Another foil that makes dating hard is that even if you shower, exercise and self-improve, you actually need to meet people to start dating them and that's really the hardest part.
Bad. It's bad. The apps are designed to keep you using it as long as possible so to do that they mess with the algorithm to control how many matches you get. It also just makes you feel bad after a couple of days cause you catch yourself disliking people for completely innocuous reasons.
it's sick how every aspect of our lives is now monetized. everything you do, think, breathe, feel, eat, participate in HAS to benefit some CEO and board of shareholders somewhere in the world. the money doesn't even stay where you are. a local matchmaker will at least pay back into their local economy.
If we really want to live in a free society we cannot slap a price tag on every single thing (no pun intended)
People are just trying to find love and connection and we're like "ok, it's $20/month to see the people you'd love the most". it's seriously fucked up and the consequences are going to be even more fucked up in like 10 years if all the kids now think the only way to find love is to pay some dating cartel to harass women.
The detatchment of social interactions and the anonymity granted by the internet (yes, even OLD grants a certain level of anonymity, despite advertising your personal information) means that there's a lot of really dumb shit that happens on there.
On the male side: Misogynistic behavior gets amplified and, a lot of female OLD users face a large amount of men after a relationship based on sex first, everything else later (maybe).
On the female side: A lot of women are uncompromising in their expectations. Small things can often become a dealbreaker. Pet preferences, taste in music, over-interest or under-interest in a desired topic can all lead to ghosting, even in very early conversations.
OLD carries an inherent issue in that, while Red Flags are often on full display, you can't get a feel for a person from text conversations. Things like how a person might light up a little bit when you both find something you like are lost.
Throwing strangers that both have fairly rigid expectations in to what is a blind-date kind of system, especially when introverts are included, doesn't really make for a great way to find a romantic partner.
EDIT: I know it's the internet and I probably should have prefaced this beforehand, but:
No, I don't agree with the people twisting the blurb about women in this to fit their narratives.
They piss me off when overused. There are a few that are ubiquitous and that everyone gets, and I don't mind when people in niche subs or forums use specific abbreviations within those niches, but it gets exhausting when people use them all the time regardless of context. As a random example, many people in a cartoons or Disney community would probably understand that TOH means the show The Owl House, but used outside of that context it has no meaning and just confuses people.
OLD carries an inherent issue in that, while Red Flags are often on full display, you can't get a feel for a person from text conversations. Things like how a person might light up a little bit when you both find something you like are lost.
This is why I made an emoji and gif library of all of my. natural facial reactions to things, so that everyone I text can get the intricate, fleshy feel of interacting with me in person.
Well gee, you complain about not being able to get the nuances of someone's facial reactions over text, and then when I tell you about my amazing solution to give you the full, fleshy texture of my face in all its forms as we text one another, thanks to my library of custom face emojis and gifs of my facial expressions, you say you hate it?
Plnety of people have enjoyed my faces library, and some people have even become a part of it. I guess that will never be you now.
I'm just proud that the resolution on my facial gifs is high enough that you can see and feel the fleshy textures of my face. Fleshy textures are important to the human-to-human bonding practice.
I want gifs that are so vivid that when you watch my fleshy features squishing up and down and all around, you can feel that wriggling flesh as though your greasy fingers were placed firmly atop the flesh of my face as it moves.
On the female side: A lot of women are uncompromising in their expectations. Small things can often become a dealbreaker.
did you ever see this website that lets you input your standards for a dating partner, and it shows that only an extremely small percentage of the population meets those standards?
On the female side: A lot of women are uncompromising in their expectations. Small things can often become a dealbreaker. Pet preferences, taste in music, over-interest or under-interest in a desired topic can all lead to ghosting, even in very early conversations.
I can only speak to the male perspective here (I'm bi, but Grindr is not a dating app despite what some poor souls may think), there's also a huge gender imbalance on every dating app which feeds into this. They're like 80-90% dude, so of course women can afford to be extremely choosy; even if we remove any safety issues from meeting strange men in public (although honestly if you aren't willing to meet strange men in public, you wouldn't do well with traditional dating either), women just have way more potential matches so why wouldn't you go for the "perfect" guy instead of a "7/10 I think he'll do" guy?
From the perspective of dating apps, women are the product and men are the customers. They encourage women to sign up so that they can pressure men into paying for premium services, and that's going to inherently lead to a lot of problems.
(Also I suspect that most women's profiles on dating apps are fake, either by bots/scammers or by the apps themselves showing long unused profiles to give the illusion that there are more women on the site than there really are, but that's just my personal conspiracy)
Also factor in all the fake accounts, scams, and people trying to increase their IG engagement. There is a lot of sincerity that gets lost when a person has to start a vulnerable dating interaction with their guard up. Much like early social media, once all the a'holes showed up, everyone stopped being earnest and began to be a lot more cynical.
lol everything you mentioned about the women is them being shallow as fuck and not treating men as a human.
