Men, where have you gone? Please come back
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Obviously there's a huge amount of nuance in approaching another person. OTOH, I certainly know men who simply stay away from women - because "that's the best possible outcome anyway, and the least painful way of reaching it".
More prudent and effective would be to approach a group, chat with them, and build a rapport. Then see where things go.
Even more prudent would be to not be so utterly pathetic and desperate, and instead just focus on doing things that bring you fulfillment. And then meet people who also do those things, some of who you will just click with. And perhaps even romantically. There's no "approach anxiety" that way because there's no "approach" at all! Just live an authentic, contented life - that's what's actually attractive to people.
The problem is that most people do not live an authentic life. But there's nothing stopping them from starting today and endless options for it. But keep "dating" out of your mind - just go and connect with people, develop interests, skills, self confidence etc
The main reason for my comment - though there's plenty more - is that a 38yr old and 22 yr old are literally a generation, and hopefully (for the older person's sake) immense life experience and maturity levels, apart.
I'm late 30s and couldn't possibly fathom being in a fulfilling relationship with a 22 year old - unless I was only interested in her as an object to be enjoyed.
That this guy had interest in her says to me that he's woefully misguided/underdeveloped. And she/the "defenders" could surely see that as well.
This is compounded by just cold approaching her in public. If they happened to meet through some common activity and got to know each other and hit it off - which is how normal people go about such things - it would be a different story.
I feel sorry for the guy, and all those here who are defending him.
And, moreover, if he already knew her, he should have been able it intuit a) if she was interested and b) what her character is like - is she the sort to try to actively shame people.
I really hope your son does deep introspection as a result of all of this, rather than blaming her, women, or an entire generation.
I know that it's a different culture, but in my country (South America one), people would not see that age difference with good eyes. I'm not sure about public shaming (assholes are not a new thing, though), but I guarantee you that people would be weirded out by a guy almost in his 40s approaching a woman with half his age, and I live in a mostly "open" country in that regard.
It's not necessarily about the age gap, but her being younger than 25, at least here where I live.
I can't speak to countries outside America. I'm sure there are a wide range of cultural norms across the globe. I recommended my son date women his own age and he agrees. He's thought about it and now sees he got older without updating his preferences for women. Now he realizes that a 22 year old woman is too young for him.
The real question is, why do you care? What happened to not shaming people for their personal sexual and romantic choices?
One thing I've noticed--there are two types of people who get upset at older men dating younger women: young single men and old single women. It's almost as if the criticism is thinly-veiled jealousy, rather than any sort of principled critique.
Moreover, at no point did you consider HER in your comment - do you think a 22yr old wants some 38 year old (of any sort) approaching her?
Ps I'm literally a late 30s, contendedly-single man - for personal reasons, not because of "how women are these days". If he was my friend (and someone so pathetic never would be), I'd have rapidly intervened as well, or admonished him when i heard about it. And then, tried to help him sort his life out.
It’s interesting that you’re in your late 30s, because you sound like the same kind of moral enforcer who publicly humiliated my son. Not protective. Performative.
You didn't ask whether the woman was harmed. You didn't ask what really happened between two people who knew each other. You rushed to frame a man who simply expressed interest as “pathetic” and “deluded.” That’s not feminism. That’s ritual purification through male scapegoating.
This is all just a verbose way of saying 'it makes me feel icky'. Verbalize your issue with it, or keep your feelings to yourself. Lots of things make me feel icky, and I'm quite certain you'd call me mean things for many of them. Difference is, I'm not so self-obsessed as to think my personal disgust should matter to anyone other than me.
>Moreover, at no point did you consider HER in your comment - do you think a 22yr old wants some 38 year old (of any sort) approaching her?
She says, 'sorry, not interested', and moves on. It's not a big deal. Walking up to a person and asking them out doesn't require a person's consent, nor is it some terribly traumatic thing. In certain cases, it can be a minor faux pas, eg if her body language indicated she didn't want him to approach her, but it's still not a big deal so long as when she rejects him, he leaves her alone.
