The Rizz Recession

It’s become its own genre; an ecosystem of cringe. I’ve read, researched, and written myself about the exhaustive discontents of modern daters; how everyone is jaded, disillusioned, and spoiled by infinite choices.

To love and be loved is the most primal human drive. It makes the world go round. And while many are opting to be single more than ever today—some voluntarily, others by circumstance, and countless others for failure to ever try—I can’t be convinced that genuine connection isn’t our most fundamental desire.

A recent study surveying 5,000 people from online dating platform Match’s “Singles in America” revealed particularly romantic dispositions among single people. Seventy-three percent believe romantic love can last forever, 69% believe in destiny, 51% think there is one perfect match for them, and a majority of men and women describe themselves as “romantic.” So why does something so base to our nature seem so out of reach now?

Low-Grade Disillusionment

To say young men and women are dating reluctantly right now is an understatement. They date begrudgingly—often, it seems, to confirm to themselves that their reluctance is logical. All sorts of solutions have been proposed. Get off the apps. Touch grass. Connect with someone in your community. Join a run club. Return to tradition. Have someone set you up. Let your father marry you off. I’m not so much interested in disputing any of these solutions, at least not today.

I have noticed, however, one glaring detail that seems crucially under-discussed. If the vast majority of people are now meeting their partners and dates online (which they are), they aren’t doing a very good job of selling themselves. It’s not just that they’re bad at marketing their attributes that would most attract the opposite sex, though. It’s that everyone seems to have experienced some sort of soul death in the past five or so years.

They’re not just failing to appeal to the opposite sex; they’re fundamentally unremarkable, uninteresting, and, most unforgivably, unfunny. It’s fine to be unfunny, but they lack a sense of humor in all respects. They don’t laugh. They don’t make you laugh. The most they might do is intentionally rage-bait you so they can screenshot this put-on conversation for their social media followers to gawk at. They’re interested in making that invisible audience laugh, or achieving some similar effect of shock, anger, or confusion.

If only that passion could be redirected into the proper channel, like the one that could actually facilitate them getting a date or experiencing love, lust, a short-lived fling, or a painfully mismatched relationship. Literally anything. Where’s the joie de vivre? Where’s the lust for life? Do you even know you’re alive right now? I’m not asking women to be the manic pixie dream girl out of a Zach Braff coming-of-age film or for men to be some woman’s Mr. Darcy fantasy, but some, any, presence would be welcome.

This brings me to my question. Where are the real lovers? Maybe you’d stumble across one if you could muster up the energy to rizz one up. But you’ve given up before you’ve even begun. You’re burnt out. This, too, has been talked about ad nauseam: the depleted ability to pair-bond after you’ve, well, you know, with too many people. But the same sort of psychic damage can occur when you’ve done nothing at all. It might even be more harmful to be stuck in an endless sea of almost-somethings that never materialize.

Maybe it’s that you got stuck in a talking phase and never made it to an actual date, or you got stuck in perpetual first-date purgatory. Or maybe women act like you don’t exist. You’re constantly wading rather than swimming through the sea. Nothing goes anywhere; you become jaded and prematurely disappointed, as anyone would when they’ve been through a thousand non-starters. This is literally how learned helplessness manifests.

You psychologically condition yourself into believing things will fail before you’ve even tried. But you could be more interesting, more fun to talk to, a better listener, someone with cooler stories and more insightful thoughts. These are all learnable skills. You probably already possess a few of them if you have any friends. You just need to learn how to be a compelling person, romantically.

Failure to Launch

According to Forbes data on dating apps, 78% of all users experience burnout from dating app use, with the most cited reason being “failure to find a good connection with someone,” followed by disappointment, feelings of rejection, and having repetitive conversations while messaging multiple matches at once. Women are more than twice as likely to feel overwhelmed by the number of messages they receive.

People have become confused about how to relate to the opposite sex. They seem to believe there are two branches of this Choose Your Own Adventure game of life to choose from: the first, to be an ignored wallflower; the alternative, to weaponize what misconstrued knowledge you have of the opposite sex for your own Machiavellian aims. Unfortunately, the latter is more successful than the former, not because of the Dark Triad traits they shamelessly embrace, but because of the attractive byproducts they convey: confidence, competence, and decisiveness. Their lack of desperation gives the illusion of desirability, which produces mimetic desire in their matches.

