I never dated as a young woman (GenX) we just hung out in mixed sex environments, did things in mixed sex groups, hung out with people who knew other people, so we had social connections that led to hookups that sometimes led to relationships.
My kids seemed to do much less of that. It seems so hard to navigate this commodified dating scene. My penultimate child was actually asking me to be a matchmaker for her but she has finally found love or at least infatuation with a gorgeous woman. But found her by hanging out with people and going places!
I really, truly believe that hanging out with people is the missing activity. And it helps you in more ways than just romantically, friends are good to have.
This is similar for me a male and total nerd crowd to but yeah met people by hanging out or being parts of stuff. Met my wife at a sci fi con.
Same. I did “dates” several times and it was just artificial and uncomfortable, and cos I’m ASD it didn’t exactly put me on my best foot. Being in a relationship is about being able to be yourself with somebody (and vice versa), and nothing about that whole scene seems designed to help you find that.
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Dating apps are actually on decline, mainly being used by millennials. Gen Z uses dating apps way less on the average and prefers other ways of dating, according to numbers by the apps themselves
Hot take:
- it’s expect to „have a Girlfriend“
- Girlfriends are perceived as a status symbol
- because of that young men care more about „having a girlfriend“, than about the actual person that is their girlfriend.
If you try dating with this concept of a relationship, it probably won’t go well for at least one of the parties involved.
… do people even know what a Bel Air is anymore? I think it was completely displaced by Rickrolling.
Yup. And I think that once again, a large part of this is the influence of the ‘manosphere’ putting bullshit into their heads.
There’s been a couple of occasions having this conversation where people respond to me and say they don’t listen to Jordan Peterson or whatever but they’re still lonely. But then they’ll say something like “I need marriage and children to be a complete human being or else I’m a failure in life. And I’ve been robbed.” I mean, what the fuck. They’re just kids or young adults.
So these guys are attempting relationships with all of this heavy shit about marriage and children and status and ownership in mind and chasing people away. I would run away too if someone started making wedding plans on the second date. And they’re not looking for a person that they get along with and can spend the rest of their life with, they’re looking for someone who can make their babies for them. Ewww.
Honestly sometimes this ‘manosphere’ shit is a little bit like purity culture. And it sometimes reminds me of some of the more cultish churches I’ve come across that push 18 year old kids who are dating into early marriage or else they’re “living in sin”. In fact I’m pretty sure that there’s a religious right wing agenda behind it.
These kids need to stop clutching their pearls and acting like religious fanatics and just have some fucking fun. Go into things with zero expectations. Have one night stands. Enjoy their youth. And if in the process of that, they meet ‘the one’, then that’s a bonus. They don’t need to be tied down with kids and bills to pay by the time they’re 21 just to be seen as any more of a ‘man’. In fact that would just be sad.
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Women in the US were first allowed to have bank accounts of their own in the 70s. We were also frequently barred from higher-paying jobs, and the few jobs we did have access to often fired us if they found out we were dating/pregnant. Because we’d ’only care about the kids’, we’d ’always be gone popping out more kids’, we ‘needed to settle down with a man like a proper lady’, and on and on.
Until recently, getting married was absolutely a requirement for a woman to have a stable life, and as men were pressured to choose young, ‘nubile’ women, there was a ticking clock on the chance to hook up.
Many religious groups try to keep this pressure up even these days, telling women that they belong in the home, that making babies is the only proper calling… they also try to ensure women in their group are not as well-educated so they’re forced to rely on men who are getting the higher-paying jobs.
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Not consciously maybe, but the ripples still echo. Aside from religious groups trying to pretend things are still structured that way, these kids’ parents most likely grew up in that environment, and movie producers (and lots of video game makers, for that matter) did too. And they often seem to forget that things have changed.
So the message they put into media is ‘guys, if you don’t have a well-paying job and a wife by the time you’re 30, you’re a loser who didn’t try hard!’ and ‘gals, if you’re not married to some well-off dude and a homemaker with multiple kids by the time you’re 25, you’re a useless old maid!’
If that’s the message you hear from all angles, then that’s the message you’re going to internalize, even if the evidence of your eyes shows things don’t work that way anymore. I’ve met several younger guys who seem to think if they’re successful then they ’deserve’ a woman, because what happens to the successful man in movies and games? He gets the girl at the end.
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That used to be the stereotype in the past, but at least as far back as I recall (late Gen-Xer), it wasn’t as prevalent an attitude as most people thought. Past feminist influence reduced a lot of that pressure but now it’s coming back via manosphere essentialism.
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Sure, that’s true. It’s all anecdotal but I’m also thinking of how people talked at the time in general.
When I wrote that I was thinking mostly of everyone I knew in my uni years and into my 20s (esp. with the sexual freedom stuff) but I also had in the back of my mind that I saw peers experience teen pregnancy when I was in high school, and there was stuff in the wider media about it being a problem. (In my elementary school, we all got Sex Ed classes, too.)
That was an age old problem that I hear has recently been reduced significantly. (Probably helps if not just the kids but also parents got sex education early in life.)
