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The author is their own worst enemy, and their article makes it abundantly clear. Hopefully, someday, they will reread what they wrote and see it as the postmortem that it is. On a broader note, maybe dating was never sustainable in the first place. The concept of dating is, for the most part, a 20th century invention. In any earlier time, it would have been considered low-key prostitution. As a man, the expectation that I pay for anything regardless of how well I know the other person or how the date goes always felt kinda dirty. Which is why I stopped doing that a long time ago, even before I quit dating all together. Dating can't be untangled from the inertia of technology, and it was inevitable that dating just wouldn't scale well. We're never going back to some hypothetical time where dating actually worked, but I do think there are pathways that can at least lead to better tradeoffs: 1. Far more people should be open to making acquaintances offline and be willing to introduce friends they think would be compatible. 2. We need to drop the pretense that the only places left for men and women to meet each other after college is at bars, and any context outside of that would be harassment. 3. Everyone is unique, but people need to consider whether their idiosyncrasies are ultimately working against them. As far as the United States is concerned, we've gone way too far in the direction of everybody thinking they can get everything their way, yet few actually do. For instance, if you're perpetually single but you're turning down people for liking Starbucks, maybe you should rethink whether you're the fool for not just accepting the coffee others like. 4. Call a spade a spade and just start calling all dating apps "hookup" apps, because that's what they're best suited for. We should reject the idea that there isn't something inherently salacious about apps like Tinder, and that attitude needs to be a part of the culture. |
5. In the modern world, technology (dating apps, ML/AI-assisted image enhancement shifting expectations of average attractiveness, and the destruction of socialization by TikTok/Insta/Snap) has rendered a significant portion of the male population undateable/unmatchable. This has tipped the scales largely in favor of the men in the desirable pool, as more women compete over that narrowing set. Purists may call this some sort of extreme Darwinism. The end result will be at least a generation or two of outsized suffering for males in the middle of the bell curve.