Three Major Ways On-Line Dating Is Hurting Women’s Dating and Love Life

There are three fundamental ways in which the proliferation and the increasing popularity of online dating has hurt women’s dating and love life:

1. Online Dating Has Devalued Women in Men’s Eyes

Before online dating took off, it took so much more for any guy out there to meet and start talking to a woman. Back then you needed a fair degree of confidence to approach and start talking to a girl in addition to being at the right time in the right place. Getting a girl’s number, whether at a bar, at a grocery store or at a library took a lot of balls, and it was an achievement to brag to your friends over drinks later that day. Picking up a girl wasn’t an every-day occurrence even for the most confident and the “smoothest” guys out there, especially if they were stuck in smaller towns with a limited supply of women. It took a skill to strike up a conversation with a girl, to demolish her natural bitch shield,  and to get her interested enough to give out her number to the guy she just met. Meeting girls was somewhat hard for any guy. Therefore, men naturally appreciated more those few girls they met back then, in the pre-match.com era. On average, those men would invest time and energy into getting to know those girls and would not rush to dismiss for all kinds of petty reasons, as it’s so commonly done today.

These days, meeting women is as easy as sliding a picture on Tinder or OkCupid to the right and exchanging a few text messages, if you are easy on the eyes. Men no longer need to worry about that dreaded first call after getting a girl’s phone number. They skip that part altogether and just invite a girl to meet over text. This kind of dynamic requires no confidence and very little flirting skills, (although it does require some degree of writing abilities, or else the guy will be spending hours contacting girls without getting any responses from them). Now, guys can meet a large number of women every day without trying very hard, i.e. without even leaving their house and of course without spending many hours and many dollars on going from one bar to another and hoping to get lucky (whatever that means). Since meeting women online is so much easier, this makes each one of those women  who a guy would meet less important or more “disposable” to him. Therefore, talking or going out with any of those girls is not as important of an occasions as it used to be. This means that a guy’s motivation to put his best foot forward while talking with or being out on a date is not nearly as high as it used to be, and often it’s downright absent, and it is being fully replaced with the “whatever” attitude.

2. Online Dating Has Confused Women

The flipside of the above is that women also have way more choices. At first, you might thing that this is good news for women as well, but it isn’t. This is because women generally never really experienced the shortage of male attention, except the ones who are really unattractive or who have a really off-putting personality.  Having too much attention from men today by way of being bombarded by messages from guys overwhelms them and prevents them from figuring out what and who they want. Therefore, many of those girls turn into butterflies – serial one daters. For those girls, going out on dates turns into just another job that they feel they have to do, rather than something that they would be looking forward to as they should.  They end up going on tons of dates with all those guys they meet without investing much attention or energy into any of those encounters. They don’t bother to put themselves together or try to attract the guys they meet. After all, it’s just coffee, so why even bother.  In most cases, these girls end up not really liking or disliking any of those guys they meet and go out with.

3. Online Dating Lead Women to Becoming Extremely Jaded

Meeting five to ten guys over a period of a few years, like it used to be, might make a woman a little more skeptical about dating, after she has experienced a few disappointments with men.  But going out on dates with 50 or more different guys who she would meet on OkCupid, Match & Tinder will make her so much more jaded than she could have ever been, and will take her lack of belief in finding love and romance to a whole new level. Like they say, dating is a number’s game. And the more guys you meet, and the more guys you end up not connecting with, the more bitter you are likely to become. I supposed this also applies to the men who look for real connection and love online.

In sum, a lot of magic has been taken out of approaching, pick-up, flirting, and first dates due to the increasing popularity of online dating. I hope that something new will come that will bring things back to a place where people can get excited about meeting someone new again, like they used to before online dating. I am probably too naïve to believe that, and dating will only get less exciting with the emergence of new dating apps and other technologies that make meeting new people even easier than today.