I have a weakly held view that many red-pillers underestimate the success of the average man because they overuse dating apps, and there are tractable ways of improving their luck.

I think it's accurate to say the average man has an unfairly degrading experience on dating apps. If Pew is to be believed, women's experiences are worse on average (48% say they have had a positive experience, compared to 57% of men). This naturally drives us away and leads to absurd gender ratios, forcing even average women to filter by shallow attributes just to triage the thousands of likes and hundreds of messages we receive weekly. This leads to men putting less effort into each message (and even just liking a profile most of the time!), which further drives women off the apps.

In contrast, this study found that 77% of women between 18 and 30 want to be approached for dating more in person, yet half of single men have not approached a woman for dating in person in the past year. The average man gets married, so something must be working for him. I posit that it is often approaching women in person where his odds appear to be much better, rather than online.

In my community, we don't have to settle for bars to make promising matches in person. We generally live in giant houses with many other adults until we have kids, and most days there is an event at one of them or the third spaces our community uses. I also belong to the kink community, where there are multiple open invite events most days. But it's not like this everywhere. I have to commute an hour to live in a big enough city to live this lifestyle. I posit that it would be easier for people to approach if we made more communities have as active a social calendar as mine does, or if more people moved to them.

Lastly, as someone who asks a lot of people out in person, I want to encourage people to not be scared of doing it. I'm autistic af and get rejected most of the time, but it's a skill that can be studied and improved on like any other. Practice is essential for building a skill. The rejection was hard at first, but I'm used to it now and get to go on wonderful dates because I invested in giving myself such a thick skin. The awkwardness I had from nervousness about being rejected used to turn guys off, but because that didn’t make me give up, I’ve basically solved that problem now.

Edit: some commenters have rightly raised the point that the we don’t know who the women want to be approached in person by from these statistics. I should have included another statistic from the Pew study: 54% of women feel overwhelmed by the amount of messages on dating apps. This is a much larger number than the 23% or less who feel overwhelmed by being approached in person, which I posit should nudge men of many levels of attractiveness towards in person approaches where they might have an easier time.