22
votes
How dating became a market, and the consequences that follow from this
Link information
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- Title
- The 'Dating Market' Is Getting Worse
- Authors
- Ashley Fetters, Kaitlyn Tiffany
- Published
- Feb 25 2020
- Word count
- 2985 words
This is how I met my wife.
It's easier to get a date if you are happy and content. There is something fundamentally unappealing about someone who seems easy to get. For me, this meant I got a lot of flirting when I was in a committed relationship, and absolutely none when I was single.
One of my female friends, who was spoken for, wanted to set me up. She pitched me to a cute friend of hers. Her friend asked if I was single. When my friend said I was single, the response was "Well, what's wrong with him???"
I thought of one more book for you. The best book I have ever read on dating was The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by Shel Silverstein.
There's this one quote from Adventure Time I keep going back to in regards to relationships. "Such is the cruel physics of love -- that those who crave it most will repel it and only the dang rich get richer."
Dating is kinda brutal, TBH. You wouldn’t date without desire, but once you start the game you gotta conceal the hole in your soul. It doesn’t help that we’re all fucked up in special and surprising ways. Relationships are not much easier, at least for me that is.
Hard disagree. I find honesty much more attractive and someone who's leading on as a perfect individual will get me to disengage pretty quickly. There should be an appropriate amount of recognition of one's flaws. That being said, you shouldn't be leading with all your flaws either.
I wish more people were like you.
Where as the physics of a long term relationship is more like the Pina Colada song.
Well that's a discouraging quasi-endorsement of what can only be called "blackpill theory" because of the sheer defeatism of the quote.
On a more serious note this is like climate change but no one knows why it's happening.
The quote comes from a composite intelligence born when their robot siblings were squished together in a trash compactor and left for dead. Not exactly an upbeat character, that one.
I kind of saw it as an explanation of a paradox of narcissism, where the people who want impossible amounts of love and validation are trying to fill a hole in their bucket with water, where as people that have some and can hold onto it make do with what they have.
Jacques Allan Miller says to love is to lack and to be loved is to be absent in the other.
Or something like that, I’m translating.
Admittedly I posted this mainly because of the 'dating is now a game' aspect of the article and I don't think anyone knows why this is happening.
A combination of a society more focused on the individual, less of a financial and social incentive to couple up to the detriment of emotional needs, and the current state of things being a bit of a trashfire might have something to do with it?
Online dating, prodding people to treat dating like a checklist task where you compare features like you’re buying a car certainly doesn’t help.
I’m very glad I met my wife before Tinder got popular. It was there, but in my area there were only like, a 100 or so women in my age range and I swiped through them all pretty quickly. I also just really didn’t like it. Something about the experience felt very Papers, Please.
Yeah, although I feel the cost of stuff would force people together so they can afford stuff like rent, even if that's not a very social or ethical arrangement. IMO stuff like mental health and our social problems are one of the very few things I don't see a systemic cause for and think is actually up to us to fix.
The systemic argument would be that we need to better our environment to better ourselves, and trying to bootstrap yourself to mental health like a weight loss program is a folly. That is probably an oversimplification of things, but modern society does have a bit of a trust deficit that wasn't there before, this probably feeds into the dating problem and we probably should do something about that before things get worse.
With this logic I should be extra desirable given that I have 5 partners! 😂
They are all very independent people but you are absolutely correct that scheduling things can become a hassle and I am in many ways 'poly-saturated' and limited by time. I see most of my partners once a week to once every other week. I wish I could see them more often but distance and other factors limit this.
I'm an extrovert so if you're referring to mental stamina, I get recharged by being around my partners not drained... frankly, I'd rather have all my days taken up by partners but that's just not a possibility in my life rn.
Only if the extra partners make you extra happy, and extra fun to be around.
They do!
Lucky you!
As someone which is a bit socially awkward, these people that are dating left and right amaze me, it's like we live in a different world. Which given how radically our perception of the social space differs, might well be the case.
Quirky is good.
Embrace your quirks.
I wonder if it's really a quick or more of a social class thing, I doubt I'm the only one that is mis-adapted to new forms of sociability.
The whole idea of dating seems so nerve-wracking and exhausting to me. I had a hard enough time just getting accepted as a housemate somewhere, I don't wanna go through a process like that again.