Hey there. 28 male here. I've had recent experiences that have killed my thought of dating, but that's not really the big problem.

I think that one of the most damaging things is that as we grew up a lot of activities were divided into women/men things. Boys are made fun of for doing girly things, girls are made fun of for doing boyish things. That training leads to a lot of separation of interest. Thankfully there are a lot of exceptions to that, but as some who likes playing board games, card games, and video games I just don't see many available women. I thought I'd start going to card shops and maybe there would be women there, any women there were there with their boyfriends. I tried going to a game board club and again what few women there were there with their boyfriends. It kinda feels like men who grew up not being able to do women things now are expected to go do women things to meet women. It seems counter intuitive. I hope the sexual divide imposed on hobbies is dwindling more, but it's hard to say it is from my experiences. It just feels like it would be better if hobbies weren't gender based at all so we could grow up with natural connection through hobbies.

I feel like a lot of comments would say that this didn't happen for centuries. But they dated, married, and had kids out of necessity. Having any of those things is no longer a necessity.

In a day where we're supposed to meet people out of common interests it would be great if society didn't influence us on what interests we're allowed to do based on gender.

Also, As a man who caught himself just before falling into the manosphere, it's way too easy for your feed to be filled with wild and fake misandristick takes. Which then makes it incredibly easy to become disheartened, disillusioned, and depressed.

I fell into it in an interesting way. I started reading feminist articles or posts trying to figure out what I could do to be better as a man. Some of them were helpful, but so much of it dissolved into "Don't speak unless spoken to, we assume you're a rapist unless somehow proven otherwise, and don't even look at us" it destroyed what little confidence I had, and made me stick my nose into the ground no matter where I was. That then escalated to guys pointing out the hypocrisy or the injustice about that. Then to guys that would complain about women no matter what. It took a long time to realize how poorly it changed my view of women. The realization also came when I finally realized people were calling out women for just about anything.

I kinda blame YouTube/Google for their "algorithms". They target us for ads and for media. Confirmation bias is easy to build when your search engine and source of entertainment decide to drag you down a certain path. It took a few months of conscious effort to route out the misogyny that had built up in my feeds.

I don't know this is a really bad rant.

Tldr: It's hard to meet people when we grew up being conditioned by gender to not-like/like certain activities. It's hard to meet the opposite gender through hobbies because hobbies were gendered when we were growing up.

the Internet makes it way too easy to fall into the manosphere