I sincerely believe that I am a respectful, reasonably attractive, healthy, financially successful and emotionally mature person.
I found dating so hopelessly difficult in America, that I decided to literally learn another language and relocate to another country. I felt like I had no future in America because of that. The difference where I am now is night and day. I have had to decline more dates and advances, which never happened before. Which I feel confirms my belief in the toxicity of dating in America.
In America, I had many women who were my close friends. They would regularly initiate conversations, share personal details of their life, and even stay at my home some days. In fact most of my friends were women. Although I have introspected on this greatly, and certainly have grown, I believe this is additional evidence that, perhaps, the problem is not me but the environment.
If you have many women as friends you are doing something good and bad at the same time. The good is that you can meet women and can interact with them and can get them to trust you. The bad is that you somehow give off all the wrong signals.
Then you go abroad and you think the women are different, but they aren't. I have lived in three countries. You just have a higher value as an American man abroad. Ironically, this might result in you partnering up with a more superficial woman.
You should always strive to maximize your value in the dating market - any other strategy is self-defeating (note that you can settle after maximizing - that is totally allowed). That means you should try to meet women doing activities you excel at (relative to other people), demonstrating leadership qualities (giving talks at conferences, for ex.) or in GP's case, moving abroad. I'm not sure how the people you attract by doing these things are any more superficial than the rest; attraction to status-displaying qualities like this is built into the human genetics and goes way beyond intellectualization.
Basically we think that we are advanced apes, but in practice we're really very fancy peacocks with brains :) Note that social status/leadership quality is actually more important than income (there's lots of anecdotal data that women would prefer a doctor over an engineer making the same income, because of social connotations).
Women have plenty of ways of determining whether someone is genuine or not.
Some of the things have nothing to do with you whatsoever; this advice is merely about increasing the probabilities (i.e. card-counting in blackjack, if you prefer). A man living in NYC will have a better chance of finding love than a man in San Francisco purely based on the city that they live in - both could be very genuine people. The only thing different between the two is the ratio of men to women in the city.
We must remember not to attach emotional judgements to statistics.
Ratio of men to women (age 25-45) to save you a click:
Seattle: 1.5
San Francisco: 1.2
New York: 1.0
Chicago: 1.0
--------
How those statistics correspond to anecdotal stories:
"First off, to say that this is not an apple to big apple comparison is an understatement - it's comparing an apple to a bushel of apples. Add in the east bay, and NYC is only about 8 times larger then SF.
So, even without the gender skew, there are just a lot more women in NYC, and a lot more types of women. NYC is far far far more diverse on every axis / scale. There are also a lot more men, but since the population is way less self selected and homogeneous then SF, being a tech guy who makes good money is a big plus, not just average."
I should have also added this is more true than average for Software Engineers.
Specifically, as a partner, you have to ask yourself what you are bringing to the table in a given relationship; if the answer to that is income/stability, it would make sense that a struggling artist will appreciate that more than a solid well to do professional with their own income. If the answer is crazy parties (or whatever other flavor of fun), you might have an easier time trying to find a partner who has stability and wants excitement in their life.
Look, anyone can close their eyes and believe in fairytales. The advice I gave doesn't guarantee anything - it merely increases your chances of a favorable outcome.
If you have issues with the phrasing, read it as "make yourself into a more attractive partner" or however it is politically-correct to phrase the above statement.
Framing, it's the framing that's the issue here. Women can smell desperation from a mile away and this "Pick up artist" mindset will set off red flags for most.
Framing the dating world as "increas[ing] your chances of a favorable outcome" (i.e. sex) is only going to lead to disappointment.
Your advice might be statistically correct and I don't doubt it works for many, but for the individual deciding whether to heed your advice, N=1 and the probabilities are subjective when N=1.
Also your first sentence and your third sentence are pretty much contradictory.
It's true that probabilities are subjective. It's also true that dating market behavior is very sensitive to small changes in the gender balance since behavior is set at the margins (i.e. when people pair off, any dis-balance gets amplified)[1]
That's true at the scale of a city, and it's also true in small cliques. Just like in poker (the analogy I keep coming back to), the table and position you sit at (and who you're playing against) matters much more than your absolute skill at the game. And you might still lose - chance is still a part of it, no matter how hard you try.
"A ratio of three college-educated men to every four college-educated women may not seem dramatically skewed, but Jon Birger insists that, in reality, it is. He uses a musical chairs analogy to explain how a 4:3 ratio can create such a large imbalance. Birger explains that after people start to marry off, that ratio quickly drops to 2:1, then 3:1."
"For his first book, “Date-onomics,” Birger studied this phenomenon in the perfect control setting: college campuses. He found that when there are more women than men on campus, students’ dating behavior is oriented more towards hookup culture and less towards monogamous relationships. (When men are in oversupply, the culture is more monogamous.)"
"Pop culture programs, such as “Sex and the City,” tend to paint New York City as a haven for singles — a place where single women can surely find a match. But if you look at the numbers, this is far from reality, Birger points out. In fact, if you live in the 10001 zip code in Chelsea, Manhattan, 78% percent of 20 year olds are females (according to the 2010 census). Birger advises that college educated women may have better luck in areas where the ratio is reversed, such as Silicon Valley or Denver— dubbed “Menver.”"
> They would regularly initiate conversations, share personal details of their life
As a non-American, what strikes me about young American females in particular is how talkative and expressive they are. I've never talked with them in person, but I've observed young tourist groups in Europe. They can be talking trivialities about their experiences in a self-assertive way non-stop, constantly littered with "I was like", "it was like", "he was like".
If only young women actually wanted all those desirable qualities. Maybe they do when they hit 40. I am hugely generalizing, but in America, young women want mercurial, adventurous, emotionally distant, confident sounding, tough guys. So so solve this problem, you have to either find women who desire your qualities, or build in some of these other qualities (confidence, adventurous, toughness) without turning into a jerk.
There are so many people looking for respectful, reasonably attractive, healthy, financially successful and emotionally mature men. My guess is that your approach is the problem. Perhaps you don't go to the right places, or strike conversations with the right people (e.g. women too young or immature to recognize emotionally mature men). Maybe you should work on improving your social skills. Or maybe your self-perception doesn't match reality or other people's perceptions.
I originally wrote this comment to someone else, but that parent comment was deleted, so I'll copy it here.
I think you've done many of the right things - perhaps it was just bad luck. Depending on where you live - that could be another factor. Who is your competition? Who are women comparing you against? The other thing to note is - did the things you do for self-improvement actually improve your status, as the women would see it. Status is frequently linked to power (and not necessarily income), but not always.
The other counterintuitive thing is that you want to be capable of evil, but choose to do good. I think a lot of people who are good people miss this point. It is crucial. If you have no capacity to commit evil, then by doing good you are showing no virtue - you are just acting by default. Develop your own dark side, learn to be selfish and then choose not to be (but don't go overboard).
(lots of parallels here in popular stories - Harry Potter / Voldemort, Vampires, Werewolves, etc etc)
Not the OP but I relocated to Barcelona from New York City a year ago and my dating life has never been healthier or funner. Women here are the most open of anywhere I've been in the world. Now dating a young Russian artist who's very sweet and easygoing and I wish I'd moved here 4 years earlier.
I assume your parent comment meant he doesn't respect them exclusively for being women and having fleshiness, but as a recognition of their qualities as human beings, if they're worth respecting.
At least, that's what any sensible adult should do. You can admire someone for being a good leader, honest, brave, smart, etc., regardless of their sex.
Are you a man or woman? Are you trying to date women? The implication is that you're a guy after girls, but that's not clear and I'm not sure what to take from that.
And did you explain anything about why it is toxic, just a reflexive "it's bad mmmmmkay" and that you left -- but you didn't say what you went looking for, or what you found, and why it's better.
Furthermore there is the "[probably rich] guy in a foreign country" thing, which may skew things further.
Nor did you explain why, despite having a ton of female friends who stayed at your house, you weren't able to turn those into romantic options.
>Nor did you explain why, despite having a ton of female friends who stayed at your house, you weren't able to turn those into romantic options.
How is he supposed to answer that? The only way to get a definitive answer for your question is to find all the female friends, then arrest them and interrogate them for a week or so (to ensure they give honest answers). Assuming OP was actually interested in some of these women, it's very likely he doesn't know why they weren't interested, and normally people don't give honest answers about why they're not interested in being more than friends with someone, to avoid hurt feelings.
What really galls me about these comments is that many people here, including you, seem to completely not understand that different countries have different cultures, and what things are considered attractive traits in romantic partners differ greatly from place to place. People are NOT the same in different parts of the world.
Disclaimer: I'm a non-American young adult in a longstanding relationship with a girl of my age.
Having read the article, I felt like the writing severely lacked in clarity & posed the problem as ultimately men's fault. The numerous quotes appealing to what I can only read as "hot takes" produced by some kind of authority only reinforce this:
> Younger men are largely responsible for rising rates of mass shootings, a trend some researchers link to their growing social isolation.
Why bring up this random correlation if not to assign blame by association? Already very hard to give this piece benefit of the doubt it probably deserves.
> “Women don’t need to be in long-term relationships. They don’t need to be married. They’d rather go to brunch with friends than have a horrible date,”
Casually throwing "horrible date" there; from my experience men are just as likely to prefer a friendly occasion to a "horrible date." In this context, what's really implied is that young men are seen by young women as horrible so the detachment effects is men's, if anybody's fault; quite an over-reaching argument.
