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Notes -
You know, sometimes when I read accounts of dating by other men I feel like I'm reading text from an alternate universe.
That goes for the successful ones as well as the unsuccessful ones. First dates that end in sex are as strange and alien to me as a first date that ends in a proposal of marriage. I don't know that I've ever been on a first date where sex afterwards seemed countenanced, like something that would even make sense in the context. First dates in my world are a "getting to know you" kind of experience, like "is there chemistry here, can we have a conversation that we enjoy together?" Generally, they've ended with a warm hug and a promise of future engagement, typically one that has either gone forward or been closed off by my own choices. I've never kissed someone on a first date. It's just never seemed to be the appropriate thing to do, a reflection of what the date was about. The second date is where you kiss them romantically under the stars. My romances have been slow burns. Good burns. But slow burns.
Actually, I've never paid for a woman's drink on a first date -- but I'm more of a coffee shop kind of guy, and the one time I offered to buy ice cream for someone on a third date they declined it, and then bought me a soda at the end. Wining and dining is not really my style, and I can't say that anyone I've dated has ever expected it to be.
I do recognize things in your history that I've experienced. I've been stood up before. The "Excited to see you tomorrow!"/BLOCK chain is very familiar. But that's also a minority of cases in my experience. Far from 90%. Most women I've dated have shown up. Some definitely haven't. And I've had a few times where I cancelled last minute based on nerves or disinterest -- I'm not proud of it, but I've done it. People are flaky in general, and I've been stood up more times by friends I was supposed to meet up with than by dates I was supposed to see. But the shape of what you're describing is very real to me, and I believe you. The fact that it's almost everyone has to sting a lot, especially after the feeling that they projected such excitement about you.
I want to emphasize the word "projected." What strikes me about your accounts is how front-loaded the excitement in your matches and connections have been.
after texting someone is, to put it politely, an extraordinary amount of certainty about someone you haven't met. They don't know enough about you to think you're "so funny," or "so sweet" -- you said some things that were funny or sweet, but so little of a person's personality comes through text that it strikes me these women were perhaps more excited by the idea of you than by the possibility of you. I mean that: sometimes the mental image and validation of a handsome, 5'11", funny guy who gives you compliments is more compelling than the possibility of a future with him. The first date is where the mental image has to meet reality. And also, where your mental image of her does, and for some of these women that might have been the scarier part.
Sometimes the problem with being a bartender is that a bartender gets left at the bar.
You suggest something close to this yourself:
And yeah, I think you might be right. Sex on a first date is pretty intimidating, particularly for women, and it does sound like many of these women felt that was within the realm of possibility, including on her side, and those kinds of stakes are scary, even if it's never been your intent to project them. But for many women even "heavy petting" sits on the "sex" side of the ledger.
When I think of the times I've been cancelled on last minute or stood up, almost all of them followed the development of real sexual tension or body-forward flirting (hence, no first dates with sex). When I think of the times I've had a pleasant first date, almost all of them followed personal curiosity, interests-work-and-hobbies conversation, and warmth. What stands out to me in your account -- and again I can't see all these situations in their entirety, I just see how you describe them -- is that your engagement with these women, on both sides, is almost entirely unpersonalized. "I get paragraphs from her about how hot I am and the stuff she likes doing to guys" is, like, the most generic sense of flirting possible. Nothing in that was about you, about anything unique to you, about something that would plausibly make someone specifically want to see you, and not Unidentified Male #9.
And, of course, "the bare minimum of communication to arrange a date" is not exactly a personalized level of flirting, either, and neither is generic "I am a Charismatic Man" banter. I know this is a degradation of what you've done before, and it must get so exhausting putting personalized and thoughtful messages out there when the world sends you so little back. But there are costs to the degradation, because like a coin flip or hiring a lawyer, past results do not guarantee future outcomes, and every new person could be the one who deserves your best.
All this is part of the reason, by the way, that women talk about "love bombing" as a problem, and why many are highly suspicious of "you're hot" sexual compliments as a flirting strategy. Both flirt without really seeing the person first. "Hot" describes someone as an interchangeable sexual commodity that can be dropped at a moment's notice ("just actually go on a date with the hottest guy out of the five(+) who've asked you out" is an analysis of this phenomenon from the male side), and "you're so sweet and funny and amazing and wonderful and I'm soooo excited to see you," to someone you don't know (or barely know), almost by definition can't be based on a fully accurate experience of reality -- it has to be based on a projection.
