I think that a pretty good indicator is how many elderly people go to shops and talk to attendants just to have someone to talk to. There are plenty of lonely people in the world - and I think that the average age is coming down considerably.
It often takes a subtle form where relatives and such keep asking single people, particularly if they are in a certain age range, if they're seeing someone or when they're going to settle down and start a family.
People are always on the lookout for "microaggressions" these days. Seems we have raised a lot of highly sensitive people - perhaps everyone should live isolated in light grey rooms to make sure they don't get sesnsory overload and upset ;D
You, too, started blaming people having been through nasty divorces who do not want to remarry for possibly being bad at relationships, rather pointlessly, I should say.
It takes two to tango. It is not like I haven't seen messy divorces - everyone has been facilitated by both sides.
Because if someone went through a particularly nasty divorce and it being nasty was their fault because they're particularly bad at relationships, they why on Earth should these people of all be trying to get back into the relationship game?
They don't have to. But if people are making decisions because other people have gone through nasty divorces - that is senseless. As you said - people who's parents got divorced.
You seem to think that there are digital worlds somewhere that somehow prevent people from acting at their own volition and make them choose to be single.
Gaming is one. 2 billion or so people in the world are gamers. it is a highly addictive pastime, as is social media and the like. These people are more likely to be at home (can't meet many people there) more likely to be over weight (limiting their options) more likely to have expectations on what is desirable, but less likely to be able to achieve it. No wonder there are large commununities of incels out there. And I will assume that there are many incel adjacent who haven't joined the forums yet, but hold similar ideals.
If someone decides to stay away from them out of their own choice, you can be sure that it has always resulted from careful thought.
I think this doesn't make sense. It requires no thought to relationships at all, to stay at home gaming 12 hours a day. However, perhaps a decade down the track they might chance upon a thought that something is missing in their lives - hopefully by then, they will be able to have their perfect VR relationship that'll do everything they want without compromise- sounds pretty fantasy land, childish and unhealthy to me though.
Maybe the increasing numbers of addictions and depressives is an indicator of something fundamental missing in many people's lives.
I'm sure there are many lonely elderly people. That is unrelated to deciding not to remarry or enter into a new intimate relationship at an old age. Some elderly widows and widowers have very busy social lives.
The point was that society does not consider foregoing intimate relationships the norm. The opposite is true. It is assumed that everyone wants one and that everyone "should" be in one.
I wouldn't be so sure because people tend to gravitate towards what they have grown up in the middle of whether or not they consciously try to avoid it. It's not some cool rational process like solving a puzzle.
Being involuntarily celibate (incel) is not choosing to be celibate. That's just logic. What you're describing is a different problem altogether. No one who feels real pressure to find a partner will avoid doing something about it. This is where the PUA courses and the gym memberships come in. Or all the dating apps that must have hundreds of illions of users these days.
What you're describing is an extreme case. For the vast majority of people, internet use in their free time is all about relationships.
You have mentioned several times that you used to be a gamer in your youth and that you used to play too much at the time. Perhaps you have more exposure to that world than most. I played computer games on C64 when I was a kid. But never in adulthood.
Very much related - considering those elderly people were in relationships once and miss it. I think that people are too keen to think they can beat their hardwiring.
So, if a parent is an alcoholic, the child should just accept that is all there is and be an alcoholic too?
If you look into it - the reason they are celibate is because the women (Almost invariably men) they do want, don't want them. "I am an incel because a supermodel won't sleep with me".
I think that you might be oversimplifying what a relationship is - Most of what you describe is not to find a long-term partner, it is for short term fling. Very, very different things.
I disagree - it is about wanting their voice to be heard, to feel relevant. Perhaps if they had better relationships, they wouldn't use the internet as a crutch for what they seek.
These days, I have less experience than most - as it has ramped up again over the last 10 years to include social platforms. The gamified experience they offer isn't so the platform can help people be happier in their lives - it is for profit - never forget that. Time on Site drives add revenues.
They do not all miss being in a relationship. Why would you assume such a thing? A lot of marriages actually aren't that great and tend to hold together primarily owing to their long history at an old age. It is fairly common that middle-aged and older people write on internet forums that they've spent years without relationships after their marriages ended or so say in interviews in magazines and that they're doing so out of their own will. In particular, not too many divorced women older than 50 feel a strong urge to find a man. Men often experience a weakening of their sexual desires with age, too. They're still there but they occupy a smaller slice of their consciousness and are much less pressing.
If someone has grown up in a particularly messed up home environment, then the best thing for them to do is accept the fact that creating a good and stable home for their own children will be more of an uphill battle than for most other people unless they are motivated to go through a therapeutic process. If one were a fence-sitter when it comes to having a family anyway, then I think it would be best to lean towards not having one in such a case.