> “Today in America, women expect more from men,” Levant said, “and unfortunately, so many men don’t have more to give.”
What is the point, again?
> “Men are less naturally relational than women,” said Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
Poorly worded and what's the point, anyway? Natural presupposition wouldn't happen to explain the observed effects now would it?
> “Women form friendships with each other that are emotionally intimate, whereas men do not,” Levant said
Perhaps when asked men wouldn't describe their relationships as "emotionally intimate" and I wouldn't expect my friends to be crying and exposing themselves in a outwards way by default but it doesn't mean that the relationships we have do not lend to the emotional component, reward emotional support and sincerity.
You can't really expect mainstream writing to take the opposite stance, that its women's fault. Somebody has to be to blame, and in a case of men vs women, the target is easy.
Why have a stance in this sense of the word at all? It's not a fight is it? Is it...? One of the commenters have pointer out that women have been getting progressively less and less happy since the 1970s (based on self-reporting) so if anything, everybody is at loss here. I've really tried to take this piece seriously but once you cut the propaganda, there's no single clear bit of writing in it worth thinking about or so I'm led to believe.
Boys are constantly chided for pursuing women all through school and the media. Getting denounced as creepy or weird. Actually following that advice will lead you to die alone though.
Still unfair, because being timorous or reckless happens in both sexes. Media and law have practically demonized young men, and I'm afraid it's been done for clicks and engagement, not a pursuit for equality.
These days it's almost inevitable to see issues as black or white, but however boring, middle gray is usually the most fair position.
I have a theory for that: I think that men are simply lost in modern times.
Love, for example, has been popularized to be a romantic movie-cliché where handsome guy spends his daytime on a picnic during middle of the day (middle of the week). In contract my bubble - all men I know show affection through dedication and work, which isn't perceived as very romantic.
Men are less social. There are reasons, but life right now allows us to be less social. ~50 years ago you either cooked for yourself or you went out to restaurant if you wanted to eat. Meeting people was inevitable. ~20 years ago you could call for a pizza, but that still involved human contact.
Today? I have an app for that. I also have an app for taxi, laundry, groceries, clearning etc. Remote work is getting increasingly common. I can manage my whole life not even leaving my flat without any need to talk to anyone. Some of my male colleagues actually live like that.
And social skills is not something one can get from podcast. They need to be trained and sustained, especially for those who aren't naturally talented and charismatic. And without them - good luck finding partner. There's also slippery slope involved, that some other commenters mention. It can't be I who is at fault, right? It must be THEM.
The only way out is to actually get more social, but that's something that men also don't do. There's this stigma that it must've been something wrong with man if they try to find friends.
So it's somewhat bleak future, but not grim nor unchangeable. It's just (some) men got behind and it'd be nice if there'd be help for them to catch up.
>So it's somewhat bleak future, but not grim nor unchangeable. It's just (some) men got behind and it'd be nice if there'd be help for them to catch up.
So civil war buddies? We could share a trench, you will be the sniper, i will be the spotter?
I think that the biggest difference from the past is that mental health of young adults is deteriorating and that it is impacting men more than women.
This is largely driven by the isolation brought by modern technologies but also changes in society, as women became more empowered they also rose their standards which once were to merely be able to provide for the family.
Among the complains of my female friends mental health of their male partners is probably the most common issue, followed by an overall lack of maturity which is nowadays surprisingly common even among older (50/60 yo) men.
Many things made young men progressively more insecure and surrogates such as porn or internet do not even push them enough to find a way out of loneliness.
I think that the amount of opportunities to display masculinity (in a useful way) has shrunk. That has been true ever since we moved off of family farms (where the man did visibly useful work by working on the farm - work that the woman could not do). I think that's what started the re-negotiation of the balance of the sexes, and we're still digesting through that (~150 years later).
The other opportunities for masculinity: war, times of conflict, times when people are afraid, etc. The more that people feel "safe", the more the male identity as a protector is diminished.
Not only they shrunk, but they are not really needed anymore by the opposite sex which became at the same time more empowered and independent. Which is good for us as a society but probably detrimental in some ways, and increasingly more, for the mental and sex life of young men.
As a male man chap fellow, I have no clue what "masculinity" means, and I have essentially no interest in trying to define it. We're just individuals. Try to be the best kind of individual you can - learn empathy, show interest in others and help them. Maybe you'll meet someone to partner with, maybe you won't, but chasing some societal ideal of "masculinity" is almost certainly not the best way to be the best version of yourself, or to attract long-term partners.
Every romantic relationship involves attraction between different polarities a masculine and a feminine one. That's just how laws of attraction work in nature, regardless of the animal and we reflect that.
Don't be confused though, it has nothing to do with sexual orientations and there's perfectly happy heterosexual couples where the energies are inverted: males are more emotional, nurturing and females are more detached, analytical and less emotional or nurturing. We're all on a spectrum of that, it's not black and white.
That being said our brains have not evolved with society and genrally we still lean differently on the two sides of the spectrum.
Men are still attracted biologically to what will give them the most chances to procreate: young, healthy women; and women are still attracted biologically to what will give them the most chances to procreate: a strong man, the clan leader, as the role of the man is really most of the protector.
Now my thesis is that as society evolved the more masculine side of the spectrum is increasingly lacking in young men: less ambition, less purpose in life, less indipendence, increasingly abundant feminine traits like emotional neediness and such.
Thus, most women which are also empowered and basically do not need men anymore as a provider find it increasingly hard to find men that project the qualities of the clan leader.
When generalizations like this are made it normally implies a plurality of people - not everyone of course. Each individual will be different, but on the whole when you analyze a large group, a pattern will emerge.
Large scale analyses of Tinder or OkCupid or any other dataset of female-male interactions will tend to show these patterns.
Apologies, I meant it as a generalization, and as I prefaced in my post it has nothing to do with sexuality. The same phenomenon applies to any kind of romantic relationship.
Actually it's interesting you brought it up because as a member of the gay community I wonder whether you would agree or not that the different polarities are any less or more or equally evident in gay couples.
Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity by David D. Gilmore goes into the pan-cultural concepts of masculinity. It's a very approachable and deep dive into what defines masculinity across cultures and times.
TLDR: It's not that men are not women, it's that they are not boys.
Manliness is a social marker and is defined by a male's peers, "honor" societies, gangs, etc.
How that is seen is via the 3 P's, which are: Provider, Protector, Procreater.
With very few and rare exceptions, all cultures have these three things as markers of a man. You can have 2 of them in spades and still be seen as a man, but you can't just have 1.
Again, I'm trying to summarize a whole book here in a comment on HN, so if you're interested in discussing and learning more, I'd buy it and read it.
Are you bisexual? If not you are attracted to femininity or masculinity. I guess you are attracted to femininity so you don't recognize that masculinity can also be attractive.
Women tend to dream of a masculine man with feminine interests, same as men dream of feminine women with masculine interests. If you think that is a contradictory statement, no it isn't, pop culture is full of them. Angelina Jolie in Transformers is a good example, she is a mechanic who loves to work with cars, but still very feminine. Take that, and replace cars with some hobby popular among women and make him very masculine in all other aspects, and you basically have a dream guy.
Article about Angelina Jolie from Transformers if you haven't seen it:
Femininity or masculinity are defined by culture, and modern society has lost them on the road of equality. It's quite common with younger people to not have a clear definition of normal femininity and masculinity. After all, everyone can be everything and do everything, so there is no specific difference between the sexes to define the traits, beyond biology. And even biology is questioned in recent years because of trans.
I mostly agree with this, but it’s missing some details in how many younger people actually behave versus what they believe. A lot of young men and women will claim to not be particularly attracted to femininity or masculinity or believe in traditional views on gender expression while being attracted almost exclusively people who do present traditionally gendered traits.
I’ve met so many young men who say they don’t particularly care if the woman they date are feminine while exclusively pursuing relationships with women who are petite, have long hair, shave all their body hair, dress in almost exclusively feminine clothes like mini skirts, wears a ton of makeup and has very feminine mannerisms. I’ve also met a lot of you women who would say the same about not caring about masculinity in the men they date and then exclusively date tall, muscular, hyper masculine jock types or the bad boy, rebel without a cause artsy types. You’re absolutely right that they’ve changed the definition of masculine and feminine, but they haven’t changed their preferences to match.
I think a big part of the gender disconnect in modern dating is that many men and women have divested themselves from their traditional gender roles while seeking out partners that largely still conform to their traditional gender roles.
It's because there is no amount of intellectualization in the world that can defeat the genetics that you have from birth - and those genetics will always dictate your revealed preferences. You can virtue signal whatever you want, but unless you want to live a life in dissonance with yourself, you'll always fall back on what is programmed in your genetic code.
And this will continue at least until mass gene editing is commercially available :)
What I mostly see in this thread is nobody deeply caring about relationships, marriage, kids, and the like.
As the article points out, the rise of sexual gratification without relationships, coinciding with women's reshaping of the financial stability side of relationships, has mostly just resulted in a lopsided winner takes all market around biological attraction.
But sexual gratification is .. just ... that. Ephemeral, weakly bonding, "childish." You don't need another person for it, you definitely don't need a member of the opposite sex, even if you want someone from the opposite sex, you can pay for it, even with a more committed relationship it's more or less transactional.
