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It's long, but very well-researched, entertaining, and demonstrates very thoroughly just how 'over' it is for the average guy in the modern dating/mating game.
I stopped it at the 0:22 mark. Why? The word 'incelmatics' appeared... all I need to know.
It really has to do with women having more choices. There is an incredible volume of research on these trends. For decades they were stuck. Very few career and education options. Incredibly limited avenues for financial independence. High societal expectation to marry early and have children. That's changed, and that's awesome. There is far more choice and more options. It's a win win.
Heck, pre no fault divorce a significant number of those 50+ year relationships were miserable. People were trapped. They couldn't get out, and even if they found a path our most women were fiscally (never mind family pressure) trapped into staying. That's just horrible.
My grandfather didn’t have many choices either — he came from poverty, had a 7th grade education (my grandmother graduated from high school) and needed a partner to have a chance at raising a family and moving up in life. With hard work and a life centered around God they were able to raise 4 law abiding citizens and live a lower middle class lifestyle on the wages of a factory worker/slave and part time hairdresser.
Really? And women being scammed by guys pretending to be smitten and rushing them into a "relationship", then disappearing, or moving into their home for free rent, aren't scams? Shall we do a study to determine how many people of which gender on OLD gets scammed the most? Care to make it interesting, and back your conviction with some spare cash?
What has me scratching my head is all the normal/responsible/home owning men I know that can’t find dates yet the men I know with tats on their necks, criminal records and little to no money find partners without even trying. It’s almost like a large percentage of women have a knack for picking men that seem “exciting” but make terrible long term partners…the types that disappear/don’t pay rent/become abusive, etc. It does seem like many women mature in their choices as they go through the “fun house” of dating and get into their 40s and 50s…especially if they are raising children as a single parent.
Except you don't need to buy a house, or have much (if any) money, or have kids, to get married. Sure, in the short term (2 years) there have been some anomalies, and wages vs housing costs have gotten worse over the past 40+ years, but that's not about marriage rates. It costs pretty much nothing to get married.
I acknowledge your point and agree with your argument here, that said in practice, it still seems marriage and kids both seem to get postponed until after some sort of home can be bought and high student loans and high housing costs seem to the driving factor that keeps people from getting married much more than say the rise of dating apps.
Or to put it another way, I think a lot of the people who struggle with online dating today would have struggled as much or more if these apps weren't available, so that is why I am less willing to say dating apps are the problem delaying marriage rates and family formation.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
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Quote:
Originally Posted by shelato
I acknowledge your point and agree with your argument here, that said in practice, it still seems marriage and kids both seem to get postponed until after some sort of home can be bought and high student loans and high housing costs seem to the driving factor that keeps people from getting married much more than say the rise of dating apps.
Or to put it another way, I think a lot of the people who struggle with online dating today would have struggled as much or more if these apps weren't available, so that is why I am less willing to say dating apps are the problem delaying marriage rates and family formation.
Ok. Fair enough. I don't think either have an impact on marriage rates. I do think student loans have an impact on people (married or not) having children.
Heck, I look at my own parents. They didn't wait to be able to buy a house even in the mid 60s to start a family. Most people I know that married pre 35 or so didn't own a house from the start. Anyway.
Really? And women being scammed by guys pretending to be smitten and rushing them into a "relationship", then disappearing, or moving into their home for free rent, aren't scams? Shall we do a study to determine how many people of which gender on OLD gets scammed the most? Care to make it interesting, and back your conviction with some spare cash?
You really need to lighten up. It's rather odd that people want others to stake cash on their opinion but can't even put their name on their own rep comments.
For the record, I got married off of On line dating. It's not always an endless rejection fest for men, or a Lifetime horror movie film for women.
It's long, but very well-researched, well-presented, entertaining, and demonstrates very thoroughly just how 'over' it is for the average guy in the modern dating/mating game.
