OK, that’s unexpected:
Does anybody have any idea why? I read the whole thread and I still don’t get it. What else are they doing at this age?
N would tell me severely that he was concentrating on his studies but he’s a) unusual and b) terrified of being dragged into the Russian army if he weren’t in college. What’s everybody else’s excuse?
Most young people are on apps, and not being on or doing well on apps is considered yet another mark of someone lacking; in the comments to that tweet you posted, you will see another survey, with plenty of young men saying “I don’t do well on apps” — my 23 yo old son says that. He does ask girls out IRL, but the thing is that girls who are straight and open to dating will be on the apps; people he meets IRL may already have boyfriends etc. And dating on apps encourages the most superficial dating practices you can imagine, including everyone vying for the top 20% most attractive people. None of it helps people relate to others IRL or learn how to flirt or recognize the clues that someone is interested.
My good friend recently got divorced and went on dating apps. Just hearing her stories and how people treat other people as disposable — there’s always someone new and more shiny on the apps! — and this is among older people, in their late 50s or early 60s. Can you imagine how brutal and soul-crushing it is for young people who are already balls of insecurity and nerves? That friend’s friend has been insistent on meeting someone in person, the old-fashioned way, and zilch. Basically, it’s apps or nada.
It doesn’t help that so much of other socialization happens online. People’s friends are now all over the place, and few are local. People like my son will relax by gaming online or going to the house of his closest friends, not to a bar or a party or anyplace where he can meet girls. It doesn’t help that he’s a grad student and as such neither suave nor flush with cash, and apparently that’s also not attractive at all to female professionals of his age.
In other words, dating has moved to the apps, so the metric of engaging in person is probably more flawed now than it would’ve been 20 years ago.
The problem with moving most of the dating online is that it’s impossible to experience attraction on an app. I mean, the real attraction, the butterflies, the chemical reaction.
If I’d met N on an app, nothing would have ever happened. He’s Russian and he compensates for being shy by choosing photographs where he looks smug and condescending. Remove the chemistry, and there’s zero reason for us to talk. With apps, you put in all that work to then discover in the first 6 seconds of the in-person meeting that it’s a no-go.
Call me old but I don’t think this is a great development.
Online dating is bad for all kinds of men who don’t struggle in person. “Terrible at taking/choosing pictures” is one great example, short men is another.
People have no idea what is actually important to them. I’ve seen many people say “I’m not into short guys/Indian guys/blondes/whatever” and within three months they’re dating exactly that. But people stick more rigidly to these arbitrary standards when they do all their dating online. I know when I was in okcupid years ago I felt myself talking myself out of people I’d probably have gotten along with thanks to their stupid match questions. I gave up on the website pretty quickly.
Exactly. I met this guy once who was completely convinced that he can only fall for diminutive Asian women with pointy long nails. Then he met me, and fell so hard that I spent the better part of a year explaining that I didn’t like him that way.
Or there was a female friend who was convinced she liked tall blond guys but every relationship, including her eventual happy marriage, was with short dark men.
“People have no idea what is actually important to them.”
This is very true. Attraction is complex and mutual chemistry is impossible to predict, plus the stuff that’s important for the long-term success of a relationship absolutely has nothing to do with whether a dude is over 6 ft tall or a woman is under 120 lbs or whatever other stupid criterion everyone seems to put down on these profiles.
I don’t think it’s a great development, either, especially not for people seeking real romantic connections. It’s great for straight hookups and, based on what I’ve read, it’s great for queer folks (casual or relationship-minded) who at least now have a space where they can find the people of requisite orientation.
I am completely with you on the necessity of assessing chemistry, which can only be done in person. I’ve seen, through this friend of mine, how much time is spent juggling various people’s messages, going on dates with multiple people per week (sometimes per day), only for most of those to ignite no spark at all. What a waste of time and energy! And don’t get me started on “currency” (what one brings to the dating market); I have to admit I was disappointed when my friend started listing this guy’s “currency” and things like “he has a really nice apartment” came up. I was like, seriously? Why does that matter? You’re a mature woman with her own retirement plan; you have your own nice apartment. These are all bullshit rationales for what was clear from the get go, which was that she was not attracted to the guy at all. All the apartments in the world aren’t going to change that. I am happy to report that after several months of what seemed like excruciating torture to me and apparently fun to her, my friend did find a great match and is freshly in love, so the story has a happy ending. But I am pretty sure that guys, in general, do much worse on dating apps than women, because women are generally more discerning when it comes to sexual partners, and the apps bring forth the stupidest, most irrelevant criteria for discernment, which hurt both men and women in the long run.