A toxic person with a few attractive traits will always beat a wholesome person with none. Such is life. But harmlessness isn’t virtue, and people need to stop confusing the two. I see “harmless” men constantly weaponize their low status for sympathy and treat their timidity like moral superiority. They act as though having no chances to be an asshole proves they aren’t one. For a perfect case study, watch Season Two of The White Lotus and pay close attention to Albie, the quintessential Nice Guy archetype.

Mr. and Mrs. Generic

The first mistake I see is just how bland and indistinguishable everyone’s bios are. A benefit of using online social networks to court people is that you already have a soul map of your potential suitor at your fingertips, especially on text-based sites like Twitter. You could have a log of 40,000 of your crush’s most intimate thoughts, their precise takes on hot-button issues that spell out a worldview that violently asserts itself in its radical honesty, random confessions that are in themselves incredibly revealing, and a glimpse into their sense of humor.

But when you’re using a dating app, there’s something almost insulting in how limited you are in your ability to convey who you are as a person. Of flesh and blood. With thoughts that pulsate through that head of yours on an unceasing loop, day after day. All of one’s inner privations are effectively flattened into three prompts, a handful of emojis, and a few hundred characters. So what do so many of these flesh-and-blood creatures, who fear death, who have deep dark secrets, regrets, and pain, memories of cherished days gone past, do? They sum it up by belittling themselves with their unremarkability. They face the challenge of defining themselves, of asking themselves who they are, by insisting they are aggressively normal.

They say, “Hey, my name’s Claire, I love [most popular TV show]. I also like to travel, and I like food. I like to chew and swallow the circular bread adorned with sauce and cheese, but it should never have pineapples on it! Haha, safe humor signals that I don’t take myself too seriously, but I would never ever go outside the bounds of what polite society has predetermined I can talk about. I’m very passionate about human rights, which no one else has ever cared about before. Swipe right if you’ve ever held any heterodox opinions on anything ever.”

So, the women are generally uptight shrews who can’t take a joke, and they interview you like you’re applying for a government-level security clearance, grilling you for signs that you’re ideologically McBad. They’re boring and interchangeable. This isn’t my assessment of who they are as people but of who they choose to advertise themselves to be. I’ve seldom met any woman as snooze-worthy as their bios would imply.

Of course, worse than being boring, they often list, rather absurdly, virtually every trait heterosexual men find explicitly unattractive, or neutral info so as to be irrelevant to inspiring attraction. “My name’s Molly, I love jet-setting across the world. I lived in Ibiza and Miami for a bit, and I have a master’s degree and make more money than you. I’m actually really smart and funny, as evidenced by my telling you right now, and I also pole dance on Saturdays and have all-guy best friends, and I’m an independent woman looking for a man who can handle all of this.”

The men are even worse. Their desperation to come across as Mr. Generic, morphing themselves into this feminine, pussyfooting loser who lowers himself to the level of actually pretending he’s “apolitical,” is so intellectually insulting that the feminists might be onto something when they clock it as low-grade misogyny. Only someone with an exceptionally low opinion of female discernment could imagine getting away with the dishonesty.

Stop Doing the Same Thing but Expecting Different Results

Stand up straight and be a man. Start by being who you are. If you can’t do that, then don’t even bother. Become someone worth being. If you haven’t noticed yet, women are attracted to confidence, competence, assertiveness, and leadership. If you’re lying about your political views—and I’m not talking about omitting some details or warming her up to you first, but overtly pulling the wool over her eyes to get in her pants—you are already screwed. In what world are you going to lead her when you can’t even lead a low-stakes conversation?

The best thing you can be in this environment is divisive. You should stand out. The problem with these people is that they’re petrified of standing out—of being seen in a way that inspires shock and awe. They want you to stumble upon them and see them, but they don’t want to appear as though they’ve chosen to be seen. From the beginning, they refuse to be honest about what it is they want, are searching for, and who they are. They reduce themselves down to pathetic platitudes, cliché jokes, vague interests—making themselves redundant. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

Your problem is that you’re greedy. Entitled. You want it all. You want your cake and to eat it too, but don’t even deign to read the recipe so that your cake comes out right. How could anyone be smitten with anyone who lists The Office as their favorite TV show and their favorite pastime as traveling enough to withstand a bad first date or to push through the drudgery of your dry texting to feel the sort of explosive soul spark necessary for true connection?

