"The very idea that men might have expectations in a relationship, or that men might have standards for women that some fall short of, is treated as essentially illegitimate."
In defense of this position, I think men are generally less picky regarding their standards. I am a single gentleman who is not looking for love because I am required to move in the next few months for work. Perhaps I am unique, but I see many more women who meet my minimal threshold for dating while I have a half dozen single female friends who feel they don't know people they would be interested in dating because of either race, religion, or physical attractiveness generally.
(I live in a city of around 150k)
Also side note, but one in ten or maybe one in twelve dating profiles I see have links to onlyfans or other such sites. I have to imagine living in the south, that this is not a regional thing as much as a 21st century thing.
I feel so fortunate to have my church help me meet my spouse. We don't do it perfectly, because of my church and BYU, I was put in an environment as a college student/young professional where I was surrounded by thousands of women who were generally 1) wanting to get married, 2) had the same vision of marriage/parenthood I did and 3) spoke a similar dating language I did.
This isn't a problem with dating apps ... it's a problem with people. My story:
I met a girl many years ago, married her, and had two kids. About five years in she had an affair. I forgave her and kept moving--but I "not good enough" from that point forward. I never missed a birthday, either hers or the kid's. I never missed a recital, or any other significant even in my kid's lives.
My wife wanted a boat, so I bought one. My wife wanted a beach house, so I worked hard and built one--paid for in cash. My mother-in-law called me the "model husband," the "son she never had."
Fast forward 14 years ... she sits me on the couch and tells me she wants to live separately, she wants total control of all of my income, she will sleep with whoever she wants, and I'm not to say a word about it. I insist on counseling, she says NO--unless the counseling is focused on hurting me. So I file for divorce.
She then blames the divorce on me and takes everything. Net worth before the divorce was about $1 million. My net worth coming out of the divorce was around $100k. Do the math.
As it turns out, she was having another affair.
I'm remarried--because I believe in marriage. I'm struggling financially, of course, because I'm close to retirement age and rebuilding assets from the ground up is hard. I care about God's way enough to find someone--on a dating app, btw--and get married again. I know the risk, I took it.
But ... it is perfectly rational for men, especially young men, to not want to take this risk. I was in a small group of men that turned into a divorce support group as almost every one of them went through the same thing. Wife just says "I'm done, no counseling, I'll take the money, and don't let the door hit your butt on the way out."
Things will change--apps or no apps--when men can see there is something in marriage for them.
I've had two middle-aged buddies get divorced recently and both of them found new partners on dating apps before their departing wife had even left the house. Clearly, the apps work for some. I think the main problem with the apps is that they allowed womanisers to absolutely run wild with no social consequences, which has created a lot of distrust and bitterness among women who were used, and honest men who are systematically overlooked by women who have been tricked into being booty-calls for high-value womanisers instead. I also think the apps have played a major role in denormalising in-person propositions, so men now fear that chatting up or asking out a girl at work is potentially viewed as sleazy. Personally, I think women remain far more receptive to this than some men fear, but the mere risk has a chilling effect.
No I'm not. I'm saying that it is very difficult for a woman to distinguish between a man who is genuinely interested in her as a life partner and one who is pretending to be interested in order to sleep with her. Traditionally, women were able to weed out men who misrepresented themselves, by talking with people who knew him, hearing gossip etc. Men were also restrained in their behaviour towards women in their wider social circle, because they knew they would suffer reputational damage if they kept seducing and dumping women. What the apps did was to create a bizarre situation where women were having to make assessments of men in a social vacuum and the fact is that many were deceived. I have heard of women conducting relationships with men who they later discovered were married with kids, and all kinds of outrageous deceits. This situation was largely created by the apps and it is no surprise that two-thirds of people on the apps are male. Dating that way is very risky for women.
I would submit that this is a long term problem that needs a long term solution. Parents need to be involved in helping their children find a spouse. They should be vetting prospective partners and discipling them as necessary. They also should focus their children on getting married and having children not what their education or career should be. Education and career should be supporting a pursuit of marriage and children.