Projections can be well-intentioned or ill-intentioned, but they aren't a good foundation for a relationship that can take root and grow. The seed that falls in shallow earth sprouts quickly, but is soon scorched and withers.
I don't know that you're responsible, entirely, for the outcomes you've had. None of us are. And your experiences do strike me as a string of bad luck.
But I do notice some things about the way you describe your dating history that stand out to me.
The first is that you actually seem to have had a few good experiences, but you have some reason to describe them as bad. A woman goes on a date with you every few months, but she's "way fatter than her photos indicated," she compliments you for your decisiveness, and you treat the date as though it's nothing. Not even, "attraction isn't there, glad I found out," but "too fat." I guess it's hard for me to understand the visceral disgust a lot of guys express for fat women; I can understand the lack of attraction, but the disgust is hard to fathom. I've been on good dates with fat women, and bad dates with thin ones. And even when the attraction isn't there, I feel good that I got out of the house and got to talk to someone who was interested in learning more about me.
Another time, a woman who laughs at all your jokes, kisses you, and agrees to a second date gets described as "plain-looking but not fat", not getting your jokes, leaving no impression, and "being bored out of [your] skull." You realize this is kind of a jerky way to describe a woman you went on a date with, don't you? You didn't even explain how the second date, the one where everything was closed, ended! You pivot in your retelling immediately to your ex, almost as though this woman, who genuinely did more in your telling than 90%+ of women to show interest and treat you with respect, never even deserved the closure of being described fully in the time she chose to spend with you.
The personalized-vs-generic dichotomy shows up here, too, of course. The feelings you had for Maggie seem like the real deal. "Someone who I was just in awe of, as a person." She doesn't get "plain-looking but not fat," she doesn't get "pretended to get my jokes," she doesn't get a story about buying too many drinks on your tab. Maggie's the only woman in your story who appears as more than just "gender/parenthood status/attractiveness/BMI." Your feelings for her were personal, embodied, not generic, not simply erotic charge. And you didn't meet her for vodka-sodas or "music late in the evening," you met her, married, at a D&D table, possibly the least likely place to meet someone you'd fall in love with.
It must have destroyed you when she left, and I'm so sorry.
I keep thinking of the essay Scott wrote on LessWrong about how people self-select so profoundly that sometimes their experiences of the world are almost irreconcilable.
I believe in your experience of the world. And I believe a lot of things about men's bad experiences with women -- I've seen shades of game-playing, inconsistency of interest, shit testing, the works, enough to believe they're real, and the flap of a butterfly's wings would expose me to a lot more of it.
In some ways, I feel a bit like the feminist Scott describes in the article: "The woman I quote above mentions that she’s a feminist who believes discrimination is a major problem – which has only made it extra confusing to her that she never experiences any of it personally." (I guess for me it's not a never thing, but the ratios are off.)
I also need you to believe in mine, because mine is the evidence that yours isn't the only kind of experience you can have with women.
Sex on a first date genuinely confuses me. Heavy petting on a first date confuses me. Agreeing to meet someone in the middle of a Saturday night out confuses me. Receiving paragraphs of explicit sexual texts from a woman I met in passing confuses me. I don't disbelieve you. But it does feel like our worlds might as well be alternate universes.
(I'd say tending bar confuses me, but I grew up in an evangelical teetotaler household, and still even after leaving the denomination that preached against alcohol, I still don't drink but once a month, if that.)
This isn't disapproval, necessarily. But it's confusion, like being handed a dessert menu when reporting for jury duty.
And it's temperament, the same way I can't go to bed before 2 AM and am so resistant to nap that my father had to pick me up from preschool before naptime. I'm wired for slow burns, and I'd be wired that way in any culture, under any incentives, against the gradient if it has to be.
I think you're wired that way too, and I think your own post proves it.
Run Maggie through the hunter rules. She was married when you met her. There was no flirtation window, no escalation timeline, no enthusiastic messaging to evaluate. A system designed like clockwork to convert matches into notches would have filtered out the one woman who it sounds like you genuinely loved. You didn't run her to ground. She turned up on your doorstep because of who you'd been at the table for months. You don't grieve a "plain-looking but not fat" woman with a ranking out of 10 for five years, you grieve a person. Everything in your post says your actual type isn't a body specification; to use your own words, it's being in awe of someone. Which means the hunt was never your game, and becoming a better hunter won't fix your problem.
But look at who you've been pursuing, and how.
