> start meeting new people and forming relationships with them, some of which may turn romantic.
I happen to think this is terrible advice, for whatever my 2 cents are worth.
I happen to think this is terrible advice, for whatever my 2 cents are worth.
Also, the advice to focus on meeting people and making friendships first is what _I_ got, and it's worked out pretty well for me. Even at times when I was single, enjoying what I had rather than pining for things I didn't was a much healthier attitude to life.
The way the professor put thing was less than ideal, to put it mildly. That was lacking in nuance and unprofessional. But "Stop thinking about life in terms of looking for a girlfriend, and start meeting new people and forming relationships with them, some of which may turn romantic" is excessively politically correct. That is: avoiding an unpleasant truth and coming up with platitudes instead to avoid it.
I've never been to the US, much less the bay area, so I can't vouch for the correctness of his views, but I have lived in different places in Europe, and there's definitely a difference in dating difficulty level between places. I don't entirely know why, there it definitely exists.
People want to have a loved one in their life. They want to have sex. They want to have that "special person" to laugh with. Your platitude sounds nice on the face of it, but it sounds a lot less nice if you've been without any of that for years, have dealt with uncountable rejections, and just feel lonely. "Friends" can only fill so much of that void. And not everyone is so extroverted they want to have lots of friends in the first place. And while some people may be fine without a partner for years, others really do have a need for it – different things work for different people.
I think it's reasonable to talk about all of this, and "dating is kind of hard here" is fair advice to give.
> The advice to focus on meeting people and making friendships first is what _I_ got, and it's worked out pretty well for me.
Yes, but you're a woman. This is significantly harder as a man. Women, especially, but also men, tend to treat you as hostile-by-default in the public sphere.
I've had plenty of girlfriends over the years, but by and large meeting one is work. "Just hang out and have the craic and end up with a girlfriend" can work, but is rare. Maybe if you're one of those very charismatic people, but most of us aren't. And again: not everyone wants to be doing this all the time in the first place.
People talk about "male privilege", but I like to call it "experience blindness": being blind for experiences of people outside of your own. This emphasises that it exists in both directions.
Related previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36473719 (not just the comment I linked to, also my reply to the top comment). While there are also ugly comments there, in general I found that to be an interesting discussion).