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I know the dating crisis has been done to death on this forum, but I want to talk about it perhaps from a slightly different angle than previous posters; that of the collapse of the ability to make collective decisions/sacrifices. Various self-improvement substackers seem to be populating the majority of my feed these days, and one, Get Better Soon had a post yesterday about how to attract women. Although much of the post is the standard dress better, be fit, be more interesting shtick, one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was Get Better Soon's insistence that you had to be making at least $70k to be thinking about having a girlfriend, as well as living by yourself and preferably owning your own house/car. Now the median income in the US in $60k, and even controlling for the fact that men out-earn women, Get Better Soon is effectively saying here that more than 50% of men in the US are undateable. This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Now I'm not saying that the advice I see from this guy is necessarily unhelpful for the individual: you will have more success if you earn more, aren't fat, and can hold a conversation. And historically some self-improvement was necessary to have for example, land to support your wife and future family. But we've rapidly gone from a situation in which pretty much everyone, including the ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50% of society could expect to get married, to a world where maybe that will happen to 20% of the population, and most of those people should expect to get divorced. The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
It's not just dating, I kind of see this with everything. We used to be able to take effective collective action as a country. Things like ballooning government debt, government incompetence, rapid urban decay, and breakdown in communities are relatively new phenomena that have popped up in the last twenty to fifty years. Aurelian loves to talk about how much the civil service and government in general have decayed in the UK (and France I think) since the end of the Cold War, and lays a lot of the blame at the feet of the focus on individual outcomes. I'm not sure if he has the causality the right way round, but it seems clear to me that we can no longer really effectively do things as a society. The inability to form lasting romantic and family attachments is only part of that.
I feel like this blog post cannot be used to make sweeping conclusions about the failure of western society. While I agree with your general outlook, there is a bit of a misunderstanding here.
When he's listing requirements, those are not requirements to date someone, really; those are requirements to date the actually desirable girls.
Just as >50% of the male population ages 25-45 that don't make the $70k cut, >50% of the female population 25-45 don't make the implicit cut for this blog post.
We had this discussion before
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million women who met the criteria he considered marriagable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all the specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime.
Given that the median WHITE male salary for under 40's in the U.S. is about 60k and its about 33k for the under 30's, I think I can spot where your largest filter is.
If a woman in her 20's is looking for a guy in his 20's making 70k or more, then she's already eliminated 90% of her options before zeroing in on other traits.
But uh, there's a bigger question there. Why are these guys single if they're such objectively good catches? Unless they're choosing to remain single, then this just shows that women are still rejecting them for some reason.
Alsoooo I notice that you didn't include "is heterosexual" in the criteria, so I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of these desirable dudes are actually just gay. Yes, even considering that they attend church once a month. Also probably a good number of divorcees in there.
By 30 one can absolutely be a teacher, forklift operator, or cop. In fact I think in most places you can't become a cop much after 30. 18-30, which I guess is what you mean by under 30?, captures a huge number of men (about 16%) who are in college, and effectively earn nothing.
Yes these men are single for any number of reasons. Do we ask the same question about your million good women? ((I should note that my age range for the men was under 40, as it seems like more of a match))
If a lot of these men were gay, it would just make my point even better, there would be even fewer straight men competing for those good women. I don't think women care about past divorces in a man.
None of your objections answers the questions raised: what part of this do you think is either not a thing your hypothetical good woman would look for, or not a thing under the control of the men? Sure most men don't meet these standards, THAT'S THE POINT. And you can do it easily!
All men can't earn above average (or whatever percentile $60k is) wage in the way that all women could have less than 5 lifetime partners. If they did, it wouldn't be above average anymore and the buying power of that money would be lower.
I don't care if all men can do it, I care if any man can do it.
Any man can become president. That's still a very bad life plan to be offering to people as a whole because all of them except one will be disappointed. It matters that the majority of people have decent lives.
Are you really comparing becoming president to getting a job as a cop, teacher, or forklift operator?
It absolutely matters for people to have decent lives, but I'm not sure what that has to do with who gets access to the best million women in the country.
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Why are these million women single if they're desirable? Clearly men are passing on them for some reason.
Well broadly if you ask them, they can't find men that meet their standards.
