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Notes -
Lots of discussion in the last few weeks on the dating recession, and I wanted to add another (anecdotal) data point to the pile.
I've been swing dancing here in Baltimore on and off for about the last three years (started in 2024 after my girlfriend broke up with me). Initially classes and actual dancing were heavily female dominated, often at ratios of 5:4 or even 3:2. This year that has completely changed: my class tonight was short 11 follows in a class of ~30 total people, meaning the ratio of men to women is about 2:1. The instructors managed to get some more advanced people to drop in to help out as follows, but half of them were dudes who wanted to learn the follow part. This was roughly true in the last session of the class as well although not as pronounced.
What I hypothesize that has happened is the message that dating apps don't seem to work has trickled down to the male part of the population. Around the same amount of women are taking this class as in the before times (2024), but the number of men has almost doubled. Men are starting out to try and meet people in real life again! Which is awesome. But for whatever reason, this hasn't happened with women.
I'm not entirely sure why this is, because dating apps don't seem to particularly work for women either. Maybe the illusion of abundance is enough to keep them from thinking that they need to meet people in real life? Maybe they're all in a situationship with the same man (lol)? Maybe women just have stronger social connections in general and don't need to do something like dancing to meet people?
Thoughts TheMotte?
I commented on the dating recession as well previously, but ill add another hypothesis: The dating recession is probably downstream of the friendship recession (Ill make a longer post talking about this, separately. As i feel it deserves attention by itself.). Even today 2/3's of couples start out as friends first. The dreaded "friend zone" a lot of guys want to avoid might be your best shot in actuality. I suspect a lot of women don't want to go out on a date with a random stranger they met on the street, at a bar, dancing, etc. (although there are still a chunk of women where this works!), and prefer friends first as way to gauge compatibility (or they just value the friendship!). There is also a safety aspect in that you know that the man in question is a descent person.
One thing that should also be added here is that you have to be comfortable genuinely being friends with these women (not just a friends to get in your pants kind of deal.), and be comfortable with the possibility that it wont go in a romantic direction. Even if it doesn't go that way, you made a connection that's valuable in its own right, and you may be able to date other women she is in proximity with.
As for why women might not be keen on going outside to make friends, or engage in hobbies that lead to friendships. I'd suspect its a combination of the "friendzone" problem in men's case. And a jealousy/toxicity problem with many women, where they are jealous of how another women looks, or just a toxic person, etc. (the movie Mean Girls comes to mind). The decline of 3rd places also may play a role. Its not that those kinds of issues weren't present in the past, but people are probably much more sensitive to these issues now, for whatever reason.
The proximity with this is important, I met my wife by getting set up by a friend of hers that I met on a dating app but didn't hit it off with. But the idea that single men who are serious about making a partner should settle for a friendship with women they meet is just an absurd delusion some women harbor who haven't ever seriously thought of the logistics of single men dating. I'd need to have maintained literally hundreds of female friends by the time I met my wife for this to have been a plausible strategy, it just doesn't really work. I'm sorry but if it doesn't work out you can't expect him to stay friends with you, it just doesn't scale. It's not personal, it's just that forming a strong attachment, getting stuck in the friend zone as it were, and then getting rejected in the end eviscerates a portion of your soul each time.
I've basically resorted to telling any women who suggest mere friendship "I literally have all the good friends I need or want." Nicely, but making it clear I'm not that guy who will remain in orbit indefinitely.
Now, if I know them as part of an existing friend network or through work or because I happen to run into them on semi-regular occasions, fine. I can pop by, be friendly and engaging, and see where it goes. I just won't be fielding long, emotional text conversations or helping them move heavy objects.
The effort required to put up even the facade of friendship with multiple women doesn't seem worth it unless she is actively wing(wo)manning for you. And maintaining mere 'facades' of friendship is way too manipulative/dishonest for my taste.
And my experience with women wingmen is laughable. They'll bring this one friend who is "single and super nice that you should meet" to a gathering. And she's 50+ pounds overweight or a major butterface and usually poor social skills to boot (i.e. there's reasons she's single). So you have to politely reject without either insulting your friend or the referral.
Happened to me 2, maybe 3 times in the past 5 years? And if you're out and about they'll suggest the most insane approaches to you. "You should talk to that 45-year-old cougar-looking lady with the back tattoo!"
Yes, having female friends is important so you can have a some social proof you're not a creepy loser and have access to her potentially single friends, but don't expect them to be that big a help in landing one.
