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It sucks because you rarely ever learn any useful lessons out of it either, because there's no reason for things ending other than "brain said to run so I ran."
You don't learn to be a better partner, you just get left wondering if you were inadequate.
What helped me a lot was keeping tabs on these women for long enough that I could see that it wasn't me, they did this to every guy. I actually had an interesting realization that of all the women I dated seriously... only one of them has managed to get into a stable relationship, so realistically I probably couldn't have made any of those situations work on my own efforts.
But also means I've been pretty bad at selecting good partners.
And finally, the thing I really hate is when I meet a girl whose personality is a really close match to my ideal and is physically attractive, but I immediately clock her as anxious or avoidant and I ultimately learn that she had a bad experience with a controlling, abusive, or adulterous/sociopathic dude who has basically ruined her pair-bonding capability. And I agonize over the "what ifs" I had met her earlier before the damage was done.
This is a problem writ large with how many of them think, that I’ve noticed. They find it easy to attach with men who are “low stakes” to them, because it doesn’t matter if they end up leaving or not. They’ve got no sustained investment in them; they’re a utility or a prop. Guys they have a serious interest in they’re more cold or distant with because they risk a “misstep” of screwing things up; or some other idiotic reason.
Guys see this behavior and say to themselves, “Shit, I wish I was treated like I didn’t matter.” Because women are treating men they don’t like or care for better than the men they do. This is why they’ve got everything backwards. If you like a man and want to lock him down, do literally the exact opposite of everything you have been doing. Roll out the red carpet for him, make his life easy and eschew the attention you receive from other men; keep them a mile away at all times. It’s really as simple as that. I love nothing more than an otherwise boring woman who makes my life easy. That’s the best woman of all time. But they make it harder than it has to be for themselves. And this is the origin story of how good men go bad over time. Men see the narrative unfold with their eyes and see men with bad behavior getting what they want, while upstanding men are punished for it. And so as time goes on, the pool of good men shrinks even further and as women age they wonder where all the decent ones go. That’s what happened to them. They didn’t “go” anywhere. They no longer exist.
Something whenever I hear it that immediately scratches one off for serious consideration thorough is when someone says “I’m not happy…” That is a phrase that is so wildly overused in relationships today that it’s all but lost any serious meaning it may once have had. Concepts like “duty” and “responsibility” are foreign to these people. Nobody in any circumstance of life is guaranteed to be happy 100% of the time. Yes, happiness is enormously important and should be intrinsic to the relationship, but someone who adopts the unhealthy viewpoint of it like they’re always chasing the next high is an emotional junkie who’s more akin to a drug addict that should be in rehab, rather than in a serious relationship. I can’t stand those people.
That's the big one.
Most guys are aware that a woman will have a dozen other prospects in their phone at any given time. You CAN'T get attached to that person, b/c her cost of swapping you out for another is minimal. You become aloof because that's what the game theory says you have to do. She can defect at any time, and she can't be punished for doing so, don't be the chump who cooperates too early.
Costly shows of effort and interest that demonstrate she's not entertaining other men is how you'd actually know she's serious and not as likely to leave on a whim (alas, it takes 5 minutes for her to set up a dating profile, so you're never truly safe).
And no, that doesn't count just sleeping with him, since there's no direct cost to THAT anymore. Be pleasant, show appreciation, make him feel like he is important to you, and he's already yours.
What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.
You’ve just described a long-term relationship. The relevant porn term is “girlfriend experience,” because this is what a loving girlfriend is like.
Women certainly don’t want to act this way for any man, just for a man they’re in love with. It’s true that women who are ‘playing the field’ and aren’t ready to settle into an LTR are noncommittal and ready to swap out — but so are men who are trying to play the field.
The saving grace for men is that most women aren’t actually looking to play the field. It looks like it, especially when you look at the population of women on dating apps, and particularly hookup-oriented dating apps. Those women, of course, are looking for hot men who are good at sex and make the on-ramp to a sexual encounter thrilling and socially permissible.
But the same statistics that show that also show that their absolute number is low, especially compared to the men looking for the same thing. Most women don’t want to be on dating apps, and most would consider joining one to be an admission of failure, an unacceptable stranger danger risk, or at the very least massively overwhelming with low-quality attention in a way that’s uncomfortable and hopelessness-inducing, not validating. These are the actual feelings the average woman feels about dating apps, not something they’ve made up to mess with guys.
I guess sometimes I read discussions from guys on what women are like in dating and I wonder if anyone’s actually been in a reasonably-healthy LTR. Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels gives the same to her.
I mean, I had a significant LTR with a woman, met her through OKCupid, built quite a bit of a life with her.
That ended badly for reasons that I came to realize were related to her deep, unaddressed anxieties. But for a couple years there it felt like it was going great. I know what it feels like to fall asleep beside someone and wake up next to them hundreds and hundreds of times.
That part of my psychology means I can't find real fulfillment in casual flings or just using someone for sex. The deeper intimacy is missing. I'm aware of how nice it is to be with someone who feels compatible and expresses affection and in theory wants you to be happy too, and now I can't accept less.