Anyway, not a fan of apps. They’re not going away, though.
I jokingly forbade my husband to die before me, because I am so not dating ever again. It’s terrifying out there.
Based on what I’ve read, it’s actually pretty bad. Being on the pill dampens your libido (which also answers the question somewhere upthread why young women don’t seem to put enough weight on sexual compatibility — if you have no drive, sex probably seems unimportant, but it’s objectively very important for long-term compatibility). When you realize (once you’re off the pill, trying to get pregnant, for example) that maybe you have quite a voracious drive and the mid-to-low libido guy you might have chosen when you were all “sex is meh” or simply a guy who doesn’t get your engine running is not the right guy for you at all in the long run. And let’s not even mention the severe consequences of starting the pill during puberty, which apparently leads to vaginal atrophy and serious issues with adult sexual function. The reproductive system and drive are not to be trifled with.
Absolutely, and this isn’t spoken of nearly enough. Birth control pills are a huge libido suppressant. We are all collectively pretending that there is no downside to oral contraception but there is a pretty huge one. I’m very glad you mentioned this because I’m used to people treating me like a nutcase when I mention this.
I understand that these pills are extremely convenient. But…. but.
Just saw this on Facebook. It’s a comedy skit, but it directly speaks of the relationship between birth control and smell:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/304650312225335?mibextid=B7JvUZ
–FB comedian– yeah, I think she nailed it. I’ve never been on HBC (I looked at the risk profile, counted up all my other stroke risk factors, and came out with an unacceptable number!), but I have an extremely keen sense of smell, that I very much use to keep in touch with my world– like somebody asked me once if I had to lose one of my five senses, which one would I choose to live without, and without even thinking, I was like “hearing”– I’d ditch that before smell. Like, how do you get to know people without smell? How do you tell when you have a gas leak? Or when the milk is just about to go off? Or if your cooking is OK? How do you tell when the chicken is getting done, without setting a timer for everything? How do you find the gross thing that is producing flies in your house (when your preschooler opens a can of tuna and hides it in a cabinet)? There is so much crucial information I get from my nose, and quite a lot of it is deeply entwined with emotion and memory.
The last round of covid knocked out my sense of smell completely for two weeks, and partially for about another month. It was horrible! I felt weirdly crippled, as though I was walking around with a crazy blindfold and earmuffs, and only getting half the intel I was used to– everything seemed unreal.
I was taught as a teenager that it was OK to look at a girl, but I was sinning if I had even a fleeting thought about sex while looking. Since talking to a female my age led to thoughts of sex, I avoided it. I never approached a woman at all until I was in college. I think this is common among boys raised in Fundamentalist Christian environments.
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A certain kind of young guy (in my experience, white and middle class) seems to think it’s impossible for mysterious “reasons” to approach a woman in person, and that all approaches must be filtered through online dating. I still don’t know what catastrophe they think will befall them provided they aren’t approaching a coworker (in which case I could concede their fears are rational.) But we never even get to the point of them catastrophizing because they’ve totally closed off the option. They’re “not allowed” to approach women in person.
If they were honest with themselves the answer would be “it’s scary to ask a woman out and I fear rejection.” But they always have some rationalization about it where they blame it on women (all women, apparently) thinking it’s creepy.
This is strictly anecdatal, but I am getting the impression that many young women do think it’s “creepy” to be approached IRL rather than on-app by a man interested in dating them. I find this bizarre because of the chemistry issues so well outlined by Xykademiqz and Clarissa (though I’ve also often wondered if some women have been trained not to think that sexual attraction is important).
I think there’s something to it, though. People have so much of their ‘social’ life filtered through online platforms these days, that it’s expected for someone to DM you first, not just approach you. If a guy approaches you in public, like as not he’s trying to steal your purse.
