Is dating broken?
A conversation on dating culture.
Hi all! We’ve made it to the end of year (well, almost) and this will be the last newsletter in your inbox until January, when we have something very cool to share with you. But in the meantime, you can get your fill of conversations like these essays in the Diem app. Join us via iOS, or Android (we also have a web app!)
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I was at my friend Grace’s comedy show the other night and she (very amusingly) described a not-so-funny interaction she had with a man at the bar recently in London. The story went like this: After initially expressing interest in her, the aforementioned man started telling her she was ‘low value.’ For any of you who are clued into Andrew Tate-coded language, this is how he talks about women who have slept with lots of men. His take is that every time a woman has sex with another man, she loses a bit of her value. By contrast, men become more ‘high value’ when they sleep with more women. Furthermore, ‘high value’ men gain more value from sleeping with ‘high value’ women (aka ‘virgins’). My friend—thank god—took this insanity in stride and managed to make us all laugh.
One of the most popular topics in Diem this year was dating. Specifically, Diemers vented about heterosexual dating woes and ‘how to find good men’. In related news, there’s been an uptick this year in advice columnists telling women to get married in order to solve all their problems. Writer Anna Louie Sussman articulated my favorite response to that sentiment in her recent Opinion piece for the New York Times. “To truly address the decline in heterosexual marriage, we must attend to the details — to acknowledge the qualitative aspects of relationship formation. And, in particular, we should listen to the experiences of women who are attempting to find partners. We should care about the interior lives, not just the educational attainment or the employment status, of the men who could be those partners.”
In this newsletter and in Diem, we’ve discussed the commercialization of dating, the simultaneous rise of incels, and how those phenomena might be impacting the heterosexual dating landscape (often negatively, for all involved). A 2019 study found that the lonelier people are today, the more they rely on dating apps. That loneliness can also skew one’s perception of dating into deep frustration—one where we often see men blaming women and women blaming themselves.
Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating and relationships. He found that nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they had trouble finding someone who met their expectations. Only one-third of men felt the same. In more in-depth interviews with those surveyed, Cox unearthed mixed messages about the broader culture around toughness and vulnerability, as well as the activity-oriented nature of male friendships. It seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said. Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added. One of the most interesting anecdotes from the survey comes in the form of a high school creative writing assignment that Cox read about, where boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise or did so resentfully. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra, and the boys do little or nothing.”
I’ll leave you with this quote from Sussman, which feels particularly relevant to the sentiment I’ve seen crop up time again in Diem:
“With no clear policy solution in sight. It requires taking the stories of single women seriously and not treating them as punchlines — something for which there is little historical precedent but which a handful of scholars are slowly beginning to do. But unless we pay attention to the granular experiences of people in the dating trenches, simply advising people to marry is not only, frankly, obnoxious for the many women out there trying; it’s also just not going to work.”
What are your thoughts or current dating experiences? Does this line up with your viewpoint? Come chat with me in Diem! I’ll be hanging out in the replies all day.
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