I feel dating kinda sucks, a large portion of my generation is chronically online and i feel many don’t know how to socialize in person.
I recently was eating at a local dinner, and saw somebody eating by themself. I walked up and ask if this seat was taken and they said no. But looked like a rabbit in a wolfs den, i introduced myself and we both got to know each other. I gave her my number but never got any call or text.
I feel lots of people around me are unappealing, yes i know that sounds seminaristic. Ive tried a foss dating app called alovoa, because i feel every other dating app would steal your liver if they legally could. The app has brought me miniscule success, i have made one friend whom i occasionally chat with.
But it kinda leaves me in a state of i want to meet new people, because at least where i live. The dating pool is really small, and my job isnt a public facing job (machine shop)
Any advise from the elders of lemmy?
27 yo elder here. Found my ‘the one’ on OkCupid back in the day, just prior to its enshittification by matchgroup. Just for the record this is a transbian relationship so idk how if at all it would apply to cishet relationships.
Every prior long term relationship with both men and women and all dates I’ve been on also came from there or otherwise online like social media or forums.
Approaching IRL does suck because most of the time you come off as a total creep intruding on someone just trying to exist, and dating apps at least have a safety net that being there is in and of itself a signal of some intention to date, like you know it won’t be inappropriate,
To be fair, that does suck for men, but I’m also unsure whether IRL would be the better strategy, I’m bi myself and not sure if I’d respond positively if approached IRL, in fact I’d probably think it’s gonna be some sort of scam or crime about to occur I’d be the victim of.
I agree so much with the intention thing you mention! If someone was flirting with me irl it would either go completely over my head or I’d think they are trying to pull some sort of scam, just because I wouldn’t be set up to expect that they have dating intentions (is that a 'tism thing?)
I met my partner on Tinder in 2018 and we’ve been going strong ever since! Ironically though, it turns out that we literally sat across from each other at the University Cafeteria like a week before we met on Tinder, and we both forgot about it (we each had a friend sit next to us at the cafeteria and our friends remembered each other later). We literally chatted without a single thought about dating, just because neither of us realized that it even was an option!
Yeah I remember being out with work colleagues IRL at a pub and there was some friends or a company, it was absolutely rammed as well, some guy kept talking to me because I think he was a friend of a colleague, and he kept buying me drinks, but I straight up didn’t realize he was even talking to me most of the time because of how packed it was, and at work it was tradition for people to take turns to buy rounds for everyone so I thought I was getting drinks on someone from work 💀
If I even understood that this person was trying to probably approach, my reaction would’ve been “literally who” because I never even knew him before, but also, that’s true for 99% of men.
I feel like it’s clear from this seemingly widespread psychological tendency of distrusting strangers that if there’s a kernel of truth to the pseudoscience that is evolutionary psychology it’s that perhaps we as a species were meant to have a much smaller social circle where we’d know everyone intimately and pick a mate over the course of a long time knowing them or at least knowing about them in our little tribe, transitioning from friends to eventually dating etc. that way also if someone was abusive you’d know just because you’d probably know and possibly be even friends with all their exes, the unknown risk is just kinda not there.
Obviously in a global urban world with the sheer amount of people you’d be lucky to even see the same person more than once, all behavior is effectively inconsequential like in an open world video game because other people might as well despawn as soon as you turn the corner. Dating apps are kind of a market solution to this, but obviously corpos have totally misaligned incentives because men to them are the customer who they need to make pay, with promise of women being the product, and men need to be kept on the app as much as possible and thus single to make them the most money, so it’s just fucked.