Maybe its politics.
Maybe its the money.
Maybe its about the weight
But its broadly women who are passing on men, not the other way around. Which explains both the large number of single women AND the fact that apparently desirable men remain single.
And the fact that half of Gen Z men are just giving up.
And young women are significantly less likely to report being single.
For those that are:
DESPITE this, young single men report greater interest in dating than young single women:
This doesn't make sense if MEN are the ones passing on women.
So yeah.
That's been my point all along and I haven't seen a single piece of data that would refute it, yet.
An 11% (or 30%, depending on how you calculate) difference is not much. Plus the fact that most of the effort of courtship is still expected of men (granted, it’s not that much in the modern world). But it’s easy to imagine those 11% men ‘would be open’ to a relationship with a woman who showed up all baked and ready to go at their door, but aren’t willing to text various women for weeks/face rejection.
Plus the general tendency of women to undercount their sex partners and men to overcount them. That is, men are supposed to want it, women aren’t supposed to want it. If you abandon the chase as a man, you're a loser, and if you're mancrazy as a woman, you could be a slut or a bad feminist. That alone, the shy loser and the shy slut, could explain the discrepancy.
I didn't even mention the most befuddling and depressing stat:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/15/among-young-adults-without-children-men-are-more-likely-than-women-to-say-they-want-to-be-parents-someday/#:~:text=Among%20adults%20ages%2018%20to,t%20want%20to%20get%20married.
21% of childless women say the DON'T want kids, compared to 15% of childless men.
Men by and large want kids.
And the ones they'd have to do it with are by and large NOT seeking kids.
"Oh but 12% isn't that big a difference."
Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of men that represents.
Women are passing on men who would date and marry them. It is not the reverse.
The ONLY way this gets solved is convincing more women to settle and have kids.
Men can't improve their way out of a shortage of women who want kids.
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Oh come on this is just getting silly now.
People have sex, and age. If that's a dealbreaker then you're basically just looking for an excuse to stay single at that point.
It is the fate of every woman to grow old and watch her beauty fade. Would not mind if she spent her youth, beauty, fertility, and purity on me; that is, indeed the greatest gift that a woman can give a man. But the thought that she gave them to another man is unbearable.
From "Fertility" by the Dreaded Jim:
And from "Michael's Story":
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The problem's not "they will turn 30". The problem's in "they turned 30 before you started dating them". If you want four kids, you want to give the woman a rest between pregnancies, and it takes a couple of years before you get close enough to make babies, you're looking at the last pregnancy starting around age 38. That's starting to get dicey in terms of fertility. Certainly, you're going to have problems if you want to date a woman much over 30 (I say woman, because men can in fact have kids in their 50s or 60s, although not so much 70s because they might be dead by then).
You might be thinking that "wanting four kids" is unrealistic. My answer to that is: a society in which this is unrealistic is a society that will die out. Women need to have over 2 kids on average to replace themselves - because slightly more men than women are born - and we're in a technological state where "having kids accidentally" is not really a thing due to contraception but "not having kids accidentally" very much is. So a large chunk of people need to be intending 4+ kids in order to get the average up to 2.1 or so. If this isn't realistic, halt and catch fire; something needs to be done to fix that ASAP as a matter of societal survival, which is of course the position you're arguing against.
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Where's the insanity in trying to marry young? That seems like a normal predilection.
As for partner count, I think those statistics are mostly useless anyway.
But regardless, everyone is welcome to have their preferences. Just be prepared to put in the work to get what you want. If you want one of the top million women, be one of the top million men at least.
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Look a single dude straight in the eye and say "Yeah she's banged 6-12 dudes prior to you, but I'm sure that she won't ever be thinking about any of them or comparing your performance and YOU'RE the one she's going to stick with" with a straight face.
And like with other issues, women now have more premarital sex partners than they've had in the past.
Yet another way in which the average woman is less desirable as a partner than they were before.
Which cannot be fixed by telling men to improve.
Man, we're getting to quite a number of asymmetries that favor women and are mostly controlled by women's behavior, aren't we? The obesity, the heightened expectations, the low childbearing rates while men keep doing the (literal and metaphorical) heavy lifting.
