Here’s a post I came across via @Urwingman.

The author, Nick, poses the question of whether or not porn is interfering with men’s/people’s dating success.

Almost every guy I talked to had the same reason for their dating struggles — they weren’t meeting enough girls. They gave excuses like “I don’t have the time,” or “I just don’t feel like it.” So, I pried further to determine where this lack of motivation stemmed from.

I found out that these men do have the time and energy to socialize with more women. This includes their lunch breaks, after work, on the weekends, and during errands. The glaring problem was that their daily routine included going home, pleasing themselves to porn, and then relaxing to play video games or surf the net…..

Consistent masturbation to pornography stops men from meeting women.

I don’t know. I’m not so sure that porn really has anything to do with it. Doesn’t this speak more to the possibility that these guys just don’t have an overwhelming desire to date anyone? I mean, if masturbating sates a person’s desire for companionship, doesn’t that really speak to the importance they place upon a need for companionship more than anything else? Therefore, it’s not the porn that is the problem. Nor is it the accessibility and ease of wanking it. I would think it’s the person’s desire to interact and form connections with other people that is the issue. Maybe it stems from a fear of rejection or a simple lack of interest in dealing with the hassle of dating. I don’t know. But I highly doubt that porn is the problem. It might be an outlier, but it’s not the root cause of why these guys aren’t going out and meeting people. Personally, I think that if guys consider masturbation to be better than a real live person from time to time, there are much deeper issues at work. You can get off and have no desire to meet anyone in those few hours after, but that typically fades, doesn’t it? Sure, if you’re sitting at home pleasuring yourself every 4-6 hours on the clock, then that might be a problem. What’s keeping people from going on dates or meeting people isn’t that they’ve relieved a sexual urge. It’s that they’re probably depressed. Porn or no porn, that would still be a factor. The correlation being drawn here doesn’t really work for me. But then, I think most of the correlations we draw between certain behavior and an outcome are sometimes faulty and our a result of us projecting our insecurities or fears on to other people .

Take that post we discussed last month about the woman who wrote out a tutorial for other single women about how to find a boyfriend via online dating. She did all these things, like post a photo sans make up, and drew the conclusion that those very things are what attracted the guy she was dating. Yet she and this man had only been dating a few months, and he ended up breaking up with her not too long after her story went live on her site. (Mind you, one of them was how she liked to be spanked. So in that regard she might have a point.) Maybe if she had 3 or 4 relationships that came about due to this profile, then her theory might be true. But one instance does not indicate a pattern.

I was reading another story the other day about a woman who had been set up on a date by a matchmaker. From the minute the matchmaker informed her of the date, she went looking for clues to help her determine the guy’s level of interest. She followed the matchmaker’s instructions and placed an introductory phone call, then she sent him and email and he replied to that and they set up the date. But he didn’t contact her in the time between when they set up the date and the day of the date. So she show’s up at the restaurant and it’s pouring rain outside. She sends him a text to let him know she is there just in case he doesn’t know who she is. (Side note: the matchmaker didn’t send either of them photos of the other.) So 10-15 minutes go by and the guy shows up and she’s sitting at the bar. He finds her and she offers to go to the hostess to see if their table is ready. When she leaves he pulls out his phone, and he’s still checking messages when she gets back to their spot at the bar. Of course, she’s miffed that he “couldn’t wait” to pull out his phone then, yet didn’t manage to reply to her text just 15 minutes before. Never considering that, um, it was pouring rain outside and he was either walking in the rain and didn’t want his phone to get wet or just rushing to get to the place on time to meet her. Then she goes on to share that he kept stabbing his lemon and was pleasant enough, but…

So she offers to drive him to his car at the end of the date. She drops him off and they hug good bye and she says something to him about seeing him again. He gives a vague reply. He never calls her again.

Let’s rewind for a moment. So he did all these things that apparently annoyed her…yet she still wanted to see him again? Okay. Here comes the part where we play what my friend M. calls the “reading tea leaves” game. That is when we review the dates in our heads and pick out things that serve as “evidence” to support our rationalizations. Her findings? He was unavailable. Based on the things he did that I mentions above, he was an unavailable guy. It wasn’t as simple as the guy just wasn’t into her. It became about all the negative things he did that proved that the outcome had absolutely nothing to do with her.

We do this, thought, don’t we? We look for causes and effects and correlations? We do all kinds of what some people refer to as “unethical research” in order to come up with definitive explanations. I think we do this because we need to connect  a bunch of insignificant and innocuous dots rather than face the truth.

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