As a regular 30s dude, definitely not 1% by any measure, app dating had its rough spots but generally was a good time, I experienced no bitterness.
Instead I met a bunch of interesting people and found my partner. We now own a house and are talking about kids.
The real toxicity here is the idea that women at large are somehow responsible for anyone's lack of dating success.
For anyone reading this who might be dating and feel disheartened- the hard truth is that you have two options: you can either blame the group of people you're trying to attract for having faulty preferences, or you can reflect and work on yourself and your approach. Only one of these has any chance of helping you.
One thing I do agree with you on: bitterness is extremely unattractive.
That being said as five foot four guy, the chance of me having any success on a dating app at the time from everything I know would have been basically 0 no matter what. “Working on myself” would have done no good. I was objectively in great shape as a part time fitness instructor and I just run my first (and last) two half marathons before I met my wife.
Some guys just haven’t won the genetic lottery to succeed on dating apps. Again I’m not bitter as one of the relatively few straight male fitness instructors, it wasn’t hard to date during my first stint of singleness
Dating is kinda like founding a startup or getting a job, in that you have to kiss a lot of frogs, but you only need to succeed once. The point's to eliminate all the unsuitable prospects in the pool and find the one that is a match for you.
That's true, but dating apps are still a pretty toxic technology. It's got kind of a McNamara fallacy baked into it, they encourage users to setup filters on easy-to-quantity aspects (height, age) in a fairly thoughtless way, and entourage superficial, consumeristic evaluations. Most people would probably benefit from IRL interactions, which present a more holistic picture.
There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous" and that if some people don't want to have kids with some women then therefore -nobody- will do it.
Good luck out there everybody - the world changes in fascinating ways and it can definitely run some folks over but try not to get jaded and fall down a despair spiral.
That fallacy isn't in there. Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly". And that's definitely another contributer to declining birth rates/families - because neither of them will feel remotely as committed to each other then they would've otherwise.
None of these are singular causes. They're all contributing to the whole situation. Which is precisely why I never made any such fallacy in my earlier comment.
Having premarital sex is not everyone's definition of "promiscuous".
I'm merely observing a lot of factors which in aggregate can unquestionably be seen as causing this.
The reality is that the traditional gender roles where very positive in the context of reproduction, which was literally my first sentence of my first comment.
It is not a judgement on wherever we should aim to revert to them, it's just factual. Arguing against that is basically at a level of arguing that water isn't wet.
Now to link this back to the discussion at hand: a significant chunk of society would consider premarital sex with people whom they aren't planning to marry to be promiscuous. And those people are part of the population which wouldve become families in a different age.
Birth rates going down seems to be a thing. That's about all I agree are facts here. I struggle to even meet you at "traditional gender roles" like that's some universal constant - is that Protestant America? Catholic Ireland? Is that one of the Chinese dynasties? Sub-saharan African tribal society?
I think, like most things, it's unlikely you've found the "as obvious as water being wet" single smoking gun to a broader solution.
Social pressure to marry young and breed will clearly have an effect on birth rates. I'd be surprised if anyone would disagree there, all other things being equal. It feels ridiculous to assert that is the only possible influence and even more ridiculous to assert one particular set of social norms is the only way back. I know so many people that don't fit this incredibly narrow view, including everything from "traditional" couples not wanting kids (for lots of different reasons from money to global stability to being jaded to genuinely not caring) to very very not "traditional" people who ARE having kids.
If this is worth talking about I think it's worth taking in more info than just blaming resentment over women being more empowered over their own lives (or more slutty or more undesirable or however you want to frame it).
By the 1700s the pregnant before marriage rate was roughly 30%. So about a third of all women in the 1700s had premarital sex that resulted in pregnancy. So the actual rate is of course even higher.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/202859
People having premarital sex is not a new thing. Strong societal norms against something are not the same thing as it not happening.
https://historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/no-turning...
A lot of those marriages are a direct result of the pregnancy, too - one thing that did happen was the couple being pushed into marriage ASAP when the pregnancy was discovered.