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by CocaKoala 1401 days ago
I'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.

1 comments

The 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).

It'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.

You'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.

Absolutely I'm trusting that stated expectations are the same as real expectations - if somebody lies to me about what they want in a partner, then we're not going to be a good match anyways and so that serves as a useful way to thin the potential pool.

> 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, or expect more than they offer, the expectation may be unreasonable.

Sure, but the article also says that the group of lonely single men is growing so on balance it sounds like the women are finding what they're looking for. Who's got the unreasonable expectations, here?

It's an unproven assumption to you because no woman has ever trusted you enough to confide the treatment she endures from men. Period.