I watched the documentary while working on my bike. There was some stuff I agreed with, there were some things I thought it got wrong, and a lot of things that I thought lacked context. The big thing that I thought it got very right was the importance of gender ratios, but on the most important the gender ratios I think it got wrong.
This video makes this big production about how that there are twice as many men as women in society as a whole for younger men.
Below 40 generally there are slightly more men than women, but the gender ratio is nowhere near 2 to 1 in any age group in the United States.
On most online dating platforms there are 3 or 4 men for every woman and there are plenty of places offline to meet women where there are much better gender ratios and its worthwhile for men to explore those options because in a lot of them, especially if you are struggling with women you likely will do better than online. These are also better places to learn how to date.
One of the points that pick up artists make that I agree with is that dating is a skill you can learn, but the more you do it, the further you go down the learning curve and the easier it becomes.
Now one of the points that this video made that I thought was really misleading is that it argued that women are mostly online for attention and that women are online because they are really focused on men's attractiveness.
Let's talk about attractiveness first. Men are pretty damn visual. Almost all men watch porn, most women do not and the closest analogue to porn for woman is likely romance novels. Now some romance novels have racy scenes and those scenes can get woman's motor's running. But the reasons women tend to not like porn and tend to prefer books is that to get their motor's running, they need a plot, they need to get emotionally invested in the characters more, sexuality without the greater character arc is a lot less appealing for them. For women there is a greater separation between attractedness and attractiveness in most women than for most men.
Men's sexuality seems to have an aspect of imprinting on it. There are men who describe themselves as boob men or butt men or maybe they are into feet or some other body part that you can search for on sex tube streaming site. But too much exposure and emphasis about this aspect of our sexuality too quickly to women can kind of screw with women's heads and can make them feel uncomfortable. This is why lot's of woman get worked up about being sexually objectified by men. They want to be assured that you are actually interested in them as a person before too much sexualized attention especially about a body part feels welcomed. But once they really understand and believe that you really are interested in them as a person, then they can actually then start to welcome and actually enjoy more sexualized attention from men. I am not trying to desexualize women, but to try to put woman's sexuality into a better context.
Women are a lot less visual than men. I don't think I have ever had a girlfriend who was as interested in my butt and genitals as much as I was into her boobs and butt. I have had some girlfriends make remarks about my butt, but overall our body parts are just a lot less interesting to women than their body parts are to us. Women's expectations about men's bodies are surprisingly reasonable and attainable. Most women are not into super huge men like the Rock or Arnold in his pumping iron days. You also don't have to be a metrosexual with a lot of product in your hair. I have dated multiple women who let me know that one of their dating requirements is that they didn't want to date a man who took more time in the morning to get ready than they did. Mostly they just want you to not be overweight, wear clothes that fit and are clean. Women's expectations for men is that you shower regularly and not smell bad. With lots of my girlfriends, they will be dressing to the nines, but I will be wearing jeans and maybe a collared shirt, and that was the clothes they wanted me wear when we were out together.
But this argument that women are just looking for attention I think underestimates both you and the women you are interested in. There is an age maybe beginning in high school and into their early twenties where women are experimenting with clothes and make up to get a sense of what men respond to, but most women outgrow that as they realize that they type of attention that they get from men from leading with too much sexuality isn't the type of attention that they want nor makes them feel very good and so they mostly out grow it. Yes there are some women after a break up who might return to that and there are some women who are higher in narcissism who do that as well. But that is not most of the women, nor is it happening most of the time.
What I am arguing is woman are less focused on our appearance because they are more focused on a much broader set of dating criteria. When a woman introduces a guy to her friend's and her family, women tend to feel that everyone is judging not just her boyfriend but also her for picking him and bringing him home. This is not about your appearance but about your conduct. When you meet her friends and family, does she sense that you might embarrass her? Guys don't judge other guys for what girl they date as much as women judge other women for what men they date. So it's a lot more important that you are warm and friendly and dependable. If you are late to family event or get drunk at the in-laws, there will be gossip about why did she settle for him?
