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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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In other words, the people you come across often who are single/available are likely heavily skewed towards the type of people that are not desired in a relationship. So if you're actively dating and trying to find someone, on average the people you meet are worse than the average person because all the suitable partners are not part of the potential partner population anymore.

This is the inescapable factor about the dating market that really blackpills me.

The worse-than-average partners are the ones you have a higher-than-average chance of encountering on a randomly selected date. The more you try to filter these people out, the more incentive they have to bypass your filters. And thus the more they color your perception of what the potential options out there are 'really' like.

And I've seen it play out myself. Almost all my close friends have been married (seemingly happily) around 10 years now, and they're all great people and great partners... and they all got married (and dropped from the dating pool) during or shortly after college, which means the people who are left as I've gotten older are the ones who DIDN'T get married or couldn't maintain it.

Which is to say, people less suited to relationships in general.