I totally agree. The two exes ago girl (last girl I was probably in love with) begged me to stay friends with her after she broke up with me, despite the fact the first time I had hung out with her we had fucked. The entire relationship was completely romantic (we had sex 80+% of the times we ever hung out), but she seemed to think that somehow the relationship had a strong platonic foundation that we could maintain. I initially agreed because I thought I could change her mind back. That obviously didn't work out, and I learned that this woman was a terrible person to be friends with because her extreme dogmatism combined with terrible mental health. I ended up terminating the friendship after a couple months because I realized she was never going to get back together with me, and that I didn't really want her to anyway.
On the flip side of the coin, I think having female friends who you have no intention of sleeping with ever is perfectly fine and perhaps even good. Women are just as diverse as men when it comes to platonic personality, and it seems crazy to remove 50% of the population from the friendship pool solely because someone might get feelings. I have few very close female friends from college/work that I have absolutely no feelings for and I'm very glad they're in my life. I would never be open to a relationship with any of these women, and unless you plan to get married, I think the friendship->lover boundary should never be crossed, because unfortunately you can't really go back.
Been there.
Its odd that I used to (and somewhat still do) believe that there was a specific sequence of words I might be able to utter that would 'fix' things and get them back to where I wanted.
But attraction really don't work that way.
Also been there. Had a really awkward Friends -> mutual crush -> 'breakup' -> friends -> FWB -> breakup/blocked sequence with one girl. Took me like 5 years to realize she was irretrievably messed up in the head and she was happily using me as a psychological crutch, which was causing a drag on my mental health. She reacted poorly to my attempt to create a boundary, which confirmed that cutting her out was the right choice.
I've got a solid handful of such friends, and the thing they have in common is I have negligible levels of sexual attraction to them (like, I wouldn't turn down an offer, but I get no arousal just from being around them) and they're usually partnered to someone and thus I mentally sort them as 'off the market.'
I think you can, but in my experience you need like a solid 18-24 months of virtually zero contact and of course lingering feelings can flare up so you have to keep a boundary in place on how often you hang out.
Me, I am loathe to give up a connection with someone I share a lot of pleasant memories with.
I honestly can't blame anyone they get into a relationship with from being antsy about it, though.
Romance is just a messy thing, tied in with our baser instincts. Even having a fully intellectual comprehension of how it works you'll still be susceptible to the standard traps and pitfalls.
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Based. “Thank you for reaching out, but all available positions have been filled. I’ll keep your resume on file and let you know if any openings emerge.”
And even when women attempt or “attempt” to wingwoman for a male friend, oftentimes they can’t help but still accidentally or “accidentally” throw the male friend under the bus: “This is @faceh, one of my besties. He’s a total sweetheart and like a brother to me, always there to listen and lend a hand.” In which case at most a friendzone just +1’d in terms of the population size.
One of the best wingwoman experiences I’ve had was from a girl I had maybe met once in person before then. I don’t know if it was intentional or not. She introduced me to a female friend of hers and was like “teehee this is [my first name], he’s the one hooking up with [hot chick they both know].” Cut right to the chase with the most value-add information she had. Female mate-choice copying FTW.
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In the long-ago pre-covid times, a female friend of mine tried to set me up with one of her friends, and was describing her. I pointed out a glaring red flag that was obvious even in my friend's super-glowing description, and the response was "well, if you're going to have standards like that [i.e. any standards], prepare to die alone." She couldn't have created a better summary of the dating market if she tried.
Its very fair to ask a friend "this person sounds great... why are they single?"
There's a few fine answers to that question.
One of my buddies got his GF from our friend group b/c the current GF asked her friend, who is close friends with my buddy, if he was single and looking and then had the friend nudge him in her direction, and things worked out well because the friend was a good intermediary and could vouch for both parties.
But they'd had a decent amount of time to assess each other from somewhat afar. It wasn't a cold/blind introduction.
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I think it's more a case of "one of your 20 friends is a woman from work you met 4 years ago. You were in a relationship when you met, but today you're both single. You go for your usual coffee catch up and decide to do it again next week instead of the usual next month. You begin dating organically after this."
I don't think the play is to maintain a friendship circle of hundreds of prospective girlfriends. Meeting people through friend groups or work does seem to be some great mechanism for finding the love of your life.
Right, having some women who are friends is definitely useful in a number of ways. Maybe I misread the OP and they weren't suggesting it as a main strategy, but there really is a strain of thought among women that a man who would be interested in dating but not becoming friends is some kind of contradiction. "why would you date someone you wouldn't want to make your friend?". It makes a kind of sense from the perspective of the selective sex but it just isn't workable.
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How do men meet women in your culture, and what are romantic relationships between men and women like?
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Was it a beginners class? My experience with kizomba is that the classes (particularly the beginner ones) may be heavily male, but the socials are overwhelmingly female. Because kizomba is easy to follow, women learn super quickly and stop going to the classes, but still go to the socials because they like the dance.
