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This was the most frustrating asymmetry that drove me crazy when I was on the market. Putting in serious effort to be fit, financially stable, mentally stable, well-rounded, interesting hobbies, solid friend group, and all the other many attributes that high quality male candidates are supposed to have, only to be confronted with legions of single women doing, at best, a few of those things. It seemed like the women doing most/all of those things got married to someone they met in college or grad school.
I've never experienced this directly, but it was depressing as hell watching a friend of mine trying to find someone to marry; here was a guy extremely fit, handsome, very well off, retired before 40, with a hobby list as long as my arm, and he still struggled to find a long-term partner.
I couldn't help but watch all this in action and left helplessly thinking, 'Christ, if HE'S having problems, what chance do I have?'
He did eventually get married to a wonderful woman, however, but he's still had to make a number of quiet sacrifices. Nothing technically major, but still...
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This is a long story, but I'm getting to a point, I swear.
A buddy of mine in college converted to Mormonism to date a girl. He was a character, but this story is going to be winding enough without getting into that. One day we went over to his girlfriend's house to meet before we all left to go see Lord of the Rings in theaters. I forget which one, maybe Fellowship. It doesn't matter.
It's around Christmas time, and this huge Mormon family is bursting at the seems with wholesome energy. Every little girl wants to show you want they've been baking with their mother. Every little boy wants to show you their somersault or some trick. The house is decorated, the Christmas tree is up, good times. So me and a buddy of mine are awkwardly sitting in the living room, not really sure what to do or say because this is not a vibe we grew up with. In addition to our usual awkwardness I might add. And two of these kids are throwing a little toy football closer and closer to the Christmas tree. My buddy and I, we don't say anything, but we're looking at each other with a panicked expression that needs no words. We are both thinking, if that ball actually hits that tree, a kid is gonna die in front of us.
Anyways, ball hits the tree, ornaments fall, train doing loops around the base falls over aaaaaaaand.... nothing. Dad chuckles, asks them to take it outside, life carries on like nothing ever happened. The boys clean up the mess they made and go throw the ball around outside. After my buddy and I piled into the car to go see the movie once everyone had arrived, we talked about how Christmas was at our homes growing up. How the house was transformed into a veritable museum of Christmas, and our mothers would fly into a violent rage if they so much as heard an ornament jingle due to a single heavy step within 20 feet of the tree. And it slowly dawned on us, that we were the fucked up ones. That family we just visited, they were the happy well adjusted ones.
It sucks realizing in your 20's that you were raised wrong. And not just "could have done better, but basically OK", but fundamentally the opposite of how you should have been raised. With all your intuitions about family dynamics and how to view and treat loved ones horrifically and possibly permanently miswired. It sucks watching the increasingly small demographic of well adjusted, family oriented peers you may have politely filtering you out and pairing off. It sucks getting older and realizing, you've been left behind with the other rejects, and now you've got to find the least damaged item in the returns bin to try to build a life with, knowing full well that's all you are to someone else as well.
I have no fucking clue how I did it. I have no fucking clue how anyone else is expected to do it today, except that it seems even more impossible, and the odds even more remote. But it sucks seeing all the "good ones" taken, and it hurts even worse realizing that goes for you too.
Yeah. And it's hard because so many damaged items in the return bin are still convinced they're the well-adjusted ones.
I think a lot about gambling apps in this context. There has been a lot of talk about them, how frictionless they make it to part with literally all your money. How if you actually do make money off them, they ban you. How, against the law, they personally call their worst addicts and entice them to gamble more. There is an argument I've seen made that if we are going to allow gambling, we need to add as much friction as possible to the experience to try to save people from themselves.
Similar care needs to be taken with those of us who end up in the returned goods bin. We don't need tiktok gassing us up about our worth, or dating apps dangling imaginary chads or stacies in front of our noses. We need examples of how non-broken people act in healthy, fruitful monogamous relationships treat one another, and maybe even the fear of god to scare us straight. Or something, anything. Just not this. Anything but this.
And possibly honorable life paths for perma-single people; there are some valuable, honorable economic niches that are hard on marriage and family. Not impossible - but hard. Long-haul truck driving, neurosurgery, stuff like that.
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It is indeed a pretty brutal and humbling realization. I knew exactly what you were going to talk about with the Christmas tree!
Having parents explode with anger at children is a terrible thing, and I pray I don't end up doing it if I'm blessed with kids. Except in rare circumstances, of course.
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Yeah.
Its a little less bad if you aren't exclusively staying on the dating apps, which I avoid like the plague now.
Its annoying as hell to strike up a decent convo with a woman you find attractive, only to find out she doesn't do much aside from Netflix, Starbucks, Shopping at Target, and maybe Music Festivals or something, and is generally not in great financial shape to boot. Often times they advertise their mental illness diagnoses.
And if you've gone to the effort of squaring away so many aspects of your life, its actually riskier to try to add someone in who might disrupt all those arrangements!
I genuinely ask myself the question "does adding this person to my life improve it or am I basically just getting an overgrown teenager with a caffeine addiction?" and it kills my interest. "The ick" as they say. The times I've gone on dates with such women hasn't done much to improve that perception.
On the flip side, you get the girlbosses who ARE spending their time at work (so have finances in order), slamming out sets at the gym, and pursuing six different side activities at once. Which is kind of neat, but they don't have time to go on dates.
What you rarely seem to find is women who have their lives generally organized, they don't spend money exorbitantly, they stay in shape through regular but not obsessive exercise and watching their diet, and have moderate ambition but are happy to just relax most nights. Someone who would be a nice supplement/complement to your own life and isn't going to disrupt your own routines.
That seems to be the blunt truth of it. The best women are getting scooped early, and, generally, stay in their relationships.
So the pool is mostly comprised of those who either didn't get scooped or couldn't stay in said relationship for [reasons].
This wouldn't be so bad if there were decent ways to filter for what you're looking for (old OKCupid!).
You must be frequently annoyed then.
The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, but she will complain men are BORING with no sense of irony. Men have the burden of performance.
Reminds me of a Tweet from some chick that was making the rounds, along the lines of:
Boyfriend: “Would you date a broke, struggling guy?”
Me: “No, for personal reasons”
Boyfriend: “What if I told you that to me, you are that struggling guy?”
I can’t stop thinking about this convo
And naturally some Noticers laughed at her phrasing it as “personal reasons” rather than acknowledging hypergamy.
One chick I casually dated at least had some self-awareness on that front.
No one:
Her: “If we got serious one day and moved in together, I don’t see how I would contribute to your lifestyle, you even know how to cook and clean better than I do”
Me: *Anakin face*
Her: “There is something I could contribute, right?”
Me: *Anakin face*
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This struck a little too close to home for me.
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See it sounds to me like you are trying to treat men and women as the exact same and getting frustrated that they aren't. Women are not and shouldn't be as hardcore about discipline and working out etc. as a man. That's ok.
No.
I have a generalized model for Western Women:
I'm actually frustrated that they AREN'T acting more different than men, and eschewing the one role that men can't actually fill.
Yes, indeed, all a woman has to do to be considered 'fit' is 'not be obese.' Just don't be obviously and grotesquely fat.
AND YET, they're still the more obese gender.
I don't know what to tell you man, they have an overall lower bar, and many of them don't even try to clear it.
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