The real question is was there ever any value in long term monogamous relationships? I say this as someone in a long term monogamous relationship who is super happy, but the divorce rates and gender imbalance in domestic violence tells a different story.
Instead, we should work on ensuring everyone having access to paid, consensual sex workers, and bring "dating apps" back from the hookup apps they largely are into something more like eHarmony or OKCupid were - a niche app for those looking for long term relationships.
People demanding other people choose sexual partners based on long term relationship dynamics that are completely irrelevant in this day and age is a weird hill to die on.
> ever any value in long term monogamous relationships
rhetorical question ? I wonder if a large group of young people just do not know what true 'contentment' feels like. To truly be at peace. To feel like everything is just right. To be relieved of all insecurities in that one moment, and just take in something for all that is.
None of my most cherished memories are ones of peak happiness or gratification. They are all moments of gratitude. Something that let me understand how content I felt. I didn't need, I didn't want, I had no desires. Everything was simple, and everything was there for that moment. The moments were, like all others : ephemeral. But the memories and the nostalgic feeling of security that it left behind sticks around for a long long time.
That to me separates sexual gratification from being in a long term monogamous relationship. The contentment that comes with time. To know that there is someone who accepts you in your entirety. Not because you were born soul-mates, but because each person has expressed an explicit intention to do so by committing the most important currency of them all : Time. And as you invest more time, the belief in the commitment strengthens, as does the contentment it produces.
>To truly be at peace. To feel like everything is just right. To be relieved of all insecurities in that one moment, and just take in something for all that is.
What if that's being alone modulo sexual satisfaction from porn or hookups? :sunglasses: :gigachad:
There is absolutely value in long term monogamous relationships. So much value you cannot see it from the inside. It's someone to 'show off' to, and to work for, and to- ineffectively- try to impress. And that matters far, far more than you'd think. It staves off the most brutal of existential crises.
I think this is a fallacy, the expected value of most monogamous relationships is zero or microscopic - most fail, many have negative value (abuse, homicide, mental illness), etc - so in some ways it's like playing the lottery.
A tax on the romantically challenged :)
Again, I say this as a proud and happy husband of 19 years!
>Again, I say this as a proud and happy husband of 19 years!
Yeah, you basically won the lottery. For every one of you, there's a bunch of people who lost the relationship lottery: divorce, abuse, etc. The odds really aren't in one's favor.
Throwaway account due to sensitive personal stories.
Me and my 4 close friends are reasonably successful in terms of societal standards; we all hit the gym religiously, earn over 100K in a big European city, speak multiple languages and we are all in our early to mid 30s. Dating wise, we each have our funnel of dates from dating apps, nights out where we collect numbers and one night stands. We regularly get around 20 new leeds (numbers) a week, which transform into 5 dates and in turn, 2 or 3 new one night stands. On average, every week adds one more friend with benefits to our "rooster".
I place on the bottom of my friends ranking because I am very pick and prefer to date no more than 5 girls (ages 20 to 25 tops) at the same time. The friend that's most dedicated keeps a harem of 20-25 friends with benefits... He tends to service them every other week or so, sometimes double or even triple booking them on the same day. As you can imagine, this takes the same effort as a second job, keeping up with all the new dates and maintaining casual relationships.
As you can imagine, my friend is in top 0.1% of guys in terms of dating success, with over 100 new sexual partners every year. I've asked girls their opinion of him and they all report that he's the kind of guy who just gets it, he's a gentleman, funny, charismatic, considerate and sexy. They seem oblivious to the fact that his skills are acquired from experience and not from mother nature. All of these girls don't mind that he's seeing other girls, they are in it for the same reason: casual fun.
All in all, we 5 men are dating around 50 girls and some are exclusive on their end, knowing the details of our lifestyle. As everything in society gets more and more polarized there's more lonely men and consequently more Dan Bulzarians running around. I find the statistics even a bit tame, the average guy is so afraid of rejection that he does 5 approaches a year. My friends do 5 approaches in an hour going to a bar.
Young girls live in a different reality than young guys. My advice is to not bother with dating until you reach certain status in life, earn good money, have good physique, have friends in high places and most importantly, provide fun. On the flip side, once you'll be at the top of the mountain you'll never want to find a good wife and settle down, mostly because a) there are almost no good girls in westernized society, b) why have 1 when you can have 10?
> My advice is to not bother with dating until you reach certain status in life, earn good money, have good physique, have friends in high places and most importantly, provide fun.
Horrible advice.
Only the last one is really important, and even then, fun looks different to everybody—one person’s idea of boring is another persons idea of fun (board games, for example).
Yes, status is important to humans (although again, it comes in many form, lots of people couldn’t care less about jacked physiques and hefty paychecks). But people are making meaningful connections from an early age and without much of a career underway.
> a) there are almost no good girls in westernized society
That’s like, uhm, misogynist! And funny, because you still seem to spend an awful lot of time and energy on these no good Western girls :)
> My advice is to not bother with dating until you reach certain status in life, earn good money, have good physique, have friends in high places and most importantly, provide fun.
When it comes to marriage, you need to realize that a wedding is not a capstone, but a corner stone. You don't crown your life with a wife, you build up one with a partner.
I assume you and your friends are also just naturally good looking too. (Taller than average, good face, preferred race, etc.) For places like the bar, online, and other cold approach avenues - looks are paramount to your success.
If someone thinks you’re physically unattractive - you’re not going to seduce them in such a short fashion. It takes a long time to build a rapport where most women will sleep with you if she doesn’t find you physically attractive.
Clothes and whatever obviously help but turd polishing doesn’t go as far as people often believe.
> there are almost no good girls in westernized society
Here we go again..
The online catalog of a dating app isn't reflective of the majority of the female population of the collective West. This sort of talk always sounds like incelism, even if you purport not to be one.
There's plenty of good women out there, the majority in fact. (some) men today are quick to point out women becoming more demanding or lower quality, but fail to see the same thing in the modern man.
Modern men seem to suffer a crisis of confidence, adolescent hobbies (I'm very sorry, but most women don't find video games attractive, you can think the same about TV shows, but it's the way it is), sedentary lifestyle, while also fostering high expectations from porn and sex-focused media.
The article briefly mentions porn as an issue. I think porn is a much bigger issue than we're letting on. The men who are now in their 20's are the first generation of men to grow up with virtually unlimited access to porn. What are the results? We can empirically conclude they're struggling to form relationships with women. That's correlation, non causation, but others have been researching this issue and their preliminary findings are pointing to porn being a much bigger problem than we'd believed.
That's a fair point, but I'd add that it's sex in media as well as porn. Media is more sexualised than ever before:- TV shows feature more sex and more of it is clearly visible, sex is used to sell basically anything, some dating apps/website have commodified sex (Tinder) and social media adds pressure for younger people.
I remember reading, maybe it's been 20-30 years ago now, that there was a lot more sex portrayed in media than sex people were actually having. To your point, today's young men have grown up with that too - thinking people are casually hooking up and having sex all the time when in reality they're not. Add in porn portraying women as nymphs who are eager to lose their clothes with little to no provocation and it would appear these young men have a very skewed idea of how sex and relationships work in the real world. Maybe they're figuring it out as they get older and that's part of the reason why today's young women are dating older men?
This is the most immature and narcissistic comment I've read in a long time. I think you absolutely don't get what a relationship is about. Having a best friend as partner who is always around. Having kids that give a whole new meaning to live. Just mating with the next best babe will give you no long term satisfaction. What you describe here sounds more like an addiction.
Fewer people are marrying, at later and later ages, and divorce rates are still very high. Every rich country, it seems, is below replacement rate when it comes to having kids.
Boys addicted to computer games and porn, girls addicted to social media which allow and facilitate sexism (only one way), an increasingly bleak future, economic and geopolitical uncertainty, "intelligence" organisations running rampant trying to control citizen's minds.. Yeah I wonder why our societies are going down the shitter.
I am highly skeptical that computer games and porn addictions are significant factors here. Sure they are problems that need to be solved, but I doubt it is a significant contribution to the problem.
I can see how social media might bias perception though. I guess pre-internet era you just had to compete against people in your local community when you were looking for a partner. Way harder now to standout in the world of Instagram / Tiktok where the trendiest people are likely in the top 10% of attractiveness (be it money, appearance, personality, etc).
I think op has a point. Almost every woman I know, my wife included, expresses some level of disgust at the idea of an adult man playing video games. I don't think I know many women who are alright with a man who plays video games, let alone a man who spends 1 hour or more on it per day.
A few friends of my wife REALLY complain about men playing video games (dating prospects and current partners). It's a double standard, because they themselves use social media or consume media, but that's just the way it is.
Women with double standards ? Colour me shocked :)
It's the age old: men are told that they should do better, women that they deserve better (for whatever reason)
It's sad to live during such tumultuous times. The lives of most people for the majority of time has been similar to the lives of their parents, and grandparents. Imagine the feeling of safety that this could bring. Now of course there were myriad other issues, but maybe a thousand years from now we manage to reach some kind of steadier state in a post industrial society. But right now we are cursed to live in maelstrom.
Historically people never felt safe. You're imagining an idealized period that never really existed. Read some firsthand accounts by people who actually lived during those times and you'll see they struggled with the same issues and worse.
As for men doing better, that's pretty easy considering how many men don't even bother to try.
