Okay, I think we’re talking past each other here. I’m absolutely not complaining; I’m in a very happy marriage with a woman who loves me and whom I love. I’m just following up on a request for a cite for someone else’s observation, and am not sure why we’re still even talking about it, so I’ll stop.
Sorry – I didn’t mean to say that you yourself were complaining about it!
In real-world spaces, you have an opportunity to get to know someone in a way you can’t with a dating app. Maybe Lurlene prefers a taller man, but 5’ 7" Chuck is cute, smart, and witty, so when he asks her out she decides to give him a chance. That’s just not going to happen on a dating app because the filter will keep them from matching.
Interesting article. It exposes the lie so many of us have been fed: everyone has inherent worth. Actually no. We are valued by others only insofar as we fulfill other people’s needs. That’s how the world works now and that’s how it has always worked. It’s the Universe’s way of separating the wheat from the chaff. ‘Incel’ might be a relatively new term but you can be sure such folks have existed since ancient times.
As a 5’4” man, I had quite a lot of experience in this area. Although my height was a disadvantage in both realms, I found it was worse online. The reason is that it’s easy to filter by height in dating apps, so I wouldn’t even be considered. Whereas in real life I could allow my personality to come through and some women, at least, were attracted.
Of course, that’s all theoretical now that I’ve been married almost 20 years.
interesting–that makes sense!
Lots of us short guys here! Hmmm.
Anyway I have a hypothesis.
I am suspecting that highly educated women, with a relative shortage of men to choose who are as highly educated to choose between, will pay more attention to other proxies of power. They will make fewer compromises on the overall combine of income and height when swiping on line for example.
I was going to say the same thing. Dating app filters mean many women won’t ever see your profile, but in real life you at least have a small chance 
. I think this is a general problem with online dating: people treat it like shopping for the model with all the features they want, rather than meeting a person and deciding if they like them enough to ask them on a date/agree to one.
I’m glad you were both able to find someone. Quite possibly so would today’s incels who complain about their height or whatever other disadvantage they suffer, if they didn’t meet each other on forums first and become bitter and hateful towards women.
Sure. Can’t we take it as given that we’re talking in generalities and don’t mean to say this applies to every single person? Besides, my point was wondering how much education in itself affects a person’s chance of staying married vs other factors affecting both, and your family is also an example of the latter.
Not sure what you mean by this?
Well, probably not around me. At least, not usually.
Plus which, I don’t think it works well even as a generality.
Huh?
Do you know who in my family stayed married and who got divorced and who didn’t get married in the first place, and what education each one had? I didn’t think I’d gone on about that on the boards; at least, not at enough length to draw such conclusions from. And I think any attempt to draw such conclusions even with that information would yield quite blurry results.
The general hypothesis is the men prefer to partner with a woman less powerful than they are, and that women prefer to partner with a man at least slightly more powerful than they are. These are not typically conscious processes. And they are not absolute rules. I’m focusing on the latter and recognizing that “powerful” is measured by multiple dimensions of proxies: education level; other evidence of above average intellect; job; income; wealth; height; athleticism; confidence … and likely more. No single proxy is the one that matters. It’s a combine score, essentially. Some do get higher weight than others to individuals. So as noted lack of height can be offset by greater income for the statistically average coupling otherwise.
A more highly educated woman will have less of a selection of men more educated than she is. So I hypothesize that other proxies such as height and income/wealth will be less subject to compromise than a woman who has a selection of men more highly educated than she is would.
The prediction would be that a highly educated woman who marries a man of lesser education is statistically more like to have that man be taller or wealthier than average instead. Those who partner with someone of equal or higher education level will have partners more average height and not as high of income.
During my late teens and twenties I had tremendous difficulty getting dates, and in some ways it was easier for me when I thought it was due to my looks. When I realized that wasn’t the problem, it made me more instead of less hopeless. I simply couldn’t read signals, which led me to ask out women who weren’t interested (although I thought they could be). Conversely, I never knew when someone was interested unless they said so directly. It made me such a bundle of nerves that I turned women off. I got lucky and found someone willing to let me know directly she was interested, and the interest turned out to be mutual. I’m no longer young, but I don’t know that I’d be any better off now if I were thrust back into singlehood.
Neither of our kids met their significant others on dating apps. Our son met his girlfriend of six years working on a project together in college, and our daughter and her girlfriend had been friends for several years when they started dating. Both are in their twenties.
I couldn’t either. A woman once asked me “How hard do I have to throw myself at you before you notice me?” I apologized for not saying anything earlier- but until that moment I had no clue she found me attractive let alone that she was flirting with me.
