Technology has greatly changed the dating landscape. I’m going to talk about key historical milestones and explain why they have negatively impacted many men in today’s SMP (especially younger men, under ~26).

Change 1: Email, instant messaging (now DMs), and text messaging shifts many interactions away from being in-person.

Change 2: Online dating sites begin attracting early adopters. This was the best time for average men to have success with online dating because the early adopters skewed heavily away from men that were already having offline success. Women weren’t as overwhelmed with messages. Therefore women would more heavily consider written communications, would often respond to messages from average men, and after a date were more likely to give you a nice response if they weren’t interested (as opposed to ghosting).

Change 3: Online dating grows in mainstream popularity and becomes available on smartphones.

Change 4: The growth of social media that focuses on showing images of your lifestyle.

On the surface these things sound like they should have improved dating for everyone, but here’s what happened instead:

Men now have far less incentive to learn important socialization and character building skills because it is no longer necessary to build attraction and ask women out in-person.

Men now have a low-risk, low-effort way to ask out women but this results in many of them communicating with women in ways that provide no value (ex: sending a message of hi, or setting up an unattractive dating profile). Women become overwhelmed with communication from men and aggressively filter most of it out. Additionally, this causes dating sites to have a much a higher man to woman ratio.

The result of men being able to mass approach women online is that women now filter for only the best men and ignore the rest. Almost all women get attention online but only the top men get attention from women.

As a result the top men get attention from multiple women and can easily next anyone that doesn’t give them what they want and have no incentive to enter an exclusive relationship unless they find “the unicorn”. This allows them to get near limitless casual sex. Women then face the problem of the top guys having easy access to sex and therefore they lose attention if she makes sex too hard to get.

This leaves men that aren’t in the top with little to nothing because: 1 - Online dating sites have more men than women. 2 - Women only respond to their top choices. In most demographics women are mostly interested in the same top men.

The men that aren’t in the top could learn cold approach skills but it is a skill that requires practice. Women today can be much more harsh in rejecting men that haven’t built this skill because culture has shifted to view these men as creepy PUAs or any other number of derogatory terms. Additionally, women have less incentive to do pleasant rejections of these guys because other men (especially online) don’t care if that is how she acts. Many men that should be learning cold approach get too frustrated to push past the begging stages because there is so much resistance from society.

Furthermore, the growth of image based social media put most younger men at a huge disadvantage. They can’t convey a lot of value because they haven’t earned it yet (status in the world that comes from hard work). The introverted person is especially punished because they often keep many details of their life private and are horrible and marketing themselves. Women don’t face this problem because they are much more valued for their looks.

In conclusion men that aren’t in top have it much harder today because the SMP brutally punishes them for being average to below average in any number of areas (looks, confidence, ability to send interesting messages, not having good photos, not being good with social media, etc.). In the past these same men often would have been fine because women would take a chance on them because the women had less exposure to top men. Any area a man was lacking in could be compensated for through building other areas (like being out of shape was ok if you had a stable job or were respected in your local community).

Additional Q4ALL: how else has technology changed modern dating?