I didn't realize this question would be so controversial but I guess I should have expected that.
I think the question might be a little too vague... like, what do we mean by difficult? What's the goal of dating? What's a successful outcome?
Obviously, if your goal is to get laid and you have a vagina and are decently good looking, you can get a thousand dicks thrown at you by jumping on Tinder and showing some skin... or you can walk into a bar and as long as you don't act too crazy, you can get some dick just about any night of the week as long as you're taking care of your body to a least a degree.
And then as people, we tend to see from our own perspective a bit easier, especially if we've had challenges, and then see the people we want and how easy we perceive it to be for them.
We have women in our community who have never been asked out on a date before and they're 30+... they've had guys want to just bang them or ask them to come over for netflix and chill... but never an actual date. My guess is that this is fairly rare and would be a lot more rare than a guy who hasn't been able to get a girl out on a date but I think it's valuable to know that there are struggles on both sides.
I think there's a lot of settling that happens on both sides. I also think there are a lot of challenges on both sides that most people tend not to see unless they're over their own stuff and willing to feel compassionate towards the other gender that they have exposure with.
But we'd have to define what it means to not settle, what the outcomes could/should look like, and how likely someone is to reach that outcome. There are more single women, percentage wise, than ever before in survey history... but there are also more women who don't believe in marriage or relationships than ever before too... but that could be a chicken and egg issue.
I just recently overheard a conversation that changed my perspective a bit on the difficulties of dating for both sexes. So i was just in the breakroom chilling and this girl come in and talks on the phone. I didn't check her out too hard. She was a bit chubby,could've been cute maybe if she put makeup on or was slimmer. I liked her voice tho.
She was on the phone with a guy who sounded like her ex. She claimed he's a cheater,liar, he told her or her friends she's too fat and he's not attracted to her anymore ,hitting on her friend(s),grinding on girls in a club,fucked prostitutes and just completely disregards her feelings. To make him jealous she said was gonna out and dance on dudes this weekend.
Sounded like a deucebag who didn't have much empathy for his woman. He was apparently asking to get back with her and she said it's never happening and she only wanted to get her money back that he owed or something.
Made me realize that while women recieve dating options without putting the mass effort we do they are still at the mercy of men in those relationships. If the bfs/husbands are bad leaders then the girl is screwed over and she gets hurt.
And they often pick men because they're attracted to their personality, which is what players and PUAs exploit to meet women. You can be a total shit bag as a man and get lots of girls, the PUA community has proven this over and over again. Just like you can be a total shit bag as a woman but still have guys who want to be with you... there are plenty of guys who have talked about shitty women they're trying to get with on this forum alone, let alone in the rest of the dating space.
This woman above has all kinds of problems... why was she with a guy who was a cheater, a liar, and someone who would tell her that she's too fat? She has massive self-esteem issues, that's why. The signs were almost certainly there before she got together with him but he probably sweet talked her, she ignored the red flags if she knew what they were at all, and then she ended up with a dude who treated her badly.
And since she's trying to enact revenge on him, it's clear that she's in low value patterns and will probably continue this thing of getting with guys who treat her badly until she either gives up on men and dating altogether or gets pregnant and potentially ends up as a single mom. She could get out of the pattern but the likelihood is very low since most people don't change.
@Vision I imagine being a dating coach for women you've probably heard at least a dozen stories similiar to this where a guy in a relationship is just completely callous and irresponsible. This is what leads to a lot of bitter, unhappy women.
While I still personally think men have it harder just because of how many men are at the bottom of the dating hierarchy, have nothing and require a lot of work to get to a solid place, dating isn't easy for women either.
Dozens? More like thousands or tens of thousands... men dating women, getting them pregnant, giving them HIV and then leaving them... men emotionally, physically, mentally abusing them... cheating, abuse, drugs, porn, whatever you can think of, I've heard about it.
But to be fair, women tend to come to me because they're in bad situations, not because they're in good ones. They often think they are in relationships when they're single. They are often in love with abusers. They're often being treated badly... so they come to me to help them fix their problems.
I'd say the majority of women who come to me are with some guy that is behaving in a way that they don't want him to... the minority is single women who know they're seeing and they're trying to attract a guy. But I'd say knowingly single women probably make up around 20-30% of my audience, roughly.
I would also like to know why
@Vision wants to know this, I know that he was some female clients and stuff like that, would love to hear from the female perspective what their struggles are with online dating, to have a better understading, but saying guys have a better time, to me, sounds a bit deillusional (just like saying the average man has a better dating life than the average woman)
Part of it is intellectual curiosity and part of it is my understanding of what's going on with men so that I can better communicate with the women in my audience.
From what I can tell, it's about the same thing on both sides... there appears to be an even amount of women who think women have it harder and both have it hard... and there appears to be an even amount of men who think men have it harder and both have it hard.
Obviously, this isn't a real study of any kind... I'm just surveying people in dating forums to understand their perspectives so there's a lot of bias that may come from that... it's very possible that most people think it's evenly hard for both sexes since going to a dating forum, you're likely to have people who have had a really difficult time dating there, possibly skewing the data towards their own gender.
I can't know that without doing a proper study though, which I'm not going to do. I just don't think there'd be a lot of value in those results.
I'm actually more interested in knowing who does have it more difficult and why so that we can potentially make better solutions for those people. I'd like to help solve these problems and make healthy relationships a more normal part of our society, help break the barriers between the war of the sexes, and have men and women come together in partnership, on the same team, working with each other, to the extent that this is possible as a society.