I don't know enough about swing dancing to say whether or not that's the case, but if it's significantly easier to follow than lead, then that could be something. Although that wouldn't explain the change in the last couple of years.
It’s way easier to follow swing dancing than lead, or at least I had more trouble learning it than the women I danced with did. Either I’m unusually bad at dancing or one role is easier than the other.
Leading is indeed much harder because you have to decide what to do.
Depends on the dance, leading a jive is easier than being a follower, the follower steps are much more complex depending on the choreo.
Leading properly (instead of just doing the leader steps/choreo) is a skill as well, but it takes like 4-5 years to learn how to do correctly, you're not going to learn it by going to 1hr weekly social dance classes.
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I also do dancing (competitive though, not social), our classes are 3-4 women per man, and have stayed this way or if anything the most recent new cohort is even more female dominated. I highly recommend dancesport to any men who are interested, at intermediate+ levels almost all couples end up 1 man + 1 woman so as a man you don't need to be as amazing to make it up there. I wouldn't recommend using this as a way to meet partners though in the short term, that's gonna get noticed and you'll be ostracized very quickly (and for good reason, we do this because we want to get good at dancing, not because we're horny, it's actually a surprisingly sexless sport, despite what the rumba may appear like to you). Longer term once you're actually good and in a stable dance partnership plenty of couples end up marrying each other, but this is a very different thing than hitting on women after 4 weeks of slow waltz.
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I've observed it multiple times over the last 4 years.
Any space that is likely to have attractive, single females to interact with in a group setting will quickly draw males who want to interact with such women, and inherently, more guys show up for this explicit purpose. So there DOES NOT exist any mythical IRL space where a straight guy can enter and find a favorable gender ratio to work with. Other than a college campus, perhaps. Other males would notice and also come to exploit it.
This creates the gender imbalance, and the attention/distraction gets overwhelming for some of the women, who might stop showing up altogether (or go to events specifically reserved for women).
This further throws off the Gender imbalance, and also might block new women from joining. No woman is seeking out a space because she heard it had an excess of single guys. And even if some of the guys give up and leave, there'll be plenty more new guys coming in to try their luck, so this imbalance can persist for a while.
So the only women who continue show up are extraordinarily confident... or already have partners. This is maybe the final blow, when the remaining pool of women are already partnered, and drag their partners in with them so that the actual ratio of single women to men is even worse than it appears.
So you can legitimately have like 5+ single guys for every 1-2 single women in attendance.
This happens in any space that doesn't intentionally filter by gender.
I've also commented on the difficulty of getting women to show up to social gatherings even when directly invited. If there aren't other women already going, they're less likely to show up themselves. Even when they claim to want to go they have a decent chance of flaking.
The ability to ensure that a certain number of attractive women will be present is thus very, very valuable.
Most spaces/events don't have someone with this capability.
Partially that they seem to have female friend groups that they can spend time with.
Partially because a lot of women, esp. those with anxiety and other mental issues, find it easier to just stay home and binge Netflix or play games online and build "communities" in Discord or similar.
I know of an upsetting number of women whose lives are basically "work/school, outings for shopping and then... staying in at home, nose shoved in their phone with a TV show on background." They're being 'social' in that they're texting/chatting with a bunch of people, but their actual social presence IRL is virtually nil, and it is VERY hard to coax them out of this cocoon.
Ask me how I know. Female shut-ins are an increasing phenomenon, I think.
And because the underlying logic of romance is "men chase, women select," guess what happens if women don't make themselves 'available'? Men have fewer people to chase, and women have no pressure to take any 'active' steps to find someone.
Larger social dance events like full weekends of workshops and parties are one of the few places that does this obviously and explicitly and still gets away with it, by selling "leader passes" and "follower passes".
Turn up as a male follower. They exist (and are getting more popular), usually taken by experienced men who want a new challenge (it also helps you understand the leader steps better if you know what your follower has to endure when you do a certain figure).
Yes, it's very useful for skill development, and it's really fun dancing with women who know both roles and can pass the lead back and forth during a song.
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I don't know if it's increasing, but it's certainly a contributor to every public social space being a sausage-fest. "The elites don't want you to know this, but women are only 20-30% of the population" might not be factually accurate, but it's directionally correct.
I sometimes ask LLMs to do Fermi estimates on the number of single women in the U.S. who meet certain sets of criteria in terms of their eligibility as a partner.
Those results are usually disheartening on their own. But I haven't dared ask what percentage of those women are actually 'on the market' in any real sense, that is, available such that you might encounter them if your social surface area is reasonably large.
