8 ms·

There isn’t anything magical about it: Why more millennials are avoiding sex

33 points by nkurz 10y ago

mc32 10y ago
It's interesting that this resembles the trend in Japan that many attribute to their lackluster economic situation post real estate/bubble collapse in the early 90s and the subsequent dirth of lifetime salaryman type job oops. They are called the parasite generation, the herbivores, etc. Some good things about it, some bad. Good in that fewer neglected children of patents who were not prepared, bad in that our current economic model depends on pop growth...
superuser2 10y ago
Okay, I'll bite. Isn't the elephant in the room obesity? Is it possible we are less sexually active because people are turned off by unhealthy weights, and being in the "healthy" BMI band now makes you an elite minority? It'd be easy to demonstrate this isn't true, if we had something like "obesity is mostly middle-aged people, young adults are roughly unaffected" or "weight and number of sexual partners are actually uncorrelated" or something. But I wonder.
- gmarx 10y ago
  Possibly and thank you for using that metaphor properly. The article says "There’s another gorilla in the room:" No!no!No!!!! The 500 lb gorilla sits anywhere it wants. The elephant in the room is what people don't want to talk about. Nowadays not only has the gorilla's weight increased to 800 lbs, he is now in the room. This article goes further, now we have multiple gorillas in the room? Flee that room. My point is, we need editors
- caminante 10y ago
  Appearance (obesity) as a factor is addressed in the article. Quote from a researcher*: "[Online life] ends up putting a lot of importance on physical appearance, and that, I think, is leaving out a large section of the population."
  - superuser2 10y ago
    Yes, but putting more importance on appearance, and appearance actually changing, are interestingly different. You could also say that non-Tinder online dating i.e. OKCupid is actually putting less importance on appearance by matching people on preferences instead of "prettiest girl at the bar."
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      I disagree for two reasons: 1) Tinder (along with similar apps) has completely overtaken "traditional" online dating sites like OKCupid in popularity. 2) Even on OKCupid or other such sites, people have photos. I'm pretty sure I remember OKC's data guys even writing an article about attractive people getting far more messages on there than unattractive ones according to some research they did. Having all that extra personal data on OKC might be useful in some edge cases in swaying someone to correspond with someone they might have skipped over, but it's only going to go so far. Maybe you'll go out on a date with a girl who's a "6" because she loves Firefly and AD&D, when normally you only date "7s", but some girl who's into a bunch of geeky things you like but is only a "2" is not going to be of interest to you, except maybe in the "friendzone".
- vivekd 10y ago
  The suggestion that millennials are having less sex because they are unattractive seems far fetched. I'm not sure what obesity rates among millennials is - but I'm sure if enough of them were that fat, it would sort of become the new norm and standards for attractiveness would change accordingly. I think the real explanation is the the curve in the graph, we had 3 for greatest generation, 5 for silents then jumping up to 11 during the boomers, then declining slightly during x and declining further during millennials. I bet if we could extend the graph back historically we would see the vast majority of human generations were closer to the greatest generation in number of sex partners. This looks to me like there was an increase in sexual promiscuity during the sexual revolution, the effects of which are tapering off as humans return to their normal sexual habits.
  - DonaldFisk 10y ago
