Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
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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