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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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