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Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

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Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#461

I'll chime in as somebody who's been considered top 10% of attractiveness in one country and bottom 50% in another - the difference in the amount of sexual opportunities on apps is absolutely staggering. Not that this should be a surprise to anyone. Where I am considered attractive, I've gotten 80+ matches in one day and random women messaging me at 11PM telling me they're lonely and to come hang out. I've had more f…

How does that work? Is it an ethnicity issue?

My guess is ethnic male of average height.

Attractive in his native country where his ethnicity isn't a factor and the average height is much lower.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only advice I've told them is to get out of any online stuff and hit bars. They need your wife to bring her single friends to the bar. If they have a hard time reaching out to women hitting bars without friends won't help them much.

For some reason at the bar people don’t ever talk to me until I’ve been drinking for so long I sound like an idiot.

Seconded. And going to a bar with the goal of finding romantic partners makes you sound particularly idiotic when you loosen up a bit. That's why many approaches here, which assume rational part, especially - importantly - at the moment of human-touchness, e.g. when you're actually communicating with potential partners, can fail dramatically. Imagine you'd drink enough and start broadcasting a little your ideas which brought you - especially if you're a nerd - to the bar. You're going to have spectacular, epic what-they-say. And if you don't loosen up, you're perceived as incincere, somebody who's hiding something, likely nasty, behind them and trying to catch strangers in who knows which schemes.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#463
post #384
post #361

Fortunatelly I have a wife now, but for me for the longest time the so called "sexual lineliness" was linked with the three facts: 1) I was raised into believing that sex implies serious relationship and vice versa. As in "if we are having sex that means we are in serious relatioinship". As it turned out - this does not work like this for most (many?) people. Turns out yuo can just have a good time and some sex witho…

> 1) I was raised into believing that sex implies serious relationship and vice versa. As in "if we are having sex that means we are in serious relatioinship". As it turned out - this does not work like this for most (many?) people. Turns out yuo can just have a good time and some sex without worrying about 1001 things before you do so. This seems to contradict some view on women's POV here. As in, for women the sexu…

Well, everything is different for everyone (not to mention different countries etc).

My experince:

1) First time I was almost forces into sex by a girl one year younger than me whom I invited to my apartment. While I obviously hoped for something romantic to happen - this was us meeting for the third time maybe and we knew each other (I mean irl, not online forum bullshit) for like 4 hours.

I "opted out" of it while she was sitting on me alread half naked. There were several reasons for this actually but the one about "if I do this now - I will be using her" was the main one I guess. After this I was told (by her) I shouldn't be "a log" (sorry, not sure about the best way to translate the idiom into english).

2) The second time the girl, seeing me being not as straightforward as she hoped for, simple asked if I ever had a girlfriend before. I was honest, saying that while I had a couple, it never went as far as sex - and she simple saying she fine with doing it with me (while inviting me to go to her apartment). Again maybe I'm more of a girl in this regard but for me this was a turn off again. Wtf do you mean you are okay? Do you want it? More importantly - do you want me?

.... some years with no sex later ....

My girlfriend (now wife) descibes her experiences. As it turns out she had more than a few partners by the time she was 20 (we met when she was around 26). Most of them - just your regular fellow student\coworker etc. She needed sex, was not interested in longterm relationship etc.

If you go to twitter these days - people (most of whom women) are also quite open to the thought of going all the way without too much worries. (as long the guys seems nice of course, I don't mean sex with the first stranger here)

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#464
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's interesting to me. I have female friends in their 30s who go on tons of dates but reject pretty much all of them for any long-term relationship. The ones they seem to be in to tend to reject them after a couple of dates. This is simply the other side of the coin, "online dating divides people heavily into winners and losers" What is happening is that in the same way most women get more attention than most men,…

I don't understand how this is a stable situation. If women have to compete so much, wouldn't it be better for them to lower expectations?

> wouldn't it be better for them to lower expectations?