I fear that a relatively chaste/modest, low maintenance woman is also less likely to be out and about and open to meeting people. If you do see them in the real world you'll pass like ships in the night. AI boyfriends might exacerbate this.
I go to restaurants and bars these days and the phenomenon of "woman sitting by herself but dressed up like she wants attention" doesn't seem to be a thing (if it ever was?). You see older adults (in my area, anyway), a few mixed groups, usually one (1) lady's group sitting all together, and a smattering of couples or lone dudes.
More and more young adults living with parents gives a hint here.
Last year I encountered an extremely tragic case of a young lady, cute, petite but pleasantly curvaceous, smart, but her entire life was just working in her parents' business, taking classes, then home to live with her parents, where she played LoL or Overwatch until like 1 a.m.. If she went out it was usually with the same 3 people. Desperately seemed to want a relationship, but didn't know a damn thing about flirting and... get this... at age 25 her mother still controlled her bank account.
I don't think she realized how much of a honking red flag that last bit was, a guy won't want to date a woman whose mother has that much sway over her life at that age. She didn't get out to social events often enough to meet many guys, and wouldn't know how to converse with them if she did. And, alas, she turned my own offer/request for a date down.
She's like 80% of the way to being the complete package for a stable, friendly type of guy, but I daresay she'll hit 30 without a serious relationship under her belt unless she gets out from under Mom's thumb and puts herself out there while avoiding the pitfalls of modern romance.
Or mom makes her put herself out there until she goes out with someone. It happens.
From what I've seen, mom is the source of the problem, wants to control her so she doesn't get into trouble but also wants to be 'best friends' with her.
The habits she's built up are probably quite set now.
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Doesn’t speed dating have a problem with not being able to get enough men?
Not in my local area, distinctly the opposite.
But given the type of woman who signs up for speed dating (read: they aren't getting much attention elsewhere) men may have caught on as to the selection effects at work.
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Isn’t Pilates very female and very attractive for the most part but does not have men showing up?
Does pilates encourage interaction between the participants?
And ask any given woman what she thinks of random straight guys showing up to her pilates class.
My point was it’s not “intentional filtered by gender”. Though there are strong norms against it. Same thing as a girl showing up to a basketball court. Though I am semi-ok with that if they have legitimate game since there are no such thing as an adult female games.
It does kill some male space vibe. And it’s a little weird to play hard against a girl.
As far as I know Pilates does not exclude male participants. But it’s not a thing men have interest in unless maybe your gay.
Men will have interest in it insofar as it can lead to meeting attractive women.
I just think 'you're only doing this to get in my pants' is a reaction women often have when the guy enters the female-oriented space.
Sure. And if you cross a social taboo line without seeming very genuinely interested that’s a reasonable reaction.
I would add it’s very nice having male/female coded spaces. Less of those exists today. I don’t like it when girls join my basketball game. Occasionally it is fine. But if it was 15% female it completely changes male dynamics.
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When I lived in a city, I used to go to yoga 3x a week. The intro classes were generally 60% women, but intermediate/advanced classes could be 10-16 women and 1-2 men.
For the intermediate classes, the other regular guy and I would show up early, BS some, set up our spots, and start doing some warm-ups. A few women would trickle in. 30 seconds before class started, 6-10 women would show up and unroll their mats. The second class ended, they'd roll up their mats and bolt.
Other dude was a married 50something grandfather. I was in a relationship and not looking. I barely talked to anyone besides him. The two of us were hardly putting out predator vibes. Even so, a good half of the women attending class were like frightened gazelles approaching the watering hole. Some had rings on, some didn't, but some without might've been married and just avoiding a ring for comfort during class. Even so, some of them must've been single.
I always wonder just how many of the single ones complained that they couldn't meet anyone, but even in strongly gender-segregated hobby environment, they didn't spend 1 second longer there than they had to.
Yep.
Dance classes/socials at least anticipate that you'll be interacting with the other members, and physically touching them, and getting to show off a skill.
The logic as to why single men would be able to pull attention there is at least sound... if there's a decent gender ratio.
Classes where you just show up, do some work on your own at an instructors behest, then leave without much of a fraternization period might encourage familiarity over the course of time. But that means the guy has to keep showing up, repeatedly, to show he's not just there to pull women, and HOPE that one he finds attractive is open to approach. Not a very active approach angle.
I teach Krav Maga classes at my gym, and when people, especially women, are new they tend to come in two minutes before class, do the class, then bolt, but warm up over time to the social aspect of it. If they don't, they often disappear within a few weeks.
But I've noticed a somewhat unfortunate selection effect where the single ladies who want to take the classes often have sexual assault, stalkers, or similar trauma that compelled them to seek out such training. And they thus have personal issues that make them a little wary of male attention in general.
