The fact that there are way more men than women in the Bay is a statistical reality, which you admit yourself.
Then you bring an opinion blog-post by a single woman as counter-evidence.
Ironically, all these complaints about "guys there that have a disgusting sense of entitlement" just go to show how picky she is, and can afford to be, in San Francisco.
Nothing in GP's post exhibits an arrogant attitude. He makes the simple observation, that the sort of guys who would be considered attractive and desirable in most other locations, are struggling to get dates in the Bay. This is easily explained by the high male/female ratio, which we already established as a fact.
Given this fact, no amount of hand-wringing will help: if there are far more single men then women, then the women would set a very high bar, and the men below that bar would have to remain single.
There are simply not enough women for all the single men in the Bay. No spectacular feats of mental gymnastics, nor nice-sounding dating tips, nor seeking to blame men for being "arrogant", will get around this reality.
As a final anecdote, I did know women who dated executives and VCs in the Bay. Some of these guys had mammoth egos. Curiously, that didn't prevent them from having far better dating lives than any engineer I knew.
> You’ll be shocked by the stark differences in behavior of women in places where women are plentiful versus their behavior within artillery distance of San Jose and San Francisco
Isn’t this literally just a commentary of the 104:100 male female ratio of SF & SJ? This is a commonly brought up argument regarding dating in the bay. It seems to be a statement saying “you’ll have an easier time dating when the demographic odds are in your favor.” Taking offense to that statement requires a lot of bad faith interpretation.
> As someone who's nowhere close to any of those numbers and has had an exceptional level of success in the Bay, I can tell you that those requirements are bullshit, and very, very common justifications that men tell themselves to resort to inaction.
I am glad for your success, but my anecdata contradicts yours.
From my social circle, I can tick off almost a dozen men who had a really rough time dating in the Bay Area. After they left for places with a better gender balance, they did dramatically better. They went from practically no dates to quite a robust social calendar. And, it seems that the quality of the women they were meeting got quite a bit better.
They didn't all magically get smarter, funnier, fitter, etc. simply by moving.
> The few women who moved to the Bay can have their pick.
I don't think so. It's only when males are desperate to settle; living alone and spending their money on their hobbies/travel might be a much more attractive option to them than to bind to an unattractive female that went to SFBA specifically to capture a high-value male.
> Dating in these cities as a single man in your 20s and 30s is good for the soul. It forces you to actually develop a personality, figure out how to be fun to be around. Have something interesting going on for you besides working at startup x.
And the women will ignore you anyway because they only care about someone who is a 9/10 and makes at least $300K+.
Why stack the deck against yourself? If you are a guy looking for a woman, LEAVE THE BAY AREA. Period.
> The more successful a women is in her career, the fewer dating options she has.
This is a result of their own sky-high standards and unwillingness to date/marry down. The same is not true for a man.
> There is a joke that women in the Bay Area have a “49er attitude”. A 4 who thinks she is a 9 because of the abundance of successful and intelligent men.
Isn't this also true nationwide due to dating apps, skewing the perception of successful and attractive men on the apps as the new "average" ?
> the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male
Why does social life only mean dating?
There are tons of social circles in the Bay Area. Hobbyist groups, aficionados of all stripes, non-profits galore and strange entertainment options. There is a diversity of bars and restaurants, and California’s unique outdoors are close.
Perhaps it would be more rewarding to focus on those, and be a little more passive when it comes to dating while you build up your interests.
> I've anecdotally heard of from a number of people in tech who've made the SF->NYC move is the better gender and career diversity there. For men this can equate to a better dating lifestyle, and just in general some want to be surrounded by people besides tech bros.
This is absolutely valid and it's sad to see this greyed out. SF dating is a shitshow from many perspectives.
> At many bars here, there may be 5 guys to every girl, and only 3 or 4 girls might be single. Of course they get a constant stream of guys hitting on them so if you are an average guy, you will be shut down immediately.