    > if enough of them were that fat, it would sort of become the new norm and standards for attractiveness would change accordingly. The most attractive women have always, everywhere, had a waist-hip ratio of around 0.7 (http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/11/11/curves-ahead-the-science-of-female-waist-to-hip-ratio-and-at.html http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/11/11/curves...). That would rule out obesity as the new norm of attractiveness. I assume there is also a formula/ratio for attractive men that rules out their being obese. Also, people are known to lie about the number of sexual partners they have had (http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/12/statistics_on_sexual_partners_cant_be_right_specialists_say/ http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/12/st...). Could that be a factor here? Finally, the article focuses on age of first sex and number of sexual partners, not frequency of sex. It doesn't rule out millennials having more frequent sex with fewer partners. Stop press: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/03/large-number-of-young-people-experience-sex-problems-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/03/large-number...
- zamalek 10y ago
  I don't fall into the overweight demographic. I just don't care for the immense waste of time that is the game surrounding getting laid. I might be an outlier, though.
- eiliant 10y ago
  That's very US-centric
- Chris2048 10y ago
  Then standards would just decrease? I blame porn.
racl101 10y ago
It's such a major liability to have sex with a girl, impregnate them, be stuck with a kid all while job prospects suck too. I say this is a side-effect of Millennials forgoing pretty much a lot of comforts that boomers have come to enjoy, like owning a home or owning a car. Austerity in every sense of the word. Also, as a male millennial, I can honestly say that the climate to be promiscuous has never been less inviting.
- gmarx 10y ago
  "has never been less inviting" how so? I'd say the climate was unusually inviting from about 1965 to the early eighties. Then the AIDS panic started. Eddie Murphy (I think) even had a routine about how eventually there would be a disease where you just stick your dick in and it explodes. We were legitimately terrified. I'm assuming it's for different reasons...
  - racl101 10y ago
    I'm talking more about feminists and the "triggered-happy" women of today. Seriously, even offering to buy a woman a drink at a college campus is a risky proposition today. It's no wonder that movements like MGTOW are taking off these days (though I don't see myself as one just to be clear.)
- Yaa101 10y ago
  First of all do not take this personal, I am trying to react in general on a whole generation and not blaming them as each generation deals with life they get confronted with. As a generation X person I think that the millennial generation is quite risk averse. You can see this in many fields, from political correctness going over the top, to risk aversion in music and culture, and even when it comes to building relations of which sex is a part. I do not know or try to point why this is but it does stand out from what I see around me. I feel very fortunate to have lived through punk music, squat housing, crazy ass parties and taking risks in my life, it made me stronger minded against what other people think of me and more confident in life.
  - 10y ago
yolesaber 10y ago
Porn and hookup apps have commodified sex to the point where it isn't necessarily as liberating or stimulating as it once was. That being said, I'd be interested in seeing this broken down geographically. I live in a big east coast city and let me assure millennials are having a lot of sex.
- greenshackle 10y ago
  Why are hookup apps making sex less stimulating? Because they cause people to have more sex. I can't see any other reason. So what you're saying is, young people are having less sex, because they're having more sex? (take this as tongue-in-cheek, I don't think you're really making that argument)
  - current_call 10y ago
    Tinder is for hookups in the same way that Reddit is for politics. Tinder provides the thrill of a relationship and Reddit provides a sense of patriotism, but neither require actually doing something. By the way, Hacker News is for hacking.
  - bjourne 10y ago
    It's the chooser's dilemma. Girls are having to many options and can't make up their mind so they end up with nothing. Same reason even very beautiful women end up single and childless in their 40's.
    - cronjobber 10y ago
      You're probably right, which also turns "millennial" into a spurious correlation.