And I'm agonized by how hard it is to find and secure that nowadays. It took me about six months on the market, including the dating apps, to meet that one. A few more months to commit my trust to the relationship.
Now, its been years of trying for a new thing, and I've encountered just about every other failure mode and false start you could imagine. And that's why its so odd, if women don't want to be on dating apps like you say, that they also don't like to behave in the ways that would actually lock down a partner, but instead make the process painful for both themselves and the men they encounter, for no apparent gain.
I'm sorry to hear that you're struggling. Dating is genuinely hard these days, and I'm not denying that -- I just think that the imputation of active malice to women is factually incorrect. Women, particularly the ones you'd most want to date, aren't really implementing a strategy, just flailing around, being lonely or platonically satisfied by friendships, inconsistently trying to date in a world that provides them little guidance for how to do it right, and not succeeding in their own ways. The manosphere, for all it says about women, persistently overestimates female competence at dating-as-a-strategy in ways that are, mildly speaking, kind of funny.
This is particularly true when we're talking about women in their mid-twenties and above -- most women who are serious about dating, driven towards marriage, and don't have baggage pair up sometime in college, and so it gets harder and harder to find people who are both serious and driven the older you get.
Well, the thing is the women I'm talking about actually just flat out aren't on dating apps, for the most part -- they're single, often don't know why, often are addicted to their phones or to TikTok, often feel like they're missing love in their lives but may never have experienced real love that is transformative in the way love is transformative. They're not implementing a strategy because, to a lot of women, implementing a dating strategy is itself a form of humiliation -- not because they hate men, but because thinking about love strategically is exhausting, and adversarial, and women by and large actually don't want dating to be exhausting or adversarial. What they want is often a deep and individualized kind of passion where they feel like they're finally seen and acknowledged as a person worth knowing deeply and intimately, and dating is as much a minefield of navigating people who claim to offer this but have a knife behind their backs for women as it is for men.
They don't want to end up in a place where they feel adversarial about dating in the way you feel adversarial about dating, and they have plenty of examples of how women can go that direction and they don't like it. They'd rather hold on to their feelings that love is real and beautiful and transformative while not having it, than face the brutal world of dating as an adult and have those hopes dashed or violated or taken advantage of. This doesn't work out for them, and it works out even less for men, but it's what they're doing and because the world is more socially atomized than ever, it's easier than ever to end up alone, only dragged out of your house occasionally by a group of friends, and without any tools or frameworks to understand what adult intimacy is and how you pursue it.
Sometimes women will create a dating app profile for a couple weeks, the process feels painful and the sorting through many options -- rather than feeling validating or empowering, as men often imagine -- puts a woman who really doesn't want to instrumentalize and reject en masse human beings, in a position where she has to do that. She is not having a good time. She is having a specifically bad time. And the women who experience this as a good time -- and such women do indeed exist -- are the very women you don't want to touch with a barge pole.
Moreover, because the men are hungry, she feels like one cute face among many, not like a person who is ever actually seen or acknowledged as an individual person in her own right, which is the basis for women's intimacy with men. They would rather remain alone, hoping for the unmediated connection of twue wove, than become the kind of person who pursues love strategically and thereby (in their understanding of the world) makes themselves unable to receive it authentically.
So, you're right. A lot of single women act very strangely, without a strategy, often in ways that make life harder for her and for the men she sees. But there really isn't much of a voice for giving women real and useful dating advice in our culture. "Just be yourself," is bad advice often given to men, but women often receive their own kind of bad advice, like "Know your worth," or "don't settle," which equally mean nothing. Being specific and useful to either men or to women requires a kind of honesty about dating and romance that is painful for both sexes, and nobody really wants to go down that road unless they have to.
My wife was befriended by another mom at the retard school, and that woman, who I will call Carol, is a perfect example. (To minimize salacious thoughts, she's on the wrong side of forties and built like an advertising column.) She's there on the app to get laid and she constantly terrorizes my wife with the pictures of her recent matches or the stories about her recent trysts. My wife's not impressed with her taste in men.
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hahaha I don't impute malice, honestly.
But it seems objectively undeniable that women are not great at selecting for men who will commit to them long term, and many of them are ignorant of their own role in their repeated failures to secure commitment (e.g. fleeing the moment a guy seems to be willing to commit).
The whole thing about anxious, avoidant, dismissive, its usually based in some psychological issues that have gone uncorrected. By and large I sympathize with women who are struggling due to these mental illnesses after we've torn down the framework that might have guided them to either get the help they need or at least manage to find a man who can tolerate their eccentricity and encourage healing.
I think the average woman really needs some external pressure to actually pick and 'settle' on a guy and someone who can help her effectively vet and filter the guys.
Normally this would be her family, esp. her father.
The apps usurped this role... while not actually fulfilling the aforementioned requirement. They do NOT pressure women to settle (the opposite: "your next swipe might reveal prince charming! keep trying!") and they do a horrendous job filtering, and honestly give more advantages to the sociopathic males than the normal ones.