Nowhere do I see this being discussed. Children are left to their own devices with no guidance.
This. I’m blessed to know a couple of extended homeschooling families. Though many miles apart, due to common interests, at some point these families discovered each other, resulting in a courtship and a wedding. But I’ve been to other of their weddings, and let me tell you, while these are joyous occasions, they take them seriously. At one a couple weeks ago, in addition to Scriptural wisdom from the pastor officiating, the groom’s father read his own son a solemn charge, seven or eight things he was now obligated to be or do before God. The bride and groom read out their own personal manifestos to each other, of what marriage meant to them, what they were pledging to be and do for each other. Last year, ahead of a different wedding, I got to see how the engaged couple, aged about 26 and 21, handled their courtship. We were on a road trip with friends, so they were properly chaperoned, but on rest stops the two would walk hand in hand away from the group, while still visible at all times. So great to see them talking gently and obviously thoughtfully with each other as they’d recede into the near distance and then pad slowly back to us as we seemed to be getting in the van again. Now married, the young lass was of course along at the most recent wedding of her brother-in-law. Visibly quite pregnant, she was saying to me not ‘smash patriarchy’ but rather how wonderful marriage is. ❤️
PS since you mentioned career, the young men in one of these families all seem to have studied engineering. This trend preceded Negative World or Benedict Option concerns, but may yet afford them more space from cancellation than other options would
Amen. You can see the difference when parents - particularly Christian parents - are involved. This is not to say that it is unassailable. But parents who love their children should demonstrate that love them by encouraging to replicate that love by getting married and having children. Otherwise we abandon them to the world which does not love them.
There’s a quotation from Chesterton that runs, “…there are some people…and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy.”
If it’s important to have some idea how a prospective tenant views the world, how much more a prospective spouse!
The postwar “Greatest Generation” came home perhaps to a bit of college funded by the G.I. Bill, or started a business, or took a job right away. But dating was a lot less fraught for both sexes (can I say that here? I’m new in these parts) because of the social/cultural/moral norms then prevailing. There was so much that one could just assume about a prospective mate. Unless they specifically spoke up for atheism or Communism you could usually take for granted that they, too believed in God, in objective morals, so even if you weren’t often seen in church you’d want to marry there, maybe go for the kids’ sake later…
J. Bottum, who is Catholic actually, writes about these general social expectations, this atmosphere:
“The general complex of the major Protestant denominations remained for nearly 300 years a great river at the heart of American public life. It was a messy thing, true enough, meandering in enormous loops and switchbacks, changing course from time to time, rising and falling. Nevertheless, everyone knew that Protestantism for what it was, our cultural Mississippi rolling through the center of the American landscape….The Mainline may have been an intellectually emaciated form of Christendom, as Catholic writers tended to insist, but it was all the Christendom we had in America, and it offered us a vocabulary with which both to criticize the nation and to support it.”
Anyway, yes, dating is broken, but that is way downstream from the larger cultural
Implosion. We have to think and live very purposefully and intentionally, we don’t have the option to go with the flow. We have to be different.
A professor friend of mine, Dr. Don Williams, an evangelical yet firmly on the Tolkien/Lewis axis, says, “Francis Schaeffer was right: In the Post-Christian world, lay men and women can no longer afford to remain ignorant of critical issues and questions that used to be the domain only of philosophy majors. The biblical world view can no longer be taken for granted, even by Christians. If we do not all think in terms of world view, that is, think philosophically, we will be able neither to discern the biblical world view, nor to retain it, nor to disciple others in it, nor to communicate it to non-Christians. Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, it is not even possible any more for those who wish to be faithful Christians and faithful witnesses for Christ."
There are two additional reasons why men aren’t among women out.
