urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Well, maybe we've had enough about European-American relations for the past week. Let's talk about European-European relations!
We know a lot about gender imbalances in China, hikikomori in Japan, 4B in Korea, and Americans screeching in existential terror at every element of the opposite sex on social media. It seems like many of the most developed parts of the world are struggling to maintain stable relationship norms, and men and women are opting out of relationships altogether at unprecedented rates. That obviously prompts the question: what about Europe?
Europeans: how do you feel about the dating and marriage situation in your part of the world? Do men and women generally couple up ok? Have dating apps caused damage? Are people isolated and on social media, or do romantic connections and friendships form more easily? More philosophically, do men and women in your country generally feel the opposite sex is trustworthy, or do they see them as more dangerous than helpful? Are there tensions over gender norms, or have people where you're from settled on a new accommodation for the relationship between men and women?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2d ago
I guess I took your comment and springboarded into my own thing, sorry. I do agree with you. The topic of romance in general has been on my mind lately, I made a twitter and the algorithm keeps feeding me intense gender war threads. I’m terrified we’ve entered a stage where there’s no possibility of stable romantic love existing because the sexes have decided the opposite sex is incapable of human decency or can only be dealt with transactionally. Figuring out what I think instead is the only thing that makes me feel better.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
I guess I see his point, that it's easy to generate romantic feeling early on that doesn't cash out in commitment, and that you often don't know what kind of a partner you'll be in a relationship until you're in one. I see he's trying to burst the bubble of "$lonely_redditor who's never had a date is treated unjustly because Henry the wifebeater has a string of inexplicably loyal girlfriends." That strikes me as wisdom borne of experience.
But I also don't think a compassionate stance towards lonely men requires that we assume every one of them is deeply a good guy, or will always be a great partner to women. My view is that it's a sad fact of the world if $lonely_redditor is lonely and inexperienced despite having the capacity to generate feelings of love and intimacy. It's certainly possible that $lonely_redditor gets some experience and turns out to be a jerk. It's also possible that he turns out to be a great guy. The issue is we don't know, and perhaps more vitally he doesn't get the chance to learn from minor failures how to be a great guy. I think anyone among us has to admit to ourselves that we made boneheaded moves in our early relationships, and improved as we got older and gained more experience.
But the principal issue with lonely men is their subjective experience of unfulfilled capacity for intimacy, and the main complaint (going back to Scott's famous posts) is that this experience is often treated with scorn, dismissal, or disbelief. I don't think many people, even struggling men themselves, want to actually face what it means for people to suffer loneliness. So we get just world theories, "well maybe they'd just be bad boyfriends anyway," accusations of various forms of creepery, and on the other side of the fence, "women are just vain hoes, the system is fundamentally evil, it's all women's fault," etc. Romantically ineffective men are almost by the iron law of nature low-status, and problems that are low-status are shoved under the rug because they're inconvenient, or denied and converted into injustices because they're ego-destroying.
That said, I think the reality that the only law of male dating is "be attractive; don't be unattractive" drives a lot of the "I'm just going to be a bastard to women, fuck you," attitudes you see among young men these days. At the extremes this is the kind of Andrew Tate stuff, somewhat less extreme the kind of Sloot stuff, a little closer to the mainstream the redpill stuff. If morality plays only a limited role in one's romantic success, and isn't a "defense against unattractiveness" (to put it one way), that's going to naturally drive them towards a feeling that acting morally is just leaving value on the table in a highly competitive environment.
I call this the “magical internet box” phenomenon. Much easier to just hang out at home than to sign up for something. Much as I’m critical of the attitude, I know that I’m shaped by it, as an introverted zoomer.
Your account lines up uncannily well with my experience in the US, as do most of the other responses. It seems like the social effects of modernity and the internet are broadly similar everywhere.
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