We will never know exactly how it was for the average person, so we might as well dream that it was better. Of course it wouldn't have been heaven, but maybe a bit less complicated at least ?
Less complicated in some dimensions, more complicated in others. There's no evidence that net complexity is higher today. Navigating social hierarchies has never been simple since before our ancestors came down out of the trees.
As others have pointed out in this discussion, we exactly know that in pre-modern times the average man died childless.
I was more referring to complexity of life in general, not reproduction wise. Also you cannot extrapolate a couple thousand year fluke to the entire pre-modern times.
I think computer games and porn addictions by large exacerbate the social awkwardness epidemic, and allow an easy escape from dealing with the world. Which needs to be done, if one wants to build useful skills and become useful to the society or a prospective partner.
It's too easy to stay at home alone all day jacking off and playing games. It shouldn't be like that, we are not equipped to deal with this kind of situations.
Most men don't prefer masturbating to sex.
Porn and masturbation is the solution to the men's problem of women not wanting to have much sex with men. It's much better than both rape and celibacy.
I think we think this is unusual, but I think the idea that we have a 1-1 matching between men and women is a very recent development (last few hundred years). We are probably just regressing to a longer term average where the average male can expect to have no reproductive success at all.
"Once upon a time, 4,000 to 8,000 years after humanity invented agriculture, something very strange happened to human reproduction. Across the globe, for every 17 women who were reproducing, passing on genes that are still around today—only one man did the same."
"Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others. These men could then pass their wealth on to their sons, perpetuating this pattern of elitist reproductive success. Then, as more thousands of years passed, the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again. "Maybe more and more people started being successful," Wilson Sayres says. In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man."
"Once upon a time, 4,000 to 8,000 years after humanity invented agriculture, something very strange happened to human reproduction. Across the globe, for every 17 women who were reproducing, passing on genes that are still around today—only one man did the same."
Further down: "In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man."
The boomer generation was an anomaly because in the 1940's "everyone" (not literally) was having kids independent of ideology. Part of this was because of a vast flattening of status (the depression and shared misery of war probably had a lot to do with it).
Historically (averaging over 1000s of years) - that is abnormal; normally people are a lot more "choosy" for lack of a better word - which is what the anthropological article implies. We're moving back into a world of inequality and more intense status competition in mating - the effects of the Great Depression + World War II have worn off.
the undrafted men, and thus most likely survivors, were largely ones who failed to meet minimum physical standards of the military, so not sure on that last point
I find this very surprising.
The first sentence of the article states that about 60% of men are single, and only about 30% of women. There's about equal men and women, so that would mean that 30% of women are dating each other, or are in relationships with multiple men? That's discounting men dating men. I find that surprising.
Another possibility is that women are more likely to choose to self report their status as "in a relationship" vs. men. (Which would be an interesting finding on its own!) I'm not sure which source they pulled those figures in the first line from, but elsewhere it talks about PEW studies and the Survey Center on American Life which are presumably working from self reported survey data? "Married" is easier to track objectively than "single" vs. "in a relationship" which is more subjective. Is having been on three dates a "relationship?" Is it a relationship if you never talked about it with each other in those terms? If you're dating multiple people non-exclusively are you "in a relationship" or "single"? (I'm not asking; just speculating that two people might answer those questions differently.)
The 60% / 30% figure doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
Edit: Noticed the comment about this data focusing on "young" women and men and the possibility that more women are dating men outside that range than men are doing the same. That's also a good explanation. This was mentioned in the article too; I was just initially underestimating its significance.
That’s a good point that the article doesn’t touch on! (and along with the other ones from the article, makes a lot more sense than the “10% of the men date all the women” meme I see repeated in this HN discussion).
The article states 60/30% of young people, so the correct interpretation is that older men are "taking" a large share of the young, single women / young women prefer dating older men.
I think this article is somewhat of a relief to myself. It always felt like the majority of women I talked to casually mentioned they are in a relationship before my interest further peaked. At least it's not just thinking it's a coincidence that the majority that I talk to are taken, it's statistical lol.
Women are not objects to be owned. Even if she's in a relationship she might be unhappy with it and open to other options. Just don't be creepy or aggressive about it.
To use an analogy, hiring managers are allowed to offer you a job even if you already have a job. They're not obligated to wait until you're unemployed.
So situations where women think they're in a relationship, but the man does not (or not with them). Again, is this statistically significant? Are women's standards for what qualifies as a relationship low enough that they think they're in one with 1/2, 1/3, or even less, of a man's time?
Those figures are for "young adults". (20s I think? The article isn't totally clear.) The article mentions further down that some of the extra women are dating older men.
I see this talking point all the time yet never backed up by studies. That would mean that these attractive men put a premium on quantity over quality (because they’d have to date women less attractive then them for the numbers to work out) and have lots of time and mental energy at their disposal to manage these concurrent relationships. Whereas in general people tend to date people that are more or less as attractive as themselves, and the most prevalent form of relationships is still a two person couple. For casual flings it might be different.
Dating apps don’t make their data available to scientists, that would be nice though!
For sure life is more easy for hot people, off or on dating apps. It’s true in bars and clubs too. In settings where people have more of a time to get to know each other it probably matters less, even if it always plays a role. It’s just that, as long as society’s concept of a relationship is still two people together, and not one person with a harem, these attractive people at the top of the pyramid will end up being picky too.
> Dating apps don’t make their data available to scientists, that would be nice though!
Actually OKCupid did do that at some point, well, it was their own employees but they did extensive and very honest data analysis. After the company was sold those blog posts were erased, of course.
Another interesting thing to observe is whether the premium for being attractive has increased in general because of the "shrinking of the world" effect via internet (i.e. attractive people have more opportunities now to be models, to work in branding, start an onlyfans and make money). Basically - whether it's easier now to "monetize" your good looks.
If that is the case, attractiveness has actually become a better proxy for social status/success than it used to be. I don't have data to back this up - intuitively it makes sense to me, but I hope someone out there is studying the effect.
You think the disparity is more accounted for by the numeric difference between multiple-dating men and multiple-dating women, rather than by women dating men who are older than themselves?
Not just "think", it's a fact that same study shows: if that was the way you are putting it, in the upper age cohort, fraction of single men would be smaller than single women: men would be with young girls and dump women of same age as themselves. But it's not the case, because percentage of single men is higher in any age cohort under 65 (then, there are more single women simply because men die at earlier age).
Isn't single parenthood already "normalized"? In the US at least, it's extremely common. Of course, it's also extremely difficult for the mother; I can't imagine why anyone would willingly choose it unless she was independently wealthy and could hire caretakers.
I don't mean to say it in a negative sense. I'm a right-wing liberal. Inequality is the only thing that saves us for complete dominance of mediocrity. Also, it's sort of stupid to complain about because it's no one's policy or anything, just an objective fact. You can't un-invent Tinder.
That's ridiculous. Poly relationships are a tiny minority and even there most stick it to two partners - everything above that just takes way too much time to juggle next to a full-time job.
Conscious poly relationships are a tiny minority and will probably always remain so. But i mean situations when women don't know that they are not alone. Tinder does it to them. It makes easy to find and "get" the best men. But there's a catch...
Plus, very frequently women get ahead of themselves imagining that they are in relationship while their men sees it as merely a sequence of gradually more and more effortless hookups.
I think what lots of people miss is the complementarity of relationships. You have to always ask yourself - what am I bringing to the table to a relationship?
This is why status is a universally attractive quality. No matter what the circumstances, if someone dates someone of a high status, it elevates the dater's status as well. Basically, someone wants to go to their friends, mention who they are dating, and wants the friends to be jealous (not really, but hypothetically).
Lots of people are frustrated because earning a good income used to bequeath status; however, with earnings gaps shrinking, income is no longer a good proxy for status as it once was. Also, status and income correlate, but are not the same. An artist working for Cirque du Soleil, for example, might have higher status than a Software Engineer at Google even though the latter might make significantly more money. One way to get an intuitive sense of status is the "wow" factor when you tell someone about your job (and another is the power you hold as part of that job, and how many people look up to you). Similarly, influencers have a lot of status independent of how much money they make via social validation.
>No matter what the circumstances, if someone dates someone of a high status, it elevates the dater's status as well.
And what makes a man "high status" varies greatly by culture. In American culture, being an engineer is just above being a janitor as far as women are concerned, and being a SWE is a little above that only because it's become common knowledge how well they're paid. Meanwhile, being a doctor or lawyer has FAR higher status, as does being an "influencer".
> “Guys are taught to prioritize career,” Karo said. “Also romantic relationships, although it doesn’t seem like they’re doing a very good job at that. Making friends and keeping friends seems to be a lower priority. And once guys get older, they suddenly realize they have no friends.”
Not surprising. Friendships take time to form, and many people have to deal with extreme working hours - a point I detailed yesterday in another thread.
"Even seasoned researchers struggle to fully account for the relationship gap between young women and men: If single young men outnumber single young women nearly two to one, then who are all the young women dating?"
Older men. The article even notes that's a trend that's been increasing in the past 100 years. There's also been a rise in women who aren't attracted to men. It's likely always been the case that a not insignificant number of women were lesbian but needed a man to not be impoverished. Now that those impediments have been removed and women no longer need men for economic security they can more freely be lesbians. And they are.