1. Ladies aren’t saying yes often enough. Many men check out of the game if there’s never a pay off, you have to “win” a small percentage of the time to maintain motivation, but if you get 100 rejections deep and never get messaged on a dating app, “be a man” doesn’t really cut it. Lady’s standards have gotten weird. I’m lucky in that I was at the tail end of dating being semi normal but saw firsthand the shift in evangelical communities to group hang outs. I Kissed Dating Goodbye kind of murdered evangelical dating for a bit.
2. NO ONE talks about this but I noticed in some major industries, there are geographical far, far fewer women. I have known several men who have quit their job and moved or talked about it just to meet women. At that point, I was thinking maybe it wasn’t just me (I had noticed that meeting single women living where these industries are oil/gas and aerospace was very rare). I want to be clear I don’t mean meeting women I liked or who liked me I mean meeting single women at all.
A friend heard my theory and crunched the numbers. There are major geographic imbalances between the sexes once you’re out of school. Women gravitate towards truly big cities and men follow the money out onto oil rigs, engineering firms, refineries, whatever factories are left etc. not just blue collar either. It’s deceptive because you see some women walking around but they are almost never single. Also advice about getting out there and talking to women (which I haven’t been shy about for quite some time and far fewer men are as shy as media makes out) will not work when the imbalance is bad enough.
Everyone who talks about dating, it seems, is based in a major city like NYC, LA what have you, there is a dating “scene”. In huge swaths of the country it’s basically families formed in college or big cities who followed the money or single men and very limited numbers of never divorced single women move there. I have personally gone a year without meeting an unattached women. When the numbers are crunched, I found it it’s not just me.
Seconded. Trying to date in a rural area unless you grew up in that specific area is well-nigh impossible if you're a single guy.
Anecdata: the first church I attended in one of the towns I lived in had a singles ministry. Everyone there except me was between the ages of 18 and 25, and there were usually three or four girls and over a dozen guys.
For what it's worth -- this was a different era, but my father was living in the Pacific Northwest (which has long had a male skew), when his mother lined up a girl for him to meet next time he was back home in the Midwest. He finally got around to meeting her, and he proposed to her the second time he saw her. That's my mom. Married 39 years when he died.
Doesn't have to be quite that fast, but I would think this is the approach to take if it fits your circumstances. Go long-distance, relying on your networks from back home, assuming "back home" is a place that has a more equal balance of singles. If you actually went to a remote area for work you're probably doing better than most of your competition back home, plus you've seen more of the world. You carry a bit of "worldly adventurer" mystique. That can easily translate to value in a woman's eyes, plus it should bring you some confidence.
That Beatty link in particular was a good read. It's bad for women out there too.
I did meet my wife on an app (Bumble). But partly, I think, it was good fortune (or Providence): we had both been on the app very briefly, and she didn't even go on any other dates with it (conversely, I packed my calendar with dates with around 2 new women per week; I was ready to find a wife). But the longer you're stuck on the app, the more you probably need to get away from it.
I do wonder if the apps are actively becoming worse. This is a trend with a lot of software out there (ensh**ification is the term of art now, I believe). Now, at least some of this may be driven by social change rather than top-down from the apps themselves. I think we mentioned before in this space that there is more polyamory on the apps, and I mentioned that I've heard this verified to me by real-world singles. One of my wife's friends awkwardly encountered her hairdresser's husband looking for a sidepiece. They apparently had an "open marriage" but are now divorced.
But Beatty mentions more of the best matches being hidden behind paywalls. I wonder if this is true. When I used Bumble, I can't remember what the paid features were, but I recall quickly concluding they were there only for desperate fools and clearly offered you no real advantage and not even any real edge in convenience. I quickly found a wife, and neither of us paid Bumble any money. An awful result for Bumble as a business that surely they should want to avoid, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have now taken steps to avoid it.
