u/gintokireddit

You can message in response to part of someone's profile, eg to ask what music or books they like. Is that the recommended way/the way many people are starting conversations? Been on it for 2 weeks, only 4 likes - 3 of those within the first day - and no matches, in a city of ≈700k people. I don't think I'm able to present my personality well from my profile/photos so doubt the types of women I like will take an interest (I often like more alt or nerdy people, but I mostly dress normally and am non-White. Been told by friends I'm "completely" different IRL than through messages, and a profile is even more of an abstraction​). Side note: the app experience is very shallow tbh, I feel wrong swiping through profiles, attempting to judge others from so little information. Honestly would prefer an app that just lets you write a longer bio free-form.

Some people benefit more from role models, coaching, advice about how others similar to themselves or similar to how they what to be have handled life situations. Therapists speak of how they want clients to have autonomy and follow their own values, but this is coming from a place of privilege where they've had a high amount of opportunity to get to know themselves and try things out in the first place and have slowly emulated others when finding what they enjoy (in the same way that it's not wrong for clients to look at a therapist ​for ideas of what they can try doing) - they mistakenly think that these values and interests come fully from within, rather than also being a product of external influences - so they cannot imagine that role models and interpersonal influences can be the key missing piece for some people. To quote my therapist "I just did what ai enjoyed and it worked for me" - this shows the privilege of knowing what one enjoys, and having it align with wider goals. Imagine if someone enjoys getting drunk, so they just do that - is this going to bring them a long-term fulfilling life? No. Is it going to empower them or get them in touch with strengths or sides of themselves they didn't know they had? No.

Because therapy is taught and ran by relatively privileged individuals (those from relatively non-abusive households, those with a relative abundance of interpersonal relationships and experiences to learn from, those with childhood and early adulthood experiences which are largely culturally normative), they repeatedly deny that non-therapy methods can be much more effective in helping people. At some point, they've missed that their objective is supposed to be to help people's wellbeing, and not to stick to a rigid dogma. When people think of "mental health" they think only of "therapy", but there's a lot of possible intervention styles being left on the table when we believe only "therapy" is valid, and that if someone doesn't benefit from the therapy approach, they're in the wrong. It's far from empowering to tell people that what they know would help them is not actually valid or acceptable.

For example, in the UK the median full-time salary in many regions is about £31-32k. This includes people of all ages and for someone in their mid-20s the median is lower, around 25k. The starting salary of a therapist is at least £27K and they make this in their mid-20s (at that age my salary was £15k, no disposable income while renting - many of these staff also are privileged by living with parents rent-free or with a partner which they're able to get because they already have the disposable income and normative upbringing to socialise and start relationships at a relatively young age​). Even a local service in my area pays their staff who often don't even have psychology degrees around £27k and these staff are usually in their mid-20s. ​In the NHS a fully-fledged therapist will be on £35k to £60k a year.

Throughout childhood and adulthood we all learn much of what we know and how to act through social exposure - observing others, listening to others and interacting with others.

If people have a language barrier, they only have non-verbal communication leftover to observe. So for example, immigrant families where a child never learns the familial language can end up surrounded by family conversations, get-togethers or community meetups where they don't understand 90% of the verbal communication and miss out on the diffusion of knowledge, and on deeper social practice. What kind of effects does this have in terms of psychology, life knowledge and inspiration?

If it​ has negative effects on life quality outcomes (eg reduced knowledge diffusion to immigrant kids with language barriers, leading to worse employment and social outcomes, worse mental health and potentially delays to life milestones compared to those with a normal level of conversations to learn from), do social scientists ever examine this as a downside of immigration? Both for immigrant individuals and for society (as anything that has a negative effect on ecomomic and social success is also causing a social and economic opportunity cost, and can burden healthcare and social welfare systems).

For example, a person in a developing country's middle to upper middle class has access to cultural education of being higher socioeconomic class (eg how to navigate the corporate world, skills and psychological attributes that come from a socioeconomically privileged start in life). Immigrants from developing countries have access to employment skills such as driving for a relatively low cost for their financial position (in some cases in countries where the cost of driving is extremely low due to a de facto lack of driving laws), often while benefitting from their familial economic position, and then move to countries like the UK where the initial cost of driving is high for those renting on low wages.

