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The rise of lonely, single men
- geminimccain 4y agoAn unfortunate percentage of these men would not have survived the trials of our ancestors. They receive unearned spoils because they exist to reap the benefit of battles won by better men. We must allow them to die out. Read the rest of Stop Feeding the F**boi Factory on Medium - Gemini McCain
- lzylwr 4y ago
- Elextricity 4y ago
- codefreeordie 4y agoI saw your comment and assumed that your first sentence was a terrible exaggeration, given your second sentence. But holy shit this article is basically just "men are unhappy because men suck. They can be happy again, but only if they decide to stop sucking"
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoDon't forget the cherry on top where the way they suggest to improve one's self is not a way that is relevant for getting dates or in the early stages of a relationship. No matter who you want to "blame" for the underlying situation crap advice is still crap.
- CocaKoala 4y agoWhat's bad about the advice? It seems to flow pretty logically from the article. "Women want to date men who are emotionally available, good communicators, and who share values" means that your starting point to search for a relationship should be that you are emotionally available, good at communicating, and you have a clear concept of your values so that you can determine whether or not you share them with a potential partner. The advice to get to that state is "focus on mental health, including getting therapy if you need it" - that all seems correct to me. It's not relevant for getting dates, but getting dates is easy. It's extremely relevant for any stage of a relationship, including the early ones.
- rmellow 4y ago> getting dates is easy Citation needed. I'm sure many here will vehemently disagree.
- CocaKoala 4y agoAsk your friend if they want to get lunch with you - problem solved. "That's not a date" Why not? "My friends are all in relationships" Make more friends.
- coldtea 4y ago- "I'm from a poor country and my family can't afford to eat" - "Be more lucky"
- CocaKoala 4y agoYou are correct, the advice to achieve the third level of Maslow's Hierarchy does not address what you have to do in order to achieve the first two levels.
- coldtea 4y agoThat was actually a parody of the third level advice given, just in lower level terms to highlight the absurdity...
- CocaKoala 4y agoThe question was "how to get dates" - "how to get friends" is a different question. The easy way to get dates is to ask your friends on dates, and the easiest way to do that is to ask a friend to get lunch with you. What part of that reduces to "get lucky"?
- coldtea 4y agoFirst of all, that taken literally is just bad advice. You're friends with your friends, you don't ask them on dates. It basically translates to "try to get romantic with one of your friends [of your preferred sex]". Is that supposed to be how people get dates? So, I take it charitably that you meant "you ask people you know" (not your actual friends/buddies) on dates. Which is as good as saying "to get a job, just ask for one" to an unemployed person. To which the proper response is "Gee, why didn't I think of that..."
- FeaturelessBug 4y agoWhy do you hang your own self worth on getting a partner over bettering yourself as an individual and building relationships that don't center on romantic partnership?
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoStop being dense. The author was offering up the tip as a way to improve one's dating prospects and even went so far as to imply the tip would specifically help with online dating. The tip was nothing of the sort and is specifically worse online than in person because the quality in question already doesn't show much until you're spending a lot of time together and shows less still through dating apps. IDK about your comment about self worth but you're the one who brought it up and it has a slight odor of projection. If you're average looks and average at text based communication getting first dates is not the bottleneck.
- CocaKoala 4y agoI'm honestly curious, can you point me to the lines that you think say "men suck" and "men should decide to stop sucking"? My read of it is that men should focus on their mental health and consider getting therapy if they need it, which I'm pulling from where it says > Level up your mental health game. That means getting into some individual therapy to address your skills gap. The skills gap it mentions is where it talks about how women express a desire for partners who "are emotionally available, good communicators, and share their values" - none of that is a value judgement in my reading. Those all seems like fairly reasonable things to want in a partner.
- nickff 4y agoThe author implicitly assumes that these expectations are reasonable because women are scarcer on the apps, and that men improving in these areas will cause their situations to improve. This seems like a non-sequitur and an unproven assumption. It could be that the men are subject to victim-blaming, and/or that the women are asserting false pretenses because the real reasons are superficial and/or sound bad (i.e. men are too ugly or poor).