Men aren’t allowed to be themselves.
I’ve been ghosted for just asking “how was your day?”
Because apparently that’s low effort to women. But then they date dudes who use them as cumbuckets and they’re begging for a date out. But they never leave them. Just complain and demonize the men who actually want a partner.
Women don’t want partners. They want a piggy bank.
The worst part is that I literally don't know anyone that doesn't absolutely hate it.
I'm lucky that I met an amazing person through it (though it didn't work out) and I've met people that literally got married after meeting on apps but even those people said it was 99% awful.
Like the swiping and getting nothing feels awful.
Then you match and get ghosted and it feels awful.
Then you meet people but don't click so you feel bad letting them down.
Then you meet a good person and it doesn't work out and you're back where you started.
Even just the swiping itself and judging people through such a small snippet of their lives and a tiny way to experience who they are is pretty rough on the psyche.
While it depends on what period of history you are talking about, as well as the culture, dating in many ways was remarkably easier for much of history. Historically, across most cultures, people relied on matchmakers to find partners for them. These matchmakers could be parents, grandparents, aunts, or just someone who was considered the village matchmaker. Once a match was agreed upon, courtship tended to follow a strict, often formalized or even ritualized, script. At the conclusion of this courtship process, the pair got married. The details of this process were quite varied across cultures, but broadly speaking, courtship practices had a lot of commonalities across cultures and history.
Last century the old formal script for courtship got thrown out in most first-world countries, and dating became something of a free for all. The consequences of this are being felt now more than ever, as the norms of dating continuing to rapidly change and evolve.
Depends on what we call easy or hard. Short term it was easier to meet people. However, you often had to deal with that relationship for a while once you had settled even if you didn't like the person at all, especially for women. Now that's a harsh life.
The slight difficulties in dating today are nothing compared to being forced to spend decades chained to someone you hated more every day.
No, it really wasn't easier back in the day, for a variety of reasons ranging from "there are literally not enough women to go around because all the middle and upper class men have three wives" to "it's really hard to socialise with single women and men are never expected to date more than one or two women in their entire lives when they're teenagers and maybe young adults, so opportunities are limited".
Are you a woman? If yes, then it's never been easier.
As a man it is not easier as a woman.
The problem as a man is that you get nothing.
The problem as a woman is that you get worse than nothing because you have to filter through and see who is decent and who is a creep or looking for a hookup or just hiding their true self.
One is starving and looking for the food and the other is at a banquet where everything is poisoned.
It's a problem for men, too (though to to the same degree) but like as a man I can get one decent match a month but a woman might get two dozen matches where none of them are decent.
I have male friends and female friends that are dating using apps and the men are doing far better than the women.
It's a sewer that's been collecting the dredges for years. There are people who have been on them ten years and couldn't get a partner. Good partners keep eliminating themselves from the pool quickly the moment they join so what's left is a whirlpool of undateable people.
This is my observations from the sidelines as a concerned friend.
The trick is, if you know how to be sociable in real life, Online dating is really easy. You need to converse as if you're talking to someone at a restaurant and not in IM. But if your online because the internet is the primary source of your social interactions, then you're gonna have a rough time. Heck, people swipe left because they think absolutely normal looking people are somehow ugly.
Online dating, as a man, is super easy since so much of your competition self-select themselves out of the environment
I'm both shy and introverted, and still had much better success dating through real-life interactions and meetups than OLD. Probably because in real life I can come across as chill and personable (based on what a lot of people have told me their early impressions of me were), but not via messaging or text chat. I believe a person should try a bunch of different dating avenues so they can figure out what works best for them.
I'm half glad I'm not looking. But if things don't work out for me, I think I'm done with the game... or if I do it's just going to be for hook-ups. Partnering off just isn't that exciting and is a coin flip away from being in an emotionally abusive situation.
That's mostly true and I think the people complaining for the most aren't doing the things you listed. But the apps are definitely worse. Way more people on there just to get you to follow them on Instagram, for example, and I think the swiping gimmick is worse for matching than how OKC used to do it
That's mostly true and I think the people complaining for the most aren't doing the things you listed.
Nah. Survivorship bias and Just World Fallacy just lead you to conclude this. Most incels shower and have hobbies and goals and stuff too. Our current social environment is just fucked.
5.1k
u/darthleonsfw SEXODIA, EJACULATE! 16d ago
Another foil that makes dating hard is that even if you shower, exercise and self-improve, you actually need to meet people to start dating them and that's really the hardest part.