This is especially interesting as same-sex dating is even more skewed toward online interaction, probably just due to the fact that we make up only ~5% of the population; any person we meet in public is straight 19 out of 20 times [1].
If the participants are free to say "I refuse to date anyone of (or not of) race X under any circumstances" then there's no solution in the general case.
I think they're referring to the "stable marriage problem" where every person is gonna get married come hell or high water, no takebacks. That problem cannot be solved in general if individuals can give a hard no.
Hard no's are fine in the classic stable marriage problem. "Remain single" gets added as an option to each person's preference list, then you can run Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance more-or-less as normal with each person on the accepting side starting with "remain single".
The original formulation of the problem is looking for a bijection / perfect matching. That isn't always possible if "remain single" is an option. I agree with you and your sibling that modifying the problem is possible, but it won't always produce a perfect matching which is what I meant by unsolvable.
Given this appears in Gale and Shapley 1962, I'd say it is part of the original formulation (though they do it by saying people are simply not allowed to apply to colleges where they'd be a hard no rather than apply and be rejected). They're looking at stable matchings for college admissions, not perfect matchings.
Are you sure? What if you inventing a "phantom partner" for each person, who represents "not getting married". The preferences for that phantom partner would be
1. The person they are phantoming
2-N+1. All other phantom partners
N+1-2N+1. All other people.
If the person prefers not being married over all other available partners, then that will necessarily be a stable marriage. If they don't then the phantom partner will be able to find a match among the other unmatched phantom partners.
I've seen numbers between 1% and 10%, but there's a lot of noise about it, is there a good source?
In any case, are homosexuals distributed equally over the area? My intuitive assumption is that they gravitate to larger cities for a variety of reasons (but less discrimination is probably a big one, since cities tend to be much more liberal and anonymous than the nation they are in), which would change the chances significantly.
Re: percentages. I just picked 5% for a talking point. It is definitely more than 1%, but it really depends on how you define 'homosexual'. Some surveys might count someone who has had a same-sex partner in the past but now does not, or people who are open to the idea but have not acted on it. Then there's trans people, who generally are attracted to the opposite gender but might get counted because they are 'not really straight' :(.
What I'm wondering about is what the attractiveness distribution looks like for gay men and lesbians (and also bi/pan people, although there's probably less data to pull from there). I would guess that for gay dudes it matches the bell curve shape - anecdotally my experience of online dating more closely matches what my straight female friends see in terms of getting matches being easy. And also my conceptualiztion of same-sex attraction is "I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women" NOT "I'm attracted to men in the same way straight women tend to be attracted to men." But I'm super interested in seeing how that plays out, especially given other confounding variables of being gay. And I have no idea what the lesbian curve would look like - I suppose I would predict it looks like the pareto distribution, but I have no idea.
Also the prevalence of "boyfriend twins" matches with what the site says - they end up with a partner of almost identical attractiveness because the curves for both of them match, and there's no bias in who makes the first move.
Gay male with a fiancé here, and I love the boyfriend twins analogy. My partner and I are (gratefully) described as similarly good-looking -- curious store clerks like to ask us if we're siblings but then quickly realize we're probably a couple.
> I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women
See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their love interests sound foreign to us..
GP of the thread here. Things that straight people stereotypically do that gay men stereotypically do not understand:
- Treating every person you date like a potential spouse instead of a potential friend
- Getting upset when your partner finds someone else attractive
- Caring about how many sexual partners someone has had in the past
- Remaining sexually monogamous in a relationship that has lost its sexual energy (i.e., 'dead bedroom')
Again, generalizations. I think straight people have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the values of western religions and government institutions that demand couples settle down indefinitely and singularly in high-stakes marriages. Soo much rests on finding the right partner, which can be very stressful, especially for women. They think that their desires have to be suppressed or changed to be happy, and have internalized ridiculous messages about sexual purity and how love is 'supposed to be'. However, us degenerates have always been shunned by those institutions and therefore can see the silliness in it, not that we don't have a huge heaping of silliness to deal with ourselves.
Why are those the only two choices? This is definitely how every woman I have dated (including my wife) has seen it - if we ain't raisin' kids in a house we damn well better be burning a fuckton of jet fuel. Not willing to entertain "just work a lot less" as even a joking third path.
I opted for a kid and a mortgage because at least this way maybe one day me "and my son" will build an electromagnetic rail accelerator[1] and remote-controlled gliders and fly them around together.
The serious answer to that question is probably because straight couples mostly have biological children, with the associated biogenic time pressure driving FOMO. Adoption or surrogacy can in theory be put off indefinitely and I imagine a lot of male-male couples wind up doing just that.
[1] Terminology intentionally changed from "rail-gun" to emphasize peaceful applications to my gun-hating wife.
I can see those stereotype applying in a lot of situations. It makes me wonder, looking at them, how does the prospect for reproduction play into it.
At a high level, one big difference is that straight couples can reproduce together. So its not merely looking for a partner in life, or a partner to help raise a child with. But for the prospect of merging your genes.
I think nowadays a lot of the behavior could be explained by values lingering. But I can also rationalize how in a more natural order, without contraception existing, the decision for two straight people to get together comes with a much higher risk/reward ratio. From this, entails that picking the best partner is much more important, and making sure they'll remain throughout the whole pragnency and afterwards to help and support, etc. All that seems to weigh on the decisions for two people to partner up in a straight relationship that doesn't seem as likely in a gay one.
Maybe those instincts remains in straight people, even though nowadays we have good contraception. Or maybe it's that values of such time still linger. Also, even with contraception, it be pretty weird for a straight couple to decide to find a suitable surrogate, so there's still that ultimate, would this be the genetic other of my child?
This is within the same ballpark of stuff I was thinking about!
Also, we're both Seattle-area engineers, leading very career-oriented lives. One reason for marrying would be to mitigate financial risk when one of us tries to do something crazy.
Funny enough, our simple desire to leave a professional legacy has helped our immediate family greatly (e.g. I'm the one my parents or straight siblings go to for big cash emergencies, etc.)
Y'know the boyfriend twin thing makes me wonder... how successful might a dating app be that just takes a front and profile photo, and then matches people by facial similarity?
The attraction comparison is mostly from me being pretty visual and noticing that many straight men are also quite visual.
When I use FaceApp to make a picture of me look female, it looks like my sister, which I don't find very attractive and many people say my sister is hot.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true just as it would be for divorced seniors. People don’t typically randomly try to meet someone on the street (usually it’s against norms and may be categorized as “creepy”).
Most people meet the kind of people they are attracted to in places where they are likely to congregate.
In other words hardly any population has uniform distribution.
People might not randomly meet in the street, but they certainly meet through hobbies, work and random social events. If you have some dating requirement that instantly cuts your dating pool significantly, the chance of finding someone at a generic event also drops. This holds true for both divorced seniors and gay people, but with being gay there's the additional difficulty of narrowing down people at an event - at least the divorced seniors can identify the seniors in a room.
I understand that and I will acknowledge it reduces the pool compared to larger populations but it’s not 1/20 because the hobbies and friends and places one might frequent are often but not always obviously the places with like-people.
