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Notes -
This is hardly small-scale, as the problem has been a fundamental obstacle to my emotional well-being for 5+ years, but
How Do I Get A Woman To Turn Up For The Hinge Date She Said She'd Turn Up For?
It's not like online dating has ever brought me much joy in life. Twice now, back in 2016 and 17, I dated one person for a month or three who I wasn't crazy about, which I suppose is the normal baseline human experience. But just going on a singular date with someone every now and then at least made me feel like I wasn't being soft-blocked out of humanity. In 2019, though, I noticed an odd change; no one would actually turn up for a date. Way before the pandemic, I remember three women becoming mysteriously sick conveniently right on the day of the date we had planned. Another one who was a fellow zoologist "met a really great guy that weekend" so she had to cancel. Props to her for honesty, but it sure did make me hate my life.
Then, post-pandemic, every woman had apparently discovered a lifehack/This One Weird Trick; you can just say yes to a date, then not actually go on the date. You get all the validation of knowing a guy would go on a date with you, without all that icky tedium of having to meet them in person and probably getting assaulted or whatever. When the evening you're free comes up, just actually go on a date with the hottest guy out of the five(+) who've asked you out, and the other four sit at home wondering why they're no uniquely unlovable. Once, there was a woman who waited until she had confirmation that I was at the venue waiting for her before she unmatched me.
When it came out, I tried Facebook dating; it's location filters were utterly fucked; I kept getting likes from women a state away. But I did match with people who lived in the suburbs, a whole 30 to 40 minute drive distant. This meant scheduling was a bit more precise; I'd ask for a date on Sunday, she wasn't free until Friday, so I'd do the old-fashioned thing of trying to keep a conversation going. And FB dating in particular felt like OKcupid back in the day, I had several "real" conversations where I'd tell jokes or stories and ask her for book recommendations, then start reading that book. I was getting praise.
It would really ramp up. Then the day of the date they'd mysteriously have to work a double because someone called in at work. Or they got sick. Or had a headache. One woman had a kid, and three times in a row the ex-husband failed to take the kid on his day with it, which was apparently her only source of babysitting, so I got three cancellations before I took the hint and stopped asking. I got it into my head that they were giving themselves cold feet by building up what they thought were too-high expectations "Shit, I let slip that I like this guy a lot and now he's going to expect sex on the first date, better cancel to be safe." One time I had plans to meet someone who was moving into the city soon but visiting for the weekend; it was going to be a chill sunday evening at a cocktail bar. Then she asked to move it to saturday night. It turned out she was out clubbing or bar-hopping and wanted to meet up at such-and-such spot in the nightlife district, which struck me as hookup-y (she was recently single). I wait for her at the venue she indicated, get a vague text message or three from her, then abrupt silence, leaving me sitting there like a jackass on a saturday night surrounded by happy couples. The next day, I get an apology, something about her getting nervous and asking if we were still on for that night. I told her to fuck off.
This exact scenario happened again with someone I met while driving Lyft on the side; she was hispanic, so the whole ride it was like someone had a gun to her head telling her to keep talking; I'm just being my normal mildly-charming self, I'm not trying to hit on a 20something passenger. Then after I get a message in the app from about a lost phone; there was no lost phone of course, just her phone number in the notes along with a bunch of hearts and kissy-faces. Then I get paragraphs from her about how hot I am and the stuff she likes doing to guys. (I keep my replies non-explicit). Then the day of the date "Just so you know I hope you're not expecting sex because I'm on my period."
As far as I can tell, women think men are terrified of periods and mentioning it is trying to get the guy to cancel so he can be the bad guy (Who Only Wanted One Thing). If this tactic fails, they just escalate to ghosting, like she did on the day of the (stroll at the park) date.
I should mention here that I generally don't ask for high-pressure dates that imply a hookup; my highest aspiration is to make out with them at some point, maybe heavy over-the-clothes petting. Drinks on a weeknight. Comedy show. A walk in the park. Free live music on a weeknight. Tacos. Sometimes I'll provide two or three options for a date that each have different connotations, so she can pick the vibe and how likely it is to get intimate. Her picking live music of an evening over coffee of an afternoon is a useful signal.
All these little stories aren't exceptions, they're the norm. 90% of my arranged dates never actually happen, and I don't have very many arranged dates. Maybe one date actually happens every two months, wherein the woman is way fatter than her photos indicated, and I get a bunch of compliments about how decisive I was in asking her out and proposing an actual plan for the date when most guys just say "IDK, watever u wnt 2 do."
Oh, yeah. Hearing any woman talk about her experiences dating is infuriating to me; guys who start conversations with "Hey," or pressure them for sex, or ask zero questions. All things I don't do, and don't expect praise for, and if I did boast about not doing I'd get the "what do you want, a cookie? All that stuff is the bare minimum, ugh, typical Niceguy entitlement" response. I'm apparently just so much nicer and respectfuler and thoughtfuler than other guys, but also completely mediocre and sub-par and don't stand out at all and just about everyone is better than me, because these chicks are turning up for dates with someone.
