From people around me, I’ve heard bad things. Cheating, leading people on, gaslighting, etc. I’ve noticed this on both genders. I feel like the western dating culture is degrading overtime.
Although I’ve seen healthy long lived relationships, they’re mostly from older people. I’m in my early 20s right now and I feel like everyone around my age are just so immature and inconsiderate.
Does it get better once I’m older? Will it be the same or will it become worse?
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No, it doesn’t get better. You just get used to it. You have three choices to make, fold, and become just like every other person who wants nothing but sex. You can become jaded like a lot of others and wallow in your self-imposed dating exile, or you accept the fact that dat9ng and relationship building is just not popular today and move on, because there are hundreds of millions of people who feel this way and still go on to finding their ever after.
I’m glad that the daily version of this exact post came out so early today.
Because it is.
I feel like we live in a hookup focused society. People also have way too much availability with dating apps at the touch of your finger.
No one wants to admit it but the answer is pornography. Pornography has been studied to have many detrimental effects in relationships, social dynamics, and even brain chemistry.
For example, excessive use of pornography has been shown to decrease pre-frontal cortex tissue, your brain’s executive center. What this essentially means is you become more impulsive the more porn you consume due to the depredation of your brain’s executive center.
Furthermore, kinks develop when dopamine tolerance is built from overconsumption. People develop new fetishes in order to maintain the same levels of dopamine as a previous fetish. This is due to the idea of novelty, the scientific term is the Coolidge Effect.
Pornography not only makes people more impulsive towards sex from prolonged usage, the content also inspires new and unwanted behaviors. What’s an example of this? Ever see stepmom and sister fetishes on the rise? It was not always trendy, these sexual fantasies have become normalized in the last 10 years. When one is literally having orgasms fantasizing about defiling sacred ideas such as the family unit, and people justifying it as an acceptable fetish, you create a degenerate culture that prioritizes hedonism over any type of morality.
Western society had begun it’s own degredation by embracing pornography usage and justifying perversion. This creates a culture where individuals prioritize hedonism over morals, exactly what you get with individuals who serially cheat. When you remove societal mechanisms such as shame from a culture, you allow the culture to degenerate since there is nothing else in place to regulate unwanted behavior.
We don’t see this in eastern culture such as Asian countries because they have a culture that still deems certain acts as perverse, shameful, and not good.
Hello, F/30’s here in North America
IMO there is definitely a massive increase in hook up culture since I was in my 20’s. Although all the behaviours you describe above have always been happening throughout time.
My humble advice: present yourself/your profile to reflect what you’re looking for. Be the kind of person you want to be with, treat people how you wish to be treated. You will attract the quality you’re looking for if you are a living example of it. Works outside of dating too. (Family, friend and professional relationships)
The key is to distance from anyone who doesn’t reflect your shared values and realize not everyone is for you, and you are not for everyone.
Because there are very few decent people in this world. If one studies history, it’s very clear that as goes a societies morals, so goes the society. The normalizing of mental illness and the complete lack of morality that we currently see happening has the overall effect of destroying everything good. Humans are by nature selfish. When that selfishness is applauded, it has a very detrimental effect on everything. Just be accountable to yourself, do your best to be kind, and be very cautious as to whom you let into your life.
It’s much better IMO. The stuff I read here from those in the 20’s and 30’s is rare north of 45. Again, IMO. Is it perfect? No. But it’s more than tolerable.
You’re in your early 20s — of course lot of people your age are immature and inconsiderate. A few years ago y’all were still teenagers. When you get older you’ll probably look back and realize you weren’t as level headed and mature as you thought you were in the moment.
> Although I’ve seen healthy long lived relationships, they’re mostly from older people
Yes, long lived relationships are typically older people — that’s how the passage of time works.
I’m 36 and it is a problem. And as a woman, as you get older, it’s even getting worse. I’ve just accepted at this point that there is only very few people left who want to do an effort and show up for something real. I don’t know what to tell you.. I think you’re right..
The problem is not only YOU are getting older those people will get older too!
The 20 year old will be the 30 year old in 10 years. Not the one that is 30 right now.
In my my late 30s we are different we grow up without the OLD stuff it started when i was 20 but it was ultra rare and didnt realy had an impact. But when i was 16 you had to leanr how to beheave. The people now dont have to they learn only OLD stuff…..And i dont think they will chance….i mean they will but will get even more extreme….