I am dying to hear some stories from that 5% who were meeting at church. And I wonder if the declining college number has to do with people waiting longer, or the fact that more people are coming out and so the age range of the survey is broader.
Same sex dating is, sadly, still not entirely safe. A little anonymity and being out of arm's reach probably makes people feel a lot more comfortable (have you ever gone on a date when you were uncomfortable for some other reason? Did it end well?)
I don't recall if it was Dan Savage or something I read earlier than that, about how screwed gay men are in a mixed orientation environment, because a heterosexual male can use prolonged eye contact across a bar as an intro to approaching a woman, while some men see eye contact as aggression. If that person turns out to be a homophobe, the author theorizes that the odds of a violent end to this encounter has just gone up considerably. A gay bar or an online dating site sets a context, a social filter. If you crash and burn it's over quickly and you can move on.
If smart phones were available sooner I wonder how much faster that line would have gone up.
There's one simulation I'd have very much liked to have seen the results of, and that would be the female preference advantage under the paretto-normal asymmetry. When you have a normal-normal preference, you'd assume the advantage to be equivalent for whoever was reaching, but that assumption isn't as well grounded when the distributions aren't equivalent.
TLDR: do the women have a similar advantage if they are the reachers?
So there's two reasons why there is a male preference advantage here: 1) I ran the algorithm assuming the men make the first move and 2) Male/female normal/pareto correlation in attractiveness
Do you mean what would happen if the distributions were switched but men still make the first move? I could change up the script and run it again if that's what you mean!
calling it male/female at this point is kind of arbitrary, when it's the asymmetry in the distributions that I thinks interesting, but yeah, what happens if the pareto-preference population was the first mover rather than the normal-preference population that acted first. It's well documented that the first mover in the stable mariage problem has an advantage, It's why they switched from residency programs to being first movers to med students being first movers about a decade ago for The Match. This is the first I've seen it done with different preference distributions in the population. I'm curious how strong of effect the advantage is for different distributions.
Hey there, sorry to comment hijack - I really enjoyed this article. Was not aware of the Stable Marriage Problem and the associated algorithm and real life applications with medical students/roommates. Appreciated the humor and memes as well :) I noticed thought you don't list any email or anything if I had further questions - is there a good way to get in touch? Thank you
Basically, dating in our modern world of few meaningful social connections is a vicious cycle for women. Men rate attractiveness on a normal distribution, women rate attractiveness on a pareto distribution. (ie. 80% of men are "meh" or worse to women.)
I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a complex rules engine for screening an endless pool of available men. (Male criteria for engaging a woman online is very low.) When you are a 29 year old female only considering seriously dating attractive jewish/catholic/athiest, asian/black/hispanic/irish/white/etc men 6'1" or taller in professional jobs (generally speaking or a specific gig) who have attribute X, Y, or Z, you're screwed.
Men will usually stop filtering earlier. They still get into awful relationships, but they don't filter out 80% of the population.
I don't think it's solely a lack of meaningful social connections, although that's a contributing factor. Women have more choices and are more picky versus historically, and men are economically disadvantaged due to globalization and wealth/income inequality.
I think the hockey stick growth of online dating is directly correlated to reduced social activity.
"Bowling Alone" captured part of the phenomena 20 years ago. That hasn't changed. Even things like little leagues and soccer clubs for kids are declining in many ways and much more commercial activities than they were in the past. Even worship has changed -- high growth religious services are scaled-up entertainment and child care focused vs. community.
Personally, I don't buy into the notion that people have changed. People are people. I think the environment has changed and people are playing interacting with it based on the funnel they get sucked into.
The online dating services are listing real estate agents -- their interest is in a higher number of conversions per customer. They will optimize for that metric over time.
> Basically, dating in our modern world of few meaningful social connections is a vicious cycle for women. Men rate attractiveness on a normal distribution, women rate attractiveness on a pareto distribution. (ie. 80% of men are "meh" or worse to women.)
Is this based on the OkCupid blog? My speculation is what men on average look for (appearance) is easily communicated via online dating, but this is less so than women. I'd be interested to see what the same chart would look for people known in person, rather than just online.
> I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a complex rules engine for screening an endless pool of available men. (Male criteria for engaging a woman online is very low.) When you are a 29 year old female only considering seriously dating attractive jewish/catholic/athiest, asian/black/hispanic/irish/white/etc men 6'1" or taller in professional jobs (generally speaking or a specific gig) who have attribute X, Y, or Z, you're screwed.
There's data showing that women care more about "dating up" in education/social class, which has negatively impacts college educated women and men without a college education. This is due to the widening gap in college degree attainment in the US between men and women[0]. The book "It's Not You, It's Biology" does a good job of going into this.
I think that men do in fact filter just as heavily as women.
They just use looks as a massive first filter.
And people from certain backgrounds also use that background as a major filter.
Anyway, what happens is that women are invested less in the beginning, but as the relationship progresses it switches. The woman gets more attracted than the man, and starts putting up with more than him to keep her investment.
> Why would having a larger pool make dating harder?
FWIW, I have found online dating way harder than dating someone I met through friends/work/school. YMMV but my theory is having access to that many more people leads one (including myself) to sometimes think there's someone more attractive/interesting out there instead of giving what's available to them a strong chance.
I have two good friends who have been serial daters for years and they have Seinfeldian reasons as to why they didn't fit with someone. It made me think my God, "if everyone had your standards, literally no one would have a long term relationship." Interestingly, when I saw them date mutual friends back in Uni, the relationships were the longest they've had their entire lives.
I'm convinced that a lot of stable marriages from people I know around me wouldn't have happened if they had tried first meeting online instead of happenstance in IRL situations, because person A wasn't the typical ethnicity that marries person B, or person A is much older than person B and wouldn't have fit in the filter, or person A isn't particularly photogenic, etc.
I'm not trying to paint online dating as a bad thing as there are quite a number of success stories.
I come from a strong family culture (dozens of cousins, off-spring, good communication, >95% stable long-lasting marriages, etc.), and we were taught that there is no perfect match. Love isn’t a feeling, it is an act of the will for the good of the other.
Ergo, it’s your job to make the relationship work.
Millennials without robust world-views haven’t yet figured out that the ‘fear of missing out’ is devastating to their pursuit of happiness.
Millenials and young people are not more promiscuous and don't jump from relationship to relationship. They are more likely to be single or have long relationship. But less so trying out many partners. Also most Millenials are over 30 now.
Some interesting stuff there. I think you could also frame it as a explore vs exploit problem. If we assume there is a successive series of partners you could meet but only in sequence and you choose whether to "attempt to exploit, i.e. form a relationship" or pass and continue to explore. At which point should you commit such that it maximizes the expected gain (marginalizing over your lifespan)? It's like RL game except you only get to play once. In addition, the time gap between successive prospects is unknown and may even be infinite.
Last year I purchased a condominium in the downtown core of where I live and I thought the process was very similar. At the time the market was very competitive. It's a sequence of potential "offers" for which you make a binary decision and you cannot go back and must consider them in chronological order and there is no guarantee if you pass on a okay condo now that you will find a spectacular one down the line and prices will not be even less palpable.
I was trying to explain this to a friend playing Animal Crossing. I did not get very far.