EDIT: I just noticed that term has its own Wikipedia link, and it calls out dating apps explicitly on the bottom:
I've been on the apps more recently. I paid for Bumble Premium because it shows me who swipes right on me -- that way I don't have to pull a Psyche and spend an eternity sifting through women when most of them either aren't interested or just don't have the bandwidth to see my profile. Instead I can just see which women are interested immediately. That's the real bottlebeck after all. It was worth $35 for me, to have the app do that for a month. I ended up with a pretty great girl after about a week.
Excellent links. Of all the publications on this topic, those that take men and masculinity seriously are few, but valuable, while those who take the baseline that "men and masculinity are the problem" are numerous, and largely worthless.
Thomas Edsall, for example, alternates between being interesting, and being just another mentally lazy liberal. His latest piece on this subject is full of quotes like those below. Basically, the libs think that if you're not a PC androgyne, there's something wrong with you...
"Young men are stagnating in their progress toward liberal values... Young men appear to be quiescent when it comes to ceding the historic advantages men have enjoyed in American society... The birth control pill set in motion the slow but steady emancipation of women and the erosion of men’s dominance in politics and in society writ large... The link between precarious masculinity and Republican voting will generalize to future elections... "
I think women who are genuinely interested in being asked on dates in person recognize that they have to signal availability in some way if they want to be asked out.
However, one mistake I think many women systematically make is that they confuse plausibly deniable signals (an oblique comment delivered at a party) with *private* signals (more direct suggestions delivered one-on-one, or via DM if there's a shared connection). The former are extremely likely to be ignored these days (that's why they're deniable, after all); the latter allow both parties to save face.
I'm obviously biased because I met my wife on a dating app. But I found them to be wonderful for an introvert like me. I was able to know all sorts of key details about women before I had to waste time getting to know them.
I was able to pre-screen potentials on how important church was to them, as well as sexual expectations. All sorts of awkward conversations on important things were already taken care of. Granted this was in 2014-2016 so it's possible things have degraded quite a bit since then. But the dating apps were night and day better for me than the old school way of doing things.
"The very idea that men might have expectations in a relationship, or that men might have standards for women that some fall short of, is treated as essentially illegitimate."
In defense of this position, I think men are generally less picky regarding their standards. I am a single gentleman who is not looking for love because I am required to move in the next few months for work. Perhaps I am unique, but I see many more women who meet my minimal threshold for dating while I have a half dozen single female friends who feel they don't know people they would be interested in dating because of either race, religion, or physical attractiveness generally.
(I live in a city of around 150k)
Also side note, but one in ten or maybe one in twelve dating profiles I see have links to onlyfans or other such sites. I have to imagine living in the south, that this is not a regional thing as much as a 21st century thing.
I feel so fortunate to have my church help me meet my spouse. We don't do it perfectly, because of my church and BYU, I was put in an environment as a college student/young professional where I was surrounded by thousands of women who were generally 1) wanting to get married, 2) had the same vision of marriage/parenthood I did and 3) spoke a similar dating language I did.
We definitely owe it to our kids to build this.
This isn't a problem with dating apps ... it's a problem with people. My story:
I met a girl many years ago, married her, and had two kids. About five years in she had an affair. I forgave her and kept moving--but I "not good enough" from that point forward. I never missed a birthday, either hers or the kid's. I never missed a recital, or any other significant even in my kid's lives.
My wife wanted a boat, so I bought one. My wife wanted a beach house, so I worked hard and built one--paid for in cash. My mother-in-law called me the "model husband," the "son she never had."
Fast forward 14 years ... she sits me on the couch and tells me she wants to live separately, she wants total control of all of my income, she will sleep with whoever she wants, and I'm not to say a word about it. I insist on counseling, she says NO--unless the counseling is focused on hurting me. So I file for divorce.
She then blames the divorce on me and takes everything. Net worth before the divorce was about $1 million. My net worth coming out of the divorce was around $100k. Do the math.
As it turns out, she was having another affair.
I'm remarried--because I believe in marriage. I'm struggling financially, of course, because I'm close to retirement age and rebuilding assets from the ground up is hard. I care about God's way enough to find someone--on a dating app, btw--and get married again. I know the risk, I took it.
