Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

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There's a group missing here. We're discussing stories talking about a demographic of women that are unhappy with the men they date, and also about a demographic of men that aren't dating at all.

The men unable to get a date at all clearly have some work to do - even when there's so many unhappy women, there is something they're still doing or not doing that makes them even less appealing.

The unhappy women and the men they're currently dating are a more curious situation. Are the men unsatisfied with them in particular, and so these women have work to do to convince a man they're "marriage material"? Or are the men simply not looking for anything that serious at all?

The general position of the media coverage is that it's the latter: the women can't "make themselves good enough for marriage" because the men just want the casual merry-go-round to continue. And there are certainly men quoted in articles about this who feel exactly that, but I can't say for certain that we're missing another group who just finds these women lacking.

My personal view is that we've shifted a bit, so the "growing up" that would've normally happened for these men in their early 20s is now ten years behind or so, but I see it happening in my cohort now as everyone is in their mid-30s. So I'm not too concerned for that side of things.

When you have 4 women who wants to date 1 man then they will feel fierce competition and that everything just gets handed to guys. Similarly the 3 men those women refuse to date will feel that dating is a woman's game.

So your belief is that these guys are just in constant relationships, jumping from one to the next with so many options that they never take those relationships to the next stage? The parent poster claimed that the vast majority of breakups are initiated by women, though! So there's a curious adjacency between the idea that everything just gets handed to them and the idea that women disapprove of them and find them wanting. Their standards are simultaneously too high and too low? Do we just believe women are stupid? "I need to give this man whatever he wants because there's only 1 of him for every 4 women, but then I'm gonna dump him the first time I get annoyed!"?? Really? None of these ideas really fits anyone I personally know, either.

The idea that only some small fraction of men get any dates at all flies in the face of everything I've seen. Is there any solid demographic data suppporting this idea that only 1 in 4, or 1 in 10, or whatever, men is actively dating or in a relationship? Not message data from a dating app, because there's a LONG process between "sent a message on a dating app" and "in a relationship" but actual data on relationships. In the world as its being described here, you'd have a huge perpetually-single population...

I believe the actual "can't find a date to save my life" crowd is much smaller and less representative than it thinks it is. The internet is very perspective-distorting here. These are all surface-level-plausible claims that don't seem to hold up to any real scrutiny.

Those men doesn't even enter relationships, which is what women complains about. They feel those guys have way too high standards, and they destroy themselves trying to live up to them.

And ultimately women have to settle, as you say the math doesn't work out and in the end they want a relationship. But that doesn't help the young men who aren't old enough to be in the strike zone of more mature women. And since the women felt they settled when they went with this man of course it is they who initiate divorce and end the relationship since they always felt that they could do better.

Aha, so it's men that you have a low opinion of! "All they care about is sex so they never commit so these women sleep with them in hopes that they'll have a real relationship but then the men never let it go anywhere, and all the women are competing over this small pool of sex-obsessed assholes." In which case a narrative blaming men is bang-on accurate, but IMO this is nothing like the majority of relationships, especially as you get further from age 20 or so...

"Live, try things out, settle down when you're ready to" sounds fine to me, since again, these groups of unhappy women and undateable men tend to be loud but I see no evidence that they're demographically dominant percentages. Way too many ... not-the-most-attractive... dudes out there getting married for the math to add up...

> Aha, so it's men that you have a low opinion of!

Why are you making this about sides? I don't have a low opinion of either side, I'm just making observations. Stop looking for a fight.

You could just as easily say it’s women’s fault for finding only very highly desirable men attractive. But ultimately this is about biology, there’s no one to blame but Mother Nature. The sooner we can automate away the infrastructure that supports society and disappear into a virtual reality of our design the better - just like every other sentient species that has ever existed.

Biology is certainly some of it, but culture also plays a major under-acknowledged role in determining what attractive means.

28% of men and 18% of women between the ages of 18 and 30 report having had no sex in the past year. So, that would be 1 in 4 men, approximately. That's as of 2018, with a trendline going very distinctly up.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...

Wow, that is a shocking chart. It looks like it was 10% in 2008 and by 2018 it's already 28%. That's a huge jump.

Just wait till you see the chart for 2020.

> There's a group missing here. We're discussing stories talking about a demographic of women that are unhappy with the men they date, and also about a demographic of men that aren't dating at all

We are not doing that. There is a lot of discussion about men who cant find partners. The common assumption in those is that women are never single if they dont want it. There is occasional pearl clutching about women who dont seek stable long term partner.

On HN, there is basically no discussion about what women think or want. And where such discussion is, what women say is ignored and instead male guesses are taken as gospel - even if man making those guesses interacts exclusively with males and dont know any woman close enough for her to tell him what she thinks.

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