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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1820 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 18, 2023

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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?

Dancing is a meme recommendation for a reason, and conspicuously missing from your list. When I look over my dating history, almost all the women I've dated came from social dancing. The trick is to do it for long enough that you don't look like you're only there to bring someone home, and to have enough skill that it's enjoyable for the ladies to dance with you. Bonus: this is also around the time it starts to become really fun. If you choose a closer/more intimate style of dance, there are all sorts of subtle escalations, you can see how you react to each other's touch, and so on. But any style in your town with a passable (and, if important to you, a not politically-converged) scene lets you move between dancing and talking when you run out of steam for either.

How does it actually work?

The social night where I met my last ex:

  • The night was a social with a "warm-up class" before-hand, before the lights went down and the music really got going.
  • I was running late to the class but was able to slot in and do a decent-enough job. I'd been away for ages so there was a bit of "who's this guy?", maybe?
  • Once the night shifted from "class" to "party", we had a few dances together. The usual etiquette in this scene was to dance maybe two songs with someone. More is a bit possessive, and less is a bit "I'm not really feeling this". This means that there's a decent rate of churn between partners, and people move on/off the floor pretty regularly. (Different cities and styles will vary here.)
  • We'd chatted and danced on-and-off through most of the night, and I also noticed that she was starting to blow off other people's invitations to dance in favor of talking with me. (I'd say it's usually pretty rare to dance with the same person more than twice in a night. We danced two or three times during the night, and then shared the last song.)
  • The way we danced as the night wore on became much closer and more and more comfortable. This is hard to describe in words, but it was much more comfortable than the usual "ok you're not a creep so let's dance properly".
  • We ended up dancing the final song of the night with each other. I was feeling good about how things were going, and we'd fallen into dancing close again, so I moved her arms from the usual frame to having her elbows behind my neck. (She later told me specifically that she really liked how confidently I did this. I was just having a good time.)
  • We ended up talking more once the lights came up, swapped numbers, helped with pack-up, etc. Teed up a date over the phone and took it from there.

I met another of my exes at a class (but I think the social environment is a lot better):

  • We'd been going to the same classes for a little while
  • The classes tend to have people rotate partners during the lesson, which is great for practice as everyone dances a little differently
  • This girl started lingering longer with me when we were practicing, and didn't linger nearly as much with other partners
  • Classes often had a "mini-social" at the end, and we'd often find ourselves dancing together after class, maybe a little longer or a little more flirtatiously than strictly necessary.
  • So I asked her after class one week, if I "could take her out on a date next week". I like saying "date" because it's absolutely clear. If you give off "secure" vibes, like you're not going to go to pieces or turn into a stalker if she says "no", then at worst she'll just be flattered.
  • I have seen other dudes get numbers after classes, so it's definitely a thing people do. But spend a good few weeks building up your skills so you're not "that guy who wants only one thing".

I see a decent number of women on the apps writing things like "I'd rather be approached in person, but that doesn't happen, so here I am". So consider that permission to do so?

Dancing absolutely doesn't come naturally to me, do you think the classes can overcome that?

In my experience probably not, but you can get good enough to enjoy it (but still quietly seethe when you meet someone with natural talent).

Hmm, something to consider for when I have more free time and disposable income then. For now, I'll settle for drinking enough that I can convince myself to shake my limbs about a bit in a dimly lit room 🙏

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