Is this actually true? This feels a bit like a post-facto generalization from specific situations. "I was a nerd and didn't go on dates. Being a nerd got me into software and now I make a lot of money. Therefore people who are on the path to high earning are not getting dates."
My experience has been that a lot of the stereotypical jocks ended up in finance and are doing quite well and that software is no longer dominated by social loners.
Even if this were true (jocks go into management and management is useless), it would be the opposite of what the parent was saying about the people on the path to high pay rarely having romantic relationships since management tends to pay well.
Maybe true but there's a lot of survivorship bias in the population. Software shops are often hurting for clear communicators. Winsome folks tend to get bumped into leadership roles even if they start out slinging curly braces and semicolons.
I don’t know where you went to school. I guess I know a “jock” type who was running a meth lab, I guess that is a kind of management, at least until he went to prison.
The meme is not about income or physical fitness, it's about psychological aggressiveness. Highly un-aggressive men are considered emotionally unattractive and don't get dates because, for one thing, they're afraid to ask, but they're nice and dependable and will take care of you forever. Highly aggressive men come across as dynamic and interesting, and turn out to have five mistresses in three states and a warrant out for their arrest in two of them.
Poe's law, sorry. (Although some truth snuck in with the parenthetical about not asking.) The arrest warrants were supposed to give away the joke...
If you're wondering why people see it that way, just imagine a world where a large number of people had undiagnosed social anxiety, and another large group of people had undiagnosed sociopathy, and they both got pushed out of normal society into the same place. Then the ones with social anxiety look at the ones with sociopathy and associate their slightly greater success with short-term relationships with the condition they do have, rather than the one they don't.
As a guy, you can handily subvert this dynamic by learning to act assertive in a way that implicitly appeals to others' sensation seeking, without being so aggressive that you end up being off-putting to others or even scaring them away.
My experience has been that a lot of the stereotypical jocks ended up in finance and are doing quite well and that software is no longer dominated by social loners.