They then access a greater number of opportunities than the local lower class population. They may start out low class in the new country, but their educational, cultural and skill advantages gained in their home country allow them to progress socioeconomically much quicker than local poor people.

40% of jobs now need a licence and many are entry-level jobs like technician apprenticeships, engineering apprenticeships, human services jobs, education jobs, citizens advice etc. Even some of the minimum wage agency jobs ask for you to only get one bus (rejected for being two buses away, within a city), so it's either live within one bus route of the job or ​drive a car.

To actually have enough disposable income to drive (like £160 a month for one lesson per week) one needs a better job, but a big percentage of of those jobs themselves want a licence.

There's this assumption in society that everyone has the opportunity to start driving while living with their parents, so no thought is given to how big a barrier to socioeconomic mobility driving is.

There are too many times when I'm overly focused on something and overthink it or do things that after leaving the tunnel vision were a waste of time, or even worse were damaging to myself, to my day or maybe to a relationship. During that tunnel vision it feels like the thing matters so much and is hard to not obsess over. But then 5 minutes or a couple hours later, it's viewed in a more balanced light. But by then in some cases damage is already done or at the bare minimum time has been wasted. If it's something like googling, it can lead to negative spirals or reading emotionally harmful content or content that leads to me getting negative thoughts or excessively arguing with people I shouldn't be arguing with after getting triggered by online content (pretty much tanked my relationship with my therapist and got in trouble with the law for sending the therapist a high volume of messages during these periods when I don't have anyone around me to distract my mind away from the obsessing. Usually I look at the situation afterwards and regret it).

I'm not sure if this is OCD, partly OCD overlapping with something else like ADHD or something, or isn't OCD at all. Despite having had OCD for over 20 years, I only learnt recently that compulsive googling and focusing on an issue can be OCD.

For example, I filled in a detailed sleep record for 2 weeks, including things like mood and triggers. Never looked at it again to actually move anything forwards with it. It reminds me of a lot of psychology and psychiatry books or online spaces that mostly only describe problems but offer little or nothing in the form of solutions.

Likewise I was given some behaviour chain analysis worksheet. But no help with the process of thinking about triggers (which aren't always obvious or can be myriad. Especially for behaviours that take up long periods of the client's day and often take a long time for the client themselves to notice they're doing) o​r with filling it in in general. Surely the whole point should be to look for ways to interrupt the chain, delay steps of it to increase the time for redirection before continuing the chain, and even better to look at the triggers and talk about them so they can cease to cause as much of a reaction or use the triggers as clues as to what is missing or important in the client's life and then look to if possible achieve whatever change the trigger reveals the client wants or needs. If the behaviour is creating a high risk of damaging relationships or leading to further psychological damage, interrupting the chain should be done quite urgently as a short-term fix. It makes no sense to me that it's all done by the client. Surely part of emotional support is to share the mental load and make the process more directed (eg pushing the client to focus on one thing a wise therapist should identify as urgent if it will get in the way of other things or cause damage to the client) and less lonely. Surely it makes sense to come up with ways for the client to interrupt the chain rather than leaving them to come up with or Google their own solutions (ironic, if compulsive googling is one of the problem behaviours and/or part of a chain of another harmful or unwanted behaviour - the lack of guidance is pushing the client towards relying on the problem behaviour) and then enact them - if they could do it all themselves they would have already. Add extra irony if any of the behaviours lead to a breakdown in the relationship between the client and therapist - so the very thing the client seeks help to prevent or address becomes what they're punished for, due to lack of sufficient early intervention.

To do social work apprenticeship requires spending time working in services first (non-agency) and then maybe after a year or two being seen as capable and worthy of an apprenticeship. I'm wondering which roles don't require starting out with a driving licence (expensive, requires a well-paying job first. I think part of why services do a poor job is because they select for these socioeconomic advantages, along with some nepotism (eg the children's residential support worker I met with a degree in beauty and according to herself no children or mental health qualifications who got in due to her parents both working in homes) more than just pure merit​). For example, family support practitioner needs a licence and own transport. Are there jobs based within one office that don't need one, or jobs that involve assisting some higher level professional who has transport?

