The Tragedy of Great Power Dating
The Structural Issues in Contemporary Dating and What We Can Do About Them
Happy White Day! White Day is the Japanese holiday that falls on March 14th, one month after Valentine’s Day, where you give reciprocal gifts to those you received gifts from on Valentine’s Day.
To mark the occasion, I have been working on this rather long-ish essay where I discuss the structural reasons that have led to dating being the horrible hellworld it currently is. Much like structural realism in IR (hence the title), I would contend that human nature is what it is, and that it is not that people have suddenly become worse, but rather the incentive structure we are trapped in has taken a turn for the worse.
(Normally when I would need to cathartically write about this I would do so on FB, but almost inevitably people, well intentioned or not, would come along and say idiotic things that pissed me off, whereas here it will cost you $5 to do so. If I say something you think is wrong and absurd I urge you to give in to your base urges and pay the money to yell at me.)
Anyone who is unmarried and below the age of 35 knows that contemporary dating is a hellish nightmare. This is widely agreed upon. I have frequently seen married people a smidge older than 35 say that looking at the carnage makes them feel like they were on the last chopper out of ‘nam. Almost no one is happy with the current state of affairs, yet it continues to persist.
I will be 30 this year. In the history of humanity, it is an outlier that I am not married by now. However, these days it is completely normal. In fact, I would be getting married earlier than the average male if I were to get married sometime before early 2024. The average age of marriage has been increasing for a long time, but these days it is likely that the average age of marriage has never even approached being so late in life.
Take a look at this chart:
I can’t begin to say how much this has been on my mind as I approach 30. Looking back I wonder what in the world I have been doing with my life since I graduated college when I was 21. The short answer to that is that my 20s were a rather unpleasant decade of my life, but all the buffeting around by the waves has seemed to have helped smooth out my rough edges and given me a lot of lessons that will be helpful with the rest of life. However, in hindsight, I tend to think I should have given dating much more priority than I ever did. I can think of plenty of pretty valid reasons for why I didn’t, such as barely making ends meet after college when I was working in DC, working two jobs without a day off for weeks on end when I quit my job in DC, being a poor grad student, then being my grandfather’s caretaker, and then Covid. Having some health problems certainly hasn’t helped anything. While I did attempt to date via apps every once and awhile, things never really went anywhere. I know that in the past I always thought that it would eventually just happen in the future, but now the future is here, and I am still single.
However, my case is hardly unique. Millennial marriage rates are so low that I suspect that they are unprecedented in the history of humanity since marriage arose as an institution. As of 2020, 56 percent of Millennial had never been married. In contrast, that number was 19 percent for the Silent Generation when they were in the same age bracket. Given the way things are going, it seems safe to think that Gen Z’s marriage rates will be even worse.
The Dreaded Apps
Obviously, one of the largest factors in all of this is dating apps. Jordan Peterson has an excellent interview with Rob Henderson, a psychologist, who has a lot of fascinating insights into the negative effects of dating apps. The short version is that dating apps are pointless for most men. From what data we have, it seems there is a pretty clear Paretto distribution, where 20 percent of the men on the app get 80 percent of the swipes from women. So, unless you are a ripped and shredded 6 foot plus tall chad (or have a PhD, as I have noticed among my friends who are lacking in the ripped and shredded department, yet have had some success on apps), then it is probably not worth the time and effort to endlessly swipe. See various number crunching by nerds on this here, and here.
However, not only men are getting a bad deal with apps. Apps are disastrous for women as well, in the same way that the sex imbalance in higher education is.
While it is common for angry sad black-pilled men to complain about, hypergamy is a natural fact of life. That is to say that women in general prefer to marry equal to or above their educational, social, and income status. This is problematic where higher education is concerned, because starting around 2014, more women than men had bachelors degrees. See chart:
This means that if a woman wants to marry at or above her educational level, then there is going to be a high level of competition between women for the limited number of men. This is disastrous news if you think that promiscuous behavior is bad. When men are in demand they get to be the price setters and women the price takers, in econ terms (ceteris paribus etc). And seeing how men are the fallen creatures that we are, that price is sex.
We can look at college campuses themselves as a microcosm of this, which is what Jon Birgir did in his book Date-nomics. I attended his talk at the Cato Institute back in 2016, and a staff member told me that it was the most attended event in Cato’s history up until that time (which wasn’t surprising, since this was the only time I ever had to go to an overflow room, rather than sit in the deceptively plushy yet uncomfortable Hayek Auditorium chairs).