Have you ever asked yourself if online dating is so great for women, why aren't there more women willing to sign up for it? Moreover have you ever asked women why more women aren't online?
One of the problems with online dating is that it gives both men and women information that is easy for online dating companies to measure and capture rather than information that is actually useful to know. I would argue that what most women would like to know is whether the guy they are corresponding with online is stand up guy, is he dependable, is he thoughtful, is he reliable? Is he kind? But the online dating companies don't really have any idea of how to measure and evaluate that. What is easy to measure and capture is your picture, maybe your height, they give usually give you some space to describe yourself, but if your self description is I like long walks on the beach and ice cream? Well who doesn't so women often really don't have a good idea of who most of the guys are that they are corresponding with.
Online dating tends to feel like low effort dating for most men and most women. It's not just guys who don't care for it, it's women too who have some problems with it. Because the gender ratio is so off online, there is a good chance that if a guy writes a longer more thoughtful note to a woman, there is a good chance that the woman who receives this note won't see it or respond to it, or maybe she will ghost him, but as a result a lot of guys will decide longer notes online aren't worth the time and effort involved and will instead write a bunch of shorter notes to more woman. So instead of sending one longer note to a woman they are interested in, they treat online dating as a numbers game and send 10 messages each night to 10 different women with some version of say "Hey sexy!", "Hey beautiful!", "Hey gorgeous!. Now the problem here is that if most men are mostly doing that and there are 4 men for every woman, on the site, lots of women are getting 40 messages a day mostly with some version of "Hey sexy!", "Hey beautiful!".
So yes the woman are getting lots of messages, but the woman are struggling to keep up with a lot of low effort messages that they are getting from men. If you are a woman who do you decide to write back to first? "Hey Sexy!" or "Hey Beautiful!"? Because you are getting 40 messages a day, you probably feel overwhelmed and so you might reasonably decide to thin the backlog of emails by just not writing back to any guy under 6 ft tall or any guy who voted for the wrong presidential candidate or maybe based upon his picture because most women actually have no idea from the information they have about a given guy what they actually think about a given guy but lots of messages are coming in everyday, so they need to shrink the pile. Yes women are getting lots of replies but a lot of their replies are mostly noise, so they are not even bothering to read all of their replies. Which is why some of your longer messages can go unread. This is not women obsessed with getting attention from men. This is women equally frustrated that online dating works no better for them despite getting 30 or 40 messages a day, but realizing that if they complain about all of the messages they are getting that suck, they fear like they sound like really entitled b*tches so they keep their mouth shut instead.
Now you can run a Gini-coeffiicient analysis like the guys did on the documentary did on how many message women send vs how many they receive, but I think that is missing the forest for the trees. Online dating really isn't working that well for men, but it also isn't working that well for women either.
Are there work arounds? For the most part, I am not a fan of online dating, I think meeting people offline is usually a better way to date, but during covid, I did meet my last girlfriend online because talking to people while wearing an N95 was difficult too.
Was I mass messaging lots of different women small short message? No. I wrote longer more thoughtful messages to women who generally took the time and effort to make a longer dating profile herself who I thought might be a good match. My dating profile was trying to give any woman who read it, a good sense of who I was and what I was actually looking for. My initial messages tended to be on the longer side. If you look at this reply here I am verbose and my initial messages tended to be longer. I also got more messages originated directly by women themselves from woman who read my profile. Was I writing to a huge number of women each night? No. I would write to one new woman on any day I wasn't corresponding with an existing woman from a previous night. But if I got message from multiple woman on a given day, I would write back to all of them on the day I heard from them. If I wrote some longer message to a woman and she didn't reply back, was I angry or upset? No, she either didn't read it or wasn't interested in what I was offering. That is okay.
This question has been asked millions of times, and you will get a million different opinions. It comes down to the specific person, and there are positives and negatives to dating apps. Age also plays a big part on how people view them.
