Dating Apps: Men Suffer from Excess

Romance is completely dead, and it’s the girls’ fault,” says Alex, 25. “They act like all they want is sex and then they yell at you for not wanting to have a relationship. How are you gonna feel romantic about a girl like that?

Part One:   Dating Apps – Final Nail in Coffin of Courtship 

By  Nancy Jo Sales

“Tinder & the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse”  (Vanity Fair, Aug. 31, 2015) 

(excerpt by henrymakow.com) 

“I’m on Tinder, Happn, Hinge, OkCupid,” Nick, 26, says. “It’s just a numbers game. Before, I could go out to a bar and talk to one girl, but now I can sit home on Tinder and talk to 15 girls–”

“Without spending any money,” John chimes in.

Neither Nick nor John has had a girlfriend in the last few years; Brian had one until recently but confesses, “I cheated…. She found out by looking at my phone–rookie mistake, not deleting everything.” 

“When it’s so easy, when it’s so available to you,” Brian says intensely, “and you can meet somebody and f**k them in 20 minutes, it’s very hard to contain yourself.”

“I’ve gotten numbers on Tinder just by sending emojis,” says John. “Without actually having a conversation–having a conversation via emojis.”

He holds up his phone, with its cracked screen, to show a Tinder conversation between him and a young woman who provided her number after he offered a series of emojis, including the ones for pizza and beer.

“Now is that the kind of woman I potentially want to marry?” he asks, smiling. “Probably not.”

“We talk for a total of maybe 10 to 15 minutes,” he says. “We hook up. Afterwards she goes, ‘Oh my God, I swear I wasn’t gonna have sex with you.’ And I was like, Well, you did a pretty shitty job of that one.”

“They all say that,” the guys say, chuckling.

That Nick …fulfills none of the requirements …that women supposedly look for in mates…doesn’t effect his ability to get laid. In his iPhone, he has a list of more than 40 girls he has “had relations with, rated by [one to five] stars…. It empowers them,” he jokes. “It’s a mix of how good they are in bed and how attractive they are.”  

“IT’S THE GIRLS’ FAULT”

Romance is completely dead, and it’s the girls’ fault,” says Alex, 25, a New Yorker who works in the film industry. “They act like all they want is to have sex with you and then they yell at you for not wanting to have a relationship. How are you gonna feel romantic about a girl like that? Oh, and by the way? I met you on Tinder.”

“Women do exactly the same things guys do,” said Matt, 26, who works in a New York art gallery. “I’ve had girls sleep with me off OkCupid and then just ghost me”–that is, disappear, in a digital sense, not returning texts. “They play the game the exact same way. They have a bunch of people going at the same time–they’re fielding their options. They’re always looking for somebody better, who has a better job or more money.” A few young women admitted to me that they use dating apps as a way to get free meals. “I call it Tinder food stamps,” one said.

Men talk about the nudes they receive from women. They show off the nudes. “Tit pics and booty pics,” said Austin, 22, a college student in Indiana. “My phone is full of ‘em.”

And what about unsolicited dick pics? “They want to see your dick,” insists Adam, 23, a male model in New York. “They get excited from it. They’re like, ‘Oh my God, you’re huge.’ “

[Author] No woman I talked to said she had ever asked for one. And yet, “If you’re a girl who’s trying to date, it’s normal to get dick pics all the time,” said Olivia, 24, a Brandeis graduate. “It’s like we have dicks flying at us.”

ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION

[Young women] talk about how it’s not uncommon for their hookups to lose their erections. It’s a curious medical phenomenon, the increased erectile dysfunction in young males, which has been attributed to everything from chemicals in processed foods to the lack of intimacy in hookup sex.

“If a guy can’t get hard,” Rebecca says, “and I have to say, that happens a lot, they just act like it’s the end of the world.”

NANCY JO SALES:  So where is this all going to go? What happens after you’ve come of age in the age of Tinder? Will people ever be satisfied with a sexual or even emotional commitment to one person? And does that matter? Can men and women ever find true intimacy in a world where communication is mediated by screens; or trust, when they know their partner has an array of other, easily accessible options?