The long and short of his findings were that on college campuses with more women than men there was more promiscuity and less long term partner formations, and that at schools with more men than women, the inverse was true.
Now, this talk was of great interest in DC, because DC women are particularly screwed by demographics there in this regard, not only because of the difference in education numbers, but also because DC has the highest homosexual population in the US, and the number of gay men is higher than the number of lesbians, meaning that they do not cancel each other out when it comes to demographic matching.
We can look at history and see this broadly, such as after WW1 in places like France where there were 1.5 million missing men in the demographics because they were blown to pieces in the war, plus 3 of the 6 million French soldiers who survived had been wounded and were in various states of dismemberment and psychological trauma. What do we see? Perhaps unexpectedly, marriage rates skyrocketed, in part because they had basically plunged off a cliff during the war and several years worth of marriages happened simultaneously.
However, that is not the entire story, as women were still in fierce competition to secure a husband. Guillaume Vandenbroucke, an economist at the St. Louis Fed argues that women whose male peers were blown up and disabled in the war began to marry younger men, which in turn displaced the younger women on and on. He does not get into discussing how that happened, (I wonder how an older woman would persuade a younger man to marry her, quite a mystery) but note that at the same time sexual mores throughout Europe moved in a promiscuous direction, among a general social collapse in the 20s. In his biography of Charles de Gaulle, Jonathan Fenby notes that at this time 10% of the French population had syphilis, there were 400,000 abortions a year, population growth was negative without immigration, and the country consumed 3x as much wine (I assume per capita) than Italy. Birgir himself draws on the French novel The Fires of Autumn that similarly documents the promiscuous behavior that resulted from the shortage of men in the interwar years.
Now, let’s apply this logic to dating apps, where somehow, things seem even worse for a contemporary American women than they do for an inter-war woman in France or Germany. As the author of this piece notes “In reality, the bottom 80% of men are fighting over the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are fighting over the top 20% of men.” And includes this graph with the explanation that “The area in blue represents the situations where women are more likely to “like” the men. The area in pink represents the situations where men are more likely to “like” women. The curve doesn’t go down linearly, but instead drops quickly after the top 20% of men. Comparing the blue area and the pink area we can see that for a random female/male Tinder interaction the male is likely to “like” the female 6.2 times more often than the female “likes” the male.”
He goes on to calculate that a man of “average” attractiveness will receive 1 like from a woman for every 115 swipes and concludes it is probably a waste of time unless you are some kind of Chad.
So obviously, this is not good news for the men like me, and probably you, dear reader, but in a way this is even worse for the women involved in this whole thing.
Women are reeling from a one-two punch in this scenario. On the one hand, app using women receive a signal that they are highly socially desirable because they are inundated with more likes than they could ever possibly know what to do with. However, as a result, 4/5ths of them are fighting over only 1/5th of the men on the app. In other words, in the app dating economy there are 4 women per high status man. This is a ratio beyond anything like what happens at colleges with more women than men, which is where Birgir draws lots of research from. (Birgir thinks that criticisms of dating apps are misguided, but I think that when the numbers are crunched it actually lends support to his argument).
The end result of this is that we are seeing some people return to what basically amounts to polygamy as women have to increasingly sexualize themselves in an attempt to win the affection of the high status men and these high status men take advantage of the situation to have tons of sex.
As Rob Henderson noted in this excellent piece from last month: “At no point in history have all men in a given society been equally desirable. Today, though, the disparity between men is particularly pronounced. And the gap shows no sign of slowing or closing. The polyamorous movement may be a reaction to shifts in sex ratios among attractive individuals. Many individuals who do not identify as poly are likely practicing some version of it, knowingly or otherwise, as the case of West Elm Caleb demonstrated. The majority of desirable young males using dating apps almost certainly have at least three women in their rotation, if not more.”
He also notes “a recent study found that the proliferation of “sexy selfies” may be due in part to economic inequality, as women compete to earn the attention of a shrinking pool of economically successful men.”
I think a great deal of this can be summed up in the first 50 seconds of this YouTube clip (start at 2:30 if timestamp doesn’t work) that showed up in my feed and to some extent served as the impetus for this essay. Some British YouTube show is discussing an American YouTube show where an attractive woman is being interviewed and she states that essentially if she is on a date with a single guy and he is not sleeping around with other girls then this is a red flag and something must be wrong with him. That sums up the horrible, to some extent largely structurally driven, state of contemporary dating.
