How Heterosexual Couples Met (From /r/DataIsBeautiful)
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Key statistic left off, how MANY couples met during these years.
I'm willing to bet money online couples don't even make up 30% of what could've been made through work if HR wasn't a thing.
That is a major issue. We had training telling us to not make eye contact with a woman for more then 5 seconds continuously and not put our hand on a woman's shoulder - like you normally do with a guy when you come over and he shows you something he works on.
It also had a section of it does not matter if the accusations are true or false you are not allowed to be spiteful to the complainant and need to continue working with a smile on your face.
When stuff like that comes out of HR who is crazy enough to actually date someone at work,
A former manager of mine (really nice guy, helped me become more professional) met his wife through work when she was just in charge of delivering mail. He's been married for I think 40 years now and at the point of grand kids now.
That has all been denied thanks to HR, because it's too easy to sack men in the workplace just for doing something as simple as asking if they want a drink when you go get one yourself from the lunch room. Work Place relationships often work well because the process of working together usually revels quickly when someone is putting up a front as you as you can compare how they act to how much they actually get done.
Then he can put her and her friends in the ground if she starts making false accusations and life the rest of his life on the tax payers dime in prison.
Happiness Culture is the worst thing HR brought to the workplace. I've worked with male-majority environments, and occasionally guys would have to be separated, but crybullies had far less power because disputes could actually be settled, and they had no power to get you fired for not tolerating them enough.
But I thought it was sexist to tell (or expect) people to smile? That whole thing is just enraging. And who is crazy enough to want to date a coworker? It almost makes you not want to even talk to any women at work. But that, apparently, is problematic too.
I'm kind of skeptical. Not because of HR, but because every women I stumble across when working is either not single, engaged, or married.
Single women on the ground nowadays is very fucking sparse, and seemingly impossible to come across organically. For me, atleast.
...you know, thinking on the matter, this might be part of a cascade effect. More single men not getting married mean less opportunity for the still single men of their group to encounter single women.
The reason I say this is because the only time I have stumbled across single women, it was because of the wife of a good friend of mine. I've met more single women because of her than I ever have because of my friends group, and I've known them alot longer than I've known her.
Huh. I wonder if anyone else has experience similar.
That's actually sort of what you should expect. Not from that particular person, but you get to know more girls the more people you get to know in general. If your current social circle doesn't have a lot of single women in their orbit, don't necessarily replace them, but just expand your circle by going out of your way to make friends with new people. You never know what kind of connections will come together.
For example, I talked to this kid at the gym between sets instead of looking at my phone. Turns out he had a big sister and as a result, when she dropped by I was already partially "verified" in her network. I wasn't friendly with him because of that, I didn't even know he had siblings. You don't expect things to pan out most of the time, you just increase your chances with every next person that likes and recognizes you.
The rare man who's good at cold approach in this day and age seems to be more into one night stands than a real relationship. If it happens then great, but I don't think it's realistic.
Pretty much, yes, I agree. 'You have to know women to meet women' is, while frustrating, a sad fact of life when it comes to dating and social circles.
It's just, I've never made the connection of 'Hey, maybe men getting married has an add-on effect of organically introducing women into their social circles, and men not getting married has cascading effects larger than we realize'.
Sort of like a social entropic cascade kind of deal.
Well that's not totally what I said, meeting more dudes will eventually lead you to more women too unless you're exclusively making friends at Magic the Gathering tournaments. I agree that making friends with women is more efficient though. Lol
Hah! I'm just biased from my experience - among all the friends I've had, the number of single women I've met through them is, well... zero. So it goes.
Well, even from what you said, you met women through the wife of one of your friends. That still counts, you wouldn't make those connections without being his friend. Other than that, expand your interests beyond Magic lol. I'm joking, but organized outdoor trips can be good for example.
You're right, tbh. But that's because you're not looking in the right places. Especially if you are older.
It's crazy how Gen X will say shit like, they can meet people on the subway or in a grocery store.
Firstly, no one's going to speak with you, certainly not romantically, in those environments.
Secondly, the people you are actually going to encounter are all basically taken and in relationships if they are normal.
Third, the people who aren't already in a relationship, are kind of broken single women in their 30's, and you don't really feel interested in them anyway because they are repulsive people generally and would treat you like shit, at best.
Fourth, those same women in their thirties are still trying to get laid at bars, which proves you probably shouldn't start a relationship with them.
I'm not really sure what else to do except widen your social circle and hope someone introduces you to a friend of theirs. That seems to be the only legitimate way forward with the most reasonable risk.
The real secret to finding a decent woman in 2023: look for introverts with skinny moms. That’s the whole game at this point. You want someone with non-fat genetics who doesn’t thrive on social validation. And if you have to sacrifice the former for the latter, so be it.
