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People on here have been commenting a lot about women not showing up for dates, which does sound frustrating, but apparently they're not showing up for each other either. I was reminded of this phenomenon by this Substack post, about women preparing home cooked meals for each other in their homes, then having people not show up last second. So my initial theory that maybe young women are scared of men from outside their social circle is not the main thing going on.
What's going on?
I tried going to a local ACX meetup, and it was fine, but after six people initially wanted to do it, only two besides myself ended up coming. Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter. I said that I would rather bring my daughter to pick up the paperwork. We fought about it. I was perhaps more prickly than is altogether advisable when speaking to a child's teacher. I tried researching how this could be considered an appropriate thing to, not offer, not ask, but mandate. Something, something, building trust, Head Start, maybe the norms of black Americans? Clearly, they have the wrong order of things. If I trust you, I will invite you over. If I don't trust you, I will want to meet at your office. Even social workers know this. Is this related to parents not actually coming to their appointments somehow? It's juxtaposed in literature withattendance, more than understanding.
Also, meanwhile, my older daughter hasn't been invited to anyone's house. We haven't managed to invite anyone to our house. It seems terribly fraught somehow. I mostly do things with one or occasionally two other families with a stay at home mom and a mom who works two mornings a week, respectively.
Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.
I liked the culture of Georgians (Kartveli) and Albanians that homes are sacred, guests are from God, and that guests and hosts have important mutual roles and responsibilities.
What's the sociology here? Why are Americans like this, despite seeming deeply unhappy about it?
I'll just say that I have never once had a woman not show up for a date after agreeing to a time and a place. Every other popular complaint seems valid, but this one is fake as far as I can tell.
If you are saying you've never been out and out stood up, my experience tracks with yours. But are you including late cancellations?
There's a gradient that goes from
2 and 4 are the most common variations. 0 (the date actually happening) happens slightly more often than 5, but less than 1-4. 1 sometimes later results in 0, but more often leads to 2 or 3.
At this point, I am forced to assume that 2, 3, and 4 are her double-booking and going on a date with a hotter guy, or having met a hotter guy in the interim. 5a is anxiety, 5b is, I can only assume, some kind of vindictive game.
My wife's sister flakes on dating app guys a lot, which I see as a spectator since I'm living next door to her. Generally more out of pure flakiness, hypochondria and being loathe to leave her K-Dramas than due to swapping to chads or whatever. From what I've seen she's a chronic #2er, but I feel that the more time I've spent with female friends and/or involved tangentially in my Wife's social circle talking about online dating there's just a ton of genuine flakiness and people massively overrate the whole double-booking thing. Maybe I'm overindexing for Asian, non-promiscuous girls who trend a lot more KHHV than serial daters but I know a lot of very timid, passive girls towards dating who'll psych themselves for essentially no reason.
A few times women have been honest and said it was because there was another guy they were more interested in, "sorry, I don't know how online dating works."
I told them it works exactly how they're doing it, just typically with less honesty.
Ah, the selective disappearance of women’s supposedly superior communication and social skills, and ability to read the room.
They know how online dating works, all right. It’s just that a lot of how it works is women jerking men around and wasting men’s time and energy.
"A real man doesn't complain."
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I swear almost all Zoomer women have debilitating anxiety. When my department used to go out to lunch every week, I had multiple female Zoomer coworkers ask me to order for them, because they had too much anxiety to order from a stranger. They eventually began to complain if we went anywhere that wouldn’t let you order from a kiosk or iPad, since I and my other older coworkers refused to coddle them in that way. Even the ones who could handle ordering their own food couldn’t handle phone calls. They’d all, without exception, rather cancel an event than spend five minutes trying to work out the details over the phone. And this is even with their friends and coworkers, not people they don’t know. If they can’t figure everything out via text and email, they’d rather skip and stay home. It’s insane.
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