[dec0dedab0de]

Most guys I know that can't get a date refuse to lower their superficial expectations. They spent so much time buying into pop culture that they only want to be seen with a woman that the vast majority of people are attracted to. Then they find themselves in a competition where they don't have a chance. It's like if a high school football player insists on going to a top tier football college, but when he gets there he just sits on the bench, not even realizing he could have been a starter at another school. Basically they need to learn their "league" and mostly stay in it.

[goethes_kind]

I think you are half right. My problem is mostly that if I can match with a woman on the looks, I then often find they are education, intelligence and values wise completely incompatible. Somehow, I cannot meet somebody who is compatible along those dimensions and then looks just right so that we can both be physically attracted to each other.

[dec0dedab0de]

One thing that was a problem for me for a while was having a bad experience with someone, and writing off entire swaths of the population that had similar characteristics. For a long time I refused to date anyone that ever voted republican or democrat, believed in anything supernatural, had student debt, made less money than their age * 2000, owned a pet, used windows an iphone or photoshop, enjoyed music that is played on the radio, or a bunch of other arbitrary "dealbreakers" that excluded the vast majority of the dating pool.

When I realized that I don't actually care about most of those things, I just was being reminded of previous bad relationships, it became much easier to figure out the things I actually cared about.

[PuppyTailWags]

IMO This is a standards problem. No one is going to have all of your compatibilities. In fact, very few people are going to even have a super satisfactory number of them. Especially if physical attraction is part of this: physical attraction is going to fade and it's going to fade fast.

If you're having trouble dating, not because you can't land a date but because all the dates disappoint you, it might be time to evaluate whether or not you're realistically setting your standards. People aren't like an RNG where you can roll and roll and roll until you get your perfectly desired stats. It's more like people will always have bad stats and you have to figure out if you can live with it.