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      > Same reason even very beautiful women end up single and childless in their 40's. I thought that was because they spent their 20s-30s focusing on college and their careers, and just as they had extremely high standards for those, they also had extremely high standards for men they dated, so they ended up not "settling" for anyone. I'm just over 40 and have dated a few of these urban-dwelling women who 40 and up, never married, no kids. There's a ridiculous number of them in DC. In my estimation based on personal experience, they're all incredibly picky and won't date a guy unless everything is absolutely perfect. In my case they tend to lose interest very fast because I live outside the city presently so I'm not conveniently located. To be snarky, they seem to all want a guy who's over 6' tall, looks like a model, dresses like he's on the cover of GQ, makes $300k/year, and lives across the street from her. And I actually meet a couple of these criteria to some extent: I'm over 6' (which seems to be very rare here on the east coast I've noticed...), I have a good-paying job (though not $300k/year good), and I'm told I'm very attractive, particularly for an over-40 guy as I'm thin and in great shape and frequently confused for someone 10+ years younger; my deficiencies are that I don't dress like a GQ model (more like an engineer who wears polo shirts all the time), I'm not outgoing and gregarious (I'm a software engineer....), and I don't live in the hip part of town these women all live in. The last such woman that seemed to be seriously interested in me (a 40yo lawyer) dumped me after a few weeks because of the distance, or so she said, even though this was something she knew about up-front. Oh yeah, these women also don't like guys who are separated or recently divorced (good lucking finding a decent guy at 40+ who's never been married or was divorced years ago). And AFAICT, they are not quick to jump into bed with someone, in fact quite the opposite (and these are not conservative religious women either, they're all liberal Democrats AFAICT, though really more like "limousine liberals"). Sorry for the rambling, but the thing about single, childless, pretty women in their 40s is something I have recent and direct experience with so I couldn't help going off.
Mz 10y ago
There was a time when you kind of had to hook up to get experience. Now, you can google just about anything and talk to people all over the world, day or night. You don't have to go expose yourself to a bunch of risks to get a clue. I don't see that as a problem and I bet many millenials don't know how to put their finger on why this is just not an issue for them. They weren't around when their parents were hooking up to figure out some basics and they just take their enormous access to information and life experience at their fingertips for granted.
- fl0wenol 10y ago
  Absolutely this. Also I think that since it's so much easier now to get access to porn and even toys easily / privately that you don't need to go find an encounter to get off, unless you actually want to be social about it. And if you want to be social, it's probably because you're thinking more long term from the outset. Less hookup, more companionship.
- ams6110 10y ago
  People know how to have sex instinctively. You don't need to do a lot of hooking up to figure it out.
  - draw_down 10y ago
    Definitely disagree.
antiquark 10y ago
Maybe it's because the millennials are less likely to own a car, more likely to live with their parents, more likely to have a huge debt (student loans), and less likely to have a job. I can see how all those facts could put a damper on having lots and lots of sex.
- pizzman41 10y ago
  Also might be worth looking at the rate of anti-depressant use and the impact they may have on sex-drive
niftich 10y ago
This article admits that millennials are still having plenty of sex, but the small percentage of millennials who isn't having as much sex is slowly growing. This implies, either that: [a] some people who had more sex in the past have less sex now; or [b] some people who haven't yet had sex are waiting even later to do so These are somewhat different circumstances, even if the article conflates them, and even if some of the underlying causes apply to both groups.
peapicker 10y ago
The curse of the Otaku is spreading....
haasn 10y ago
