What’s the most popular day of the year to join an online dating site?
On or around Valentine’s Day? Over a summer holiday? Maybe after spending all Thanksgiving being the odd single out?
Nope. It’s Jan. 3.
After enduring happy couples canoodling at Christmas dinner and friends who got engaged on New Year’s Eve all over their Facebook feeds, singles bite the bullet and log on. The dating site Match.com calls it “a dating holiday.” New year, new you — and for many people, that means new mate.
And despite the clichéd lonely woman racing against the biological clock, it turns out a great many men make the same discovery: In the immortal words of the classic song by The Police, “It seems I’m not alone in being alone.”
“A lot of people assume women are the only ones flooding the dating apps after New Year’s, but we’ve actually seen a large influx of men coming in to meet with us in 2016,” said Emma Tessler, director at the Dating Ring app that functions more like a matchmaker service.
(Disclosure: My sister-in-law works at the Dating Ring.)
Why do we assume that? It might be because popular culture tells men that they should hold off from getting into relationships as long as they can.
A New York Times article last week profiled unattached men who found that being the old guy at the nightclub isn’t as cool or as fun as the old guy at home with his wife and kids imagines it might be.
But even the Times piece misses the point with this line: “While they are not dealing with a reproductive deadline, they had the feeling that the party was nearing its end.”
Yes, men can have children into old age — but why would they want to?
For a long time, men were told that their dating and mating life could continue indefinitely. After all, the men on their TV and movie screens were doing it. Steve Martin became a first-time dad at 67, Rod Stewart had kids in his 60s, Larry King and Woody Allen, too.
The list of 60-plus-year-old dads goes on and on in Hollywood.
Few men wake up from their bachelorhood in their 50s and find an Amal Alamuddin waiting around for them.
But most men aren’t in Hollywood. It seems that lately more men are looking around, realizing they aren’t celebrities and having children at an age when they should be having grandchildren isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Even setting aside the growing concerns from the medical community that a father’s age can factor into various issues a child may have — including learning disabilities — only people without children could imagine there’s anything fun about dealing with a crying newborn when you’re 60 or going to a high school graduation when you’re nearing 80.
And few men wake up from their bachelorhood in their 50s and find an Amal Alamuddin waiting around for them, as George Clooney did when he tied the knot at 52. More likely, they’ll experience the panic of the men in the Times article that all the good women are taken.
In Harvard’s groundbreaking Grant Study, which was conducted over 75 years and looked into male happiness, researchers found that what makes men happy isn’t very complicated. Corny as it may sound, love is the most important factor in a happy life.
And while love doesn’t have to mean marriage and children, the study found that the happiest men had meaningful relationships — often, yes, with their wives and children. That means that while short-lived love affairs found after swiping right on Tinder can be exciting, they probably won’t ultimately lead to happiness.
The fact that relationships lead to happiness shouldn’t be surprising, but somehow it still is. The line sold to men, especially alpha males who have options when it comes to choosing women, is that settling down is for suckers.
But more men are finding out they were suckers for believing that.
The sooner men realize that their single life won’t be like it is for “the most interesting man in the world” in the Dos Equis beer commercials and more like the sad guy mocked at the club, the better.