Do people even want to date anymore?

By “date” I mean “want to meet someone of the opposite sex for a potential romantic relationship”.

Obviously, I can only speak anecdotally, but I feel like there’s this weird lethargy among singles.  Each side CLAIMS to want to date, but there’s like zero sexual charge in any co-ed interactions.  Guy are terrified of contradicting a woman or telling her anything, while women wander around cluelessly, waiting for Some Guy to come along and sweep them off their feet.  Or, they try to take matters into their own hands and get burned by a bunch of guys who don’t actually want them.  Then they go on Facebook and complain that men are shallow and don’t realize that the confident, beautiful, successful women already in their lives have A Lot To Offer.

I mean, I don’t roll with a club crowd, and maybe that’s where all of these Horny Singles stories come from, but in day-to-day interactions, young guys just seem weirdly uninterested in women.  I can only imagine that they go home every night, having talked to zero women during the day, and fry their brains with Teh Pr0n…but how does a decade or two of doing this help ANYONE?

It’s impossible to eliminate all risk in any human interactions, especially with dating, but I feel like that’s what the current generation of singles is trying to do.  No one wants to ask for a date until they’re ABSOLUTELY SURE that the other person will ABSOLUTELY say yes…but then people want to wait for like five years and attempt cohabitation to be ABSOLUTELY SURE that ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING is EXACTLY to their liking before even THINKING about marriage.  (Except that Athol Kay wouldn’t have a business if premarital sexual activity was a perfect predictor of marital sexual activity.)  But without risk, there can be no excitement or real romance to anything.  No girl wants to find out that the guy who asked her out first polled five of her closest friends for assurance that there was zero possibility she would say no.

I don’t know, maybe in different social strata, the patterns are different.  But as far as I can tell, the college-educated set just don’t seem all that interested in making real connections.