So ultimately, the sort of event where:
A) Attractive, single women would attend;
B) They're actually actively looking for partners/accept approaches;
C) Aren't damaged goods;
D) Interaction between men and women is encouraged;
and
D) There's a balanced gender ratio.
Just do not seem to exist hardly anywhere, even when people try to intentionally create such spaces.
One's workplace might be good for this but huge risks there.
This one is something of a funny disparity. As an employee at various state government agencies, the hammer of HR has always been hovering, especially with any perceived "power disparity." An attorney dating a legal secretary could expect to be fired if it goes south, even if the attorney wasn't the supervisor. On the other hand, I've seen HR turn a very blind eye to 2 attorneys dating, even when one was the supervisor of the other (until it became so public and such a problem internally that they had to do something). Huge, huge risk for an attorney to date a non-attorney, even if historically that kind of intra-office thing led to marriages.
But small firms? The stories I've heard (from reliable sources) make half of them sound like a continual frat party (especially the ones that are a bunch of solo attorneys or partnerships sharing office space--one I'm very familiar with had a legit "who's the father" freakout among the attorneys with a secretary). This is not all that surprising given the personality types involved, and also that plenty of women get jobs at firms looking for a lawyer husband. You've mentioned being at a small firm, so even if yours is professional, I bet you know of some that aren't (which means you just need to get invited to those holiday parties...).
I have managed to find a balance where I can have a jovial atmosphere around the office, keep morale up by occasionally going out to dinner with staff but otherwise keeping healthy distance such that I don't engage with their personal lives much and definitely don't have text conversations about non work stuff that might lead elsewhere.
That said, since legal assistants tend to either be young women in their early 20's OR older, 50+ ladies, I do see the temptation that arises when you've got a nubile young thing around a bunch of Type A personalities.
I know of at least one attorney who imploded his personal life (not his law practice, funny enough) by getting an assistant pregnant.
We do a Christmas party that involves our other offices every year, and like 5 years back one of the attractive younger assistants got pretty drunk and was hitting on me slyly but openly. The means and opportunity was there, but equal parts concern for my job AND the fact I was still with my ex at the time kept me from acting. In all retrospect, since the assistant left the firm not too long thereafter, and the Ex broke up with me, it probably wouldn't have done much harm in the end. But its the principle of the thing.
It didn't even leave that much impression, since I cannot even remember the assistant's name. Else I might have tried to look her up after the breakup.
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Also a lot of women don't understand how to do the intermediary stages of the dance where they make themselves available but also do some mild shit testing. Or atleast conduct it in a sane way.
I've been involved in multiple conversations with single friends of my wife where they're forlorn over some potential beau not leading hard when they've dropped the handkerchief via liking 2 IG stories and stonewalling DMs. Literally seen women crying over failing to inspire hot pursuit vis texting conduct on their part that, to me if received from an online dating match would have me assume that they're soft dumping me.
Most agentic and emotionally resilient young women.
They’ve more than done their part in deigning to perform the Herculean emotional labor of liking 2 IG stories and stonewalling DMs. Men are supposed to read their minds and know when and how to message them and court jester for them.
Exactly plus it's like... On a scale of 1-10 where 10 is a marriage proposal and 1 is a restraining order I'd have read these messages as a 2.5/10 at best and desisted from further pursuit if I'd been the recipient.
I feel like I'm only successfully married now since my wife is essentially male-brained and met me in the middle in terms of communication
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Yep, separate but related issue. Young women don't know how to flirt, nor how to gracefully reject advances (or reject them in a way that encourages future attempts). I used to think it was just me being autistic, but nah. Often the signal just isn't there.
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
I've also taken the initiative to push forward whenever I see any positive sign of interest whatsoever and gotten HARD rejected when I finally cross whatever threshold of comfort the woman apparently held in her mind. There's no push-pull. Its just me pushing pushing pushing then an ABRUPT pull away when some arbitrary line is crossed.
Like, I've legitimately heard a woman say that even viewing someone's IG/Snap Stories should be an actual hint, but then you follow up on such things and try to ask to meet up in person and they are suddenly super busy and can't make the time. Because guess what, in person you're expected to use your words and physical touch and you're not 'protected' by a digital barrier of plausible deniability any longer.
Something about the dopamine hit of being desired and getting the other party to express interest being enough stimulation, then the actual stress/tension of actually reciprocating interest seems to snag many of them.
I'm reminded of a platonic female friend of mine who had this like 6 month crush on her boss and was eternally talking about how she wished he'd do all sorts of 50 Shades activities with her.