3 years since my divorce. Haven’t even attempted to date (unless you count asking one woman out and having her straight up tell me she isn’t attracted to me, which is fine. Honesty is good.)
Hey OP, sorry you’re having a hard time finding the right people to date.
“Decent people” is a subjective opinion that implies there’s good or bad. People are not all good or bad. Life happens and people make weird choices from individualistic viewpoints that sometimes the rest of the world won’t understand.
“It’s not right but it’s okay”-Whitney Houston
There’s indecent people in every generation of people. But Dating in modern times has shifted to having access to a larger dating pool of people with an even wider variety of unique attachment issues.
Dating does get better as you get older cause you’ve had more time to practice, make mistakes, get to know yourself, and change. Yes, you’ll experience heartache when you do eventually get disappointed by someone and unfortunately that’s where one learns the most about themselves.
After intentionally or sometimes unintentionally getting to know yourself, ones ability to discern what behavior is and isn’t cool with them expands and improves.
Once you get to know what’s acceptable to you, you stop dating people who exhibit undesirable behavior and you also learn to communicate and learn to work with people you deem decent.
Op, good luck with dating, it is hard but love and connection are worth it.
Western culture can be ruggedly individualistic, so be kind to yourself, learn about you, your true wants and DO what you really want to do, so you stop meeting people who aren’t for you and meet the ones that are.
It’s very difficult. I’m a 51 year old woman and I was dating a 39 year old man who suddenly told me he was still hoping to have children. All this time I thought he wasn’t interested in having children because he seemed like such a confirmed bachelor. It’s really sad because we were so compatible other than that. But here I am, back on the streets looking for love and a relationship.
Not to be “that guy,” but a lot of what you hear is the dramaticized and straight-up incorrectly labeled version of events.
Social media has turned any complicated situation in dating into abuse, manipulation, etc. when many times it is just the result of 2 different human beings having to compromise and be partners.
There is a lot of selfish individualism particularly in America where a partner asking essentially anything of you is wrong, and that they should be 100% on board with all your thoughts and life decisions and never try to change your mind or counter you.
Not to mention that a true partner must dedicate all their time to you, and to have a life outside of you where they choose to hang out with other people sometimes or are not hanging off your every text and call shows a lack of dedication and therefore unworthiness.
There are shitty people who are selfish or just don’t care about monogamous relationships that plague the dating pool and cause headaches for anyone who has the misfortune to get stuck with them – that’s just a constant in life.
Howevwe, you have to be careful just blindly trusting people’s one sided, self favoring stories, especially when we have such a large problem with people taking psychological terms and applying them inappropriately to situations that upset them.
I’m (M62) not dating; I’ve been with the same woman for 40 years. I only know what I read on Reddit:
– hookup culture is far more casual now than a few decades ago. This has allowed many young people to ruin their appreciation for sex as an exclusive special bond in a marriage.
– people do mature. E.g. a 26 year-old man is very different than a 20 year-old man, and far more capable of sustaining a relationship. Women mature even more deeply but are also more captive to bad choices made in their youth.
– technology — the web and the phones — has fundamentally changed the way men and women interact at all ages. People feel the need to be constantly connected and are less capable of appreciating healthy solitude
– the phone has both enabled easy infidelity and at the same time made it harder to conceal
– the web has made it harder to leave our youthful stupidity behind us
– feminism has evolved from an obvious moral imperative of equal opportunity to a misandric cult with a self-destructive moral code for women.
– young men are giving up on healthy relationships; hookups and porn are easier
– we have lost a sense of duty to sustain our species and our culture. Many people now regard humanity as a global parasite and child-raising as a destructive indulgence
– people no longer feel a duty to a marriage for its own sake. If the marriage isn’t working to their advantage today, right now, they leave for another shot at “living their best life.” In any marriage, the advantages and disadvantages will change across decades and the short- term outlook ensures the marriages will fail.
You can downvote me to hell now.