The sexual market values (SMV) of the sexes are not distributed similarly particularly in the sexual prime years. Also, women's sexual market values tend to peak at an earlier age than men's. Women are sexually at their most valuable between, say, 19 and 24. Men tend to peak clearly later. I'd say between about 25 and 35. Also, men's SMVs are distributed in more unequally than women's. That's because a woman's value as a female of her species is primarily in her ability to give birth to a healthy baby whereas a man's value is not only in his health and fitness (indicated by looks) but his resources and his ability to acquire them which depends on his social status and his potential social status (this is where certain personality traits come in).
Young women in their sexual prime tend to look for mates not only in their own age range but among somewhat older men, too. That is considered normal both at an instinctual level and at the level of social conventions. What follows from this and the aforementioned facts is that, say, a heterosexual 20-year-old guy right in the middle of the sexual attractiveness distribution has clearly harder time finding a woman willing to be his intimate partner than his female counterpart. What that also means is that a MUCH smaller minority of women than of men will not find any takers among young people.
The dynamic changes considerably after the age of 30. While raw sexual market values (when desirability for a purely sexual encounter is considered) of men and women probably never reach equilibrium owing to men's generally stronger sexual urges, the pair bonding market values of men and women reach parity at some age. I can't really say when but the market is radically different at ages between 35 and 40 than between 20 and 25 let alone for teenagers.
There really is a subset of young men inevitably left without takers while there is a similar subset of old women. This would be the case even without any difference in the shape of the attractiveness distributions of men and women all things considered equal because of factors like men and women peaking at different ages and men dying younger. But there's also the biologically-based reality that men's attractiveness distribution is more top-heavy than women's in any age category. That's ultimately because one man is capable of impregnating several women in a very short space of time whereas a woman can be pregnant with one man's children at a time (and normally only one) let alone make sure that they survive infancy. How this manifests itself is polygyny (in some cultures) or serial monogamy (in modern Western culture).
The context here was the desire to do something about one's inability to get any kind of a partner in the first place, of which those things that I mentioned are examples. Besides, getting in shape and knowing how to talk to the opposite sex are quite important regardless of what length of a relationship one is after.
Yes, and that's all about relating to other people.
Men and women are generally mainly compatible at a hormonal level. That's what attracts them toward one another in the first place. Just by looking at what kind of pastimes, hobbies or even occupations men and women tend to prefer, it becomes obvious that their perspectives and preferences are quite different in most cases. I think it's healthy not to hang out with your spouse all the time. Since the dawn time men and women used to do different jobs and spent time socializing among people of their own gender. If forced to share every activity with their spouse, I think most people would be bored or irritated out of their minds. Only in the relatively recent history have we adopted the idea that we should find a total soulmate for a spouse. That's completely unrealistic. If you disagree, I invite you to immerse yourself in Finnish literature with your wife. ;) The internet just happens to be one of the modern pastimes.
Why would you assume they all don't? I would make the assumption (based on a fair whack of experience) that most do.
You still seem not to recognize the difference between, sex, marriage and intimacy - As far as I have seen - 100% of people require intimacy of some kind - whether it be my daughter who wants to be held, to the alcoholic neighbor who talks about his love for and pain of his wife passing. 100 percent.
You talk about sex drive and cultural aspects - but I am still talking about intimacy. People keep searching for it, even if they are not looking for a relationship - and even if one day there is a robot that can provide it - it is still a human need - likely ingrained in us since before we considered human at all.
You seem to only focus on the sexual needs - which do not require intimacy at all - I know.
It doesn't matter about numbers of partners or how many one has or sexual drive - the need for intimacy seems to be enduring from birth to death.
Yes - for an intimate relationship - not sex or marriage. But, as I keep saying - they are very likely to be looking in the wrong place and using the wrong mediums and making some very poor decisions on how to fill that void.
Very little of what you have written seems to be concerned with what I have written, which is about the need for human intimacy. There is a very good reason there aren't many hermits in this world and I could pretty much guarantee that if people could experience a healthy intimate relationship - they would want to experience it again.
Because I believe they're not all lying when they say they're not looking for a relationship. (We are still talking about a pair bond here, are we?)
You seem to be the one who keeps conflating these things.
If I'm not mistaken, the term "intimate relationships" nearly always refers to erotic love. I've made the distinction between kinds of intimacy early on in this discussion.
You seem to be shifting the goal posts here, to be honest.
That need is easily met in close friendships. It does not require pair bonding at all. I've been saying that from the start. Do I need to produce a quote?
You talked about involuntary celibacy in your last comment. In general English language parlance, "Intimate relationship" is a term, if I'm not completely mistaken, that refers to erotic love particularly if the context is unrelated men and women. I have made the distinction between forms of intimacy from very early on in this exchange.