I think it's a bit more than that: the Kinsey Scale exists because many people (probably most really) are somewhere in-between, even if they have a strong preference for one sex or the other. A large number of women have probably always had bisexual tendencies, but these days with the impediments removed, they can more freely choose to explore their same-sex attraction and relationships with other women. After a few bad relationships with men, many have probably decided to only pursue relationships with women in fact. And why not? Women are generally more attractive (really attractive men are somewhat rare, but it's not as hard for most women to look nice), smell nice, are far less prone to violence, and these days generally have more education and better careers. They also are much better at being emotionally supportive in friendships/relationships and not depending on their partner to be a full-time therapist. As a bonus, they can even share clothes!
Is this surprising? My intuition, backed by approximately 0 data, is that there's a 5 to 10 year age gap preference, such that men prefer to be with slightly younger women and women with slightly older men.
As a result, young men don't really have a dating pool. Once they hit 30, as long as they're not total wasters, women will take more interest.
the average age that humans had children throughout the past 250,000 years is 26.9. Furthermore, fathers were consistently older, at 30.7 years on average, than mothers, at 23.2 years on average, but the age gap has shrunk in the past 5,000 years, with the study’s most recent estimates of maternal age averaging 26.4 years. The shrinking gap seems to largely be due to mothers having children at older ages.
I mean, wouldn't you expect a gap in those numbers, purely from a biological perspective? If there's a biological cap on how old a woman can be and give birth, but there's no cap on how old a man can be and father a child, unless there's some truly odd stuff going on it seems obvious that this gap would exist. They even say that the shrinking of the gap over time is largely because of women having children early, not anything changing in men.
This is part of it. Teen births are way down and women are delaying having kids until their 30s. But also, importantly, women are starting to earn at parity or out earn men, negating the need for a partner to support themselves. This is a cause of the imbalance I believe. The pool of potential female partners wasn’t great before for the age cohort, and empowered women shrink it further.
Also, men will date down, women typically don’t. So these higher earning, ambitious women are unable to find a partner that meets their expectations. Men are happy to (or if not happy to, can make do) exit the dating marketplace when this expectation mismatch occurs. There just aren’t enough women who want a low status low earning male partner.
And doesnt this say that the average maternal age was 23/patenal 30--not the "average age of first child" which would be lower. The average age of first child for women is now over 30 in the us i think. So the difference is huge.
Similar breakdown in red states vs blue states. Blue states have much older age of first child, on average (because of correlation with educational attainment).
In fact the gap we should talk about is the gap between college-educated women and the rest (which stands at ~8 years)
yes thank you, i mixed up some things. the average age of giving birth is now 30 (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna27827) which is (i think) the number being measured in the paper as 23 historically. So the increase is large. Also I am somewhat confused because other sources like the NYT from 2018 say the first birth number is 26...i wonder if the statistics you provided are skewed by younger motherhood for the older part of the 15-44 cohort? Here you can see in many cities the avg age of first birth IS 30+. The big divide is geographical and by college degree. These are 2018 numbers so it wouldve probably gone up a bit more since then (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...)
it would also be interesting to see recent statistics on foreign born mothers vs us born mothers...here is another source supporting that first motherhood is now 26+, not 23 as in cdc numbers:https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/28/u-s-women-a...
It is not surprising at all if we consider evolutionary psychology and how dating actually works due to the differences between men and women. David Buss did a lot of research in that field, this [1] is a nice intro.
Women and men have completely different attractiveness trajectories and „what's at risk” when having sex.
The article correctly argues that societal changes made it a lot more difficult for young men to find a romantic partner:
- No pressure to marry early in your twenties as a woman. Instead, it's even expected to „have some fun“ and marry later.
- Dating apps and a more individualistic society make it easy for women to find a mate outside of their social cirle.
Unless they've been doing exceptionally well (e.g. are physically fit, have a good status in their peer group, a well-rounded personality and make some money), men in their early twenties don't have a lot to offer to women of their age. On the other hand, women are usually in their peak attractiveness in early/mid twenties and can easily select an older partner.
Anecdotal experience also confirms that. I'm in my late 20s, my GF in her early twenties. She had no serious interest in anyone from her school year. We met on a dating app. Quite a few of my similar-aged friends who had very litte luck with women found a romantic partner once they've finished their degree and earned some money.
My intuition tells me that it's probably a result of how young people meet these days. A lot of relationships start from dating apps, where it's kind of expected that men will make a first move and then women can filter through them.
It's been shown long ago that most men rate most women as above average (in attractiveness), whereas most women rate most men as below average.
Good luck finding anyone that wants to do such a study.
The best we're going to get is data from dating apps. And even that's now hard to find, since Match.com removed that blog post after purchasing OKCupid.
Hug Hefner's intuition was the famous formula: age of the male divided by two, plus seven...
So the ideal same-age relationship is between two adolescents of 14, and a successful 40 year old male would, all things considered, prefer pairing with a 27 year old female.
it is definitely surprising...a big change in last 5-10 years. Women actually dont prefer a v large age gap--less than men and on the order of 2-3 years. Age def explains some of this statistic but isnt enough to explain it all. This is probably also result of slight harem effect and of people categorising relationships differently (man thinks he is single, woman thinks its monogamous etc).
Well, it's not exactly about age per se from either side. If we're going by the crass (but largely true) stereotypes, then men are driven by looks, and women (notwithstanding any "bad boy" dating inclination) are more looking for a protector/provider (i.e. maturity/money). Maybe with more men living with parents due to economy/housing/etc, this has an effect.
yes as i said age has something to do with this, maybe even the big effect, but probably doesnt explain the whole change. And if women are dating men with a larger age gap than before because of the factors you stated (taking men longer to get money, basically), it is against their stated preferences of age gap, so they are compromising more than before. And of course men are taking longer to get to "maturity/money" stage in some part bc of financial competition from young women, so this interesting dynamic.
> Women actually dont prefer a v large age gap--less than men and on the order of 2-3 years.
This seems mathematically impossible to me. The average age gap in a relationship with a woman for a given man should be the same as the average age gap in a relationship with a man for a given woman.
I suppose that the age similarity might mainly be a peer group effect. People in the early twenties tend to hang out a lot with people of around their same age, e.g. due to college/ university classes or parties. As long as dating happens predominantly within the peer group, age differences usually aren't very big. But once online dating is used, larger age differences occur quite naturally.
What I am citing comes from surveys of men and women, not just observations from anecdotes. Women virtually always want men just a bit older, throughout their lives, or at least say they prefer this. I think you can find some of that data in link below.
What do they mean "single"? Did they just ask individuals?
I'd also take into account in a lot of early relationships if you asked the guy they might say they're not in a relationship and the women might say they are.
From my personal experience I have seen this disparity in the extreme, since I studied physics where the gender ratio was very unbalanced. I knew many guys who had some trouble socializing, but were very nice people, and they did not get any attention from women.
I get quite tired of the boomer-esque takes on HN and everywhere else. The quintessential one is “shower, dress, have a job, and be respectful” is somehow enough to attract just about any woman. People assume that 60% of young men must just be filthy neckbeard degenerates. As far as I can tell - this is cause they never talk to young people or meet any.
Attracting young women today is an entirely different ballgame than in the past and it’s incredibly challenging for average men. I do think social media has warped our perceptions of what an “average man” is. The classic “dad bod” quip is an example. A lot of women have mentioned desiring a “dad bod” and then will point out someone like Jason Mamoa when he’s either off-cycle or not completely shredded. A body that is very much not a “dad bod” at all to most men - this body is already incredibly difficult to attain and required steroids to get to to start with.
The decline of third spaces and ways to interact more in person and without it being transactional has also likely made it really hard. When you need to sell yourself through images - it turns out really only a couple body types are appealing to women when it comes to images alone. Yes, you can be more attractive when interacting in person and they see your full personality but we don’t have the spaces for that anymore. Most young women I meet are incredibly full of stranger danger as well. So many stories of violent rape hit national headlines and most people are taught men are a threat before you even say hello. So, yeah, it’s no wonder you can’t really make a good first impression as an average young man. There’s nowhere to hang out with other young women in person where it’s not transactional and they already assume you’re a threat to begin with… so you’re in bad footing before you even started. The only way I’ve seen to get past this is to be incredibly charming (very rare and person specific) or genetically gifted looking to where people’s defenses are lowered (also rare).
Overall - I blame capitalism. I think its desire for atomicizing everyone and making everything a transaction is the source of all these issues.
I never made that connection before but you're absolutely right! The whole "just take a shower, comb your hair and dress nicely" dating advice is exactly like the "just walk up to the owner of the company and give him a firm handshake and you'll get the job!" career advice. It's coming from a place of good intentions, but from a reality that no longer exists.
Tbh a lot of men I've interacted that held borderline incel opinions could have used a shower and a fashion make-over. It woudn't get them the dream gf but it would have been a start from where to develop
Most incel opinions I've met are from men who are well educated, financially successful, socially fluent, dress decently, and exercise. The reason they have incel opinions is because they've done everything society told them that should attract women but they're still not getting anything.
It's no wonder most single men in FAANG are incels (only ones I found to not be single usually met their spouse in college or got arranged marriages). They're all ivy league educated, work hard, and do a lot of crazy shit for hobbies but ultimately look like a nerd and that's an incredibly oversaturated market.
One thing the article didn't address that would be interesting to see would be the impact of the childhood obesity epidemic.
