also before anyone chimes in with “it’s cool/ok/fine to be single” or any variant thereof…

seriously fuck anyone who says this shit to someone saying they can't find any partner. and it's definitely not fucking fine to live your life with no peers who care about you.

My recommendation, find a buddy or two you can get baked and watch movies with. Do this regularly, it's good for the soul.

good lord yes, it's ugly out here. And I love when the go to excuse you usually receive from the internet is "well you must just have a shitty personality," nah, my personality is great, I make friends easily as hell when I actually get the opportunity to make them. (And let's be honest, we all know a good personality has never been a necessary prerequisite for intimacy)

But the opportunities simply do not exist, they are drying up just like our freshwater sources. Alienation is intensifying across western society, and social relationships become increasingly transactional and nakedly self-interested. And my god, I swear interpersonal communication skills are at a historic low. I don't think people even really know what they want anymore, after being fed so much manufactured, individually targeted corporate culture and living under "democratic" political regimes whose entire purpose is to gaslight you into being proud of your own exploitation. No wonder everyone seems fucked in the head psychosexually in the west these days.

Imo it's because liberalism in all its glorious "brilliance" has created a patriarchal society in which no one can become patriarchs anymore (though that was always sort of a myth for most people to begin with, but it's like there's less smoke to obscure that fact now). Tons of people don't even want this dynamic anymore. but society seems completely stagnant, like there's nothing to do about it but suffer trying to either attract or become one of these ridiculous caricatures of "dominance" while 99% of the population are forced to live as pathetic losers in comparison (aka "the proletariat"). The dissonance is fucking people up (men AND women) just like it fucked up the chuds into becoming qanon freaks. And personally I feel this phenomenon is partially why younger people are becoming more open to queer and nb ideas because the "standard" gender norms don't make any god-damned sense anymore in contemporary society.

I went on a first date from hinge today with one of the prettiest people I have ever seen

It was fun, and I think went well. If we keep dating, I will have a positive opinion of hinge. The other apps are truly awful, and all of them have issues with starting conversations and creating genuine connections

holy shit does straight dating fucking suck

this has always been the case. gays stay winning

where do I find the women who won't care that I'm unemployed / on disability?

Glad to know I'm not the only one out there having a horrible time on the dating apps. They really, really suck. It's frustrating to continually match with women who don't seem to bear much interest in me as a person or the things I care about but do want to immediately interrogate me about my sexual history and watch me squirm as I try to find the best way to spin my total lack of relationship history due to severe mental illness.

I'm 37 now, turning 38 in a few months. I've never had many friends and never officially got my shit together in any capacity. And I feel, sometimes, like I missed the boat on life, and I don't get to be a real person because I wasn't able to move out and make my own life before whatever the fuck milestone it is that makes it too late. How am I supposed to get any relationship experience if most women treat me like a leper if I'm honest about never having been in one?

Women don't be masking.

Not that men are either. But I do, and having the bare minimum of concern for the health of me and others is kind of high on my list.

I know it can be frustrating when someone gives you advice in response to venting...

But

p much all my friends are partnered women I would never dare ask to help me in that way.

Why not? I don't know the nature of your friendships, but I don't think its too much to ask a favor to help set you up with someone. Friend-of-a-friend type situations were how most couples met before The Time of The App in my experience

lol oh man, anyone who knows me from the megathreads knows ive been griping about almost the exact same shit for the past >half a year - I'm pushing 33 and got out of an adulthood-spanning serious partnership almost a year ago after a number of different long-standing issues made me realize i didn't want it to be my lifelong romantic relationship. work an unskilled manual labor job that will probably be a foot in the door to a larger career, but one in a relatively low-paying, public service position. (i'm also shorter than average, though i think (?) conventionally pretty solid looking)

honestly if i knew being single in the 2020s was this bad, i might have just tried to work things out with my ex (deep down i think it was still the right call to end things, but the misery of being single in our current dating environment sometimes makes me wonder lol). the apps are pretty much worthless, had to pay-to-win to even get a not-insignificant number of matches, but converting those matches into actual convos let alone dates has been pretty much a non-starter. the few times ive gotten promising seeming matches, they've dropped off the conversation but not given me the clear no of an unmatch. in addition to the self-esteem blow this all brings, i also hate how many profiles i have to swipe left on who i know with 95% certainty i wouldn't be interested in - they're people too who are probably lonely like me, and it feels like im just adding another layer of dehumanization into my life as a regular thing. these distinct souls with interiority are reduced to a "meh, i think not" in a human being catalogue. it's fucking gross.