I know that sounds awful, but at the same time… group social environments IRL where you meet people who are friends of your friends, not everybody does that anymore.
There certainly are a minority of women who think this way who are very vocal online. Ime these women will also roll their eyes at whatever you message them online. They simply only want attention from men they happen to already be interested in. Someday they may evolve past emotional infancy. Luckily, this is a minority of women. And even these ones are usually ok being approached by men they are friends with.
The average young woman seems to be craving it. I get flirtatious looks and giggles from zoomer age women on a regular basis. And I’m not particularly attractive. Any decent looking, outgoing young guy has a plethora of options.
Since most if not all young people do just about everything by using an app – they can get a meal, book an uber, a train or a plane, a holiday, have everything delivered to their door, they think they can also get relationships that way.
It goes with slogans like “If you can text it don’t phone me”, and thinking that remote work is even better than working in an office or a real place, and never setting foot into a bank and talking to a real person, and hating the inconvenience of standing in line to pay at a checkout, and I could go on but I’m afraid of boring people to death.
If everything can be done purely on the basis of convenience, it is only right that people should be punished for thinking that relationships can also be found on that basis. 45% of women under 36 in the US are single and probably destined to stay that way. Men are not in a much better position and young men are suffering an epidemic of loneliness. People seem to have no problem with a virtual world and yet they complain that they it’s hard to find meaningful relationships.
The comment above about boys and fundamentalist boys was from me, David Bellamy. I am using my tablet and it does not work the same way as my computer so my info did not appear.
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….nobody to leave the dog with.
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“Does anybody have any idea why?”
Isn’t a lot of this a by-product of “Me too”? If I were in the US and in a position to hire/mentor…. I would treat women as if they were radioactive because why risk it?
” They’re “not allowed” to approach women in person.”
The cultural meta-message being sent to young men for about 20 years (give or take a few) is: Showing interest in a woman in any way is inherently sexist and predatory and shores up systems of patriarchal colonial and racial oppression.
In that context approaching women in person (even in places people go to precisely in order to meet new people)….. let’s just say the juice isn’t worth the squeeze (especially if the orange in question turns out to be a hand grenade).
Since women usually don’t overtly approach men (instead sending subtle messages of receptivity that almost all young men are in no condition to understand) you’re gonna have a standoff…
I get that lots of women have to deal with massive levels of unsolicited attention and lots of men can quickly morph from innocuous to terrifying….
All in all it’s a no-win situation for both men and women…. good job, culture!
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I’m sympathetic to the unfortunate social pressures of the modern age…but at the same time, part of being an adult is not being a scared bitch all the time.
What are the likely consequences of asking for a girl’s number at the bar, etc.? I don’t know a single man who’s suffered anything worse than a harsh rejection for that (and that’s nothing new.) Outside of a professional context, it just isn’t that risky.
The “juice” here is “any chance at a successful relationship,” unless you’re one of the rare men who is good at online dating. The “squeeze” is “an imagined catastrophic scenario where I become an unemployed social pariah because I asked for a woman’s number.” If anything, online dating is riskier because people can take screenshots.
“part of being an adult is not being a scared bitch all the time”
agree
“imagined catastrophic scenario where I become an unemployed social pariah because I asked for a woman’s number”
No, the squeeze in the metaphor is the amount of effort needed to have and maintain a relationship.
What I think a lot of people don’t understand (it took me a while before it became clear) is that it’s not rejection per se that young men fear. By the time he’s old enough to date your average male knows exactly what rejection is and most are used to it.
What really scares them is not failure but short-term success…a short term hook-up that ends in accusations of rape or a longer relationship that ends with accusations of ‘abuse’ usually never really specified or marriage that ends in divorce and getting zeroed-out (losing financial and other types of stability.
There are plenty of examples of all these happening often enough that lots of men look at the whole relationship market and go “… nope”.