There's two metrics here though which influence and confuse one another. Women get plenty of attention on the attractiveness side, but just because you can get laid doesn't mean you can get a relationship. It makes sense that if a lot of people are acting as suitors that you would then down select from this group. The problem is that on the woman's side you don't know if the suitor is looking for a relationship or just to get laid. Without a good metric for that, you can't properly down select and might just end up with a pool of only people that want to get laid. Especially if the primary initial selecting criteria is simply attractiveness (i.e. you're using an app). This is probably unsurprising considering in the digital world we often convince ourselves that we have stronger relationships because of tools like these (e.g. keeping up with friends more because Facebook) but in reality we don't because we are sacrificing the only meaningful tool to build and maintain relationships: physical time together.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In regular bars it's downright rude to walk up to most groups if you're not in that group, and good luck finding a single woman drinking by herself. In night clubs? Better hope you've hit the gym for the last month...

Groups could be drinking at someone's house. They're paying money and arranging transportation to be doing their group drinking in public. It's rude not to engage with them.

hahaha you are a funny guy, makes sense to me.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shit I can drop like 3 (relative) points on the good ol' 10 scale just by traveling to different sections of my own city. And while I'm not bad by local standards I'm only like a 2 or a 3 in some cities I've visited. From "not bad" to "uggo" just by traveling to another city, without ethnicity being a factor.

how? Honestly I am not doubting you, I have just been married for a very long time so out of the game. Is it a presentation of wealth or dress style?

> how?

A small town 8(/10) can be an LA[0] 4 or 5. Then again a small town 10 can also be an LA 10. Samples can be biased in weird ways.

0. If you're fan of the LA aesthetic measures.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a past life I got pretty deep into trying to help guys like this. There's a whole industry around it peddling advice that ranges from effective (yet impossible to implement for a broken person) to counter-productive and evil. It's really very simple, but people just have massive amounts of negative programming that radiates out from them like a reverse pheromone. Those who are hungry do not eat. You can't fake it,…

Might be simple but still unattainable to a huge swath of guys. It's like trying to tell someone not to freak out before a job interview - just go there, be yourself and don't care about the outcome. Let me know how well that worked out...

Correct. If I had a cure I might still be doing it. Like I said, some people are broken. What I've described is more fundamental. It probably will be of more assistance to people doing okay with some hangups than people whose self esteem is not in a place where flirting can be an uplifting activity.

Edit:

-Therapy

-Dance classes (not for flirting, just having positive touch experiences)

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> /at the office (40 years). With the move to remote work in many places we've cut off the office part There might be another factor here, that office relationships are far more taboo than they used to be. I'm not saying harass your office mates, but if two people click they click. Like you're saying, it isn't that the office is a place "to look" for a partner, but rather that it simply happens because you build emot…

The problem is not what happens when two people click, but what if the relationship goes south. Do you really want that former partner you might hate as your coworker, or your boss? Or your subordinate, whom you're required to treat fairly, as a matter of basic business ethics? How many people would manage to achieve this and be trusted to?

Meh - people often have bosses, or coworkers, or subordinates they hate anyway. Nothing ventured nothing gained!

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#470
post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That blog post is -- and this is putting it charitably -- so horribly misguided and confused I hardly know where to begin. The post is horribly misguided and confused. Yet despite being so horrible you can't bother to explain what's bad about it? It always amuses me something is evidently so horrible as to warrant this language, but apparently not quite horrible enough to actually explain why. Ultimately, i'm not r…

Don't you think the "Am I The Asshole" subreddit is going to have a bit of a selection bias towards describing men who are assholes? You seem to be using AITA as evidence that some huge percentage of women want to date/marry asshole/abusive men. It does not provide evidence of that. You and the article you linked are suggesting a correlation between being an abusive/asshole man and having a large number of women want…

And you conclude that this is incorrect and garbage on the grounds of what, exactly? I'm more inclined to believe the licensed psychiatrist over a random internet commenter.
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