I have some suspicions about the survey that says 2/3 of people were friends before partners. Looking at it superficially, they did rely on a particular set of college people. In my own educated circle in HCOL cities, it’s practically unheard of.

The Reddit-tier level advice of “wash your ass, comb your hair” is not so much about actually trying to help men - so much as signal “I’m better than other men”. If you’re physically unattractive, dating apps can’t help you. 90% of this is determined by genetics. You can certainly sandbag an attractive man but you can’t make an ugly man good looking. For apps, even though we list out many attributes like height, job, education, etc. the number one most important feature is your face. If you’ve got an ugly mug, you’re not getting matches. This is the main reason men struggle with apps - most men just are not facially attractive to most women. Recent studies show that women are as superficial as men when it comes to choosing partners. 

I think of it as a jigsaw puzzle for every person. There are a lot of pieces for every puzzle but I'm sure each piece is working against you. The other aspect is that some pieces are far larger for some and much smaller for others. e.g. you're 4'10" as a man who dates women, your height is probably the single biggest piece working against you.

More generalized pieces:
- You have no third spaces to meet people and form longer bonds. The shift in the way people meet has all been on very superficial places now. (dating apps, bars)
- Increased emphasis on lookism (maybe this ties in with social media - e.g. tiktok, instagram, filters, way more hot people at your fingertips than ever before, etc.)
- You're bad at talking to people. There's a perception that young people are worse at talking to each other than young people were in the past.
- You don't make enough money/our-economy-sucks-for-normal-young-people. (e.g. the person who still lives with their parents because rent is now $2k/month for a 1-bd when it used to be $800/month - logistics are important for getting a relationship started)
- You don't have friends. Young men especially have fewer friends than they did 30 years ago. Meeting your partner through friends was a pretty high ranking way of meeting people a long time ago. This blows my mind because as a man with many friends, I rarely hear of my friends meeting their partners through friends. Maybe a difference in culture/region. Maybe more popular method in more rural areas and not in big cities like NYC?
- Your work is incredibly gendered and this was a more common way to meet people in the past. Tech jobs are really common these days and it's a overwhelmingly men who join.
- You don't have a community and/or you only are in heavily gendered communities. A la bowling alone.

On a personal note: I find a lot of the advice people give in this area is generalized to the point of being incredibly useless and actually harmful. For myself, I've only met partners through social dancing and only after doing one or two specific types of dance with them. I can meet someone in any other dance or context but they will never see me as a sexual or romantic prospect regardless of how many hours we talk, how well we get along, etc. As soon as I dance with them in one of these other dances - it can flip the script entirely and it's often what any romantic partner in the past has told me. "That first time we did X dance, it changed everything." For people like myself who are incredibly social but aren't good looking - the current market is obscenely challenging because you have nothing to blame but genetics and everyone in the mainstream won't blame genetics. So my own puzzle piece is: it's because social dancing is wildly less popular than it used to be and there's very few new people who show up in any given year. I did everything that people suggested and got nowhere. It was only when I just gave up on the other stuff and kept going back to my tried and true meeting women at a dance and then convincing them to do X dance with me that things would ever progress. Coaches, apps, photofeeler, bars, clubs, hobbies, friends, parties, etc. never worked but X dance has. My main complaint is that it's just low volume because no one dances anymore and it also attracts a less physically attractive crowd on average as well. I go to any bar in west village or dimes square and the people are wildly more physically attractive. I'm not super picky but most dancers really don't do the scene any favors.