Men explained why they no longer ask women for their numbers in public. The answers are eye-opening.

“Social media has proven public encounters are off limits.”

By

Mark Wales

Jan 10, 2026

By Mark Wales

January 10, 2026

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Photo credit: Photo credit Canva – Two people enjoy a conversation.

In our modern world, one might think making connections and finding relationships is easier. Perhaps for some it actually is. However, with more people moving toward online dating, fewer are meeting and starting relationships in person.

On the Reddit thread r/AskMenAdvice, someone asked, “Are men generally not asking women for their numbers anymore when they meet someone in the wild? If so, why?” Some of the answers shed light on a troubling situation. Men aren’t comfortable asking women for their numbers in public, and so they don’t do it.

man, woman, well-being, camping, modern world, face-to-face, phone numbers — Coupleu00a0talking in the woods. Canva Photos

Redditors share why they aren’t asking women for their numbers in person

Men have other avenues for striking up a conversation with less face-to-face risk. With social media and dating apps, some find it a simple, and safe, alternative. Many find the thought of social embarrassment overwhelming if they were to approach a woman in public, and so prefer the safety of swiping left or right. Still, with fewer young people dating, there’s a dramatic change in how we form relationships in the modern world. As this trend unfolds, it’s worth investigating why men aren’t asking women for their numbers anymore.

chatting, complaining, flirting, hints, interest, friendship, caution, ask out — Woman and man have a conversation. Canva Photos

It’s harder than ever to read signals

There’s no doubt that people respecting each others’ boundaries should be the standard. However, some men complain that it’s hard to tell what those hard-line boundaries are these days. Does a transition still exist to move from a casual conversation to asking someone out on a date?

“Also, we’ll assume maybe she was just being nice and fun and we absolutely aren’t picking up any hints. Unless you tell us explicitly, assume we don’t know.”

“Yup. Flirty, laughing, touching me… And then laugh at me when I ask for her number.”

“There has been a big (and imo positive) move forward in terms of men misreading women’s friendliness as interest, so a lot of men are simply more cautious these days. Perhaps it’s about that?”

“I’m extremely dense and need a runway lit up like a Christmas tree for me to realize you’re flirting. Then you have to ask for my number.”

public spaces, comments, Reddit, TikTok, social media, peer pressure, work place, relationship status — A chat on the couch. Canva Photos

Men feel like in-person is no longer a viable option

It seems the modern consensus is that it’s probably better that men don’t approach women in public for various reasons. Due to this, and according to some of the comments on the thread, the responsibility for moving a relationship forward in a public space falls on women.

“The sentiment from women for the last few decades has been don’t bother women while they are working, or while they are at the gym, or while they are on the street, or at a bar. And I think it definitely is an overcorrection from men in general. But it’s tough to find that balance and you don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable…”

“Social media has proven public encounters are off limits. I’m not here for you to feel good about yourself and make media content for others to enjoy. I don’t approach anyone. The ones ‘acting really nice’ get a smile, small talk, and ‘have a nice day.’”

“Because women have made it clear that they don’t want men approaching them.”

“You don’t know who has a 50k follower tiktok account that will put you on blast if you have the audacity to approach while ugly”

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Trying to respect a modernized dating world

Women have every right to be treated respectfully. These men shared that they want to meet that standard:

“Contrary to popular belief most men do listen, and the loudest women tend to be those who are telling men to stay away and not ask. So people listened.”

“I never ask for a woman’s number, i offer them my own. It can be a red flag to ask for theirs, i dont want them to feel unsafe. I offer mine that way if theyre interested they can reach out to me without giving out their own info to a random guy first”

“Better for a woman to give her number versus asking in today society”

gif, men, night at the roxbury, dating, public — Movie scene from Night at the Roxbury. media0.giphy.com

Don’t be creepy

Rejection can be uncomfortable and even painful. Nobody wants to be viewed as undesirable and downright creepy. These men find that thought mortifying:

“Cuase we dont wanna end up on tik tok as “creeps” and “stalkers” and lose our jobs and life’s ruined”

“There was a thread the other day where someone said it was normal to ask someone you just met out and/or for a number and there were ENDLESS responses that it was creep behavior and not normal. I’m not sure how one of the most normal rituals on the planet has suddenly become creep behavior.”

“Men have been chastised in the media to the point they dont want to do anything that may come off as sexually harassing.”

“From around 2023 onwards I feel like the attitude towards men showing any kind of interest in women has soured. Absolutely everything can be considered creepy. It’s like a weird social contagion caused by TikTok.”

