were a couple of people from both of the other two systems. I had struck up a conversation with a couple of other long haired guys, and we were standing next to the kegs. A twenty something librarian who worked in The Bronx had spotted me and wondered who I was. She wandered over, and one of the guys I’d been talking to introduced us. When she found out I rode a motorcycle she asked if she could have a ride. I was skeptical she’d actually take me up on it, so I said “sure, let me know when.” “What about tomorrow?” she replied. She wrote my number on a cigarette pack (she hasn’t smoked in decades now). That was in September 1995, and we were married the following August. Back to the party, it was pretty raucous. There wasn’t enough space for us to stand very far apart. We climbed up to the roof of the house at some point, where we got a great view of the Manhattan skyline. When my future beloved was about to climb the ladder I promised her I wouldn’t look up her skirt (she was wearing leggings, so I wouldn’t have seen anything).
I went to one of those back in 2002ish when the conference venue for a different conference I was attending simultaneously hosted an ALA meeting. IME, and I’ve heard this elsewhere too, partying librarians are a fairly rowdy bunch.
What I remember most about that party, though, was the stories from the front lines in the conflict between protecting civil liberties and the recently enacted PATRIOT Act greatly expanding federal agencies’ snooping powers for antiterrorism purposes. Meek little lady (mostly) librarians were having to tell these menacing agents in their intimidator sunglasses or whatever that no, sorry, we cannot share with you our library patrons’ borrowing histories, that’s private. They were so matter-of-fact about it too, pretty badass.
[ETA: yup, summer 2002. Migod, I’ve been oversharing random experiences on these boards for well over a quarter-century. Indeed, the internet never forgets.]
Interesting question. I can think of examples of both genders doing it to some degree. I would lean toward saying men do it more, but that’s just a vague impression.
If I might follow up this question, is it mostly positive or negative when people blame themselves? It’s possible that it could lead to positive changes in someone’s life. If lack of dating success causes someone to exercise, lose weight, dress better, become a better conversationalist, become a better listener, step out of their comfort zone for social situations, or a thousand other self improvements, is that necessarily a bad thing?
All the stuff about men following the techniques of pick-up artists, isn’t just about blaming themselves, but that they fall prey to such bad advice in how to improve. It’s not really the self-blame that’s the problem.
Blame is a difficult word about a difficult feature of human nature. Blame can be about determining who’s scapegoated and therefore who gets to be exonerated. Or it can be about dispassionate root cause analysis leading to corrective action.
Blaming others is pretty much always a losing game for you, because no matter how much you wish the world or humanity would change or just be different, it ain’t gonna cooperate in that. It and they are all just going to keep doing what they’re doing. If you want different results, only you by your different actions can obtain them. And most of us, me certainly included, really don’t want to hear that truth.
This then is the nub:
Once you’ve correctly placed the blame / responsibility where it belongs, on you, then you can
a) Wallow in self pity
b) Do abusive stuff to others in a misguided attempt to “win”
c) Change your [whatever] until it works for both you and others.
I’d say a is easier than b which is easier than c. At least for a hefty fraction of people male and female alike.
At age 30 I chose A to an extent, but it came with a sense of resignation and a goal of accepting that I wasn’t likely to attract anyone to the point they’d want a long term relationship with me. I had a career, I had friends, I had things I enjoyed doing. I started training for a marathon. I was still severely depressed. It was probably less than a month after I told a therapist I was giving up on finding a relationship (she was pretty concerned, and recommended I go on medication) that I met my future wife. I almost didn’t go to the party where we met, but reasoned that there would be tons of unattached women and a much smaller number of men there so I could possibly meet someone. It wouldn’t go anywhere, but why not? It’s gone 30 years so far.
I didn’t think I was blaming myself so much as taking responsibility for where I was and not blaming anyone else.
Or d) decide that it’s not worth it to pretend to be somebody else in order to get partnered, and stay single. Without snarling about it, and while recognizing that it’s legitimate for the other people not to want to try to turn themselves into somebody else either.
Some people have more potential partners than others. Some of those who have fewer good potential partners will never find one of that relatively small group, at least not while they’re single and somwhere within plausible age. This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault.
Of course, if the problem is something like‘doesn’t take enough showers’ or ‘treats potential partners like dirt’ or ‘refuses to do anything that’s useful to anybody’, that’s a different sort of issue; though the latter two categories may be difficult to fix.
This was my goal when I decided to give up on trying to find relationships. I always had a firm belief that anyone considering being in a relationship with me deserved to know who I really was. I always have tried my best to be kind to others, and keep myself healthy and clean. I know I’m a bit of an oddball, and that’s scared potential partners away. Friends who hadn’t know me long and coworkers I believe greatly overestimated the size of my potential partner pool. Now there were times I believed the size was virtually zero, which was also unrealistic. My inability to tell who was interested and who wasn’t without being told directly didn’t help. For instance, the friend whose party my wife and I met at was actually intersted in dating me, but I had no clue. We had been hanging out regularly as friends. I only heard after the fact. She was at our wedding, and we’re still friends.
