Dating in San Francisco Sucks for The Same Reason That Living in San Francisco Sucks

THE SUPERIOR EAST BAY —A popular Reddit thread has asked, “What annoys you the most about dating in SF?” There are the typical dating woes: ghosting and commitment issues. There’s also some mildly satisfying tech-bro hate-age. (“The engineers all like the same damn things. ‘Let’s eat dinner and then play video games/go to the climbing gym/drink IPAs or whiskey/talk about my startup.’) But the top complaints can be summarized as, basically, economics.

The most annoying thing about dating in San Francisco is that the city is too god damned expensive and is filled with people who make too god damned much money.

As the original poster of the thread, which was originally discovered by SFGate wrote in lead up to his query, “[B]eing a guy with a very average income can make things difficult here with the ladies, especially if they are a lawyer/doctor/work in finance or tech. There is a real elitist attitude here now, one that wasn’t as prevalent when I was growing up in the city.”

The thread now has well over 100 comments and it is clear that lawyer/doctor/tech “ladies” are not the only problem. The problem can be boiled down to a city full of “transplants” who are digging for tech gold (“they are just here to make some quick cash and move on when the opportunity strikes”) and “transients” who know they can’t settle down here (“no one can afford to raise a family here, so what’s the point in taking things seriously?”). A sampling:

Single girl here, but I struggle the most with the city being so transient. Everyone is always coming or going at some point, and I feel like everyone I connect with eventually ends up moving, or they’ve been here too short of a time to get serious with someone.

I definitely have felt the same thing. It’s hard to make connections with people when I think everyone has the same sense of being stuck on a merry-go-round that’s just going faster and faster. It’s not a matter of if you let go, but how much longer you’ll manage to hold on. Everything feels temporary. Hard to imagine anything permanent when you can’t exactly count on building anything here.

I think this is a cost of living issue in general. I’ve been here for ten years, and a lot of my friends have moved out of the city to buy single family homes somewhere I’ll never visit.

Of course, there are the self-satisfied East Bay-ers, like myself, who chime in to predictably announce that all the cool people have moved across the Bay. The honest truth is I was dating in San Francisco before the latest tech boom and I can attest that dating in the city sucked back then, too, but for stock reasons. There is something uniquely unsexy, though, about all conversations about a city, even when it comes to dating, essentially being reduced to money.