The other day, I read a facebook link to an article from Men's Health about the best places to meet single women. To my amazement, Saint Paul, Minnesota (my current residence) was not only on this list, but ranked 10th in their series of criteria.
Without leaving my bed, I fucking flipped shit upon reading this.
I'm a young black male, moderately educated (well read, as some like to say) with a well paying job (tech advisor) , a showcased talent (musician), and have been told that I have a decent taste for fashion. I have lived here for 4 years, and I have been on a combined total of 8 dates in that span. Keep in mind, numbers can be super deceiving (4 of those dates took place in 2010, the last 2 were between november '11 and early this January. Both horrible dates by the way)
In a "College Town" like the Twin Cities, one would expect a great blend of awesome nightlife fun, wild late night debauchery and a quite active dating scene. This couldn't be further from the truth of these 2 areas.
I feel that Minnesota is one of these states that have been socially crippled by the Internet Age. With the large amount of families raised in suburban/rural/country/hick/wooded/hill/whateverthefuckyoucallit areas, the constant stigma of "City Fear" is instilled in the youth of yesterday and today and is now translated into where everything has to be in a sheltered, bullet-proof, mother approved bubble.
Let's backtrack a bit. I grew up in Chicago, the infamous South Side, in a nice area surrounded by the hood. I was sheltered slightly in my younger years for safety sake, but was always taught how to deal with the situations of life that will come up down the road. Case in point, childhood wasn't riding horses in the country or playing in the park. It was helping mom get the groceries before nightfall and being reminded to always stay aware of your surroundings. Looking back, I loved that I was brought up that way and it has paid countless dividends in the past decade of my life.
So, the point is that certain lifestyles groom certain patterns. And one of those affected patterns is social interaction.
I frequent many bars and nightclubs within the metro area on a constant basis, and it's the same picture and 1,000 words every time. 50 girls and 100 guys, half the girls dancing with each other, half the guys standing by the bar, another quarter of guys looking to dance with the second half of girls, only to be shutout for the various reasons (not cute, I'm not here to dance, or my personal favorite "he's creepy")
I love the "creepy" line for several reasons. I don't think most women realize all men are "creepy" by their standards. I have many friend girls (my term for "I've got a lot of pretty, pretty girls, than I call friends")
Who have told me that they like hanging out with me because I'm not Creepy. I then ask them what is the criteria for being creepy and the general consensus is when a guy hits on them. I usually reply back with "what an assholes of him! To think that he found you attractive enough and got the courage to talk to you" (I minored in sarcasm)
It goes back to the shelter bubble. In the days of incurable sex diseases and rookies, women (and men, too) must use common sense and wit to keep safe, but it has now parlayed to a fear of nearly all personal contact outside of a platonic level.
So now you have to ask yourself 2 questions. 1: What do you want from the opposite sex?
2: How do you go about acquiring it?
It's well known that people never want to hear the truth (truth hurts, you can't handle the truth, act...,). People don't come forward and outright ask what they want when it comes to intimate social interaction. Men do it way less than in previous generations because it gives off this "creepy" factor, even though, as I said earlier, all men are creepy in this sense.
Side Note: for homework, I want every girl who reads this to write a list of your top 10 guy friends and mark off 2 boxes, one for if you think they would sleep with you and the other if they would date you.
If you have more than 2 boxes empty on the sleep side, you're probably wrong already. It's an unstated fact that every guy who meets a girl takes between 10 seconds and 10 minutes of that first interaction and assesses both questions to himself. Mostly all guys would sleep with a girl they talk to within 20 minutes of conversation during first meeting. Count that out next time you meet a guy in a group setting, if he keeps talking to you and 20 minutes adds up over time, there's a bet table chance that he would consider taking you home.
Now as far as meeting someone with the intention of dating, this is a lot more difficult because the conventional style of dating (aka how 99% of the world meet between 1900-1997) is about as dead as Whit... (Too soon, eh?) And who exactly killed the dating style? The group of girls who became greedy. The "Independent" women. And when I say that I don't mean women who go out, do well in school, get jobs and make their own money. That's what guys like, no one would complain about a successful woman. I'm talking about the (for lack of better term) fucking bitches who flaunt the fact that a man didn't help them get their success and in return, require an intensive list of attributes in order to talk to a guy. These bitches often end up alone, and rightfully so. But in their quest of inevitable solitude, they managed to infest their ideals to a younger group who blended these thoughts with the "City Fear/Suburban Bubble" culture and smashed the odds of "boy meets girl, girl likes boy, vice versa, boy + girl = couple"
Don't believe me about these independent bitches? The numbers for the Men's Health chart on St. Paul suggested that there are 108 single women to 100 single men in the area from ages 21-30, however the numbers increase and after age 55+ ,the ratio skyrockets from 276 single women to 100 single men in the area.
That tells me 3 things. 1: Marriage is still a fucking joke. 2: these smart, educated, career-oriented women are meeting guys and following down the family pattern and by the time of late life, when the kids have moved away, the relationships falter, ergo, these men are dying/leaving/running away from these women after a certain point for some unsolved reason. 3: the late inflation throws askew the entire chart and without the 55+ category St. Paul would fall way out of it's top 10 ranking.
Now, with all this said, the Twin Cities is a bad dating area. And if dug deep enough, these results could be discovered in other areas of the country. So what can we do to change it? It's a process, but I will leave you with a quote from a friend of mine: "Honesty isn't what we all want, but it's what we all NEED to avoid further issues down the road."
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