Reposting with a more neutral title. This isn't a "which gender has it harder" type debate, just discussing something that happened yesterday. I was watching a show called Insecure with my fiance, and we're on the second season. I'm about to spoil the first one for context, but in a nutshell the main character (Issa) and her boyfriend starts out having relationship problems. Just as things are seeming to work themselves out, she "accidently" cheats on him by sleeping with with a guy from her past. She felt a lot of guilt and hid it from. Eventually he finds out, rightfully get upset, packs all his shit and leaves the apartment. Second season starts off with her dating again, showing scenes of her on several dates with guys and each one she seems inattentive and disinterested because she really misses her old guy and she's trying to get over it.

A one point there was a scene where it shows Issa swiping left on guys profiles and looking defeated. My fiance then goes "ughhh" and tells me how she can relate to that and how hard it was finding a quality guy on dating app (a little background, we met on Bumble two years ago). I then tell her at least yall have options, you can go on there right now and get a hundred matches in 24 hours. She then tells me yeah but they have to filter through everybody and I'm like men don't even have that option, we struggle to even talk to yall lol. It would be nice to have 100 options presented in front of me and I can pick and choose from there.

After a lil back and forth I asked her how many women does she think I matched with on bumble in two weeks (a little more background, I came off a long distance relationship which was a bad idea from the start, moped for a week then hopped on bumble. We matched two weeks later). She tells me 30. I then say I'm only counting the ones where the woman sent a message, because the rules of the app is women have 24hrs to message after a match or it goes away. You can buy 24 hour time extenders but fuck that lol. Anyway she replies "yeah, 30". I tell her no I only had 7 matches in 2 weeks, with her being he 7th. The first 6 never made it past some infrequent texts. She looked dumbfounded and goes "what, really?". I'm like yeah and she sits there as if she's pondering. I then tell her that I felt like I was lucky cause a lot of men take months just to get that. She then mention her friend who has been single for a while and is below average height (I think he's lke 5'6-5'7), and if he puts that then he virtually gets no responses.

Maybe this is something women on PPD already understand, but I definitely think that most women in general don't and it's funny to see them realize how tough it is for the average guy to find a mate in the OLD world. If you think about it, the most average 50th percentile man isn't even good enough since men generally outnumber women 3:1 on these apps which puts you below the threshold, and that's not including bots and onlyfan sellers. Once you make it to the IRL portion then you have to hope you're not a free meal or a placeholder for the one they really want like Issa lol. Does this knowledge change anything in reality? I don't think so, but it's still interesting to me.