Friend Finder, Dating, and Angry Men

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Kay Hymowitz explains why peo­ple who use friend-finder dat­ing or sim­i­lar tech­niques are find­ing a state of anar­chy:

…the [Sin­gle Young Male, or SYM] is putting off tra­di­tional mark­ers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s imma­ture but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dis­hon­est, self-involved, slutty, manip­u­la­tive, shal­low, con­trol­ling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the cul­ture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that mar­riage these days is a raw deal for men.

Men and Their Relationships

The arti­cle con­tains many insights, so I’ll post excerpts below and then com­ment on them:

By the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the fol­low­ing: he was sup­posed to call for a date; he was sup­posed to pick up his date; he was sup­posed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was sup­posed to call for another one; and at some point, if the rela­tion­ship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was sup­posed to ask her to marry him…

Today, though, there is no stan­dard sce­nario for meet­ing and mat­ing, or even relat­ing. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exag­ger­at­ing here—new to human his­tory. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least the­o­ret­i­cally, their equals—socially, pro­fes­sion­ally, and sexually.

It is impos­si­ble to over­es­ti­mate the effect that fem­i­nism has had on the West­ern dat­ing scene — whether in blind dat­ing or the tra­di­tional route. As I wrote in a lengthy essay, men and women have become so inde­pen­dent that they no longer need each other. They only want each other. As a result, they refuse to set­tle for any­thing less than their respec­tive men­tal images of perfection.

By the time men reach their twen­ties, they have years of expe­ri­ence with women as equal com­peti­tors in school, on soc­cer fields, and even in bed. Small won­der if they ini­tially assume that the women they meet are after the same things they are: finan­cial inde­pen­dence, career suc­cess, toned tri­ceps, and sex.

But then, when an SYM walks into a bar and sees an attrac­tive woman, it turns out to be noth­ing like that. The woman may be hop­ing for a hookup, but she may also be look­ing for a hus­band, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a rela­tion­ship, a three­some, or a tem­po­rary place to live. She may want one thing in Novem­ber and another by Christ­mas. “I’ve gone through phases in my life where I bounce between ser­ial monogamy, Very Seri­ous Rela­tion­ships and extremely casual sex,” writes Megan Car­pen­tier on Jezebel, a pop­u­lar web­site for young women. “I’ve slept next to guys on the first date, had sex on the first date, allowed no more than a cheek kiss, dis­pensed with the date-concept alto­gether after kiss­ing the guy on the way to his car, fucked a cou­ple of close friends and, more rarely, slept with a guy I didn’t care if I ever saw again.” Okay, won­ders the ordi­nary guy with only mid­dling psy­chic pow­ers, which is it tonight?

As female friends of mine have fre­quently admit­ted, women rarely know what they want at any given time. Part of them wants to indulge her ani­mal instinct to have lost of sex, part of her does not want to be seen as a slut; part of her wants to get mar­ried some­day, part of her wants to get laid tonight because she has not had sex in a long time; and part of her wants a nice, sta­ble guy who is “mar­riage material” while another part of her wants a tough guy who will excite and rav­ish them.

Dat­ing Rules for Men

But as Hymowitz notes, the game no longer has any rules – so every­one is con­fused. Guys do not know what to do. If they do not pur­sue sex imme­di­ately, then some girls think they are wimps and losers. How­ever, other girls will respect that greatly. If guys treat girls nicely, then they receive the same set of oppo­site reac­tions, depend­ing on the spe­cific girl: wimpy guy or respectable guy. It is mad­den­ingly confusing:

Straus describes a 26-year-old jour­nal­ist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as adver­tised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mis­take: he fails to open the car door for her. Mis­take Num­ber Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hap­less social worker sup­posed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female col­league for reach­ing for the office door the pre­vi­ous week.

This is another exam­ple of the con­fu­sion in the dat­ing world: Are women equal or not? Should men open doors for women or not? Today, every woman has a par­tic­u­lar, indi­vid­ual par­a­digm in which she oper­ates, and guys can­not ever know what a spe­cific woman will want when they ask her out.

More­over, men gen­er­ally resent any­thing that resem­bles “dat­ing with a score­card.” In the prior exam­ple, Lisa the Jour­nal­ist makes note of every “mis­take” that her date made. But how would Lisa have felt if her date thought the fol­low­ing: “Mis­take Num­ber One: she is a lit­tle fat­ter than I thought. Mis­take Num­ber Two: she said ‘like’ too many times dur­ing our con­ver­sa­tion, so she is obvi­ously dumb.” Still, this is a non-issue for most men. Guys fre­quently com­plain that women are too picky because every girl “wants it all.” As long as a woman is above a given thresh­old of attrac­tive­ness and not a bitch, an idiot, a crazy per­son, or a gold-digger, most men do not care about most any­thing else. We do not under­stand why women think and act oth­er­wise. Guys are pretty chill.

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