In the greatest generation, silent generation, boomers and gen X, the rates of obesity in teens and 20-somethings was a rounding error. People varied in attractiveness, but almost everyone would have been "dateable". Today, 20-30% of the young population is obese, which is going to severely restrict the dating prospects as well as throw off some of the youthful lust-based pairings that grow into relationships.
The overall statistics and various causes are interesting, but I wish the article had further broken down how each factor impacted things, eg, how much does income, education, bmi, male-friends, etc skew the statistics on romantic relationships.
Yes, obesity is probably a huge factor here. Excess adipose tissue suppresses testosterone levels and is a risk factor for erectile dysfunction. Unfortunately, some of those fat young men have just lost interest, or can't get it up.
Endocrine disruptor chemicals such as pthalates also seem to be part of the problem.
I’m 26, work at a faang, and I currently see about 5 women as sort of FWB. I don’t considered myself too special or a 10/10 but I can imagine there are guys that are even better looking and richer and are seeing even more people.
We have a loneliness epidemic and we have just invented language models that are exceedingly good at acting like humans and even mimic emotions and personality (and even when we do our best to try and prevent them from showing emotion, it still bleeds through).
I've tried Replika and some of these other AI friends (who are more and more pivoting to being AI girlfriends), and they seem so far from state of the art. My guess is we're a few months away from gpt3-level (or better) chatbots aimed less and productivity and information and more at romance/sex/friendship and its going to change the world as we know it.
Replika is aimed at friendship and romance, it’s in all the marketing. I’m sure you saw the fiasco when they suddenly decided to filter romantic talk last week?
I grew up in Latin America but now I'm married to an American woman and thus out of the "pool". I hang out with coworkers still in their 20s and I'm blown away by how their teens and 20s differed from mine. When I was single, all my friends and I could think about was how to find the next date or sexual partner. We were all very active, and I personally had over a dozen "serious" girlfriends (3+ months) and another couple dozen kissing flings/sexual partners, roughly 50/50 between Latin America and the US. I actually can't easily remember all the women I've been with, certainly not all of their names and in fact I'm pretty mediocre in terms of "achievement" among my friends, the best of them having had 50-100 sexual partners in their lives.
Most of my younger American coworkers get to their 20s barely having kissed a couple of girls in their lives, the difference is astonishing. Have in mind I'm not particularly attractive, tall or fit, I have an average build and I'd say I disappear in the crowd but I know how to communicate with a woman and respectfully "court" them, even if it's for a one night stand. This is skill learned in my teens through trial and a LOT of error. I can't explain, maybe today our sanitized and risk-averse schools repress men's learning of the "courtship language".
I’ve found many men also severely underrate how physically attractive they are. I’ve had male models tell me they’re average looking, guys who are 6ft+ say they’re average height, and guys who literally have girls asking them out saying they’re nothing special.
You might think you know how to talk to women but it might just be a halo effect. It’s more often that than anything else. I’ve seen many men go through the exact same dialogue and have wildly different results because one guy is physically attractive and the other isn’t.
There’s a good example of someone I see in person regularly. Guy is a bit of a doofus but he’s tall as hell and has a jawline. Women are constantly asking for his number and interacting with him all the time. Yet, the women who have talked to him for more than ten minutes are like, “yeah he’s terrible. So awkward, unfunny, and the dancing - holy cow is it bad!” Literally he sells so well on his physicality but then he can’t deliver with personality. Women give him more chances than they’ll ever give any of his shorter peers.
I was pretty blown away when he told me about how he gets endless matches and dates from online because - again - dude is a total doofus. You couldn’t get a much worse person socially and yet he’s swimming in options.
Well, I'm not saying I'm unattractive, just that I won't stand out in a crowd. I'm the average guy. I'm healthy, not overweight, I shave regularly and wear Tommy Hilfiger instead of Target (although they might sell TH at Target, haha).
Here's how I know it: it's the amount of effort I have to put in getting a mate. I said I learned how to do it with a lot of trial and error, but that's not the case for a few of my friends. Women come to them with minimal effort (I've witnessed it many times). Not the case with me, I have to initiate it and conquer every inch of territory, so to speak.
I also had a hard time on dating websites when I used to do that. Few responses, almost zero girls reaching out organically, but a high success rate when getting a response (however that is to be expected, I suppose).
For a math analogy, I don't get the A because I'm a genius and finished the test in 10 minutes without studying. I'm the guy who studies a lot to get the A, so not a "natural", just someone with enough potential alongside learning to write the right things down.
This is where I think you're undervaluing what's going on with what I said.
Often getting a response is all you ever need. The same is true when going out to a bar or whatever. If a woman finds you physically attractive - you really just need to not shoot yourself in the foot when interacting and it's mostly smooth sailing.
What I'm trying to say to you is: you might think you're not attractive because you're not a celebrity ("I don't stand out") but you're probably quite physically attractive to a certain amount of women. You discredit that because you don't succeed with every woman and you don't think you have incredibly high status or whatever.
You're also in your 40s now but I'm talking about when you were single and younger and how you're using your life experience then as justification as to why men aren't doing well. How you look now is not a reflection of how you looked then.
I suppose that there is no objective way to measure that, and we won't arrive at a conclusion by just talking about it. Maybe I could go use one of those sites where you post a picture and people rate you?
You are right that I'm physically attractive to a number of women. I just don't think this number is very big, haha... at least compared to most of my friends, but maybe my friends are way more attractive than average for some odd reason? A bunch of CS/Engineer geeks...
I just don't understand why you are - it seems - almost dismissing the possibility of this being a skill, something you learn. Why wouldn't it be? My life story gives me a lot of evidence that this is the case, it would be tedious to write about it in detail, maybe one day I'll write a book!
One thing that is easy to talk about is how my partners would often say that I'm "confident", "funny" and "charming" rather than "good looking". Not even my wife calls me good looking :)
Because calling someone good looking is considered shallow and we deem shallowness a bad trait to exhibit. No one is going to say - “well the only reason I really got interested in my partner was because they were good looking”. They’ll try to posthoc justify it by saying your personality or whatever was good - even though your looks is what opened the door.
I’m not denying the skills. I literally talked about the doofus with good looks. He could improve his personality and skills and then he’d be a gigachad… I am saying that improving your skills is hardly sufficient for today’s market. We live in a different time and it’s wildly superficial.
Looks will always help - and I'm also literally saying that with my argument by stating that I had a harder time than my buddies because of average looks. I'm also saying that you can very significantly tilt the odds on your favor by "acting right", because that's what I experienced.
Sure, being "charming" probably won't help too much in getting people to reach out to you on Tinder, but it will help you once you get a few hits, and it will also help you in parties, night clubs, work environment etc. We are in a different time, but people still meet in person. If you meet absolutely no single women ever in your day to day, I can see this is a problem but even that can be improved with local sports events, church, Meetups etc. Opportunities are EVERYWHERE.
I went out on a date with a girl who called my phone accidentally - she mistyped the number she wanted to call. I had never met her before, we were absolute strangers until I answered her saying "Sorry, I dialed the wrong number" with "Nope, I don't accept your apology, you are not getting out of it that easily, not with that sweet voice you aren't". She gave me her number, a few phone calls later, we went out. You can do it too, man :).
You need to learn... this is the most important part. This is where men struggle. Men aren't struggling because they have a bunch of hits and need to just follow up. That is hardly the issue these days. Men have endless advice about how to act, respond, message, flirt, etc. There's endless services out there for that these days. The issue is that most men can't get a single match. Go look up the stats on this - most men never even get matches on dating services. Point blank. The same is true for going out to bars, clubs, etc. Almost all the men I know who have slept with dozens of women in the recent years say the same thing: Bars, clubs, etc. are absolute garbage for meeting women because it requires immense physical attraction for the women to want to spend any amount of time with you. The same is true of dating apps. And, guess what, most men aren't that physically attractive and never will be. This is where things like "warm approach" and building absolfuckingutely huge social networks is what most men are spending their time doing these days. (That and going to the gym, dermatologists, and cosmetic surgeons obsessively)
I think this might be more reflective of the time and place you grew up. It's certainly not the same now. I can't imagine any of my friends who are women going on a date with a random guy they haven't seen even a photo of yet. I mean - that's also a very old timey story, tbh. These days you put in the wrong phone number and you don't know where that call is going as cellphones put you anywhere in the world.
> I can see this is a problem but even that can be improved with local sports events, church, Meetups etc. Opportunities are EVERYWHERE.
Ooph. My man, you have been out of the game for a long time. Sports events with single women? lol - what are you on? Meetups!? Have you ever been to one in the last five years? It's a complete sausage fest for any activity. Church is mostly full of old and married people.
I'm sorry man, you're just living in the days of old. It's very boomer-esque. Looks are paramount for most men to have any success like you had today. You might not feel great looking but you were probably above avergage but more importantly - you lived in a time where your looks weren't as important.
LOL, what can I say? I've been to most of the activities I mention recently. Meetups where most attendants are women (went to one last month), sports with groups of women in the crowd in the past 6 months... Even a cruise with my wife - full of old people AND women in their 20s... I have friends who married recently after meeting in Church. Night club in Vegas, went 3 years ago, PACKED with women...
I won't be offended by your "Boomer-esque" comment as I'm Gen X, but let me just say, Millenial son, one can go through life telling themselves that others have/had it better, only if life was fair to them...