Apparently research shows it’s not a fear of being MeToo-ed (as if women do so willy-nilly and not to absolute creeps and generally serial harassers). It’s fear of rejection which for some reason looms large in young men’s minds. And if what you wrote above is true even for some men, that’s some twisted misogyny right there, assuming all women are cruel harpies hell-bent on destroying men’s freedom, self-esteem, and bank accounts. Maybe the plasticky “influences” with boob jobs that everyone salivates over are like that, but most women are not. Men and women are not that different in what they really need, FFS.
” assuming all women are cruel harpies”
You dont’ have to assume ‘all women’ just ‘some women’ or ‘a very few women’ is enough.
If someone convinced you that one in every 500 m&m’s was laced with cyanide…. how many m&m’s are you going to be eating? (replace m&m with any snack that you might enjoy).
Dunno. Eating m&m isn’t a biological imperative (unlike sex) plus cyanide would kill me (unlike being rebuffed by a girl (a common outcome) or being accused of harassment (exceedingly unlikely if you’re not actually harassing anyone) or getting divorced (not unlikely, but hardly deadly). So staying away from some mediocre candy because I don’t wanna die seems like no sacrifice at all. 45% of young dudes staying away from sex and reproduction altogether (strong biological impulses) presumably because they fear women being cruel harpies makes no sense unless they vastly overestimate the abundance of cruel harpies.
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” they vastly overestimate the abundance of cruel harpies”
I’m sure they do, but it’s a bit like going to the beach the day after a big shark attack… intellectually you know the chances of being attacked are small but… it just takes one meeting to make things go… really wrong.
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What nobody’s telling them is… yes there are some truly terrible people out there that you don’t want to get involved with in any way. There are two simple rules that will keep you safe from the vast majority of them:
1) Don’t drink and date (this applies to all recreational drugs).
2) Don’t sleep with anybody until you know them well enough to answer this simple question:
“Would I let this person babysit my (dog/chinchilla/preschool-aged-family-member) for a week?”
If the answer is anything other than an unequivocal “yes”, do not, under any circumstances, have sex with this person.
Also, I thought we were talking about men who will only approach online. That doesn’t mitigate any of the stuff you were talking about. Heterosexual men who’ve intentionally foregone women altogether are a minority, and I’m confident in saying these “men going their own way” are really not representative of the general population, nor are they mentally sound.
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“men who will only approach online”
Is that a problem? Apparently women far prefer online contacts first and most male behavior toward women (for better or worse) is following female preferences.
I think that online approaches turn the digital medium into a go-between so that saying no is easier and the rejection doesn’t cut as deep.
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From what I’ve heard the electronic dating scene is a depressing toxic soup.
But my husband and I met on Xanga back in the internet dark ages, and that’s worked out quite well.
It seems like there’s kind of a huge gulf between “I met someone while hanging out socially online”– a story I’ve heard a couple of times from young marrieds at church, for instance (“we met in a religious discussion group on Discord”), and internet dating sites. I know one couple who married after meeting on an internet dating site, and that was back when eharmony was a new thing, and populated almost entirely by conservative religious people looking to get married, so a good field of prospects.
Tinder… isn’t any of those things. Pretty sure if you’re looking for anything long-term, that’s the wrong place to find it.
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(lightbulb finally flickered on)
I have basically nothing to say about “most people” in the current dating scene. Cultural degradation blah blah etc. “most people” aren’t in it to get married anymore.
But because of that, online is often the best way to meet people, for the rest of us weirdos. Just not Tinder. “Going places” to meet people– volunteering, at work, clubs, hobbies, whatever– mostly gets you more of the “most people” who are looking for something else. If you can narrow it down to the Discord chatgroup for twentysomething Orthodox singles, your odds are far better than IRL.
For the theoretical metoo problems you were talking about before (being accused of something, etc.), it wouldn’t make any difference if you initially contacted the woman online or in person. “Women prefer this” is a totally different issue, and for the record I think it’s untrue. Woke feminists certainly act like this is true, and I wouldn’t blame a confused 19 year old boy for believing them, but people who reject wokeness should be able to reject this too. And since it’s usually men who do the approaching, it’s going to be men who have to end the bluff, rather than waiting around for woke feminists to tell them they’re allowed to ask women out. Someone who goes through life that passively is doomed to never be a man.