- CocaKoala 4y agoIt's hard to say that somebody's expectations for what they want in a parter are reasonable or unreasonable - you're allowed to decide who you spend your time with, and if that means you don't spend time with anybody, you're either satisfied with that or you change your expectations. If somebody says "I want to date somebody who is emotionally available", it's not anybody else's place to say "Wow that's completely unreasonable of you". Same thing when somebody says "I only want to date a man who's rich, taller than me, conventionally handsome, and will cater to my every whim" - do you meet that criteria? Maybe not, but they've decided that they only want to date exactly one person in the entire world and they're gonna hold out until they find exactly that person, who are you to tell them they're wrong? It's their life.
- nickff 4y agoYou're trusting that stated expectations are the same as actual revealed expectations, which is something I doubt in this area. If I'm right, men doing more of what women say they want will not lead to more relationship success for those men. I agree that it's hard to judge the reasonableness of other people's decisions, but I think that if they either fail to find what they are looking for (i.e. I expect a luxury car for the price of an econo-box, and am persistently disappointed), or expect more than they offer (i.e. I expect a partner who is equal or superior to me in all respects), the expectation may be unreasonable.
- citboin 4y ago“ Men need to address skills deficits to meet healthier relationship expectations.” Define “healthier”. On the contrary I see pervasive and normalized misandry. In my employee handbook one of the examples of sexual harassment is “asking a coworker out on a date”. Yeah, fuck that.
- FeaturelessBug 4y agoWhy do you feel entitled to ask your coworkers on dates?
- _8j50 4y ago"Skills" lol. I guess marriage really is a job. Dating apps should be more like job sites then, well I guess they sort of are already in many ways.
- 202206241203 4y agoYes, and if you leave the job employer takes half of your stuff and recurring lifetime compensation payments as per the contract.
- lucaspm98 4y agoReminds me of the study from a a few years back that found women are looking for husbands with an income 58% higher than available men who generally are "economically unattractive". With women now being more educated than men, this issue is only going to get worse. Modern women expecting a traditional relationship simply isn't possible on a societal level. Acknowledging the downsides, or at the very least challenges, of women's empowerment still seems to be a taboo subject. https://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/spotlights/economically-unattractive https://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/spotlights/economically-un...
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoCaveat, education itself isn't necessarily a problem. Men still go to the more lucrative fields far more often than women, and there are many ways to earn a higher income than what most women end up studying earn. The real problem is continuously pushing women into a fast lane to get these high-paying jobs and handing other freebies in the name of some warped sense of justice, at the cost of younger men. The STEM paradox exists for a reason, and its not because 2nd/3rd world women love IT a whole lot more than 1st world innately.
- fknorangesite 4y ago> modern women have become, unmarriageable. In what way?
- badpun 4y agoGiven that sex distribution is roughly 50/50, doesn't that automatically mean that there's also the rise of lonely, single women?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- _8j50 4y agoNo. Multiple partners and homosexuals are a thing. OnlyFans exists because of the amount of men that will pay for the attention of all kinds of women.
- cuteboy19 4y agoIf anything gay men outnumber lesbians. And polygamy is nowhere near common enough to affect the ratio
- _8j50 4y agoI don't know the numbers but I didn't say polygamy, I said multiple partners as in not married but sleeping around when you feel like it with anyone as well as being content with that lifestyle. It is essentially a question of having a partner to share life with and marriage isn't as popular now as it used to be either.
- mountainriver 4y agoIs there really that big of a population of men dating multiple women?
