BergischerLöwe
Master Don Juan
1. The shrinking dating pool is something that really worries me. The door is rapidly closing on my chances of falling in love at a relatively young age. If I get to my early 30s and I'm still in the situation I've described in this thread still stands I might as well give up as far as I'm concerned. As far as age gap I'm looking for a woman a few years younger than me, like maybe in the 21-25 range. As it stands now it feels like the prospect of having a meaningful and fulfilling love life is passing me by.Today is the youngest you'll ever be. Seize the day! You have a valid point about limited size pools. Dating in your 30s is more difficult in many ways than dating in your 20s. Dating in your 40s is even worse than your 30s. Single mothers become a big problem after age 30 in dating pools. You need to be excellent in some way to get age gaps of 10+ years once you are 30-35. If a 40 year old man wants to date a 25 year old woman, he typically needs to be rich. A better than average physique + rich is often what works for the 40 year old trying to date a 25 year old. For a 40 year old to get a 10+ year age gap, he's better off trying to do that in person because a lot of women won't see him on the apps because they filter their card stack to men within 5-7 years of their own age. Most men end up dating someone less than 5 years younger than they are, and the typical age gap is 2-3 years if couples meet after about age 23 or so. There are narrower age gaps for those who meet in high school and college.
I agree that a smaller high school is a worse mating environment than a larger one. 50 students per grade level doesn't leave a lot of selection. That's going to be 25 females per grade level if ratios are 50-50, which they often are not. In life, too little choice is bad. However, too much choice is also bad. Big city women using swipe apps end up having too much choice.
A bad high school experience can have longer term effects. There are plenty of men today 30+ in the mating environment who are feeling the effects of a bad high school experience. You don't need to be a top tier poon slayer in high school to be ready for the mating environment in the next stage of life. However, having at least some good experience in high school can serve as a building block for the next phase. One girlfriend for a good portion of at least one year of high school is enough of a building block for the next phase. If someone goes from high school to college or working world with no dates and no sex while in high school, that's not going to make the next phase easy.
The upside is that you managed to get laid in your 3rd year of college as a 21 year old. Imagine going through 4-5 years of college, getting a bachelor's degree, and managing not to have sex for the entirety your time in college. That would be very bad.
There's a great thread on college sex in this forum (see below). The 50th percentile guy at college isn't having much sex, regardless of the ratios at his college. Ratios in colleges have gotten more favorable for men in the last 15 years or so. When I went to college (2001-2005), ratios were closer to 50-50 in most schools.
In the past 10 years, college students have been far more likely to use swipe apps as compared to the likelihood of college students using dating websites in 2001-2005. In 2004, very few college students were using dating websites. Around the time I was in college is when dating websites were becoming de-stigmatized in the general population (mainly people in the working world) but were still rarer in colleges.
College is not a vagina paradise for most college students. First year freshman men are competing for freshman women with the sophomores, juniors, and seniors. The typical sophomore-junior year female doesn't want to fucck a freshman either.
The upside about college campuses is that almost everyone is unmarried and there are almost no single moms of typical undergrad age (18-23). The downside of college campuses is that it doesn't take very long for women on campus to find a boyfriend or get into a top tier guy's rotation in a situationship. Either way, a lot of women are quickly off the market for new penis and won't be open to fielding your approach.
Most college men are most likely to score consistently while on campus if they can find themselves a committed girlfriend or 2 during their time in college. That won't mean they put up big notch count numbers for their college tenures but their frequency of sex will be good if following that path.
Approaching strangers, swiping on apps, and sending random DMs on Instagram are all difficult paths.
I've lived long enough to see the changes. Think about the 1980s-early 2000s. There were Walkmans, Discmans, and even early iPods/MP3 players. Women weren't were headphones/earbuds at the same rate as you've now.
If I were to think about my college gym in 2003, I would estimate that 10-20% of women wore headphones/earbuds to the gym with a personal music playing device. By the early 2010s, my estimate would have been 85-90%, a number that has stayed consistent in the last 10-12 years. Women are obsessed with wearing earbuds at the gym and on outdoor walking/hiking paths.
Male earbud wearing percentages are far lower, both at the gym at outdoors.
Women are actively discouraging approaches in-person by using earbuds/headphones.
2. Indeed the experience I had in high school has affected me adversely. During that time I really wanted a girlfriend and all the things that come with that but the prospect of achieving those things was so daunting to me that I just didn't try. In high school I believed it was imperative that I lose my virginity before college and that was my goal, but I should have lowered my expectations a bit in hindsight. If as a teenager I had done as little as merely kissed a girl and gone on a couple dates but still not had sex I would have been in a much better situation entering college than what actually came to pass. Looking back there were a few girls I could have gone out with but I either never pursued them or if I "tried" to my attempts were half a$sed. Not having the opportunity to have dated in high school is something I really regret. Had been able to I wouldn't have had as many problems later on. The infuriating thing is a year or two after high school I later found out that there was at least one girl who was interested in me back then but I didn't realize it at the time and when I learned that it was too late.
3. When I was in college I was deathly afraid of the possibility of going thru the entirety of undergrad without having sex, and I fought tooth and nail to ensure that I wouldn't graduate a virgin. I had to start from literally nothing and try to catch up to everybody else. It was a pretty hard slog and I had to approach it with the intensity and precision of a military campaign. I finally lost my virginity at 21 after a few years of hard work. It truly was criminal that I was a virgin for that long, there was absolutely no excuse for it having to turn out like that. There I was, 20 years old, good looking, the bass player of the hottest rock n roll band in my college town, playing shows at the local biker bar almost every weekend and walking around town with my long hair and bell bottom jeans looking like Robert Plant, but yet I was still a virgin. Overall my dating experience in college was pretty mid, mostly consisting of hookups with unremarkable women. I did hook up with hotter girls a couple times but those ended badly. By far the most sex I had in college was in my final year when I had a girlfriend. To this day that's been the only time in my entire life where I've been able to have sex on a regular basis. After not having had any for four years I feel like a virgin again.
4. Indeed approaching in public, sending DMs, and swiping on apps are difficult paths, but at least I have experience using apps and they worked for me in the past. As I said before if it wasn't for tinder I would still be a virgin.
5. Yes, the psyop is real, and it's herding men into the slaughterhouse cattle chute of online dating, as I like to say