There IS a dating problem in the western world. Something of a dating crisis, really. Traditional methods of pairing-up have fallen by the wayside and have been replaced by a mess that doesn't work.A common theory says that women are instinctually hypergamous, and will seek out the highest status man available. The peasant girl wants to marry the prince, And if she goes on a date with the prince, then no other man is good enough.However, this joke of an idea won't fix it. It is just another gimmick that doesn't address any root cause and just won't work.
We are kind of stuck. There is simply no going back to the old world. The kinds of technologies that shape our daily lives make doing so a ridiculous prospect. The Internet, in particular. It has made a fundamental change in how we connect with each other (and a whole lot of stuff I won't bother to mention because nobody wants to read a novel here anyway). The old world is gone.
But the new world is broken. Especially when it comes to dating. And dating sites are a major contributor to this broken world. They present us with a selection environment utterly unlike the one in which we evolved. Much like the way in which modern food abundance gives free reign to instincts that should have been naturally curtailed (and drive up obesity and diabetes), so to does the modern dating site give free reign to instincts that only serve us when naturally constrained by a much more limited environment.
To put it bluntly: dating sites motivate the upper 20% of attractive people to have short term sexual flings with each other while leaving the other 80% alone and disappointed. 100% of the people want to date the top 20%, so this is what you get. The people that "everybody want" will never commit because they have too many options, and everyone else will never settle in the face of such desirability a seeming mere click away.
It gets worse. Those in the 80% who actually do settle for an "even match" both feel like they are getting less than they deserve, both feel like the other should be grateful for settling, and hence both feel like they bring more value than the other and hence the other owes more. That dooms the relationship.
And for the upper 20%, once any of them decide to stop sleeping around and find a life-mate, they generally find a barren wasteland. Some of them have aged out of the upper 20% and so are no longer desirable, and others find people who are in theory willing to commit but both of them have become so narcissistic that the relationship is doomed before it begins. And this says nothing of the life-destroying consequences of the inevitable divorce, when it happens.
No dating site will fix this, but we cannot just eliminate them. They are here to stay. It IS possible that a few individuals can enlighten themselves out of this mess and find a satisfying relationship that will last, but statistically speaking this is not a common event. And the threat of life-destroying divorce remains ever-present even for them.
I think that the first step in climbing out of this mess is to fix the divorce situation. People need to know that getting married is a financially safe thing to do. They need to know that they will not be facing a life of indentured servitude if the other decides to leave. And they need to see marriage as something other than a means of gaining access to someone else's money. We need a new definition for it and new laws to regulate it so that it once again becomes an agreement with social-support that fosters child bearing and family. This will require legislation and will be fiercely resisted by religious types who cling to the past and others who still want to use marriage as a means of financial enrichment. So, that's an uphill battle and probably lost already.
After that, we need much better social support for raising kids. It's expensive as hell, hard as hell, and takes two decades. People are more hesitant to sign up for that than ever. We need to take the edge off if we want more babies.
And after that it's mostly a matter of educating people as to how love actually works (no more hollywood romance bullshit), what their timeline is, and why they need to reflect on their life goals and proceed along a life plan if they want to feel accomplished and satisfied when they die.
Personally, my money is on "we are doomed."
That is an ancient story, but is exaggerated with urban opportunities and dating apps. An average woman can go on a date with a top 5% man, but he is unlikely to marry her. So all the women chase the alpha men, and get dumped. People do not find suitable mates, and everyone is unhappy.
There is no easy fix. We lack the political will to make any big changes, so we are probably doomed.
A NY Times op-ed details how no one knows what do about declining marriage and birth rates:
To date, no government policies have significantly improved their nation’s birthrates for a sustained period — at least no policies whose lessons are easily transferable to other countries. ...Usually behaviors can be changed with financial incentives, but they have not worked here. When women make more money, they become more picky about men, and not less picky.America has made parenting unusually, needlessly hard. Child care and rent are unaffordable; medical care, even when subsidized, is a nightmare of red tape; family leave is too short and too rare; everyone feels overextended and underachieving.
As the climate activists Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli have observed, the United States “is already an anti-natalist country in everything but name.” ...
Surveys conducted over the past few years show that Americans already want more kids than they are having; they’d like between 2.1 and 2.7 children on average, depending on the gender and age group questioned, which is half to a full child more than the 1.6 that women are actually having at present.
The highest fertility rates are in the poor and the rich. The rich do not need the financial incentives. Giving money to the poor just moves them out of the demographic having the most kids. So no nation has succeeded in paying people to have more kids.
She has her own unworkable ideas.
So what do America’s women actually need? Or to put it another way, is there a way to be natalist without also being patriarchal?She goes on to recite a bunch of feminist goals. But she admits they do not work either, as Denmark has created her feminist utopia, and still has declining birth rates.First, some facts about American women. A growing share of them are single; by one estimate, more than half of non-college-educated women born in the mid-90s will be single when they’re 45. Among women of reproductive age, a vast majority work. Women are increasingly having children in later years. And despite women’s growing earning power, they still do the lion’s share of housework, even when their husbands are unemployed.
But fewer women are marrying, at least in part because they’re having trouble finding appealing men. In addition to the partnering problem, many women report financial concerns as a major obstacle to having kids (or having more kids).
Helping heterosexual women have children, then, will require tackling toxic gender dynamics before and within marriage, and committing real, ongoing financial support
The most woman-friendly and birth-friendly regime I have come across so far is in Denmark, where child care is subsidized and extensive parental leave is provided. The public health ministry, which has offered free in vitro fertilization for single women as well as couples until the woman turns 41, recently started to cover treatment for a second child. Today medically assisted reproduction accounts for roughly 12 percent of Denmark’s births, compared with just over 2 percent in the United States. ...Denmark can maintain its population by importing foreigners, but it has tried that, and stopped it.Denmark’s policies haven’t changed the trajectory of the nation’s falling birthrate, which now stands at about 1.5 per woman.
Note that she does not want to roll back any of the feminist trends that led to the marriage and birth declines. Her main concern is giving women what they say they want, but women may be already getting too much of that. There is no mention of what would incentivise men.
Any plan to make marriage and children more attractive would need to consider what men want and need. But that does not seem to have occurred to the above author. Also what women say they want may not be what makes them happy. By most surveys, women were happier before the supposed gains of feminism.
Update: The NY Times celebrates Fathers Day by publishing a whiny narcissistic list of petty complaints. This is a good example of leftist feminist women devaluing fatherhood. by a woman about her father.