Why Dating Apps Don't Work For 80% Of Men… | Richard Reeves

do you know what's funny when I was on dating apps I didn't get much attention really no I didn't and I've got a very good-looking best friend and he got all of the attention so bear in mind I was 18 shoplifting food to feed myself I was scrawny as hell okay um I was did you put all that on the I put that in my bio but I tried to put my best selfie on there and I just couldn't get any like decent leads and my best friend who like blonde and beautiful and he's got the perfect hair and he looks like something out of like a magazine I would sit with him and he would just get the pick of the litter so my whole strategy was I would just do much better in person when I met people but obviously it's much more difficult to meet people if you look at the stats around what how people meet it's crazy it's like a a vertical line upwards um when you look at the the the line that's showing people meeting online just out of nowhere and it went school's gone down and church has gone down and through a friend gone down and it's pretty much all online so if you're if you're not I think aesthetically beautiful in the typical sense of the word yeah and you know have signals of wealth and status you really are going to struggle and I actually came to learn this a lot not just from my own experience on dating apps once upon a time but also from doing this podcast and I remember the first time we had on a founder of a dating app and put the episode out assuming everyone would love it and just the anger in the comment section from pretty much all men m who feel like dating apps have ruined their lives or are just are just an evil thing in the world and it really caught me off guard in fact reading those comments on that particular episode is when I go oh my God people hate dating apps there's like this group of people that just think it's like the the cause of all pain um this is really difficult stuff to talk about I think because it's so it's so visceral it's Primal right we're talking about sex we're talking about procreation we're talking about our DNA being passed on MH and who with and so it's not for nothing if if something's happening in that in that market and it's not for nothing we see a huge rise in the share of childless men like especially getting to 40 and and of women but more even more so for men and more men saying having children is important to them more men starting to say actually forming a family is kind of important to them and so there's a there's a weird Paradox here which is that you know the old idea of like marriage and kids is that like women have to kind of trap men into it right you know as men we just want to go our own way right we want Cowboys around the desert or the forest or something but the ball and chain the woman she traps you right and she domesticates you and you kind of go along with it because you to have kids but but in your heart in your heart you're still out there on the frontier right and she's the one at the heart that is complete [ __ ] on every single level actually historically back to where were before being masculine meant being in the tribe it meant generating more than you need for your yourself I love this idea of a surplus that comes from this guy David Gilmore that mature men generate more of whatever it is than they need they're Surplus generators so rather than being Surplus to requirements which is what I think a lot of men feel they're actually generator Surplus for others to use and so the idea of like you heard this men going their own way movement it's like a male separatist thing online we're going to go our own way we don't need know turning away from women is the opposite of masculinity right masculinity defined as like a A Lone Ranger or a I'm My Own man is the least masculine sentence I think you could ever utter I'm just my own man I do my own thing right if you're not a man for others and in my view you're not you're not a man and so it's quite interesting to kind of think about how the current world of like dating and families and so on if it does leave many men feeling like they're not going to have those connections they're not going to have a sense of being for others and not just not providing just in the economic sense but being needed then it does leave a lot of them benched and they either go their own way or they get mad as hell so you see the rise of the incel movement Etc um and so again you're just seeing these extreme the extreme examples of the ones that get the headlines but behind that behind the kind of men who are acting out there's a lot more men who are checking out they're just saying I think I'm done with this and that's very dangerous you mentioned uh an elderly man who's now alone you know maybe lost his partner maybe um what do they call it widowed no widower what's the male I think widowed is both isn't it oh is it a widowed man um but as we think about younger men and the environment in which the sort of dating love environment that they're in what's changed there because one of the ways that we can feel needed is if a you know 18 years old we find a partner and you know that she makes me feel needed my in my life my girlfriend is one of the people that makes me feel most needed and most important she's constantly asking when I'm coming back from Dragon's Den filming or when I'm going to be here and she's you know she makes me feel like I've I'm serviced to her in the same way that she service to me so but but that landscape seems to have changed as well the dating environment the Romantic environment yeah it's interesting again I just reflecting on my own personal experience too just through the lives of my sons and know one of my sons has just spent ages helping his girlfriend buy her first car and he's really into cars and all that stuff and and he's into Finance with the loans and he's just basically done like basically done the the work for her around it cuz she's working fulltime and he's got a bit of time so that is a really good example he said to me the other day he said I said God you put a load of time into like test driven like 20 cars and all of this stuff loads of this for for your girlfriend he's like well right now I don't have that much of my own stuff to do so it's really nice to be able to do stuff for her and so you're right I think those relationships they can be in like traditional families but also of course friends but particularly romantic relationships they can do that for you so it's not for nothing that we're dating less dating later