And are there jobs in the middle that need a licence but no car?

I'm in London from a Midlands city and so far it seems people here are dressed much more trendily. I'm in a relatively upmarket area (lots of brand new privately-built apartment blocks) but I was fairly impressed in the tube stations too.

Dunno if there's some level of novelty effect visiting other cities, since even Birmingham seemed like a trendier-looking place. But can't say I felt the same in Derby, for example.

I did say this to her (that I would never end up knowing her in any other context), but she gave no advice of where I could start going or steps to increase the chance of such connections in my personal life (as opposed to a fake, very temporary and narrowly context-constrained connection). This also makes me think that people I would connect well with ​as friends or partners are people I either don't meet, am bad at identifying or they're bad at identifying me (I'm not White, and I don't think my therapist looked like anyone I would usually share a social connection with, in terms of their fashion. I think I'd be invisible to such a person in daily life).

For context, we talked a lot (ofte and for 2 hours, a couple times for 3 hours. The context was a community-based mental health centrr, rather than a conventional place and I was usually her last appointment. I've never been able to access therapy etc due to various barriers despite over a decade of seeking it (UK mental health/social services system is not good and definitely not trauma-informed or abuse-informed at most levels of the systems, and protocols ironically are set up in such a way that it's harder to access things the worse your internal or external circumstances are - "inverse-care law" in action. Even what I've accessed more recently only became viable after years of self-treatment and reading and some recent luck. Ie when my circumstances were worse it was harder to access anything. One big problem is services have a false belief that abuse survivors all are aware of whether they were abused or not ​​and put the onus on survivors to take the big risk of disclosure rather than helping people to find out by asking the right questions etc. So people have to rely on the internet, movies, chance conversations with normative people, reading abuse textbooks etc rather than professionals providing illumination. They tell you they'll do something, then don't do it because they didn't make notes so their colleagues have no idea what was supposed to happen, other times they clearly don't read your previous notes eg a new professional completely neglects to mention all previous disclosure of trauma and tries to focus solely on possible genetic neurodiversity so they can get their department's caseload down even if it means having to go on a new waiting list/try to self-advocate for a new referral ​which can easily take another year or so, don't follow their own purported official guidelines and intervention criteria. I could go on) and even though it was a short-term service she probably identified that I needed something more so worked with me for much longer, which she had the power to do as a manager) and she said I talk more than any client she's ever had (in her 10 years of experience). But I'm certainly not talkative to that extent with random strangers I meet, because unlike with a therapist, we're not meeting with the primary intention of talking (which facilitates quicker connection).

If you're wondering why she told me the quote, it was in response to a conversation where I explained that I'm not sure if she cares or not or is purely doing things that appear to be caring but may just be done to fulfill a professional role or to allow her to live accordance with her own values (making me just a prop).

Just like a racist makes presumptions about the experiences, intentions and abilities of other people who are of other races, or a classist person makes presumptions about people based on class, woke encourages and emboldens people to make presumptions about individuals based on race, gender, BMI and anything else seen as aligned with privilege. It encourages seeing the experiences, feeling, needs and full humanity of some people as more valid than others.