But ... it is perfectly rational for men, especially young men, to not want to take this risk. I was in a small group of men that turned into a divorce support group as almost every one of them went through the same thing. Wife just says "I'm done, no counseling, I'll take the money, and don't let the door hit your butt on the way out."
Things will change--apps or no apps--when men can see there is something in marriage for them.
I'm sorry to hear about what happened to you.
I've had two middle-aged buddies get divorced recently and both of them found new partners on dating apps before their departing wife had even left the house. Clearly, the apps work for some. I think the main problem with the apps is that they allowed womanisers to absolutely run wild with no social consequences, which has created a lot of distrust and bitterness among women who were used, and honest men who are systematically overlooked by women who have been tricked into being booty-calls for high-value womanisers instead. I also think the apps have played a major role in denormalising in-person propositions, so men now fear that chatting up or asking out a girl at work is potentially viewed as sleazy. Personally, I think women remain far more receptive to this than some men fear, but the mere risk has a chilling effect.
You're skating dangerously close to saying women have no agency in this area.
No I'm not. I'm saying that it is very difficult for a woman to distinguish between a man who is genuinely interested in her as a life partner and one who is pretending to be interested in order to sleep with her. Traditionally, women were able to weed out men who misrepresented themselves, by talking with people who knew him, hearing gossip etc. Men were also restrained in their behaviour towards women in their wider social circle, because they knew they would suffer reputational damage if they kept seducing and dumping women. What the apps did was to create a bizarre situation where women were having to make assessments of men in a social vacuum and the fact is that many were deceived. I have heard of women conducting relationships with men who they later discovered were married with kids, and all kinds of outrageous deceits. This situation was largely created by the apps and it is no surprise that two-thirds of people on the apps are male. Dating that way is very risky for women.
I would submit that this is a long term problem that needs a long term solution. Parents need to be involved in helping their children find a spouse. They should be vetting prospective partners and discipling them as necessary. They also should focus their children on getting married and having children not what their education or career should be. Education and career should be supporting a pursuit of marriage and children.
Nowhere do I see this being discussed. Children are left to their own devices with no guidance.
This. I’m blessed to know a couple of extended homeschooling families. Though many miles apart, due to common interests, at some point these families discovered each other, resulting in a courtship and a wedding. But I’ve been to other of their weddings, and let me tell you, while these are joyous occasions, they take them seriously. At one a couple weeks ago, in addition to Scriptural wisdom from the pastor officiating, the groom’s father read his own son a solemn charge, seven or eight things he was now obligated to be or do before God. The bride and groom read out their own personal manifestos to each other, of what marriage meant to them, what they were pledging to be and do for each other. Last year, ahead of a different wedding, I got to see how the engaged couple, aged about 26 and 21, handled their courtship. We were on a road trip with friends, so they were properly chaperoned, but on rest stops the two would walk hand in hand away from the group, while still visible at all times. So great to see them talking gently and obviously thoughtfully with each other as they’d recede into the near distance and then pad slowly back to us as we seemed to be getting in the van again. Now married, the young lass was of course along at the most recent wedding of her brother-in-law. Visibly quite pregnant, she was saying to me not ‘smash patriarchy’ but rather how wonderful marriage is. ❤️
PS since you mentioned career, the young men in one of these families all seem to have studied engineering. This trend preceded Negative World or Benedict Option concerns, but may yet afford them more space from cancellation than other options would
Amen. You can see the difference when parents - particularly Christian parents - are involved. This is not to say that it is unassailable. But parents who love their children should demonstrate that love them by encouraging to replicate that love by getting married and having children. Otherwise we abandon them to the world which does not love them.
There’s a quotation from Chesterton that runs, “…there are some people…and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy.”
If it’s important to have some idea how a prospective tenant views the world, how much more a prospective spouse!