- _8j50 4y agoNot neccesarily actively dating but stats show women are only interested in top 10-20% tier of men for casual dating. Casual dating is also taking longer now with marriage becoming more rare. In other words, women change partners more and are content with not having a partner for months at a time between attractive partners. Women are attracted to similar traits much more than men (who are atteacted to like 80% top tier women) which means the too tier men do date more women more constantly than top tier women. The result is, only the very lowest tier of women have trouble finding a partner for casual relationships while only top tier men can say the same. It really boils down to what is considered attractive by men and women. There are many porn sites and communities dedicated for appreciating large women for example while with women, it might be a tolerable feature it is rare to find women fetishizing that (just an example, pick any other category such as height, age,etc... ) Just to be clear, I see nothing wrong with either men or women wanting and appreciating any traits they value in partners. No one is owed affection from strangers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rafael_c 4y agoWeird to see such a poorly-written article on the front-page of HN. Full of dubious and unsourced claims, weird choice of terminology, etc. It reads as if written by an undergrad.
- carabiner 4y agoSocial media and dating apps have led to a hyperfocus on selecting partners with conventional, mediagenic appearances. With more personal lives out in the public, you don't want to be embarrassed by an ugly boyfriend. So tall, white men are awash in attention. This represents 10-15% of men in the US. Of course, a lot of women want this. So they have to share. Thus the rise of ENM on Tinder.
- CocaKoala 4y agoCuriously, that's not at all what the article says! > I hear recurring dating themes from women between the ages of 25 and 45: They prefer men who are emotionally available, good communicators, and share similar values. You'll note that none of the three traits listed as preferred are "mediagenic appearances"
- BlargMcLarg 4y agoYet both men and women who have shed some fat weight and maybe got some muscle, saw the world treat them differently and can tell you exactly why you can't trust words over actions. Even the descriptions of these traits alone are extremely vague. That's not to say they are bad traits, but they certainly aren't the magical bullets that will get you through any door that the women claim them to be. Certainly opens a few eyes when a non-insignificant portion of women saying those words seem awfully lenient to a guy with a higher status and a stronger physique, even if he acts like a jerk.
- CocaKoala 4y agoThere's no magic bullet that will get you through "any door" - every person is different, and every person has different things they want in a partner. There are some people who will absolutely refuse to date somebody who isn't taller than them, and if you're too short, then yeah - nothing you can do will change that. But there's nothing you can do to change that, so why get hung up on it? There are plenty of other people (I'll drop the dehumanizing metaphor of doors here because it's not needed) who have different criteria that you could meet, and focusing on the things about yourself that make you happier (like being emotionally available, being able to communicate, and having a clear sense of your values) seems like a pretty reasonable way to go about meeting those criteria with a side-benefit of making you happy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ridiculous_leke 4y agoThanks for letting me know that there's another area where I need to focus on my "skills".
- deerIRL 4y agoI don't understand how this is exclusively a men's issue. Now this is completely out of my realm as a gay woman but wouldn't this roughly mean that there is a similar amount of straight women who are single as well? In my experience polyamory among the straights isn't nearly as common as the internet likes to make it sound. In general, millennials (and I assume gen-z as well) are having less sex on average and getting into less relationships than previous generations.
- evapadilla 4y agoThere’s studies that show heterosexual men are happier in relationships; while heterosexual women in relationships are the least happy of all the relationship demographics. So I think there’s more single het men because there’s just more het men per capita. But even if there’s a similar number of single het women it has drastically different implications on quality of life.
- boppo1 4y agoThere's a Plenty of Fish or OK Cupid survey somewhere where heterosexual female respondents reported sex within the last year at a much higher rate than heterosexual men. The implication is that some of the more attractive men are having sex with more than one woman. There are some other surveys out there In my personal experience, the average person having sex with more than one partner is unlikely to identify with the term polyamory. It's not as mainstream as the internet makes it seem.
- FeaturelessBug 4y agoAre you saying that the average person having sex with more than one person is cheating or simply only persuing casual relationships?
- boppo1 4y agoI'm not making an assertion about that. Could be either, imo more likely the latter. There are people I've met who are basically poly but balk at the label.