Apps Aren’t the Whole Story: Feminism Is the Greatest Con of All Time
While dating apps are horrible and you should flee from them, they can’t be blamed for everything. If you go back to the first charts, the trends in marriage have been happening for decades and across generations. Apps just seem to have poured some more fuel onto the dumpster fire that Gen Z and younger millennials are stuck in.
So what is happening?
Well, if you ask some men, modern women are just all evil manipulative hoes and we should not have anything to do with them. This is the take from the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement. These men think men should just stay away from women as much as possible and content themselves with porn and hiring prostitutes to satiate our base male urges.
I do not adopt that view.
Call me a simp, but as bad as things are for men these days (and they are bad, if the numbers of us blowing our heads off or ODing on pills is any indication) I can’t help but feel more moved to pity for the state of women these days.
It seems that women are bombarded from their teenage years or younger with the idea that having lots of sex with lots of men is empowering and good, and that marriage is just an evil plot by the patriarchy to oppress them. “Sex work”, the contemporary euphemism for prostitution, whether actual physical whoring or digital OnlyFans whoring, is portrayed as just fine as a career choice and once again “empowering”. What planet are these people living on? (See some depressing OnlyFans stats towards the end.)
Nothing seems to be more proof of an evil patriarchal conspiracy than the world that feminism has wrought. Could anything be more beneficial to men, or at least our libidinous appetites, than the extreme proliferation of not only actual pornography, but of sexualized women in general and both being sold as being empowering to women? Men, in general, might not want to marry women who act slutty, but unless we have gained strict control of ourselves we sure don’t mind enjoying it. Lo and behold, sluttiness is everywhere and promoted as being good.
Having been raised in evangelical “purity culture”, which I think was disastrous overall and led to the deformation of many developing minds and ended up driving people my age away from church, I do not want to come across as being puritanical here. I find prudery to be annoying and that trying to hide away our sexual nature is just extremely counter-productive. There is an enormous difference between something being benignly “lewd” in an ecchi anime way, or erotic, and being straight up pornographic. For instance, Game of Thrones did not need to eliminate sex from the story, but it did not have to have the level of graphic detail that it did.
My point is that sex is a natural part of human life that plays a large role in things and it is weird and unhealthy to suppress any recognition of that, especially in art. There is obviously a difference between “Baby It’s Cold Outside” (and one might even venture to argue S&M by Rhianna) and “WAP”.
Similarly, while no doubt some part of it is a lingering effect of my upbringing, it is rather astonishing to see the trashy way women will talk about things like sex openly without shame. For instance, it is not difficult to find YouTube videos of various scumbag type men going around and asking women (usually on a college campus or a bar district) what their “body count” is (ie their number of sexual partners) and for them to receive numerous replies. That is just extremely bizarre to me.
The point here is not to “slut shame” these women, but to point out what kind of culture they (and we) live in, where it is apparently not considered weird to discuss how many people you have banged with a random man who asks you about it on the street.
Also, note how dehumanizing the term “bodycount” is. In the type of videos I mentioned above men and women will often reply “I have x bodies”. I think this speaks to the extreme way in which sex, one of the most intimate acts humans can participate in, has been so severed from its proper roots in people’s minds. “This isn’t a person (a term loaded with a great deal of implications and meaning) who I am having sex with, it is simply a body.” It betrays how deeply materialism has rooted itself in our culture these days.
One way of looking at this, is that feminism is the masculinization of women (in more ways than are being discussed here, but that is for a different essay) stemming from our society’s obsession with egalitarianism, which is, quite simply, a revolt against nature. Men and women are different. Just because I believe it is wrong for men to have sex before marriage, let alone sleep around, does not mean that I can’t recognize how there is a difference between men sleeping around and bragging about it and women doing so. Men, in general, react differently to other men engaging in “locker room talk” than they do to women doing so. It's just how it is.
Feminists would here complain that such a double standard is unfair, but the simple retort to that is that life itself is hardly fair and that I don’t want to join your gnostic crusade to try to immanentize the eschaton, to use a Voegelinian phrase, in an attempt to try and alter the structure of reality. Humans can try to ignore reality, but in the end reality will inevitably win.