The postwar “Greatest Generation” came home perhaps to a bit of college funded by the G.I. Bill, or started a business, or took a job right away. But dating was a lot less fraught for both sexes (can I say that here? I’m new in these parts) because of the social/cultural/moral norms then prevailing. There was so much that one could just assume about a prospective mate. Unless they specifically spoke up for atheism or Communism you could usually take for granted that they, too believed in God, in objective morals, so even if you weren’t often seen in church you’d want to marry there, maybe go for the kids’ sake later…
J. Bottum, who is Catholic actually, writes about these general social expectations, this atmosphere:
“The general complex of the major Protestant denominations remained for nearly 300 years a great river at the heart of American public life. It was a messy thing, true enough, meandering in enormous loops and switchbacks, changing course from time to time, rising and falling. Nevertheless, everyone knew that Protestantism for what it was, our cultural Mississippi rolling through the center of the American landscape….The Mainline may have been an intellectually emaciated form of Christendom, as Catholic writers tended to insist, but it was all the Christendom we had in America, and it offered us a vocabulary with which both to criticize the nation and to support it.”
Anyway, yes, dating is broken, but that is way downstream from the larger cultural
Implosion. We have to think and live very purposefully and intentionally, we don’t have the option to go with the flow. We have to be different.
A professor friend of mine, Dr. Don Williams, an evangelical yet firmly on the Tolkien/Lewis axis, says, “Francis Schaeffer was right: In the Post-Christian world, lay men and women can no longer afford to remain ignorant of critical issues and questions that used to be the domain only of philosophy majors. The biblical world view can no longer be taken for granted, even by Christians. If we do not all think in terms of world view, that is, think philosophically, we will be able neither to discern the biblical world view, nor to retain it, nor to disciple others in it, nor to communicate it to non-Christians. Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, it is not even possible any more for those who wish to be faithful Christians and faithful witnesses for Christ."
There are two additional reasons why men aren’t among women out.
1. Ladies aren’t saying yes often enough. Many men check out of the game if there’s never a pay off, you have to “win” a small percentage of the time to maintain motivation, but if you get 100 rejections deep and never get messaged on a dating app, “be a man” doesn’t really cut it. Lady’s standards have gotten weird. I’m lucky in that I was at the tail end of dating being semi normal but saw firsthand the shift in evangelical communities to group hang outs. I Kissed Dating Goodbye kind of murdered evangelical dating for a bit.
2. NO ONE talks about this but I noticed in some major industries, there are geographical far, far fewer women. I have known several men who have quit their job and moved or talked about it just to meet women. At that point, I was thinking maybe it wasn’t just me (I had noticed that meeting single women living where these industries are oil/gas and aerospace was very rare). I want to be clear I don’t mean meeting women I liked or who liked me I mean meeting single women at all.
A friend heard my theory and crunched the numbers. There are major geographic imbalances between the sexes once you’re out of school. Women gravitate towards truly big cities and men follow the money out onto oil rigs, engineering firms, refineries, whatever factories are left etc. not just blue collar either. It’s deceptive because you see some women walking around but they are almost never single. Also advice about getting out there and talking to women (which I haven’t been shy about for quite some time and far fewer men are as shy as media makes out) will not work when the imbalance is bad enough.
Everyone who talks about dating, it seems, is based in a major city like NYC, LA what have you, there is a dating “scene”. In huge swaths of the country it’s basically families formed in college or big cities who followed the money or single men and very limited numbers of never divorced single women move there. I have personally gone a year without meeting an unattached women. When the numbers are crunched, I found it it’s not just me.
Seconded. Trying to date in a rural area unless you grew up in that specific area is well-nigh impossible if you're a single guy.
Anecdata: the first church I attended in one of the towns I lived in had a singles ministry. Everyone there except me was between the ages of 18 and 25, and there were usually three or four girls and over a dozen guys.
For what it's worth -- this was a different era, but my father was living in the Pacific Northwest (which has long had a male skew), when his mother lined up a girl for him to meet next time he was back home in the Midwest. He finally got around to meeting her, and he proposed to her the second time he saw her. That's my mom. Married 39 years when he died.
