The “Dating Market” Is Getting Worse b A. Fetters and K. Tiffany
For anyone who cannot wait to get to it, here’s the link to the piece on The Atlantic:
(Link): The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse
Some of my comments about that piece before I put in some excerpts from it:
About the only “numbers approach” I have ever mentioned on my own blog here is that Christian women really do unnecessarily limit themselves if they try to live out the “Be Equally Yoked” philosophy in regards to dating and marriage, because the reality is, yes, the math is that there are not enough single, Christian men to go around for all the Christian single women who’d like to marry.
So, it makes sense to forgo the “equally yoked” rule, if one is a Christian, to date outside the Christian faith.
At the same time, though, I have seen other adults singles make much too much out of the “numbers game” philosophy on dating sites or comments sections on blogs about dating, where they make finding a romantic life partner sound so cold, or as though they’re shopping for a car.
There’s nothing wrong with having standards, but I am afraid there is a category of single adult who is too stringent or unrealistic with their lists of “must haves.”
I am personally turned off by anyone dispensing dating or “how to get married” advice who behave as though there is a sure-fire guarantee way to land a spouse – because (Link): there is no such thing.
So, I’m really turned off by the many (sexist) attitudes and lists out there telling women if only the women do X, Y, and Z, they will absolutely get married to a great guy.
One problem is that most of these lists (which go viral on Twitter) are predicated on the notion that all men want and prefer 1950s, submissive, uber-feminine women.
Well, I lived that way for many decades – I was raised in a very traditional family that was into conservative values – so I had many of those prized traits sexist men online say will grant a woman a husband, but I remain never-married into my late 40s.
I was a very meek, docile, passive, sweet woman with traditional values, and no, it didn’t get me a husband.
(As I’ve aged, I’ve realized that it’s not a healthy or safe dating strategy for a woman to fit the picture of docile, overly feminine, passive, etc, that the “dating advice” gurus suggest on twitter and elsewhere, because many abusive, selfish, or controlling men intentionally seek out women with such qualities so that they can control, abuse, or take advantage of them.)
There are many conservatives – including women authors, unfortunately – who keep writing dating advice books for women, or who go on to FOX cable news morning shows, who keep encouraging women to engage in these dangerous dating strategies (of being a doormat, where being “feminine” is associated with doormat behaviors), which I’ve written about before (Link): here and (Link): here, among other blog posts.
The article below states at one point that men out-number women on dating sites. That may be so on some sites, but certainly not all.
Years ago, I had a paid membership on a dating site, and the site was forever claiming they could find no matches for me, most of the time.
For the four or five month paid subscription I had, I was only linked up to a total of about three men in that time.
My research on that particular online dating company found it’s the same with a lot of women, as it had been for me: that site tends to only “dribble out” a tiny number of matches for women, while they send male members more matches per month, every month.
Here are excerpts from…
(Link): The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse
The old but newly popular notion that one’s love life can be analyzed like an economy is flawed—and it’s ruining romance.
…It’s understandable that someone like Liz [a 30 year old single who is using dating apps to find dates] might internalize the idea that dating is a game of probabilities or ratios, or a marketplace in which single people just have to keep shopping until they find “the one.”
The idea that a dating pool can be analyzed as a marketplace or an economy is both recently popular and very old:
For generations, people have been describing newly single people as (Link): “back on the market” and (Link): analyzing dating in terms of supply and demand.
Continue reading “The “Dating Market” Is Getting Worse by A. Fetters and K. Tiffany”
Christian Pundit 