A Life Of Perpetual Bachelorhood: How Online Dating Is Ruining Men's Ability To Have Relationships

Back in the old days, if men wanted to meet women, they had to go out and approach them in bars where, let's face it, women are usually congregated in groups.

Men understandably hated this swing-and-miss approach because it's intimidating and there is so much potential for rejection. Still, they did it anyway because there were no other options.

When a guy finally met a great girl, he was relieved to never have to find a date at a bar again, and he thought twice before dumping a girl and re-entering the dating world.

All this changed with the phenomenon of online dating.

Suddenly, men are able to hit on countless girls on any given night from the comfort of their own sofas. They don't have to worry so much about rejection because they never have to approach women in person.

At first, the goal was to find that one great relationship. Now, how can a man be expected to choose just one eligible bachelorette when there are so many out there? Seriously, there are so many… page after page after page.

Then the emails start pouring in. There's Jessica, Stacy, Sarah and Lauren, all of whom are interested in meeting. "Why choose one?" he thinks. "I'll just go out with all of them." A year passes, and he is just as single as when he started the year before.

Another one bites the dust.

The Evolutionary Explanation

Online dating may seem like a Godsend, but in reality, it plays perfectly into the evolutionary desires of men, which are tons of attention to feed the ego and the potential for a lot of non-committal sex.

It doesn't take long before men realize that getting into relationships means giving all this up, so they become perpetual bachelors.

You might be thinking that women get at least as much attention from the opposite sex as men and certainly have more potential for sex, and you're right.

Although, the kind of attention that online dating facilitates is not the kind that women are genetically predisposed to desire.

Many women want committed relationships, while many men want to feel like badasses and have as much sex as possible. This isn't gender stereotyping; it's millions of years of psychological evolution.

Over time, survival of the fittest has ensured that whatever traits are most successful in advancing the human race will pass on to the next generation.

One of these traits is for women to be extremely selective about sexual partners because up until the widespread use of effective contraception (which has only existed for a tiny fraction of human history), sex was very likely to make a baby.

So women had to ask themselves, “Do I actually want make a baby with you?” The answer was often “no.”

Women who were less selective about with whom they slept were often not provided for because the baby daddy didn't stick around. This caused those bloodlines to become extinct and bloodlines in which a father stuck around to survive.

After tens of thousands of years of asking ourselves this question, women are evolutionarily conditioned to continue to be selective, even though thinking about sex no longer necessitates thinking about babies (thankfully).

So, men, this is one of the reasons why you don't get many matches on Tinder.

In stark contrast to female traits that facilitate populating the world, the number-one male trait that advances the human race is that they have as much sex as possible with as many different women as possible.

The genes of men who had lots of sex thousands of years ago likely passed on, creating little boys, who grow up to be men, who also have a lot of sex and so on.

So, women, this is why it is so incredibly easy to get laid.

It is very important to a man's sexual pursuit that he thinks highly of himself. Otherwise, how would he have the confidence to approach so many different women for sex?

This trait has become genetically selected and thus, the male ego is born.

Up until now, men had to eat their veggies, so to speak. That was the only option for dinner, and if you didn't eat veggies, you didn't eat.

But then, all of a sudden, McDonald's fries became abundantly available and now, that's all men want. I can only hope that eventually, men will get tired of eating McDonald's fries and instead, will crave healthy salads.

Until then, online dating is a man's highway to perpetual bachelorhood and it doesn't seem like it's changing anytime soon.

Photo via We Heart It