I've worked with plenty of people who have no visible significant other, even. It's fucking weird. Thirty+ (40+) year old guys living alone in huge houses, never married. I'm guessing they are just hitting up sex workers. These are smart, well adjusted people who would have made good fathers.
Maybe they just never met the right lady. Calling it "fucking weird" seems a bit over the top, and contradictory to your statement about working with plenty of them.
I guess the older I get, the more unclear I am on what normal is supposed to be or what it ever was. What percentage of men historically even had children? My impression is that it has always been significantly less than the percentage of women who do.
Historically as in recent history or more distant?
In more distant history, yes most women had children and many men did not.
In recent history (in the west), I believe the ratio was much more equal due to culturally enforced monogamy. Obviously it was never 100% followed but I believe it made a very large impact on this metric.
if you don't meet the right lady by 40 then you haven't been looking hard enough. meaning, you were not really interested or focused on getting married. i am the only male among all my cousins that i know of to be married with children. and i am your proverbial geek who has a hard time meeting women. which my cousins or brothers are not. they had more opportunities to meet women than me (as far as i can tell), but for me, getting married and having children was one of my life goals. i achieved my goal. my brothers or cousins simply didn't even have that goal.
Maybe they're just not into it? Some people enjoy living alone without a committed relationship.
A lot of users in this thread assume that everyone's goal is to marry and have children. A lot of people are not interested in that, partly because they have other interests, and partly because the social pressure is not as strong as before.
It is wrong that our society rewards drinking beers with tech bros and “skydiving” hobbies and what not fucking weird stuff.
And doesn’t reward that much investments of money and parental time into having healthy and educated kids.
Educated and well rounded kids, teenagers and adults don’t come free for society. It requires a lot of work, money, time and love. Ridiculous amounts.
To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game.
From experience, I can tell you that women are far more attracted to the beer-swilling bros who jump out of airplanes than the quiet, introverted engineers who retire each night to their homes to relax while cooking dinner and watching TV. That doesn't make for a particularly interesting date. So it goes.
As a quiet introverted engineer who went out on many dates and got married I couldn’t disagree more. Maybe it depends on age. What you say is probably true at age 21, by 29 most of the women I met were very set on meeting a serious life partner, not a bro. I found that actually talking to them about their interests and engaging with that did wonders, even if my introverted instincts didn’t tell me to.
As a quiet introverted engineer who went out on many dates
as a quiet introverted engineer who almost never went out on dates i have to agree with GP ;-)
actually talking to them about their interests and engaging with that did wonders
completely aside from the topic, this is very important relationship advice.
love means to care about your partner and their interests and goals.
finding a compatible partner means to look for someone whose goals and interests do not conflict with yours. (the need or should not be the same, but it should be possible for each partner to continue to pursue their goals with the strong support of the other partner.)
As an introvert, I feel I had to work harder to compensate for the fact that I didn't naturally find myself in environments where I'd meet people and engage with them, but I've also found that the attraction I've gotten from women has steading increased over time. I've found it far easier to date in my 40's than in my 20's. Not just people who wanted a serious life partner. Some of it does seem to be women equating older men with more maturity, some of it hopefully reflects actual maturity...
I don't know if you had to learn how to do this, but for me I think a large part of it is also the same thing you mention - it took a lot of effort for me to figure out, but the same parts of my nature that was a disadvantage for me when younger drove me to experiment, even take notes, until I figured out what I got wrong and how to improve myself.
Ironically I've found one of my best assets when dating in my 40's was my past struggles. Particularly recognising them and being able to use them to give observations about how clueless men tend to be about dating based on the mistakes I used to make myself.
> To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game.
It's going to increasingly become a challenge. China's population is contracting. India has hit replacement and will start to see decline barring immigration over the next 20-30 years. Only sub-Saharan Africa is left with above replacement birth rates.
We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.
At the same time it's going to have significant economic ramifications when more and more market categories stop getting "free growth" from growing population sizes.
> We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.
