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My takeaway from the discussion a year ago you linked is not that we're fucked. It's that things are bad, but bad in a way that's contingent on cultural factors that could absolutely change, even if it's hard.
I particularly liked @SpoonOfSugar's comment:
This checks out to me. The most successful relationships in my life have been ones where explicitly, repeatedly, both my partner and I demonstrated that we thought higher of the other than we thought of ourselves. In other words, we both thought we were punching above our weight. But I question whether this not happening very often is a permanent fixture of human mating or whether there's something going on specifically in the 21st century. It used to be that people could see "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt."
I also liked @Forgotpassword's comment:
I genuinely believe the core of the problem is the prevalence of online dating, which transforms dating from a personal test of compatibility into a meat market where women are overloaded by offers of cheap sex. This distorts people's perceptions of their actual attractiveness while also incentivizing sociopathic behavior. Women are incentivized to offer early sex to high-quality men (because they won't give them the time of day otherwise), and high-quality men are incentivized to avoid commitment (because they already got the milk(shake) for free) and proceed to avoid committing to them.
So then these unfortunate women's barometers for men's attractiveness are set on 'high' and they don't find more average partners attractive or interesting, which means, like a pornsick man, they can't bring themselves to find happiness with a suitable partner and they become disgusted and revolted by how "all men [who I am still capable of seeing as a sexual being] are like that."
And these are the women the unfortunate men on online dating have to try and woo, and because they don't see the men as attractive or valuable they make excessive, deranged, and unrealistic demands of them, and the men find themselves unable to find happiness with a suitable partner and become disgusted and revolted by how "all women [who haven't already found a suitable partner and are still on online dating after years] are like that."
With online dating taking over, we've also eliminated the other cultural opportunities where people meet spouses by labeling them sexual harrassment or stigmatizing them. The decline in voluntary associations has also played a role.
I can't tell you how many stories I have in my family of the average guy marrying the girl next door. When your dating circle is limited, and tied to your fixed community, you connect with people, and consider your potential partners part of your sphere of concern. You care about even the people you reject.
To fix dating, we need to rebuild communities. I realize that's basically the "draw the rest of the owl" argument. But we need to draw the rest of the freaking owl. I don't know how we do that, I don't know how we get people to talk to each other again, I don't know how we make people see others as part of their sphere of concern, I don't know how we do it. But we have to do it. Deus vult, deus vult, deus vult.
I don't think this is the entire picture, since there's also an incentive on the part of a man who 'knows how to play the game' to pose as a viable longterm prospect and then dip and/or incompatibilities are found during the trial period and it's donezo. I've seen in my friendgroup both men and women in their late twenties join dating apps with 0 meaningful relationship experience prior.
For most men the immediate response is crickets and zero interest (assuming introverted nerdy type) which then requires considerable personal development to grind through. For the women, the result tends to be getting played a few times and then pivoting hard to PVP mode or just opting out.
Well… yeah? I’m not completely sure where you’re disagreeing, that’s my point… many women get played and conclude “all men are like that” and many men are left with either women in PvP mode or no traction at all, and they conclude that “all women are like that.”
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Maybe I'm just surrounded by giga-chads but that has not been the issue for any of the men around me IRL, whether they found their partner the old fashioned way or through online dating, but it's a complaint I hear repeatedly online. Then again, people in places like the ww threads here and elsewhere frequently have bizarre stories of their issues dating which suggest to me that they are not just slightly below the median in mate attractiveness but very much so.
I think the issue here is that the internet amplifes the voice of the bitter losers that always have had issues, but were just invisible before. People like to trot out the graph of recently increasing sexlessness among young men but that has since rebounded.
As for why people don't have kids, I always come back to historic fertility trends and note that urbanism killed fertility a hundred years before feminism or modern dating markets, and it's remained remarkably consistent throughout time and place and the primary thing that has changed is the rate of urbanisation.
It seems to me that some combination of children being a major economic drain rather than a boon, delayed pair bonding, higher cost of living (particularly sufficiently large housing in safe areas with jobs), access to entertainment and maybe female labour force participation (lots of evidence against this being a major factor though) are the real culprits.
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