I am 40 and remember them in their early stages. Many people back then (and many who are my age), viewed them as “creepy” and being for people who were socially awkward and didn’t have the skills to be able to meet someone in the real world. The media also played up stories of catfishing and violence. All that put together, made them very taboo in their infancy. Many my age or older now accept them as part of modern age of dating, but a few still view them as creepy. I admit that for a long time, I resisted them because of this negative and antiquated stereotype.
But I personally dislike them for other reasons. I personally like to develop relationships organically, where I meet someone and get to know them as friends first and then decide if want to pursue them romantically. With dating apps, I find that you can’t really do that. You kind of quickly have to decide if you want to pursue a relationship because there are hundreds of other prospectives online waiting. Also, I’ve found that it’s really hard to get a true sense of the person online. So you text and talk, and it always seems to take a while of playing the message game before you can actually meet up. Then it’s hit or miss as to whether there is real chemistry.
Also there are superficial reasons as to why someone will or will not respond online. True story, there was a woman I was really attracted to online and sent her a couple messages on a couple different occasions online. Never responded. I randomly saw her at a Gala, and finding her attractive and remembering her, I talked to her and we kind of hit it off. Went out a few times over the course of about a month. It didn’t work out, but the point being, for whatever reason, she didn’t respond to me online but did in real life. I think it demonstrates that online dating isn’t a perfect tool. It can be good for some people, but for me it has its flaws and I prefer meeting people in-person.
This is a wonderfully balanced assessment.
I met my first wife (1976) in the conventional manner of the day, introduced by friends via a double date. The marriage ended in divorce after 15 years due to my wife's severe mental illness.
My second wife (1994) I met via what could be regarded as a crude proto-dating app, wherein you paid a service which published your profile in a bimonthly broadsheet. You would see someone that interested in you, and write them a letter which you sent to a PO Box with a code on it, and they would then mail it back out to the person of interest. You would exchange in this slow and clumsy way until one or other other person would provide actual contact info, usually phone or snail mail but maybe even email (which was just coming into being at the time, via Prodigy and CompuServe and the like). In this case, I was widowed after 13 years.
My third wife (2009) I met online but not on a dating site, it was a site for people over 40 and in particular on a writer's sub forum and a grief and loss sub forum. We liked each other's writing and thinking style and got to know each other by phone; in this case it was my wife that expressed initial interest. Initially it was a long distance relationship (2,200 miles) but we made it work. We are on year 14 now and expect to set the "longevity of relationship" record in a couple of years, lol.
I can't say that any of these methods was really better or worse than the next.
I suppose that modern dating apps tend to lean towards instant gratification and/or snap judgments (swipe right or left, etc) but they are probably mostly what you make of them. If I were "on the market", I would prefer the paid ones that are oriented less toward hookups and more toward serious long term relationships, and work off a more detailed profile / questionnaire, I'd suppose. They don't cost that much and both persons paying for membership demonstrates some level of seriousness. Back in 2009 I did briefly look at the free ones like Plenty Of Fish and they struck me as an almost comic cesspool of players and posers, and scrolling through profiles there was a great way to lose all faith in humanity!
I watched the documentary while working on my bike. There was some stuff I agreed with, there were some things I thought it got wrong, and a lot of things that I thought lacked context. The big thing that I thought it got very right was the importance of gender ratios, but on the most important the gender ratios I think it got wrong.
This video makes this big production about how that there are twice as many men as women in society as a whole for younger men.
Below 40 generally there are slightly more men than women, but the gender ratio is nowhere near 2 to 1 in any age group in the United States.
On most online dating platforms there are 3 or 4 men for every woman and there are plenty of places offline to meet women where there are much better gender ratios and its worthwhile for men to explore those options because in a lot of them, especially if you are struggling with women you likely will do better than online. These are also better places to learn how to date.