As I have said before, I met my beloved at a friend’s party. She was apparently sending me signals all night- things like indicating that I should sit next to her. I missed them all. I was putting on my coat when she spoke up and asked me a series of strange questions. Eventually, I said I wasn’t sure whether she was mocking me or if we should exchange phone numbers. She said it was the latter.
I met my beloved at a party as well. She asked if she could have a ride on my motorcycle the next day. I wasn’t sure she was serious, and hoped she wouldn’t lose interest after spending some time with me as several others had done. Nope, that was almost 30 years ago.
Mine is a much less impressive meet cute. Graduate school party and asked a cute girl to dance. She said no. Asked her also cute friend next. We are now married 40 years.
That’s no guarantee of success.
Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by “gone insane”.
To me, “gone insane” implies that their perception of the world no longer reconciles with reality. And I think that a lot of people’s perception of reality has been warped by too much time spent online or in the virtual would instead of the physical one. From what I could preview, that Atlantic article seems to agree with me.
What I think that means for young men and women is that they develop a lot of warped expectations for relationships. Particularly for young men who spend a lot of time in the “manosphere”.
This missed connection happened about 23 years ago.
There was a woman that I seemed to be getting along well with, we had seen each other at several parties with mutual friends. We both smoked, so we’d go out and smoke together, we seemed to have some good banter going and I thought we have good vibes.
We went out to smoke one night, and I worked up the courage to ask if she wanted to go out some time. She turned to me and said, “Do you want to fuck me?”
I said, “No! I just want to spend more time with you, get to know you better.”
She said, “So you are saying that you don’t want to fuck me?”
I replied with some random inarticulate syllables until she flicked her cigarette in my face and stormed inside.
While I was trying to figure out what happened, the host came out and asked me to leave, and had me go around the house instead of through. They were kind enough to retrieve my jacket for me.
I didn’t have any contact with most of that social group ever again.
Now, if you’ve already figured out the punchline to this story, you are much faster on the draw than I am. For me, it was fourteen years later when I reconnected with one of my friends from back then. That’s when I learned the other perspective. She had wanted to have sex with me, had been working up the courage herself to make a move, and was embarrassed and insulted when I rejected her. What I had taken as an accusation that I was overstepping her boundaries was actually an invitation to step further.
I took from this encounter entirely the wrong message, as I thought her offense was over me wanting to be more than friends, but it was actually over my conditioning that thinking that desiring sex made me a bad person combined with my laughable inaccuracy in reading signals. Obviously this caused me to be even more hesitant about reading signals in the future.
My current beloved I reconnected with a couple years ago. We went on a few dates a lifetime ago, but she was disappointed that I never seemed to make a move on her and she moved on to other things. What I meant as respect for her boundaries and consent, she took as disinterest. The last time I saw her in that previous life, she was in my house, had eaten my cooking, and said that she was tired. I told her that she should go home and get some rest. It was only much more recently that I found out that she was trying to hint that it wasn’t her bed she was looking to spend the night in. (I didn’t figure this out on my own, she told me.)
I am oblivious to “signals” and only understand actual words. It’s why my only intimate relationships have been with women in their 40’s who just say what they want, rather than hint at it and expect me to understand. I was a bit of cougar bait in my early 20’s but those were never relationships with long term prospects, as I didn’t have much in common with them. We had a bit of fun until they moved on to other things. But, at least they didn’t leave anything up to interpretation, I always knew exactly where I stood with them and what they wanted from me. And now that I actually do have a lot in common with a woman in her 40’s, it works out fairly well.
I suspect that there are also a lot of other young men in the same boat, not knowing how to express desire while maintaining boundaries and not knowing when a signal is someone showing interest or just being friendly. Failure is the norm, and all they learn from it is that they did something wrong, but not what. This causes them to second guess themselves. When they get frustrated and give voice to their difficulties or pain from their misunderstandings, they are generally mocked and derided as losers or incels. They are told that they already have it so good that they don’t have anything to complain about, that others are hurt worse so they don’t have a right to express their own pain. They are told all sorts of horrible things about themselves, claiming that they are their actual thoughts and motivations, and that just makes them feel even more misunderstood, making them even more insecure and isolated. The more they try to articulate their feelings, the more they are told to shut up. That’s dangerous, not just for them, but for everyone, as they are easily manipulated by people who are willing to say what they want to hear, by someone who is willing to make them feel heard and understood.