My interactions with women via text become more and more begrudging, I offer less, don't bother to make jokes or give compliments, I just propose a time and place. My number of arranged dates doesn't change, nor does the rate of flaking/ghosting, so it seems what I say has zero effect.
Back in april I opened up Hinge after not touching it for months, saw I had one like, and sent the bare minimum of communication to arrange a date. She was plain-looking but not fat. She laughed at all my jokes, after a two-second delay, the time it took for her to realize what I'd said had been a joke she hadn't got. Everything I said went over her head. She drank a lot of vodka-soda, which I wound up paying for too many of. To this day, I don't remember anything she'd said to me, she left that little of an impression. We kissed a bit. A week later, we went out again, and every place I tried taking her to was closed despite their hours indicating they weren't closed, I was bored out of my skull, and the whole experience just reminded me of how much I missed Maggie, who I could sit for hours just listening to, who always said something unexpected or insightful, who'd catch fireflies with me and do weird bedroom roleplays and encourage me to write more. Someone who I was just in awe of, as a person. We met at a D&D table while she was still married; when I put out a public call for help moving, she turned up on my doorstep, recently-divorced. I distinctly remember the last time I was happy; October of 2019, right before she left me to go back to her abusive ex-husband.
I uninstalled Hinge.
I've lost a lot of weight over the past six months, I'm now under 200lbs. I'm a quarter-inch shy of 6ft. I'm apparently handsome. I'm a bartender, I've done stand-up, I'm an accomplished Dungeon Master, I can hold a conversation and be charming. I dress well. A guy friend said "I don't see how you could have any problem dating, dude, look at you." I know he was trying to be encouraging, but hearing it it just crushed me inside. I get less interest from women now than I did when I weighed 240lbs. Part of this is that I just became less outgoing over the past two years, because when I would try, I'd just have experiences that made me hate people. Women would start conversations with "Men are all such trash, amirite? Such-and-such media is So Queer, so-and-so film is Incel, what are your Pronouns? Astrology, Gaza, Orange Man, there's too many white people around here, I'm neurodivergent and asexual." The other week, some woman I'd spoken to before and been shot down by came over to me at my local bar and inserted herself into me and my friends' conversation, talked over both of us, then said she was going back over there, I could come join her if I wanted to. "There" was over by the guy she had come to the bar with. I didn't take her up on it, few things disgust me more than a woman flirting with me when she's already on a date with someone else.
Over a month ago, I tried going to speed dating. After the event, three of the cuter women I'd talked to were all chatting together and pulled me in. Apparently I was the most normal, non-creepy guy there who'd been the most fun to talk to. Some other guy had gotten handsy with all three of them, apparently he was a frequent flier at these events. I didn't match with any of them. Even when I'm the best guy in the room, I'm not good enough. At least this speed dating service doesn't require proof of vaccination or mandatory pronouns like that other one did, the one I got banned from for not writing down pronouns on my nametag.
Last week, I tried going to a Singles Board Game Night. There were 15 people there when there should have been 30+, the gender ratio was almost 2:1, and the only games on offer were Uno and Jenga. There was an older bro-y guy who did corporate sales who immediately started mechanically interacting with me, bought me a drink, warming me up, I recognized all the rote Networking behaviors. Turned out he was the organizer's boyfriend, and he was the designated wingman for the night, tried to get me to interact with an unfortunate-faced asian chick with zero personality who ignored me, then stopped talking to him when she realized he was a plant. I had brought Boss Monster, started taking out the cards, someone asked me about the game. I began explaining the premise, one girl got distressed when I said the goal was to "Kill adventurers," I looked around at the glazed expressions on the people around me, and just silently packed it back up mid-sentence and went to the bar. I do not belong here. Designated Wingman bothers me again, says I'll do great here, I have hobbies, I just have to bE mYsElF. It was an effort of will on my part not to blow up at him. Another woman arrives, wingman says "Ohh, there's one, do you want me to get her over here. Nah, you probably don't like black chicks, do you?" Before I can say that I actually don't mind them I just have bad experiences with the hipster ones who are way too into their Blackness, he's doing his bit on her. She's smart enough to notice something's off and is asking him if he works there or something. I lean in "He's a plant, he's trying to be everyone's wingman, just talk to me for a minute and he'll move on to someone else." We talk for a bit, I try to not be flirty, she's surprised that wingmaning is still a thing, I wind up explaining the theory behind it and why it doesn't work regardless. She's smart, but also not flirting with me, I suspect she's a therapist and switched into session mode. Some people have left at this point, making the gender ratio three to one, all at one table where the two remaining cute girls are where they've been all night, hedged in by a crowd of guys (all of whom are the most generic motherfuckers you can imagine). She gets me to join the table, where she sits down so the fattest woman in the room is between me and her, who is also black, so I suspect she herself is wingwoman for her fat friend. I look at the woman next to me, who's heavier than me, look at the Uno cards in front of me (I don't know how to play Uno). I look at the table with it's 3:1 gender ratio. I look around at the shitty bar basement private area with the too-loud generic club music, and the dudes in polo shirts, and I leave.
I have a few post-weight-loss photos of myself now. I could reinstall Hinge. But the prospect of going back to getting flaked on over and over and over and over and over just twists me up inside.
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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