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IIRC this phenomenon is mostly driven by, as Dave chappelle puts it ‘I don’t have a girlfriend, but there’s a lady who’d be very upset to hear me say that’(or something to that effect), not ‘Chad hoarding’.
The norms between the two sexual revolutions are not a stable equilibrium, and no one wants to actually go back to them anyways.
And that’s the rub- there were two sexual revolutions, one in the roaring twenties and driven by courtship moving outside of the woman’s family settings, and one in the sixties and driven more by feminism and the decline of censorship. The second sexual Revolution could only have occurred in an environment where the first had happened already, and would have been driven by something if it wasn’t for feminism and declining censorship.
You can, if you want to badly enough, go back to pre-first sexual Revolution norms. It doesn’t work great for the conservative Christians who insist on calling it courting instead of dating, but probably a lot of that is because it needs to be updated to modern social technology(after all, it works a lot better for Orthodox Jews). But most people don’t want to do that, so we’re stuck where we are.
Aren't those pretty similar categories? Guy dates two or three women casually (from his perspective), while the women each consider him their monogamous boyfriend.
I think most of the disparity between young men and women is driven by women dating older men, for what it's worth. In a highly simplified model, if women all date two years older, and you've got an age cohort that's twelve years wide, you immediately get a 17% gap, as the men in the bottom two years have no eligible partners. That does assume that men can't date women younger than 18, but it does a good job of explaining why the large gap in the youngest cohort pretty much disappears in the next youngest cohort.
From the little I see online, it's as likely to be "couple are dating for a few years but not living together, woman is sure this is a relationship and maybe leading to marriage, guy just thinks of it as 'yeah I'm seeing someone but we're not, like, boyfriend and girlfriend or anything'".
Reminds me of the joke, "it takes a woman to fake an orgasm, but it takes a man to fake an entire relationship."
Men will often complain that being a good person and a gentleman doesn't earn them any points or favors with the ladies, despite being raised with the understanding that good and ethical conduct correlates with your interpersonal and professional success in different spheres of life. It's a shocking revelation to most of them when they learn that not only is that not true, all too often, the exact 'opposite' of that was true. The Halo effect is a real thing. Innate physical attraction and social sophistication that comes off as authentic will color all aspects of another person's interpretation of your external behavior independently of the content of your actions. Confidence for example 'enhances' attraction. It doesn't 'create' it. Thinking the opposite is true is just the intangible equivalent of mentally putting lipstick on a pig, and people can see that in your outward expressions and behavior. Confidence won't bring you attractiveness or sophistication if you don't have it from the get go, and acting confident in the absence of that doesn't make someone confident. You simply look like a pompous moron lacking self-awareness.
"Someone once asked who I was to a colleague of mine upon seeing I was going to be doing a upcoming presentation and he said he's like Tony Stark without the fortune or the suit, and the guy replied isn’t Tony Stark without the fortune or the suit, just some asshole?" - Scott Aaronson
Women on the other hand don't understand that sex isn't some kind of vending machine where you give it to a man and a relationship is expected to fall out of that. Women have sex for many more different reasons than men do, but the only valid one to be concerned with is where there's some kind of mutual attraction between both parties, otherwise it's a letdown when women give it away, only for them not to have gotten out of the act what they were trying to manipulate their partner into doing by giving it away in the first place. Mutual attraction on the other hand, satisfies both parties. If it's one-sided it's going to be dysfunctional in all likelihood. A woman who plays hard to get is hard to want. If they don’t reciprocate a similar level of interest that you do, then they’re not interested. Yes means yes. No means no. “Maybe,” is also no. Don’t keep trying if she doesn’t show interest, or excitement or enthusiasm for you; and you’re not a backup plan for her to keep you confused and waiting in the wings to see if it works out with the other man she’s talking to.
You don’t pique a man’s interest by playing games and introducing challenges to his life, his life is hard enough. You show your interest by being forward, removing obstacles and making his life easier. Most women in my experience have absolutely no idea how to attract and keep a man. They do the exact opposite of what they should be doing by 180 degrees.
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I think a lot of these guys are actually being monogamous, they’re just not offering the kind of commitment we associate with it.
Would it be possible for you to elaborate? Most of the guys I know who have been in such situations are only monogamous in so far as "having a sexual relationship with only one partner at a time" could be stretched to only mean "someone who does not partake in group sex."
I think there are a lot of guys who women think are in a relationship, but the guys aren't having sex with anybody else because nobody is directly approaching them, and the woman is good enough. Ironically, this is far more likely than what many online MRA/incel/PUA types are worried about, which is a chad swooping in and stealing your girlfriend via Instagram DM's or whatever.
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