There really are no good male role models for modeling relationships and romance. The media only has terrible examples, every romance or rom-com is full of people doing terrible things and being rewarded for it, and then it ends with they guy getting the girl and living happily ever after, as though that’s the end of the journey, rather than the beginning.
They are confused and looking for answers and meaning in their lives. It’s a ripe picking for malevolent actors to prey on these insecure young men, as they are not welcome in the communities that they would like to be in, so they turn to the communities that will actually welcome them, which is where they end up following the likes of Andrew Tate.
I’m going to mention that the most advertising I have seen for Tate and their ilk are people putting down struggling men. A man will voice their pain or frustration, and they will be immediately told that they sound like an incel, that they actually hate women and just want them for sex and housework, and they should be listening to Tate. So, you know, they do what they are told to do and listen to Tate.
It may be a poison, but it’s a sweet poison, and it is given freely.
There are male role models for being a good person. You got men on Sesame Street, you have Mr. Rogers, you even have Tom Hanks and Keanu Reeves. They can model how to be a kind, compassionate, and respectful man, and that’s great, it’s what a lot of young men do look up to and want to be.
However, young men need role models for love, romance and dating, that is severely lacking. They have no one wholesome to look up to. If we know anything about a celebrity’s sexual activities, it is not because it is what should be modeled.
We need better male role models for romance. When people say that men need to be better, the only people that seem to really hear this message are the men who are struggling to get better, but don’t know how. The ones who seem to ignore the message are the ones who are doing just fine, and don’t think they need to do any better. But, they are exactly the ones who do need to step up, to give healthy validation to fears and pains without wallowing in them, to demonstrate healthy relationships, to help explain failures and miscommunications without invalidating their experience. If men are to be better, they need to lift up those who are struggling, rather than putting them down.
If the only people reaching out to these young men are those exhibiting and encouraging toxic traits, then that’s what young men are going to look up to.
Not saying I have the answers, but just writing them off as losers that don’t deserve to experience love in their lives is not only an act of cruelty that is horrible for them, but actually does cause damage to the rest of society as well. Personally, I act as an anti-role model for my nephew and his friends. They start getting into a negative mindset, and I just say, “I used to think that way.” And that straightens them out quickly. I’d love to role model more positive behaviors, but I don’t have the tools for that myself, all I can do is point to where the road they are taking will lead them.
Heh - it’s like the mirror image of the scene in Dave Barry’s Big Trouble where the male cop tries to hit on his female partner:
Monica sighed. “Walter,” she said, “do you want to have sex with me?”
Walter stopped in mid-chew and stared at Monica, trying to figure out if this was really happening, if Monica was going to let him take the shortcut straight to paradise, if he had somehow found the wormhole in the universe that guys had been seeking for aeons, the wormhole that would enable him to bypass all the talking talking talking and just do it. He thought hard about exactly how he would phrase his response to Monica’s question.
Finally, he said, “Yeah.”
“Well,” said Monica, “I don’t want to have sex with you.”
Walter stared at her. It had been a trick!
I meant families in general. Sorry, I should have been more clear. How someone is brought up, what kind of example their family sets them, is likely to affect both their education and chance of staying married - it doesn’t have to be via the characteristics you mentioned.
I think this is slightly incorrect. I don’t think men organically want a less powerful woman, I think they a) value other attributes more and so discount power in order
get a woman who is ‘better’ in those areas, and b) they know that women prefer more powerful men, and so don’t bother pursuing women who are more powerful than them. In other words, this matchup is primarily driven by women’s preferences. And IMO the same occurs in reverse with age, where the man being the older one in a relationship is primarily driven by men’s preference for younger women.
Absolutely. I would be very surprised if that was not true.
I’ve heard very similar stories before. I’ve seen men unfairly attacked and derided for complaining about their difficulties dating. Too many people seem to think if they have sympathy for the struggles of women, it’s impossible to have sympathy for the struggles of men; that the only option is to blame one side or the other. It’s horrible and counterproductive. I don’t understand why we have to set different groups against each other like this.
that’s like saying “cars are expensive” … well, some are, some aint … it depends on what you make out of it.
Ours was (17+ years ago) about $1.5-2k … nice ceremony with 10-15 family members and 15-20 friends - a fun and pleasant afternoon/evening for all. Of course it did not involve beaches in Hawaii or Bali or renting out the local Hyatt, so …
… AND I am not in the USA, so “expectations” might be different (not that I am the person necesarily inclined to meet expectations).
that strikes me as odd … you are short, yet you (implicitly) discriminate against short people?