Your bio should be something that causes some proportion of people to feel completely repelled by you—an instant swipe left—and inspires the rest to be utterly enamored by you—instant swipe right. This might sound counterintuitive, but it isn’t. The old saying “a jack of all trades is a master of none” applies here. Rather than watering down every aspect of who you are so that you appeal to no one, double down on your selling points; the polarizing parts of you that will be of interest to a particular audience, a particular kind of man or woman. You need to niche down.

Standing Out

Let’s say you’re alternative. You have tattoos, listen to grunge; you’re pretty edgy and unconventional. For the love of God, advertise that! That’s a selling point. There’s an alternative counterpart to you that will be interested in you and share, probably not just the same aesthetic values, but deeper values. Perhaps the aesthetic is downstream of a shared value for non-conformity, for example. I’m going to take this a step further and suggest that, at least if you haven’t had any success with your current strategy, you advertise the aspects of yourself that are things people might encourage you to hide.

A nerdy man in his 30s who has a collection of Funko Pops, still watches Naruto, collects action figures, and attends Star Wars conventions, for example—what do you think a man of this sort ought to do when it comes to seeking the attraction of women? Most would tell him to present himself as more conventional and to hide his passions because they’re not exactly “cool.” Herein lies the problem. People are supposed to mate assortatively. That is, people throughout history and all over the world tend to select partners who are very similar to themselves. A man of the sort I just described, who is not just a passive nerd; he’s a proud nerd. It’s a lifestyle for him.

He isn’t going to be able to suppress those aspects of himself and feign different characteristics in their place for the long haul; neither should he want to. If you want to, then that suggests deeper problems, like a lack of self-esteem or a desire to be someone else. Ideally, this guy would advertise his nerdisms so that he can find his perfect nerd woman. That’s exactly what this guy did, and it led to him finding his perfect match: a fellow introvert who preferred to stay in, order pizza, and watch Naruto for a first date. They’re married now.

Examine yourself and find out what your angle is. Are you the funny guy? Are you the hot girl whose intelligence gets underestimated? Are you the high-IQ wordsmith with esoteric ideas? Are you the alternative girl men turn to when they want to feel more alive? Analyze yourself with surgical accuracy. Lean into that. Be that. Embody that unapologetically. If someone doesn’t like you, good. What was your plan? To pretend to be someone else and pull a bait-and-switch after date three?

Let’s get real here. You were never going to be anyone else. They were never going to like you. It was never going to work. So mourning the missed potential of catching these fish is a waste of time. What you should be mourning is the opportunity cost of hiding the content of your soul from your actual soulmate. Everyone shouldn’t like you. That’s a sign of dishonesty and ambiguity—a substance-less void mimicking human-ness. You’ve given people nothing to dislike, which isn’t necessarily the same as being attractive or interesting.

Dating Apps Made People Forget How to Flirt

Your chances of success increase, particularly if you’re a man, by having a bio that’s absurd, even patently offensive, as opposed to being boring. At least you’ll stand out. At least it’ll provoke a reaction. Audacity creates tension, and tension is where the spark lives. Ninety percent of singles say sexual tension is crucial, and 72% claim they can gauge it within three dates. If there’s no early tension, it’s not magically emerging later. Make an impactful impression or go silently into that good night.

Take, for instance, this viral post of a very brief text exchange between a single woman using a matchmaker and a single man the matchmaker introduced her to. The matchmaker described an underrated aspect of her job: preventing her clients from talking themselves out of dates. This guy, she prefaces, is 40 years old, successful, handsome, but unfortunately for him, texts like he’s in high school. Unsurprisingly, her girlfriend got the ick—a sudden feeling of intense disgust or repulsion towards a love interest. Once it appears, she’s activating the HR speak, and you’re never hearing from her again.

Blowing up on X with over 3 million impressions, discourse abounded. “What did this poor old chap do wrong?” “Women deserve less.” “It’s ridiculous to cancel a date with so little cause.” It might seem a harshly punitive response to a trivial back-and-forth, but when you consider dry texting as a proxy for something worse—like a “lack of wit, charm, or cleverness”—then it makes more sense. These are not meaningless cues. Even an early conversation is an experiment to feel out each other’s vibe. If the vibe you’re getting is neutral or underwhelming, that’s one thing, but if it’s viscerally repulsive, then it’s not cruel to call it off. It’s discernment.