Consider the ratios. “Groups of women” doesn’t mean anything if there are “hordes of men”. Come to nyc or sf or any major city. It’s overwhelming how many single men show up to any event. Often more men but especially more single men than single women. I also think a cruise is almost the worst place to try to meet a partner. People fly in from all over for cruises…
What kind of meetup? I haven’t seen any with any good amount of women.
Culture matters. You can have the most "game" but if you grow up in Saudi Arabia or India you will almost certainly have a lower "count" than someone with no game who grew up in Brazil.
True, but what I'm saying is that the same overall approach - at least in my case - worked well in the US, even though things were harder at first (some tweaks were needed indeed). I bet things would be different in India or Saudi Arabia, however we're talking about the US here. I'm saying that if young American men had the opportunity to learn how to court women, they would have no problems finding mates.
> if young American men had the opportunity to learn how to court women
You growing up in a culture where courting women is encouraged makes a huge difference, you can't really practice if it isn't socially acceptable to court women badly.
It can mean many things, but it will generally eventually boil down to some sort of sexual relation at some point in the future, not necessarily in the context of, but also not excluding, a relationship. There could be other possible outcomes of a courtship (living together with no sex?), but I think that's the most common.
It started in the early 00s, but schools/media really started to shame boys for pursuing girls. Especially if the girls showed the slightest bit of resistance.
The article is written in a weird way which suggests that women are pursuing better options and are happy about that, but statistics don’t bear that out. Self-reported life satisfaction for women has been declining since the 1970s: https://docs.iza.org/dp4200.pdf
Something I’ve noticed is that American parents of the boomer generation have pretty much abdicated their role in getting younger people paired up. Young people don’t know what they need in a partner (how could they, they don’t have the experience) and aren’t good at estimating their own market value. As an immigrant I mocked the idea of arranged marriage when I was young, but most of my cousins had marriages that were facilitated to some degree and most ended up with good matches. If my boys aren’t hitched up by 30 I’m going to seriously consider the option.
Ha! That reminded me of a time in my teens (25 years ago). I have always been extremely shy, and thus was the one in my (male) friend group without a girlfriend.
Two times, a friend of mine fixed a meeting with a girl (different girl each time) where he told the girl that "his friend liked her" (I was his friend) and also told me that "her friend liked me". At parties, we got to meet (each with the assumption that the other person liked us) and both times we became boyfriend/girlfriends.
Both times we were very young to get into a long term relationship (I was 15 at the time), but in hindsight, I am impressed how simple it was. Just a matter of "breaking" that illusory barrier of fear of rejection.
Better options, does not necessarily mean more happiness. The better options are usually independence and physical security, and they come with a price, of which happiness might be one of them. After all, western societies have long moved into a direction where actual happiness is not as important as the fake-happiness from economic factors and social standing, or recently the kick from entertainments.
I'm not sure how to make these two statements consistent:
> More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women
> “Women don’t need to be in long-term relationships. They don’t need to be married. They’d rather go to brunch with friends than have a horrible date,” said Greg Matos
So women don't need to be in a long-term relationship, and yet they are at a much higher rate?
A man who is financially autonomous, practices basic hygiene and grooming, wears tasteful clothing, and approaches women with respect and manners has nothing to worry about. You don't need to make 6 figures, to be 6 feet tall, to have the body of The Rock or 2004 Brad Pitt's face. Having one interesting hobby is also a huge plus, even if it's as simple as hiking or jogging. You just need to be minimally interesting.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for those among us who fit in the above, many men fail on one or more of these points. The trueoffmychest and TwoXChromosomes subreddits are full of horror stories about unkempt or disrespectful men.
>A man who is financially autonomous, practices basic hygiene and grooming, wears tasteful clothing, and approaches women with respect and manners has nothing to worry about... one interesting hobby...
Congratulations, you've just described 95% of men who are gainfully employed in fairly technical white collar sectors of the economy.
You're getting down-voted because they are probably the single biggest demographic on HN and their experience doesn't match what your alleging it to be.
A lot of people are in denial of basic genetic factors and keep trying to intellectualize mating practices. I found that listening to the "Beat Your Genes" podcast the most helpful out of the resources available.
Women (on average, obviously individuals are different) are attracted to status vastly more than anything else. All the other "requirements" are basically seen as proxies for status (job, income, character, etc).
IT is still seen societally as medium to low status, so people in the industry are going to struggle. I think the best thing you as an individual can do is get a higher-status hobby (i.e. not video gaming, but something like acting or guitar, etc).
I also find that America is completely in denial about the status game, where as other countries are more honest about it (i.e. people will actually tell you)
>I also find that America is completely in denial about the status game, where as other countries are more honest about it (i.e. people will actually tell you)
I've found that IT has much higher status in other countries than it does in America. American women want men who are lawyers (or politicians), doctors, or business executives, not engineers or IT people. In other countries, women don't all have an automatic stigma against IT, because they know it pays well.
Exactly this. I've been single for four months at 27 and dated a lot during that time and I noticed that the bar is set _so low_ to place yourself as a better candidate than, let's say 80% of other men, that's it's simply scary.
Most men have literally nothing interesting to offer for a relationship. When you look at their situation from an objective point of view it's so obvious why they remain single and yet most are unable to see it. They either have no hobbies, hobbies that are almost exclusively shared by other men and often show no interest in their potential partners' hobbies. A lot of them also spend most of their time in online communities that are almost completely absent from women. They end up having discussion subjects and interests so far away from their dating partners that it turns into an awkward date.
I daresay a higher percentage of men have interesting hobbies than women, at any age. Mostly because having interesting hobbies is a good way to attract mates for men, and not for women.
It's still an issue. When online dating, one of the main thing you get from a person's profile is "what are their interests?". Even if it's not explicitly written down, people try to infer based on the pictures.
Oh, a picture him riding an ATV with the boys. Ah, here's one of him fishing with the boys. There he is, happily posing with a normally dangerous but sedated wild animal. Hmm.
>Oh, a picture him riding an ATV with the boys. Ah, here's one of him fishing with the boys. There he is, happily posing with a normally dangerous but sedated wild animal. Hmm.
>You get the idea.
I don't get the idea.
Half the comments here are about men lacking healthy masculinity. Now you just described someone who loves going out in the nature. Fishing and hunting are fun hobbies and it's not for men only (literally my local angling club is like ~40% women)
>hobbies that are almost exclusively shared by other men
So all the best ones.
Programming, GNU/Linux, complex bideo gamez...
>and often show no interest in their potential partners' hobbies
So all the braindead ones for people who for some reason are too cognitively limited or environmentally discouraged to be into the ones above.
Sex, drugs, travel, shopping...
This stark sexual partitioning is either a joint failure of society and feminism in not encouraging women to do better or some redpill biological thing, but, either way, it sucks and the answer is the same: posthumanity. Let's go bb :clap:
I do go out on weekends and approach women. Respectfully. While having basic hygiene and grooming and tasteful clothing. And I'm financially autonomous. And I work out regularly. And have a social circle. I'm perfectly average looking.
All that gets me is friends. Loads of friends. Women who I share a conversation with and have a laugh with. Never any attraction or meeting up at a later date.
Don't speak confidently about subjects you know nothing about.
Are you signalling that you’re looking for friends or partners?
IME women don’t react well to crudeness or excessive directness but with a silver tongue you can flower up “hi I’d like to escalate” and as long as you are clear (by ‘clear’ I mean with an amount of sexy deniability) then that will act as a quick filter.
Plus it takes cojones, which women also enjoy (IME YMMV IANAW)
Comments like these get tiring. Not only do young men have to suffer in silence but now they have to read stupid comments like this which are nothing more than gaslighting.
The men in those horror stories that you mentions are not the ones having problem. They already have women in their lives.
Not really true, as the actual studies show if you read beyond the headline.
And dumb "life/advice" subreddits are all "creative writing" at best, and just straight trolling/karma farming more often. Nothing posted there is true. Taking reddit as evidence for anything is a terrible idea.
> A man who is financially autonomous, practices basic hygiene and grooming, wears tasteful clothing, and approaches women with respect and manners has nothing to worry about.
The tasteful clothing can be even left out and I find your comment largely naive, but your point kind of stays true: if you're "normal" there's armies of women out there looking for relationships.
A suprising amount of 30+ year olds I know would spend most of their free time gaming or conducting isolated and unappealing lives.
And the biggest complain I hear from women is lack of maturity, masculinity and most of all mental health among men.
The problem is, if a man hit all these points there's really no reason for him to form a relationship with a woman. Ideal state for a man is being single and having series of one night stands :) Relationships are for those who have trouble attracting women and once they succeed they want to keep their "prey" forever. /s
“Nearly half of all young adults are single: 34 percent of women, and a whopping 63 percent of men.”
If the population is roughly 50/50 how does that add up? Are there lots of men in two relationships at once? Or are younger women primarily dating older men?
...or knowingly sharing. Some women would rather non-exclusively have a partner they perceive to be high value than exclusively have a partner they perceive to be low value. I've heard it put as: "I'd rather have 25% of a winner than 100% of a loser."
People outside the sample age dating people inside the sample age. AKA, Older men dating younger women, and in far greater numbers than vice versa. Also, In America it seems women are more likely or at least more open about being gay/bi as well. Those 2 things account for the majority of the disparity.
