The Biggest Problem With Modern Dating (Why It's Impossible For Men To Date In 2025)

I coach people about dating all the time. It's changed so much, the pandemic. But this thing where if somebody's not interested in dating anymore, they block the person. And it tends to go along with this belief system that, oh, it didn't work out, therefore they're a narcissist, they're bad, and therefore they've done something wrong. And as soon as you just like turn a first date into sex, like the whole app part is all over the place. And when people are getting used in that way, nothing good ever comes of it. I see this very disturbing trend. And I coach people about dating all the time. And I've been, how long I've been coaching? I don't know, eight years or something. And even in that time, it's changed so much, the pandemic. But this thing where if somebody's not interested in dating anymore, they block the person. And they think that I'm old-fashioned, because I'm like, can't you just like not decide you're not dating anymore? I don't recommend trying to stay friends or anything, but the blocking thing, like I would do to somebody who was a stalker, and it tends to go along with this belief system that, oh, it didn't work out. Therefore, they're a narcissist, or therefore they're bad, and therefore they've done something wrong. And the whole thing of dating, dating is meant to be this process of getting to know somebody to see if they would be somebody you would like to get to know better. And then progressing down towards would you like to like make a life with them, form a family with them. As soon as you just like turn a first date into sex, It's like the whole apple cart is all over the place. All the stuff in your body is attaching, bonding, and then you're overriding it with this idea like I have to be cool about it, I can't expect anything, or I can dislike this person but take the sex, and all this stuff that I think jams the radar so bad. It's a drug, really. I think romantic excitement, sex, certainly porn, is just more ways to sort of escape the anxiety we feel and try to get a hit of dopamine or whatever it is, the magic drug where we just feel like placated for a second. And when people are getting used in that way, nothing good ever comes of it. Nothing good comes of it. I agree. I feel like there's this massive lack of legitimate deep self-awareness right now. People don't know who they really are or what they're capable of, and therefore they lack a certain degree of self-confidence and the ability to move forward in life with transparency and authenticity. And how does one go from just assuming that the world is out to get them and that everybody else is wrong, which may be the case, to also being self-aware enough to look in the mirror and be like, hey, of all these problems that I'm dealing with, I seem to be the common denominator, so maybe I'm to blame here. How does one juggle that dichotomy? That is the truth. Radical responsibility is a very good thing to do, and it's easy to go too far. It is nobody's fault that they were abused as a kid. It's the person who did the abuse, it's their fault. But here we are. Nobody's going to fix it for us. And therefore, I think this focus on other people and what they did is a waste of energy after a certain point. And I don't mean to knock all therapy. There's so many different kinds. And it is really important to talk to somebody. And especially, I think, people who are professional helpers, a lot of it depends on their unique special gifts. And some people are so incredibly gifted at this. But when it gets stuck in this kind of technique, like one thing when I used to do therapy that they wouldn't give me was moral feedback, going, are you kidding? No, you can't. That's a terrible person thing to do. Like chasing somebody else's partner, just doing my best for it. And I would go to the therapist and we'd be like, draw a picture about it, talk about it. How do I feel about it? But a woman came into my life who was this very scrappy former street person, 23-year-old, covered in tattoos. And she was a recovering alcoholic. She was in my theater group. And when I confided in her that I was in dire straits, that I didn't feel like I could go on, I didn't know her very well enough. And for some reason, I picked her to tell. She very casually said, oh, come in. Let's talk about it. Oh, I know. But she, I think, this is what I love about people in AA, even though I never had the privilege of being an alcoholic amongst them, that wasn't my problem. I certainly had them all in my life when I went to that program. But what I love about alcoholics is they recognize that it's life and death to stop blaming all your circumstances and people and to find out where you're making a mistake and setting it right. That you go out and you face the harms that you've done. And you go apologize and make restitution. And it's taken very seriously as a life and death matter for yourself, for your own ability to hold your head up and survive. So luckily, because of her showing me the techniques, her techniques