Yeah, I didn’t want to tag you here because I wasn’t sure how my post would play to this crowd or how you’d feel about me using your post as a springboard, but this is something I’ve thought about on and off for a long time. I was thinking of dating as a job search back in the 1990s when I was just a cynical Xennial (or late GenX) teenager.
Those are fair points, but I’ve found that if I worry overmuch about what sort of meaning people might find in my words and how that meaning might diverge from the meaning I intend to convey, I might not write anything at all.
I find the job search metaphor useful precisely because it isn’t just men who have a hard time finding decent jobs nowadays. Hell, if I was single today I’d probably have a marginally better chance of finding a forty-something woman whose company I enjoy than I would a job that pays a decent salary and doesn’t demand the sort of servile devotion expected of a high-ranking Scientologist.
Of course, I don’t expect people wrapped in their own pain to empathize with that of others. They want validation for their own suffering, and generally don’t care about anybody else’s. But that’s what friends are for, and I am nobody’s friend.
I’m not sure it’s a matter of asymmetry. Like I said, everybody gets a raw deal when it comes to dating. It’s just a different raw deal depending on gender. What I’m seeing, and what I saw back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, is that the old protocols don’t work any longer. They probably didn’t work all that well for most people before then, either, but there wasn’t much anybody could do about it.
Besides, this isn’t my field of expertise. Even if my understanding of the problem is on the money, I have no idea how to fix it. Going back to the old ways won’t work, because they didn’t work for most people. It won’t happen no matter how much crybullying right-wingers do. The world has moved on, and people have to move on with it.
If I was going to suggest anything, it’s that we need more “main character syndrome”, not less. We need more people exercising agency in their own lives, taking the leading role in the stories of their own lives, and not settling for being supporting characters in everybody else’s lives. Men should still approach women they find attractive, and be honest about their desires and intentions. However, women should also approach men they find attractive, and be honest about their desires and intentions. Nobody should be passively waiting to select from a pool of suitors whose only common quality was that they had the nerve to make the first move. Everybody needs to cultivate patience and learn to take rejection graciously. People need to go for what they want, instead of hoping that dating works like the fabled cat distribution system.
Like I said, I wasn’t looking when I met my wife, but counting on that sort of luck or serendipity isn’t going to work for most people. It shouldn’t have worked for me, to be honest.