Obviously there's a huge amount of nuance in approaching another person. OTOH, I certainly know men who simply stay away from women - because "that's the best possible outcome anyway, and the least painful way of reaching it".
More prudent and effective would be to approach a group, chat with them, and build a rapport. Then see where things go.
Even more prudent would be to not be so utterly pathetic and desperate, and instead just focus on doing things that bring you fulfillment. And then meet people who also do those things, some of who you will just click with. And perhaps even romantically. There's no "approach anxiety" that way because there's no "approach" at all! Just live an authentic, contented life - that's what's actually attractive to people.
The problem is that most people do not live an authentic life. But there's nothing stopping them from starting today and endless options for it. But keep "dating" out of your mind - just go and connect with people, develop interests, skills, self confidence etc
The real question is, why do you care? What happened to not shaming people for their personal sexual and romantic choices?
One thing I've noticed--there are two types of people who get upset at older men dating younger women: young single men and old single women. It's almost as if the criticism is thinly-veiled jealousy, rather than any sort of principled critique.
Second. Reading a eulogy for late-stage hook-up culture written by someone old enough to be by mother is awkward.
Worst of all, and I hate be crude, but she has to romanticize, I'm so sorry, I hate to say it...getting piped and objectified. And that somehow there is a subtle nobility to this and that men—ostensibly her age and possibly younger—in spite of all the nonsense taking place in the world should chase more booty.
She'd be better off packaging her ChatGPT prompts as a Lena Dunham Agent.
But I completely agree with you. She sounds like a cougar. And, worse, apparently has no ability for introspection - for herself or her collective gender.
I'm not saying that she or women are "the problem" in this story, but surely the question must be raised. Eg "ladies, do we have a part to play in this disappearance of men?"
As if they were afraid of talking.
Most of them only want dinner and taxi for free and have three pics for insta: one of the dinner, one of the dessert and one of the fool paying.
I met my girlfriend at a metro station just like that, unprepared, both with empty smartphones, we exchanged the numbers oldschool, on napkins.
Just avoid any situation that looks like "dating" - too many rules, expectations and pretexts. Too much lying and deceptions.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (Jane Austin, 1813) Vs. modern capitalism has, for most American men, optimized away any chance of enjoying basic financial security. To paraphrase Burma Shave - don't expect them to put their chins out there, if they feel hopeless about affording the ring and the flat.
Between older-style advertising, the web, and smart phones, modern capitalism's Borg has gotten incredibly good at optimizing human behavior for its own profit. Men having quality relationships with women is not very profitable for the Borg.
It ain't just men. Over the past decade, especially during the COVID mess, many of the women I know decided to seriously cut back their social engagement - "to take better care of myself" and other phrases.
(Yes, I know the NYT's "Modern Love" series is far more poetic than analytical.)
Not so much anymore.
OTOH: I know a fair number of older women. From their PoV, trying to "date" in the past couple decades or so has also gone a long, long way downhill.
Notice the excessive use of the em dash throughout the article combined with the sycophantic contrasts ChatGPT loves to use so much:
"It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation — clean, fast and frictionless."
A sad state of affairs if the NYT is letting AI-slop through.
Additionally, the observation about AI using dashes really only applies (if it applies at all) to informal text conversation, not published articles. Here's a random NYT article from 2014 that uses 4 em-dashes within the first 3 paragraphs. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/fashion/the-year-of-taylo...
It seems like everyone watched some video essay about how em-dashes are a sure sign of AI, and they're just parroting it without question. The thing that apparently goes over people's heads is that the reason AI tends to use a lot of em-dashes is because the text in their training data uses a lot of em-dashes, and the training data is largely published articles and books, so it's a terrible heuristic for whether a published article or book was written using AI.
The thing that actually is somewhat more telling is that many people will use hyphens instead of dashes, eg on a computer, I typically type '--' instead of an em-dash, partly because my xcompose setup is inconsistent, partly because I write most of my text in editors that use monospaced fonts and the distinction between -, – , and — is extremely subtle in most fixed-width fonts, for obvious reasons. But on macs and many phones, as well as in google docs and similar, by default a hyphen will be autocorrected to an en- or em-dash depending on context, so it's not really a tell that the entire thing was written with AI, just that there was possibly non-human involvement. But also, a lot of people actually just know how to type and use dashes. It's not really that hard.
> No shrinking. No waiting. No apologizing.
> slowness, curiosity, accountability
> Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.
> It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation.
https://www.nightwater.email/em-dash-ai/
I do dread the wave of AI slop coming our way. But honestly what I dread even more is the comments that’s going to second guess every other article and comment, just because they use some character or style that people have decided is a sign of being AI generated. That’s gonna get tedious real fast.
