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I usually relate to, if not agree with, a lot of online discourse but dating discourse and the battle of the sexes is the one thing where I feel a fundamentally disorienting disconnect between online and IRL. It's always so stunning and unrelatable when I read stuff like this.
I'm an early-30s straight guy, currently have a serious girlfriend, and when dating, actively date women between 18 and early-30s. It feels like everyone I meet in a dating context is a decent woman, marriage material (conditional on there being mutual attraction), and has the eventual goal of marriage + having kids. Well educated, bright, agreeable, high achievers. Everywhere I go is full of attractive women like this, all rearing to go. All the straight guys I know are in good relationships, many married, some with kids. The whole thing feels very healthy and positive.
I like women, in fact I love women. I love going on dates with them, I love hanging out with them, I love flirting with them, I love hooking up with them, I love dating them. I'm excited to get married someday. I've probably been on 250 dates, had sex with 125 women, been in some serious relationships, etc. etc. It's all so much fun. I hardly ever have a negative experience; I could do this forever except at some point I want to start a family. I really do not understand the seething hatred I see some guys express online towards women. How can you hate them? How can porn and gooning and videogames be a substitute for taking some beautiful girl out to a bar and getting laid? Why should you care? Because it's fun, you're built for this, you want to get married and have kids.
And women love men. My current girlfriend is a dancer in a major ballet company. I hang out with her and her ballet friends. They're top 1% in terms of looks and talent. They all have nice, normal boyfriends. One of the bfs is a poor PhD student. One is a random software engineer at some company. Just normal guys. One is one of the few straight guys in the company. The ones who aren't in relationships are dating, typically on apps (I met my gf on an app), and overall just having positive experiences. There's minor drama here and there, of course, but again it all seems super positive and there's no seething battle of the sexes going on. The women want to get married and have kids. It's true for the ballerinas and its true for the SF tech girlies and the PE girls and the McKinsey girls and the HR ladies too. Obviously, selection bias is showing me the more social women in dating, but all my coworkers, female friends, etc., are basically in the same spot.
Where is this all coming from? Is it rejection? I get rejected a lot, who cares? Do a lot of men not share my love of women?
You get rejected at 50% rate, average man get rejected at 99% rate.
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This kind of reads like a troll post from a new account, but I guess I'll bite.
If this is all true you're clearly on the very right end of the bell-curve in terms of sexual success and social milieu, it's like a multi-millionaire heir asking why people complain about housing affordability when they were gifted three on their birthday.
I suppose I can't really relate personally, in the sense that my libido is quite low and I don't have a lot of interest in casual dating or sex.
The median man probably does, in the sense they would mostly like to be Chad and Casanova who can fuck a lot of hot women, but obviously this is out of reach for the vast majority of men even if they work as hard as possible.
Yes. Very few people can be professional ballet dancers, either - and "Chad" is every bit as determined as any world-class athlete. His social gracefulness probably cannot be described in English, at least not the dialects any of us speak. It would take Paul Ekman and his team a hundred years to articulate what Chad can do - a microexpression held for a tenth of a second too long can communicate an entire sentence.
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Do you have a strong romantic drive, or is the concept of marriage for you mostly a material alliance for childrearing? If you lean mostly towards the latter, I think that would absolutely contribute to your feeling that marriage in the modern concept has little to offer.
Also not a fan of casual sex, but my libido is moderate to high. I just enjoy sex with an intimate partner in a romantic context a lot more than casual trysts. I can’t have a tryst without catching feelings — not overwhelming passion or anything, I’m not insane, but I end up wanting to make a connection. I’m probably in the top 10% of men in terms of… romance orientation? Physical affection? Romanticalness? So the incentive for me to date is strong, even if I never wanted to marry, even if I never wanted kids. So long as there’s a woman out there with sweet eyes and a warm smile, I’m going to want to look deeply into them and smile back.
Yeah, if put in those terms I definitely consider marriage primarily as an material alliance for childrearing purposes.
I enjoy fiction about romance occasionally, but I suppose I'm blackpilled/realistic/cynical enough to think about romance (in the eros sense) in Roman terms, as a force that wounds men and drives them crazy; that the initial burst of limerance for someone that doesn't exist will always fade with time, and that it has very significant risks to my health and happiness.
At the end of the day, romantic drive (in the storge sense) is definitely more something that would hypothetically be nice, not something that substantially motivates me day to day.
I don't know that storge really describes what I'm getting at when I talk about romantic drive, but that word has been used in all sorts of contexts to mean so many different things, so I don't know.
I find it hard to meaningfully distinguish "companionate love" from "passionate love." I can understand the difference between infatuation (which often involves an impossible idealization) and a deeper intimacy based on truth, but I see a great overlap between the concept of eros and the more companionate romantic love you're describing as storge. In particular, I've been in relationships where the passion increases over time, rather than decreases -- and also where lots of things that are described as characteristic of infatuation (like "'Desire for "complete union,' permanency") also grow over time.
But infatuation is also fun! Yes, it's dangerous. Yes, it has led men and women off cliffs into the great dark beyond. But many great and valuable things begin with a little risk. When I fell in love with a woman for the first time, it was one of the most intense experiences of my life, and I've only ever been able to describe it in spiritual terms, both then and now.
Would you say that you've felt limerance before and believed on that basis that it's dangerous, or is your cynicism about eros based mostly on observing others who've experienced it?
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Must've missed my screed about the current state of Western Women a couple weeks back.
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My dude.
These are not normal people.
Alot of the motte falls into the far end of the bell curve when it comes to employment, money, and success. Of course they're going to look around like John Travolta and wonder aloud 'Where's the problem?' They all have factors in place that mitigate alot of what the median have to deal with.
I swear, I feel half the posts that seem to come up when this topic arises could simply be replied with the phrase 'OK, Boomer' and be done with it...
Idk, a PhD student is low status financially and a software engineer is low status socially, and they manage to date girls like this. The difference is that they love women and it shows.
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