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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'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.
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.
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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