12 dudes isn’t that bad bro, you’re just being insecure. If they played a full court 5-on-5 basketball game, each team would only have one sub!
@erwgv3g34’s humorous exasperation from a few weeks ago comes to mind, where (to paraphrase) due to hoeflation we’ve gone from “she doesn’t have to be a virgin, bro” to “if she had an STD in the past that doesn’t make her any lesser as a potential wife.”
If some large subset of men doesn’t meet women’s preferences, it’s a male problem and those men need to improve themselves.
If some large subset of women doesn’t meet men’s preferences, it’s a male problem and men need to improve their preferences.
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Ok but this is entirely normal in Western culture and has been since like the 70s so about 50 years now. And it's not just her that's expected to have 6-12 previous partners it's you as well. If you don't well that's probably part of it but the vast majority of men in modern Western society would not be at all phased by a body count of 6 and thinking they would be shows you as an extreme outlier. I realize modern Western culture is also an extreme outlier but nevertheless that's the culture you live in.
Now it's actually not that hard to marry a virgin in the US you just need to sincerely convert to one of the dozens of conservative religious denominations that enforce this many of which have more women than men. The other way is to ingratiate yourself into a more conservative nonwestern culture and try for marriage there. But acting like a body count of 6 is some damning thing when that is what is culturally expected of modern secular women is not going to get you very far. Modern secular women and men are expected to have several previous relationships and flings from high school and college that's the cultural expected norm. It's totally fair to not like that but understand you are like a Saudi woman searching for a sensitive feminist hipster plenty of those exist but you are going to have to go out of your cultural comfort zone to find them.
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This is just your insecurity talking. You're afraid that you might be worse off in some way than a previous partner, and thinking of sex like it's a "performance" instead of viewing it as a mutual exploration of intimacy, pleasure, and most importantly, as a way to bond with your partner.
Also 6-12 partners, those are rookie numbers. Like I could understand being weirded out by your partner having over 50 hook-ups, but 6-12 is perfectly normal in this day and age.
Yeah sure. And if you have a job applicant whose resume shows 12 different jobs in the past 5 years, none of which lasted more than 3 months, they're 'insecure' if they pass you over for an applicant with a more stable history, right?
(hint: it shows trouble actually committing, i.e. a red flag).
Nobody is obligated to be 'secure' about promiscuity, that's laughable to even suggest. Its about the one thing we are genetically wired to BE insecure about.
Which is to say, your comment reads like satire.
And it was less normal in the past.
Granddad had a 64% chance of marrying a woman with only 1 or fewer sexual partners.
Guys now have a 27% chance, at best.
Strangely, more people got married back in granddad's day.
If you’re dating a 28 year old, that 6-12 is spread out over ~12 years, so a new sexual partner every 1-2 years. Switching companies every 2 years is perfectly normal in industries like software engineering (in fact it’s often easier to further your career that way than by getting promoted internally).
Also you’re assuming those 6-12 partners were 3 month long relationships. It could have been two high school boyfriends, 3 college flings over the span of 4 years, and a 5 year long relationship that just ended. Are you really going to call that behaviour promiscuous?
Body count has never been an issue in my relationships. I know people who’ve had over a hundred sexual partners, now that I understanding having some reservations with, but 6-12 is still in the perfectly normal range. We’re not talking about people who take part in rationalist polyamorous orgies here.
That spread can still be a red flag, depending on the distribution. If it's evenly spread out, it sounds like someone with issues forming long-term relationships, who'll sabotage the relationship after 1-2 years. If it's unevenly spread out, it could indicate a slutty period of their life depending on which side of that 6-12 range we're talking about.
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Well, we're getting to the root of your dating problems at least. "Ah, where have all the virgin 25 year old 130 lbs women who have more interesting hobbies than just Netflix gone..." You're doing the same thing as the women who say "yeah I have 20 options but I'm just not feeling any of them, you know?" It's the exact same thing.
It would be utterly bizarre if she didn't! How could you not compare! This is what humans do!
Basically we've discovered that you're not after "dating" (quite attainable), you're after "she has to be noticeably above average in most metrics, and I have to own her mind body and soul, there has to be no chance that she ever even thinks about a man other than me, lest I constantly be paranoid about cheating" (maybe not as attainable, unsurprising that you're having difficulties).
