Many of our cities in north america don't have good access to third places anymore, due to both availability and cost.
I refuse to use online dating/friendship services so I struggle to meet friends and partners in the new citiy I moved to. Everyone at the local bar scenes is 15-30 years older than me, my outdoor local areas are homeless emcampments or riddled with needles and litter. I've met some people at my local climbing gym, but I find it difficult to get there between the cost of climbing and my physical labour job.
It almost feels like if you don't make the plans online you don't get to meet/hang out with people anymore and I'm not a huge fan of that.
Not OP, but the usual reply I see is, because dating companies are incentivized to keep you on their app, not get you a happy relationship, so you need to go through hundreds of dates and thousands of rejections, which can be mentally taxing.
Lots of bots too. Also texting online usually has a lot of shallow conversation or just pleasantries and everything fizzles out quickly. People get weirded out too if you try to date too quickly. Online dating sucks.
Online dating is so shit for the majority of hetero dudes. You're lucky if you match with somebody, luckier if you get to have some kind of discussion that doesn't end after a few messages, even luckier if it ends in a date, amazingly lucky if anything physical happens, and incredibly lucky if it turns into a relationship.
Men are expected to initiate, keep the discussion alive, ask out, keep the woman entertained, and be grateful they were chosen. It only gets worse online.
That's how I found out I might be a little attractive. Lots of stories about apps being ghost towns and it being hard to talk to people. I didn't struggle much to talk to people, went on dates and found my now fiancee that way.
this power imbalance is bad for everyone as well, if you meet up with someone via these (if are not male presenting), there is a concerningly high chance that you get sexually assaulted, I am terrified how common this seems to be among the women I've talked to
This is partly because the apps suck (because of capitalism/profit motive) and partly because we all suck.
Many people of all genders won't do better than "hey". And then complain that they're not having good experiences. Sometimes it's garbage in, garbage out, my dudes.
I also get a lot of weird dead ends. Their profile will be like "I love elden ring". You'll be like "elden ring is a masterpiece! Did you play the new expansion yet?" They'll be like "no". End of messages. My dude. That's not how this works. In real life, fine, maybe you can give a short answer and see what they do, read some body language. But in an asynchronous text only communication? That's not pulling your weight. And if you're not actually interested, just unmatch. If you don't have time , don't reply at all. It's async. Come back later.
Maybe some of these people match with each other and are very happy with "what's up?" "nm u?" "Im good" forever.
And due to urban sprawl, everyone gets into their car in their garage, drives to work, then drives back to their garage. There's no room for walking to the neighborhood pub, convenience store, pharmacy, etc and bumping into neighbors on the way.
It's a survey, so it relies on the surveyed to tell accurately the date they meet and how, so I won't be surprised that the line here is incorrect.
Or maybe they refer to using classified ads in the newspaper or over of those "romantic meeting agency" (I don't know the name in English, in French it is agence de rencontre) that existed back in the day
I'm curious if that included classified and dating messaging services. Aziz Ansari has a good book where he interviewed people who met using those services back in the day, and were embarrassed to tell people that's how they met.
That's interesting. I wonder whether those 6519 surveyed are representative of whole population, or of people who anyway online a lot.
It’s seems there was an inflection around 2012 - what happened then ?
The curve ends during covid lockdowns, wonder whether deflected since ?
There was an almost overnight shift from "ewww, online people are weird strangers" to "the Internet is just digital real life". For years it was the first, and then as mainstream popularity hit, it was like a switch flipped and suddenly the Internet was "cool" and just like comics and superheros, everyone acted like they were a fan all along.
It was kinda jarring tbh. All the things that got you labeled a nerd and a geek(negatively) were suddenly good things. I think it mostly had to do with the tech surge and people seeing it as a valuable thing now.
Tinder launched in 2012. eHarmony and Match.com were pretty fringe sites but Tinder commodified and gamified the mechanics. That made online dating “fun”. Also we saw a huge growth in smart phones in 2010 to 2012
That's possible, and it would make the most recent drop even more dramatic as there still should be people with more than one dating experience in a year.
So only about 30% of the population are dating right now? Sounds suspicious to me.
My wife and I met through a dating site in 2011. She felt awkward about online dating, so we had a cover story for the first few years of our relationship until the stigma around not meeting "the natural way" died down.
The good news is that there is another single gay man out there for you. Several hundred to thousands depending on your area. Single straight men don't have that going for them so you have the advantage here.
Go through all your hobbies. Find every meetup related to them within an hour of your location. Attend them. Have fun doing what you are doing. Maybe you meet someone, maybe you don't, maybe you meet people that help you meet people. Either way you are out and doing the things you like and that's better for your mental health. It's win-win.
Online through dating app is pretty much the same as through matchmaker. If it is through discussing on a forum, on meeting on social media, it would be something else ok or closer to go the bar. Anyway, we need the matchmaker figure to properly compare things.