A woman who dropped, unprompted, paragraphs about "the stuff she likes doing to guys" -- but obviously didn't have the courage to say anything to your face, an unstable interaction from the moment she used a fake lost-item report to turn a passing encounter into explicit fantasy. A date you can't remember a single sentence from, despite there being a second one. Women who appear in your own retelling as a weight, a look, a rating, a political vibe, because that's genuinely all that was ever exchanged.
You're seeking the most personal thing that exists in the least personal register that exists, and then you're experiencing the interchangeability, and its attendant disposability, as betrayal.
But I understand why the personal angle might hurt, too. I think I recall you mentioning another girl in an older post, the one who kissed you on her birthday and got very mad at you about it. That seems like the only time in your recent history where you got close to the kind of feeling you had for Maggie, and then everything came crashing down. This strikes me as a time when, maybe, there was some level of miscommunication, mis-signaling, that caused you both distress. Maybe she ended up perceiving your kissing as a physical escalation designed to drive more physical escalation, reading your desire as predatory before reading your love as real, because of the implication. Or maybe she was just inconsistent, or her own flirtations with asexuality made her confused about her intentions as much as yours.
Maybe Chicagoland is like this. I come from Jesusland; Peace be with you. And I do wonder, just a bit, if the differences in culture explain a lot of the divergences in our accounts. Most of the women I've dated have been Christian in background, even if presently secular, and more than a few have come from rural or small-town backgrounds. Casual sex was not a big happening at my school, though I heard about some such reputations later on, and when I went off to a major party school for college, I was struck by how different the vibe was romantically and sexually. And it was there that I first encountered the game-players, and one woman, in particular, who insisted after a first date that she "wasn't really ready to date right now," and then followed this up, two weeks later, by inviting me to her dorm and seemingly expecting some kind of a move. I don't deliver escalation to the inconsistent, and if you're not really ready to date, I'm not really ready to fuck. I'm not a booty call.
My own "why are all the women like this?" experience is I have a strange penchant for pulling the inexperienced, from my teenage years (where this is statistically the norm) to adulthood, and if all of my dates had a common theme it would be "introverted, doesn't get out much, haven't dated much before." I can only imagine that whatever unconscious vibes I broadcast have something to do with that, though it's hard for me to see how, or why.
This is wild speculation, so take it with a grain of salt. But I wonder if part of your unconscious self-selection, the part neither you nor I can see from your posts, is that your vibe broadcasts something you're not actually pursuing.
You're a bartender. You've done stand-up. You dress fashionably. You're handsome, you've lost weight (and things have gotten worse since then!). Your default register is charge, banter, performance, charm. That register reads, to a lot of women, as sexual pursuit, which would explain the strangest pattern in your account: women preemptively negotiating sex with a guy whose actual ceiling is making out.
That would explain the period texts, the "hope you're not expecting anything," the nerves, the hookup-coded nightlife meetups. Those women were responding to an intent you say you don't have. If that's right, it's the most fixable problem in your whole post, because nothing about you would need to change except the signal. You're not broadcasting "looking for another woman like Maggie." But by your own account, that's the only broadcast you've ever actually meant.
It might be worth one experiment before you write off the apps. Run the D&D table version of yourself inside Hinge. Answer the weird prompt, ask the question only she could answer, don't propose a date until you're actually curious about a specific person. And if curiosity never comes, don't propose one at all. See if genuine warmth or personal curiosity exists for you in text. It might not. But you've never actually tested it. You've been testing charm, which is a different vibe altogether, and it's not the one that gave you Maggie.
Obviously AAQC, so please forgive my focusing on the only bit that doesn't make sense to me:
One time, decades ago, I had been tempted to "cancel" (early afternoon blind date planned, and I got stood up, then she contacted me to say she overslept and begged to reschedule for that evening), and it wouldn't have been the end of the world personally if I had bailed (near zero chemistry, and there was no way I was going for a second date), but it was still a chance to meet and talk with an interesting new person, not a bad way to spend a couple hours.
I'd just been assuming that these stories of cancellations were due to double-booking - a girl accepts a date for evening X, then someone she thinks is more attractive asks her out for that same evening, and she doesn't want to have to explain why she's busy or risk him not agreeing to reschedule, so she cancels or ghosts on the first guy. Selfish, but not self-destructive. (I'd have wondered if this had been what happened to me, except that my date did in hindsight seem like the sort of person who could oversleep into the mid-afternoon...) I guess "disinterest" would make sense too, if someone managed to throw up a real red flag in between the planning and the date. But nerves? I was a scared little geeky kid way back when (fought the Ur-Quan when SC1 was new!) so "she's throwing me signals but I still can't work up the courage to ask her out" is a painfully familiar idea for me, but I still can't imagine working up the nerve and then backing out!
