Perhaps you have heard that the romantic outlook for young people is bleak. Members of Gen Z are dating less and reporting fatigue from swiping on dating apps. A cascade of panicked headlines have declared that young people are facing a “sex recession.”
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager, has heard, too. So he took to social media over the weekend to offer some practical advice for young men who he said are struggling to approach potential dates in public.
“I would ask: ‘May I meet you?’ before engaging further in a conversation,” he wrote in a post on X that has been viewed more than 37 million times.
When he used the line in his youth, it was almost never met with rejection, he added. “I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness. You might give it a try.”
Mr. Ackman’s pivot to dating coach is the latest swerve in a career that has included helping to fund President Trump’s third campaign, crusading against Harvard’s former president Claudine Gay and competing in a professional tennis tournament. (That last one did not go especially well.) Mr. Ackman, 59, married his second wife, Neri Oxman, in 2019.
His advice came from a place of concern about young people’s happiness as well as “population replacement rates,” he wrote. But his suggested approach drew puzzlement, and some jokes, from those who were not quite sure Mr. Ackman had landed on a four-word solution to a generation’s romantic malaise.
Many found it rich that a billionaire was offering generalized dating advice to the masses. For some, the issue lay in Mr. Ackman’s phrasing. “May I meet you?” has a “stilted, never-felt-the-touch-of-a-woman aura,” Katie Baker wrote in an article for The Ringer. Others argued that declining birthrates had more to do with the cost of living and difficulty of finding child care than with young men’s conversational prowess.
“Solving underlying social issues that wealth-hoarding billionaires have exacerbated might prove more effective than a grammatically interesting pickup line,” Arwa Mahdawi wrote in The Guardian. (Reached through a representative, Mr. Ackman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.)
At least some romantic hopefuls have taken the financier’s advice to heart.
On Wednesday, Sebastian Salinas, a photographer in Austin, Texas, tried using the phrase to introduce himself to a woman he had met in his 7 a.m. hot yoga class.
“I said it — ‘May I meet you?’ — and she looked at me with the most confused, odd look,” Mr. Salinas, 40, recalled. He rolled up his yoga mat and made for the exit: “I was so embarrassed I turned red.”
But a few minutes later, she approached him and gave him her name. The line may have been “awkward to deliver,” but it succeeded in starting a conversation, Mr. Salinas said. “In hindsight, it did kind of work.”
Luca Cioffi, 25, who works in marketing in Alberta, Canada, and has been single for about six months, said he found the advice a bit dated. “It’s kind of like when people say, ‘Just go hand in your résumé at the front desk,’” he said.
Mr. Cioffi added that he was unlikely to use such a formal phrase to approach someone at a bar. He agreed, though, that his romantic interactions seemed more fruitful when he put down his phone and got to know others in person. Mr. Cioffi said he had recently deleted Hinge after a few unsatisfying months of swiping.
“I don’t think we were ever really meant to have the illusion of endless options,” he said of the dating app.
Mr. Ackman said on X that he believed his suggested introduction would also work for women trying to meet men, as well as those seeking a same-sex partner.
Noelle Mercer, a 26-year-old actor in Santa Monica, Calif., said she first thought that “May I meet you?” was jarring and “weird.” But the more she thought about it, the more she appreciated that it allowed for rejection.
“It’s asking permission, which is such a breath of fresh air in our dating culture today,” said Ms. Mercer, who started dating her current boyfriend after matching on Tinder.
Mr. Ackman’s advice has landed amid a wave of concern about young people’s economic trajectories and romantic outcomes — especially those of young men. This month, the N.Y.U. marketing professor Scott Galloway released “Notes on Being a Man,” a book in which he argues that a “mating crisis” is among the forces that have left young men feeling lost, destabilized and left behind.
Matt Meiselman, 35, who lives in Hoboken, N.J., said he did not always agree with pundits who dole out dating advice to men decades younger than them. (For example, he said he wished Mr. Galloway’s suggestions focused more on displaying empathy and less on hitting the gym.)
He said he was glad that Mr. Ackman’s phrase, stilted as it was, invited in-person conversation.
“Saying a normal sentence — somehow that’s the bar,” he said. “It just makes me kind of sad that the bar is that low.”
Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times.
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