It is great that you joined in 2002, posted this thread in 2004, and are commenting on it today.
I like sex a lot more than I like talking. I think most of my generation (Millennials) are socially stunted, even the Millennials with halfway decent social skills.
With online dating, your looks are your personality. Online dating (if defined as both swipe apps and sliding into DMs) has replaced in-person approaching and social circle as a way for a lot of people to start relationships. Since your looks are your personality for Millennials and Gen Z, the women get their dreams in shutting out a good portion of men from the sexual marketplace. Pure social skills don't matter as much now as they did in the 1990s/2000s when PUAs like Mystery were first getting big.
You come to this discussion right now from the perspective of a 48 year old man. Gen X'ers were the last generation to have decent in-person social skills. In 2022, we have 2 generations now (Millennials and Gen Z) with lousy social skills. It's common to criticize men for poor social skills but even the Millennial and Gen Z women have weaker social skills.
The de-emphasis on an in-person social skills was apparent when I was in college, which was 2001-2005. The time I was in college was when earlier Millennials were getting to campus. September 2004 (when this thread was last active) was during my senior year of college. I remember in 2001-2003, people were using AOL Instant Messanger to send messages instead of making phone calls. MySpace launched in 2003 and got popular in 2004. Facebook and YouTube launched in 2004. I wasn't using Facebook then despite it being geared towards college students.
For decades, as more people went to college, more people formed extended romantic relationships from random interactions on campus with the man approaching the woman. Around 2000, as the Millennials were first getting to college, formation of longer term couples in college diminished (see chart below). Boyfriend-girlfriend relationships while in college were common in my 2001-2005 day, but these relationships were rarely serious and rarely stood the test of time. This is a trend that continues in college to this day.
The Boomers and Gen X did romantic interactions differently than Millennials and Gen Z have done them. Gen X'ers will still use phones for voice communication. As an early Millennial who has dated mainly women born between 1983-1989, I know it's a big chore to get a Millennial woman to talk on the phone in the early stage of a romantic interaction. It's even difficult to get my mid to late 1980s born Millennial male friends to have a phone conversation.
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