I happily and squarely blame those who maintain these apps for the conditions we find ourselves in, but I do point out that our unwillingness to do anything that might upset or displease women as a class as to why we're stuck here.
Do feminists actually oppose attempts to kill or control the dating site industry? I think the USA's distrust of socialism might be a bigger deal there, honestly (there could also be First Amendment issues).
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Lesbians in porn do not act like lesbians IRL, but how men like to imagine lesbians. Likewise "girlfriend experience" is not named because it accurately portrays girlfriends IRL, but bevause it portrays how men would like girlfriends would act. Such conduct is not required to be prevalent among real GFs for the name to stay around.
A man who is "pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a [partner] with sexual desire as an undertone" is not as valued as highly by women, as it is by men. I would correct your statement to say "Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels sparks in her the same utility gain". What that is exactly is a subject of debate, but one can't women and men value the same things in a partner. As you admit in the following quote:
Gender asymmetry is built into every point of this debate.
Every serious girlfriend I've had has been like this -- I haven't had many of them, 3 or 4 I suppose if we're generous, but the experience isn't at all foreign to me and when I've been in relationships, the women I've dated have given every appearance that they've valued being this way around me, and we've enjoyed each other's presence because we cared for one another, made each other laugh, felt like the best versions of ourselves around each other. If that experience is as rare as you're suggesting, then swipe right on my profile and call me gigachad.
It's true that things like being able to be a provider, being a psychologically stabilizing in the presence of crises, and caring about her physical and mental needs to an intense and specific degree, are things that women care about in their partners in a way that men don't necessarily do about theirs. Even as stable and formidible a writer as 2rafa, when she talked about being engaged, described how wonderful it was that her fiancé remained calm and helpful even in moments of crisis. Women aren't quiet about this stuff, and it's not stupid or malicious that they value these things. Husbands and fathers exist because women, especially pregnant women, are vulnerable in moments of crisis, and men's adaptive function to hominid evolution was to protect them and provide for them.
But there's more symmetry, at least at a greater level of abstraction, there than you seem to be implying. Both men and women ultimately want a partner that cares for them as an individual person specifically, who pays attention to their needs, and supports them and roots for them when times get tough. Maybe that's not possible in the long term, I'll grant the manosphere the possibility of reasonable doubt, but my experience seeing my mother with my father, my grandmother with my grandfather, my friend's mother with my friend's dad, and my own experiences with women, indicate to me that it is possible.
It may be true that this is much harder to find in modern times, and I don't actually doubt this at all. But blowing it up into an overall model of human behavior given the WEIRD and unique and socially atomized nature of modern times is a pretty serious empirical error.
It's true there's gender asymmetry, but gender asymmetry isn't malice in the same way that the fact that women menstruate and men don't isn't malice; it's just part of what the world is like for a sexually dimorphic mammalian species.
If you've ever been in online dating where you receive male attention, and I have, having explored in a bisexual phase, you realize pretty quick that a lot of male attention is low-quality not just in the sense that the men are basically normal, friendly guys who just aren't hot, or whatever, but that the men are simply just not great prospects under anyone's definition.
You'll get attention from 50 year olds, you'll get people who don't read your bio, you'll find a lot of guys whose profiles are basically "the worst possible selfie a human being has ever taken, obviously taken because the app asked, plus a bio that describes nothing about them." Oftentimes these guys will be aggressive, not even in a threatening way but in a really dumb way, like messaging you and then two hours later, after you don't reply, messaging "well it sounds like you don't actually want what you say you want, you jerk," like externalizing their frustration at one person who doesn't reply will somehow change their fortunes.
And that's not even an environment where the gender asymmetry you're talking about exists -- that's gay men, the most sex-forward group of human beings ever to walk the earth, and many of the same principles that women complain about encountering from men are present there in men looking for men spaces, too. This isn't really because men are horrid people or anything; it's just that the floor for men's attractiveness and basic social competence is pretty damn low, and because of the realities of the species men have to put some effort into being attractive, even to other men who are looking for men.
Complaining about that is of the same genre to me as women complaining about men not having to get pap smears -- your complaint is with God or Darwin or the universe as it exists, it's just what biology is, symmetry and equality was not evolutionarily adaptive. Feminists complain endlessly about the world not being equal for women, and the most confusing thing about the manosphere to me is that they copy them: yes, men and women are not biologically equivalent, them's the breaks.
But also, the main reason that many women don't like dating apps is their perception, which is not without evidence, that a huge number of men are looking ultimately to play the field and not commit to a particular woman. This is a gender asymmetry that resolves in terms of men not looking so great on the LTR-orientation front, and it too has its deep connections to evolutionary biology.
If you tell me the idea of a harem of beautiful women has never occurred to you as compelling because you're just so LTR-oriented and the picky dating app women just can't see that, well, I don't believe you. The thought's in my heart as much as yours, and if we want to be brutally honest about gender asymmetry we have to acknowledge the male desire for polygyny, and the fact that a massive number of men -- both hot and frumpy, rich and poor -- would take the option given the means and opportunity. If we're allowed to question seriously women's 'wonderfulness', then questioning men's 'wonderfulness' is also fair game.
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