I wonder if these numbers would change if one included sexting. I have a feeling that a growing portion of both relationships and sexual activities are being held over the internet.
- soylentcola 10y ago
  But is that really "having sex"? I know we had the discussion of what constitutes sex during the Clinton years but still, I feel like anything that doesn't at least include physical stimulation of some sort (in the same location) isn't really having sex. "Sexting" is more like flirting or "dirty talk". I wouldn't consider phone sex (to go back to previous years) the same as having sex. It's like leaving a sexy note in your lover's or spouse's pocket to find at work or calling them up at lunch to ask them to guess what you're wearing. It's definitely on the spectrum of intimate activities but if I've only had sexy video-call time or sexy Snapchat exchanges with someone (but not actually participated in anything in person) I would definitely not consider myself to have had sex with them.
greydius 10y ago
I'm not a millenial, but this quote sums up my attitude towards dating > “For an average date, you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy,”
- niftich 10y ago
  Don't dating sites, or merely texting for a while before a date mitigate some of that feeling? The parties involved can narrow down a range of activities that they'd like for a first date. In my circles, a normal first date is somewhere casual in public where you can sit for a while, like a Starbucks or Panera, or equivalent coffeehouse in countries where coffeehouses actually exist. First impressions matter insofar as 10 minutes into the date you start to get an idea whether you and the other person is truly on the same wavelength, and about 30 minutes in, you know for sure. If it's working, you're connecting with another person, and you can plan something more engaging for the next encounter, and if it didn't work, you're only out the price of a drink. Is it truly a common sentiment that dates are too bothersome to make them worthwhile?
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    >In my circles, a normal first date is somewhere casual in public where you can sit for a while, like a Starbucks or Panera, or equivalent coffeehouse in countries where coffeehouses actually exist. You mean like the US? If you're in any kind of decent city, there's plenty of nice coffee shops which aren't Starbucks. If the only coffee shops around are Starbucks, you're living in a shithole. I usually propose to meet at non-Starbucks coffee shops for my first dates too. It's nice because even if the date is a bust (as it always is...), I now know of a new coffee shop. >Is it truly a common sentiment that dates are too bothersome to make them worthwhile? I really don't know because I don't hang out with Millenials that young (that guy in the article was only 18 IIRC), but I kinda doubt it. I think that guy was just a freak. He talked about how he just likes to sit at home in front of his computer with 3 different screens showing 3 different things at once (video game, movie, other) and focus on making money. I really don't think that's normal, I think the article's author managed to find one of the weirdest people possible and then try to present him as representative of all younger Millenials.
draw_down 10y ago
I feel sorry for these people, quite frankly. You've been busy, eh? I see, I see.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
shiftoutbox 10y ago
Idiocracy is beginning.
Joof 10y ago
8 seems like a pretty reasonable number. It was much lower before that...
atombath 10y ago
Isn't sex over-rated though? Obviously it is the funnest activity evolution has ever given us but the associated social/resource costs ruin it. From a Millenial's perspective, previous generations have put sex on a pedestal because there were few better things for them to pass the time with. Now we not only have sexual agency(toys + porn) but we also have the world's information and media at our fingertips. I know it isn't the intention of the well-done article but the premise does feel like the jock making fun of the nerd who simply has different priorities and better things to do. I wish these statistics cared less about generational changes and tried to plot sex-drive changes for everyone by decade. I'm sure we'd see it plummet after widespread acceptance of the internet and discrete shipping.

