[Arbalest]

Interesting perspective, and one I imagine will have a lot of criticism. Honestly I find the perspective too interesting to start picking holes in it. I do wonder how many criticisms will come from idealised notions of intellectualism. Which is of course in direct conflict with the base assumption of this article, which is that what we believe is often tied to emotional needs.

[jfengel]

Something about the tone kept raising my hackles, and the shoe finally dropped at:

    I hope that this doesn’t come across as mocking. I find this genuinely sad. I strongly believe that relationships are preferable to aloneness.

He summed it up nicely at the end:

    The real article should have been called “The Dangerous Decrease in Moderately Liberal Men Who Are Willing to Date My Woke Friends Who Compete With Me for the Last Few Single Woke Guys in Their Thirties”

I think he considers himself one of those Moderately Liberal Men who have been put off by some subset of extremist progressive women. You may well be in that category; I'm pretty close to that target as well. I have more sympathy for the Woke Women than he does.

One of the big mistakes I think he makes is seeing a "horseshoe" in that graph of extremism vs affiliation. That's not really what the "horseshoe" is about. The idea there is that the far left and far right actually have a lot in common, if only they'd stop yelling at each other long enough to realize it. But that's not what the graph says. It only says that moderates tend not to fight a lot, and extremists do.

So I think what he wants to say is, "Hey, crazy woke women. You'll be a lot happier if you stop playing ideological games and start taking moderation more seriously."

Which, ya know, is probably true. I hate that bit where I'm biting my tongue because I know if I open my mouth the next words will be "Well, actually..." That's not going to end well. And that sucks. I want to be right. I want them to be right. I want them to be right for the right reasons. Surely we can agree on that, right?

Well, no. Because there's more going on than that. And I don't want to write up all that because this comment is already too damn long. But I'll shorten it to "Getting stuff done means picking your battles."

He really seems to want to gripe about that, and citing various anecdotes about women who were bad to him despite agreeing with him. And all I can say is, "Get over it." Both your dating life and your political goals will be better for it.

And that's where that quote about the relationships bugs me. Yeah, relationships are better than aloneness. But bad relationships are not better than aloneness. It sounds a lot like he's trying to say that women owe it to themselves to date him, because their reasons are bad and they'll all be better off if they were less devoted to their ideology.

But... tough. They'll work through their issues at their own pace. Meantime, date other people. Or don't date at all if you can't find somebody. Because it sounds a bit as if he's spending his free time proving that they should date him, and that's not a good look. Ironically, you'll be more attractive if you're comfortable being alone.

[msrenee]

He's obviously writing about his own perspective. That would be fine, but he tries so hard to dress it up as logic and math. He doesn't address the conservative end of the problem where so many 25-35 year old men are belly-aching about how they can't find a girlfriend while being extremely hostile to women. Honestly, that's the horseshoe he ought to be looking at. I'm not even in the dating pool and I've got plenty of stories of guys who say that women are manipulative, less intelligent than men, overly emotional, and overall inferior and then wonder why no woman wants to date them.

How about we just agree that very few people want to date someone who hates their gender?

[telotortium]

> How about we just agree that very few people want to date someone who hates their gender?

I can get behind that.

Ultimately I submitted this story because I believe that (a) gender ratios, partitioned by city, educational background, political circles, etc., do affect dating dynamics, and people should take them into account and (b) the media is willing to publish the stories of women in progressive circles griping about their dating lives in a way they generally don't for men when the root causes of both their complaints are more similar than are commonly represented.

[telotortium]

> He really seems to want to gripe about that, and citing various anecdotes about women who were bad to him despite agreeing with him. And all I can say is, "Get over it." Both your dating life and your political goals will be better for it.

He just posted his partner's fetus ultrasound on Twitter: https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1416539496967983106. I don't think he's griping because he can't get a relationship.