Optimality breaks down when humans get involved. Because what most humans need is to believe they did a good job picking, which is quite a bit different. If the best solution falls into your lap you may continue spending energy on that decision forever, and that longing for what might have been is a big opportunity cost (which is magnified if your partner ever finds out about it). We have this sort of intuition that we have to put a bit of sweat equity into a decision before it feels good. Which may relate to the somewhat debunked theory of 'ego exhaustion'.
You may know what fridge you want but you have to keep showing options to your spouse because they aren't okay with the decision yet, and if you rush it then you'll regret it. You can spend that energy now, or you can make emotional interest payments for the life of the fridge. At work you sometimes have to do the wrong thing so that people get why the more expensive option makes sense.
What my friend was doing and what I see other people do, including myself, is make a list of targets of opportunity. 5% of the options are acceptable and I will stop when I get access to the first one in that category, be it a fridge, an islander, or a partner. This person is smart, funny, likes cats, and your family adores them, and you have chemistry so why not. You feel good with your decision, or at least you do at the time. You might still leave them six years later because it turns out those other things you didn't like overshadowed everything else, once you had to live in the same house. How many other potential matches went away during that time?
> I created a Python implementation of the classic SMP solution in order to calculate some initial results...
> Did I write all of this to justify why I'm single?
Despite the demotion of most masculist search results in Google and YouTube, if one skips the first page of results, the answers to the Stable Marriage Problem exist within MRA, Red Pill, MGTOW, and Manoshpere online articles and videos.
>> The first graph demonstrates the O(n²) complexity of the algorithm. We can see that as the community grows larger, even by a small amount, the amount of iterations it takes to solve the matching problem grows exponentially.
This statement is contradictory. Probably the author is using "exponentially" to mean quick growth. I suppose this is alright in common parlance, but I find it disturbing when people describe a function as exponential just because it is a superlinear polynomial.
Whenever I visit family in the midwest this phenomenon makes me twitch.
It seems people out there have taken to using "exponentially" as a pseudo-scientific word meaning "a lot". i.e. "you're making my job exponentially more difficult"
On the other end of the spectrum, I like when people tell me "you're making my job exponentially more difficult, with a negative exponent" to let me know I'm doing a good job. Math nerds are the best coworkers
This bothers me to no end too. But I’ve given up in every trying to fix it, it’s entered the public lexicon, if you want to talk about actual exponential growth you need to be more specific now.
If y = 2^x, then log y != 2^log x because of Jensen's inequality. You can take log of both sides to keep the equality, but applying the transformation inside of 2^() results in the equality turning into a strict inequality.
Yeah, I'm willing to let this slide coming from regular folk in everyday conversations, but when you're writing a blog post about algorithms and you just said it was O(n^2)... this is a situation where I think it's reasonable to expect someone to hold to the technical meaning of a term.
> ”I find it disturbing when people describe a function as exponential just because it is a superlinear polynomial.”
This is the kind of statement people should put in their dating profiles if they want fewer but better matches. No, I’m not teasing you (ok just a little). Show quirky elements of yourself, just keep the mood sunny rather than salty.
"the top 20% of men hold 80% of cumulative attractiveness in the eyes of women" - OKCupid stats
As a guy who lives polyamorous, this is an interesting observation.
Many guys told me that they try the poly life, because if they don't have to be "the one" for a women, their potential partners would give them a chance even if they aren't a 100% fit.
Somehow, only a few guys end up with multiple women.
Mating strategies are not exactly uniform within the group known as mammals, either. A number of things come into play, such as the resource differential between sperm and egg, and then general sexual dimorphism.
When men swipe right on almost every single woman no matter their interest it results in the women having tons of matches to pick from. There is no incentive to not pick from the top of the list.
Even after reading through the profiles and discarding many of the men with a big enough pile there is only so much time in the day to talk with the guys so why not start with the more attractive ones?
definitely see this in my scene. the most attractive guys have many partners while the lesser ones don't have that many. more attractive guys are fought over and rifts are created because of it. It's really funny because a lot of them consider themselves anarchists politically...yet the few attractive men seem to dominate.
I wonder how much of this is perception vs. reality. Many women trip over themselves around me, but I'm monogamous and have only chosen to be in a couple of relationships because finding a match is really hard. Just because someone gets a lot of attention, that doesn't mean they're going around having endless casual sex or unlimited girlfriends.
When you value intimate encounters with people you care about, there is an upper limit, even if you have multiple women waiting to date you.
The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.
This is operating on the assumption that sex requires caring about other people at a high capacity. I'd suggest a read of The Ethical Slut if you're actually interested in a world where sex and romantic intimacy aren't the same thing.
Regardless of whether you liked it or not, it has a pretty effective framework against your assumption:
>The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.
On the other, the pool of potential partners they'd effectively sequester for some length of time isn't really impacted by whether these men would engage with them or not.
If someone said "Just because an apple is red, that doesn't mean it's a red delicious.", why would you reply "I'd say that's untrue if the apple is a red delicious."
I'm not sure what this is called, but your statement is basically just redundantly agreeing with me.
Ahh I see. So, your original comment "definitely see this in my scene. the most attractive guys have many partners while the lesser ones don't have that many. more attractive guys are fought over and rifts are created because of it. It's really funny because a lot of them consider themselves anarchists politically...yet the few attractive men seem to dominate." was specifically referring to poly communities. I thought you meant this was your experience in general, regardless of monogamy or polyamory.
We were talking past each other because my comments were basically saying "It isn't like this in general" but you never intended to communicate that claim. You were only talking about specific situations.
Just because Warren Buffet isn't spending his money frivolously doesn't invalidate the observation that economic gains tend to follow a power distribution (few winners take almost everything)
This is a complicated and very interesting problem; we had some fantastic related discussion here[1][2] earlier this year. I like your angle of population size being the "input" of some n^2 "matching algorithm" -- it's probably a bit too game theoretic in practice, but I think it makes sense.
I'm of the opinion that online dating has been creating some real market problems; as you mention, communities were small and people met within their own circles back in the 60s. But nowadays there are millions of people just a swipe away, and FOMO can be really strong, and as such, supply/demand curves are extremely skewed.
Could we solve the advantage towards men by removing the condition that there could be some unstable pairing ? (but not a lot), it is not like changing partner is a liquid market.
What would be the percentage of people not being in a unstable pairing in order for men to not have any advantage over women ?
My understanding is the "advantage" men have over women in this article is due to the average man finding the average women more attractive than the average woman finds the average man, at least in the data used.
Without removing that, and assuming everyone pairs up, the "advantage" remains.
Are they the ones choosing first? I think it's completely the other way around. Consider the common Tinder/OkCupid situation where a man sends out hundreds of messages to only receive a few replies, while a woman has hundreds of messages waiting in her inbox, from which she gets to select her preferred match.
This is an interesting point. The way Tinder works is a little different than how this problem is normally modeled since both people need to swipe (propose) in order to get a match and therefore proposals are bidirectional. There is still some subtleties because people don't know who swiped right on them (unless they have gold).
A more apt comparison is how Hinge works. People don't need to actively go out and 'like' people, they can just sit and wait for likes to come in and they can choose if they want to match or not.