Haha, I'll take "SFBA experiences I definitely don't miss" for $800, Alex!
Your friend's experience is quite similar to my own. Dating life completely turned around as soon as I moved east.
This is such a striking and serious issue, I'm surprised there's not a whole lot more discussion of it. Are all these engineers happy to just move to SFBA, and then not have a single date for 7 years like your friend?
> Getting out of the bay area to date might be great advice.
It depends on the kind of partner you're looking for. I met my now-wife (and many other great women) in the Bay Area. But some men are threatened by women who are as smart/capable (or moreso) than they are.
> Become a multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person.
According to census statistics, there are 1.63 single men for every 1 woman in Marin County. 1.34 single men per single woman in San Mateo County. 1.55 single men per single woman in Santa Clara County.
So I really like your advice; if every man in the Bay became a "multi-deminsional, multi-faceted person", they would transcend the boundaries of plain arithmetic so there would be enough single women to date every one of them!
>Women do not have an abundance of choice. There are more women than men in the United States. In major urban areas there are many more mating age straight women than men. When you look at the number of college educated straight women compared to their male cohort in urban areas, there are more women. This is reported, often, in the media.
This is absolutely incorrect. Actual numbers are irrelevant, what's important is experiences. Talk to actual women using online sites and find out their experiences. My ex-wife, just after we decided to break up (but before actually being divorced) got on OKC and was absolutely bombed with messages from men. She had a bunch of dates, no bad experiences at all, but basically got overwhelmed with all the attention and shut it down for a while. (Then she ended up meeting someone through a friend and they're a couple now.) Men just don't have this experience, unless maybe they're over 60 or something. Ask any man if he gets a lot of action on online sites. They don't, unless they're a very rare minority who's very successful for some reason. The frequent complaint on OKC is that they write a bunch of long, thoughtful messages and get no responses.
You're looking at the absolute numbers of women and men, but that assumes that they participate in online dating in equal numbers. I think that's a completely flawed assumption. Men have long been more likely to participate in online dating, and women have long been far more wary of it. Also, I think a lot of women simply avoid dating altogether in their 30s because they have kids.
Finally, you're flat wrong about women in urban areas. It's well known that single women outnumber single men in east coast cities (esp. DC and NYC), whereas the reverse is true in west coast cities (esp. SF/SV and Seattle). Men and women don't work in the same industries in equal proportions, and certain industries are concentrated in certain places (e.g. tech in SV, fashion in NYC).
>Women in their thirties ... There are more of us
This is flat wrong too, if you look at population figures. Men outnumber women from birth to about 30 (children are more likely to be born male). Around 30, the numbers become equal. Women don't really outnumber men until after 40 or so, because men die earlier than women usually.
>If you're looking for something casual, I think your profile should reflect that. Then you meet someone who isn't looking for a relationship right now.
You obviously don't talk to many 30+ women, and you obviously haven't swiped through thousands of women's profiles. There are zero women like that over the age of 30 on Tinder. There's a tiny number of swingers, and that's about it. Everyone else says "no hookups". (I'm not looking for something casual, I'm just pointing out the fallacy here.)
>There is lots of information out there about how guys are successful on Tinder. From what I've seen most of it seems to be from the PUA perspective, which relies on chipping away at a woman's self esteem, and games.
Yeah, and that information is being sold by people who are trying to profit off that advice; it may or may not be correct. But if it is, that really says something about women, doesn't it? Actual research (by OKC's data people I believe) has shown that women are frequently dishonest about what they want and what attracts them (and not just dishonest with men, but dishonest with themselves too). If women really were repulsed by PUA tactics, then they wouldn't work, would they?
> make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life
Ironically the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male. I noticed that you don't live in the Bay Area, you're married, you probably meant a much broader meaning of "social life", so your experiences are likely very different. But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful, male SWE in the Bay Area making $120K+ a year in his 20s or 30s, who should be a magnet for women, turns out to be living in one of worst places because of male-female ratios among singles (and some other cultural factors).