saved my life. This writing, she also told me, meditate afterwards, 20 minutes of meditation afterwards. So that gave me a footing where I wasn't like freaked out all the time. Like if I had a soundtrack for how it used to feel before I had these techniques, it was like this. I was just going through life, just completely freaked out. And I didn't start out that way. I was a fairly competent, intelligent person, but I had a lot of stuff working against me. And then I messed everything up, like traumatized people do. Just treated other people badly, got into ridiculous relationships, very self-centered really, like an alcoholic. So do you feel like the reason the alcoholics see success is because they view it as a life and death situation? Do you feel like a lot of people are stuck because they don't put it on enough of a pedestal to recognize it as life or death? Well, I can give you my opinion about it. Because my family's riddled with alcoholism, like more than half of the members of my family and extended family have it or are already dead from it. And drugs like heroin. I just come from a family with a high addiction rate that somehow I didn't get that aspect of it. No physical addiction. I have cigarettes. Got over it. But I do understand, I understand what alcoholism is like up close, like very, very deeply. And I've had a couple of relationships with people who were in active addiction in the past. And so this is what I would say. I think it's human nature to have to really struggle to face honestly where you're making a mistake. Like our human nature, it just wants to blame. We just love to blame. It's so comforting. It's like, well, how can I get a job in this economy or how can I sustain a relationship when men are all just awful? That kind of thing. And those were two trauma-driven beliefs that I had that were really holding me back. My antipathy towards men was not attractive to good men. There were some who would put up with it, but they were high. And I had no idea. Nobody called me on it. In fact, I think that I had some therapists who were on board with it. And it's just a luck of the draw who you get. So I had to make a conscious decision and I ended up, I read the Stoics too. And I read St. Thomas Aquinas and I read religious texts about everything. I learned seven forms of meditation before I settled on one of them. But I got to a point where I knew I was going to die if I didn't change my life, that my life wasn't worth going on with when all I did was alienate people and feel angry and miserable all the time. And I wanted something better. And I kind of had a spiritual experience one day where I just sort of was given to understand that I was meant for something better and it was time. It was time to just put all this behind me and do something different. And a lot of what that involved is being willing. This is something I learned from the drunks too. They have this saying, I was willing to go to any lengths. That's the thing, that's the key. Are you willing to go to any lengths to change? Are you still holding on to, it's like, well, but it's not fair. So I'm married and you have a family, so I guess you're married too, and you know those days when you're just like, well, maybe it's just me, where you're just like, oh, everything's so messed up. If only my spouse weren't causing all my problems. I get this very blamey mindset. And that's when my spiritual and mental condition is weak and I'm dysregulated and I'm also, you know, traumatized people, we get emotional flashbacks sometimes. Some old like emotional thing just kind of wafts in and paints everything black. You're like, see, I have to do everything around here. Nobody will ever help me. That's like one of my loops. I know what it is now. So if I hear myself thinking that way, I know not to do it. Or my other one is, I don't need you. I don't need anybody. Every relationship I ever had where I ended up saying such things ended, hello, you know? That's a very dark place to be coming from, but I believed it when it was happening. And so to undo that, I had to work on myself and then get the result of noticing that people cared about me. I think a lot of advice that people get is backwards, like you have to love yourself before you can love somebody else. But I think it's most people's experience that we do love other people before we love ourselves, if we have that problem. And so there's this like, I just call it normal people advice. You have to love yourself before you can love somebody else. I understand the point. I understand that you can't go in with low self-esteem and expect a great relationship. But the thing is, when you grew up not cared for, you're just going to not love yourself. It's a wound that you're carrying. And how you're going to learn to love yourself is through being loving to others and then doing living in such a way that you feel good about yourself. And over time, you start going, I feel pretty good. I did clean up all my messes. I was honorable in all the situations that I found myself in. When I couldn't figure out what to do and I