For example, when it comes to "microaggressions". These are a real phenomenon, which cause negative effects - often without necessity - to individuals and to the relationships between individuals. However, how woke ideology determines whether something is a microaggression or not, is based on bigotry. For example, a person who is (allegedly) thin can have disparaging comments made about their low weight or slimness, but these equivalent comments would be considered a higher level of microaggression if made about someone (allegedly) being overweight. The justification given by woke people is this: thin people are privileged in society, overweight people are underprivileged and overweight people have had a lifetime of being disparaging or excluded for their weight, while thin people do not have these experiences. Firstly, this itself is a generalisation - some overweight people have not had much disparaging comments and some thin people have. So, it would be more accurate if woke people said "thin people are less likely to have had these experiences", rather than that they never y have the experiences. Secondly, even though it may be true that overweight people are more likely to have had a greater magnitude of negative treatment and messaging ​due to their weight, when meeting a new individual it is emotionally unintelligent and bigoted to presume you know the history of that individual. For example, many overweight adults were not overweight as children, and therefore don't have a lifetime of negative comments. And for example, I know people who were routinely physically hit by their own parents for being thin, or bullied in school for it. But according to woke ideology and courses on microaggressions, it is fair to assume that the thin person has a low level of historical hardship due to weight, than an overweight person - this is simply a form of bigotry. Why not encourage being aware that some characteristics do correlate more with particular experiences or views, but also that that we should view each new person as an individual and try to make as few presumptions about their life and their thoughts.

Just as it's statistically less likely that a woman does woodwork as a hobby and statistically less likely that a stranger you meet is homosexual, ​​I'm sure the woke would say that it is presumptuous and bigoted to presume that a new woman you meet does not like woodwork, or that a new person you meet is heterosexual. But, woke people are happy to encourage bigotry towards individuals in particular groups - it's missing the forest for the trees, because the forest is that bigotry is generally wrong, rather than only opposing whatever form of bigotry is currently popular to oppose (which would be the trees). That's also how you end up with ridiculous situations where woke people from one country go to another country and try to superimpose their ideas of privilege hierarchy - and subsequent justification of some groups' experiences and needs being less valid than others - onto the new country. For example, transplanting American racial history dynamics onto the UK (or vice versa) or Americans telling South Africans not to use the word "coloured", because they transplant their own social presumptions (about language and racial classification) onto another country.

I have never seen anyone ask someone out or even strike up conversation with a stranger at either of these, and I've gone to bookshops dozens of times per year to browse books, just for something to do (I also like browsing clothes for fun and homeware - in that case I've had guys or women talk to me, but rarely and just questions like "which earing colour suits me more?" or "how can I get to X town as cheaply as possible without a train ticket?").

Question origin: I was looking up how many dates do guys go in a year and AI said 0 to 50. I looked up how do men get lots of dates per year (eg people who say they go on 20, 30, 40 dates per year). What I mean is, not stuff like" what makes them attractive", but literally how are they meeting women to even have a chance of getting to know each other - since even if I hypothetically asked out every woman I meet, excluding people who just happen to be in the same public place as me ​​like a shop or on the street (including those in relationships or way older) and they all said yes, it wouldn't be that many people. When I did dancing (not partner dancing) would be an exception, but even that's less than 20 women (not the best place to socialise for me btw, because of separate changing rooms, memorising and learning routines is far too attention-demanding to allow for conversation, most of the women look several years younger than me and I'm reticent to risk disturbing someone's hobby by being a guy intruding on a 95% female space). And of course, dating every woman you meet is just a thought experiment and wouldn't actually be what's happening.

When I looked at a thread about how "average men" (a term that means different things to different people. I have no idea what average is, because since living in houseshares for a year with other men - after previously living alone for several years - I realised how the average level of behaviour/skills of partnered men could be lower than I imagined. Actually, the guys who seemed most put together and with a good head on their shoulders were single, and I'm not talking about myself. Guys who couldn't cook properly, did did drugs, were inconsiderately noisy, had been to jail for domestic violence or got someone pregnant and wanted nothing to do with the kid, all had partners) can meet women if apps aren't giving them any matches, I saw something I've seen written on reddit before: bookstores and thrift shops, with one commenter saying that's where they've had success. It's one thing to say "I happened to meet a partner in a bookstore" but something else for it to be advice of something to do to proactively maximise the chance of having dates. I also don't know many people, or perhaps any, who frequently go window-shopping for fun (like I used to, multiple times a week). So is it really a place to go to to meet women? How often? It seems like to meet a partner there, if you're only going occasionally you'd need to be very proactive about talking to people, since the number of opportunities is low, unlike with a weekly club or something like university. Since it requires a high level of proactivity, it seems like most guys wouldn't do it and not something to recommend as a standard strategy - I rarely ever see men approach women in public (maybe four times ever, and I used to be in town a lot). This reminds me that a lot of advice I see is tailored to particular personalities that are very outgoing and highly social (eg "talk to everyone you meet"), which of course many partnered people aren't.

