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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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?
I'm immensely grateful that my profession has an excellent ratio of men to women, and that these days the women slightly predominate.
Then again, I never had any particular issues getting a date when I wasn't studying in bumfuck nowhere, so YMMV. The advice that others have given, namely to shoot your shot whenever possible and not societally suicidal, is good advice. It's a numbers game, and that doesn't change even if the numbers are smaller.
How did you date in India? Apps or just ask out people you meet in class or whatever? Is the expectation that people won’t have sex until it’s serious?
I mean, contrary to popular belief, Indians can and do have relationships before being packed off to an arranged marriage (and even those are usually family sanctioned dates more than the bride and groom seeing each other for the first time on the day of the wedding, at least out of the boonies).
As for how I've dated, well, it's usually been people in my med school, or a friend of a friend. The girl I was seeing for the longest, almost five years, I met at a friend's birthday party. Current girlfriend, well, let's just say our plan to do a research paper together ended up involving another kind of biology, but we met in the maximally nerdy manner of both being in the same local study group for a medical exam.
I've tried Tinder and managed to squeeze a handful of dates out of it, but it didn't go anywhere. I imagine it's even worse than the West, about the only person I've met with any success on it was a doc buddy of mine, who despite the shared degree, was hogging all six of the packs. It's an utter wasteland as far as the eye can see.
I'm pretty charming, so I have no issues just flirting on and off in person or sliding into DMs later. It's that HR meme personified, you just have to be funny and provide plausible deniability.
Now, the last question depends strongly on where and who you are. There are sections of richer society that are almost as libertine as the West, but the UMC in general doesn't usually do one night stands, perhaps after a few dates, and the lower you go, the longer it takes to get past kisses and heavy petting. Sleeping around a lot will likely get you heavily slut shamed, and even the wildest women I've dated would be considered pretty tame by American standards. My slag of an ex, has what, maybe 10-15 notches on her belt that I know of? At most it's like 20. But things are only getting more liberal, and horny medical students or young doctors are usually independent enough that it's not a big deal and they can usually put their past behind them when it's time to settle down.
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