I came pretty close on my first date with my wife. The only reason I actually showed up was because it would've been a dick move to bail after we had made plans. Otherwise, I was a bundle of nerves to such an extent that I felt like my heart was going to stop, and I desperately wanted to turn back and go home. Obviously I'm glad I didn't.
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This is why if I'm talking to someone and the conversation has reached the point where I'd normally ask them out, I ask them out, even if I suspect that it's not going to work. I could think of worse ways to spend a couple hours than having drinks with an attractive woman, and I don't know that you can really learn too much without actually meeting someone, so even if I'm pessimistic I'll give them a chance in person. I should add that unless I'm really uninterested I will always try to keep the conversation going long enough to get to that point (which isn't that long), for the same reason; ie that it's always worth actually meeting someone. I don't know that anyone's time is really so precious that they can't spare it, and this comes from someone who typically doesn't leave the office before 7 pm. If I have legitimate commitments that make it difficult to schedule things I actually feel bad about it, though I'm not skipping something I've been looking forward to for a first date that isn't likely to go anywhere.
I can catalog exactly 4 times in my life that a Hinge date has cancelled on me. 2 of them were rescheduled right away and went off shortly thereafter. One went off a year later (long story), and one offered to immediately reschedule but I turned her down because I wasn't that interested. There was also one who agreed to a day but not a place before telling me she ended up deciding to move in a couple months and didn't want to waste my time. In retrospect I should have told her that since I already had the night open I was just going to go to this bar anyway and she could feel free to join me, because I think she might have taken me up on the offer.
You never know. I went out with one woman who was figuring on a summer fling before I moved away for grad school; it ended up going long-distance before she moved out to join me. Years later I went out with another woman who was planning to date for only 6 or 12 months before she'd break up for a planned move across the country; our 17th anniversary is this year.
I've done the long distance thing before and I'm disinclined to do it again, if it would even be an option. Eventually it gets to the point where a decision has to be made, and it's not a fun decision to make.
That's fair. It worked out well enough for me under "we'll see each other for 3 or 4 months out of the year, never more than a couple months at a stretch apart" circumstances, and in another case it worked great for me under "we'll see each other every weekend" circumstances (I didn't even think of this one as a LDR, despite us living too far apart to meet up on weekdays, until I talked to someone who complained about a slightly shorter distance), but I've never attempted anything rougher than those. A friend was long-distance with his fiance for a year due to education and work conflicts, I think separated for more than a few months at a time during that, and they're happily married decades later but I know that year was awful for both of them. I also have more depressing stories but all of those feel too personal to tell, even anonymized, behind the backs of the people involved.
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It's a social anxiety avoidance thing, and I've done it for general hanging out, not just dates. I've gotten better at it, and the "regardless of whether it goes well, it's a time to meet someone new" attitude has become more comfortable for me as well.
I guess the nerve of asking out and the nerve of actually going on a date are different. I feel fight or flight the day of a date, like can't sleep, shaking, staring at the clock, extremities going cold because of a rush of blood to the core. One of the two options there, of course, is flight, and "the unbelievable relief of cancelling plans" is a meme among late millennials and zoomers for a reason.
And with online dating, the asking and the going have moved even further apart -- it's much, much easier to say, "Let's go on a date" to a Greece travel picture over text than it is to actually show up, face the risk of awkwardness or embarrassment, and take a chunk out of your vegetative TikTok time to encounter someone who might judge you. I genuinely believe most last-minute cancellations are of this type. Most women simply aren't as strategic as the dual-mating discourse makes them out to be, and the current crop of young people are, by every measurement we can find, more anxious than any other cohort we've measured.
An uncomfortably large proportion of "why is my girlfriend doing this?" behaviors that men often complain about (silent treatment, inconsistency, asking a question like "would you still love me if I were a worm?" and then reacting seriously to the answer, reassurance seeking) are just anxiety behaviors that are painfully familiar to me from the inside. They aren't good, and they certainly aren't healthy, but they're very rarely strategic, and if they accomplish something for the person they do so in the short term, the way all maladaptive behaviors persist. Avoiding long-term beneficial behaviors for short-term benefits is the failure mode of anxiety. Some of our female posters have talked about avoidance being a huge part of young people's socialization problems. That's very much the case.
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