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?
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.
The social night where I met my last ex:
I met another of my exes at a class (but I think the social environment is a lot better):
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?
I personally think I have next to zero dancing talent (I'm literally flatfooted and empirically the people who started with me got to higher levels before me) and I get complements on my "skill" by untrained people frequently. A surprisingly high number of people in my club are super nerdy STEM type people and the teachers explain this as dancesport being attractive to the sorts of people who like systemising stuff since it's literally "we tell you how exactly to do this move step by step and which portions of your body to move when and where" and there is basically zero "just do what feels right to you" crap.
As a proper sport there's literally a book that details how exactly each step is to be performed and what steps are permitted in which dances. In competitions judges will notice how well you perform your steps when deciding to mark you down for the next round or not.
Here is an example video of what it's like to learn a step: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jNq75FrUgV8 , this one is a bit complicated (it looks simple, it's really not) but you can see the process to learning a step, it's all systematic.
I'm worried I'm too uncoordinated for even rote learning to work on a useful timescale, but I'll certainly give it a try when I can! Thanks
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