I​ also see dating advice in blogs like "go on lots of dates to get practice" - with who?). Since apps have an imbalanced user base of 80% men, at present a woman could benefit from that and feasibly use apps and unpickily get frequent dates if they want to try dating lots of people to maximise the chance of a partner. Just due to online numbers, that's unlikely for men.

In my experience of going to social activities:

Board game social groups, it's around 70% guys across time, some weeks closer to 90% as only woman is there every week (decades older than me). In 2 months I've met 10 men and 5 women.

I go to a board game's club - I've met 12 men and 1 woman. I went to some card game group for a few weeks - met 8 guys, 0 women.

MMA, 95% men. In a year I've seen 5 women there (and just a handful of times at most), including when I went 5 days a week for 4 months. Maybe 80 guys.

Dancing, 95% women. In 3 months I saw 3 other guys there. Maybe 20 women.

I've thought about this for a couple months. The vast majority of therapists are women. Ergo, they've not had to learn to be proactive in finding a partner, as the effort to be proactive is done by men around them at various social events or work events (my therapist said all her friends were from work, and that she barely talked to people at any other activities she attended like knitting or board games. Not the first MH professional who's told me all their friends were made at workplaces). And then for both therapist men and women, they're in highly-regarded/highly-paid (good phone for photos, high disposable income for doing lots of fancy things and taking photos while doing them) jobs from a young age, so apps are a quite easy option for them. Probably most of them could divorce and within a month be in another relationship.

I've had this issue come up with my therapist (who I'm no longer working with, and who never actually addressed any questions like this. Instead of discussing any contentious topics, they ignored them and only commented on whether something offended them or not).

SW interests me on and off (my main apprehension is a lack of belief in the appropriateness of the systems to effectively help people, lack of belief in the willingness/ability of services to improve and lack of belief about the effectiveness/ethos of the social worker profession - in my experience most progress comes from luck derived outside the system, and I often think a lot of people would be better off if the government diverted mental health and social services money away to invest in things that allowed people more control in their lives: accessible training pathways (eg top up people's apprenticeship wages if they have no family support), allow benefits while in education, housing) because people tend to figure what's best for themselves if they have the ability to invest in their life, people remedy their own mental health issues better than the NHS does and good mental health comes not from talking to someone about your problems without remedy but from better external circumstances (opportunity for interpersonal connection, empowerment and use of ability through work/hobbies/interpersonal roles). I think someone can gain confidence/undo the effects of trauma better living alone with career opportunities, disposable income for socialising than being stuck in an HMO or having no disposable income and a dearth of accessible educational pathways.

but an issue I found doing an "Understanding Mental Health" courses is it was hard to not get bothered about how much of what the course claimed the NHS does or how they're supposed to think had an around 0% match with my personal experience - besides being gaslighty, it pissed me off how shamelessly services make a living off of doing such a poor job that doesn't help service users, doesn't meet their own formal guidelines, doesn't meet best practices found in academic literature and doesn't, doesn't meet the purported ethos of social/health services - a poor quality job by any of the metrics I can imagine judging services by. I often found I couldn't do more than 5 minutes without wanting to write about how the course material was nonsense, googling about failures or wanting to write complaints to NHS services.

