Getting older and the myth of the shrinking dating pool
It's not you, it's not even them, it's just life
Let me preface this by saying I am terrible at maths, to the point that I have a lifetime ban on helping friends work out splitting the bill after eating at a restaurant. However, I would like to put forward my case that the calculation of doom we feel around getting older and dating because of the smaller number of people to choose from, isn’t as straightforward as it seems.
I think this is important for people who may have been single for a while and aren’t happy about it, people who are leaving relationships, people who are staying in bad relationships because the prospect of them being single is terrifying, and perhaps people like me who have had an unusual string of sub-par first dates and are wondering about giving up dating altogether.
(Also to be addressed: couples who counter your story of a bad online date with ‘gosh! If only people met in real life these days! That would be the answer to all your woes!’ And this is why you shouldn’t ask your long-term couple friends for dating advice, ever.)
In my family, we have a joke around ‘the pool is getting smaller’ because it’s something my mother once said to a cousin of ours, who was resisting getting married. He’s now married with two kids so maybe my mother’s words worked, but he also had zero game so maybe he considered his prospects of meeting someone in the wild versus an arranged marriage and chose the latter.
Anyway. It’s a phrase that features a lot. It’s used to pressure people in their 20s and early 30s, in a semi-menacing way of ‘well, if you don’t settle down now, you’ll be left with the human equivalent of a box of wonky vegetables’. And as people get older, it’s something they say with regards to themselves, and how hard it is to meet someone because most people are taken.
While I know the maths of it is true – that people in their 40s and 50s in particular – are likely married and therefore equal fewer single people to date, this is a slightly lop-sided view of dating that doesn’t quite tell the full story.
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