One of the points that pick up artists make that I agree with is that dating is a skill you can learn, but the more you do it, the further you go down the learning curve and the easier it becomes.
Now one of the points that this video made that I thought was really misleading is that it argued that women are mostly online for attention and that women are online because they are really focused on men's attractiveness.
Let's talk about attractiveness first. Men are pretty damn visual. Almost all men watch porn, most women do not and the closest analogue to porn for woman is likely romance novels. Now some romance novels have racy scenes and those scenes can get woman's motor's running. But the reasons women tend to not like porn and tend to prefer books is that to get their motor's running, they need a plot, they need to get emotionally invested in the characters more, sexuality without the greater character arc is a lot less appealing for them. For women there is a greater separation between attractedness and attractiveness in most women than for most men.
Men's sexuality seems to have an aspect of imprinting on it. There are men who describe themselves as boob men or butt men or maybe they are into feet or some other body part that you can search for on sex tube streaming site. But too much exposure and emphasis about this aspect of our sexuality too quickly to women can kind of screw with women's heads and can make them feel uncomfortable. This is why lot's of woman get worked up about being sexually objectified by men. They want to be assured that you are actually interested in them as a person before too much sexualized attention especially about a body part feels welcomed. But once they really understand and believe that you really are interested in them as a person, then they can actually then start to welcome and actually enjoy more sexualized attention from men. I am not trying to desexualize women, but to try to put woman's sexuality into a better context.
Women are a lot less visual than men. I don't think I have ever had a girlfriend who was as interested in my butt and genitals as much as I was into her boobs and butt. I have had some girlfriends make remarks about my butt, but overall our body parts are just a lot less interesting to women than their body parts are to us. Women's expectations about men's bodies are surprisingly reasonable and attainable. Most women are not into super huge men like the Rock or Arnold in his pumping iron days. You also don't have to be a metrosexual with a lot of product in your hair. I have dated multiple women who let me know that one of their dating requirements is that they didn't want to date a man who took more time in the morning to get ready than they did. Mostly they just want you to not be overweight, wear clothes that fit and are clean. Women's expectations for men is that you shower regularly and not smell bad. With lots of my girlfriends, they will be dressing to the nines, but I will be wearing jeans and maybe a collared shirt, and that was the clothes they wanted me wear when we were out together.
But this argument that women are just looking for attention I think underestimates both you and the women you are interested in. There is an age maybe beginning in high school and into their early twenties where women are experimenting with clothes and make up to get a sense of what men respond to, but most women outgrow that as they realize that they type of attention that they get from men from leading with too much sexuality isn't the type of attention that they want nor makes them feel very good and so they mostly out grow it. Yes there are some women after a break up who might return to that and there are some women who are higher in narcissism who do that as well. But that is not most of the women, nor is it happening most of the time.
What I am arguing is woman are less focused on our appearance because they are more focused on a much broader set of dating criteria. When a woman introduces a guy to her friend's and her family, women tend to feel that everyone is judging not just her boyfriend but also her for picking him and bringing him home. This is not about your appearance but about your conduct. When you meet her friends and family, does she sense that you might embarrass her? Guys don't judge other guys for what girl they date as much as women judge other women for what men they date. So it's a lot more important that you are warm and friendly and dependable. If you are late to family event or get drunk at the in-laws, there will be gossip about why did she settle for him?
Have you ever asked yourself if online dating is so great for women, why aren't there more women willing to sign up for it? Moreover have you ever asked women why more women aren't online?
One of the problems with online dating is that it gives both men and women information that is easy for online dating companies to measure and capture rather than information that is actually useful to know. I would argue that what most women would like to know is whether the guy they are corresponding with online is stand up guy, is he dependable, is he thoughtful, is he reliable? Is he kind? But the online dating companies don't really have any idea of how to measure and evaluate that. What is easy to measure and capture is your picture, maybe your height, they give usually give you some space to describe yourself, but if your self description is I like long walks on the beach and ice cream? Well who doesn't so women often really don't have a good idea of who most of the guys are that they are corresponding with.