Take a look at these two charts from the CDC:
It seems quite clear that young women are growing up in a culture that is hardly healthy for them. I mean, a quarter of high school girls made plans to kill themselves (though there is strong evidence that some of the increase in relevant years stemmed from lockdowns, see something I wrote up about a CDC study here). People have made the argument that social media plays a large role in this, and have run the data and argued that the beginning of this rise can be traced to the rise of smartphones and Instagram. (For instance, see Jonathon Haidt here, and Richard Hanania here, where he explains he was skeptical of the case against social media, but has come around. As an aside, He also includes this very depressing chart showing that the time kids hang out in person has nosedived).
I would venture to say that it is not just the deprivation of actual human contact that is negative, (as a cave dwelling writer I can certainly attest that this is true) but that this digital contact, especially for women and girls, ends up being highly competitive, not only for social status among other women, but for the purposes of impressing men in this hellish Ghenghis-khan harem world that has emerged. Hence, the increased sexualization and WAP-ification of culture.
On a related note, authors such as Louise Perry have made the argument that widespread and easy to access hardcore porn has more or less warped a lot of young men’s minds and led to the normalization and even expectation of hardcore and dangerous rough sex acts such as sodomy, choking, and hitting.
In the above analysis sex was simply aggregated together as a price set by men. However, in reality sex is not a homogeneous act. It seems likely that this increase in dangerous and degrading sex at least partly stems from men being able to demand higher and higher “prices” in the sexual marketplace and women, especially high school girls, which Perry has reported on, are accepting these “prices” partly out of youthful ignorance and partly out of a fear of losing out on access to socially desirable men. This is extremely sad and depressing.
(I leave aside here the argument about whether rough sex acts and the like are ethical per se which would be relevant in situations where a woman actually wanted to participate in them versus begrudgingly participating as a result of the pressure and incentives created by current social conditions. One argument would be that such acts are inherently disordered. Another argument is that even women who do want to participate in them actually don’t, with the arguments usually taking various forms of “you think that because society has conditioned you to do so and have that preference”).
Given the Above, What Are We to Do?
I think I have laid out enough data for those of who are living on the dark side of the Moon/have been married for ages and didn’t already know all this to at least indicate that things in the world of dating are not very good. So what do we do, now that we have confirmed that dating sucks right now?
Obviously I don’t have a great answer. If I did I could write a best selling book and be on Dr. Phil or Oprah.
Everyone (aside from the extremely desirable men at the tip top of attractiveness, like West Elm Caleb, who are having Ghengis Khan amounts of sex) in the dating market realizes that it is a dumpster fire right now. A recent poll found that 59 percent of adult Gen Z desire to delete dating apps and to meet a partner in a more traditional way, like the train or a pub.
Now you might think this is good news and will solve lots of our problems, but I wouldn’t get too excited yet. In reality, most people aren’t going to be rushing out to flirt and find love with strangers they are attracted to in bars, coffee shops, and roller rinks (which is where my grandparents met).
The issue is that while everyone was ignoring meat-space in favor of their phones, dating norms have collapsed and no longer exist, if by norm we mean a widely understood set of practices that are socially acceptable. Things have gotten even worse post-lockdown.
In the past I have crowdsourced advice about this on Facebook and everytime the thread turns into a dumpster fire with no consensus and a great deal of acrimony.
I once left my business card with the check at a restaurant and wrote something like “Want to get coffee? :)” on the back. When I mentioned this on FB responses fell into three different camps.
On the one hand were the people who thought it was silly to leave a note and that I should have just asked the waitress out. Then there were people who thought leaving a note was fine. Then there was a small, but very vocal, minority who insisted that leaving a note, let alone talking to the waitress and asking her out was akin to being a creeper and committing sexual harassment (somewhat ironically, the most obnoxious person in this camp was a former “f#ck-boy” turned woke male feminist).
My response to the people saying one should simply ask the waitress out is that that could be seen as very aggressive, and as the nutty people in the comments were making it very clear some people think I might as well have slapped her on her butt.
This anxiety is not felt by me alone. As one advice columnist put it: “there are women out there who find it so burdensome to say no to a man who doesn’t interest them that they consider any overture, no matter the context, content, or intent, to be a form of sexual harassment.” She then goes on to say that “these women are silly and very much in the minority” but acknowledges that things are a bit weird right now and suggests leaving a note as a safe bet.
