If he spits on the ground, can’t cook, lies about his height, identifies as apolitical or doesn’t travel enough. If he’s weird about other men wearing makeup (“like, K-pop idols”), says he wants a “slightly autistic woman”, has no skincare routine or only likes songs that got famous on TikTok. It’s an ick if he doesn’t call his parents, sniffs every five seconds, is an unsuccessful DJ or is embarrassed to do karaoke. Recently, she uncovered a new one: if he’s saving himself for marriage. It’s now at the top of the checklist on her Notes app that she references whenever she starts seeing someone new.
“Three strikes, you’re out,” she said.
“For so long, I’ve been idealizing this one man who will drop everything for me, who will know my likes, and is someone who’s the perfect mold,” she said. “I think I’m constantly disappointed by real men.”
Gen Z have long faced accusations of being losers in the dating realm: young people are having less sex, meeting fewer new people, getting cringed out by even sending roses on Hinge. They are the most rejected generation and the loneliest generation. Most of these trends point to a big change in dating culture: social media has entrenched itself into our romantic reality, often informing our interpersonal relationships rather than the other way around. For young women like Veloso who have never dated without the internet’s input, that means the construction of a Dream Man informed by viral terms served to her by algorithms, social feeds and stories people share online more than her IRL dating life.
The phraseology is expansive and ever-evolving, and for many, wielded as a prescriptive rubric for tackling the thunderdome of heterosexual dating content. There is no shortage of ways to describe the kind of man who is a romantically superior kind of partner: a loser provider man with golden retriever energy who worships you because if he wanted to, he would. The health of a prospective match can be deemed on a red-to-green flag scale, from minimum effort and weaponized incompetence to getting the princess treatment from a real yearner, written by a woman. Your happily-ever-after can be ensnared with the red nail theory or the orange peel theory. The truest love, the ship, the OTP (one true pairing), is also increasingly championed on social media through tropes, whether it’s enemies-to-lovers or a slow-burn relationship arc.
This desire to develop theories that explain the painful steps of falling in love feels similar to older adages around dating, like the teachings of Cosmo magazine, Sex and the City, or Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. But relational psychoanalyst Cynthia LaForte said there is also a generational trend of diagnosing and clinicalizing everything, often propelled by misappropriated therapy speak on social media, that is unique to gen Z and the digital era of dating.
“We’ve pathologized away personality,” LaForte said. “I think there’s a big narrative around ‘these are the types of people you date’ and ‘these are the people you break up with’ and it leaves little room for compassion.” (...)
Whether you are young or not, human relationships are fraught with emotional tripwires, and Dream Man content offers a safer way forward. But that means we are all dating under a panopticon, where virtues and sins can be broadcasted and scrutinized and farmed for engagement. There is a huge appetite for other people’s horror stories especially. Millions-strong Facebook groups like Are We Dating The Same Guy? and apps like Tea were specifically designed to catch cheaters in the act. Really any fuckboy behavior can be posted and reposted until daters are ubiquitously known across the internet as West Elm Caleb or the Couch Guy or the man from Reesa Teesa’s notorious 50-part “Who TF Did I Marry?” TikTok series. And online, it doesn’t matter if the crime was pathologically lying or not looking overjoyed enough when your girlfriend walked through the door – the deliberation and condemnation processes are the same.
“Social media makes me scared shitless to date,” Nicole said. “Everyone is on the wave of holding people accountable, which I do very much support, and because of this, people are highlighting more of the abusive side of things to raise awareness to it. But it also drowns out the hopeless romantics.”
by Steffi Cao, The Guardian | Read more:
[ed. Posted mostly for the links (all new to me - don't do social media). See also: It's a loser boy summer (It's Steffi):]
***
Something is brewing in the murky waters of our crumbling society. Everyone is battling loneliness and existential dread. We’re all physically or spiritually chaste, but somehow still trying to be hedonistic brats in the club. Sex and the City is being studied on social media like a fossilized relic of a bygone dating era. Romantic morale is dissolving like saltine crackers under the wet, baking sun. Everywhere, every hour, someone is at a bar or up on Twitter, talking about yearning. (...)Last year, I wrote about the medium ugly boyfriend and his meteoric ascent as romance’s hottest status piece. The appeal was clear—in the external trappings of your relationship, the medium ugly boyfriend ensured that you would always be perceived as the glamorous and altruistic heroine. He seems to know that you’re out of his league and will, to any passerby in a Uniqlo, always make you look good. But now, a new phenomenon has expounded upon the fertile soil of the boyfriend status symbol: the nonchalant cool man is out, and the loser boy is in. Medium ugly boyfriends of last year have opened the floodgates to a new dawn, and it is unequivocally the era of loser boys. Men who proclaim to “only date models” are as dead in the water as the Shein microtrends of 2020. In the relentless heat of August, we are too tired to deal with texts that say “I mean, you can come if you want,” and we are now searching for the person that will get down on both knees, put their hands together in prayer, and beg for a woman to look their way. (...)
To be clear, I mean “loser” in a very laudatory way. There are a million other names for him: he’s a yearner. He’s a worshipper. He’s a real eater. He’ll cherish you and love you even if you were a worm. “Loser” is simply the ironic digest of these personality traits that have historically been considered undesirable by traditional masculinity. (...)
Within the context of patriarchal oppression, loser boys are the very antithesis to the red-pilled manosphere that seems to grow bigger each year. Loser boys are really lover boys—the ones who are conscious enough to identify a hegemonic dog whistle and act accordingly.
It makes sense why this has happened. Over the years, the Joe Rogan–Andrew Huberman–Sneako enclave of digital masculinity has peddled the ideologies of homophobic, racist chauvinism to millions of men. Young women are skewing more progressive as young men skew more conservative, and a huge factor has to do with the content they are fed on their feeds. And of course, there are interpersonal impacts. I hear stories from women who more frequently encounter direct forms of such alpha male ideology on dating apps or during IRL dates—men swiping up just to tell them that they’re ugly, men directly telling women during first dates what they perceive to be wrong with their looks, men actively putting down women for their interests, professions, and beliefs. For having sex with them, for not having sex with them.
It’s disrespectful, yes, but also incredibly boring. It’s so boring to get disrespected again and again by the same genre of man who has shit to say about your looks while he’s nursing a hairline that’s got two years left before it takes permanent PTO. The loser boy phenomenon is indicative of women wanting more—they want someone who, at a very baseline level, understands that they deserve to be treated above a level of degradation and dehumanization.
It’s disrespectful, yes, but also incredibly boring. It’s so boring to get disrespected again and again by the same genre of man who has shit to say about your looks while he’s nursing a hairline that’s got two years left before it takes permanent PTO. The loser boy phenomenon is indicative of women wanting more—they want someone who, at a very baseline level, understands that they deserve to be treated above a level of degradation and dehumanization.
[ed. PTO? Had to look it up (paid time off). Lol.]
