There’s no question that it’s hard out there for those in the dating pool. It can feel impossible to meet anyone nowadays unless you want to download an app, and standing out from the crowd can be extremely difficult. People tend to judge an image much more harshly than they would judge a person sitting across from them at a bar, and there’s no way of knowing if the information on their dating profile is even true.
After all, one study found that 65% of Tinder users are already married or in a relationship. So it can be challenging to figure out how to navigate the dating world without wasting time and energy looking in all the wrong places. But apparently, as this list makes very clear, the strategy deployed by some men is just to message women as much as possible and hope for the best.
When it comes to why we see this behavior from men far more often than from women, there are plenty of factors to consider. One being the fact that women are much more selective on dating apps than men. In fact, over 80% of women will only like one profile out of every 100 that they swipe through. Meanwhile, a study from OkCupid found that most women consider 80% of men to be unattractive.
However, men, on the other hand, tend to swipe right on nearly half of the profiles they come across. And the majority of men say that they reply to messages within 5 minutes, while only 18% of women do the same. So perhaps these men grow impatient and begin sending more and more messages, desperately hoping for a response.
One of the biggest issues that is made very apparent through these posts is the fact that some men can’t take no for an answer. Instead of respectfully taking the hint that these women aren’t interested, they continue sending message after message, sometimes becoming rude and aggressive, believing that will somehow convince the women to change their minds. And according to Suzanne Degges-White, PhD, part of the reason for this may be that some men are hypersensitive to rejection.
Dr. Degges-White wrote a piece for Psychology Today discussing some of the unhealthy responses that men may have when they’re hypersensitive to rejection. While nobody likes to be turned down, it’s not a good sign when someone’s reaction to being rejected is behavior that “is likely to garner even stronger or more widespread rejection,” the expert notes.
Men and women also tend to respond differently to rejection, due to the difference in cultural expectations that each gender faces.
“Males tend to take rejection as a challenge to their masculinity or an insult to their perceived place in the social hierarchy,” Degges-White explains. “Women are likely to feel emotionally hurt by a rejection and to assume that there is something lacking in them that warranted the rejection. Or blame the person who did the rejecting, but use self-soothing to get over the insult, rather than lashing out as males might do.”
Another factor that may impact how men pursue women is what they’ve been shown in the media. We’ve all seen a romantic comedy where a teen boy or man goes after a woman who clearly has absolutely no interest in him. But after months or years of wearing her down, she finally agrees that they’re meant to be. This can be a dangerous message to send men. Instead of teaching them to respect women’s wishes and take no for an answer, they are taught that with enough persistence (and sometimes harassment), the woman will eventually give in.
