Why Men Get So Few Matches on Dating Apps [video]

I'm 31 and I find myself agreeing with a lot of what you wrote.

My experience and conclusions are very similar but different. I’m part of an increasingly forgotten subgeneration that graduated college and entered professional life in the Great Recession, amongst additional adversities. That makes me around 20 years your senior. I spent something like 4.5 years unemployed and seemingly unemployable. Now, I make a good six figure wage and my one and only goal is to never again experience anything like that. Doing that is all I could dream of for my life.

And I agree in many ways-men would be as picky. No one owes anyone anything like intimacy. Stuff is frustrating and leads to the incel misplacent of their frustrations. Etc.

Life and the universe have a very uncanny way of being especially cruel. So be kind to each other.

It's not hopeless. In fact, online dating is the most common path to finding a partner.

That said, you have to set yourself apart somehow. Different for every individual, and it takes a serious amount of effort. But it's not impossible, and it's not hopeless, and it's not pointless, and I sympathize and understand why you currently feel that it is.

If it doesn't make you uncomfortable, I'd like to know, how much siblings/cousins have you?

I have the hypothesis shifting demographics made it harder for people to leverage their inner social circle to bootstrap relationships. Say, if the world averaged 3 children/couple, across 2 generations that means each grandchildren will have on average two siblings and six cousins. That is a solid baseline of socialization, through their extended family people would know more people. With 2 children/couple those numbers would fall to 1 and 2, and with 1 child/couple, to 0 and 0.

People can compensate with other socialization sources, like school, but we and people we know there tend to move and drift away from each other. On the other hand, our relatives tend to stick in our lives, for better and worse.

I solved this problem with one year of lifting weights and dancing lessons. About 2hr/day 6day/week time commitment. It is not quick or easy, but it is simple and very effective.

When you have muscle, girls on the bus will come sit next to you and chat you up. They forgive you if you speak inelegantly. When you can dance your body language and posture will make people feel at ease. It was a strange experience for me as a nerd. Apps are a waste of time.

What worked for me was shaking things up greatly. I joined the Peace Corps, was forced to socialize with fellow volunteers, learn a new language, then daily interact with my new local colleagues, living in radically different surroundings. The combination pushed me out of my shell, gave me new confidence, helped me date attractive and interesting women, and led to a rewarding career and family life.

I am glad to be 45.

Human attraction has so many dimensions, but online dating reduces them all to a bunch of photoshopped pictures in one fell swoop.

I am an average guy (not ugly, but not handsome either, though I was fairly tall for the standards of my country in the 1990s), and most of my 'scores' could be traced towards an ability to make people laugh. Not everyone, of course, but "they say" that I have a dry sense of humor that is refreshing.

Someone else "scores" on kindness, cute goofiness, elegance, ability to play the guitar, nice smell, the ability to listen, inner energy or peace etc.

Nevertheless, you need real world conversations and events to deploy such "weapons". And in the world of 2023, where online apps tend to push out everything else, all those dimensions of attraction just go away.

No wonder that the dating market is becoming "skewed" by such development.

What does yourself out there mean? Basically that you have to work it like a job. You need to go out when to don’t feel like it, go do activities that maybe aren’t super interesting but have the right demographic. You also you have to sell yourself. It’s like working a sales position, you need to be starting conversations with strangers even though it feels weird, you need to be asking for numbers and following up dating is just another form of work. Read, do research, improve your product and try again, and again and again x1000. Also lower your standards in the beginning. if you are 22 and never been in a relationship you need to start somewhere and that would be with less beautiful women. Then if you keep practicing and building up skills you can date more attractive women.

> When you realise the girl on the other side has an abundance of men blowing up her phone with first messages, you realise it's hopeless.

The reality of online dating for women is that all you have to do is show up.

yes, you will get a TON of messages. You'll have to sort through them. we know this.

it's an entirely opposite experience for men. online dating is still geared towards separating them from money.

I hope to never have to deal with it again, honestly. it's depressing.

> The way to avoid this mess when applying for jobs is to build up a network and lean on it for new positions. I wonder if dating may have a similar alternative approach.

The analogue would be court colleagues/coworkers. But today it may be considered harassment.

I like this metaphor on a few levels; from an employer's perspective, a family is the same as a second job and so naturally they prefer unattached employees.

what was the point of this interaction? to make the site look like there were actually users?

or was she just scamming people?

nah

Careful. It's only one small inference to women being valuable, and a socio-biological explanation of why so many groups tended to protect women and the consequence for the power balance.

Just for the trigger happy: I'm not saying we should lock our women behind the kitchen counter in a modern society, but that roles are much, much older than that, and may have an evolutionary reason.

... like women are all special and interesting by virtue of being female? Most of humanity is bland and forgettable. Gender is hardly a factor there.

Or don't. Here's a TL;DR: It's a relatively small effect where men tend to go for women more attractive than they are, and women tend to go for men who have higher status and earnings than they do.

Certain circles like to misrepresent it as responsible for why so many men remain single, but in reality people tend to match with those close to them in social status and earnings, with just a bit of the bias remaining unexplained by wage inequality.