On Modern Dating

I don’t know whether I’m a prude or a sensualist. I don’t know whether I’m a one-woman man or a lifelong bachelor in the making. I don’t know if I’ve missed the one or if she’s around the corner. Shit, I don’t even know if I’m gay or straight half the time (even though I’m pretty sure I’m straight. And I’m definitely not non-binary lol).

The dating world is so wide open today that you can literally choose your own adventure in nearly infinite variety.

Want to roll the dice on some exotic mail-order scheme with a woman from a second-world or third-world country? There’s a website for that.

Want to find your perfect 'kink'/'fet-life' partner in an area code near you? There’s a website for that.

Want to date an upscale, well-heeled, *cultured* slender beauty with all the right opinions and a daddy with a prodigious net worth? There’s a website for that.

Want to hook up with as many women who are sexually available on the night you happen to be swiping left and right? There’s an app for that.

Want to marry a farmer, a devout Christian, a welder or a bassoonist? There’s a website for that.

Want to have sexual intercourse with any nationality on this earth for a modest price? There’s a city for that.

Want to view any number of billions of adult content acts, with endless faces and bodies ad infinitum? There are many, many websites for that.

And on and on.

Our society is overflowing with sex from nearly every conceivable quarter. Soon we’ll even have readily accessible robots to offer us coitus and companionship.

So, what is one to do in such an evolutionary novel environment?

I choose those words carefully. We are not – I repeat – are not, in well-mapped territory.

Yes of course, there has always been porn, prostitution, infidelity, deviancy, etc. But the time we are experiencing, I would wager (bigly I might add), is unprecedented in human history.

There is no other civilization in history where sex has become so democratized. In every other society past sex has come with significant strings attached: money, elaborate rituals, marital ties, property, social prestige, phases of courting, etc.

Now, unfettered from the confines of pregnancy and social morays, sex is a right. It has become celebrated and decoupled. It is no longer attached as tightly to the fundamental pressures and consequences it has evolved alongside for millions of years.

Additionally, with sex as a right, we find the concomitant trappings of citizenship to go along with it. Hence the explosion of sexuality-based legal conundrums in the past several decades; no-fault divorce, alimony fiascos, gender identity, reems of sexual content on the internet, and so on...

And this is where we find ourselves. We are awash at sea with the flotsam and jetsam of previous social morays, legacy instincts and the modern, liberal legal fictions and fantasies as our only compass in the wreckage.

I say all this because I have experienced that it is indeed possible to simply hook up and have sex for a long period of time with no need to settle down or form any real lasting bond of any kind. One has to go on dates for the most part (not that they’re not enjoyable), but - especially for the individual orientated towards promiscuity - sex is mostly readily available.

Modern western people, are for lack of a better term, quite easy. I’m not saying this in a judgmental way, it is simply a fact.

If one is reasonably good-looking, well-groomed, has half a plan as to what one wants to do in life, is moderately invested in achieving it AND you put yourself out there to be enjoyable company to women – you will, in all likelihood, at some point find yourself enjoying consensual sex.

This too (it may surprise you dear reader) has happened to me. Quite often in fact. At least more so than many of my peers, or so I would surmise anecdotally.

This is no doubt a wonderful thing in large part. Sex is one of the great joys of life. But, like any powerful phenomena in life (fire, intelligence, strength, etc.) it comes packaged with a coterie of decision tree trade-offs. We are in the midst of those decision trees rapidly changing.

Now - a Chadly caveat - I am 6’4”, have worked out most of my life, am reasonably intelligent, articulate and ambitious. These are attractive qualities. But aside from the raw genetic potential, I had to put in a lot of fucking work to bring these qualities to fruition.

This is for the crypto-blackpill virgins out there who don’t lift a finger toward their own salvation. The denizens of the dark corner of the internet who spend their days posting about jawlines and shit like that. If you workout, get sunlight and eat healthy consistently you will magically feel better and look better too. And then maybe people would want to be around you more.

But I digress. My point is, even for the non-Chads, people are fukkin.

It’s hard to say how much, because it’s often touted in media circles that cover this topic that the frequency of sex is in fact down statistically within my generation (millennial) and Gen-Z.

This would make sense given Gen-X came up in the wildly lascivious times of the swinging 70s and such. Not to mention a whole host of other socioeconomic factors in the decades prior to the 2010s that made people want to get-to-scrumpin’.

But such lofty and erudite matters lay outside the realm of this piece. Overall, sex is as free as it has ever been. And that makes it damned difficult to date.

Add to this complicated and dynamic picture a special feature of our own collective psyches. Our Western obsession with romance.

The Western conception of romantic love is rooted in the medieval age. The tale of true love is especially embedded in our western psyches. It was transposed onto Christian based ideals of self-sacrifice and otherworldly reward. It has been distilled into Disney movies and drug-store romance novels ad-inifinitum then blasted into our collective subconscious like pesticides on an Iowa soybean field.

Additionally, on an even deeper level, pair-bonding is at least in part innate to our mammalian instincts. Plenty of our primate cousins’ mate for life, or at least in long-term monogamous relationships. It has no doubt been a successful genetic strategy literally billions of times over, for millions of years.

Undergirding the swooning narratives of our minds and the romantic stories we indulge in, we have deep, innate drives to form long-term bonds with a significant other we can make babies with.

Yet so much of this has changed. We are constantly receiving messaging that this is hard to do in various ways – career precedence, basic living expenses, the tantalizing promise of another partner who’s better around the corner, really finding true love somewhere out there, the cornucopia of available sexual experiences seemingly being had by many horny and sometimes very strange subcommunities, etc.

At least in my current estimation. There may be more.

We’re at the nexus of an epochal clash of drives.

One towards our tried and true home of sweet domestic bliss and true-love. This will likely always be with us.

The other towards modern, emancipated and intrepid sexual citizenship. This is uncharted, pioneering territory.

Where it will go, who will win, how many babies will be had and kinks discovered; who can know? But it is admittedly a damn interesting ride.