um you're seeing a massive rise in the share of young men who are single by comparison both to young women and in the past and and so that's another change which you could argue is good or bad right is it good or bad that we're dating later and having sex later and taking longer to get married and so on again I think you can argue for sure there's lots of good stuff there but one consequence of that is to leave a lot more men going a lot longer before those romantic relationships were also pulling on them calling calling on them to say I need you to do this I need you to drive me to work can you pick me up from this can you do to do this right and that used to happen much much earlier uh than it's happening now and so there's now perfectly possibly 25 26 27 years of age and your parents don't need you because then you know you maybe you've left home they don't need you maybe you don't have a girlfriend so you don't have a girlfriend that needs you maybe you're not working or you're working in a place that you don't really feel like it matters if you're there or not it's like so it's perfectly possible in a way that wasn't possible until recently to get to your mid late 20s as a man and honestly feel like it's not quite clear who needs you it's interesting because also when you layer on top of that the dating app environment um I've had a lot of people come on the podcast that talk about I mean I've had a couple of the founders of the big dating apps but I've also had have you had the Tinder founder on no okay I've had people that have left Tinder and started their own apps like Bumble uh but one of the things that I've come to learn is that the bottom sort of 50% of men are basically getting not much action at all almost none yeah almost none and then the like top 10% of men are getting all the action because the way that these dating apps are set up is to really reward that sort of most affluent most attractive top 10% of men that are most desirable but I imagine if you'd gone back a 100 years it was really like who's in your village versus you know yeah versus an algorithm sorting millions of but that's it's so interesting that pattern that you describe of like the bottom 50% of men basically not getting much action if any and the top 10% like getting almost all of it because an evolutionary psychologist that I know looked at that data and said that looks like human history to me so if we go back further actually 95% of known human societies were polygamous right monogamy is very weird and very recent and here's one that always blows my mind even though I've said it so many times now is that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors we have twice as many women in our ancestral past as me why is that how does that make sense because and the reason it's so hard for a modern brain to get a head around that is because you're thinking well you need a man and a woman to have a kid right so you'd have to have equal numbers yeah but you're thinking about monogamy across human history men have only had about a 50% chance of reproducing so back in each generation half the male lines just literally die out like 50% of the men just don't have kids so boom they're gone and almost all women have reproduced right so if you got almost all women reproducing 50% men then mathematically you're going to end up twice as many female ancestors because you don't need that many men to have babies and so historically what's happened is the top status men with the gold and the rich whatever they've had multiple wives or certainly concubines or multiple partners and there's like famous examples on like Genghis Khan is the ancestor of whoever but in Ireland something like more than one in five Irish people are descended from King Whatever It Is Well I was told my grandfather in Nigeria has I'm going to say 10 wives okay I'm told that I have 40 odd uncles and aunties in Nigeria not intending to go back anytime soon just just in case there's a lot of conversations you're not you're not tempted by that model I'm not no no I am actually going to Nigeria soon but uh but it's it's a headache to think about navigating that many uncles and aunties but it's but isn't it interesting how actually these by going online and sort of taking away the sort of cultural norm around kind of monogamy yeah in a way what it's exposed is kind of this ancient pattern which is women are much pickier than men around partner selection right and so women are trying to women are sort of ideally will go for him and women are just going no no no no I don't know which way it is that's right which way it's right yeah so yeah so so the women are going no no no no oh he's incredibly handsome and Incredibly rich and like maybe whatever like maybe whereas the men are like yeah sure yeah sure she looks nice maybe not yeah so so you get this incredible asymmetry between the two but in some ways it's like um making light of it but but actually could you find a kind of more telling sign of the fact that so many men are just kind of feeling like well maybe a bit useless not very attractive not very needed not very like just right the old rules about how to kind of navigate the Romantic space the old rules about how to be a man the old rules about how to succeed a lot of those have just been turned upside down creating this huge vacuum U which has been filled by all kinds of bad stuff and and but also just this massive sense of disorientation it's like a kaleidoscope you shake it right but it's still moving we don't know what the new patterns look like yet and so I genuinely kind of feel like when I talk to a lot of young men and see them like that is the sense they've got they're just like whoa like the the disorientation that they're feeling uh as we kind of shifted the equilibriums in some ways the online dating apps are just magnifying that but there's a that's not a great feeling is it to G and G A dating app and not get any interest at all if you love the dver CEO brand and you watch this Channel please do me a huge favor become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel that have hit the Subscribe button it helps us tremendously and the bigger the channel gets the bigger the guests

Channel: The Diary Of A CEO Clips

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Keywords: the diary of a ceo, podcast, the diary of a ceo podcast, life lessons, ceo, Steven Bartlett, Steve Bartlett, life advice, doac, diary of a ceo, diary of a ceo clips, Steve Bartlett Podcast

Id: dk9UmDolUBI

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2024