re: The Dating Crisis

This is a spiritual sequel to my previous writing, re: Online Dating. The scope of this writing is my own data and experiences, your data and experiences will vary.

I often see people dance around a big issue; dating is broken. This writing is concerned with why this is and how things could be better. Patterns in my own data and experiences have clarified a few common themes, which I’ve distilled here.

The origin of our current dating crisis is an intersection of many current events, including technology, over-qualification, wealth inequality, cultural worldview, and the masculinity crisis. re: online dating already explains how just one aspect of technology has revolutionized dating for better and worse.

I would organize the ongoing causes of the dating crisis into four major points:

1. Lack of Third Spaces & Opportunities for Social Interaction

Third spaces are all spaces that are not work or home. They are the places we are able to socialize and be seen. Restaurants, bars, nightclubs, theaters, venues, parks, and the great outdoors, to name a few. The quantity and quality of third spaces in our lives has mostly diminished as we have grown more isolated in our day to day lives. Many of our third spaces have become more expensive, less comfortable, outdated, or otherwise inhospitable. Our capacities to interact within them has also been undermined. Entertainment has been moved to screens at our fingertips. Hobbyist have been moved into internet chat rooms. Exercise has been put behind paywalls. People live on the internet. They don’t go out as often. Our culture is steadily becoming lonelier.

There is no one to meet at home and coworkers are typically unviable partners, thus, it’s third spaces where we meet people, but many of our remaining third spaces now shut you out. At the gym people put in their headphones and are focused on their workout. At the bar they just want to have an outing without being bothered. At a nightclub or concert good luck managing to break the ice with anyone over deafening music and poor lighting. Malls and movie theaters are closing across the nation. Many third spaces that were once cornerstones of American culture haven’t existed for a generation or two.

The health and availability of third spaces correlates to our ability to meet people. Every intimate interaction now hinges on bringing someone back to a private residence, which causes the sexual activity of our society to become anxiety-filled, class-bound, and choosy. These days everyone says they’re an introvert, but what’s really happening is they were born into a place that fails to empower their ability to be extroverted.

2. Reduced Leisure Time & Disposable Income

The cost of living is high and wages are low. The enormous and unsustainable costs of rents, education, and healthcare place financial burden on young people. People have to work more and work longer to get less. We have less time and money to pursue the things we want to do. We have less time to date. We have less money to spend on dates. We have more anxiety about trying to make the most of our time. We are less able to give others a chance. Young people are increasingly constrained and financially dependent on their parents, which further prevents them from socializing face to face like they used to. Even if we find someone to start a family with, it’s likely we cannot afford to. Society has been optimized to make all our time and space accounted for. You’re expected to spend all your productive hours at work and all your remaining time on human maintenance. When livelihood on a macroscopic scale is strained, it’s obvious that dating suffers.

3. Inflated Standards

Increased connectivity via the internet has created a dating culture of inflated standards. Social media is deceptive and paints a picture through selection bias that people are more attractive and their lives are more interesting than they really are. Dating apps have caused choice overload for straight women, forcing them to adopt inflated standards as a tool to sift through candidates. Many straight men have been disassociated from women to such a degree that they’re incentivized to direct low effort strategies to a large number of partners rather than high effort strategies on a small number of partners, thus further perpetuating the cycle. The lack of effort put into dating compounds the problem; people are less likely to put effort into a singular date, which fails to make it special or stand out, thus further convincing them there’s no point in wasting more effort on dates since they won’t go anywhere anyway. A series of poor previous dates also conditions people to see or assume the worst in people, further compounding the problem.

Inflated standards have motivated people to spend more time on their career, skills, and hobbies in the hopes of being competitive and alluring to potential partners, when this has given them less time and energy to actually meet or date potential partners. Many people are overqualified and under socialized. Inflated standards have caused people to believe that their value as a human being is correlated to their sex appeal, financial success, or personal achievement, or that they’ll only be considered valued as a partner if they possess those qualities. Simp and sugar culture as they relate to the masculinity crisis are an entire complex unto themselves which have further undermined dating due to their inherent power imbalances.