My advice would be work hard, save your money, travel when you can to better locales to improve your social life, but with the eventual goal of permanently moving out when you've saved enough. If you pick your destination within the USA well, dating prospects will improve greatly, and if you look worldwide (and can overcome the language and immigration issues), it could improve dramatically.
> It’s looking grim AF.
> I have the high income (~400k).
> high net worth for my age (~2M)
SF is like another planet. Unless you're exceptionally ugly or have an incredibly bad personality, you wouldn't have problem dating anywhere else on entire Earth.
I'm 33, living in Eastern Europe, and have nothing special in terms of looks (probably solid 6, but you can just google my username) or money (certainly nothing even close to SF tech salaries). And yet, when I re-activate my profile on Tinder, I get first 100 likes in a first day or two.
>The dating game in most cities is abysmal, and the majority of attractive single ladies are high end escorts, sugar babies and or gold diggers.
Yeesh this just comes off as bitter. The dating game is hard but it's a two way street. I doubt anyone is going to be surprised that the most attractive members of either sex are taken but writing them off as sex workers is remarkably disingenuous.
I’m going to guess they won’t have an answer to your question of how single men in the Bay Area working on themselves and “becoming interesting” will suddenly make tens of thousands of single women materialise in the Bay Area.
It was merely a rant about how they felt people shouldn’t feel entitled to anything and that expecting to be able to date if you’ve got your life in order is too much entitlement.
> in most markets men are at a significant disadvantage because of how men and women differ in the way they approach dating
This is such a ridiculous thing to say. A significant disadvantage compared to _who_? Other men? That sort of negates your statement? The women on the platform? Men aren't competing against women on the platform to find a date, for the most part.
I think you're sort of dancing around the issue that attractive people on the platform are going to attract more attention, but that applies to both genders equally. If you don't want 'competition', try seeking out people who aren't conventionally attractive.
Holy shit was this article all over the place. Some interesting theories, but it's pretty clear from reading this what the author's issue was--he's way too analytical and left-brained, especially for women in NYC. Glad it worked out for him, but he'd have been better off dating in the Bay Area.
>Plus, as a single man, I got a ton of matches on Bumble, a lot more than any other state. Made me feel very welcome.
Really? According to the statistics, the west coast cities have a surplus of single men, whereas the east coast cities have a surplus of single women. Of course, lots of single women in a place doesn't mean that there's a lot who will match you.
I'm in DC, the #2 metro area for surplus single women (NYC is #1), and interestingly, I do get a lot of dates, but the large majority of them are from Asia (as in born there, not just descended from there). The professional white women here all seem to want a guy from the cover of GQ who likes to go to bars and drink a lot, and I don't drink. Or they're conservative and religious. Maybe I need to move to Portland...
The fact that there are way more men than women in the Bay is a statistical reality, which you admit yourself.
Then you bring an opinion blog-post by a single woman as counter-evidence.
Ironically, all these complaints about "guys there that have a disgusting sense of entitlement" just go to show how picky she is, and can afford to be, in San Francisco.
Nothing in GP's post exhibits an arrogant attitude. He makes the simple observation, that the sort of guys who would be considered attractive and desirable in most other locations, are struggling to get dates in the Bay. This is easily explained by the high male/female ratio, which we already established as a fact.
Given this fact, no amount of hand-wringing will help: if there are far more single men then women, then the women would set a very high bar, and the men below that bar would have to remain single.
There are simply not enough women for all the single men in the Bay. No spectacular feats of mental gymnastics, nor nice-sounding dating tips, nor seeking to blame men for being "arrogant", will get around this reality.
As a final anecdote, I did know women who dated executives and VCs in the Bay. Some of these guys had mammoth egos. Curiously, that didn't prevent them from having far better dating lives than any engineer I knew.
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