Millenial/GenZ borderline here. Perhaps not wise, but I have the modern dating experience and I can give advice about that.

Apps are completely useless. There are way too many guys and way too few girls who regularly use these apps, and that leads to awkward interpersonal dynamics, as though you’re interviewing for a job. You should never feel like you’re interviewing for a relationship. Even if you “pass,” it’s never a good sign that the start to a relationship is built upon checklists, transactions, and being the “best candidate.” I honestly expect that this is where a lot of incels get their strange dating worldviews from.

The hard truth is that there is no easy answer. There’s nothing you can do that will guarantee that you find someone nice. All I can say is that there are things you can do that will destroy your chances of finding someone. The best that you can do is to not do any of those things and hope for the best. Here’s a couple tips that might be helpful:

• Don’t spend your time online. As mentioned above, dating apps are worthless. Beyond that, though, it’s pointless to find anyone when everyone is anonymous. It’s ok to use the internet, but you also need to spend equal, if not more, time outside. Touching grass is a real, underrated advice. If you don’t have a reason to be outside, find a reason. Whether it’s a job, or a hobby, or a club, or some other commitment, you need to have a public presence. It was easier to be outside back when the internet wasn’t a thing, now you have to be intentional about it.
• Find in-person communities to be a part of. Goes hand-in-hand with the tip above. You need a public presence. Have in-person friends that you see regularly, have people whom you know well enough that they recognize you and know who you are. I was part of a for-fun orchestra group, but you can also find gardening groups, or sewing groups, or any other number of formal or informal groups that might host regular in-person meetings
• Know your neighbors. Your neighborhood is a community that you’re already a part of. It’s quite easy and low commitment.
• Find new hobbies and expand your horizons. You should have a wealth of experiences, not just an autistic-level depth of a single experience. If someone asks you what you do for fun, you better not have only a single thing to say. Not only does this make you a more interesting person, it increases the chance that you’ll encounter someone that you connect with. ie, you’ll be part of more communities and therefore encounter more people, but also for any one person, there’s a greater chance that you share at least one interest.
• Never stagnate. Builds off the previous tip. Always look for more things to do, more communities to join, more people to meet. There is too much to do in life for you to stagnate. Not only does this make you a more culturally rich person, it also gives you an excuse to be outside.
• Take some time to evaluate and reflect on what sorts of incel mindsets you have inadvertently adopted. A lot of internet and modern trends have fundamental roots in incel thought, and it’s very easy to get subtly influenced by those ideas. Having any sort of incel ideology is a major red flag, so you’ll need to self reflect on how you have been influenced by these ideas. Many people that I know who are single use incel or incel-like terminology or have expressed incel-like ideas. They’re not bad people, and they’re definitely not incels, but they have been subconsciously influenced by incel ideology from the internet. Meet enough of these people and you can start to see why it might be hard for certain people to find partners compared to others.
• Don’t approach someone who doesn’t actively indicate that they want to be approached. It’s rude and possibly creepy to do so. It’ll immediately destroy any chance of a connection with that person. It’s a false stereotype that people in the past got relationships through cold-approaches. At any given point in time, very few people want to be approached. There are only 2 solutions to this. First, meet more people so that you run into more people who want to be approached. Second, be more targeted with where you spend your time. If you are at a community meeting, the people there are significantly more likely to want to be approached than people that you find randomly on the street. Even so, read the room and determine if they want to be approached or not.

You don’t need to do all of these tips, but the more you do, the more appealing you become and the higher the chances are that you find someone. With a long enough time, you’ll get lucky and find someone that you connect with. I won’t lie, it’s hard. In a sense, it’s like losing weight or getting fit - you have to be intentional about doing things that you know are healthy. Except in this case, you’re building social health, not physical health.

Get off the apps and go do classes at places. Gym, cooking class, whatever. Or go sign up for one of those programs that specifically gets a bunch of single people together to go do activities.

The dating apps don’t work unless you’re a mega hottie. You’ll be spending a lot of money monthly to not be buried by their algorithms. You can use them to cast a net, but don’t expect anything immediate to happen.

If you’re using anything other than Tinder, Hinge, or Bumble you’re shooting yourself in the foot big time if you expect any success.

I am assuming you’re male. When Ashley Madison got hacked, stats came out that 5.5 million of the 37 million accounts were female. Gizmodo did an independent review and thinks it’s actually closer to 12 THOUSAND of those female accounts were actually real. While the vibe of Ashley Madison is very different from something like Hinge or Tinder, if those apps even remotely resemble the user base of AM that means the numbers are well, well stacked against you.

Thee One

Thou onanist.

Get comfortable with the reality that you won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, remember that rejection does not always imply a dislike of your entire person, and go out there with a couple of jokes/lines in mind until comedy becomes more second nature to you? Also, women, especially online, will talk about their long list of requirements for relationships but trust me that if you can provide them with a safe space to yap and complain and make them feel better about themselves and the world (and they think you’re not ugly), they’ll forget all about it. Do not be discouraged, build resilience and optimism because it’s not just good for you but also highly attractive! Get a haircut? That’s all I can think about at the moment.

Little anecdote: when I was about 12 I got invited to my first house party and I used to dress like a grandpa (now, when my wife is not around and honestly since my late teens, I dress like a hobo so I guess I’ve traded one form of being unfashionable for another, lol) and I tried to ask a couple of girls I didn’t know there to dance and it went as badly as you can imagine and I felt so bad about it… So I asked my mom for some normal, age appropriate t-shirts and went online (back in the day when going online meant that your phone beeped weird, lol) and printed a list of jokes and went outside determined to change these results. Little by little I gained more confidence, as girls laughed more with me than at me (lol 😭), to the point that I continued dressing like a hobo because I realized being confidently charming can do 90% of the heavy lifting. All of this to say that maybe you just haven’t socialised successfully enough to become competent and feel that way, so just do it, because as long as you don’t verge into misogyny (remember “women seem wicked when you’re unwanted” 🎶 was sung by very handsome man!) you can only get better at being what women want and need. Good luck!

I gave up dating several years ago. It’s mainly because I’m too much of an introvert for relationships. I had a few girlfriends back in high school but obviously none of them were successful, as they just didn’t feel right for me. Some people, like me, just aren’t cut out for dating.

I’m an elder. I’m going to die alone.

Try this one weird trick? https://lemmy.ml/post/35842202

Btw “seminaristic” = ???

If i didn’t have someone now id probably go to music shows, thats a good place to meet like minded people. Otherwise see if your local library puts on events.

Or maybe sign up for a community college if you can afford and learn something at the same time. Who knows.

Lemmy users

Not everyone here is on Lemmy, and this is a Redditism that I wish we’d leave behind.