Thank goodness my dating days are over, happily married for 22 years come December, to a 5'7" hubs 😂 I'm only 5'1" myself, pre hubs I dated a lad of 6'5" (very briefly in my teens) and I can't recommend it. For obvious physiological reasons 😂 My parents are both vertically challenged, my hubs family is a heady mix of six footers and little people, so what the future holds for our two boys is anyones guess. Our eldest is just shy of 15 and a strapping 5'8", his 12 yr old brother is exactly a foot smaller.....
Women can be so bloody shallow. Kindness, a sense of humour and resilience are what matter most in a long lasting partnership.
I appreciate your post and points. Nonetheless, I still think things are better today with dating apps than before without.
For one, I've not found the rules-based discrimination to be any worse on them than in real life. The charming 5'7 guy has trouble getting a swipe today; in the past he'd have trouble getting a hearing, as the haughty women insisting on no deviation from their standards today would, then, simply and literally talk over his head to demonstrate their lack of interest and disgust.
Similarly, the tools of charm and humor are no less important today than then; if anything, they're even more so. This is because the swipe is not the only filtering step in the process; the next phase is, of chatting via messaging app or text.
20-30 years ago this phase did not meaningfully exist in many settings; if you were picking up women late at night in a loud bar or club where most were inebriated, you had to be charming, yes, but the type of charm which proved useful was quite limited, in its variety, scope, and utility.
The messaging phase today is integral to success on the apps. It creates a period of a few days to a couple of weeks when a man can impress and interest a woman primarily based on his writing ability; for those of us who devoted ourselves to learning to write but never quite nailed how to appear haughtily disinterested yet engaged in a bar, this is a Godsend.
It also is a return to an earlier mode of dating, in my view, by bringing back courting as an intermediate step between meeting and intimacy. Of course, this step It has no exact historical equivalent. However, its closest analogue, to me, is the courtship - the period between the couple meeting and expressing initial interest, and the couple becoming intimate.
As I said, this is a tremendous boon to the type of men you are talking about, and all of us interested in meaningful long-term relationships. Initial attraction is the brutal winnowing process you indicate rules by an alchemy few of us can control or crack. Intimacy essentially makes us drunk on hormones, clouding our judgment, including of whether a person is a good potential partner or not, or just good in bed.
Courtship/chatting is a step in which the intellectual, interesting, and witty can shine, and we can gauge whether we think a potential partner could be right for us without the intoxication of intimacy.
I dated before apps when the procedure was just to guess, to approach random women randomly. The women often weren't interested in you in the slightest or even looking for someone at all in that moment. The approach was no better, the equivalent of flying on a trapeze without a net - trying to find an entree that would allow you to demonstrate the charm and humor you mention (few of us being as able as Hitchens at marshaling it for a stranger on cue), and usually crashing and burning.
Dating apps are hardly perfect; every point you raise against them is fair. Nonetheless, compared to the world before, they're a Godsend
Now I am an average American man. 6 foot even. Of course age has taken its toll on me. Yet, growing up it never seemed an issue. I wonder what has changed.
I absolutely agree about dating apps. When I was young and single there were dating services, but I never would spend the money. I met girls the old fashioned way. At dances and bars.
My 93 year old mom refers to her favorite politicians as ‘tall and handsome’. The two descriptions are always used in that order. An extremely popular song in 1933 America title was’ You have to be a football hero to fall in love with a beautiful gal’.
Social media now makes this quest brutally efficient.
Yes my dad was a six foot tall football hero circa 1950.
I should have mentioned that the most successful amongst my friends were usually much shorter than me. I wonder about the Dutch. The average man is six feet.
I became aware years ago in an SF novel when a woman had her femurs extended. So that isn’t a a surprise. It’s that normal people think it’s so important is what is crazy to me. Way back, my mom told me of a man she dated. Back in the 1950s. He was short. She didn’t care. Herself being about 5’2”. But it was the chip on his shoulder about his height that turned her off. Just be yourself, people!
The world will be inherited by non-virtual women who meet non-virtual men in non-virtual space who decide to couple and reproduce. Dating aps pairing up 80% of photo-shopped women with 20% of men of fictional proportion will go the way of the '70's discotheque "meat markets".
Pygmies
I’m reading about Pygmies,
who measure about four feet
and live deep in the Congo.
Who hunt and forage in the twilight jungle
where they sing strange melodies
using the pentatonic scale heuristically,
riffing off the forest chatter,
making magical opera
such as the Pharaohs once
employed them to produce
back when the music first appeared
forty thousand years ago.
They live in frond homes
where everything falls around them:
“plop, plop, plop!”
and pass their days to a tune like souls floating
and maintained aloft like balloons drifting
from the forest undergrowth,
where they hunt with nets, big sticks and bash things.
Their lives are as sadly short as their stature.
They must climb to the top of trees to see much.
And the children compete to hold their breath longest
in the dirt paths’ shallow puddles.
This just comes out of your head... bravo.