Online dating tends to feel like low effort dating for most men and most women. It's not just guys who don't care for it, it's women too who have some problems with it. Because the gender ratio is so off online, there is a good chance that if a guy writes a longer more thoughtful note to a woman, there is a good chance that the woman who receives this note won't see it or respond to it, or maybe she will ghost him, but as a result a lot of guys will decide longer notes online aren't worth the time and effort involved and will instead write a bunch of shorter notes to more woman. So instead of sending one longer note to a woman they are interested in, they treat online dating as a numbers game and send 10 messages each night to 10 different women with some version of say "Hey sexy!", "Hey beautiful!", "Hey gorgeous!. Now the problem here is that if most men are mostly doing that and there are 4 men for every woman, on the site, lots of women are getting 40 messages a day mostly with some version of "Hey sexy!", "Hey beautiful!".
So yes the woman are getting lots of messages, but the woman are struggling to keep up with a lot of low effort messages that they are getting from men. If you are a woman who do you decide to write back to first? "Hey Sexy!" or "Hey Beautiful!"? Because you are getting 40 messages a day, you probably feel overwhelmed and so you might reasonably decide to thin the backlog of emails by just not writing back to any guy under 6 ft tall or any guy who voted for the wrong presidential candidate or maybe based upon his picture because most women actually have no idea from the information they have about a given guy what they actually think about a given guy but lots of messages are coming in everyday, so they need to shrink the pile. Yes women are getting lots of replies but a lot of their replies are mostly noise, so they are not even bothering to read all of their replies. Which is why some of your longer messages can go unread. This is not women obsessed with getting attention from men. This is women equally frustrated that online dating works no better for them despite getting 30 or 40 messages a day, but realizing that if they complain about all of the messages they are getting that suck, they fear like they sound like really entitled b*tches so they keep their mouth shut instead.
Now you can run a Gini-coeffiicient analysis like the guys did on the documentary did on how many message women send vs how many they receive, but I think that is missing the forest for the trees. Online dating really isn't working that well for men, but it also isn't working that well for women either.
Are there work arounds? For the most part, I am not a fan of online dating, I think meeting people offline is usually a better way to date, but during covid, I did meet my last girlfriend online because talking to people while wearing an N95 was difficult too.
Was I mass messaging lots of different women small short message? No. I wrote longer more thoughtful messages to women who generally took the time and effort to make a longer dating profile herself who I thought might be a good match. My dating profile was trying to give any woman who read it, a good sense of who I was and what I was actually looking for. My initial messages tended to be on the longer side. If you look at this reply here I am verbose and my initial messages tended to be longer. I also got more messages originated directly by women themselves from woman who read my profile. Was I writing to a huge number of women each night? No. I would write to one new woman on any day I wasn't corresponding with an existing woman from a previous night. But if I got message from multiple woman on a given day, I would write back to all of them on the day I heard from them. If I wrote some longer message to a woman and she didn't reply back, was I angry or upset? No, she either didn't read it or wasn't interested in what I was offering. That is okay.
I liked the documentary, but it definitely has some flaws. One thing I agree with you on is that women don't seem to be as easily impressed by looks as men. Women seem to have an almost "atrophied" sense of aesthetic judgement.
I've read a study before showing that heterosexual men are more likely to describe other men as 'handsome' than heterosexual women are. My own experience corroborates this: when I go out, almost all the positive attention I receive is from men, not women lol.
I have a working hypothesis: women's interest in men is completed correlated with their need for provision and protection from individual men. If you doubt this, ask yourself: what is the safest, most highly developed, most high tech nation in the world? And what nation is currently experiencing the most pronounced "sex recession?" That is not merely a coincidence. Online dating, dating apps, etc only accelerates women's disinterest in the average male.
Last edited by Taggerung; 04-16-2022 at 04:26 PM..
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