Catholic priests and ISIS fighters are good examples of why male celibacy is a very bad thing.

Of course, being in a sexless marriage isn't much good either...

My solution to this: we need to genetically engineer people somehow so people don't have to be single.

Beta was not superior to VHS. No one liked having to change tapes in the middle of the movie. Your analogy is like saying the P4 was a better chip than AMD's offering at that time, if your criteria for "good" is "performance per watt". Beta was better in some ways, but not ways that consumers cared about.

I'm not that young any more (which doesn't help); I'm about 40. I'm separated, not single, but that means I'm back in the dating game and looking to meet new women obviously. But I'm finding that, for me, nothing's changed much since my late 20s when I was last in the dating game. The biggest difference, I guess, is that my dating pool does seem to be a bit wider, in that there are a lot of late-20s women interested in dating men up to my age (but that's about the cut-off), so my range is from about 27 up to 47, whereas in my late 20s it was narrower, probably only about 23 to 31. And of course, I've now been through one marriage so I'm a bit paranoid about making sure I don't hook up with someone that I don't think is really right for me, as I feel I rushed into it before, so now if I see a woman's profile online and it has too much commonality with my current wife, I pass.

Your novel sounds really interesting, and does sound a lot like me (now, not when younger; I didn't consider the location factor much back then, which in retrospect I think was a big mistake; I was in a (different) big metro area then and thought that was good enough). I would be interested in reading it and providing feedback if you like. Thanks!

Um, I don't think that's going to help matters unless most of us decide to try being gay.

Slashdot dating tips, sure; surely I'm not the only one here who needs advice. But a dating service? Unless it's homosexual, you need to actually have a good mix of both sexes for that to work. There is not a significant number of women here who are looking for a relationship. (I imagine what very, very few women we do have here, are all attached and not looking.)

True, but we still hold monogamy as the ideal, and then when someone doesn't live up to it, then the relationship is ended, frequently involving the court system and some expensive lawyers.

If you're openly non-monogamous, you can avoid all that.

Well, we also delegate our politics because we have societies with more than a few hundred or thousand people now. These days, a group of 1000 people is a small town, and a small city has 50k. In the ancient world, that was a very large city. I imagine the Romans probably did a lot of innovation as far as cities, by bringing us aqueducts to improve sanitation, easily the bane of human civilization.

Thanks for the advice! I've never really had much success in even seeing any women I have much interest in IRL, which is part of my problem (and was back in my 20s too; it hasn't really changed much). I just don't see a lot of available, attractive women in the grocery store. But much of this isn't too different from the approach I take with online dating.

Maybe I should try staying at a Holiday Inn Express though....

I don't know about this. With the upper classes back then, marriages were usually arranged and had nothing to do with love, only property rights and strategic alliances and such. So of course they didn't want to sleep together, they really didn't even like each other much.

The lower classes weren't so much like this; they were just peasants, so they married people they liked.

However, I do think you're right about relationships not lasting a lifetime any more. There's also good evidence that monogamy really isn't natural for us either, and many people in non-monogamous relationships are happier and have stronger relationships than typical married monogamous people. Many older cultures were completely non-monogamous, such as the Hawaiians before European contact.

Exactly, this is excellent and highly insightful.

So what can we do to try to get back to something approximating this environment? Maybe we need to try to make some kind of social change in this direction.

The US is also the #1 oil consumer; it uses all it produces, and then imports more from Canada and Mexico to make up for the shortfall. Europe is the same way, only worse; they get some domestically (Norway), but then they have to import the rest.

I'm really wishing I had gone into medicine instead of engineering.... you're absolutely right.

However, my mother was a hospital nurse for a while, and I think that turned me off to that a little. But it definitely would have been a better profession than engineering, that's for sure.

However, what can an outsider like myself do to get in there? Some kind of volunteer work I guess?

I think you should be more charitable; you sound a bit snobbish.

I'm not trying to be snobbish, I'm just expressing that I do not care for, or really even respect, Southern redneck culture. Do you like Middle Eastern Arab culture or northern African culture, where Islamic fundamentalism runs strong and little girls have their vaginas sewn shut? I don't, and I don't think it's "snobbish" to say I look down on that culture. It's the same with Southern culture for me, just to a much, much lesser degree. So I avoid women who appear to be products of that culture.

I deliberately act less intelligent when I am with women.

Ok, there's something really wrong with this. Not necessarily with you (you gotta do what works for you), but with our culture. I guess this is another example of America's extremely anti-intellectual culture. I don't even consider myself that much of an intellectual or even all that smart, just someone who aspires to it and tries to keep as educated as I can, but much of this country (and not just the Southern rednecks who like NASCAR and pork rinds) seem to actively dislike anyone who seems more educated than them.

Best of all, they would do girly things like cooking

Chef Gordon Ramsay would like to have a word with you (as would Chef Puck and many others).

As for their liking NASCAR, the girls I am talking about tended to like what some previous boyfriend had shown them to like. They would soon adapt to anything else though, like standing on the side of a football pitch, or sitting in a classical concert if that's your thing.

Sorry, I don't buy it. People are largely products of their upbringing, and get set into their ways by their mid-20s, more or less. They can (if they're smart and adaptable; "dumb girls" by definition are not) grow and change after that, but only so much. You're not going to take a redneck gun-loving, pitbull-loving, NASCAR-loving girl and turn her into a sophisticated NYC-type woman who likes classical concerts when she's already 35-45. Maybe you're talking about 20-year-old girls, but I'm not young enough for girls like that.

I think you need to reconsider. If you want to have the whole family-and-kids deal, you don't have that much time left to find someone worthwhile; women can't have kids past 40 usually, remember, and the longer you wait, the worse your dating pool is (more women are divorced and already have kids as you get to older ages). Don't wake up when you're 40 and realize you should have made a move earlier. Get out of your comfort zone; there's a better life out there than what Wichita has to offer. If you're anything like me, the problem isn't you, it's the area you're in: you're just not a fit for that area and the denizens there. The women you're looking for probably all left that town when they went to college, and the women left there aren't ones you're interested in, amiright?

Yeah, I'm sure there's tons of well-read women in Manhattan going to NASCAR races every weekend....

News flash: NYC is nothing like the rest of NYS.

I haven't been paying really close attention, but it's usually been my observation that Sony electronics are more expensive than everything else.

Anyway, Sony -> rootkit fiasco, DRM, and many other things. So there's no way I'm going to give them my money.

And now with all the stuff about Smart TVs recording your conversations, those are out too, no matter who makes them.