33 points by nkurz 10y ago

mc32 10y ago

It's interesting that this resembles the trend in Japan that many attribute to their lackluster economic situation post real estate/bubble collapse in the early 90s and the subsequent dirth of lifetime salaryman type job oops. They are called the parasite generation, the herbivores, etc. Some good things about it, some bad. Good in that fewer neglected children of patents who were not prepared, bad in that our current economic model depends on pop growth...

superuser2 10y ago

Okay, I'll bite. Isn't the elephant in the room obesity? Is it possible we are less sexually active because people are turned off by unhealthy weights, and being in the "healthy" BMI band now makes you an elite minority? It'd be easy to demonstrate this isn't true, if we had something like "obesity is mostly middle-aged people, young adults are roughly unaffected" or "weight and number of sexual partners are actually uncorrelated" or something. But I wonder.

gmarx 10y ago
Possibly and thank you for using that metaphor properly. The article says "There’s another gorilla in the room:" No!no!No!!!! The 500 lb gorilla sits anywhere it wants. The elephant in the room is what people don't want to talk about. Nowadays not only has the gorilla's weight increased to 800 lbs, he is now in the room. This article goes further, now we have multiple gorillas in the room? Flee that room. My point is, we need editors
caminante 10y ago
Appearance (obesity) as a factor is addressed in the article. Quote from a researcher*: "[Online life] ends up putting a lot of importance on physical appearance, and that, I think, is leaving out a large section of the population."
- superuser2 10y ago
  Yes, but putting more importance on appearance, and appearance actually changing, are interestingly different. You could also say that non-Tinder online dating i.e. OKCupid is actually putting less importance on appearance by matching people on preferences instead of "prettiest girl at the bar."
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    I disagree for two reasons: 1) Tinder (along with similar apps) has completely overtaken "traditional" online dating sites like OKCupid in popularity. 2) Even on OKCupid or other such sites, people have photos. I'm pretty sure I remember OKC's data guys even writing an article about attractive people getting far more messages on there than unattractive ones according to some research they did. Having all that extra personal data on OKC might be useful in some edge cases in swaying someone to correspond with someone they might have skipped over, but it's only going to go so far. Maybe you'll go out on a date with a girl who's a "6" because she loves Firefly and AD&D, when normally you only date "7s", but some girl who's into a bunch of geeky things you like but is only a "2" is not going to be of interest to you, except maybe in the "friendzone".
vivekd 10y ago
The suggestion that millennials are having less sex because they are unattractive seems far fetched. I'm not sure what obesity rates among millennials is - but I'm sure if enough of them were that fat, it would sort of become the new norm and standards for attractiveness would change accordingly. I think the real explanation is the the curve in the graph, we had 3 for greatest generation, 5 for silents then jumping up to 11 during the boomers, then declining slightly during x and declining further during millennials. I bet if we could extend the graph back historically we would see the vast majority of human generations were closer to the greatest generation in number of sex partners. This looks to me like there was an increase in sexual promiscuity during the sexual revolution, the effects of which are tapering off as humans return to their normal sexual habits.
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  > if enough of them were that fat, it would sort of become the new norm and standards for attractiveness would change accordingly. The most attractive women have always, everywhere, had a waist-hip ratio of around 0.7 (http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/11/11/curves-ahead-the-science-of-female-waist-to-hip-ratio-and-at.html http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/11/11/curves...). That would rule out obesity as the new norm of attractiveness. I assume there is also a formula/ratio for attractive men that rules out their being obese. Also, people are known to lie about the number of sexual partners they have had (http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/12/statistics_on_sexual_partners_cant_be_right_specialists_say/ http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/12/st...). Could that be a factor here? Finally, the article focuses on age of first sex and number of sexual partners, not frequency of sex. It doesn't rule out millennials having more frequent sex with fewer partners. Stop press: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/03/large-number-of-young-people-experience-sex-problems-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/03/large-number...
zamalek 10y ago
I don't fall into the overweight demographic. I just don't care for the immense waste of time that is the game surrounding getting laid. I might be an outlier, though.
eiliant 10y ago
That's very US-centric
Chris2048 10y ago
Then standards would just decrease? I blame porn.

racl101 10y ago

It's such a major liability to have sex with a girl, impregnate them, be stuck with a kid all while job prospects suck too. I say this is a side-effect of Millennials forgoing pretty much a lot of comforts that boomers have come to enjoy, like owning a home or owning a car. Austerity in every sense of the word. Also, as a male millennial, I can honestly say that the climate to be promiscuous has never been less inviting.

gmarx 10y ago
"has never been less inviting" how so? I'd say the climate was unusually inviting from about 1965 to the early eighties. Then the AIDS panic started. Eddie Murphy (I think) even had a routine about how eventually there would be a disease where you just stick your dick in and it explodes. We were legitimately terrified. I'm assuming it's for different reasons...
- racl101 10y ago
  I'm talking more about feminists and the "triggered-happy" women of today. Seriously, even offering to buy a woman a drink at a college campus is a risky proposition today. It's no wonder that movements like MGTOW are taking off these days (though I don't see myself as one just to be clear.)
Yaa101 10y ago
First of all do not take this personal, I am trying to react in general on a whole generation and not blaming them as each generation deals with life they get confronted with. As a generation X person I think that the millennial generation is quite risk averse. You can see this in many fields, from political correctness going over the top, to risk aversion in music and culture, and even when it comes to building relations of which sex is a part. I do not know or try to point why this is but it does stand out from what I see around me. I feel very fortunate to have lived through punk music, squat housing, crazy ass parties and taking risks in my life, it made me stronger minded against what other people think of me and more confident in life.
- 10y ago

yolesaber 10y ago

Porn and hookup apps have commodified sex to the point where it isn't necessarily as liberating or stimulating as it once was. That being said, I'd be interested in seeing this broken down geographically. I live in a big east coast city and let me assure millennials are having a lot of sex.