i also know men are "supposed" to swipe relatively indiscriminately, but im honestly pretty selective about my type - if someone isn't some combo of creative, intellectual, also a leftist, into some of the same nerdy shit i am, a lil "alt", etc etc, i tend not to be attracted to them beyond physical attraction. and a lot of the matches i do get check these boxes! but, it's just so hard to stand out from the sea of men/the "meat market" as you put it that those matches just don't amount to shit. part of this boils down to enshittification/the apps not working being better for profit. but imagine if we could actually filter for hobbies, politics, etc as a given with these stupid things??? oh, the horror!

i also think your point about this being driven by loneliness is important. i'd be more "fine with being single" if the world had any semblance of community or consistent access to consistent friendships built into it anymore. but as it stands its "wake up in my apartment box, go to work box where people only interact sporadically (if they get along at all), go back home to my home box, sleep, repeat, punctuated by seeing friends once a month if im lucky (where we spend waaaaaaay too much money to do basic shit like get dinner or drinks together), once every few months if not." i will ask though, what's your cutoff for "significantly younger"? i keep a pretty wide range of Solidly An Adult open (would be open to anyone from 26 to early 40s), i personally think it's too hard to find a solid connection for me to be super inflexible about age. but everyone has their own standards and comfort levels!

EDIT: oh also i just don't list my height if its an option and while my results are still not amazing i think it's helped lmao i just don't see much upside in it, there's a million different ways a date can be shitty or a waste of time and if height is a dealbreaker for the other person then whatever, they don't have to go out with me again

I feel you. It's comforting to know I'm not the only one with similar experiences, but also that so many of us seem to be going through it

Gloria Steinem said you should be just fine because women only supported Bernie for the boys.

In all seriousness I'm sorry dude. It's hard to even make friends when you get older let alone meet partners.

Since you invited grievances, here's mine: I went through all of the online dating bullshit 12 years ago, met my soulmate, spent 10.5 years with her. She was in and out of hospitals the entire time and never got a clear diagnosis. Then one day she just suddenly fucking died at a horrifically young age. I found out a couple months later that she had an undiagnosed congenital disease that killed her. We both felt like she was never taken seriously at hospitals because she wasn't insured, wasn't white, had tats and piercings. Basically, she fit a profile. Shit fucking sucks. I'll add that I understand not wanting to be alone. Although I'm alone now as a widower, it's entirely different than when I was single before I met her. Having met her totally filled my heart, and I hope you can find the person that does that for you as well.

I'm a hermit so I can't relate. At a certain point the desire to date vs the energy I need to put into it becomes not worth it in my mind. Sometimes it sucks but I've got no choice at this point.

Plus the city needs me

The dig at polyam people is kind of bullshit tbh. I'm polyam and all the other polyam people I know exclusively date other polyam folks. It has nothing to do with them being married or not or tricking anyone, it has everything to do with them having a shared lifestyle/interest and social community that bonds over that shared interest. We go out with our polyam friends to parties or dinners or polyam meetups or whatever and we meet other polyam people and sometimes we also date them.

So that's really the clever trick that polyam folks have already figured out, and is the exact same trick you and everyone else I've ever seen or will ever see complaining that dating is hard need to figure out; go out and do things with other people who have shared lifestyles or interests with you and you will make friends and those friends will introduce you to their friends and at some point along the line you'll probably find someone who wants to date you. Don't do it with the intention of dating, do it with the intention of sharing experiences that you enjoy with other people who also want to share those experiences and the rest will come. It's the exact same thing as what polyam folks do except that polyam folks can also date their friends that they're already hanging out with. That's pretty much it.

Outside of early life relationships (high school / college) where you're just constantly in proximity with single hormonal folks who also want to date...that's pretty much how much people do it. You either get on the apps with your hot face and attract people that way and go out on tons of shitty dates until you find someone who you actually click with, or you go out and share interests with your community and you'll meet someone.