I didn't consider her in my comment because we know literally nothing about her other than her age and sex, and there's no reason to assume from those details alone that she wouldn't be open to going on a date with him. I could imagine it being uncomfortable for her, but that's not something anyone can know in advance (you do realize there are plenty of young women who date significantly older guys, right? it's not the norm, but it's also not exactly rare), and there's nothing so outrageous about asking a woman out that a person needs to avoid it in order to cater to the portion of women who would be uncomfortable with it. I am uncomfortable with lots of interactions I have, but that doesn't mean the other party is doing anything wrong. In fact, I've been uncomfortable being asked out before, by people who I believed should realize I wouldn't be interested in them -- but again, that doesn't mean they did anything wrong. This all has the air of nobility taking offense that a commoner would dare to speak to them.
>And then, tried to help him sort his life out.
Respectfully, a single almost-40 y/o man isn't in a position to help anyone sort their life out, particularly not one who gets upset over a grown man asking out a grown woman.
Second. Reading a eulogy for late-stage hook-up culture written by someone old enough to be by mother is awkward.
Worst of all, and I hate be crude, but she has to romanticize, I'm so sorry, I hate to say it...getting piped and objectified. And that somehow there is a subtle nobility to this and that men—ostensibly her age and possibly younger—in spite of all the nonsense taking place in the world should chase more booty.
She'd be better off packaging her ChatGPT prompts as a Lena Dunham Agent.
But I completely agree with you. She sounds like a cougar. And, worse, apparently has no ability for introspection - for herself or her collective gender.
I'm not saying that she or women are "the problem" in this story, but surely the question must be raised. Eg "ladies, do we have a part to play in this disappearance of men?"
As if they were afraid of talking.
Most of them only want dinner and taxi for free and have three pics for insta: one of the dinner, one of the dessert and one of the fool paying.
I met my girlfriend at a metro station just like that, unprepared, both with empty smartphones, we exchanged the numbers oldschool, on napkins.
Just avoid any situation that looks like "dating" - too many rules, expectations and pretexts. Too much lying and deceptions.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (Jane Austin, 1813) Vs. modern capitalism has, for most American men, optimized away any chance of enjoying basic financial security. To paraphrase Burma Shave - don't expect them to put their chins out there, if they feel hopeless about affording the ring and the flat.
Between older-style advertising, the web, and smart phones, modern capitalism's Borg has gotten incredibly good at optimizing human behavior for its own profit. Men having quality relationships with women is not very profitable for the Borg.
It ain't just men. Over the past decade, especially during the COVID mess, many of the women I know decided to seriously cut back their social engagement - "to take better care of myself" and other phrases.
(Yes, I know the NYT's "Modern Love" series is far more poetic than analytical.)
Not so much anymore.
OTOH: I know a fair number of older women. From their PoV, trying to "date" in the past couple decades or so has also gone a long, long way downhill.
Notice the excessive use of the em dash throughout the article combined with the sycophantic contrasts ChatGPT loves to use so much:
"It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation — clean, fast and frictionless."
A sad state of affairs if the NYT is letting AI-slop through.
https://www.nightwater.email/em-dash-ai/
I do dread the wave of AI slop coming our way. But honestly what I dread even more is the comments that’s going to second guess every other article and comment, just because they use some character or style that people have decided is a sign of being AI generated. That’s gonna get tedious real fast.
Additionally, the observation about AI using dashes really only applies (if it applies at all) to informal text conversation, not published articles. Here's a random NYT article from 2014 that uses 4 em-dashes within the first 3 paragraphs. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/fashion/the-year-of-taylo...
It seems like everyone watched some video essay about how em-dashes are a sure sign of AI, and they're just parroting it without question. The thing that apparently goes over people's heads is that the reason AI tends to use a lot of em-dashes is because the text in their training data uses a lot of em-dashes, and the training data is largely published articles and books, so it's a terrible heuristic for whether a published article or book was written using AI.
The thing that actually is somewhat more telling is that many people will use hyphens instead of dashes, eg on a computer, I typically type '--' instead of an em-dash, partly because my xcompose setup is inconsistent, partly because I write most of my text in editors that use monospaced fonts and the distinction between -, – , and — is extremely subtle in most fixed-width fonts, for obvious reasons. But on macs and many phones, as well as in google docs and similar, by default a hyphen will be autocorrected to an en- or em-dash depending on context, so it's not really a tell that the entire thing was written with AI, just that there was possibly non-human involvement. But also, a lot of people actually just know how to type and use dashes. It's not really that hard.
> No shrinking. No waiting. No apologizing.
> slowness, curiosity, accountability
> Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.
> It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation.