Why Is No One Having Sex? - Alex DatePsych

Something to consider about dating apps is that it's not a one-one ratio of men to women. There's about three men for every one woman. Imagine everyone on an app at any given moment just paired off one-to-one. Every man got one woman. About 66% of men would have no match, just from the ratio alone. Already the fact that there's a big, big sex disparity explains a lot of why there's this top percent of men that get most of the attention. (wind blows)

What's your background?

So, I have an undergraduate degree in psychology. I previously was doing a master's program in research and behavior and cognition, and now I'm in a second master's program in behavioral and, uh, cognitive neuroscience. So graduate student, should be entering a PhD program pretty soon. Not the qualifications of many of your guests who are the top, top tier of, of psychologists in the world, but working on it.

Why did you get interested in attractiveness and dating psychology?

So I think probably what first got me interested in attractiveness and dating psychology was just how important relationships have been throughout my own life, uh, throughout the trajectory of, of my life. I think they're very integral to the experiences of most people, uh, kind of a, a core part of, of life experiences that brings value to life, and that was something that was interesting. And then, in addition to that, uh, observing kind of subcultures online within the manosphere and that sort of a thing, the way that people perceive attractiveness and dating, a lot of discourse around that. So understanding those subcultures and everything also very interesting.

It's a fascinating time, man, to-

Oh, yeah.

... consider the potential solutions that are being proposed, the challenges that everybody's facing. One of my favorite tweets that you've put out recently ... You do these fantastic tweet threads online that break down, go really, really deep into the original data, which nobody wants to look at, but apparently you do. Uh, half of single men report not approaching women out of the fear of being seen as creepy, and 82% of women reported experiencing creepy behavior sometimes, often, or constantly. And yet I saw in a different study that around 86% of women say that they want a man to make the first move. How do you square that circle?

Well, on a practical level, if men are afraid to approach, women find a great deal of approaches creepy, how do you reconcile that? Um, men have to approach and they're gonna be rejected and they're gonna be found creepy at least some of the time, right? There's, there's no other way to reconcile that, that at sometime it's going to happen. Something that surprised me when I posted that thread and, and that research, uh, uh, a surprisingly large number of people came out and they said, "You know, you should just never approach people in public, not at the bar, not at the gym, not on the street, not at school. You should just online date. That's it. We have apps for that now." A surprisingly large number of people basically only thought that apps were the only appropriate venue now for, for meeting people. But certainly that's not how most people meet, right? Uh, a recent survey by the Kinsey Institute, by Match ... Match hires the Kinsey Institute every year to do this big poll of singles, nationally representative, uh, poll of singles, and only about, uh, 10 to 20% are actually meeting through online dating. Similarly, the Pew results from this year that were just published about a week ago for 2002, about 10% of all Americans meet online dating, about 20% of people under 30. So still most people are meeting in, in public. A great deal of those are meeting through friends, maybe about 20 to 30%. So that's the way that a lot of people are meeting. Work, school, friends are a big chunk, and then of course, online is a big one, and social media is becoming a big one as, as well now, but, you know, at the end of the day, you have to approach and people will find you creepy. Not everyone is going to like you. And what can you do? As long as you're not violating any major social norms, it's okay to be rejected.