greenshackle 10y ago
Why are hookup apps making sex less stimulating? Because they cause people to have more sex. I can't see any other reason. So what you're saying is, young people are having less sex, because they're having more sex? (take this as tongue-in-cheek, I don't think you're really making that argument)
- current_call 10y ago
  Tinder is for hookups in the same way that Reddit is for politics. Tinder provides the thrill of a relationship and Reddit provides a sense of patriotism, but neither require actually doing something. By the way, Hacker News is for hacking.
- bjourne 10y ago
  It's the chooser's dilemma. Girls are having to many options and can't make up their mind so they end up with nothing. Same reason even very beautiful women end up single and childless in their 40's.
  - cronjobber 10y ago
    You're probably right, which also turns "millennial" into a spurious correlation.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    > Same reason even very beautiful women end up single and childless in their 40's. I thought that was because they spent their 20s-30s focusing on college and their careers, and just as they had extremely high standards for those, they also had extremely high standards for men they dated, so they ended up not "settling" for anyone. I'm just over 40 and have dated a few of these urban-dwelling women who 40 and up, never married, no kids. There's a ridiculous number of them in DC. In my estimation based on personal experience, they're all incredibly picky and won't date a guy unless everything is absolutely perfect. In my case they tend to lose interest very fast because I live outside the city presently so I'm not conveniently located. To be snarky, they seem to all want a guy who's over 6' tall, looks like a model, dresses like he's on the cover of GQ, makes $300k/year, and lives across the street from her. And I actually meet a couple of these criteria to some extent: I'm over 6' (which seems to be very rare here on the east coast I've noticed...), I have a good-paying job (though not $300k/year good), and I'm told I'm very attractive, particularly for an over-40 guy as I'm thin and in great shape and frequently confused for someone 10+ years younger; my deficiencies are that I don't dress like a GQ model (more like an engineer who wears polo shirts all the time), I'm not outgoing and gregarious (I'm a software engineer....), and I don't live in the hip part of town these women all live in. The last such woman that seemed to be seriously interested in me (a 40yo lawyer) dumped me after a few weeks because of the distance, or so she said, even though this was something she knew about up-front. Oh yeah, these women also don't like guys who are separated or recently divorced (good lucking finding a decent guy at 40+ who's never been married or was divorced years ago). And AFAICT, they are not quick to jump into bed with someone, in fact quite the opposite (and these are not conservative religious women either, they're all liberal Democrats AFAICT, though really more like "limousine liberals"). Sorry for the rambling, but the thing about single, childless, pretty women in their 40s is something I have recent and direct experience with so I couldn't help going off.

Mz 10y ago

There was a time when you kind of had to hook up to get experience. Now, you can google just about anything and talk to people all over the world, day or night. You don't have to go expose yourself to a bunch of risks to get a clue. I don't see that as a problem and I bet many millenials don't know how to put their finger on why this is just not an issue for them. They weren't around when their parents were hooking up to figure out some basics and they just take their enormous access to information and life experience at their fingertips for granted.

fl0wenol 10y ago
Absolutely this. Also I think that since it's so much easier now to get access to porn and even toys easily / privately that you don't need to go find an encounter to get off, unless you actually want to be social about it. And if you want to be social, it's probably because you're thinking more long term from the outset. Less hookup, more companionship.
ams6110 10y ago
People know how to have sex instinctively. You don't need to do a lot of hooking up to figure it out.
- draw_down 10y ago
  Definitely disagree.

antiquark 10y ago

Maybe it's because the millennials are less likely to own a car, more likely to live with their parents, more likely to have a huge debt (student loans), and less likely to have a job. I can see how all those facts could put a damper on having lots and lots of sex.