You should have had no trouble attracting a woman…who would then demand you give up all those interests and activities and focus all your attention on her (turning you into exactly the sort of man she wouldn’t want to date)!
Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by “oddball” and “inability to tell who was interested”? Like do you think you might be autistic or something like that?
Sometimes women don’t overtly tell or show you that they are interested, same as men. Or sometimes they are just naturally friendly and flirty and has nothing to do with you,
Unfortunately, for men most of the time the expectation is for us to ask them out and take our chances.
I think maybe since I actually started dating in my teens, I never really worried “why won’t women date me”. But truth is I really don’t like dating. I don’t mean I don’t like hanging out with women doing stuff. I just find the process weird and tend to overthink everything. Should I ask for her number? How long do I wait to call? Where should we go? What should we do? When should I try to kiss her? How frequently do I need to call her? Are we exclusive? Hoe much of her BS should I endure before we have sex? Are we going to have sex? How do I get out of this?
Seconded. With a side of recognizing that single people are allowed to be happy, and you shouldn’t let the experience of missing out on one of the (potentially) great blessings of life permanently ruin all the other great blessings of life for you.
I do think that this attitude is often easier for single women to achieve than for single men, because of their different historical circumstances. Less than 180 years ago, Charlotte Bronte could write
The opportunity to choose and pursue a fulfilling education and career as a self-supporting, independent, respected person, and the societal “permission” to remain single without being automatically mocked as a contemptible failure, still feels somewhat new, at least to women GenX and older. (Rich women of leisure, as Jane Austen pointed out in Emma, have always had more options for a fulfilling single life. But if you were part of a socioeconomic class dependent on earned income, marriage was basically your only hope of any position of respect and authority. Non-wealthy old maids were either scraping by in solitary poverty, or following orders in an employer’s household, or dependent on (and subordinate to) some wealthier relative.)
So the silver lining of “alone forever” is maybe more apparent to single women than to single men. It wasn’t so long ago that the basic autonomy of being able to study what you chose, work at what you liked, live and travel on your own, choose your own friends, etc., was the norm for single men but considered inappropriate for single women. It’s hard to feel sulky or morose about singlehood when we think about what an unattainable dream an independent single female life would have seemed like to countless generations of women.
Oddball is mostly out of the ordinary interests and music tastes, which was more of an issue when I lived in Tennessee where I grew up than in New York where I moved in my very late twenties. I know that “inability to tell who was interested” is a trait associated with the autism spectrum, but it’s really the only trait I have (I head interests, or combinations thereof, that seemed odd to some, but not to the point of being obsessed). I’ve taken a couple of online tests and scored very low.
The asking for her number part left me frozen in terror, and it did not improve with time.
Yes indeed. And not only is that true, but I think it’s essential for any sort of successful reconciliation to accepting that one might not find a partner. Who, after all, wants to reconcile to being miserable all of their life?
There are advantages to being married (or otherwise partnered, though you won’t get all of them). There are quite a lot of them. And there are advantages to being single; quite a lot of those, too. If you are single and likely to stay that way, that’s going to work a lot better for you if you concentrate on the advantages of being single, and don’t spend too much time concentrating on the disadvantages. And I strongly suspect that if you’re partnered, you’re better off concentrating on the advantages of that, instead of on the disadvantages. I suspect that a lot of unhappy marriages and a lot of divorces happen because one or both partners keeps thinking of the advantages of singleness and the disadvantages of being partnered, instead of the other way around.
A suggestion you no longer need, but which might be useful for someone else: Offer her (him, them) yours instead.
I was remiss in my setup wherein I assumed, but did not say, that the rhetorical “you” has decided that the status quo was unhappy. You (thorny_locust) are totally right that there’s the additional option of deciding that your current state is good for you and you’re good with it. And that’s a hell of a lot healthier than wallowing in self-pity remaining miserable. Or being a jerk to others.
I’ve been through all those phases myself. Been a long and twisty road to get to here and now. Maybe I’ve finally learned to play this game to my and others’ satisfaction. Maybe.
I agree it might be useful for many people. It’s tricky to guess how it would have worked for, say, 28 year old me. I’m not sure that I would have been able to see the difference in the two approaches. That speaks to how broken I felt at the time rather than the usefulness of the suggestion, though. It also shows why my close friends felt frustrated with me sometimes, even though they stuck by me. They were also delighted to celebrate with me when Ms. P and I were married (one actually performed the ceremony, and her husband was my best man).
It’s a different kind of stress. As @P-man said, it’s rather forward to offer your phone number like that. It also means, if you’re the anxious type, you spend the next few days on pins and needles waiting for the phone to ring. And if she does call, she catches you off guard. I’m not usually at my most smooth and well-spoken when taken by surprise.
I was in the same boat as some of the rest of you, and for even longer. It’s not that there isn’t advice on how to meet someone and start dating, but sometimes there’s too much; be yourself, fake it 'til you make it, make an effort to find social activities, and you’ll find someone when you stop looking.
