Why Online Dating has Always been a ShitShow

In the past few years, but especially since 2019, we keep hearing about how online sites and dating apps have seriously damaged the dating scene- for men, but also women. These criticism range from a large increase in the percentage of young incel men, a small percentage of men almost monopolizing female sexual attention, high levels of social atomization etc. Others blame them for the large increase in rates of unmarried and childless women. There have also been criticisms about the business model and design of these apps which are allegedly meant to keep you single, miserable and on these apps for constantly increasing profits. It is fair to say that at this point you can easily find multiple blog posts, substack posts, YouTube videos, TikTok clips etc to justify a multitude of criticisms about these ‘new-fangled’ smartphone apps. While a lot of these critiques have a point, they do not address the underlying social problems which make people use these apps in the first place. With that in mind, let us address an interesting and usually ignored contradiction- why has the percentage of people who met online kept increasing at same pace as increase in male inceldom. As you will see, addressing this is the first step to understanding the underling problem.

The first question we must ask ourselves is how was the data presented in the first graph generated. To understand what I am getting at, let us talk about the crisis of reproducibility in “peer-reviewed” scientific data. To put it bluntly, the majority of published data, especially from supposedly “prestigious” institutions, has not been reproducible for over past 2-3 decades. This is even true in supposedly hard-science areas with lots of perverse incentives such as biomedical research, clinical trials etc. The situation in allegedly academic disciplines such as psychology and social sciences is far worse- to the point that we can consider almost all published data in these areas to be either data manipulation, dishonest study design or outright fraud. With that out the way, the only thing in that graph is some hint of a trend towards an increasing number of people meeting their sexual partners through online dating sites or apps. To be clear, I am not saying that the trend is false- just that it might be exaggerated and deliberately misleading. A better way to answer this same question is how many of the people you know in person have met their BFs/GFs etc via online dating. And this brings us to the second part of the previously mentioned contradiction.

This trend, in contrast to the first one, has much more supporting evidence. It is no secret that the past two decades have seen a huge increase in the male interest in a number of topics ranging from how to become a pick-up artist, red-pill ideology, finding allegedly traditional women- often in non-western countries. We can also clearly see an increase in the number of single and unattached men, of various ages, who would not have had much trouble finding a GF or wife in a previous era. It is also easy to see that there has been a sharp decrease in fertility rates among young women with an significant minority now being childless- something which is historically unprecedented. So how do we reconcile the rise of online dating with the obvious trend towards inceldom, singlehood and general social atomization. Let me explain this problem with an example- while the rates of divorce per unit of population/ per year have gone down since the 1970s and 1980s, the rate of marriages have gone down even further. Now let us apply this explanation to the problem at hand.

While there has certainly been an increase in the percentage of sexual partners met through online dating, the total percentage of people in such relationships has gone down. Furthermore, there has been a change in distribution of female sexual partners where a minority of men get intimate with multiple women, leaving a significant minority of men without any. We could go into the many social and cultural reasons for why these patterns have emerged, but that is best left for another post. Let us instead focus on what aspect of online dating makes this worse. Once you understand this, it will be a lot easier to connect the other dots in this problem. So, let me ask you a question- does online dating remind you of another much older style of meeting new people? If you guessed nightclubs, bars and pubs- you guessed right. Online dating is a far more accessible and turbocharged version of meeting (or hoping to meet) people at drinking establishments for casual sex. But what made me come up with this unusual parallel and why are these two forms of dating so similar.

Let us start with the obvious similarities. The vast majority of men who go to drinking establishments, to find willing women to have sex with, will be unsuccessful. However almost every woman who is actively looking for casual sex can find a willing man in such a place. But there is more. Both online dating and drinking establishments have a significant gender imbalance with noticeably more men than women. You might have also noticed that just like online dating, a small percentage of men will get most of the alcohol-fueled casual sex and most will return home empty-handed. To make matters worse, in the past, the majority of clientele for nightclubs etc was groups of friends including many couples. Single men looking for female company were the minority. Only so-called “singles bars” even approached the ratios and dynamics of what is now commonplace on online dating apps. Now ask yourself, what percentage of men could reliably “get lucky” in singles bars?

But as if often the case, the additional layers of real-life distance created by being online make thing much worse. For example, the legendry levels of female flaking seen in online dating are only possible because of the disconnect from real-life interactions possible with online dating. Similarly, their long lists of must-haves and deal-breakers would not survive a real life interaction- even in the snootiest singles bar. We cannot also forget that the ease of hitting on women online lets many more men do that to mediocre and borderline ugly/undesirable women. As a result, even the most pathetic woman with nothing to offer starts to believe that there is no shortage of handsome men willing to have a relationship with her. Of course, this is not real and her online suitors are just in it for the chance to score some easy pussy- as it is more impersonal and anonymous than hooking up at a nightclub. This might also explain why a higher percentage of women claim they are in a “relationship” than men. In summary, online dating is (and always has been) such a shitshow because it recreates the dynamics of night-clubs and singles bars- but then turbocharges it by introducing new perverse incentives and pathologies that are hard to get away with in the real world.

Maybe, in the next post on this topic, I will write about the social and cultural factors driving people away from real life interactions and into online dating.

What do you think? Comments?