Ah yes, my granfather still remembers the moment he was told that feminism is good. And from then on he deeply knew that the rise of women is no threat to him and his brethren. I on the other hand look at this result and long for the old days, were only the eldest son was allowed to marry and women were not allowed to vote.
Jokes aside, your view of feminism, it's history and results is very reductive. Are you talking about beauvoir, judith butler, the cyborg manifesto or more about the pop feminism that gets represented in talk shows, lifestyle and outrage yt-videos?
I'm happy that my sisters don't have to put up with people that dont treat them well just because their women. Take this with a grain of salt, I've noticed that young men generally seem not to be as emotionally mature as their female counterpart.
I may not be using the term feminism accurately, but what I mean is that men were told that any progress made for women would also be beneficial for them. While I fully support gender equality and fairness, it doesn't seem like these advancements have actually helped men. It appears to be a zero-sum scenario.
We need to produce less children, so that trend is perfectly good, isn't it?
And the younger the woman the better, isn't that an obvious?
What about friendship between men, this is your personal choice. I have more than one really close friend and I can not see myself without that kind of relationship.
Poes Law and all, I'll take your comment at face value.
Where does your percieved need to produce less children come from?
One could also argue that older people who are more settled in life make better parents.
The article also points out a decline in male friendships. Having a relationship doesnt automatically exclude friendships and vice versa.
Personally I think that choice has a similar influence on both. Approaching people you meet only as potential and exchangeable players for your DnD setting or as partners for your bedroom will turn them away the same way.
> Where does your percieved need to produce less children come from?
Too stupid all the pro-children agitation. For example, why to produce less children and allow aborts? To stop human-caused crisises like global warming, plastic pollution, pollution of air. But why to produce more children and forbid aborts? To keep your nation rising, to keep traditional lifestyle, and to pay more taxes.
Any decent arguments lost in pro-children vs anti-children question?
I meant the question more personally. Where do you feel pressured to have no/more kids?
I mean yes, there are sensible arguments on either side. But it sounded like we are getting pressured to have more/less children. And that we was what I tried to get at. It sounds egoistic, but on very personal matters I don't like to listen to the ominous blob of internet opinions we all contribute to. And you should too..
I have seen some of my own comments and would be very ashamed if someone took it as literal advice/imperative.
We do if we want to preserve the little bit of wild are we have left and keep a decent quality of life where we can eat fruit and vegetables. Even cutting meat to zero isn't going to be enough.
It's an unpopular opinion for sure. But as it stands, our planet cannot sustain the way we exploit it. Our seas are being emptied and poisoned, we cut rainforest to be used for overcropping. It's what happens if you have 8 Billion people on a relative small planet. Sure we could do better but that's not in our nature untill doom stands on our doorstep.
Sorry for the pedantry, but Earth is not a "relatively small" planet. It's actually quite large for a rocky planet. Out of all the rocky planets and moons in our own system, Earth is by far the largest (except for Venus, which is about 90% the size). From what we're seeing with exoplanet research, it looks like Earth is still pretty large, though it's hard to tell since we have a hard time detecting smaller planets, and the "super-Earths" are more easily visible to us.
Of courses, compared to gas giants, Earth is small, but that's like comparing apples and whales.
It's actually quite popular among environmentalists. We need to make progress on sustainability, and we will. We CAN sustain 8 billion people because of the immense progress humans have made in food production and efficiency. Pretending the only solution is, less humans, is antithetical to everything humanity has accomplished.
"we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence but we're about 2 centuries away from complete population collapse of the species.
There are less babies born on this day than any day in history, and that will be true for the rest of our entire species' existence, barring major technological "Brave New World" style test tube baby advances (which are indeed extremely likely given this fact.)
We have a bunch a problem that could be solved by tech progress. Tech progress is pushed by more brains. More sticks in pop fertility's wheels reduce the number of brains available to work on said problems.
That would be cool but I was obviously thinking the most boring and reasonable solution, more human brains educable to a high enough level in the usual suspect domains.
The article poses the situation as a problem, and I say "screw that noise" (pun intended) with my anecdote:
I'm a man now in my mid-30s, and I cannot god damn wait until I'm old enough to be out of the "marriage market" so everyone stops fucking pestering me about marriage.
I find absolutely no appeal in the concept. The legal and social risks of associating with women beyond friendships are simply not worth it. I also consider the idea of affecting and being affected by someone to such a deep extent to be a violation of individual freedoms.
Last but not least: I consider it a cardinal sin to create kids and then tell them with a straight face that life is, on average, fucking horrible. You know what it's like to see your parents pass away? To witness their finals days? It's shit. Absolute shit. I refuse to make any kids, my hypothetical kids, suffer that. I'm not even getting into the other nasty aspects of life. Fuck all that.
Then why would you imagine parents tell their kids that life is "fucking horrible", instead of telling them that life is "plenty happy"? Like, everything you describe, you have or will go through as well, and apparently you don't find it to be "shit. Absolute shit".
Sure, there’s plenty of reasons to not have kids, I do get that. But “I’m happy with life but I think that everyone else’s is horrible misery” is an odd position to hold.
When did I ever say that? I don't care about others' lives, it's none of my business.
I find life, as far as I experience it, to be overall horrible. I'm plenty happy regardless, but it's nonetheless not something I'm interested in foisting onto my hypothetical kids.
> not something I'm interested in foisting onto my hypothetical kids
Nor is anyone asking you to. Just, don't go around assuming that parents tell their kids that "life is, on average, fucking horrible"—instead, they show their kids how to be happy, like you are.
So you wish you had never been born? Isn't that just a theoretical-linguistic proposition and not a truely held belief? We are after all stratified beings.
That is it seems you are just venting or virtue signaling (that is still OK).
Recently my life has acquired some properties that many might class as "hell on Earth". It doesn't bother me though, I will always be grateful to be breathing as I am a human being.
I mean if you lived in the days of our prehistoric hunter gatherer ancestors and didnt know if you would starve to death next Winter would you be so antilife?
By the way I am single and dont have kids which is what I selfishly prefer. But I dont think that should be encouraged for healthy males as we have a responsibility to society.
Were I given a choice in the matter with the ability to make an informed decision, I would choose not to.
That's not what happens, of course. So I'll just enjoy my time here and respect the decisions my parents made. My parents made theirs, and I will make mine.
>I mean if you lived I'm the days of our prehistoric hunter gatherer ancestors and didnt know if you would starve to death next Winter would you be so anti life?
Absolutely. Given the willpower to overcome natural instincts and desires, I would choose to not have kids because why would I intentionally want them to experience even the possibility of starving to death in the Winter?
It's fortunate that the world has become a much better place since then, but at least for me the bar is still not low enough to convince me.
>we have a responsibility to society.
I couldn't care less whether humanity thrives, survives, or goes extinct. Not like anything I do would make a difference anyway, of course. My only duty to society is to not overtly bother or violate anyone, that's it.
Interesting comments. I will say that I still think my point about our linguistic frame regarding belief (and our beliefs about our own beliefs) as opposed to an action-oriented frame is confusing to me.
Without pragmatic grounding what are we ever even talking about, our untested ideals? Action in the present moment is the important bottleneck to consider in my opinion.
Your comments reminds me how recently I sort of made a triadic taxonomy of "types of values" (value in general, like a replicating bias). I think it was (1) parasitic values, (2) self-sacrificial values, and (3) circular (stable) values.
But again using the principle of thinking of things not through any singularity sort the frame but allowing extension and similar concepts we can seem some interesting properties about this dynamic.
Let think of things as a stratified hierarchy of values having tendency that higher up strata mean a larger spatiotemporal perspective (I guess once space and time are completely abstracted then the hierarchy is more about scaling in semantic space in general.)
Parasitic values are biased toward limiting or even eliminating the replication of other lower level values. I guess this is analogous to a neuronal group acting as an inhibitory module.
In the example of antinatalism the specific value of antinatalism is oriented toward limited or stopping what we could call the self-preservation or Darwinian value (a biological value, aka instinct). Of course it depends if one wants humanity totally extinct or just down to a small number. I would agree that a degree of this inhibition is good (maybe "parasitic" is too negatively connoted a term to use)
This is interesting because the value is stratified on top of the self-preservation value and so if it succeeds in any large degree in becomes self-undermining. This is like human's killing off their ecosystem on which they are stratified.
This is really the extent of my thought on this (you probably can complete the analogy with (2) and (3)). Also it will be interesting to think through the implications of feedback from the higher strata to the lower.
>Their misogyny is honestly invading my brain to the point that I suspect every man I meet to secretly harbour at least some of their toxic opinions. I don't even want to bother dating anymore.
Seriously? this is some extreme opinion and approach, really out of touch with reality.
This sub is no different from the people described in this post, just the other side of extrema.
Any top reddit post is going to be unrepresentative and indeed, probably made up. It's the unfortunate result of the existence of bullshitters/karma farmers and that reality isn't optimized to be engaging and interesting.
I found dating so hopelessly difficult in America, that I decided to literally learn another language and relocate to another country. I felt like I had no future in America because of that. The difference where I am now is night and day. I have had to decline more dates and advances, which never happened before. Which I feel confirms my belief in the toxicity of dating in America.
In America, I had many women who were my close friends. They would regularly initiate conversations, share personal details of their life, and even stay at my home some days. In fact most of my friends were women. Although I have introspected on this greatly, and certainly have grown, I believe this is additional evidence that, perhaps, the problem is not me but the environment.