“In the entire dataset, 29% of men said they never approached a woman in person before. 27% said it had been more than one year. This was larger for men in the age 18-25 group: 45% had never approached a woman in person,” according to the study.
A majority of single males surveyed reported fear as the main reason they do not approach women for dates in person. Fear of rejection and fear of social consequences were the two most common responses.
The data highlights a growing concern in the United States and abroad — loneliness. A 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that almost half of U.S. adults report “measurable levels of loneliness.”
It’s interesting to say the least. It seems as though the social repercussions and rejection are the most profound reason. While the fear of rejection is easy enough to digest. But I think the fear or social consequences is a relatively new construct.
From what I understand it’s the fear of being viewed as a creep to approach a woman out of the blue. Which to me, is reasonable enough. But I don’t think I have ever heard my old man or anyone of his generation bringing this to the table.
Yet I do remember asking my friends about picking up hints and whether or not men are really that bad at it. And most them saying the just don’t want to risk misinterpreting it.
Perhaps there is an argument to be made that approaching women like this, has fallen out of social fashion. What do you guys think?
p.s. I hope this is casual enough of a conversation. I kinda screwed up my last one, I admit.
Edit: Here is a more detailed paper on the survey for those that are interested
There is very little positive guidance, just a sea of don’ts, usually worded as absolutes. And a lot of divisive “gender war” BS from all sides. Really not surprising.
For positive guidance, here’s my approach in bars:
- Casual environment. Preferably full of people, it’s safer for both.
- Good hygiene, and clothes that show self-care. You don’t need to LARP as rich, but don’t pop up with a spaghetti-stained T-shirt either.
- Find some excuse to start a conversation. Plenty of times I’ve approached women outright saying “hey, I’m drinking alone and up to a chat. Are you waiting for someone?” (implied: “is it OK for me to sit with you?”)
- Offer a drink. Make sure that the waiter/waitress brings it, don’t bring it yourself.
- Find some topic that both of you enjoy to chitchat about. Avoid divisive ones.
It works well enough here in Latin America to break the ice.
Important: be assertive but don’t be pushy. It’s fine to show interest, it’s not fine to insist. If you notice that she’s uncomfortable with your presence, just leave. And some people will be only up for the chat, but won’t be willing for anything sexy or romantic, that’s fine too as long as you don’t push boundaries.
PERFECT advice! Much love.
be assertive but don’t be pushy
I think a lot of young men won’t do the former in fear of being judged as the later. Sorry guys, women want assertive men, not twerps. The vast majority of women want a man who can make a decision and execute.
Know the age old meme where a man asks a women where she wants to eat and she hems and haws, can’t decide? Guys! YOU make the decision and present it to her. Hopefully you learned something about what she likes. Maybe you know a place she’s never been to? (That’s a great choice!)
“Dinner tonight? We’ll go to La Hacienda. Ever been there?”
And then judge her reaction. If you’re not too far off, they usually jump! People have a hard time hiding negative reactions. If she doesn’t go all in?
“(laugh) You don’t look like you’re not loving it. OK, we’ll try $restaurant.”
Or maybe she presents you with two wardrobe options before going out. Pick one, and be assertive. Even if you don’t care one way or the other.
“That one! That will look great on you!”
At the grocery store? Lol no
At the bar, if you’re hot sure
So with the exception of attractive people, you would say it’s an out of date norm?
I’ve noticed less interactions between strangers in general. I think there is a general anxiety issue and a fear of conversations going south/ people getting aggressive. Whether or not that’s rational idk.
Don’t know how old your father is, but at least among Gen X women, creepy men absolutely have been part of the discussion. It just wasn’t a public discussion until much more recently. Hell, the fake phone number thing goes back to landlines.
We’re still at a point of significant cultural change in gender relations, and until an equilibrium point is reached, there’s going to be apprehension about approaching others. To that end, it’s important that we keep small gaffes made in good faith as social misdemeanors (to allow for opportunities to correct behavior) and not career-ending incidents. It only takes a quick browse of social media discussing one of these incidents to see why said apprehension exists.
That said, I still don’t think we’re having enough conversations about consent around positions of authority and social hierarchy in general. Too many people don’t understand that being nice to someone when you’re on the clock isn’t implied consent for continued interaction with that person off the clock. That’s the light stuff; it can go all the way to gross stories about cops and women. It all stems back to authority and power imbalance. This might be more of an issue in the US than elsewhere; I think ideals of “equality” and “social mobility” are so ingrained in our culture that some Americans don’t have the social intelligence around the very real stratification that exists at the workplace and elsewhere.
