Stop Telling Women To Settle Or So Help Me

Take your “there are no good ones left” bullsh*t and shove it where the sun does not shine.

Photo by Athena from Pexels

I love numbers as much as the next gal. Cozying up to my monthly Google Analytics data is my idea of a rockin’ Thursday night. Numbers never lie, as long as you understand what they’re saying. But there’s one area of life where numbers don’t help us, because there’s one thing in the world that’s unquantifiable, unplannable, and unpredictable against any model: love. If love could be predicted, planned, and assured, we’d all stop this dating ballyhoo, hire an analyst, and be done with it. Instead, we keep on trying, and we keep listening to assholes who love to tell us every part of trying that’s stacked against us.

A friend of mine recently alerted me to the fact that this post exists: Why is Finding a Good Man so Hard for Single Women Over 35? Once my eyes were finished rolling, and it took awhile, I read all about the author’s exploration into The Eligible Bachelor Paradox by game theorist Mark Gimein. I treated myself to yet another essay about shrinking pools and dating app disparity and the college graduate imbalance between the sexes—that old chestnut. Everything we love to scare the shit out of women with. Oh and we throw in the fact that she’s aging, too—that always helps. As if she had another option or finding a relationship freezes time for women somehow.

Here’s why I get so incensed about numbers-driven content written for single women, particularly single women over 30: No one who writes it ever has an actual solution to the “problem” they’re so thoughtfully outlining with data. When you support the impossible experience women are having on dating apps with data and then don’t tell them what the fuck to do about it, you’re just scaring the shit out of women for no reason. You’re not offering any kind of thoughtful plan for easing the fears you just stoked like a campfire.

None of these data-driven pieces about the realities of dating apps ever take into account the fact that dating apps themselves are a for-profit business whose last goal is for their users to find the thing they came to the dating app for in the first place. A dating app user meeting a long-term partner is the worst case scenario for a dating app that makes more money the longer its users are single…