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Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

The real culprit isn’t porn, it is mainly the change in societal expectations and the ease of changing your baseline expectations. Our relationships have become extremely disposable. You are one Instagram DM away from moving onto the next one. Dating websites and apps largely have the same problems.

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> You are one Instagram DM away from moving onto the next one.

Is this reality for the HN audience?

Hyperbolic, but yeah.

The HN audience is probably all mega-genius super chads

likely richer than average, though...

I'd bet that how much money you have (beyond a low bar of "enough") matters a lot less for the American dating pool than being able to make somebody laugh.

One hypothesis of a contributor to falling marriage rates is that as women's income potential has risen there's still a standard (whether cultural or innate) for them to marry "up" economically. Therefore, there's a growing demographic shortage of economically attractive male partners in the U.S. marriage market.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12603

To me a rather more reasonable take than "women are coached or born to flock to money" is "the world is going to hell, economic precarity is making it scarier to tie two people to a particular geography for work, and the future looks grim enough that having kids is probably a bad idea, so why get married?".

My priors probably differ from yours, though.

Is HN audience anyhow different?

This is the reality of dating in 2022. It doesn't mean you're the one in control, however, as this holds true if you're the one being dumped too.

The HN age demographic seems older than most online communities.

If they aren't using apps for quick thrills, they are moving to the Villages and using an upside-down pineapple as an ironic bat signal for some fruitless copulation.

Even as a mid-30s male HN reader I've been able to get another relationship months after my previous one failed. I'm sick of it, though. I don't want to lose this one. I didn't want to lose the last one either.

IMO this is a different issue. If you change your partner say every week it doesnt mean that you have less sex. Also in my (limited) experience the "swinger" type people who constantly cheat (=more sex) or just have one night relationships (=more sex) are a small subset of the population.

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