Some people recognized this, acknowledging “if communication is off, the likelihood of relationship success is too.” Not only that, but if some of the disqualifiers are examples of extreme tone-deafness, awkwardness, or, worst of all, passive aggression, then it’s a signal for something deeper. It’s a Malcolm Gladwell “Blink” situation, a.k.a. our intuitive judgments based on thin slices of information can be just as accurate as well-thought-out ones because we unconsciously detect patterns. This is known as thin-slicing, and you do it every time you instinctively assess whether you should move away from the shady-looking guy on the train.

This woman was making an informed decision based on micro-signals that indicated insecurity, lack of social acuity, and emotional volatility. He word-vomited, asked odd questions, overshared, but, most egregiously, implied that she wronged him by taking too long to answer him, despite not even knowing him. Those aren’t trivial signals at all. Of course, taking this approach can turn up false negatives by failing to give people a chance who might turn out to be a solid match for you but are just clumsy texters. But you aren’t compelled, and for most women, it isn’t logistically possible to give every guy who shows interest in them a chance. So, she cut her losses and walked away. Better yet, he learned that responding with passive aggression, among other social blunders, whether that was his intention or not, produces negative results. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I’m not saying this guy has to change, but I’m sure that he is actually a more compelling and interesting guy than these texts communicate. If that’s the case, then he could only benefit from an improvement in his communication. As it stands, he gives off an overly eager, even a bit menacing, vibe. Like he’s sitting in his room staring at the chat log waiting for her replies, and all too happy to share his displeasure with her response time. It’s also evident that he puts women on a pedestal and is perhaps a bit fearful of them. It would benefit this man’s aura immensely if he would just take a beat and chill.

Reverse-Engineering Aura

Rejection sucks. It’s a painful burden men bear far more than women, and I empathize with that. I’ve written about it extensively many times. But just to say “poor you” isn’t constructive. That’s why I’ve elected to write this article, though I know many will interpret it uncharitably. Clinical psychologist and content creator Orion Taraban, who runs the YouTube channel PsycHacks, proposes a useful strategy for dating in the modern age without losing your sanity. He calls it walking the razor’s edge. “To succeed in today’s dating environment, it’s helpful to have no conceptualization of the past and no conceptualization of the future but to abide as completely as possible in the present moment.”

This is easier said than done. Of course, we want things! That’s why we’ve bothered with all this effort and humiliation in the first place. “However,” Taraban continues, “the more these general wants are projected onto the specific person or circumstance they’re dealing with, the harder it will be for people to satisfy their desires. This is because people generally do not respond well to feeling like they have to live up to other people’s expectations, especially when those people are, more or less, random strangers.”

This is the core error: obscuring who you are as a person, pussyfooting around your beliefs, being so enamored by the imaginary future that you fumble the present. Only by being present can you truly connect with someone—to the point that your words overflow like a river of inexhaustible resources requiring no forethought or energy—where charm feels like breathing because you’re genuinely interested in what they have to say. In carefully unwrapping the hidden nuggets within their soul.

You don’t cultivate connection with canned questions, corny pickup lines, or aura-less small talk. It’s people who observe with real curiosity, make inferences about their worldview, interests, and personality, and call them out in a way that involves real risk who are met with resonance. If you’re socially awkward, you can literally learn how to be a charismatic person. Make it your special interest. Treat them like lectures. Then go out and test what you’ve learned. There’s no way it could be worse than texting “what u been up to tonight.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

Don’t go through the motions of asking cliché questions plainly or recite facts about yourself as if this were a job interview. That sucks all the fun and mystery out of what should be the most electric stage of attraction. Here’s a simple heuristic: if what you’re doing is designed to play it safe rather than create tension, change course. Make a playful inference instead of asking a boring question. Offer a take with your full chest. Disagree with them playfully, not with hostility.

Find ways to express a contagious energy. Make them feel seen. Make them feel alive. Men shouldn’t let pickup artists monopolize the concept of having “game,” and women shouldn’t resign themselves to being interchangeable NPCs coasting on their looks just because the numbers on the apps skew in their favor. Both sides owe each other some actual presence, effort, risk, and evidence that they have skin in the game. That’s how we solve the rizz recession: with a stimulus package of rizz.