The fear of being portrayed as a creeper or accused of sexual harassment is one of the largest roadblocks to more traditional ways of meeting romantic partners. An older acquaintance of mine seemed to not understand why I said I would never in a million years try to flirt with a girl at the gym. And that was before the whole recent kerfuffle where some tik tok girl was doing hip thrusts in a skimpy gym outfit and accused some guy in the background of basically eye raping her so she could get internet clout (and presumably subscriber to her OnlyFans). The reaction and public backlash to that tik tok stunt was on the one hand encouraging, since the girl apologized and it was widely recognized that what she did was ridiculous. On the other hand, many of the comments from men on various videos and articles about the incident were very depressing. Some said that they now purposefully go to the gym when they have figured out women won’t be there and others say they try to have the minimal amount of interaction with women at the gym as possible.
A little bit after that incident, a woman who was filming herself at the gym was doing squats and got stuck and no one helped her for quite a while. When the video was posted people began to immediately associate all the men keeping their distance with the aforementioned video that had everyone in a tizzy. Tim Pool more or less sums up both instances here.
Now, just expand this phenomenon out to the rest of society and you can see why men are reluctant to approach women in public, even without all the pressure from fear of rejection etc. Let's look at the math that goes through men’s minds. Not only does approaching a woman to talk in public mean that you run the risk of being rejected, which is unpleasant, but there is also the risk that for daring to speak to a woman in public you will be labeled a creepy perv. Is it surprising that more and more men do the math and conclude it would just be safer and all around easier to go home and watch porn instead?
To me, the key issue is the breakdown of norms. Men can definitely be creepy and inappropriate. But the problem now is that there is not a standard definition of what being a creep means. Our society is at the point where people can seriously argue about whether it was creepy to just leave your number with the check for the cute waitress. Men who don’t want to be creepy are stuck not knowing whether the girl they want to approach is one of the ones who complains that men never come up and talk to her and wants it to happen, or one of the ones you need to worry will call HR/the police. What if she thinks I am some kind of scummy pick-up artist? The safest course is to just say to hell with all of it.
It would be great if everyone just had an update to our norm files in our brains and we were all on the same page. That won’t happen, so what are we to do?
I think that ultimately, we men just have to suck it up and go for it and start trying to talk to women in public places. With the lack of social norms we have little choice but to create rules for our own behavior and use those rules to govern our interactions with women in public. As I mentioned before I am more of a cave-dwelling gremlin than a dating coach or something, but it seems to me that the keys to attempting to flirt in public with a clear conscious are to make sure you don’t come across as a weirdo or threatening (for example, don’t go touching a woman on her shoulders or something, don’t block her way) and to make sure that you accept rejection (if it happens) with grace and tact.
Of course, one should also make efforts to be clean, in shape etc.
Even if you do everything correctly, don’t come across as weird or threatening, and accept rejection with grace and tact there is no guarantee that you won’t end up being pilloried on femi-nazi/cynical Onlyfans creator tik tok. But ultimately, the way I think about it is that good parents will face any risk or endure any amount of discomfort to save their kids if they are in danger. Well, in a way your kids are in danger right now. Danger of never existing. So for their sake, we ultimately have to man up and just try and make our way as best we can.
It Takes Two to Tango: Men Aren’t the Only Problem
Now, I am sure that some readers are probably a bit annoyed at the way I have framed things above, perhaps thinking that I have portrayed everyone as more or less actors without agency tossed and turned about by the structural currents. I do not think that is true, but we have to recognize these structural problems to better understand how individual people can best act in the face of them.
I have been pretty clear that men in general are randy beings who have to control their urges and that for some of us are taking advantage of the current structure to go wild. Men have to control these urges and work on becoming good men. There are currently about 7 million prime working age men who are not working and are basically mooching off their parents, the government, and their girlfriends (I try not to dwell on the fact that apparently some such bums have girlfriends and I do not because it is quite depressing).
However, women also have agency and are not merely buffeted about by structural incentives with no control. The reality is that many men find many contemporary women to be undateable and undesirable, even if they are smoking hot.
I am just going to speak frankly here and not bother to try and sugar coat things. I can’t begin to describe how many conversations I have had with male friends who bemoan that a woman is physically attractive but has basically been ruined by feminism. In general this means that women have adopted attitudes that are profoundly unfeminine and unattractive to men. Think of the stereotypical pink/purple haired angry ranting feminist. But even to lesser degrees than that women have adopted many views that are rather hard for men to honestly accept.