Sure. So why do you only think it's a problem when men do it?
Its the asymmetry that grates me.
Once again I assert that you are completely and utterly off base about my material conditions.
As stated, I've gone on dates with a number of women who, far from getting scooped up by better men, just end up alone and slowly have their lives spiral away.
If I were the problem, why aren't they going on to something better?
They have a uterus. You don't.
That is the asymmetry.
And a huge (and growing) portion of them aren't using it.
Whose fault is that.
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Yes, I think that's pretty much it. The modal <50th percentile woman seems to be a heavy single mother, who will bring a lot of drama into her boyfriend's life.
In my experience, it's not even that they have to be making $70k now, either, but more like that they clearly would be able to buckle down and do it if they ended up having kids together.
Everyone’s entitled to their preferences and requirements (abs, height, penis, tits, age, religion, veganness etc), no matter how high, unrealistic or weird they are, but somehow I dislike this cash requirement the most.
Maybe it’s because I’m lazy. Or because feminism has always presented the heavy burden of providing as a male privilege. Or because it seems materialistic and exposes the harshness of the transaction. If a funny guy is with a beautiful girl, in a way he’s exchanged his jokes for her tits. But I find this far more pleasant and acceptable than if he had used actual dollars (if he’s a successful comedian and she doesn’t find him funny). I don’t condemn it morally, I don’t condemn prostitution either, but there’s something distasteful about it I can’t quite explain.
Maybe it’s just the old nagging desire to be loved for yourself alone, unconditionally and forever, which no lover has ever achieved. If she loves you because you're tall, you can't test her love by losing a few inches, and her love is somewhat secure. Otoh you can test or lose her cash-based love by abandoning or losing your job. So that kind of love never feels secure, it's more a sword of Damocles hanging over you. In the neighborhood where I grew up, two fathers who lost their jobs killed themselves.
Money is the universal medium of value. Can't we say that I exchange my data science skills for her beauty?
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To be clear, neither my mother, nor I, nor the friends I can think of married a man who had, from the start, what you would call a career, or was making that kind of money. My mom's mother gave them money for a down payment, because my dad was never going to have it himself.
Ultimately, I think it's more important to signal potential love and commitment, but that's more subject to specific circumstances, and making more money is also nice for other reasons, so it's a safe thing to focus on.
I would prefer it if someone was just trying to harpoon an heir or heiress like some Becky Sharp or Bel-Ami. You wish to live on yachts? I respect your moxie.
Some women love you because you have a french accent, or you made them laugh once. I’m told some wives love you because you leave a love note on the fridge for five minutes everyday. But others want the whole 8 hours. Just in a cubicle, being miserable for money, so you can hand it over. It’s as costly a signal of love and commitment as it gets. For the one ‘buckling up’. The requiring party’s love and affinity is more doubtful.
Anyway, nothing against you, obviously it’s a very very common requirement. Some people say it’s hardwired in the female psyche, although I don’t know how nature would hardwire a wealth preference into humans in an ancestral environment where wealth was just ‘being fat’, and some sticks and shells. How could Lucy in the savannah have learned to be turned on by zeroes on a bank statement. By contrast the male ‘gaze’ seems more clearly hardwired to like certain aspects of the female form which have remained the same.
Women are not attracted to zeros in a bank account; they are attracted to the things to the things you buy with those zeroes. Which is why rich men go out of their way to signal their wealth with expensive cars, flashy jewelry, bespoke suits, etc. Those things confer status, and status is something which has always existed and which women are definitely hardwired to be attracted to. No woman is going to be attracted to a man who has a million dollars in his bank account but lives like a pauper, at least not for his money.
There is a much more parsimonious explanation why she spurns the lentil millionaire and welcomes a big spender, even on credit: she likes money. No evo psych needed. If a male chimp gives a female a banana for sex, the female was not attracted to the chimp‘s banana procurement skills or his status: she was attracted to the banana.
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Because it makes marriage look like it’s just a long-term form of prostitution. Which I guess for some people it basically is.
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What do you consider to be an actually desirable girl, exactly? Just curious. Because I feel like my own criteria is not the norm.
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