Then he made one like off-color milquetoast but not like insane joke at the end of a meeting and she instantly icked on him/wanted to take him to HR. A certain part of female sexuality is wanting to be the proverbial dog barking behind a fence who doesn't do anything when let out, but some of the instant 180s I've seen as a third party are jaw dropping.
To what extend would you guess that this ick was motivated by having a crush on him that was unrequited for 6 months? As a third party reading a second-hand text description, it appears to me like cliche-level sour-grapes behavior.
This was like still during the crush, though. If I recall correctly the joke was something like that they were traveling together and there was enough of an age gap that a coworker remarked it'd look like a father and a daughter then he said something to the effect of he'd hope he's in good enough shape that she'd look like a second wife
If anything, that makes the "sour grapes" scenario far more likely.
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Ah, the joke being about her and the age gap makes this more intelligible.
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I can understand changing your opinion on your coworker because he makes an off-color joke, but what I find genuinely hard to understand is the having of a months-long intense sexual crush on your boss and telling your friends you want to do BDSM with him. That's wild.
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This is my diagnosis.
There's a solid number of women who are absolutely down to clown if you get them in the mood. They don't just talk the talk.
But many, MANY of them get engrossed in the fantasy, they read the romantasy books, watch the shows and movies, maybe even watch the porn, and will engage in massive amounts of dirty talk, digitally, but are terrified of having the actual physical interaction. Maybe they dip a toe in and then immediately retreat back to the safe, comfortable world of fiction.
And in some cases, if you end up part of their fantasy world, and then break that fantasy in some way, either from rejecting them, or giving them the ick, or, hell, you actually help them act on the urges but your performance isn't up to snuff (good luck living up to minotaur standards), and they get incandescently angry at you.
Something about the collapsing of the ideal they imagined to the dirtier, lacklustre reality leads to disappointment that manifests as anger.
Its something like accepted knowledge that women get off way more on the mental side of sex whereas men, despite being very visual, really need physical interaction to be completely sated. Hence why strip clubs for women aren't really a thing. And current tech is much more catered towards entertaining the mental aspects of sexuality, whilst keeping the physical at a 'safe' distance. So I'd guess many women now have a completely enclosed, fantasy-centric approach to their pleasure, and the thought of making the jump to realspace is daunting.
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Conceptually, the men in a dance class can be divided into 3 groups: (1) men who are there primarily to meet women; (2) men who are primarily there to learn dancing, but meeting women is a secondary goal; and (3) men who are strictly there for dance and not to meet women.
My guess is that the vast majority of men in your dance class belong to either group (1) or group (2). Which makes sense. It's no secret that there are a lot of young men out there who are fairly desperate to get a female romantic partner. And most men, at some point, are told that a good way to meet such a woman is to do some mixed-sex activity.
You can laugh, but I definitely think that this is a factor. It seems pretty clear that ultimately man is a tournament species. In the absence of laws and social and economic constraints, most men would build a harem if they could and most women would join such a harem. Dating apps allow people to circumvent some of these constraints because they make it much easier for men to enter into relationships with multiple women without those women knowing about each other. (Or at least allowing those women to avoid facing the reality that they are part of a harem.)
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I did swing/salsa/ballroom/etc dance classes off and on at a UC school from 2011-2014. Every single class session had more men than women :(
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If you've been at it for a few years, presumably you're in some of the intermediate/advanced classes. You allude to the social dancing also, but I'd be interested in a specific breakdown of the ratio between beginner classes and the more advanced classes and the social floors. I'd also be interested to hear what the vibe's been like among those men, particularly the newer ones - do they seem like they're interested in dancing or just pulling?
It'll be interesting to see how long this lasts. IME, dancing scenes don't stay tilted towards an excess of men for very long, as the etiquette of asking women to dance means men either get in each other's way asking women to dance, or get no dances at all. In the reverse case, where there's an excess of women, the men are busy dancing, and surplus women often dance with each other or get asked to dance the next song or the one after.
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Dating is anti-inductive. A parable:
Back in the early days of Tinder it was common for women to mention that they love to watch tv, specifically Netflix. There wasn't any subtext to this. That was in fact what they loved to do, and so they put it on their dating profile. Men, wanting to get laid, responded by also putting how much they loved Netflix on their dating profile, and by asking women they matched with to "Netflix and chill".
This did not result in previously unheard of numbers of interest-matched couples forming relationships. It resulted in the word "Netflix" or "tv" becoming a gigantic red flag.
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I counter your n=1 anecdata with my n=1 anecdata; I got dragged to dance classes by my girlfriend and our class is (remains? I don’t actually have eyewitness evidence as to the gender ratio pre-2025) heavily female skewed, roughly 3:2 women:men.