An academic friend of mine sent me this chart from a project he is working on where he polled people on if they thought that having kids was good or bad. Women (and Democrats) responded that it is bad.
Some men don’t want kids, but deep down a lot ultimately do. Now, to some degree anti-natalist attitudes can be attributed to the apocalyptic environmental attitudes that younger people have been brainwashed with. But there is also just a pervasive anti-life attitude among many modern people. Deep down I suspect that even many men who are ostensibly pro-choice are quite horrified and turned off by some of the rhetoric that women use when it comes to abortion rights. In reality women arguing for abortion access is pretty much the most anti-woman thing one can do when it comes to the archetypal woman/wife/mother. No doubt the horrible side-effects of hormonal birth control contribute to this as well.
Another important factor in all of this is the simple biological fact that at a certain point women can no longer have children. There is a ticking clock. Yet, increasingly marriage and children are pushed back for career and other reasons.
It might be cruel and unfair, but the reality is that men are generally virile far into old age. Ultimately, if a man wants to have children he can marry a younger women, even when he is in middle age and women his age are going through menopause. In fact, a middle aged man is likely to be much more attractive to younger women since he likely now has a high, secure, and stable income. Ultimately, the odds for finding a wife improve for men as time goes on, assuming one doesn’t turn into a total schlub. That is not true for women, and it must be acknowledged.
There is another elephant in the room, and that is the extreme loosening of sexual mores stemming from the structural reasons discussed above. Many women are acting in a more sexually loose way than would previously be considered acceptable. Simply look at the stunning growth of OnlyFans creators:
Millions of women are effectively online prostitutes. No matter what men say, most of them don’t want to marry a prostitute. They might want to mess around and have fun with one, but they most likely won’t want to marry one.
A lot of these things can be chalked up to youthful mistakes, and it is very sad to think about all the pain and regret that so many young women are going to have in the future. It is especially depressing considering how the vast majority of women aren’t even making money from all this.
According to these stats, the average creator on OnlyFans makes only $151 a month and “the best 1% of accounts earned 33% of all money on OnlyFans, while the top 10% of accounts earned 73% of all the money.” So in other words, 90 percent of accounts are only making 33 percent of the money.
Even if the majority of women were raking in tons of cash from their OnlyFans, that would hardly be a reason to do it, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of women are basically making no money in exchange for posting nude pictures online where they will probably be floating around forever is just heaping indignity upon indignity.
Now, why am I bringing this up? I think it needs to be addressed that both men and women’s expectations need to be dialed down some and we both need to work on improving ourselves.
Being a thot, as the youth say, is not a good look. But ultimately, I certainly cannot cast the first stone in condemnation. But at the same time, Jesus commanded the adulteress to “go and sin no more”. Personally, I don’t think I would mind dating and or marrying a woman who had formerly done OnlyFans/had a high “bodycount” and then stopped and regretted it. But I must admit that I am likely an outlier here among men in general when it comes to women I would be fine dating.
A lot of my male friends are rather horrified that I would not be bothered if my wife made more money than me and I stayed home and took care of the kids while writing. As long as it didn’t bother my wife I sure as heck wouldn’t care. And while I love my friends, I ultimately don’t give a damn if they think that would be weird. The same applies to my not caring if a woman has a past sexual history that many other men would find unattractive/and or being “cucked”.
However, not many men feel like I do. I would contend that it might perhaps be beneficial for men in general to be more forgiving and merciful when it comes to this. I would point out that Christian men are called to love our wives as Christ loves the Church. And I would further point out that Christ himself was a descendant of David, who was himself a descendant of Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho, who was counted among the righteous who had faith.
Women also have to make some changes to be more realistic. There literally are not enough college educated men for every college educated woman to marry. Its just simple math and it seems that in the wake of Covid even fewer men are going to college so that disparity will likely only continue to get worse.
If women continue to reject men because they are not 6’5” chads, then they are increasing the odds that they will be left without a seat when the music stops in the musical chairs of dating.
Ultimately, we are all broken people and we are called to have mercy and love one another as Christ loves us. If you are looking for perfection you won’t find it.
The structural issues that have been discussed at length are very real, but we still have agency. Everyone can work to fight against these issues, especially if you are aware of them. And in doing so, everyone will be a lot better off if we treat each other with mercy, understanding, and have realistic expectations from each other.
Remember. No blackpilling!