“I think that online approaches turn the digital medium into a go-between so that saying no is easier and the rejection doesn’t cut as deep” this is true, and it’s exactly what I’ve been saying throughout this whole conversation. It has nothing to do with any of the metoo stuff you were talking about.
I’m sorry if I’ve come across as harsh here btw. But I think it’s important not to affirm these rationalizations. The sooner people are honest about what their problems are, the sooner they can solve them.
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“since it’s usually men who do the approaching, it’s going to be men who have to end the bluff”
So… men need to man up and take charge…. like this guy….
I think that applies more to men older than the age group in question, though. The younger ones haven’t been through that wringer yet (and don’t have friends who’ve been through it).
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Funny comic about this topic I saw recently (click and look at the full thread)
The context here is that US fertility (TFR) is 1.6 and dropping while a bare minimum for survival is 2.1. And 1.6 isn’t so bad, South Korea is 0.8 and also dropping. People aren’t meeting, aren’t dating, aren’t getting married and aren’t having children.
The old cliche is that the future belongs to those that have babies. That most assuredly isn’t us. But look at the bright side: As population begins to collapse perhaps we’ll realize that our obsession with global warming was worrying about the wrong problem.
In Spain, the median age for a woman to have her first child is, I think, 34. An insane number of women 40+ have no children at all, and almost all of them are unhappy about that. Their reproductive rights end at the right to abort but, apparently, this isn’t causing much joy. When I say this at academic conferences in Spain, the reaction is intense. People want to talk about this but they don’t know how.
And here’s a fantastic example of women making it weird when a guy asks for a phone number, instead of just saying no, thanks, let’s keep it professional: https://www.askamanager.org/2023/09/should-i-tell-my-employee-she-needs-to-give-a-clearer-no-to-a-client-who-asked-her-out.html
That’s a sad story. What should have been a simple, straightforward situation was turned into a mega big deal for no reason.
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“women making it weird when a guy asks”
OMG!!! Thank you!!! That is a perfect example!
The standouts for me.
This “Emma” sounds far too immature to even think of a relationship… yet the first comment is “Don’t blame Emma”
I did a quick search thru the thread and not one shred of sympathy for Ryan from anyone. Everyone agrees what he did was totally wrong…. with many suggestions that he’s a menace, some suggestions that he be banned fromt he studio etc
Hostile cultural attitude toward young men, anyone?
Such a mystery why men aren’t stepping up to the plate…
I do feel bad for Emma, though. She can’t handle the simplest situation that can bring a modicum of discomfort. This will not make for an easy life. How will she survive in the workplace? Manage to ask for a raise? When she gets pregnant, how will she discuss her needs with the medical system that isn’t extremely hospitable to that? How will she parent if she falls apart in the face of the tiniest unpleasantness? There’s a lot of discomfort in life, and here’s a grown woman not socialized past the emotional age of 5.
This worldview is poisonous to both men and women.
I was amazed (though not really surprised) by the comments, especially those that focused on how women should be scared all the time. I have never in my life worried about parking next to a van; if I check my back seat before getting in my car, it’s to make sure that it really is my car and not another blue Honda; it has never occurred to me to take a picture of a taxi driver and send it to a friend in case the driver attacks me (I don’t use Lyft/Uber, but I suppose people might be a little more anxious about those services, where the company doesn’t seem squarely aligned with its drivers). I think of myself as a high-strung person who is more anxious about many things than I need to be, but I have not spent my life in such fear as some of the commenters describe. Maybe because I dated a lot when I was young, and have brothers? I don’t think of men as foreign creatures!
“saying no, thanks, let’s keep it professional”
Right?! How is this not the first impetus? Although I might be misremembering how it was to be a 20-yo woman. It was definitely a less self-assured place than where I am now, but I am pretty sure I’d have done everything to get out of giving him my phone number, because giving someone your number is not signaling a “no.”
Well, sure, but… if you can’t manage even that, perhaps you deserve the consequences. My brother did that whole marry-stupidly, divorce-painfully thing, and I am heartbroken for him, but at the same time… even he would agree that drugs and poor judgement had a lot to do with the initial decision.
“What terrible fate has befallen this guy?”
I was referring to the reactions in the comments… not a single shred of understanding of him or any kind of defense in the comments to what should be a very banal occurrence.