messed things up, I went back and apologized. That's when I started feeling good about myself. And I think that's really underrated. And people are going to complain in the comments and be like, oh, you're blaming the victim. I'm not. But if you want to stop being a victim, you're going to have to start taking action. People are not going to cooperate with your fantasy that everybody's going to stop hurting you. And I feel like a lot of people get hung up on the time of adherence to create the outcome they desire. But, I mean, you can have the mental shift relatively quickly if you're in the right head space. But to have that manifest through your daily compounding actions is where the magic happens. And so many people, especially in today's day and age, the instant gratification, that dopamine hit that you were referring to earlier, it's like people, if there's any long game approach to it, they just throw up their hands in defeat. The time is going to pass anyways. Life goes on. And if you're here on this life, you might as well make compounding actions that lead to your betterment as opposed to your demise. Yeah. Yeah, that's a very sober thought you have right there. But it's very hard to learn when you feel emotionally like you're drowning and everything feels like it's like this second or death. It's just got to make it better this second or death. So I think that's the lens I bring. I have a knack for explaining. This is what it feels like. What you see on the outside is this. It doesn't always match, but it explains a lot why people can be so unreasonable. Why they're screaming at each other. And a lot of stuff that we're doing, I think time will show us. People know this already, but if you're looking at a screen and especially inflammatory stuff online, which most of it, if it's not there to make you angry, it's there. There's this thing that's really bothering me I see online a lot. It's like this, I call it sentimental porn. These posts that are fake, you can see they're AI generated. And it's like, Rusty was a cowboy and everybody thought he was just a loser. But one day there was this lost child and he was the only one who persisted in finding the kid. And then he did. And it's some AI video of the cowboy and the child. And I'm just like, this is fake. This is fake. And then everybody chimes in and goes, this is wonderful. This is wonderful. I have serious reservations about where this is going, where we activate our love and sympathy and admiration for robots, but not people. Maybe it's good that we're sort of practicing that muscle. Yeah, I feel like we're very disconnected from reality and truth. We all have our own perspective. And perspective is your reality to some extent, but there are certain black and white truths in the world. And I feel like the more we step away from that, the more chaos we're bound to encounter. Yes. So that's why I wrote the book ConnectAbility, that connecting with people with your heart is necessary to human flourishing, but also to your own life. And so I started focusing on this because I realized I love YouTubing because people talk to you all day long about how they feel about what you just said. So I've learned a lot about the variations of trauma and stuff that's not that varied. And almost everybody with trauma feels like they can't connect with people. And I sure did. I just never felt like I fit in. And then later, I left high school a year early. I was like a punk rocker. I graduated early. I left. I never talked to anybody ever again. And then Facebook came out. And I reconnected with the most popular girl in school, and I ended up visiting her. And we had this heart-to-heart, and she's like, remember, we used to have those boonie parties out in the boonies? And I was like, no, Amber, I was never invited to those. And she goes, yes, you were. Everybody liked you, Anna. You were always just so ooh about it. So I had sort of pulled away from people, and that's the prototype. That's what a traumatized person does, is it's so stressful and brings up so much fear and anxiety and anger just dealing with people that it feels necessary to hold them at arm's length. So you can simultaneously just feel like, why don't I have more friends? I'm so lonely. And be like, oh, these people, I'm holding them back. And how it shows up in adult life, just in the lives of regular people, is looking at your phone all the time, being busy all the time, committing to a plan and then canceling at the last minute, going to a party late, leaving early, going, I use this example because it's very tangible. You go to a potluck, and everybody brought some chicken, a salad, and you bring a bag of chips. That's actually like a holding people at arm's length thing. It's not investing in your relationships with people. And I totally understand some people, it's a time in their life where they don't have the money or the time to bring more than a bag of chips. Thank you for watching this episode of The Savage Clip. If you want to see the full-blown deep dive, check out the full episode here, and I'll see you there.