White women under 40 are very sparse.
"Church" isn't even listed on here, but it should be considering how far back it goes.
My issue is that I would certainly expect that as the percentage of online couples goes higher, we would also see a collapse in nominal relationships.
I don't understand why people list church. Going to church has never lead to romantic opportunities in my experience, not even fumbled ones.
I think it could, but there'd be a whole social environment around it. Less like hooking up at church, and more like hooking up at the Church's chilli cook-off event.
Totally agree.
It benefits churchgoing married men to keep single church ladies single to pick up side pieces.
Just go to bars/restaurants with nice waitresses?
Nah these women get hit on endlessly
And what, simp for them? They get hundreds of dollars a day from simps trying to "impress" them.
Social media ruined society.
The rate of technological advancement has drastically exceeded our collective rate of evolution.
Humans have an average generational turnover time of 20 years. That is, it takes two decades for a newborn female to grow up and start producing offspring of her own.
That's a pretty slow turnover time.
Technology used to advance fairly slowly; a baby born a thousand years ago could expect to grow up in more or less the same world his parents grew up in, save for maybe one or two slowly-spreading innovations every two or three generations.
That started to change with the end of the Victorian era.
I used to marvel at my grandparents having seen the early days of flight, and the advent of electricity and all the changes that brought (the farm my grandmother was born on didn't have it.) But then I realized I've probably seen more change than they did just in the past 20 years ... never mind how much has changed overall since the late 1960s ...
Anyway, I wonder if that's a solution to the Fermi Paradox. Just as technological change gets out of control, the species evolves to be too stupid to keep up with it all thanks to a lack of natural selection.
Don't forget medical progress. Things like CAT scans/MRI really revolutionized medicine.
My aforementioned grandmother died at 72 basically because of CAT scans/MRI not being available in 1980. And now, I just survived heavy shit because of these things, and more that didn't exist 50 years ago. They've been able to save preemies that wouldn't have lived when I was born (yes, the survival of younger and younger preemies even sparked a line of fucking toys back in the 90s.)
Airplanes being safer and transporting more humans everywhere. It's so normalized you don't even notice.
Drones opening up more secrets of the natural world. And affecting it.
If anything, technologies have become more efficient at what what they do, for better or for worse.
As a guy who works in IT I get weird looks when I espouse my belief that technology was a mistake. People become increasingly concerned once they realize I'm not joking.
I'm in IT. Early on in my career I would hear guys "joking" about just up and quitting to work on a farm. It did not take me very long to realize it wasn't a joke.
I don't fully agree with Uncle Ted, but damn
Working on a farm, buying some acreage in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, running screaming into the woods, living in a mountain cabin, it's got many forms but it's all the same realization.
lifts coffee mug, looks out window to field Yep.
The word "meme" comes from gene, being something that spreads and changes as part of existence. Social Media has been like exposing our memetic code to intense radiation, causing mutations and growths of unrestricted cancer.
That's pretty clever. Was that one of Dawkins ideas or did you come up with it? (I haven't actually read The Selfish Gene) Memes becoming mutated during rapid global propagation is analogous to the woke mind virus that Elon Musk talks about.
I came up with it myself. I haven't read Dawkins either. The high-energy, constantly changing nature of the internet just makes radiation a fitting analogy. Especially looking at the results....
Press 'X' to doubt the 'stay together' part, especially of the red line.
When The Algorithm brings you together, their only choice is to stay together, lest the glue gun is deployed.
Data is man made horrors.
The Internet didn't exist before 1989, so how could you meet someone on it in the 80s? Even if they count the ARPANET as the internet, the 1980s figures are still ridiculously high considering how few people used it.
Edit: According to this: https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ there were about 10K hosts in 1987. Let's be generous and assume that there were 10 users/host, that's still only 100K people online in 1987, so the 1980s numbers are definitely bullshit. That's without even taking into account that the overwhelming majority of those users were male.
Good point. The sample size is only 6519, so maybe the 65 people who met online in the 80s were the study authors and their friends in academia.
They may be including services like AOL and Compuserve, both of which existed in the 80s.
Maybe some phone based services? Don't know too young for ti.
This data isn't "beautiful" -- it's horrifying.
You used to be able to rely on friend networks and people around you to semi-vet potential partners, but now that you can't do that the odds of getting fooled by somebody who will turn around and try to ruin you or cause you to lose access to your job/club/bar/etc are just too high to risk.
That's a good observation.
That kind of behavior would also ruin your social reputation in the past, but now there's no consequences for being evil.
I think online games like WoW have accounted for a lot of online relationships as well
Well, that's a problem
I don't know but that's about the time the whole woke mind virus really started to hit critical mass in society.
iPhones, I believe? No, that's a bit earlier. Maybe a major dating website like eHarmony?