I met my wife at a fundraiser for the local public library. I used to go to a LOT of social events like that when I was single and looking. Most didn’t lead to any connections. But that one did! So you never know.
The counter to that is the constant messaging–at least from part of society–that women are not to be even potentially bothered in any way when out, whether it’s a cold pickup attempt or after spending time together with others. She’s at the gym to work out, not to be bothered. Same with any retail establishment. This is a Meetup for whatever activity, not a way to find a date with someone who likes the same things. And of course leave the one single woman who comes to game night alone, she’s not here for that and it’ll ruin the group. The bar or club is right out for what should be obvious reasons, you potential rapist. College and work are also out.
So to a number of men the dating apps are the only acceptable way to maybe find a date. Especially if you really do want to not bother someone in real life. Now, that may not be the actual reality, but it’s one pushed very heavily by a segment of society and especially online. So much dating advice sounds like the romantic equivalent of the “Old Economy Steve” meme that was popular a decade ago or so or similar financial advice, like just save up enough money for even a $10k down payment on a house by not going to Starbucks.
I mean, the gym and the retail establishment, sure. But a club or a cooking class or whatever where you are the same people repeatedly, and part of the goal is to socialize, is a different thing. Especially if you actually meet someone, as a fellow human being, before hitting on them.
This graph is aways going around on Twitter:
Apparently it comes from this (pre-pandemic) article:
I also found this one from after the pandemic, which not surprisingly says things have got even worse since then:
On dating specifically, I found this:
Maybe she’d seen your profile? 
But seriously, these are the kind of things that get you screened out on apps, which is why it’s important to be able to meet people in real life.
Can confirm I have seen this kind of messaging in the wild. And don’t even think about making friends with her first; that makes you a Nice Guy™ who believes he is owed sex for friendship.
A lot of this comes back to the inability to read signals - if you can tell whether the woman at the meet-up is interested, you can avoid harassing the ones who aren’t. But many men are unable to tell, and also many don’t care and would never dream of listening to advice like this in the first place. So everyone ends up unhappy.
Agreed, but I think thirty years ago people didn’t feel so trapped in the “virtual world”. A lot of guys nowadays, ISTM, really don’t think there is any viable path to a social life and relationship for them other than attracting a fellow user of an online dating service. And if the odds are against them on the apps, they just feel hopeless about their prospects in general.
Speaking of which…
What this is highlighting is the cognitive disconnect in a lot of guys’ minds between the concepts of “develop a social circle where you can get to know various people over time” and “acquire dating partners and potential relationship partners as quickly and efficiently as possible”.
Yes, if your only experience or expectation of “putting yourself out there” for possible dates or relationships is the online-shopping approach of dating apps, and you try to implement that same approach in real-life social situations, you’re apt to come across as creepy or too intense or outright scary.
The dating-app attitude is “All of us are here for the purpose of optimizing our chances of finding a compatible date, let’s interact with that in mind to see if we have a successful outcome.” Sure, a lot of people would like to put that into practice in real-life situations too, rather than just “aimlessly” interacting with a larger variety of people and “not getting anywhere” with their mission of date achievement.
But developing a real social circle, through which you might at some point meet and get to know somebody with whom you discover you have date/relationship potential, is a different process from the focused mission of date achievement. It means letting possible attractions emerge mutually over time, rather than prodding at every new acquaintanceship to see if it can be translated into dating. It means a lot of time “wasted” in pursuing activities and hanging out with people where the current dating potential often appears to be zero, just because you happen to like them for non-dating reasons.
If that seems too slow or frustrating or hopeless for some date-impatient individual, then yeah, they need to stick to the apps rather than opportunistically pestering chance acquaintances in the real world. But for those who are willing to treat social enjoyment as a goal in its own right, and dating and relationships as a possible occasional side effect, then real-world socializing is often worth it.
Once again, I am confused. I am genuinely unsure what you mean here.
IMHO, the real fundamental “problem” underlying young men’s frustration about dating is simply that there’s a lot less social pressure on women these days to be “chosen” by a man in order to have a fulfilling life.
Young people’s social lives don’t revolve obsessively about couples events like school dances, proms, theater dates, etc., the way they used to. A girl without dates is no longer so completely shut out from socializing, social status, fun activities, or personal achievement. An unmarried woman is no longer automatically a laughingstock and/or object of pity in her community.
The decline in women’s overall levels of desperation to gain social acceptance (not to mention financial stability) by becoming the dating/relationship/marriage partner of some man has undermined a very real practical advantage that men in general used to have in seeking dates.
Not surprisingly, a lot of men unthinkingly reacted to that development with a lot of understandable resentment, often expressed as hostility and contempt toward women or towards individual women in particular. This, also not surprisingly, just decreased women’s incentives to consider dating and relationships with men as socially necessary for themselves.
This large-scale shift is not something that individual men are ever going to be able to compensate for on an individual level, if you ask me. Women’s default assumptions that they really needed a date, or a boyfriend, or a husband, just to have a chance at a happy life, were an incredibly powerful motivator for openness to dating a wide variety of potential partners. That incentive has been steadily shrinking, and it isn’t coming back.
Sure, but that sort of “go somewhere and do things” advice is given as advice to the question of “how do I find someone to date?” And again, the message that DemonTree distilled fairly nicely of
I am no longer young nor am I interested in the game. Sure, I’d love to be in an actual good relationship. It’d be a nice change from the abusive one I was in for a decade. But I’m also not willing to go deal with all the bullshit that is dating. So now my social circles are mainly male, with a mix of single and married guys with and without kids. Not great for trying to find a date and that’s fine with me. If a woman is ever interested in me (and that ain’t likely these days) she can make the first move. I’ve mostly made peace with the fact that I’ll probably never have what I really wanted and am not out to try to somehow have it happen now.