This has an implied assumption that either more population is always better or that for all of the countries the current population is below the optimum level.
What if for some countries the best population size - the one that provides the best quality of life for its citizens - is close to the current one, not larger? What if for some countries the most favorable population size is below the one they currently have?
It has the implied assumption that a functioning economy is linked strongly to the number of people of working age relative to the number of people outside it, and part of the population decline comes with an inversion of the population pyramid where an increasing proportion of the population is retired.
As such, even if there is a "best" population size below the current population size, you will face massive upheaval if the decline toward that size isn't happening slowly enough that you can offset that either with technology, temporary workers, or just grit.
You also have no reason to assume the drop will stop at whatever level you want, and so you will see even countries where people do think some reduction is fine start to aggressively compete to hold on people or attract immigrants at whatever level they feel will give them a soft-enough landing and then stabilization.
E.g. you can look to Italy over the coming years. Italy is already in population decline, yet has a government many consider far-right and anti-immigrant - clearly, Italy is not ready to loosen up immigration to stem it yet, and is willing to accept even increasing the rate of its population decline while trying to address the underlying fertility rate.
Personally, I expect to see a major change in policy from Italy once this really starts to bite, but their current unemployment rate will still buffer them for a few more years (and once it drops, it might well create a slight rebound, but even if that happens, it's unlikely to do more than slow the decline slightly, and won't address the labour market for more than two decades).
If I'm right, you should start to see the tone change once the unemployment rate drops a bit further and pressure from businesses in need of labour starts affecting Italian politics more, followed first by increased attempts at appealing to European migrants first, with e.g. tax breaks and the like, before they eventually give in and start rolling back the restrictions on non-EU migration.
> We're about to hit increasingly aggressive competition both to hold on to people, and to attract immigrants as more and more countries start getting bitten by demographic shifts.
And yet we are seeing more and more walls (literally and figuratively) that rich countries put in the way. Even for "desirable" people immigrating and naturalizing in a western country the whole process is quite degrading, all the quotas and queues for H1B/Green cards, constant threat of deportation if person lost a job and couldn't find another one in very short time period, arbitrary delays and constrains on getting citizenship, etc.
Because it hasn't started to bite enough yet for the most desirable targets, coupled with politicians that have painted themselves into corners and are struggling to find ways out.
E.g. in the UK, the last several Conservative governments have on one hand presented themselves as tough on immigration, with deals to send asylum seekers to Rwanda (a few hours worth of applicants is all the deal can accommodate), putting them on barges (another few hours worth), turning back boat refugees, etc., while at the same time presiding over the largest increase in net migration in British history.
Predictably the conflict between that image and reality is starting to cause problems for them, and while immigration numbers are still high enough despite a process that is intentionally hostile, eventually the supply of people wanting to come will dip below the numbers that still allow the UK to be selective about whom to accept.
We've already gotten a slight taste of that with the sharp dip in EU/EEA migrants, who, as it turns out don't feel the UK is worth it enough to go through the immigration process vs. just showing up the way we could before (I'm in the UK with EU/EEA Settled status), and it's caused assorted groups complaining..
It will take until you have broader labour shortages before you see the real pressure though - especially countries buffered by unemployment will be able to put it off a bit longer, but when it hits, it will hit hard and just raising fertility rates won't be sufficient, because it has a lag of 2 decades of worsening conditions before it even starts reversing the drop in the labour supply.
It's going to increasingly become a challenge. China's population is contracting.
i think the economic differences and the population density still make immigration a viable strategy for some time to come, despite contracting population everywhere.
the future will be that the population in every larger city will consists of least a quarter chinese and indian (and eventually african as well).
It will be a viable strategy for decades, you're right, in as much as UN population projections don't show an actual global population decline until around 2100 or so.
The challenges that will bring, though, is policy, and which countries are attractive enough to "sit back" vs. being forced to offer increasingly attractive incentives, and where it will cause substantial political complications.