4. Romantic Desire

Overexposure of narrative media has created a cultural worldview that overvalues romantic desire and undermines other forms of love, romance, and intimacy. If you ask what most people who claim to seek a long-term relationship are looking for, it’s likely they’ll tell you “a spark”. This singular pursuit is not a healthy foundation for a sustainable relationship. By definition desire is a form of denial and you cannot desire that which you have obtained. Romantic desire is pleasurable, as many other forms of desire are; the entire reason cucking exists is because romanticism, the pursuit of desire, has inherent components of denial. The traits that cause a partner to be desired in this sense also make them unavailable; there must exist barriers between you and the desired. Seeking a relationship with barriers is often problematic.

Romantic desire is pervasive throughout our culture due to narrative media that fixates on it: Mark Antony, Pride and Prejudice, Gone with the Wind, Titanic, and nearly every contemporary YA novel or fanfiction. This has shaped each of our personal worldviews. Romantic desire is also inherently unsustainable. It is founded on conflict between partners for which the desire is allowed to come into existence; barriers which either cannot be overcome thus destroying the relationship, or will be overcome thus destroying romantic desire. Anyone who has been in a relationship with someone long enough has experienced it; the romantic desire was there and gradually it was lost or replaced with a different form of love.

Barriers of desire related to external factors between couples in modern society have become less common; we no longer live in the times of Romeo and Juliet. Instead, barriers are often internal, either caused by fundamental problems with a person’s behavior and tendencies, or something which is a fabrication of perception. Most people are horrible at perceiving others and instead project onto them, making assumptions to fill in the gaps. Most romantic desire is founded upon a person assuming the behaviors and tendencies of their partner before they truly know them, at which point the romantic desire wanes.

I’m going to propose something that most people won’t want to accept; the best partner for you, the person who would make you happy long-term, is someone who if you went out with, you might not find particularly exciting or click with right away. In the YA novel / fanfic narrative landscape they are often the less popular choice, the prince charming / princess or nice guy / shy girl trope; they may be physically attractive, intelligent, kind, dependable, and trustworthy, but most do not find them intriguing, exciting, alluring, dangerous, or desirable. A common misconception is that people pass over nice partners for those who mistreat them, when it would be more accurate to say people pass over stable partners they perceive as unexciting and available for volatile partners they perceive as exciting and unavailable. Most of us are guilty of this poor decision making at some point in our lives; rejecting a partner who would’ve been a good fit for us to pursue someone we foolishly perceived as more worthwhile who was never going to work. Until we overcome this cultural conditioning and mentality we will continue to allow desire to lead us to incompatible partners.

Those are the major problems. How do we fix them? Start with the simple and move to the more complex. Here are some suggestions:

1. Keep Standards Grounded & Be Open-Minded
Train yourself to remain focused on the things that matter in a partner, like their behavior, character, values, interests, direction, and goals. Do your best to shorten your list of dealbreakers. Accept that compromises are just as important in partner selection as they are in relationships. Be willing to explore different types of partners; the best person for you may have traits that you never would’ve considered valuable prior to meeting them.

2. Build Momentum
A single date, conversation, or interaction could be the difference between having a family and never finding anyone. A first date might be enough to spot major red flags, but for any partner with depth it won’t be enough to even scratch the surface of who they are. Escalate your efforts with time and put in effort regardless of your gender or status. Be creative and aim to create unique experiences. Be adventurous.

3. Integrate With Community & Support Third Spaces
Get hobbies, go out, and connect with your community. Interact with people face to face, attend events and festivals, and volunteer. All of these things will get you more involved in third spaces, more socialized, and given more opportunities to meet other people. With enough support you can encourage other people to enter those spaces, or even create new ones, increasing the quality of third spaces and the dating scene for everyone in your community.

4. Wealth Equality & Human Development
We must invest in ourselves and each other if we want a better world filled with love. Educate, organize, and agitate the status quo. Focus on discrete, concrete, incremental change. Become an expert in your field and be acquainted with others who can help make you more well-rounded and informed. Dismantle the built environment as a way to store wealth to make housing affordable. Make education and healthcare available to everyone, not only the wealthy. Reorganize tax structures to disincentivize exploitation and corruption while serving as the lifeline of our communities. Segregation in wealth, race, gender, age, sexual expression, and every aspect of our lives are the enemies of crafting and maintaining a healthy and loving society.