I wonder if this problem would occur with social work too. Almost like "sleeping with the enemy". Because I look at industry course titles and online webinars and I wonder if learning about all the lip service will just annoy me too much. It seems the field likes to make these online video sessions and learning modules about all these topics but just for show (eg "complex trauma", "lived experience", "neurodiversity and multiple disadvantage" (leaving out my qualms with how "multiple disadvantage" is defined, in a way which possibly reflects social work's roots in the Poor Laws/Workhouses which had a more punitive focus - it seems problems only matter when they disrupt other people eg drug addiction, rough sleepers, criminality. And the irony is substance addiction requires relative privileges of social connection, freedom, a certain level of functioning and/or money to acquire - good luck getting drugs in some coercively control scenarios, with agoraphobia, or if one has no disposable income post-rent and barely affords to eat - you'll find some people only afford addiction because they live with their parents or after they become homeless and then have disposable income for the first time in their life. And maybe there's something to be said about individuals of some cultures being less likely to evidence severity of issues via certain substances eg Muslims are less likely to use alcohol as a coping mechanism, because alcohol intake is less normalised in their culture than in mainstream British culture))).

Likewise, I have personal experience with the homelessness pathways and most of it is a farce, in terms of the gap between the public narrative of organisations and the actual quality of services provided (eg supported housing with no hired support workers for 8+ months, staff asking me to find information for them, no wheelie bins, no internet for months, broken washing machine for months, support workers with extremely poor knowledge of the benefits system, poor support around accessing healthcare, ignored disrepair, inappropriate housing locations (rural locations which promote social isolation, long-term HMO galore, bedrooms next to nightclubs), gaps in systems (eg people being referred-on for being too low needs and within 3 months rejected for being too high needs from two teams within the same organisation, people being referred to systems they're already barred from without any liaison) and total disregard for people's needs or histories (poor recording of disclosures of abuse, lack of previous healthcare or social service involvement being seen as evidence of lack of problems, no consideration of mental health needs or trauma in housing allocation (HMOs, extremely noisy co-tenants, isolating locations), council homelessness workers dismissing abuse disclosures as "what you consider abusive" (the same abuse the police suggested pressing charges over)) and no consideration of people's long-term prospects - very much get people off the streets and as long as there's a roof over their head, they should adapt to anything, rather than have a good base for volunteering, education or employment (myself I've been waiting for over a year for things to happen that never did).

I'm also well aware that social work has a lot of flawed thinking that leads to people "falling through the cracks" (but in ways that social workers themselves don't even view as "falling through cracks, because it's often people who never have contact with social workers in the first place (eg quiet children who are missed, or ethnic minority children where abuse or domestic abuse presents differently to in the mainstream culture) or who are excluded because of flawed social services protocols. A good example is mental health reablement teams, where after being told about barriers to access they still ask the ignorant question "what diagnoses do you have?", with nowhere on their form for other mental health issues, even though we live in a country where the NHS operates on a largely non-diagnostic model (with statements from clinicians such as "diagnosis isn't helpful"), and there are barriers to diagnosis such as medical neglect (my guess is the average social worker or SW system worker can't imagine not having the privilege of non-neglectful parents or the freedom to leave the home to secretly see a doctor, and cannot imagine being used to having their problems dismissed), coercive control or mental health disorders/problems themselves being incompatible with NHS protocols (things like the 8am GP system; GP appointments being 10 minutes; appointments requiring a certain level of motivation, organisational skills/executive functioning and social interaction; IAPT's strict time deadlines eg 7-days to check voicemail and ring back or discharged; NHS systems requiring either consistent third-party advocacy or repetitive and relentless self-advocacy - I don't think I need to explain here how people with various disorders such as depression, C/PTSD, ADHD, agoraphobia, social anxiety, body dysmorphia, autism, schizophrenia, ocd, sleep disorders could all struggle with these protocols precisely because of the same problems they're seeking or in need of help for).

Eg seems Black people are more widely culturally accepted than other minorities. And racism against Black people is definitely considered wrong, but against other races is considered more of an acceptable joke . I first noticed this like 15 years ago (being a minority myself in a school, full of middle class liberal racism).

