I guess I'm supposed to be sympathetic, but since I started dating in the early 90's I've gotten the distinct impression that women by and large want most men to leave them alone in general - isn't this what they've wanted for generations? Men who aren't the sort of men they're interested in to just go away?
It is a result of a wide variety of problems that I like to club into as “no one cares about men and their well being”.
High school graduation and college admissions rates for men have been dropping for decades. Meanwhile in the dating market, no one wants to date a college drop out (or less successful men than themselves). In fact as a man to be worthy of dating, you need to make six figure, be 6’ tall, not be overweight, look great, help with the household, support your partner’s career, be emotionally strong and a bunch of other standards. Meanwhile any problems you have as a man, don’t get even an acknowledgment. There’s a reason all the alpha bro podcasts are popular. And that will be the same reason AI Gfs will take over. It’s not that women can’t compete, it’s that women are being held to the same standards by men that women hold men to and they don’t like it.
Women want to be left alone, until they don't. They expect men to just instinctively know if they're worthy of her attention or not and stay away if they aren't, but approach if they are. Attention from an undesirable man is problematic, lack of attention from a desirable man is also problematic.
It sucks but it's hard to fault women for this, as it's basically just survival instincts. The amount of women who have been literally sexually assaulted or raped by a hookup or date or meeting someone at a bar, let alone just really really bad experiences that didn't even reach physical harm, means that the only way to stay safe in public is to disengage.
However, women often still want partners, because most people do, and it's their market to dictate, so of course they have high standards.
For most women, every "yes" to a date is basically Russian roulette, because people who sexually abuse women do it a lot, do it often, and do it to a lot of women, because nobody stops them. Sexual crimes almost always become "He said/She said" because consent is not a physical thing, so it's rarely possible to hit the "beyond all reasonable doubt" criteria of a conviction, which predictably doesn't calm the nerves of women or survivors of assault.
Maybe, but there are many, many studies showing that on dating apps, it's 80% of the women choosing 20% of the men. Many women are also fairly ignorant about how unrealistic some standards (over 6' tall, makes over $100K/yr.) are.
I honestly have zero problem with people having "unrealistic" standards. You can restrict your own pool as much as you like, as long as you don't complain about not finding any partners.
I (and people in general) have no right to be upset at not meeting what we see as "unrealistic" or "unimportant" standards held by people we are interested in. We are not entitled to a relationship.
(I do think it's kind of sad when e.g. I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius. She said she could go months out and about in a major city and not see a single man she found physically attractive. It's very much not the experience I've had, I see reasonably attractive people everywhere, so I wonder what people are looking for who say there is nobody even worth considering anywhere around them?)
Edit: to be clear, I don't mean she couldn't get dates with people she found attractive, she didn't see anyone attractive at all. Her "type" was incredibly strict: between 6' and 6'2", wavy blond hair, medium length, athletic without being too "muscular", and no brown eyes. She showed us pictures of her past boyfriends and they could have all been identical twins of each other, it was absurd. But hey, again, more power to her, nobody has the right to demand she relax her standards for them.
Not finding anyone physical attractive for months at a time is something that can happen to both sexes. Around the age of forty I, a man, began to feel like I was completely surrounded by unattractive women wherever I go. Not because the women changed or there is anything at all wrong with them, but because with experience, I have a good idea now of how relationships work, and my interest has waned.
I myself have what one might term “unrealistic standards”. At some point, what I was looking for was someone to share experiences with: someone to travel with, watch great cinema or view art with, etc. Yet every woman I have personally been with sought a relationship because they wanted a man to make them feel comfortable, secure, and desired, and that left me bored and feeling used. I don’t complain about this any more or feel entitled to a relationship, I just get on with living alone. But I still understand younger men’s feelings of frustration, and hope that those feelings can get channeled in some non-destructive direction.
>I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius
I don't think it's that they're ignorant. They probably don't really care if it's unrealistic or not. They're given a platform where they can describe exactly what it is they want, and given the imbalance in men/women on the platform, they've got a decent chance of getting it.