Thank goodness my dating days are over, happily married for 22 years come December, to a 5'7" hubs 😂 I'm only 5'1" myself, pre hubs I dated a lad of 6'5" (very briefly in my teens) and I can't recommend it. For obvious physiological reasons 😂 My parents are both vertically challenged, my hubs family is a heady mix of six footers and little people, so what the future holds for our two boys is anyones guess. Our eldest is just shy of 15 and a strapping 5'8", his 12 yr old brother is exactly a foot smaller.....
Women can be so bloody shallow. Kindness, a sense of humour and resilience are what matter most in a long lasting partnership.
Men, too. The 'ideal' woman now looks like the cast of The Only Way is Essex. How far we done fell!
Blimey......I'm nobody's ideal in that case (except hub's, obvs). Young people, I despair....
I appreciate your post and points. Nonetheless, I still think things are better today with dating apps than before without.
For one, I've not found the rules-based discrimination to be any worse on them than in real life. The charming 5'7 guy has trouble getting a swipe today; in the past he'd have trouble getting a hearing, as the haughty women insisting on no deviation from their standards today would, then, simply and literally talk over his head to demonstrate their lack of interest and disgust.
Similarly, the tools of charm and humor are no less important today than then; if anything, they're even more so. This is because the swipe is not the only filtering step in the process; the next phase is, of chatting via messaging app or text.
20-30 years ago this phase did not meaningfully exist in many settings; if you were picking up women late at night in a loud bar or club where most were inebriated, you had to be charming, yes, but the type of charm which proved useful was quite limited, in its variety, scope, and utility.
The messaging phase today is integral to success on the apps. It creates a period of a few days to a couple of weeks when a man can impress and interest a woman primarily based on his writing ability; for those of us who devoted ourselves to learning to write but never quite nailed how to appear haughtily disinterested yet engaged in a bar, this is a Godsend.
It also is a return to an earlier mode of dating, in my view, by bringing back courting as an intermediate step between meeting and intimacy. Of course, this step It has no exact historical equivalent. However, its closest analogue, to me, is the courtship - the period between the couple meeting and expressing initial interest, and the couple becoming intimate.
As I said, this is a tremendous boon to the type of men you are talking about, and all of us interested in meaningful long-term relationships. Initial attraction is the brutal winnowing process you indicate rules by an alchemy few of us can control or crack. Intimacy essentially makes us drunk on hormones, clouding our judgment, including of whether a person is a good potential partner or not, or just good in bed.
Courtship/chatting is a step in which the intellectual, interesting, and witty can shine, and we can gauge whether we think a potential partner could be right for us without the intoxication of intimacy.
I dated before apps when the procedure was just to guess, to approach random women randomly. The women often weren't interested in you in the slightest or even looking for someone at all in that moment. The approach was no better, the equivalent of flying on a trapeze without a net - trying to find an entree that would allow you to demonstrate the charm and humor you mention (few of us being as able as Hitchens at marshaling it for a stranger on cue), and usually crashing and burning.
Dating apps are hardly perfect; every point you raise against them is fair. Nonetheless, compared to the world before, they're a Godsend
Mr. Gage, it was a joy to read your post.
Now I am an average American man. 6 foot even. Of course age has taken its toll on me. Yet, growing up it never seemed an issue. I wonder what has changed.
I absolutely agree about dating apps. When I was young and single there were dating services, but I never would spend the money. I met girls the old fashioned way. At dances and bars.
My 93 year old mom refers to her favorite politicians as ‘tall and handsome’. The two descriptions are always used in that order. An extremely popular song in 1933 America title was’ You have to be a football hero to fall in love with a beautiful gal’.
Social media now makes this quest brutally efficient.
Yes my dad was a six foot tall football hero circa 1950.
I should have mentioned that the most successful amongst my friends were usually much shorter than me. I wonder about the Dutch. The average man is six feet.
I had no idea a person could actually have their height increased. Sounds ghastly.
I became aware years ago in an SF novel when a woman had her femurs extended. So that isn’t a a surprise. It’s that normal people think it’s so important is what is crazy to me. Way back, my mom told me of a man she dated. Back in the 1950s. He was short. She didn’t care. Herself being about 5’2”. But it was the chip on his shoulder about his height that turned her off. Just be yourself, people!
Yes! Nobody cares unless you make an issue out of it.
I spared you the worst details. Grotesque!
Those dating apps? Limit your searches to *short* women. Problem solved.
And a bit of humor:
Q. Who was the shortest man in the Bible?
A. Bildad the Shuhite. (Job 1:11)
The world will be inherited by non-virtual women who meet non-virtual men in non-virtual space who decide to couple and reproduce. Dating aps pairing up 80% of photo-shopped women with 20% of men of fictional proportion will go the way of the '70's discotheque "meat markets".
Can we just go back to 1999? Things made sense then. Seinfeld was right about everything.
Also, virtual castration is better than the real thing!
Platform shoes abounded back then, BTW...