Yeah, i got out of the dating pool many years ago, not worth the fakeness nor the drama
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I’ve been checked out of serious dating for a few years too. I still go on occasional dates, but I’m not stringing any of those gals along about my long term intentions. I can only promise a good time. I’m not a solution to your problems.
I would love to meet a gal who is a better cook than me, in a good financial spot with her act together and a similar lack of baggage who might be interested in working part time to play homemaker. I’d also entertain a role reversal with the right kind of sugar momma.
I just haven’t found one and it doesn’t particularly bother me at this point in my life. Modern feminists have made me into a very strong, independent man who doesn’t need a woman in his life. I’d particularly like to thank them for giving me no choice but to learn how to cook, resulting in me becoming a better cook than most women.
Enjoy your cats, ladies.
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Hey, i have a cat, 
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My bio would say:
I love long naps
Make a damn good pizza
And yeah, its going in your butt.
Gotta keep it simple and to the point.
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You can ask a man these questions at any time, including during your first phone conversation, even in a first email. Not all men feel comfortable broadcasting everything publicly.
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I used to have nightmares about having yo go back to college, now I have nightmares about dating again. Sure, I have other really fucked up dreams, but I have a fucked up job, so those are fine. But dating, that makes me wake up in a cold sweat.
I have 3. Awesome companions.
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I’m not really a cat guy, but I did once bond with a roommate’s cat. I get it.
Dogs are just like one million times better, but I understand cat people too.
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See, I think this is, as @T3hPwnisher says, “a people thing.”
Remove the bitter jabs specifically at women, and this was exactly my attitude for dating. I dated only men who at first glance had their shit together. I had a brief-ish relationship with a Peter Pan type that made me a little more questioning, less polite and accepting. When I became more deeply involved with the guy who would become my husband, there was a conversation about debt and savings. Had that conversation not gone well, I would have ended things, or maybe just taken it less seriously. Because I also have no interest in saving someone from himself. And it’s really not practical, given my profession and relatively low pay.
I looked up the piece of my husband’s dating profile I have in old emails, and his first self-descriptive line was “I’m easy going and love to laugh.” Then it went on to describe “active looking for someone blah blah travel blah blah museums blah blah outdoors stuff.” But easy going and love to laugh certainly caught my attention. And ten years later, for the most part it’s true. Bad moods are relatively rare for both of us, though they do occur, as do fights, but for the most part life is cheerful. And really, what more can you ask?
As I look back at both of our profiles, there’s nothing untrue in them. He is active, we have traveled a good bit (he travels for work, so until Covid it was very easy and cheap for us with hotel, car, and airline points), he likes museums (I tolerate them) and he’s an outside guy. I still love my work and my hobbies and like spicy food and laughing and am affectionate (suffocatingly so).
Dating, online or in person, takes patience and optimism, along with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Guy has probably taken his hits, too.
Exactly. Or in person, for that matter. I dropped long correspondences after a bit, going for a quick midday Saturday lunch if they seemed at all reasonable.
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Oh, the jab wasn’t bitter and it was merely directed at modern feminists, not all women. The irony of my peaceful, stable situation is that it is the expected outcome of cultivating the notion that women don’t need men any more than a fish needs a bicycle. You’ll end up with fewer women making choices that make themselves attractive to most men and instead making choices that modern feminists suggest are good. Good for them, they’re out there living their life.
You’ll end up with more men like me in peaceful, financially stable situations who become uninterested in disrupting it and fewer women who are even under consideration for the job, which doesn’t actually need to be filled over here at @twojarslave, inc.
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I was here for that! Glad it’s worked out well.
Hi @EmilyQ. Things are good here, too.
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I view mainstream feminism differently. Sure, there are man-haters, but those, in my experience, are the fringe. In the middle, where I live, I see it as giving me the same opportunity as you to live a peaceful, financially stable life sans the stomach-churning disruption of an angry or otherwise undesirable man.
So now, thanks to the bra-burners, we fish don’t need bicycles, but I happen to be a feminine fish with a bent for masculine bicycles. I’m also pretty flexible and easy going, so imperfect bike rides don’t send me into vapors. That being the case, I happily traded my peaceful, financially stable solo life for a mostly peaceful life of bicycling. My husband is not a feminist, but he does like my income and other advantages my job confers. Mostly he likes me, and I think wants me to be happy, though sometimes an argument is necessary to get to the happy part, where I feel respected and he feels like he has his contented wife back.
I’ve had intimate conversations with probably now more than a thousand people, and only once have I heard a woman express hatred for men. Many times I’ve heard some variation on “DONE” from women who’ve been in shitty relationships and now want their peace undisrupted, but mostly I hear yearning for a good relationship. I’m a social worker, and you’d think the hard core feminists would be thick on the ground in my world, but even in college and grad school I never encountered one of the feminists that garner so much attention for their rage against men. Most women want a man, as most men want a woman.
I’m always stunned to realize that our combined income at my house puts us in the top 10%, and I think there’s something there that can be applied to other areas of functioning. I think of myself as very average in most ways, though I know I’m in better shape than most women my age, and brighter. When I consider the men I know, there are so very few of them that I could ever see myself being happy with. And again, I see myself as relatively average and very flexible. Nevertheless I need someone in the top 10% of desirable - but specifically to ME, @Spock81 would not make the same choices.
Anyway, this is why I think patience is so needed for people wanting to couple. Only 10 out of every 100 people are going to fall into that 90th percentile, and if you’re shopping for something even finer, less.