I would be very interested to see Hinge data for how often men give out likes versus women.
The first graph shows that choosing first does give an advantage, however like another poster has said, the advantage is amplified with how each gender sees each other.
I think this overlooks a good many points. For example, the "being the initiator is always better" claim would be more accurately framed "having been the initiator is always better". The data completely ignores the downsides because it only looks at the potential results, not the path to get those results.
Yes, if you're willing to face repeated rejection, if you're willing to bother people who aren't interested in you and ignore the guilt of having done so, then it's better to be the initiator.
One factor that I didn't see addressed in the post which does make a significant impact is that men in general rate women more similarly than women rate men.
As such, male advantage is probably a lot lower in the real world, if (hyperbolic) every woman has a different man on nr 1 of their preference list, and every man has the same woman as nr 1 of their preference list, all women could theoretically have their best possible partner, while only one man can.
I'm always surprised that while men apparently rate women's attractiveness on a bell curve, women seem to rate men on a Pareto distribution.
Considering how much I hear about beauty standards and how they harm women, I almost never hear anything about male beauty standards.
If society is to be improved by having more realistic female beauty standards, then there's apparently a lot more headroom for society to be improved by having more realistic male beauty standards.
Unrealistic beauty standards are absolutely a problem for both men and women, the difference is that in society, men can be valued for other things (occupation, knowledge, athletics) and that is much less true for women.
Though if men can be valued for other ways, that doesn't explain why most men are seen are far below average for the average woman. I think an amendment for your previous statement is that though they can be valued from different areas, the starting value for men is starts way below that of a woman.
For example in Asian cultures there is the idea of 666 standard for males, 6 feet tall, 6 figure salary, 6 pack, which make up less than 0.01% of the eligible population. It may be due to the gender ratio being off, but the standard leaves a lot of women unhappy in their later years
There are two male beauty standards so to speak: male ideal for males and male ideal for women. Male ideal for males is overly bulked up dude with six pack. Male ideal for women is what you get in female journals or in boy bands.
But the other think is that the body shapes for males that showed up in entertainment were more various for males then for females. There was less perfection and more variety, but that is changing. Now it seems guys are moving toward similar restrictive requirements, so we may get there with guys too.
From what I've seen and heard from my friends, women tend to select for lean-ness. Smaller guy with six pack is usually more attractive to them than a big guy with six pack. And it shows in their dating preferences too.
It helps that women seem to weight attractiveness pretty low when it comes to partners. The stereotype of the funny fat guy with the hot partner exists for a reason.
Generally, women prefer physical attractiveness for sexual partners (genetic value), and high financial/social statue attractiveness for relationship partners (they are less likely to abandon her with nothing).
This leads to a very interesting conclusion - small gains in male attractiveness leads to a much larger perceived gain in their attractiveness. It basically means men have a LOT to gain from improving their looks!
> One factor that I didn't see addressed in the post which does make a significant impact is that men in general rate women more similarly than women rate men.
That is addressed halfway through the post. Methinks you didn't actually read the article.
This is not the same point addressed in the post. The post references the 80/20 attractiveness bias. YetAnotherMatt is referencing a different phenomenon - that men rate women similarly to each other, whereas women rate men with much higher variance. See https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences/m...
Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked at horribly wrong.
People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, they settle down.
This article https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ is not about a guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person that matched that criteria.
Do you have any data to back that up that you can share? I don't mean to call you out, it could very well be the case, people date in rather not-understandable ways to me.
What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married.
Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a dating history with a lot of partners "to find out what they don't want". That said, I'm aware of the negative selection bias there.
> Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married.
This is not against what OP says, you could have some people who date less people and some who prefer to date a lot. At the end, both of them will probably settle down when they find one they like a lot
Because long term marriage is a lot about your tendency to create long term emotional ties to people. It is also about your willingness to think about relationship itself and put work on it.
It is also about selection, but much more about ability to weed out abusive people and selfish people and so on. Of course also compatibility, clean freak will never be happy with messy person.
And those abilities form a lot in childhood, in family and with friends. They are also about your deep seeted values.
A lot of short relationships suggest either lack of interest in long term relationship or inability to form it.
The way hn talks about these issue always strikes me like a bunch of people who think people are machines and kind of don't undestand how people form relationships. Like qualifying a partner that don't fit some checkbox on original list someone was forced to make as "settling down". There is chemistry alias emotional and hormonal side to the whole thing, people.
Yes, but you won't train them by dating a lot of people. Dating a lot of people trains you that people leave, it will teach you that strong relationship hurts more when it breaks.
Also, if you dated a lot of people who were genuinly unsuitable for long term relationship, issue really is either your selection or what you signal to good prospective partners. Like, abusers pick up certain types and stable guys/gals avoid certain types.
I believe that therapists are better at convincing patients that therapy helped than they are at generating improved outcomes. Furthermore most therapists are not using treatments that there is much evidence for.
This is not to discount that there are treatments that really do work. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is an excellent example.
This is also not to deny that people who seek therapy on average do better than people who do not. That is clearly true, but it is unclear whether it is explained by "therapy worked" or the selection bias that "people who are demonstrate putting effort into their problems are likely to do better."
But it is a lot easier to make the claim that therapy helps than it is to demonstrate it. And given the combination of the replication crisis and widespread poor use of statistics, it is hard to trust most of the research into mental health treatments.
That said, most people who have been through therapy believe that it helped them. This is not actually evidence of effectiveness. Because that was true even for therapies such a Freudian psychology that are demonstrably ineffective. And even widespread belief in the effectiveness of treatments is not evidence either - as https://psmag.com/social-justice/75-years-alcoholics-anonymo... points out there is remarkably little evidence for 12 step programs for addiction. Despite testimonials and general belief to the contrary.
I agree with this generally. For most people I know in happy marriages it's not because they figured out exactly what they wanted and found "the one" -- as much as they love their partners there are probably a lot of people they would have been happy with.
Yes, if you're not religious it's actually pretty ridiculous to believe that there is a "perfect person" for you. To paraphrase The Office, if that were true they're probably in China or India anyway so most of the readers here are out of luck.
I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but I still think it's not the right point of view. A lot of the compatibility in a long term relationship stems from shared values, experiences, interests and culture. So I think your pool of potential "perfect people" is a lot closer to home than that.
Looking at divorce statistics you find that pattern doesn’t really hold up. There are spikes around various life transitions like retirement which still occur even with long term emotional bonds. Long term relationships are a continuous negotiation as people’s want’s and needs change.
Edit: Collage education and getting first married at an older age significantly lower the odds of divorce. Which suggests having multiple prior relationships increase the odds of marriage success. However, we don’t have good statistics for this stuff.
How do you know those divorced people had strong emotional bonds?
People often avoid divorce and keep dead marriage because of inertia or fear of change. The massive life trasitions bring on stresses that test all of of that. And things are changing anyway at that point.
You are not offering evidence against the hypothesis.
Divorce spikes around various life transitions occur because predictable events create predictable stresses that predictably are hard on marriages. Examples include the death of a child, children leaving the home, financial crisis, retirement and long-term illness.