Doesn't have to be quite that fast, but I would think this is the approach to take if it fits your circumstances. Go long-distance, relying on your networks from back home, assuming "back home" is a place that has a more equal balance of singles. If you actually went to a remote area for work you're probably doing better than most of your competition back home, plus you've seen more of the world. You carry a bit of "worldly adventurer" mystique. That can easily translate to value in a woman's eyes, plus it should bring you some confidence.
That Beatty link in particular was a good read. It's bad for women out there too.
I did meet my wife on an app (Bumble). But partly, I think, it was good fortune (or Providence): we had both been on the app very briefly, and she didn't even go on any other dates with it (conversely, I packed my calendar with dates with around 2 new women per week; I was ready to find a wife). But the longer you're stuck on the app, the more you probably need to get away from it.
I do wonder if the apps are actively becoming worse. This is a trend with a lot of software out there (ensh**ification is the term of art now, I believe). Now, at least some of this may be driven by social change rather than top-down from the apps themselves. I think we mentioned before in this space that there is more polyamory on the apps, and I mentioned that I've heard this verified to me by real-world singles. One of my wife's friends awkwardly encountered her hairdresser's husband looking for a sidepiece. They apparently had an "open marriage" but are now divorced.
But Beatty mentions more of the best matches being hidden behind paywalls. I wonder if this is true. When I used Bumble, I can't remember what the paid features were, but I recall quickly concluding they were there only for desperate fools and clearly offered you no real advantage and not even any real edge in convenience. I quickly found a wife, and neither of us paid Bumble any money. An awful result for Bumble as a business that surely they should want to avoid, and I wouldn't be surprised if they have now taken steps to avoid it.
EDIT: I just noticed that term has its own Wikipedia link, and it calls out dating apps explicitly on the bottom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
I've been on the apps more recently. I paid for Bumble Premium because it shows me who swipes right on me -- that way I don't have to pull a Psyche and spend an eternity sifting through women when most of them either aren't interested or just don't have the bandwidth to see my profile. Instead I can just see which women are interested immediately. That's the real bottlebeck after all. It was worth $35 for me, to have the app do that for a month. I ended up with a pretty great girl after about a week.
Excellent links. Of all the publications on this topic, those that take men and masculinity seriously are few, but valuable, while those who take the baseline that "men and masculinity are the problem" are numerous, and largely worthless.
Thomas Edsall, for example, alternates between being interesting, and being just another mentally lazy liberal. His latest piece on this subject is full of quotes like those below. Basically, the libs think that if you're not a PC androgyne, there's something wrong with you...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/29/opinion/gender-gap-biden-trump-2024.html
"Young men are stagnating in their progress toward liberal values... Young men appear to be quiescent when it comes to ceding the historic advantages men have enjoyed in American society... The birth control pill set in motion the slow but steady emancipation of women and the erosion of men’s dominance in politics and in society writ large... The link between precarious masculinity and Republican voting will generalize to future elections... "
I think women who are genuinely interested in being asked on dates in person recognize that they have to signal availability in some way if they want to be asked out.
However, one mistake I think many women systematically make is that they confuse plausibly deniable signals (an oblique comment delivered at a party) with *private* signals (more direct suggestions delivered one-on-one, or via DM if there's a shared connection). The former are extremely likely to be ignored these days (that's why they're deniable, after all); the latter allow both parties to save face.
I'm obviously biased because I met my wife on a dating app. But I found them to be wonderful for an introvert like me. I was able to know all sorts of key details about women before I had to waste time getting to know them.
I was able to pre-screen potentials on how important church was to them, as well as sexual expectations. All sorts of awkward conversations on important things were already taken care of. Granted this was in 2014-2016 so it's possible things have degraded quite a bit since then. But the dating apps were night and day better for me than the old school way of doing things.
Glad to hear it worked for you!