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DinoInNameOnly

Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed

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joined 2022 September 06 17:23:50 UTC

I sometimes write about whatever I find interesting. Software Engineer by day. Rationalist-adjacent, I guess.

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User ID: 873

DinoInNameOnly

Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed

0 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 06 17:23:50 UTC

					

I sometimes write about whatever I find interesting. Software Engineer by day. Rationalist-adjacent, I guess.


					

User ID: 873

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How often do you spend time socially with somebody 1-1 who is not a family member or someone you’re dating? What do you do, and how do you initiate the interaction?

I realized that I basically never do this since I graduated college, and wondering what other people’s experiences are.

Thanks for your reply. For what it’s worth, my experience is not consistent with the theory that “tier 2” social events have higher ratios of women than “tier 1” social events. I’ve been to private parties that are almost entirely men.

I’m astonished that anyone ever managed to date without dating apps.

I’m a 25-year-old man. This year I have been living a very social, outgoing lifestyle. To explain what I mean by that, this is what I’ve done in the past month.

  1. I went to 4 concerts
  2. I went to a friend’s birthday party
  3. I went to 8 Meetup events. Most of them were with a group called “20 somethings in [city]” that mainly does happy hours but I also went to a few board game events and an improv session.
  4. I hosted 2 game nights myself.
  5. I informally gathered with friends at bars 2 times
  6. I went rock climbing with friends 2 times
  7. I went to a haunted house with some friends.

These weren’t all with the same friends. I have lots of friends and I make new ones fairly often.

I’m hoping to eventually find a girlfriend, and other than dating apps it’s common advice to be very social and meet new people. I do. (Not only for this reason, I also like it.)

The problem is the demographics of those friends. I made a spreadsheet of everyone I’ve done social activities with lately and it was like 70% men and 25% women who are in relationships. Even though it was like 60-70 people, only a handful were single women. And of course being single and female is not the only criteria for being a good match for me. I’ve still yet to go out with a woman I didn’t meet online.

I don’t really understand how anyone did this in the Before Times because I don’t really think my situation is that unusual. I think it’s normal for a man to have more male friends than female friends and it’s also normal for many people in their mid 20s to be in relationships.

For people who regularly find or used to find people to date by means other than dating apps / the Internet, how does it actually work? Is my problem that my milieu is really unusual for having a low ratio of single women? Or is meeting people to date at general social activities unusual for everyone, and “cold approaches” more common than I’d assumed?

I don’t think I would ever get a female roommate… Apparently for you it went very well, but it definitely has the potential to go badly, including in ways that at first appeared to be going very well.

How did partnered Mottizens meet their partners? I appreciate all responses but more detail is more interesting, e.g. “we sat next to each other in our second year chemical engineering course and bonded by venting about our terrible professor” is more interesting than “college.”

Probably, yeah

Thank you. She’s not a big texter AFAICT and the most likely thing that happened was that she read this and thought about it for 30 seconds and forgot to reply because she was in the middle of something and had other more urgent messages which really isn’t that bad, but I can’t help overthinking.

Thanks for the kind response. This helped me feel less bad about it.

Thanks for the reply. In-person wasn’t really a practical option; we meet too rarely and only in group settings.

Thanks for the feedback. Re: The first bullet, those sorts of “dates that aren’t dates” are how I used to approach things and my experience was that it’s a good way to make friends. So I started trying to be more direct.

They say “the worst thing she can say is no” but I asked a woman who I’m sorta friends with on a date via text and she read the message but hasn’t responded for 11 days and that’s so much worse than “no.”

I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything wrong but I guess I just want feedback on this message as a sanity check.

Hi [name]

I just want to say that I think you're really kind and intelligent and interesting and pretty and I'd like to go on a date with you some time if you're interested.

If not, it's not a big deal, we can pretend this didn't happen and keep being friends lol

I haven’t heard this before. Do you have any link about this?

The Republican party is not the same thing as conservatism. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, there were lots of conservative Democrats in elected office; now there are basically none. I agree that conservatives were in a better position in 2017 than they are in 2023 or were in 2009, but it’s certainly not an all-time high watermark for conservatism.