Pairs who proved compatibility by settling down fast last longer because they are more likely to survive these stress points. However stress points are still stress points and "more likely to survive" still means that lots won't.
Personal disclaimer. I married at 20 to my second girlfriend. I was her first boyfriend. We did divorce..but only after 25 years. You can decide for yourself whether a 25 year marriage is evidence that we were more or less stable than an average couple.
Divorce after 25 years is statistically below average for a first marriage in the US. Waiting would have significantly reduced your odds of divorce. Overall, most relationships don’t involve marriage and many people never get married, so it’s really a question of what you consider below average.
I don’t think a relationship that ends is always worse than one that continues. Many stay together out of habit, fear, finances, having kids etc, continue long enough and someone is likely to die. Simply lasting a long time is thus a very poor measure of success. Arguably being happy, raising well adjusted kids, financial success, and or a host of other things could be considered a much better benchmark.
So I will turn it around, what’s the odds you would each have found a better partner or even become a better partner by looking longer?
I'm not so sure. Dating often only reveals a person at their best, most agreeable. I've known couples that needed years to discover they were in a marriage with someone who had deal-breaker qualities. Sometimes things don't manifest until time and pressure force them out.
I'm guessing those marriages are likely correlated with strong shared religious beliefs[1] and closeness to extended families that help share the burden of raising children.
That’s definitely not true in my circle of friends. Of my 6 closest high school friends (all female), the ones who didn’t date in high school all married first, to either their first or second partners. The ones who dated a ton are still dating in their early 30s. None of us are very religious, and we all live in traditional (American) families with commensurate amounts of support.
Negative selection bias as in people who are less capable to maintain long term relationships are more likely to have a lot of dating history.
Conversely, people who are super easy going and great partners to be with may have very few people break up with them (and kind of succeed on the first try).
Or another way to put it: To have a long dating history with a lot of different partners, you need to have broken up (or been broken up with) quite a few times. This could be due to circumstances outside of your control, but that is probably not true for all people in that category.
The parent poster is being a bit overly specific, but the gist is correct: compatibility is mostly about finding someone who clears a list of minimum criteria (in contrast to the classically romantic notion of dating alluded to in the OP, which is more akin to finding a global maximum). Plenty of people may have relatively few criteria (are we roughly the same age? do we live in the same place? can we have children?), and so need less (or no) time in the dating pool to determine what their minimum criteria are. Other people are pickier and will spend more time figuring out what their deal-breakers are.
Experimentally, you are correct if the goal is to have a long-lasting marriage. People with small numbers of sexual partners before marriage are much less likely to get divorced than those with many sexual partners.
I think the primary requirement for making a relationship work is that both parties are committed to making it work. The problem is: we're not, because we've been fed fairy tales about True Love and we keep looking for a Mr/Mrs Perfect that doesn't exist.
Finding out what you don't want is definitely important too. Some people figure that out quickly, some go through a lot of drama before they finally figure it out. And I can certainly see how people who have trouble figuring out what they don't want, may enter a marriage that doesn't work out. But I also think that people who marry with relatively little dating, are more committed to making it work.
My wife and I talk about this occasionally. There's also a sort of prisoner's dilemma that disappears when you have both credibly committed to making it work. Suddenly each disagreement is... lower stakes(?) because you know that the other person is acting in good faith to solve it as well. Committing to make it work makes it easier to make it work.
This right here. Married for 16 years and took me a while to figure out the iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game with no winners in a marriage. We also call this game "why did you do it that way" and again there are no winners. The only way to win the game is ... (struggle not to make the War Games reference) for both parties to cooperate all the time. Therein lies the problem. Some people do not have the integrity to not take advantage of a spouse who is always cooperating. We call those people "not marriage material".
That's been my experience since getting married also. Disagreements are now low-stakes, time away from each other is low-stakes.. things are just way more chill because we've suddenly got all the time in the world and a belief that the other person is in it for the long haul.
Accepting the premise of:
"you have both credibly committed"(a nice phrase)
-> removes reason to be suspicious.
Removing suspicion -> removes fear.
Removing fear -> removes anxiety/anger.
Less suspicion, fear, anxiety and anger -> Less effort
Hence:
"Committing to make it work makes it easier to make it work." (another nice phrase)
On the one hand you are committing to work. Who wants to sign up for more of that!? On the other hand, it really does reduce the overall workload. Long term relationships may be less scary than people realise.
When my wife does something that irritates me, my first question is "What error in communication led to our team play resulting in this?", because I have already accepted she is not doing it from spite.
It really is like that. The less effort you put in with every choice in a relationship, the more work you'll end up having to do to save it later on. Every choice is a potential investment into your future together. A relationship is very much about doing fewer things wrong, because your default state is to be happy together.
Absolutely, the requirement is commitment to success. I used to believe in true love and finding the right person. About 10 years ago I went on a trip across China, and at one point joined a tour group for a few days. On that tour I got to know a couple who got married through an arraigned marriage. I grew up thinking that arraigned marriage was terrible, but what I saw in this couple was a more beautiful facet of love than I had ever witnessed. Each person was committed to making it work, learning to live with and love the other.
People who are in stable relationships are people who want to be in stable relationships. This is readily apparent when most find their spouse, significant other, love of their life or other half of the walnut in their small town, neighborhood, school, or place of work.
People like me, who have been dating forever, fool themselves when they think the issue is compatibility, not having found the right person, or other pedestrian rationalizations. The simplest and more likely explanation of the dating-forever syndrome (or pleasure, because I had a great time dating) is that consciously or sub-, we don't want to be in a stable relationship.
I've subconsciously burnt a number of opportunities to end up in a relationship with perfectly good women over the last few years. I work full time, I'm a single father and I'm studying. I get time to date between uni semesters but deep down I think I realise I don't have time for a stable relationship. At the same time I'm a human who has needs to develop connections with others, develop intimacy, etc. I don't see why dating-forever is seen as such a bad thing if you actually like dating.
Most of the norms of behavior and goals we find — at first – desirable are often nothing more than what novelist and people of imagination have repeatedly written or spoken about. But life is not a romance novel, there are rarely happy endings, and according to most people who got married, their spouse sounded more interesting a few years back. Why someone should be "the one"? How is it possible, if not by chance, that someone you find desirable in your 20s is still as desirable 30 years later? Then, when I hear that relationship need work to work, I want to run away as fast as Général du Pommeau. Next.
As it is often the case, it boils down to personality, character traits, and culture; if you are someone who is intrinsically and culturally driven to long-term, if not forever, relationships, fine. But if you are not, live your life and respectfully forget about what novelist and imaginative people have written about. I traveled the world on my own, dated everywhere, and fulfilled my childhood dreams of desire and be desired. I had a few multi-year relationships, but don't make me think about them or you'd ruin my day.
Had I listened to the spirit of the times or of the place, I would have ended up miserable, sad, and probably out of shape. Instead, when I am in bed and close to fall asleep, I often think about the exciting life I had, the amazing people I intimately knew, and the dreams I have for tomorrow. To each their own, always. And life has different phases and new desires will knock on my door, maybe a kid, maybe a long-term relationship, but always (I hope...) my choice.