30F.. I think it gets worse as you get older because you just get super comfortable being alone lol. My house is fully designed the way i want it… It’s getting difficult to imagine another person in the home all the time – i think a lot of people get this mindset and don’t realize it and that’s why there’s so many flaky people. They like the idea of dating and having a family, but when it comes to compromising their everyday life to make it work with another person, they’re not really in a mindset for it and brush it off really quickly. It takes a lot of effort to acknowledge you’re behaving this way and make yourself act more intentional with dating. If people don’t even realize it’s the issue, they likely won’t make real effort.
I find the best solution to this kind of thing is to get off the apps and find people in the real world. Also helps you find happiness that doesn’t involve depending on another person to not be socially stunted.
I think mobile phones, dating apps, much more advertising and comparisons to others (usually over the Internet/insta/FB etc), have made it easier and much more normalised to play around.
The amount of reality TV that shows people cheating like it’s just a bit of drama.
Just lots of different factors resulting in a shit storm.
The underlying problem isn’t that people prefer hook up culture or such, the underlying problem is that people are more able than ever to live independently of one another. Relationships used to come about out of desire as well as needs, but the needs aspect of relationships has nearly completely disappeared. I’m in my late 50s and have been single for nearly 20 years, after being married and divorced, then having girlfriends live with me, then dating a bit.
The last 10 or 15 years “having a relationship” disappeared from my radar.
Don’t lose hope just yet. Think about it this way- how often do you see people leaving good reviews vs leaving bad reviews for a restaurant? I think usually if people have a bad experience, they want to vent about it and tell the whole world. If someone has a good experience, they usually keep it to themselves and treasure it. It may be that the nature of dating is still roughly the same as it’s always been, but we hear more negativity because our friends want to vent about bad experiences AND people on the internet mostly talk about bad experiences too
I think the pandemic amplified the mental health issues we all head and you’re getting the worst side of individuals coming out right now. Hopefully this will lead to more people seeking out personal growth and therapy.
To be honest, I am lonely, and I wish I had a companion. To meet someone I have to start dating. But I am not emotionally ready to date right now. It would be unfair to the other person for me to go out on a date right now, as well as being unfair to myself. There are a lot of people that are in my shoes, that choose to try and fill the void by dating, and that’s what many people are experiencing, at least in my humble opinion.
It gets worse actually… When you get older you’ll have to deal with people with kids, baby momma/daddy drama, people who never matured.
Dating apps have also ruined peoples attention span, if people arent entertained within 5 minutes its on to the next quick fix.
Also alot of people with the mentality of “What can I take from you without having to reciprocate?”
Not to mention the plethora of online dating gurus… “oh they fold their laundry a certain way? 🚩🚩DUMP THEM”…. like yeah we’re doomed
First of all, long lived relationships don’t automatically means these are healthy or happy. Especially among older generations. I’ve witnessed the vast majority of older generation people around me, staying in an unhappy/unhealthy marriage just because they disprove of divorce (of course, some people also stay because they have no other choice, I’m not blaming them for that).
Second, I don’t think it is exclusive to western culture. I’m multicultural, and from what I’ve seen and heard from people that aren’t westerners, it’s the same issue.
I’m in my early 20s as well. I’ve been in long-term relationships, seen some as well, from people my age. It is more rare, of course, as a lot of people in their 20s don’t look to settle down as quickly as older generation used to. But that’s really not a problem. Your brain isn’t even finished at that age.
The problem with older generation is that often, they will completely dismiss the gaslight, the manipulation, the cheating, the abuse, for the sake of keeping the relationship.
Older generation also used to not believe depression is a thing, so their knowledge on mental health was limited. Which is not as difficult nowadays, so people are more aware of the assholes that lurk outside. People being more picky isn’t a problem. It’s a good thing.
Finding people that are compatible with you, when you have proper standards, have always been difficult. The cheating and gaslighting doesn’t disappear with age either. You’ll keep seeing those people throughout your life. But as you grow older, you’ll learn their patterns well enough to avoid them.
I feel you. We are very hook-up focused society as others have said. Grass is always greener. From a female perspective more and more women are also becoming more ok with being single and actively removing themselves from the dating world as many are fed up with cheaters, emotionally unavailable people, the mental/home workload falling solely onto them. A lot is happening-plus we can have everything on our phones and more and more folk are working from home so no need to go out as often.
Feminism.
It’s probably just going to get worse.
This is a symptom of dating apps, social media, and porn/onlyfans effect on society and dating.
Because being decent is not respected