E.g. China is notorious for it being near impossible to permanently settle as an immigrant. I expect that aside from increasingly drastic measures to try to bring the fertility rate back up you'll see their first attempts be to entice the diaspora back to China, secondly an increase in rhetoric about One China towards Taiwan, and only well after those attempts to loosen up visa requirements for foreigners with no ancestral ties to China.
We'll see the return of diasporas increasingly becoming a problem for countries that has come to rely on certain immigrant flows.
A lot of countries will find political tension between forces wanting to more actively court immigrants vs. anti-immigrant groups becoming increasingly challenging and a major economic issue.
> To a degree this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration. But this only works to a degree and at a larger scale it is still a zero sum game
It can actually be a net negative for both the home country and host country of the immigrants. The home country may lose some of their more ambitious members. And there is a significant cost to a host country that is now accommodating a potentially large number of people from faraway places with vastly different cultures. (Some may ignore or deny these costs, but they're real and being felt in many ways e.g. in the US right now.)
> And there is a significant cost to a host country that is now accommodating a potentially large number of people from faraway places with vastly different cultures. (Some may ignore or deny these costs, but they're real and being felt in many ways e.g. in the US right now.)
You are being down-voted, but I'm curious what are the costs of having _legal, desirable_ immigrants in the US in your opinion? (because I would assume that OP meant specifically that group when writing "this resource can be stolen from other countries, via immigration").
I also worked with a 60+ woman who once said at the lunch table "if you're a 35 year old guy and single there's something seriously wrong with you". Maybe you would have hit it off with her.
I'm one of those. Very shy even into my late 20s. Then my Dad got sick so I was his support for nearly 20 years. Life went by and now it's too late to have kids. No woman of child bearing age wants to date a middle-aged man 10 years her senior. So really why bother even trying to have a relationship at this point?
Plenty of women wants to date a guy 10, 20 or even 30 years her senior. Especially if he's financially secure, wants a stable relationship, is reasonably healthy and treats her well.
If you have your life in order, all you have to do is to look in the right places. Those places exist in any country, but if you're a man like that and look on dating sites for Thailand or the Philippines, you will find 10 women that want to marry you within an hour or two.
However, if you're broke, don't have a decent job and have serious health problems, you may indeed by out of luck.
Not to give OP fuel for his fire, but just to be real because I am so sick of seeing these misleading comments all over the internet:
It's not just finding a woman who is willing. It's finding a woman who is a quality person that you have an attraction to that is willing.
When you are a woman who is sane, smart, have your life together, and is decent looking, you have many choices for a partner. Many of these woman can easily find high quality men who are their own age and have the same life situation.
So while yes, it does happen that the 50 yr old guy meets the amazing 33 yr old woman. Far more often than not, the amazing 33 yr old woman meets to amazing 33 yr old guy.
Unless you are down with divorced w/kids. Then it gets much easier. But you will be second to her kids.
> So while yes, it does happen that the 50 yr old guy meets the amazing 33 yr old woman. Far more often than not, the amazing 33 yr old woman meets to amazing 33 yr old guy.
This is absolutely true, well at least if you include those amazing people who met even earlier than 33. Amazing people tend to have options whether they are male, female or even other.
Those less amazing (the remaining 60-80%, depending on who's counting), often have to lower their standards or expectations in some way, unless they're lucky and find a special soulmate. Indeed, if someone is 35+ and still single, chances are their expectations are not aligned with what they themselves have to offer.
I've been there myself. Only when I decided that I did NOT want to remain single for the rest of my life and became serious about finding a partner did that change. And it changed virtually overnight.
Maybe just having a friend; as I've said elsewhere in the thread, I never really got the whole marriage/kids idea myself, but perhaps now that I'm also aging out of childbearing age, dating will be less complicated once any expectation of children are out of the picture.
Maybe They haven't found the one who they want and or wants them ..too maybe they aren't into women. With society being more accepting of same sex situations I'm pretty sure I read the number of those who identify something other then straight has increased.