Fear of rejection is a whole other problem that likely stems from everyone having more anxiety now. I was around a bunch of people in their late teens/early 20’s a lot more than usual the past couple years and holy crap. I thought my social anxiety was bad. I don’t know how these kids are going to function.
OP didn’t really bring up trying to pick up your work colleagues, I think that’s pretty universally a bad idea, though it certainly happens. The risk of consequences is absolutely going to be high in a professional setting
Not just talking about work colleagues, also client or customer relationships.
I ended up marrying my work colleague. By the time we started dating I was already slated to leave the state for another gig in a couple months. Figured if it didn’t work out, I’d be completely out of the picture soon anyway. If it did work out… well a year of long distance turned into a marriage, so it really worked out.
That said I have a more corporate long term job now, so I’d certainly have to be a lot more socially careful if I were single trying to meet someone at work.
I think both the “would you rather run into a man or a bear in the woods?” question for women and the “would you rather be emotionally vulnerable with a woman or a tree?” question for men scream loud and clear why there isn’t much meeting in the middle on this issue.
Women are still living in a world that by and large treats women as property and rape as something that women should just get used to.
A woman in the US couldn’t have her own bank account until 1974.
Until 1993, marital rape wasn’t recognized at the Federal level, and only some states had laws against it.
So, up until just thirty-one years ago, raping your wife was cool and legal.
Women are watching politicians try to control their bodily autonomy by making abortion illegal, and the same people pushing that also happen to be pushing for an end to “no fault divorce” because they don’t like women having the choice of divorcing them.
Women have so many good reasons to have had it up to here with men…
Now, women aren’t responsible for men’s emotional well-being and men really should do more to support each other when it comes to being open and emotionally vulnerable, but the downside is that it means men, overall, generally feel like they can’t actually be open with women without it hurting their chances, romantically.
Much like it isn’t every individual black person’s job to educate every idiot white person they come in contact with, it’s not every woman’s job to educate every idiot man they come in contact with.
However, this impacts men who are just trying to find a footing and may grow into better people, given the opportunity. However, the attitude of that you’re not responsible for explaining leads to nobody explaining except… right-wing asshats who are pushing division and hate. So, because there aren’t left-wing men speaking to how to handle these issues and providing healthy in-gender support for other men, we’re leaving it all up to women to do all the educating, and I mean, I get it, they don’t want to, they’re kind of over it, and that’s probably why they’re pretty rude about it, to boot. And since they’re saying no and bowing out, that means young men are left to listen to voices like Andrew Tate.
I think both sides of this coin are doing each other a disservice. Women not having enough patience for men who could grow to be good men, and men not having enough self-reflection to realize that hanging your entire emotional stability on whether or not you are in a relationship is unhealthy, period.
I think both the “would you rather run into a man or a bear in the woods?” question for women and the “would you rather be emotionally vulnerable with a woman or a tree?” question for men scream loud and clear why there isn’t much meeting in the middle on this issue.
I totally forgot about that one. And you’re totally right! Seriously everything you’ve said here is an interesting take on the matter.
However, the attitude of that you’re not responsible for explaining leads to nobody explaining except… right-wing asshats who are pushing division and hate.
Would you say that perhaps an emphasis on social education (like in middle school or something) would be good first step to this? And not just to talk about what you shouldn’t do but also when you in fact CAN try and make a move.
Back in the day they had things like “etiquette schools” (I guess they still do) with a focus on politeness and manners.
Frankly, there can and should be a modern version of etiquette but focused on interpersonal relationships taught in school. The modern version would focus on things like consent, healthy emotional support structures, and health communication strategies.
School itself is supposed to be a place to “live and learn” as it were when forming relationships, but it basically has very little adult stewardship of those concepts.
School today is nightmare with everybody filming everybody. If you are a young person doing young person mistakes, it will probably filmed and put on the internet.
I can only speak from my experience because it is the only one I’ve lived, but being a young man with hormonal changes and no male role model in my life, my life would have been way harder today since I made many gaffes that a young man usually makes.
The only difference is that it wasn’t filmed and I had a chance to become better, instead of ridiculed by the whole world.
The problem with dating right now is that for centuries there was an order. Men were the dominant ones, and women were the submissive ones. In general, at least.
Then WWII happened, and all the men went overseas, and all the women were brought into the workplace.
Then the surviving men came back, and people tried to go back to what it was. They tried to have women go back to being home makers, and men go back to work.
