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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.
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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