But that’s not how I was 20 years ago. As frustrated as I was trying to find someone then, I can’t imagine how shitty I’d feel trying to find a relationship in how I often see the current environment described.
Agreed, that advice as an answer to that question is bad advice. It’s encouraging men to treat their everyday interactions from the viewpoint of date-shopping.
The societal-level changes that can help make dating/relationships with men more appealing to women, on the other hand, could be pretty significant in their impact (again, if you ask me). But they’re probably all going to be hard to achieve.
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Make interacting socially with men less risky. Without getting into a debate about what does or doesn’t constitute “rape culture”, I think it’s safe to say that there’s still too high a level of social acceptance of intimidation or harassment of women by men (at least by “high-status” men). If men as a group (and women as well) are more assertive about not tolerating that behavior, it will lower the stakes for women in their social lives.
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Make interacting socially with men less burdensome. There’s still an awful lot of sexist exclusion in a lot of environments (online gaming?), and the default level of sexism in random people’s attitudes is pretty high. There’s also a lot of opportunistic harassment and demands for attention that women get dumped on them routinely. It’s easy to see why a lot of women figure they’re better off just not bothering.
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Make partnership and family relationships with men more supportive. This situation isn’t the fault of any of the many individual men who work very hard at being equal partners. But, sad fact, default levels of sexist expectations and gender stereotypes in domestic and family situations are also pretty high, on average. A majority of women with male partners are still expected to do more of the household and childcare work of the home than their partners do. There are also persistent stereotypes of the “head of the household”, and prioritizing men’s needs over women’s, that are burdensome to a lot of women.
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Make having sex with men less stigmatized. The return and intensification of “slut-shaming”, after a brief and far from universal cultural shift around the 1970s endorsing “sexual liberation” and what we now call sex-positivity, was a bad strategic error from the point of view of men who want women to be willing to have sex with them. Slut-shaming used to be part of a pretty effective social strategy for controlling women’s sexuality, but it’s not going to work if women have the liberty and autonomy to decide that under those circumstances, they’re better off just not having sex at all.
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Make having sex with men more fun. There are a whole lot of guys out there who are good and caring lovers, natch, but let’s just say that they’re not getting the societal reinforcement that they deserve. Stereotypical “masculinity points” are still more readily awarded for success in “getting women” than for success in making women happy.
Of course, this is not to blame men in general for the existence of longstanding societal sexism, or to say that men’s dating woes are somehow “their own fault”, or to imply that men could easily fix these issues if they would just bother to try, or to claim that there aren’t also many other important factors affecting people’s perceptions of dating and relationships nowadays. These are sensitive subjects, and I’m not pointing fingers at anyone or any group in particular.
But I am pointing fingers at some specific sociocultural facts that persist as artifacts of the long history of patriarchy—a system that both men and women have created and maintained over millennia, and for which neither men nor women nowadays are individually to blame—which IMHO are significantly contributing to the difficulties of dating these days.
I agree completely with this post. Slut shaming and the double standard (men who have sex with a lot of women are praised as studs. Women who have sex with a lot of men are condemned as sluts) never made sense to me.
It makes sense if you view women as a piece of property to be claimed as some untouched virginal creature that will provide you with offspring and tend to your needs.
Or (as I’ve seen) your some frustrated guy whose pissed off because she’s having sex with a lot of men and he’s not one of them.
I think a lot of problems in general can be alleviated somewhat if people “just bother to try”. I think a lot of the recent problems people are having with dating come from an adversarial view of the opposite sex.
To paraphrase the movie Hitch, no woman is going around saying “I don’t want to meet an interesting, thoughtful man I can form a relationship with.”
True.
But it does seem many of them are saying “I don’t want to go through the vast pile of dross interactions with dross men to find that one nugget. Y’all just leave me alone. Period.”
Right. Things like a game club or a LARP etc are meant to be social events. Go there, make a friend- it is always good to have another friend- and then maybe that friend will turn out to be a special someone.
I was friends with every one of my relationships first.
So, I disagree.
Classy.
As few as there may be.
Who would want a relationship with Alfred Hitchcock? He was the worst. The absolute rock-bottom sub human FREAK.
Yup. They don’t have enough offline social life for it to be a viable way of meeting someone, and total lack of interest in them on the apps has discouraged them from even trying.
I’ve often thought that this kind of dating advice should come with the caveat that you should only do things that you will enjoy or will be good for you. Go to the gym to become healthier and feel better about yourself, and if it attracts more potential partners, that’s a side benefit. Work harder and get promoted so you can have a better job; go to meet-up groups because it’s something you might be interested in; make friends so you can have a better social life. Seems to me this mindset would lead to a healthier and more open attitude, and less bitterness if these things don’t result in finding a partner.
Maybe so. I think most people do want a relationship, but this sort of attitude is common:
And this:
It’s not that people don’t want relationships, the problem is market failure.
Maybe social pressure on women in the past stopped them from simply giving up the difficult search (and limited availability of porn and lack of fun distractions like videogames did the same for men). But I think dating really has become harder due to social isolation. And the apps aren’t designed to help people find long term relationships, because they would lose their customers. They want people, especially men, to keep coming back as long as possible. That’s why they have all been enshittified in the last decade or two.
It makes perfect sense when you realize that sex & access to women has historically been treated as a commodity. Browbeating women into having less sex is a way of raising the price by lowering the supply. It’s the same reason why historically masturbation and pornography have been condemned, they cut into the market. And it’s also why so much of the pressure for women to not have sex has come from other women.
Of course it’s oppressive and makes life worse for all the people who don’t want to treat sex as a commodity, but the people who do such things don’t care.