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What science says is happening

A 2024 study by DatePsychology reported that about 45% of men ages 18-25 had never asked a woman out on a date in person. These young men are heavily reliant on social media and dating apps to navigate social anxiety and the fear of rejection. There seems to be a growing trend of less energy invested in dating in general. In a 2025 survey, Dating News reported the average U.S. single person went on fewer than two in-person dates in 2024.

Although research into the psychology of recent dating trends is a rather small body of work, dating anxiety seems to be a significant factor. The distress about initiating a romantic interaction reduces the likelihood of someone making a first move. A 2022 study in Research Gate found that people’s growing attachment to their appearance and the high value placed on it make rejection more anxiety-inducing.

If people are going to attempt to move a casual conversation toward a possible date, that transition of responsibility now rides heavily on women. As this Redditior stated, “The ball is in the women’s court now; you can ask us, or we will respectfully treat all your ‘hints’ as you just being nice.”

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Culture, Internet

Italian man claims to be ‘human cheetah’ with lightning-fast reflexes

“I blinked and I missed it”

Mark Wales

4/29/2026

At first glance, this probably looks like a camera trick. Ken Lee, an Italian content creator, has built a massive online following by doing something that doesn’t quite feel real. Viewers refer to him as the “human cheetah” because it appears he has near-instant reflexes.

Grabbing objects out of the air with uncanny precision, flicking clothespins and lighters, and throwing a blur of punches and kicks at impossible speeds, it is easy to call him unbelievable. Half the audience thinks his viral speed videos are fake. The other half is just as convinced they are watching something incredibly rare.

@kenleefastestman
KAIOKEN DELL’UNIVERSO!🐉😱 PER VOI DIVENTO LUCE!!!💥(Super Saiyan 11° livello!💫) #kenlee🐉 #kenshirorealstar💥 #kaioken #universe #animeman #live #supersaiyan #ultrainstinct #maivisto #manga #dragonball #fastest #saitama #brucelee #goku #funny #divertente #comic
♬ suono originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

Hands so fast they blur time

In the video above, a timer runs to confirm its authenticity. In what looks like half a second, he reaches out and snags the lighter from the table. To prove it is real, he does it twice.

Having amassed millions of followers on his TikTok page, the identity behind the mysterious influencer remains largely unknown. Active since around 2022, with almost 100 million accumulated likes, Lee has cultivated a fandom around his self-proclaimed “Superhero per Hobby!”

Do you believe it is real? Is this person the fastest human alive? Many followers cannot wait for the next video to be posted. Plenty of his fervent fans are Italian, so sifting through the remarks takes a bit of hunting. Here are some comments that sum up how much people enjoy the fun and the spectacle:

“Ken lee the fastest and the best”

“Most dangerous human”

“Is this what the lighter sees before my homie steals it”

“It was sped up during he grabbed the lighter, if u count up with the timer u would be off by like 0,5 seconds whenever he grabs the lighter.”

“If the flash were human”

“How is it possible to get such powers ?”

“I blinked and I missed it”

@kenleefastestman
AIR OF THE DRAGON! 🐉😱 #kenlee🐉 #kenshirorealstar💥 #animeman #over100000 #ultrainstinct #over100000 #saitama #goku #brucelee #speedoflight⚡ #manga #cartoon #fastest #flash #velocita #sport #impossible #lighters #world #record #real #speed
♬ suono originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

People love good entertainment

The awe of peak performance attracts people to watch elite athletes, musicians, or even dancers. There is something that deeply satisfies all of us when a human appears to push a skill to its limit. Whether it is real or fake seems to matter less than the opportunity to chime in on some good entertainment.

How far could any of us go by practicing and repeating a particular motion over and over until it is mastered? Beneath the flashy nickname and his viral speed videos, Lee’s content has a way of drawing people in. This is not a superpower. Just repetition. Focus. Obsession. And maybe some digital wizardry.

@kenleefastestman
KEN LEE💫THE NEW SUPERHERO! 👽⚡️🌎🐉#kenleespeed👽⚡ #fastestmanalive⚡️ #speedoflight #worldspeed🌎 #superhero
♬ audio originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

Testing the science of speed

If you wish to question the validity of Lee’s performances, maybe some basic science can help. Human reaction time is not just a reflex. A 2024 study found that the nervous system can fine-tune responses in real time. Practice can make movements appear almost automatic.