This is backwards, in my personal experience. Marriage benefits men, women are the ones at risk from pregnancy and childbirth and usually having kids impacts women’s careers more than men’s. Plus we can have kids without a relationship if we want them, that’s more difficult for men.
Now do SOME girls dream of a wedding and see a guy as an accessory, just a means to an end? Sure. I don’t know any of them but I’m sure they exist. It’s certainly a trope in stories.
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I guess I just thought of a guy as one more thing to take care of? I really never envisioned a long term relationship, as a young woman, but was absolutely sure I wanted kids.
It has become more equal now, I’m sure. Or at least I hope. My husband was a single dad so we do both feel like it’s easier with both of us. But our exes - being single parents was considerably easier than parenting together with them. So that can go either way. A helpful partner is a wonderful thing, yes.
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That expectation applies to everyone.
What kind of person do you think are attracted to dangerous assholes? Likely someone that cares more about the status than the actual person that is their partner.
Feels right
“This whole enterprise needs a lot of grace,” he says, “and a lot of forgiveness and a lot of accepting people in good faith.”
You know what all of it really needs? not just the dating, but all the relationships we have with each other - work, casual, personal, familial, especially political.
Patience.
You know what people at large seem to be lacking?
Patience.
Patience requires time, which means people need to feel as though they aren’t constantly overworked.
So, yes, people need to feel that way, absolutely. But… people can’t expect that some magical event is going to come along and produce patience within them, or make the world stop so that they can have time to develop some patience… if you’re waiting for something external, you will always be waiting.
I disagree with you, actually - patience doesn’t require time, patience makes time - patience is what happens when you make time for someone else. For patience to exist, you have to stop what you’re doing, what is important for you in that moment, and focus on what is important for someone else… and I’m not suggesting that’s an easy thing to do, right?
Patience is a practice. It’s not something that you have, it’s something that you do, and you become capable of doing it by practicing (and, you know, failing, a lot).
I like Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Peace Is Every Step. He describes this better than I can:
We can smile, breathe, walk, and eat our meals in a way that allows us to be in touch with the abundance of happiness that is available. We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.
“You can see a little bit of risk aversion among young men,” Reeves says. “Partly because they are largely, and I think incorrectly, worried about the risks that are going to come from putting yourself out there.”
OK, what are the risks men say they are worried about that you reject so soundly?
TLDR: Don’t worry, just put yourself out there bro. Just get out of your comfort zone, bro.
You apparently skipped over all the words before and after what you quoted:
With many women no longer willing to accept ghosting, noncommitment, and harassment, men may be forced to change their ways or face being shut out of the dating pool. By and large, Reeves says the men he has spoken to understand this; they know what not to do — “don’t mansplain, don’t be toxic, don’t be a predator … don’t be a creep” — but they’re at a loss for what is acceptable when trying to date.
“You can see a little bit of risk aversion among young men,” Reeves says. “Partly because they are largely, and I think incorrectly, worried about the risks that are going to come from putting yourself out there.”
All social interaction carries some form of risk, a potential for rejection, but the alternatives to dating available in the modern dating landscape make putting yourself out there even less appealing.
It goes on
Sorry, which of those are the risks?
The implication of the article is that men fear a woman will have second thoughts and cry rape after the consensual sex is done.
But while this is a risk—albeit unlikely—it’s a smaller risk when compared to actual rape.
What a lot of people are not acknowledging is that men have a social expectation of expressing interest first, and in many ways, that is a privilege.
Feels like a burden tbh
To achieve stuff you most of the time need to get out of your comfort zone. But it on parents to slowly teach their children to overcome fears. It gets much more difficult when you are grown up.
I’d like to know this too.
authors email is [email protected]
They’re quoting Richard Reeves.
Wonderful! But WHY is she quoting Richard Reeves? That was my question, after all.
I’m not a young man so I can’t really talk about the youths, but from what I’ve heard and seen a lot of people are just bad at dating. Garbage profiles, poor message writing, poor in-person behavior.
I don’t really like this article’s “both sides are equally bad” subtext. Well, text. It’s kind of just there in the text.
What the hell did I just read?
If you’re all so concerned about dudes not getting dates, then do something that results in dudes getting dates. And yes, I speak as a man myself—albeit one who has not been single for a long time.
I mean, to be fair, it’s a journalistic outfit and their job is to write about stuff, not fix problems.
The problem is it pays to keep people single for too big a corporation. Male loneliness is its own whole industry, and dating apps are riding shotgun. There is also an industry for women’s loneliness, it just manifests in different ways.
The point is, capitalism got involved in our love life because there was a fuckin dollar in it. And when people aren’t actively looking for love, those dollars disappear. Hence the current situation.
I get that, but it also seems like there’s a lot of hand-wringing—almost the sense that dudes are entitled to dates.
But getting a date takes work, going in a good date takes work, and keeping the relationship going after that takes work too.
All this takes an investment. And if you aren’t willing to put in the work, nothing will happen for you.