I think there's an unwarranted assumption in most dating theory that some kind of psycho-social compatibility, whether pro- or anti-, is a primary decider of anything.
What if it's yet another illusion that the conscious mind is in control and, in fact, it's not really related?
The attractiveness to women of differences in major histocompatibility complex genes is a documented thing, for example [1], More loosely we've all known people who were most attracted/committed to people who, intellectually by lists of criteria, etc., even they'd agree made no sense for them.
> Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, they settle down.
I don't see how this suggests compatibility is an illusion. You just described another way of finding someone who is compatible. Personally I already had a mental checklist of everything I wanted out of a relationship, no dating around was necessary to know those things. Just basic introspection. I ended up marrying my second girlfriend and I would say the relationship is 100% perfect.
Seems like real-life more closely resembles Kepler’s “Marriage Problem” (later reformulated as the “Secratary Problem). https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/05/15/312537965/h... Its a solvable problem from optimal stopping theory. How many people should you date before you know enough to stop and settle (for the next person who’s better than than all the people you’ve dated thus far)? The answer’s x/e, where x can either be a maximum partner quantity, or thr number of years you give yourself to be on the open dating market.
I think what makes relationships work/fail is the relationship people have with themselves above all else.
At times I was lonely and miserable and wanted somebody in my life badly and in those times nobody ever was even remotely interested in me. The moment I did well and / or was also in a relationship it seemed like potential partners were all over me (it seemed almost unfair). Point I'm trying to make is people usually "date" for the wrong reasons. The moment they're in to find somebody to "complete themselves" they create a an unconscious demand on their partner which is the pre-programmed disaster that it will turn out to be. The moment I notice my date is "actively looking" I run.
To me the whole concepts of "dating" is very sterile. It's not in my culture maybe to have a formal process where you sniff each other with prepared questions and then after 3 years you check "where this is going". What has worked well for me is not ever to look for partners actively and the trick was always "the less I look the more opportunities I find" (strange that).
I think why most relationships don't last is because we literally suffocate everything that is good out of it. Usually it happens slowly so we don't notice (or tell ourselves things will get better - they usually don't). For most people it's just a way to build many small co-dependencies into a neurotic prison which they can be unhappy in but tell themselves "at least I feel secure". Some even think it's their mission to fix their partner (and all they do is set themselves up for pain).
Easy dating app: instead of making profiles and 'matching', just organize a bunch of dances, hikes, etc in a community and charge a nominal fee for membership. This will likely lead to much better matches than some silly algorithm.
some examples: if you end up "not single" you cannot cancel your membership and are obligated to keep paying through the agreed term, BUT are not allowed to participate in any events as they are "for singles only".
If they were upfront about that, I actually think it's a good thing. One of the big conflicts of interests for dating apps is that if they're too effective it's bad for business. They have a vested interest in keeping you on the platform as long as possible, but with this sort of payment process the company isn't punished for you finding a relationship.
The apps are particularly bad at this. Bumble in particular heavily promotes the profiles of people who are traveling. So when I go on vacation I get the dopamine hit of 10x more matches than usual, but with a decreased chance of actually forming a lasting connection. On the flip side when I'm not traveling probably 15% of the profiles I see are people at the nearest airport or flight attendants who live in other cities.
At work, we had a problem that's similar to the stable marriage problem. We ended up finding another combinatorial optimization problem called the "assignment problem" [0] that fit more closely with our problem. Here's a brief summary of the assignment problem:
Suppose you had people in two groups A and B where each individual in group A wants to pair up with an individual in group B and visa versa. If you can assign a "compatibility score" to each possible pair, then the goal is to find the set of pairs, where a pair consists of an individual from A and an individual from B, that maximizes the sum of the compatibility scores. In other words, the assignment problem is about finding the best 1:1 mapping between groups A and B when given a compatibility score for every possible pair between the groups of individuals.
This isn't how it works in the real world at all, though. People want to optimize for their own pair, with no regard for "maximizing the sum of all compatibility scores." In other words, I don't care about anyone else's marriage, I only want me and my partner to be as happy as possible.
Absolutely! I agree. To be clear, I brought up the linear sum assignment problem because it’s relevant, I liked reading about it, and perhaps someone else here would like to read about it too. At work, we applied the linear sum assignment problem when comparing results from a tracking algorithm to the truth data.
Schopenhauer believed that we can't control who we are attracted to, nature does, and further that the mates nature predisposes us to aren't the one most likely to make us happy, it's the ones most likely to produce genetically compatible offspring.
"Love... casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him... Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends..."
So what? Plenty of women write from their perspective, which could be taken as misandry.
There's something to learn by putting yourself in someone's shoes, and seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).
> Plenty of women write from their perspective, which could be taken as misandry.
Women writing from their perspective != misandry any more than men writing from their perspective is misogyny. Those words have specific definitions that you are abusing to make a false equivalency.
And what's wrong with calling out historical misogyny when it is presented as wisdom? That's not to say Schopenhauer has nothing useful to offer, but his misogyny isn't one of those things. It's no different from calling out racism in a similar historical context - like acknowledging that Winston Churchill was a great statesman and also simultaneously a very racist person.
Schopenhauer's misogynistic perspective has long been the default of much of society, so it doesn't need to be treated with kid gloves.
> seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).
18th century misogyny doesn't deserve the same hearing out as BLM protests against contemporary police brutality. That logic would also excuse the presentation of 18th century racism as a valid perspective today.
The article links to another article [1] at the same site for a description of the stable marriage problem. I don't think the description is right.
Here is the description:
> Find a stable matching between two equally sized sets of elements where each element has a preference ranking of all the elements in the opposite set.
> A matching is stable if there are no unstable pairings.
> An unstable pairing happens in the following example:
> A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 and A prefers 2.
Let's arbitrarily call the lettered set the males and the numbered set the females.
That definition of an unstable pairing cannot possibly be correct, because it is defined entirely in terms of male preferences.
For a pairing to be unstable you need a male who prefers a different female, and you need that female to prefer him over her current male. Only then are they both willing to ditch the current partner to form the new pair.
A correct definition of unstable pairing must involved conditions on both male preferences and female preferences.
It should be something like this:
> A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 over 2 and 1 prefers B over A.
related: nrmp kidney match (al roth is kind of a guru on this subject)
i tried to apply the results and thinking about matching and stability to a many to many matching problem between students and courses offered. i basically just wrote a bunch of bullshit in latex but it was fun. i cant remember now but i think there is often a set of stable matches, although maybe it can be empty- and finding them requires pretty savage computation. i remember some of the newest papers were just big nasty algorithms for finding the set of stable matches.
>> The 2010’s showed a monumental rise in online dating, and the number of people who have met their significant other online is only going to continue to grow.
> Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think people started to meet online before 2010.
Certainly, but back then meeting online was highly unusual and there was a period where online dating had a bit of a stigma. It's probably only been in the last decade or so that it's been fully normalized.
I met my now wife on OkCupid in 2005, and while not necessarily holding a stigma it would certainly raise comment. By 2010 it was no longer weird, and by 2015 not even worth mentioning.
COVID is throwing an interesting wrench into dating. No more bars, clubs, large social gatherings, everybody working or studying remotely, most people wearing masks in public, meeting in person carries the risk of contracting the virus.
