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Wellness Wednesday for October 18, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I’m astonished that anyone ever managed to date without dating apps.

I’m a 25-year-old man. This year I have been living a very social, outgoing lifestyle. To explain what I mean by that, this is what I’ve done in the past month.

  1. I went to 4 concerts
  2. I went to a friend’s birthday party
  3. I went to 8 Meetup events. Most of them were with a group called “20 somethings in [city]” that mainly does happy hours but I also went to a few board game events and an improv session.
  4. I hosted 2 game nights myself.
  5. I informally gathered with friends at bars 2 times
  6. I went rock climbing with friends 2 times
  7. I went to a haunted house with some friends.

These weren’t all with the same friends. I have lots of friends and I make new ones fairly often.

I’m hoping to eventually find a girlfriend, and other than dating apps it’s common advice to be very social and meet new people. I do. (Not only for this reason, I also like it.)

The problem is the demographics of those friends. I made a spreadsheet of everyone I’ve done social activities with lately and it was like 70% men and 25% women who are in relationships. Even though it was like 60-70 people, only a handful were single women. And of course being single and female is not the only criteria for being a good match for me. I’ve still yet to go out with a woman I didn’t meet online.

I don’t really understand how anyone did this in the Before Times because I don’t really think my situation is that unusual. I think it’s normal for a man to have more male friends than female friends and it’s also normal for many people in their mid 20s to be in relationships.

For people who regularly find or used to find people to date by means other than dating apps / the Internet, how does it actually work? Is my problem that my milieu is really unusual for having a low ratio of single women? Or is meeting people to date at general social activities unusual for everyone, and “cold approaches” more common than I’d assumed?

The old fashioned and still fairly reliable way is to go to a bar and start chatting to some girls. I've met a good chunk of the women I've dated through dating apps but the rest are mostly just women I walked up and said hello to at a bar. The walking up and saying hello bit is important, there have been periods when I would go to bars a lot and not have any luck with women because I just talked with my friends and women usually aren't going to walk up to a group of guys to spark off a conversation.

If you don't like that idea I've found language exchange meetups to be very gender balanced and you can get to know people beforehand a lot more than you would at a bar.