It has been well established in research that the gap between seeing something and responding has a limit. A 2025 study concluded that the most elite extremes allow for reaction times of 100 milliseconds. At that speed, the human brain can barely process that something has happened.

Science explains Lee is not necessarily moving as fast as we might perceive him to be. And therein lies all the fun of it. We cannot prove it is real, nor can we actually prove that it is fake.

Maybe Lee is the “fastest man alive” or the so-called “human cheetah.” Or maybe he is just a remarkable entertainer. Either way, he has clearly tapped into something strange and fascinating: a blend of human ability and fantasy that people do not want to miss.

To give context to Lee’s videos, watch this performance on Tú Sí Que Vales:

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Photo credit: LisaStrachan/iStock via Getty Images – Fear not: There isn’t anything that needs saving.

Culture, Media

Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

Why “bad” English is nothing new.

Good Partner

4/22/2026

Valerie M. Fridland

As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.

While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.

Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”

The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.

In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.

From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.

Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”

While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.

If people learned to look at language more like linguists, they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.

And yes, that absolutely is a sentence ending with a preposition – something many modern grammar guides discourage, even though the idea only took hold after 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth intimated it was a less elegant choice based on the model of Latin.

Though Lowth voiced no hard and fast rule against it, many a grammar maven later misconstrued his advice as an admonition. Just like that, a mere suggestion became grammatical law.

The rise of the grammar sticklers

Many of today’s ideas about what constitutes correct English are based on a singular – often mistaken – 19th-century view of the forces that govern our language.

In the late 18th century, the English-speaking world began experiencing class restructuring and higher literacy rates. As greater class mobility became possible, accent differences became class markers that separated new money from old money.

Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.

Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.

Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”

Evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”

Embrace the change

Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.

But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.

So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Culture, Media

10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild

The premise was simple but high stakes.

Adam Albright Hanna

GOOD Staff

4/19/2026

It sounds like the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. However, in the mid-2000s, it was a very real and very controversial reality television experiment.

Footage from the UK Channel 4 documentary Boys and Girls Alone is captivating audiences all over again. It offers a fascinating and chaotic look at what happens when you remove parents from the equation.

The premise was simple but high stakes. Twenty children, aged 11 and 12, were split into two groups by gender. Ten boys and ten girls were placed in separate houses and told to live without adult supervision for five days.

The Setup

While there were safety nets in place, the day-to-day living was entirely up to the kids. A camera crew was present but instructed not to intervene unless safety was at risk. The children could also ring a bell to speak to a nurse or psychiatrist.

The houses were fully stocked with food, cleaning supplies, toys, and paints. Everything they needed to survive was there. They just had to figure out how to use it.

The Boys: Instant Chaos

In the boys’ house, the unraveling was almost immediate. The newfound freedom triggered a rapid descent into high-energy anarchy.

They engaged in water pistol fights and threw cushions. In one memorable instance, a boy named Michael covered the carpet in sticky popcorn kernels just because he could.

The destruction eventually escalated to the walls. The boys covered the house in writing, drawing, and paint. But the euphoria of freedom eventually crashed into the reality of consequences.

“We never expected to be like this, but I’m really upset that we trashed it so badly,” one boy admitted in the footage. “We were trying to explore everything at once and got too carried away in ourselves.”

Their attempts to clean up were frantic and largely ineffective. Nutrition also took a hit. Despite having completed a cooking course, the boys survived mostly on cereal, sugar, and the occasional frozen pizza. By the end of the week, the house was trashed, and the group had fractured into opposing factions.

The Girls: Organized Society

The girls’ house looked like a different planet.

In stark contrast to the mayhem next door, the girls immediately established a functioning society. They organized a cooking roster, with a girl named Sherry preparing their first meal. They baked cakes. They put on a fashion show. They even drew up a scrupulous chores list to ensure the house stayed livable.

While their stay wasn’t devoid of interpersonal drama, the experiment highlighted a fascinating divergence in socialization. Left to their own devices, the girls prioritized community and maintenance. The boys tested the absolute limits of their environment until it broke.

The documentary was controversial when it aired, with critics questioning the ethics of placing children in unsupervised situations for entertainment. But what made it so enduring, and why footage keeps resurfacing years later, is what it reveals about how kids are socialized long before anyone puts them in a house together. The boys weren’t born anarchists and the girls weren’t born organizers. They arrived at those houses already shaped by years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, what boys do and what girls do. Whether that’s a nature story or a nurture story is the question the documentary keeps asking without quite answering, which is probably why people are still watching and arguing about it nearly two decades later.

This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.

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