It seems so many liberals need to be individually told that new forms of bigoted thinking, exclusion, overgeneralising about people based on some characteristic or stereotyping are wrong. So it'll be "don't be racist to Black people". Liberals: "ok I won't, but I'll still be racist to all these other races". "Don't be racist to Black and Mexican people" "ok but I'll still be racist to Chinese, Indian, Arab or Romani people, until I'm specifically told that prejudice against those people is also wrong". These are example, you can swap out whatever races. When I say "racist" I'm not talking only about slurs and jokes, but even just generalisations or the idea some groups are viewed as outsiders or put into particular boxes. If I walk in the more liberal/"woke" parts of my British city centre (a city that has a lot of visible minority people, including 2nd or 3rd generation immigrants. By city centre I mean where the shops, cafes, bars and businesses are - not the inner city residential areas next to the centre), it's telling it's basically all-White groups, and the only minorities are the security staff or delivery riders. I don't see as much in the more mainstream parts of the city centre, where the more mainstream people are.

Then you'll get liberals moving on to being ableist, or thinking it's fine to generalise based on some characteristic like how someone walks or body language (off the top of my head, see all the Zuckerberg hate, which was mostly based on his facial expressions than on his political or corporate positions).

Before some bozo says "conservatives do it too" who cares what they do, as they're never claiming to be anti-prejudice in the first place.

Median being in the £30k to £38k range (in my region it's around £32k for full-timers).

Besides the obvious ones (for me that's engineering, medicine, programming, nursing, allied health professionals, social worker, air traffic controller, lawyer).

Bonus points if no driving licence needed.

Also side question, but where are those jobs advertised usually? Eg today I've read on here that graphic designers (just an example) can make £30k, 40k or so, but based on job postings and it being related to people's passion I always imagined it was a high risk and much lower-paying field, like sub-30k. I'm astounded people are on 50k+ in quite a few fields outside of medicine, since I don't see those sorts of salaries on Indeed.

Since middle school age I've lived in a medium-sized UK city with two universities.

In the bars, restaurants, nightclubs and cafes, most of the clientele are either students or older professionals. A huge percentage of the retail economy is driven by students. The trendy parts of the city centre are frequented not by common people from neighbourhoods, but by university students.

Students on social media claim to be broke. People talk about their "broke college days". However, in terms of disposable income it's quite clear they were not really broke, because if they were they wouldn't be affording to regularly go out in the first place. If you can afford to go drinking in bars every week, or to randomly buy coffee on a regular basis, you definitely aren't broke. Broke isn't having your parents' money, or government loans/grants to spend on having fun.

Broke would be low-wage working adults paying full rent on their own, without other financial support, who can't afford to eat out. It's families who never eat out or holiday, because they're spending almost everything on essentials like bills, commuting, food and their kids' essentials.

Not the only factor, but this is probably a large factor that is consistently ignored by most feminists.

Young women are statistically in relationships more than men of the same age are. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/08/for-valentines-day-5-facts-about-single-americans/ - https://medium.com/beloved/people-who-never-married-are-there-more-women-or-men-9cf1f734ede6 - https://time.com/6104105/more-single-men-than-women/

When women are single, it's usually a short break from relationships for a few months, or maybe for a year after a few years of being in relationships. They know that at any given time, they can jump on an app or sit at a bar, and start a new relationship within a week or two.

This is supported by this quote: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12178563/ - "single Black women reported a greater desire for a partner than single White women. These results may be explained by barriers in dating experienced by Black women. For example, Clarke (2011) examined Black women’s experiences in romance and found that they often reported guilt and frustration over their barriers to romance, creating a yearning for satisfying sexual lives. In addition, in Moorman’s (2020) interviews with single Black women, frustration with singlehood was one of the emerging themes in participants’ responses. These frustrations and barriers may create contexts whereby single Black women have a greater desire for a partner."

Is a person who's camping on holiday happier living in a tent than a homeless person? Probably. Because it's voluntary and short-term. Is a professional on a two-month sabbatical from work happier about not working than a person who's involuntarily long-term unemployed? Probably, because it's voluntary and short-term.

A male relative pulled out some photo albums and they have dozens of photos with their old adult/teen friend groups in the 90s, taken with an actual film camera. I was surprised because I figured this generation is the social media one, not the 90s generation. I can say I don't have a single photo with friends in my teens or adulthood, including people I was friends with for 15+ years (I have a few photos of them, but nothing together or of myself taken by friends).