Dignity and Dating

So the other day a woman asked me if I would like to go on a date sometime. I told her if I had a nickel for every time a woman had asked me that, I would have too many nickels to count. What I didn't tell her is that I have thousands of nickels, so my statement would have been true even if no one ever asked me on a date. I keep a big bucket full of nickels precisely for this purpose.

It got me thinking, though. I think the reason dating can be so humiliating is that it asks us to do something we almost never do otherwise: sell ourselves. We are essentially making claims about our own quality and then waiting for other people to react to those claims. In most of our activities we are protected by legal rights and strong social norms. Our treatment by society is dictated by our status as humans and nothing more. Well, our status as humans and our wealth, race, and sex, and nothing more.

In dating, we are products. We are entitled to nothing whatsoever, and our success will depend entirely on judgments about our worth. It's bad enough to be a salesman. When the product is you, and every rejection is a comment on your value, it's degrading.

Imagine being denied a library card because you have an annoying accent. Imagine a judge saying, "Your 4th Amendment claims are persuasive, but I'm allowing this wrongfully obtained evidence to be presented at your trial because I don't like what you've done with your pubic hair."

I can see why some people are opting out of sex altogether. These people are called beta males, although I suppose females could do it too. The idea is, why subject yourself to the humiliation of looking for a sexual partner when you can have a great time playing video games? Exiting the market entirely is a pretty extreme response, but it actually makes a lot of sense. I'd long assumed that the "market" for sex had broken down, that the social norms that allowed young people to pair off and exchange fuck faces had eroded. What if it's always been this way, though? What if the big difference is that now we have alternatives that will allow us to enjoy ourselves without companionship?

At first I chortled a bit at the thought that women will have to compete for fewer males, now that beta males are exiting the market. So you're too good for me? Enjoy crippling loneliness, then! That'll take them down a notch. On second thought, women are victims too. The reason people are going lonely generally isn't arrogance, it's a horribly dysfunctional social system. I might write a few posts about ways to improve the situation, or I might to to Atlantic City with all these nickels. Come to think of it, I bet in Atlantic City I could find some companionship...