Unfortunately(?) it’s not the sort of skew that tests my fidelity; I would rank the quality of IRL women on offer somewhat lower than I would have ranked those on offer on the apps. And with the significant added problem that the apps were designed to solve: namely that IRL, you don’t know if they’re going to be receptive to solicitation, whereas online, you do.
Perhaps, but at any offline event the attendees are physically present and unmediated by anything other than the immediate social standards. You're not limited to one introduction a day, or waiting around for a six word reply that never comes, or seeing only what they looked like five years ago in their best photos, and so on. And while there might be thirty other people at the class there isn't a thousand other people (a number of whom aren't even real) vying for attention as they rotate past on an endless carousel.
Besides that a lot of people can enjoy music and dancing for their own sake. Dating apps not so much. Figuring out a tactful way of assessing whether someone is single seems like a small trade off.
You’d think so, but no, it’s an insurmountable, socially paralysing cliff face for anyone vaguely neurotic (my past self included), especially those who have been involuntarily stewed long enough in the social messaging milieu of “Expressing unwanted romantic interest to a woman is Basically Rape”. But if she’s on an app, then she’s Asking For It so can’t really call you a creeper for cold approaching, can she?
Most people (both here and in wider society) seem to condemn dating apps in The Current Year; I still think they’re fucking great, because - while they certainly have many problems - they also solve many problems.
To be fair, dating apps haven’t gotten me a respectable wife in my half decade of using them, so they have technically failed the assignment. But dating apps have gotten a lot of Zoomer girls into my bed, which is certainly worth partial credit when 6 years ago I was staring down the barrel of incel-dom.
Yeah, using dating apps to find chicks, sending rideshares via apps to deliver them to your place, and ordering alcohol through app-delivery for the dates, is *chef’s kiss* when it comes to effort efficiency in Current Year. Booze and broads straight to your door.
Born too late to explore the earth, born too early to explore space, but born just in time to lay pipe without having to leave my place or take girls anywhere to monkeydance for them.
Partial credit? More like enough extra credit to offset the original failed assignment with bonus points leftover to spare. woody_harrelson_wiping_tears_with_Aplus_report_card.gif
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Because women get a steady diet of fear porn about how men are all out to get them(and to be fair, some are. Not all or most, but certainly some). When they've had 'men are malicious and dangerous' pounded into their skulls they'll not go out of their way to meet men. Simple as.
As @Quantumfreakonomics alluded to, a much larger proportion of men are "out to get them" in the sense of a pump-and-dump. Unfortunately, I doubt that their cautious instincts are well-calibrated on average to avoid this, but it is a legitimate cause for concern on their part.
I think two things can be true at once, for example the average man on a dating platform might not be out to get you, but the average man you meet on a date made on that platform might be. The average man who manages to get you agree to sex on the first date is probably not going to be around for a second date.
Basically, the question to ask would be: "If this guy is such a great catch, then why is he single?"
I think there is a large gap between the hottest man (by whatever metric) a given woman might get to have sex with her and the hottest man a given woman might get for a longer term exclusive relationship, and a minority of men use that to be unethical sluts.
An awful lot of women don't actually care, though, except for the implications to their status. I met a very beautiful girl through a friend and she confided in me that her dating-app match had just messaged making it clear he expected her to put out on the first date (in about four hours time). She raged and vented for some time: did he really think she was the kind of girl who would do that?
You've already guessed the punchline. I commiserated with her over the failure of her date plans and she looked at me like I'd dribbled on her shirt. "Obviously I'm going. He's hot," she huffed, and flounced away.
This is pretty funny, but I might compare it to the oft-ignored advice to not "stick your dick in crazy." It seems to me both sexes are bad at putting down and holding to firm and sane boundaries if the individual in question is hot enough.
I know I've put up, in brief courtships, with some pretty noncommittal/confusing/game-playing behavior because I found the individual in question very attractive. There was certainly some stewing in those situations, but in my heart of hearts I have to admit that if they'd resolved their confusion and stated what they wanted clearly, I'd probably have gone along with it. But my response to that kind of behavior, absent the stewing, is basically to shut down and move on, in annoyance, so these kinds of things never advanced. I'm willing to trade a lot of attractiveness for stability and common sense.
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That's the kind of behaviour that is frustrating and that her mother should have smacked out of her.
Plainly, she is that type of girl, she just was affronted by the guy being so explicit about it. He was hot enough that she agreed to go on a date, so she probably would have had sex anyway, he just needed to play the game. Demanding at the start that she put out (or, the presumed implication, he would call off the date) was insulting: if he would call off the date, then she wasn't hot enough for him.
Now, whether that was a bluff on his part or not, I don't know, but she didn't call him on it and so yeah. We're just arguing over the price now.
