Was dating always this terrible?

san__404 · 2020-10-26T22:23:01+00:00

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penelopekitty · 2020-10-26T21:50:15+00:00

No, it didn't used to be like this. When I was a teen and young woman boys and men took us on dates, and paid. Most of the time the guy became your boyfriend, no question about it. There was no such thing as hooking up or FWB. In college some people had one night stands but it was pretty rare. I only did it once and the next day the guy sent me an enormous bouquet of flowers. He wanted to continue to see me but I wasn't interested. This was in the 80s and early 90s.

When I re-entered the dating scene after my divorce in 2012 I was shocked. I've been traumatized by the way men have treated me. People have changed and treat each other as disposable and most relationships seem to be transactional. It's very depressing.

Maude2010 · 2020-10-26T23:18:22+00:00

No. I dated twenty five years ago and I’m dating now, and I can assure you that a lot has changed.

For some perspective, I was in my late twenties when I got my first cell phone, in my thirties when I got a Smartphone and joined Facebook, in my forties before Tinder was mainstream. When I first tried OLD, around 2000, I had to mail in a photo of myself. People didn’t even have digital cameras, let alone Smartphones.

Certain things haven’t changed. There were always double standards around sex, for example. Men lied and cheated.

But so much is different. Sending nudes/demanding nudes wasn’t a thing. People just didn’t take nude photos of themselves at all, unless they had a darkroom. Everything was less visual and less shallow. If you had one photo on your OLD profile, no one demanded more. There was no Instagram, so no following Instagram babes. Anal sex was whispered about but not remotely mainstream. Brazilian waxes weren’t expected. (I remember dating a guy in 2009, who was shocked that I had one). A slap on the ass or a bit of hair grabbing during sex was rough. Doggy style was kinky. Spitting on women and slapping their faces was unheard of outside of the BDSM community. Most people didn’t know what a safe word was. People hooked up and had casual sex but it was not expected. Porn was not as accessible, it wasn’t as extreme, and it wasn’t nearly as out in the open. Men wouldn’t talk about watching porn all the time, even if they did.

The most recent changes I’ve noticed, even more recent than the sex stuff, is men’s hygiene and effort taking a total dive.

I had some terrible experiences when I was younger, and I wasn’t as well equipped to deal with then as I would be now. And hurt is hurt. Disrespected is disrespected. Betrayed is betrayed. It’s kind of pointless to compare the ways in which it happened.

But back then it was like you met someone and dated and became a couple, or you had a bad experience (like someone dumping you right after sex) and you felt bad and then you healed. Now it seems like it’s never ending drama with these situationships or guys blowing hot and cold for years. Dating is just endless stress and frustration and it seems like there’s no joy or promise in it at all.

2020-10-27T10:44:18+00:00

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coolestgirlyoueverme · 2020-10-26T23:48:32+00:00

No, it was not. I believe there has been a change somewhere around 2015 or even a few years before that. When I was in highschool and university, if you were sexual with a guy, the default assumption was that you were now a couple. That was the norm. If you wanted a FWB instead, that was something that had to be explicitly discussed instead of exclusivity and it was NOT the norm default assumption. Now those norms have been reversed. It's f*ed up. I'm curious what caused this. PUA culture? Manipulative male sexual strategies? What happened around 2013-2015? Anyways, I think it has gone too far and I sense there will be another shift in reaction to this.

Pornruinedsociety · 2020-10-27T07:48:36+00:00

Silicon valleys misogynistic sex obsessed tech culture

https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2018/02/07/pulling-back-the-curtain-on-silicon-valleys-misogynistic-sex-obsessed-tech-culture/amp/

Facebook is so misogynistic and so it seems are all these men involved in tech and silicon valley. They were incels who now have money and power to have massive influence on people. I agree with a comment further up it really started in slowly in mid 2000s but has increased rapidly more so the past few years with further development of phones technology, online dating making things easier for men to lie and string women along, more and more adult content online becoming increasingly violent and hate speech against women online and pua etc.

I don't use social media at all with the exception of Reddit purely for fds, but when I was on Facebook there were often sexualised photos of women that weren't taken down but if a woman but scantily clad photo of man up it was taken down pretty quick. I sometimes wonder if it's all deliberate and the tech nerds knew they could brainwash men across the world to hate and objectify women as much as they do.

OpenCelebration3 · 2020-10-26T21:45:53+00:00

I feel like dating has changed so much even within the past two years for me personally. Like a complete 180. I used to never have problems meeting men organically out in public and I usually had a pretty good Rotation going on. My most recent relationship of two years ended in April of this year and dating is WAY different now than it was before I met my ex in 2018. I have only been on two dates since my breakup. My standards have increased substantially since being introduced to FDS and that’s a factor , and Obviously COVID has created an environment that makes meeting people out and about very difficult but even aside from that .....the dating climate in general is just ugly to me right now . The few men I have been meeting are super low effort and just ughh to me ......I swear it wasn’t always this difficult . Lol . I think OLD has been making men lazy.

ModernDayOracle · 2020-10-27T02:17:01+00:00

It's definitely different. I blame porn, dating apps, and hookup culture.

I was horrified when I started reading stories on FDS about how men are treating their partners in bed. It's so far outside my experiences as to be almost unrecognisable; even in my wild 20s (and they were very wild) the casual violence and misogyny wasn't part of the general dating landscape. Sure, there were men like that but you knew who they were and kept well away from them

janeaustenfan99 · 2020-10-27T00:18:24+00:00

Yeah, it wasn’t even this bad in 2012. I honestly think when dating apps became a thing, things went bad. Even when it was just dating websites only, accessed on your laptop, it was a lot better.

amievenreal99 · 2020-10-27T10:52:51+00:00

Despite it being supposedly modern times and feminism is supposedly getting big, in reality it's getting more dreadful by the day for women.

Karthasis11 · 2020-10-27T10:12:14+00:00

No, causal sex wasn't that prevalent. When you had sex with someone, you were pretty much an item.

hilariouslystated · 2020-10-27T18:26:31+00:00

I wish we could go back to when dating was like this. Everything is so complicated now. Nowadays, a man a woman can confess feelings for each other and absolutely nothing will come of it. I think dating apps, social media, and hookup-culture have a lot to do with the decline in formal courting and the rise in depravity.

Title	Was dating always this terrible?
Author	mangogreentea_
Upvotes	205
Comments	29
Date	October 26, 2020 9:10 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/FemaleDatingStrategy
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/comments/jindmv/was_dating_always_this_terrible/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/was-dating-always-this-terrible.770794 https://theredarchive.com/post/770794

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