You know, your job is unappealing to liberal women but it might actually help you with other leftists. I'm another cis white communist but I still have my PMC job and I can tell it drags me down a lot with the women I want to date. I also find that the women interested in me skew younger, which sucks.

I know they're soul-killing in large amounts, but I got some good pictures and find that 20 minutes a day of swiping yields more dates than I can handle. Problem is almost all are liberals. In particular, I'm killing it on Hinge, which has the most conservative population of all the apps. I've seen two vegans there out of hundreds of profiles. I actually did shell out for a week of Tinder platinum or whatever insanely expensive tier lets you filter by diet, and discovered that there's like 50 single vegans in my city, tops. So fuck the subscriptions, you don't need them.

Yeah its tough. Pretty much in the same situation. about the same age, also in a large city.

I've used apps for years and spent an embarrassing about of money on them. I only recently gave them up. I wouldn't go back. There's just no point to them these days.

I also think that as much as we, as a society, have tried moving past some of the gender norms that were so prevalent in the past. But their impact still weighs heavily today. So things like your job, physical features, etc, etc are still things that can really hold you back in the dating scene.

No main I see

It sucks, man. Mostly agree. No idea what to do.

We need to recruit more women into communism

Solidarity. I'm a bit younger, and not really a man, but I pretty much present as such and have only ever dated as such, and... yeah, shit really sucks.

I've still got some kind of white collar job, though not really much of a ladder, just accumulating more responsibilities with not-quite-commensurate pay raises. Haven't really dated in like 5 years, and before that it was just a LTR, so I have very little awareness/experience with dating, but from what little I have experienced I just hate it.

I'm starting to get to the point where being single has been good for me but sorta, overstayed its welcome, and don't know what to do about it. I have similar reservations about the apps, and I literally can't use them on my phone since I don't have a normal smartphone, plus I don't know what the fuck to tell people about my gender identity, I'm bisexual which seems to be a turn off for a good chunk of people on both sides, and I have some unresolved mental health struggles (but like, who doesn't? right?).

The most recent time I tried using the apps there were some cool (mostly queer) people, but I ran into similar issues as you where it seemed like my lack of career ambition really turned people away, plus my difficulty being like, witty and flirty. I'm a bit too serious and I don't know if I'm even capable of turning that off. It doesn't take a lot, especially in person, to get me laughing and joking, but it isn't instant either, and over text I'm just like... what am I even doing here? I got some matches, some conversations, and like 2 actually arranged dates, both of which ghosted or otherwise flaked.

And when I (very rarely) do meet someone I get along with IRL, I'm too oblivious to act on what in retrospect was probably them showing interest in me (has happened a couple times). So I can work on that I guess, it's not totally hopeless, but someone in a similar position but totally straight/cis I really do not envy.

Feel you about the apps, I uninstalled everything like 5 years ago and can't imagine how much worse it's gotten. I definitely prefer being single forever to using them again.

No real advice, but hopefully things work out

nothing to add, just wanted to say I'm basically in the same situation. it seems like most people meet online these days, but I'm a 5'4 guy and not particularly attractive so the apps are just completely hopeless.

yeah I'm on disability and can't even imagine how much it would hurt my chances if I even somehow had a social life where I met women occasionally

I think I'm a completely hopeless case

having been married (now divorced) to the wrong person I guess I have become very okay with being alone. did some dating post divorce but I live in a place where my type are few and far between. I got called too old by my last date (pre-pandemic, set up by a coworker), and I have little interest in getting back out there again. my advice to you is to get a cat

for me, I found being alone in a relationship to be far more painful than being alone on my own. and that was a hard lesson to learn.

but your description of experiences in a manual labor gig are very familiar. I was a seasonal farmworker for years. best shape of my life, low stress, tons of stamina for any activity, and I was passionate about what I did for the first time in my life.

generally speaking, nobody gave a fuck. best case scenario: I was a stop for some professional-type playing tourist and slumming it with me for a future story. I'm really sweet and all, but they have their eyes on a 3/2 in the gentrified enclave and a Porsche Cayenne in the garage.... so unless I'm sitting on a trust fund, we should call this what it is.

I used to be pissed about it, but we all gotta be who we are in this world. both me and them. my advice for anyone is to bet on yourself and your instincts in the long term, and if you find the work that builds you up, don't let go of it to make yourself more appealing to somebody else.