I have a different background in this because I was never rooted in a social circle growing up due to multiple childhood relocation, followed by multiple adulthood relocations. I've now put up a lengthy stint in my current city. The multiple relocations up until my late 20s put me in a place where I never could develop a meaningful social circle.
I think you and I would be engaging in a chicken and egg debate here. You are asserting that social circles by nature force beta male behavior. My argument would be that men by nature are beta males and are thus attracted to social circles. However, I would agree that they are a mirage.
I believe social circles tend to vanish. There's one guy I know who has used social circles so well that it is astounding. Although this may be an outlier story, it has influenced my world view about social circles to a great degree.
This is a guy in his early 40s who lives in a medium sized metro area (population around 300,000). In terms of regions, I don't think the region matters all that much because mid-sized metros like this exist in all USA regions and function similarly.
He has lived in that same metro his whole life exception for the 4 years of college. Since college graduation, his major relationships have all been from social circle. In his mid-20s, he started a 10+ year relationship that resulted in a failed marriage. According to his ex-wife, he strongly pushed the social circle to put the two of them together. Her initial interest in that pairing was rather tepid, but she eventually settled into it. I don't think she would have ever given him a chance as a cold approacher, nor do I think that guy could have ever cold approached her meaningfullly at that time in his life. Like many marriages, it eventually falls apart. He finds himself divorcing in his late 30s and the timeline falls a few years prior to the onset of the pandemic. Swipe apps exist at this time but he doesn't end up needing to use them. He does very minimal cold approaching either when the marriage falls apart.
Due to his extensive social network from a lifetime of geographic stability, there are women in his social network who hear about his failed marriage and try to pitch themselves to him. He ends up immediately getting into an LTR while in the midst of a divorce process with some gal that at least one of his male friends knows and they got married in about 1.5 years time.
A guy like that is not like
@Jesse Pinkman or I at all. This is the type of guy who isn't at all represent on SoSuave forums or any other similar forum.
If this guy's 2nd marriage falls apartment when he's 45-50, I don't know if he'll be able to use the social circle again, but his use of it has been decent for LTRs. I would argue that this guy is too beta. His geography is meaningful but not all guys in mid-sized metros like his have social circles. The ones who grew up in mid-sized areas like his that didn't get into social circles moved to the biggest metros areas in the USA and ended up experiencing the mating market via swipe apps, cold approaches, co-ed sports leagues, etc.
I have shown that chart many times and will show it again now. The data set comes from existing couples at the time of the study. The most recent study was from 2017. If you look at the universe of existing couples in 2017 and how they met based upon the year the relationship formed, it is clear that the relationships forming in 2010 or later than were current in 2017 were often swipe app based. There's no category in this chart for daygame formed relationship. In the 2009 data set from this researcher, "Met in Bar or Restaurant" was "Met in Bar or other Public Place", so I think the "Bar and Restaurant" group covers the longer term relationships formed from daygame. Additionally, some of the "bar and restaurant" group is likely some spillover from online formed couples too ashamed to admit that was the case, even though the surveying data was anonymized as is standard practice in survey-based methodological research.
Social circle as a means for forming established couples has been declining for decades.
College-formed relationships increased between 1975-2000 as more Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers went to college than GI Generation peope and Silent Generation people. You can see that college formed longer term relationships took a nosedive in the early 2000s right as the Millennials were getting to college campuses. To me, that's not coincidental. When I think plenty of romances were formed in college in the 2001-2007 era, most of them didn't stand the test of time and weren't current couples by 2017.
When thinking about college formed relationships, they could be social circle or they could have been a result of forced interaction within the confines of an extracurricular club. You need some social skill to approach a female in your English 102 class, so that's somewhat of a cold approach. Some relationships formed at off campus parties too, and that's debatable if that's more like social circle or a bar style cold approach. I doubt too many college formed relationships formed from a random cold approach while walking on campus (day game).
The workplace took a nosedive as a way of forming relationships starting in the early to mid-1990s, after an immense rise from the 1940s to up until the 1980s.
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