Social interactions seem to have become a minefield. This is even more so in a work environment where a thoughtless word, action, or a simple misunderstanding can end a career and damage a reputation beyond repair even if after an investigation it turns out that no such thing happened.
When we look at dating, things can be even worse because expectations can be too high, and just as bad, too low.
On more than one occasion I have mentioned that it seems to many young women have standards a man must meet before she’ll even consider dating them. There’s nothing wrong with that...as long as those standards are reasonable. But when young women keep talking about men who are now referred to as “Sixers”, meaning that are at least 6 feet tall, have a six-figure income, and have six-pack abs, they are deluding themselves because the number of men in the US that meet those criteria and are available is less than 1% of male population. Add in a few more ‘standards’ and that number gets even smaller. The problem is there are millions of women competing for that small number of men that meet their standards.
A related issue is what when the women who would like to meet a guy to settle down with, particularly those who have successful careers of their own, have their own money, their own homes, etc. but insist anyone they would consider dating must have more income and more net worth than they do. (This is an aspect of hypergamy where women want to marry up, not to an equal or someone who makes less than they do.) The problem is that the wealthier women become, the more their dating pool shrinks. While hypergamy is nothing new as it has been around throughout human history, it seems to have taken on a darker meaning as as it doesn’t deal with marrying up regarding wealth or social status. They also have to be good looking, ambitious (as if they aren’t ambitious even if they’ve reached the economic stratosphere), and be willing to lavish gifts and money and anything the want before they’ll even consider spending more than one minute to get to know them.
The question we seem to hear from many of these women again and again is “Where are all the Good Men?” The problems is that there are plenty of good men around, they just can’t (or won’t) see them because they don’t meet their standards.
For men, it seems to be a “Damned if we do. Damned if we don’t,” situation. We hear women’s complaint that men aren’t approaching women anymore and they wonder why. On the other hand many of those same women castigated men on social media about being approached and told men to leave them alone. Men listened.
I could go on and on about this but I would probably get depressed or angry or both. Instead I will leave you with this from the ‘manosphere’ that might explain some of the problems and why men are keeping their distance: