Member-only story
Hi, my name is John. I am a straight man in my early thirties, own my house outright, have a full time job, and I’m in reasonable shape for my age. I also haven’t been on a date in two years and haven’t gotten laid in nearly four.
I spend about an hour a week on dating sites — I have an OKCupid profile and a Bumble one, & only recently got rid of Tinder & PlentyOfFish for security reasons. The last time I got a message on any dating site was more than a year ago. I have never gotten a match on Bumble (after a month of use) & I have gotten a grand total of one match on Tinder (which I used on and off for about three years) — she unmatched without even messaging me.
And, I blame the patriarchy.
I am not particularly undesirable — I’m okay-looking & a little smarter than average, and my friends find me personable and funny. But, I have enough self-awareness to realize that it takes a certain kind of person to want to spend time with me, and that just as any randomly-chosen stranger isn’t likely to be somebody I want to know, some randomly-selected stranger isn’t likely to want to know me. I also have enough self-awareness to recognize that I can’t reliably distinguish between someone who is interested in knowing me better & someone who is politely waiting for me to leave them alone, & enough cultural awareness to recognize that for a lot of women, unwanted attention from a man (especially a socially-oblivious man) is a red flag for an existential threat.
So, I err on the side of caution: if I can detect ‘back off’ vibes, then I assume much subtler signals have been sent at me for a while, & I back off immediately; if I don’t get an extremely clear indication of interest, I try not to show any myself.
This is a problem for me, because while women are taught that attention from a man is potentially dangerous, they are also taught that being unambiguous in your acceptance or rejection of that attention is more dangerous — in other words, the kinds of signals that are explicit enough for me to recognize are the ones many women send only in dire straits.
