Despite all others blaming it on entertainment, porn, alcohol, working etc, I blame online dating.
The bar and amount of work needed to get into relationship (I'm not into casual sex) is just too high for great amount of people.
The bar and amount of work needed to get into relationship (I'm not into casual sex) is just too high for great amount of people.
Outside of online dating where are you even supposed to meet women now? I see women saying all the time they don't want to be approached in public. COVID decimated my already fairly meager pool of friends that I see regularly so opportunities to meet people through friends are few and far between. On top of that most women near my age (mid 30s) are already in long term relationships. At this point I've mostly given up, now I'm trying to accept that I'll likely spend the rest of my life alone. It sucks.
I would be careful with letting a few anecdotes from a minority of women drive your behavior so much. There's nothing wrong with approaching people in public. Especially if you go to eg a bar, many women will be open to having conversations. I met my current partner this very way.
Thanks, you've exactly described what I'm feeling.
It is easier to assume that it's everyone's fault rather than your own, but I found that I did a lot better (not just romantically but--well--everywhere) when I worked on having reasons to like myself before I wanted other people to. The people who go on about "the top few percent of men" are most frequently so bitter that it can be detected from space, and that's a them problem. It was, for a while, a me problem. It requires concerted effort and desire to unscrew your head and to make yourself somebody you like, but it is doable. Therapy helps. So do honest friends who aren't in the same shitty boat you're in.
I am not fit, I am affluent but not rich, but I try to be decent and patient and kind (which is different from being needy), and I do pretty well for myself. Saying "just do X" would be lying because of the "just" part, but--you can do okay for yourself too. You probably have to work at it some.
How is it? Like, okay, what's the alternative? I genuinely don't understand the criticism beyond "well, self-described low-status men are getting passed over because people have options." Should they not be getting passed over? Should people be taking one for the team for these self-described low-status men and dating them despite themselves? There have always been lonely people, and some so for good reasons and some for not. I am not sure that there's a way to substantiate that there are proportionally more of the latter group now or that dating apps etc. are accentuating it for this population.
These apps do suck, don't get me wrong--they're gacha games, and they're structured like it--but the mode of criticism matters. As near as I can tell, the It's A Wonderful Life of this is "nothing", not "something theoretically better for self-described low-status men". It's not like people would be going to church to meet and then obligatorily marry Goody Marshall's cousin's son were it not for Tinder.
The criticism is similar in nature to the criticism of Twitter and Facebook. These apps play to and encourage the worst side of humans in the way that their social dynamics are designed, which distorts relations between people for the worse.
In the case of dating apps, it's because the "first meeting" is viewing someone's curated digital profile instead of getting to know their full self in the real world, they strongly encourage selection based on trivialities like height, hip to waist ratio, income and other signals. You also encourage the same narcissistic performance games that Instagram encourages. It's also the sheer deluge of profiles. Like, our dopamine system isn't designed for that, and nor is it a fully free choice when the app has exploited that evolved system to hook users. And what's going to be the impact of designing a system that makes it easy for people to self select into opposing political tribes?
Of course most of this stuff happened to an extent 15 years ago too. But as with Facebook and their tendency to stoke outrage and division, the problem is how the app has turbocharged our worse tendencies while also creating dilemma like incentives that make it tricky to opt out from.
My point about low status men is that they often aren't bad mates. They're low status through the prism of hyper gamified dating apps that magnify the importance of trivialities. There's no question that there's people who've had it worse in this regard in the pre-dating app era (various low-caste/untouchables types in different societies), my point isn't that we are at rock bottom, just that dating apps are a pretty large step in the wrong direction.
To that end, I think these are awful, but perhaps not the darkest timeline.
You seem to miss that outcomes are not only getting worse for men.
Very much this.
Where I am in SF - it’s purgatory. Even when I change to NYC - it’s incredibly difficult. The main reason? So much choice for the women. Why date sideways or down when it seems like you could always date up? There’s endless options available - whether they’ll stick around… not likely.
Or only specific to these apps? I'd like to see the documentation on the "well-documented asymmetry" to believe otherwise, because that's not what I observed.
I am not saying this as sour grapes. I have had sex with dozens of women from Tinder, putting me in the top success percentiles of male users. The reality for average men online is extremely bleak. Denying this, giving advice to "like yourself" or to do therapy, or the ever common "you have to be happy alone first", are entirely fabricated coping mechanisms.
If you are even getting a handful of dates from the app from which to test your personality theories, you never had the problem at all.