Meeting a new romantic interest in person first is bound to take a big hit. Most first encounters will have to be through online dating apps. If the OKCupid study is to be believed, 80% of men on these apps will be frustrated from the inability of dating "within their league". What is this going to lead to?
There are a ton of papers on the properties of stable matching under random preferences. The classic paper (Pittel 1989 https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0402048?journalCode=s...) calculates the average rank of men and women for their partners under male-proposing Gale Shapley. They find the men's average rank is O(log(n)) and the women's average rank is O(n / log(n)). Depending on how you calculate percent advantage, that roughly matches your simulations.
The difference based on which side proposes turns out to be a knife-edge result for balanced markets! For imbalanced markets, the short side gets average rank `O(log(n))` in every stable matching and the long side gets `O(n / log(n))`
BTW What's up with Tinder granting for free global in discovery settings? I am the only lucky one? Never have I had an opportunity to swipe on so many single mothers 3000km away.
I think I will start to charge Tinder for my time...
I am interested in how dating apps are changing humanity. Starting with three assumptions:
1. Over several generations of successful partnering, Human cognition has become really good at estimating someone's "rank" as a potential mate (in the stable marriage problem sense).
2. Language, modern UX design schemes and dating apps do not have sufficient bandwidth to communicate all the signals needed to "rank" a potential mate.
3. Dating apps present the lowest bandwidth signals first (photograph, age, height etc) and expand out to higher bandwidth signals after an initial screening (Language, communication, cultural similarity etc in messages).
Putting these ideas together, it's possible that dating apps will reward an entire generation for optimizing for those narrow range of signals that work well on dating apps (and not reward investing into developing a well rounded personality). I would think that being good at Instagram, TikTok and Photoshop might almost become evolutionary advantages for today's 14 year olds as they grow older and start seeking partners.
How will this change our society after 5-6 generations of descendants who all found partners on dating apps? Should schools begin to teach 8 year olds how to photoshop away their bad hair days because one day it will become an essential skill to being successful at one of the most important human experiences?
A contest is only an evolutionary advantage if the winners reproduce more, or more successfully, than the losers.
So assuming you're not having babies with everyone you match with on tinder, having a large number of matches isn't actually an increase in fitness. I haven't seen any evidence that people who don't do well on dating apps don't actually end up reproducing... in fact it's possible less success in that realm could be correlated with stronger relationships when you do find someone - since you don't feel you have a million other options waiting in the wings.
Now having large number of matches means you have more to choose from, so perhaps you're likely to get a "better" partner - but this seems like it would be a fairly weak and therefore slow-acting selection bias.
Evolutionary success isn't about stronger relationships, it's about having more sex with less birth control and a basically safe environment for childhood survival.
A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in stable relationship, as can (to a lesser exteny) a woman who is so unstable that her children are adopted.
I was meaning stronger relationships, as in ones that are more likely to get to "let's have kids". But I'll meet you at your point, is stability in a relationship a bad strategy?
My answers would be:
1. it's debatable
2. there are multiple viable strategies
3. any theory about what increases fitness needs testing and ones like this are very hard to prove or disprove since the signals are noisy.
> A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in stable relationship
Theoretically can have, sure. But that doesn't instantly translate to that being a higher fitness strategy. For example - does that strategy work in practice, or only in theory? And if it does, what is the success of those offspring? An individual's reproductive success is only as good as their offspring's reproductive success. It's quite possible kids from stable homes are more likely to have more kids than those from unstable homes for a million subtle reasons.
>3. Dating apps present the lowest bandwidth signals first (photograph, age, height etc) and expand out to higher bandwidth signals after an initial screening (Language, communication, cultural similarity etc in messages).
The rest can be usually be surmised with a quick chat about where you grew up/live, the universities you attended, the firm you work at, and what you do for a living. After that, any nuances would probably require spending time with the other person, when the other person finally lets their guard down and you can see who they might be in the long term.
It could also be trivial for one of these dating apps to pull credit reports and incorporate them when offering matches, as well as asking the candidates to submit their last 3 to 5 years of tax returns.
The lowest bandwidth signals are not enough to secure reproductive success. It would be enough only in the scenario where the lured (with a nice photo) dating app user is immediately kidnapped when meeting the photo fabricator for the first time (and "prompted," to put it delicately, to reproduce). Even then, there is birth control.
The higher bandwidth signals (shared values, etc.) are what is used to determine a suitable match for reproduction, especially in more developed societies. You can see those values occasionally supersede actual romantic compatibility when it is common in some professionally competitive places (less time for dating - Bay Area, New York...) for two people in their 30s to agree to have a child together outside of marriage and with shared custody only because they
a) want a child
b) have not yet found a suitable romantic partner
c) the reproductive "partner" has shared values
That, in my opinion, is more likely to change humanity, especially as the above article demonstrates how much harder dating has become for everyone.
The rules of the game will remain the same (or even get worse for males): almost all females will reproduce (if they decide to do so) while a relevant chunk of males will not manage to do it. As an extreme example remember how reproduction works in an animal farm.
I'll chime in with my experience. I married a partner who gave me a strong sense of trust and we now have a child together and are a happy family. We are not very compatible in the sense that we have different mindsets and personalities but share values. We both agreed that rather than trying to change each other we should strive to complete each other instead. It is hard work, but I have the sense that marriage is never easy.
Previous to meeting each other I dated a bit more than she did. I did the online dating and it did not work at for my personality. We ended up being introduced by a common friend.
Edit: I think it may be relevant to the discussion. Im in my early 40s and she's in her late 30s so marrying was bound to happen at some point around this age.
> We are not very compatible in the sense that we have different mindsets and personalities but share values.
The way I've heard this phrased is that you don't want to marry someone with the same strengths as you, you want to marry someone who has the strengths you are lacking. You want someone who will complement you.
This is not something I was specifically looking for when I was dating. I wasn't very sure what I was looking for to be honest, I think I was trying find someone to get along with as well as be attracted physically. When I was dating I wasn't even looking for a wife and this is a bit of a problem with the dating culture, only few want to take this step. This is important because it take your life to a different level or completely wreck it if the marriage fails and end up with kids and bills
I used to work at a dating service pre-IntarWebz. Still had a matching algo. I started privately running some analyses looking to confirm or disprove my hunches. I will say this: it's still brutal out there.
A thing I think is interesting is that comparing my single friends to my married friends, there isn't really an obvious advantage the married friends have in terms of skills / attractiveness / etc. other than they decided they wanted to be married.
Someone with a mind to settle down can find someone to settle down with pretty quickly it seems. I'm sure there is more to it than that, but I'm not sure what.
I dunno. The place where I worked had some folks pretty desperate to get married who couldn't seem to make it happen. But almost every trend pointed out in this blog entry was something I saw from constantly entering data. It was very, uh, eye-opening at the same time it was quite a bummer.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] thread[1] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...
1. The person they are phantoming
2-N+1. All other phantom partners
N+1-2N+1. All other people.
If the person prefers not being married over all other available partners, then that will necessarily be a stable marriage. If they don't then the phantom partner will be able to find a match among the other unmatched phantom partners.