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Pump and dump from Chad >> Lifetime of Brad.
Listening to a hot chick talk about her dating life when you haven’t banged her feels like a humiliation ritual.
Especially when interjecting sarcastic remarks which make her cry ("and after all that you slept with him anyway") makes YOU the bad guy.
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And then people accuse me of hating "natives" when I express the (justified, I submit) contempt I have for these people. And my tax money is going on funding this shit. People complain about their tax money going on migrants with different values here in the UK, never mind that these migrants make up a small portion of society and there are lots of "natives" that don't even pay much tax in the first place, so the per "native" price they are paying is relatively small. On the other hand the tax there aren't that many people like me, I pay a shit ton of tax and there are a shit ton of these "natives" who make bad decisions that society (read: taxpayers like me) end up subsidizing and we're supposed to just sit and take it. I'd wager I'm personally paying 6 figures in GBP each year directly subsidizing the likes of these people. Few things make me seethe as much as seeing the government's yearly breakdown on where the money I spend paying tax ends up going.
I have at least 1.5 orders of magnitude (closer to 2 actually) more justification to be pissed off at the "natives" than the average "native" has to be pissed off at a poor migrant care worker. And yet...
Well, unlike the natives, you joined the society willingly with full knowledge of the deal. I'm not saying you're not entitled to wish it were otherwise or advocate for it to be so, but I am no particularly sympathetic to your complaints.
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Assuming you have citizenship elsewhere, you could move elsewhere and not pay those tax rates. Natives who complain about funding migrants don't have that option.
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Not English. I met her back in Japan - she was some non-Japanese Asian ethnicity like Korean or Indonesian. No idea about her finances but we're definitely not talking welfare queen.
Okay, that adds another layer to it. If she's managed to score a Japanese guy, she was probably willing to put up with more crap from him because of the Japanese attitude to foreigners. Though apparently Japanese have a good impression of Indonesians (if I believe online search results) while seemingly there's a more negative attitude to Koreans.
So it depends exactly where she was from and if the guy was Japanese or not. I mean, I still think she's an idiot, but there's more going on there than simply "yeah of course I'm gonna sleep with him, he's hot".
There may have been an element of that, I don't know. I can't remember if the chap was Japanese but she certainly had no shortage of non-Japanese admirers. She was half-French, or she'd grown up in France, if I recall correctly, and was involved with the embassy in some fashion. It's a fleeting impression from a while ago in any case so my recollections could be incorrect in any number of ways.
What makes it so vivid for me is the memory of her confusion at my confusion, as if it was weird and rather impolite of me to not be familiar with the kayfabe involved. Clearly, it was very improper of me to expect "there's no way I'd sleep with that guy!" would not be followed up with "brb, fucking that guy".
I filed it away as another part of the world I'd failed to understand until then.
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Getting corrupted by the westoid mindset is just as bad in the long run because it's contagious. She might not have been a leech and may have had a background which could fund her behaviour, in which case more power to her, she's not the sort of person who I'd want in my life but that's fine, different people are different. What's not fine are the people who are like this and fund it off the taxpayer's teat and then lecture us for our values. Neighbour, have you looked at your values???
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It’s way too early to be reading blackpills like this.
Consider the implications for a hypothetical “no hook-ups” dating app. Are they really going to ban people for consensual encounters? How would they even know?
This encapsulates my entire objection to the Apps as a class.
Regardless of how they advertise the intentions of their service, the ONLY thing they 'promise' is to show your profile to other people, and to initiate a connection if you both click 'like.'
They have done no vetting, their algorithm is sorting your matches but makes no guarantees as to quality, and they give you no recourse if your match doesn't pan out despite doing everything 'right.'
They abdicate all responsibility for filtering and policing and otherwise giving any useful feedback, basically disclaiming any blame for what happens after the match. WHICH IS THE PART THAT MATTERS.
And yet, they expect to be paid money for this service, and refuse to openly admit they can't help police people's behavior, continually implying the blame lies solely with the user.
This would be intolerable in about any other industry.
Anyway, if I were going to pass just one law to regulate these apps without banning them outright, I'd require they post their 'success rates' for the average user (by gender) for both achieving matches, and achieving actual relationships.
And have these appear on the screen for like 5 seconds every time you boot into the app.
If you're going to turn dating into a casino, you should be required to post the odds.
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While that’s fair, there’s a pretty easy remedy against the classic pump and dump- don’t sleep with him until you have your relationship. The classic pump and dump scenario might include some deception, but it does not typically imply rape.
Or even better, save it until marriage. Unfortunately, outside of religious communities, that doesn't seem to be the preference of either men nor women.
A coordination problem, you say?
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