Tangent: where'd you get that number? Not questioning it, I'd just love to know if there's a tool that makes it easy to get intersections with that kind of data.
that's 1 million men spread across the US. For comparison's sake, Greater NYC has ~22 million people. LA has a bit more.
1 million in a country of 330 million is nothing.
Plus there is competition, both in terms of other mates, as well as other priorities. Your ideal man may be in the military and disappearing in 6 months, or working 70 hours a week in a law firm.
I’m not that old but I also never did online dating. Is there a possibility that online dating has a bias for women that are “choosy” (for lack of a better term)?
>Is there a possibility that online dating has a bias for women that are “choosy”
Worse: online dating apps create choosy daters. It is less like "dating" and more like online shopping. People who use such apps are incentivized to drill down using increasingly-specific filters hoping to find the perfect mate, but in reality find themselves with no suitable matches at all. Worse yet, if they do find someone, the false sense of being able to continue refining toward a more perfect mate often drives them away from actually-existing relationships and back to the apps where they fruitlessly search for an "upgrade"
This isn't what the parent comment is talking about, it's talking about how (generally) women's rating of men's attractiveness follows the Pareto principle. This is purely from pictures and profiles, before anyone interacts with anyone else.
If it makes us feel any better, in the same data set, women did actively message and pair up with men they didn't rate as very attractive so.... good for us I guess?
> Men's ratings of women follow the same principle. Practically everything does.
The OKCupid data doesn't bear this out. Men's ratings of women's attractiveness is fairly symmetric. Women's ratings of men's attractiveness is highly skewed and unrealistic.
This asymmetry is a fundamental law of online dating, as inescapable as gravity. If you were genuinely ignorant of this ... I really don't know what to say.
>And I'm telling you, from the female side of the exchange, it takes nearly nothing to be in the top 20% of profiles (could be done in 10 mins of thoughtful effort) and even less to be in the top 20% of conversations (keep pants zipped).
Of all the guys you swipe right on, what percentage are below 5'9?
> Men seem to be under the impression that their desire is the default, that if a woman is on an app, she wants what they want. But raaaaarely do women on these apps, or in general, only want sex.
that's not a problem with men or women, it's a problem with the apps. There should be apps that are strictly for scheduling casual hook ups and other apps that are for people looking for meaningful relationships. At the very least, if an app wants to cater to both markets, there should be a means to filter for that within the app. That way people who only want sex have an easy way to find it and nobody is wasting their time.
It's not just a problem with apps. It's a problem with the people using them. No one wants to admits what type of relationship they're really looking for because they're afraid it will scare off partners.
I guess if some people can get their foot in the door with casual sex and somehow turn that into a meaningful relationship or (perhaps more challenging) get some casual sex out of building a lasting relationship it might benefit some people to lie about what they want, but it seems like honesty would be a lot easier.
While a shit ton of men do in fact sabotage themselves with dick picks, they also work a non-zero amount of times, which sort of drives the whole problem with them.
But no, "it's not that easy" for most men to experience ANYTHING on Tindr. Just go look at posts on data reddits where people export their tindr profile into a visualization. The average "male" experience actually looks most like the experience of a (self described) "fat" woman. This matches what OkCupid found before they were purchased by Match.com and hid that blog post.
There's no shame or problem with women having a powerful market and getting what they need or want from above average men, but at the very least be honest with yourself about the position that puts unlucky or below average men in.
I recommend you ask to "run" a male friend's tinder for a day, especially if they don't do well on tinder. I once let my sister and her friend run my tinder, and it was eye opening just how little it took for them to swipe left on EVERYONE. "I don't like her smile", or "eh" or basically ANYONE below a 9 got left swiped, or anyone that had any opinion at all in their bio. It was insane. I was NOT the level of attractiveness to be that choosy. Even my current girlfriend says my bumble profile wasn't that attractive. Good thing she swiped right though, because she is very happy with the person I ended up being. All she had to do was look past physical appearance, IE, stop looking for 9s that were not interested anyway.