I think that better accounts for your “fewer women who are even under consideration for the job” than that the feminists have changed everyone.
And it also speaks to the OP’s frustration.
Hi LoRez! Are you married now?
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I have no doubt there are many men just like me, or @Bauber or @fitafter40 in Spock’s or the OP’s area. Fellas who are mostly checked out of the game, or would be if they found themselves back in it. And yep, it’s always been a numbers game to a degree.
When I speak of modern feminism, I’m referring to the waves that they refer to themselves in. I’m no scholar of gender studies, but we’re in the fourth wave presently. I’m mostly on board with the first and second waves. The third wave was starting to stretch it, and the fourth wave is just manufacturing issues to be outraged against in the absence of any actual inequality, like the mythical gender pay gap and the absurd concept of toxic masculinity.
My concern with feminism is not of “man-hating”. I’ve only ever encountered a few outright misandrists, and those were in the workplace, not dates. My concern is how modern feminism shapes behaviors like promiscuity and attempts to redefine gender norms. This I have experienced quite a bit. One of my pandemic-era dates was with a lovely veterinarian, same age as me from Chile. We met in jiu jitsu class, so we already had something in common.
The date went south real quick when I opined that men are just as vital as women for the well-being of a child. It turns out, that was exactly the right thing for me to say because we cut to the chase right away. She also had a lot of ugly things to say about other men I knew in BJJ, immediately assuming that her perceived mistreatment was due to malice or judgement of women. It wasn’t, she was just a new student and didn’t understand just how tight of a club it is among people who have been doing BJJ together for years. You aren’t in it yet, not because you’re a woman, but because you just got here.
I had no interest in conforming to her vision of masculinity and no interest in attempting to convince her otherwise. We weren’t a good match at all, except on paper.
When I think of the outcomes of feminism over the last 30 years or so, I can’t think of too many positives. I can only observe a very thin pool of women I’d even consider dating seriously, which is okay for me because I’m better off single than I was in any of my recent relationships, and it isn’t even close.
When you think of the outcomes of feminism over the last 30 years or so, meaning third and fourth wave, what do you consider the positive outcomes that have come from it? What are the positive behaviors that it shapes?
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If we learn anything in life, it’s that a relationship involves two people. Like any bad result that keeps repeating itself, you need to ask if maybe you are the problem. So those women, if you know them well enough, probably reveal through their daily lives the reasons why their relationships always fail.
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I am. I disappeared in the midst of wedding planning and house building (both of which were successful; it’s about the 7 year anniversary for both), then did lots of mountain hiking, then some job changes, and kids, and eventually made my way back here.
My oldest just started Kindergarten this week.
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Do you think this has been achieved in the US? I ask, because when talking with my SIL recently, she does not think so (at all). She is of the opinion that things are still much harder for women. That any issues men face are small compared to what women endure. I didn’t like that attitude TBH. I think it should be okay to acknowledge both sides face unique issues, and it isn’t a competition for who has it worse. That acknowledging men face issues shouldn’t be seen as denying women face their own issues (which I’ve noticed happens when bringing up men’s issues).
It is difficult for me as a man to see things how a woman does (or in this case a specific woman, my SIL). I have little confidence in my ability to gauge the difficulties faced by women.
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I think we can imagine it. I can think of a few things women must face these days and have faced for a long time.
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If attractive, the sexual objectification done by nearly all men, with plenty of those men considering women little more than masturbation tools, to be manipulated, used and discarded. An attractive young woman is bombarded by male sexual interest. Dealing with constant offers to “hang out” and “date” or even unwanted physical touching and bad manners, I think all that is a huge burden. With beauty comes added responsibility. Some young women might not even be aware of the sexual intentions of the their male “friends”. Hence you’ll hear some of them say, “most of my friends are guys,” not knowing they’re just biding time in hopes of gaining her sexual interest.
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Being physically weaker than nearly all adult men. This puts women’s safety at higher risk than ours. A women cannot roam about as freely as we can if she has awareness of lunatic men in this world.
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The prejudice of men, even men that are not bad men. Eg, “Women don’t belong in engineering,” or something like that.
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Tell her to go become a lumberjack, work on an offshore oil rig, or marry a woman.
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Oh, but it is, at least in the modern era. Our society has, in fact, commoditized the perception of victimhood. Making people perceive (insert group here) as victims is a principal lever for power in modern politics. That power is put to work in all kinds of ways, from funding to school policies, civil rights laws, corporate culture and popular culture.
That’s why modern feminists are hand-in-hand allies with critical theorists, both of whom condition young people to assume racist, homophobic or sexist intent for bad outcomes. That’s why a highly educated woman I went on a date with assumed that she was being excluded because of sexism, and not the fact that she’s just not a full member of the BJJ club on week 2.
If I’m being cynical, I can at least praise modern feminism for making sure there are no shortage of women interested in hooking up. If not for that I may have settled for a really bad match a long time ago. Of course, this isn’t good for women and it isn’t good for me, but people gotta eat.
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It seems that often when I say something defending men I just get deemed as hating women. When the contrast happens though it’s seen as empowering. It can happen both ways. Far too many people struggle to have an intelligent conversation about the problems because they jump straight to an “us vs. them” rhetoric.
Mix this with an insecure man and a girl with a promiscuous past and it’s the perfect recipe for a relationship full of fireworks. Before it starts, during, and when it ends.
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