But the toothpaste was out of the tube. You had a major societial shift, in a very short time, and you can’t go back like that.
So now women wanted to work, and men were expected to work. You wanna know why the 50s were so ecconomically strong? It’s because you had a two person income household in a one income per household society. Suddenly these people who grew up during the great depression, were now living in the strongest ecconomy in history. Prices needed a decade or two to catch up to the idea that women worked too.
This began to crack the foundation of the idea that men were the dominant ones because they worked. Well, now women worked too. So they had to find another way to go back to the way things were…but again, the toothpaste was out of the tube. The end result was that men increased the amount of rape through the 50s/60s/70s. Then in the 80s, women started fighting back on that front. I’m not saying they solved the issue, but prior to the 80s, there was zero resistance. Now there was.
Suddenly you could be sued at work for grabbing a womans ass. Or talking the wrong way. You could be fired, even from high end jobs.
The increase in resistance eventually lead to the mid 2010s where they overturned roe v wade. The pendulium had begun swinging the other way now. This is leading to more and more women being scared of men, because they don’t know how far this is going to go.
Now everyone has guns, the world for unrelated reasons is getting more and more divided and scared. And it doesn’t matter that actual crime rates are going down through the decades. Most people falsely believe crime is increasing. So they will act and feel accordingly. Add that to the fact that something like 90% of rape goes unreported, and even among the reported rapes, only 1% of cases even see jail time over a year.
So it becomes a toothless crime that rapists freely get away with. So women are preparing for a world where every man is out to hurt them. The same way police are trained to view every civilian as a threat.
And I used to say they were worried over nothing, until I saw how men that WEREN’T me treated women. It was a case of me being an introvert, not seeing the world around me. There very much is a problem with how men treat women, and there is also very much a problem with how women treat men. There’s also a problem with how men treat other men. And there’s a problem with how women treat women.
The whole concept of marriage is obsolete, yet it’s treated as the end goal of a relationship. Women are treated as baby ovens. Men are treated as bank accounts. And all of society is just toxic in everyway.
Because somewhere along the line, parents lost a sense of community, and teaching their children who to trust, and who not to. Instead they’re told not to trust any strangers. Well all that does is cripple their social skills when they get to kindergarten. Day 1, they’re surrounded by strangers. What are they supposed to do? Shut down, and have a room full of 30 kids not talking, not listening to the teacher?
I had a guy when I was 14 say he liked my hair. I’m not gay, but he was, so I politely told him I appriciate it, but also I’m not gay. He thought I was. At no point did I feel he was a threat, or creepy. He was just shooting his shot at a destined to fail attempt at flirting. Oh well, things go these ways sometimes. I knew I could trust he wouldn’t get violent.
But when I was 18, a guy in his 40s, who gave off some real men in black vibes, the guy in the overalls who was filled with bugs, he said “You suuure do got purrrdyyyy skiiiin”. And I knew NOT to trust this guy. He made my skin crawl, and I got out of there.
And thats what we’re not teaching kids today, because our parents didn’t teach it to us. How to learn WHO to trust, and what signs to look for. People think judging others is a bad thing. It’s not. It’s a nuetral thing. Its a skill that allows you to assess people.
Instead, we have a generation of people with no social skills, who feel that everyone from the other gender is out to get them. People list things like the ecconomy and threats of war as reasons people are having less kids now. I think it’s because people aren’t meeting. The traditional family is dead. All children now are accidents, which is why they wanted roe v wade overturned. To increase birthrates. Because republicans don’t care about families. They care about having wage slaves working the machines at low costs.
What people need to go back to is one person being in charge of the relationship, and one person being the caretaker. The genders on that don’t matter. You need a leader, and a supporter. And right now, everyones fighting to be the leader because they think it sounds cool.
Problem is, if you have two dominant types, all they do is fight, and eventually resent each other. If you have two submissive types, they just slowly drift apart and eventually the relationship falls apart.
But if you have one dominant leader type, and one (or more) submissive supporter types, you can have a healthy relationship that lasts.
The problem is, the toothpaste is out of the tube. And right now, theres so much hate and anger and division, that nobody is even TRYING to find a valid solution. It’s all just one big power grab, leading to many to just stay out of the whole damn thing. Myself included.
would you rather be emotionally vulnerable with a woman or a tree?
Lol lol. I haven’t heard that one. Tree, by far. The tree won’t use it against me later. (which has happened enough times that I got the point, even from women who told me verbatim to be vulnerable. Yep, they still used it against me later.)