pizzman41 10y ago
Also might be worth looking at the rate of anti-depressant use and the impact they may have on sex-drive

niftich 10y ago

This article admits that millennials are still having plenty of sex, but the small percentage of millennials who isn't having as much sex is slowly growing. This implies, either that: [a] some people who had more sex in the past have less sex now; or [b] some people who haven't yet had sex are waiting even later to do so These are somewhat different circumstances, even if the article conflates them, and even if some of the underlying causes apply to both groups.

peapicker 10y ago

The curse of the Otaku is spreading....

haasn 10y ago

I wonder if these numbers would change if one included sexting. I have a feeling that a growing portion of both relationships and sexual activities are being held over the internet.

soylentcola 10y ago
But is that really "having sex"? I know we had the discussion of what constitutes sex during the Clinton years but still, I feel like anything that doesn't at least include physical stimulation of some sort (in the same location) isn't really having sex. "Sexting" is more like flirting or "dirty talk". I wouldn't consider phone sex (to go back to previous years) the same as having sex. It's like leaving a sexy note in your lover's or spouse's pocket to find at work or calling them up at lunch to ask them to guess what you're wearing. It's definitely on the spectrum of intimate activities but if I've only had sexy video-call time or sexy Snapchat exchanges with someone (but not actually participated in anything in person) I would definitely not consider myself to have had sex with them.

greydius 10y ago

I'm not a millenial, but this quote sums up my attitude towards dating > “For an average date, you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy,”

niftich 10y ago
Don't dating sites, or merely texting for a while before a date mitigate some of that feeling? The parties involved can narrow down a range of activities that they'd like for a first date. In my circles, a normal first date is somewhere casual in public where you can sit for a while, like a Starbucks or Panera, or equivalent coffeehouse in countries where coffeehouses actually exist. First impressions matter insofar as 10 minutes into the date you start to get an idea whether you and the other person is truly on the same wavelength, and about 30 minutes in, you know for sure. If it's working, you're connecting with another person, and you can plan something more engaging for the next encounter, and if it didn't work, you're only out the price of a drink. Is it truly a common sentiment that dates are too bothersome to make them worthwhile?
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >In my circles, a normal first date is somewhere casual in public where you can sit for a while, like a Starbucks or Panera, or equivalent coffeehouse in countries where coffeehouses actually exist. You mean like the US? If you're in any kind of decent city, there's plenty of nice coffee shops which aren't Starbucks. If the only coffee shops around are Starbucks, you're living in a shithole. I usually propose to meet at non-Starbucks coffee shops for my first dates too. It's nice because even if the date is a bust (as it always is...), I now know of a new coffee shop. >Is it truly a common sentiment that dates are too bothersome to make them worthwhile? I really don't know because I don't hang out with Millenials that young (that guy in the article was only 18 IIRC), but I kinda doubt it. I think that guy was just a freak. He talked about how he just likes to sit at home in front of his computer with 3 different screens showing 3 different things at once (video game, movie, other) and focus on making money. I really don't think that's normal, I think the article's author managed to find one of the weirdest people possible and then try to present him as representative of all younger Millenials.

draw_down 10y ago

I feel sorry for these people, quite frankly. You've been busy, eh? I see, I see.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

shiftoutbox 10y ago

Idiocracy is beginning.

Joof 10y ago

8 seems like a pretty reasonable number. It was much lower before that...

atombath 10y ago

Isn't sex over-rated though? Obviously it is the funnest activity evolution has ever given us but the associated social/resource costs ruin it. From a Millenial's perspective, previous generations have put sex on a pedestal because there were few better things for them to pass the time with. Now we not only have sexual agency(toys + porn) but we also have the world's information and media at our fingertips. I know it isn't the intention of the well-done article but the premise does feel like the jock making fun of the nerd who simply has different priorities and better things to do. I wish these statistics cared less about generational changes and tried to plot sex-drive changes for everyone by decade. I'm sure we'd see it plummet after widespread acceptance of the internet and discrete shipping.