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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35345 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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I wonder if it’s basically shared knowledge. The thing about dating is that nobody will tell you how it works. If you’re lucky in your social circle, you and your friends figure it out in your late teens and pool your shared knowledge and experience. If not, your only option is people who are incentivised to lie to you: priests, gamer girls, masculinity influencers, MeToo journalists, etc.

For various reasons, all these people tell you what they want you to believe, not what’s true. For high-conscientiousness men especially this is a killer.

People flock to those like themselves, so you have all-male groups who collectively have no idea how to get dates and have male hobbies as an alternative, versus mixed groups like yours who all date constantly.

I think that might explain what you see.

your only option is people who are incentivised to lie to you: priests, gamer girls, masculinity influencers, MeToo journalists, etc.

I'm confused, how do you figure priests are incentivized to lie to people about how to find dates? I wouldn't go to a priest for marriage advice (for obvious reasons), but plenty of priests dated (and yes, even had sex - priests are sinners too) before joining the clergy. For example, the pastor of my parish is a pretty young guy who was engaged before he decided he was being called to the priesthood, so he could probably give decent advice about attracting women (if you're in Brazil where he's from).

There are priests who are good at this and priests who are bad at this, IME.

Obviously if you ask your priest how to get laid on a first date he will answer ‘dont’. But the better ones are fine people to listen to. Few of them are popular on the internet.

Essentially along the lines described below by other posters. I would expect priests to be disproportionately virgins or bad at dating for the obvious reasons, and they are also often older and regarded as pillars of the community. Finally, Christianity has certain ideas about what women and dating are like and how they should work (as do feminism, PUA, etc.) and priests are sort of expected to uphold those values.

As such, it's not that priests are incentivised to lie to you exactly, but I think to some extent they are motivated to lie to themselves and also they will not necessarily tell you all their own private thoughts. Some very self-aware exception will exist, as with any other creed, but I don't think institutional authority figures in general are very helpful in this sphere.

Priests and especially Protestant pastors, influenced by feminist tendencies, often tend to push misandric, gynonormative ideas, even though Christianity as a creed is unreservedly and unquestionably patriarchal.

It's not about having no experience, it's about them having a tendency to tell you that behaving like a good christian or [insert religion] will surely lead to you finding and holding a partner, when it's at best unrelated or at worst actively counterproductive.

Ironically, I would actually say that they are better equipped to give good relationship advice once you already are committed to each other, for the same reason.

behaving like a good christian or [insert religion] will surely lead to you finding and holding a partner

I was going to say that churchgoing women outnumber men, so yeah maybe. But, now that I google it, articles say young women are attending church at much lower rates than previous generations. So much lower that it flipped to more young men than young women who regularly attend church.

Sorry young guys, you missed the boat on that one.

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