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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.
What dating crisis? This is just the almighty hand of the free market at work. Standards are high, as they inevitably will be when all parties are equally free to enter into voluntary associations.
We need to take "collective action as a society" to remove impediments to men's access to women (including, presumably, the "ugly, mean, and poor bottom 50%" of men) -- yeah, ok, have you asked the women how they feel about that? "I have this plan that will make it more likely for you to date someone who's ugly, mean, and poor". Wtf that's a terrible sales pitch.
Guaranteed monogamy for all is nothing more than the socialized ownership of the means of reproduction.
Is it a free market? Are you factoring in the market distortions of women taking out massive loans for fake degrees that don't pay, and then lobbying to have the taxpayer just forgive them? Or the weaker market distortions of income based repayment? Are you factoring in the cartel like behavior of HR which is predominantly run by overly educated women? Are you factoring in all the assistance programs women get for almost every facet of their life?
There is a lot going on, but at no point would I claim it's the "hand of the free market at work".
I don't understand this response. What do spurious degrees, the failed debt forgiveness plan, or "cartel-like" (????) behaviour of HR have to do with the dating market? Are you confusing the real economy and market with the dating market? I don't think this engaged with Prima's question about why women would settle for poor stupid smelly boyfriends
Evidently there is a link between the real market and the dating market.
(And if the descriptor “stupid boyfriends” means “un(der)educated boyfriends”, then “women taking out massive loans for fake degrees that don't pay” is an example of another “market distortion” identified in the original comment that affects the dating market. Now, there’s nothing inherently gendered about this strategy, so a man who is willing to sacrifice earning potential in order to meet the criterion of not being a “stupid boyfriend” can do so. But then he gives up his ability to not be a “poor boyfriend”, so he fails that criterion too.
None of this addresses the “not being a ‘smelly boyfriend’” criterion, of course.)
But the guy who wrote that even flagged that those pointless degrees "Don't pay.", am I now to take that the men in this scenario are poor because their potential girlfriends have psychology BAs and work at Starbucks? What's the connection here, beyond asserting that it's evident? The number of undergrad degrees as a percentage of young people has been increasing steadily for decades, and women have been earning them at a greater rate than men since at least the 80s (People who are now likely out of the dating market or irrelevant). Where's the link in this argument? It sounds just like vague outgroup complaining "Those idiots with fake degrees/who control HR/ who don't want to date me" etc
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