One thing I don't see people discussing (outside of women's spaces at least) is how sexual assault drives poor Tinder satisfaction (for both parties). Way too many women report being sexually assaulted or raped by their Tinder dates, often saying that Match.com does not respond to their accusations, putting other women at risk. Women will of course try to be more choosy from that, because getting raped for wanting a casual date or something is insane.
Both parties report strong dissatisfaction with apps like Tinder. Men swipe right on everyone because that's their only hope of getting ANY attention at all, literally relying on winning the lottery to get a single date, while women are extremely choosy and have very high expectations, because it's their market to dictate, but as long as they both do the "rational" thing, they will continue to suffer, because if you "defect" a la game theory, you objectively have a bad time.
Yes, once you've had it explained to you that your mere display of interest construes an insult because you are "obviously" not in the same league and to suggest that you are is to somehow imply that she is somehow "lower," well, there's an awful lot of not only Go Away but You Should Not Have Even Tried.
With a sample size of 29 women and 0 men, they presented 100 tinder profiles and asked them if they would swipe right or left. The sample size was all Korean and excluded anyone that looked "foreign" with no further explanation of what that meant. The women were likely to swipe right only 20-30% of the time, however, they go on to explain that while some 40% of the profiles were rejected by most participants, there was only 1 profile that was accepted by over 80% of participants.
At worst, this indicates that 40% of men are generally undesirable to a large part of the female population. But the researchers asked the participants why they rejected these most-rejected profiles:
> To better understand possible reasons for rejection we have additionally analyzed the profiles that were rejected the most (by more than 90% of the participants). In the majority of those pictures (61.5%), a man’s face could not be seen clearly, which supports previous findings. When a face can be seen, there was weird or unfriendly facial expression (60%) or excessive photo editing (20%), which were also mentioned during the qualitative stage as the reasons for swiping left.
So it sounds like this study is finding that profile presentation is much more of a factor for universal rejection than other factors such as aesthetics, fitness, status, etc.
This study has a small sample size, doesn't make the claims that the articles all make, and doesn't contain any data to support those articles. The study also assumes that all men will swipe right on all women in the study. When they run an experiment where they put 100 women and 100 men into the same study and show them each-others tinder profiles, maybe you'd be able to make the claim that 20% of men are dating 80% of men, but that's not what the study winds up saying. They say that women are rejecting ~80% of possible matches, but in aggregate, only about 30% of profiles had fewer than 5 of 29 swipe rights, and only 1% of the profiles were rejected by all participants and 1% of profiles were accepted by all participants.
I'm not sure the math on that works out. Sounds exhausting. Like, how do those men have time for anything else! Are women really okay with passing the same men around?
> Are women really okay with passing the same men around?
Absolutely. There are women out there who will literally recommend men to their friends. I've seen them talk about this. Desirable men can literally end up being shared among a network of women. The more sex they have, the more sex they get to have.
There's a related phenomenon in women pursuing men who are already in marriages or relationships because they've essentially been pre-vetted and thus deemed desirable.
I guess that only works if the women don't mind being cheated on. If they get a man to cheat with them, they know exactly the kind of man they're getting.
I guess I wouldn't be surprised if it were happening somewhere, but I still have a hard time believing that's the norm. Maybe I'm just the possessive and jealous type...
Of course women want most men to leave them alone. Especially those men they went on a date with, and weren't a good fit.
Most women in a relationship aren't looking for extra-marital male attention.
Men of course are simply flattered by any attention, and assume this goes both ways. Hence wolf-whistles are supposed to be some kind of compliment.
In a world where male on female violence is rife, -any- un-solicited attention is potentially dangerous. Men who can't gracefully take no for an answer are especially dangerous.
Does this make it harder to actually meet someone IRL? Yes it does. If you make a move outside an accepted environment, then I recommend making your advance in the least potentially threatening way possible. And when rejected have the grace to accept that with a smile and respect.
I say this not to suggest that you are predatory in any way, but simply to point out that men and women have -very- different viewpoints and experiences.