He asked a young woman he knew for her phone number (which is what guys looking for relationships are supposed to do) but from the comments you’d think he was a new Boston Strangler in the making.
Unfortunately the young woman in question rather than simply politely turn him down (like young women have been doing…. forever) panics and then thinking about it later panics some more and burdens her boss with her inability to manage basic human interactions…. I’d say the odds of Emma never getting married are pretty high (or if she does she’s going to turn some unlucky guy into a nervous wreck with her infantile anxiety).
I’d love to tell you the story of a friend who’s been through the flip side of this, but there are just too many details that would be potentially revelatory, so no …
But I can talk in hypotheticals, and so: imagine a woman seeing some guy as desirable, and after initial significant indicators of interest, instead of letting that flow naturally, she decides it’d be good to snoop around within the community to gain intel on the guy so that she can try to “seal the deal” as soon as possible.
Then when the guy realises that she happens to have information she shouldn’t know, he immediately assumes that the best-case scenario is that she’s an industrial spy trying to weasel her way into exfiltrating secrets about his business deals, and at the worst she’s a real deal live action role playing honey pot working for something nasty enough that it’s going to bother him for a few weeks.
What do you think such a guy’s next steps will be?
I’d expect a FOR SALE sign on the house, several vehicles getting sold, a parallel life being constructed at a distance, and a gradual winding down of personal relationships in that area on the basis that he believes he’s been sold out.
So women acting like every guy who approaches them is a potential “Boston Strangler” as Cliff has suggested? Now take the flip side of that where the guy has been messed with by enough of these women that he believes every woman in his local area of operations is potentially compromised by something that’s actively targeting him.
Clearly that hypothetical guy is not going to engage in unsafe relationships, will have nothing to do with hook-up culture, will not be installing apps to talk to the bulk of people who seem to be OK with that mode of interaction, and will be rapidly looking for a way out that rebuilds his self-image and where he wants to go next in life.
In the meantime, he will be looking at every woman who approaches him not as an interesting situation that may yield lovely results, but instead as more of the same of this kind of potential operation until he leaves that place entirely.
No, this isn’t about me, but I can sympathise with the situation.
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As for me: I don’t deal with apps, restrict who can text me to only three people, and generally stay away from online life except for the odd comment here and there.
My regular phone is voice over IP (or VoIP) and doesn’t have the ability to text it, and so people talk to me personally, leave voice mail, or don’t talk to me at all.
I’m OK with all three.
So people generally have to deal with me as I am: well-spoken, somewhat intimidating, usually intense, with looks where I can size up people in an instant.
This immediately puts off certain types of people who especially don’t like that I can speed read them in a few moments and lose interest entirely.
I’m also busy, much too busy to deal with unsure people with bullshit life stories and bad interaction habits, and so that pushes the kinds of people who play these games away as well.
Anyone who’s similarly well-spoken, somewhat intimidating, usually intense, and obviously good at people reading is therefore one of the very interesting rarities out there.
And so it was my girlfriend who took the risk of approaching me in a situation where it looked like I was approachable (and of course I was).
“You took a risk approaching me …”
[surprised look]
“You’re also not faking it, that’s clear with how you’re looking at me.”
“Yeah.”
“So when’s our first date? Are we already on it?”
If you are an intense person, your first date starts now.
Now how do you think these weird people you all are talking about would relate to being called out on their attraction and having to act on it right at that moment?
Cliff: “Basically, it’s apps or nada.”
And so many guys are saying, cool, nada it is … John Nada!
[puts on the “THEY LIVE” sunglasses]
“BE DESTROYED IN DIVORCE COURT!”
“FIND OUT SHE WAS HOOKING UP BEHIND YOUR BACK!”
“SHE DIDN’T REALLY LOVE YOU, JUST THE ATTENTION!”
“THE BABY ISN’T YOURS!”
[takes off the “THEY LIVE” sunglasses]
… nopenopenopenopenope noooooooooope NOPE …
🙂
BTW Clarissa, your comment plug-in no longer works in my usual browser, so whatever got upgraded a few days ago needs a closer look because it’s somewhat broken.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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