In any case, are homosexuals distributed equally over the area? My intuitive assumption is that they gravitate to larger cities for a variety of reasons (but less discrimination is probably a big one, since cities tend to be much more liberal and anonymous than the nation they are in), which would change the chances significantly.
Also the prevalence of "boyfriend twins" matches with what the site says - they end up with a partner of almost identical attractiveness because the curves for both of them match, and there's no bias in who makes the first move.
> I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women
See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their love interests sound foreign to us..
That sounds intriguing. Care to elaborate at all with any examples?
- Treating every person you date like a potential spouse instead of a potential friend
- Getting upset when your partner finds someone else attractive
- Caring about how many sexual partners someone has had in the past
- Remaining sexually monogamous in a relationship that has lost its sexual energy (i.e., 'dead bedroom')
Again, generalizations. I think straight people have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the values of western religions and government institutions that demand couples settle down indefinitely and singularly in high-stakes marriages. Soo much rests on finding the right partner, which can be very stressful, especially for women. They think that their desires have to be suppressed or changed to be happy, and have internalized ridiculous messages about sexual purity and how love is 'supposed to be'. However, us degenerates have always been shunned by those institutions and therefore can see the silliness in it, not that we don't have a huge heaping of silliness to deal with ourselves.
- Bog down with mortgages and children instead of hopping around the world, partying.
I opted for a kid and a mortgage because at least this way maybe one day me "and my son" will build an electromagnetic rail accelerator[1] and remote-controlled gliders and fly them around together.
The serious answer to that question is probably because straight couples mostly have biological children, with the associated biogenic time pressure driving FOMO. Adoption or surrogacy can in theory be put off indefinitely and I imagine a lot of male-male couples wind up doing just that.
[1] Terminology intentionally changed from "rail-gun" to emphasize peaceful applications to my gun-hating wife.
At a high level, one big difference is that straight couples can reproduce together. So its not merely looking for a partner in life, or a partner to help raise a child with. But for the prospect of merging your genes.
I think nowadays a lot of the behavior could be explained by values lingering. But I can also rationalize how in a more natural order, without contraception existing, the decision for two straight people to get together comes with a much higher risk/reward ratio. From this, entails that picking the best partner is much more important, and making sure they'll remain throughout the whole pragnency and afterwards to help and support, etc. All that seems to weigh on the decisions for two people to partner up in a straight relationship that doesn't seem as likely in a gay one.
Maybe those instincts remains in straight people, even though nowadays we have good contraception. Or maybe it's that values of such time still linger. Also, even with contraception, it be pretty weird for a straight couple to decide to find a suitable surrogate, so there's still that ultimate, would this be the genetic other of my child?
Also, we're both Seattle-area engineers, leading very career-oriented lives. One reason for marrying would be to mitigate financial risk when one of us tries to do something crazy.
Funny enough, our simple desire to leave a professional legacy has helped our immediate family greatly (e.g. I'm the one my parents or straight siblings go to for big cash emergencies, etc.)
The attraction comparison is mostly from me being pretty visual and noticing that many straight men are also quite visual.
Most people meet the kind of people they are attracted to in places where they are likely to congregate.
In other words hardly any population has uniform distribution.
Same sex dating is, sadly, still not entirely safe. A little anonymity and being out of arm's reach probably makes people feel a lot more comfortable (have you ever gone on a date when you were uncomfortable for some other reason? Did it end well?)
I don't recall if it was Dan Savage or something I read earlier than that, about how screwed gay men are in a mixed orientation environment, because a heterosexual male can use prolonged eye contact across a bar as an intro to approaching a woman, while some men see eye contact as aggression. If that person turns out to be a homophobe, the author theorizes that the odds of a violent end to this encounter has just gone up considerably. A gay bar or an online dating site sets a context, a social filter. If you crash and burn it's over quickly and you can move on.
If smart phones were available sooner I wonder how much faster that line would have gone up.
I think the author is confusing the probability of a “stable marriage” with the probability of a relationship.
What this says is you’d expect cheating to go up. As Chris Rock says, “you’re only as faithful as your options.”
Although this is all assuming people date to get married.
Tongue firmly in cheek, I bet a not insignificant number of people get married to stop dating.
TLDR: do the women have a similar advantage if they are the reachers?
Do you mean what would happen if the distributions were switched but men still make the first move? I could change up the script and run it again if that's what you mean!
Basically, dating in our modern world of few meaningful social connections is a vicious cycle for women. Men rate attractiveness on a normal distribution, women rate attractiveness on a pareto distribution. (ie. 80% of men are "meh" or worse to women.)
I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a complex rules engine for screening an endless pool of available men. (Male criteria for engaging a woman online is very low.) When you are a 29 year old female only considering seriously dating attractive jewish/catholic/athiest, asian/black/hispanic/irish/white/etc men 6'1" or taller in professional jobs (generally speaking or a specific gig) who have attribute X, Y, or Z, you're screwed.
Men will usually stop filtering earlier. They still get into awful relationships, but they don't filter out 80% of the population.
Here's a comment where I opine on this from a previous thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407388
"Bowling Alone" captured part of the phenomena 20 years ago. That hasn't changed. Even things like little leagues and soccer clubs for kids are declining in many ways and much more commercial activities than they were in the past. Even worship has changed -- high growth religious services are scaled-up entertainment and child care focused vs. community.
Personally, I don't buy into the notion that people have changed. People are people. I think the environment has changed and people are playing interacting with it based on the funnel they get sucked into.
The online dating services are listing real estate agents -- their interest is in a higher number of conversions per customer. They will optimize for that metric over time.
Is this based on the OkCupid blog? My speculation is what men on average look for (appearance) is easily communicated via online dating, but this is less so than women. I'd be interested to see what the same chart would look for people known in person, rather than just online.
> I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a complex rules engine for screening an endless pool of available men. (Male criteria for engaging a woman online is very low.) When you are a 29 year old female only considering seriously dating attractive jewish/catholic/athiest, asian/black/hispanic/irish/white/etc men 6'1" or taller in professional jobs (generally speaking or a specific gig) who have attribute X, Y, or Z, you're screwed.
There's data showing that women care more about "dating up" in education/social class, which has negatively impacts college educated women and men without a college education. This is due to the widening gap in college degree attainment in the US between men and women[0]. The book "It's Not You, It's Biology" does a good job of going into this.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-...
They just use looks as a massive first filter.
And people from certain backgrounds also use that background as a major filter.
Anyway, what happens is that women are invested less in the beginning, but as the relationship progresses it switches. The woman gets more attracted than the man, and starts putting up with more than him to keep her investment.
Baumeister and Tice did some daring studies:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2013...
fucking what?
FWIW, I have found online dating way harder than dating someone I met through friends/work/school. YMMV but my theory is having access to that many more people leads one (including myself) to sometimes think there's someone more attractive/interesting out there instead of giving what's available to them a strong chance.
I have two good friends who have been serial daters for years and they have Seinfeldian reasons as to why they didn't fit with someone. It made me think my God, "if everyone had your standards, literally no one would have a long term relationship." Interestingly, when I saw them date mutual friends back in Uni, the relationships were the longest they've had their entire lives.
I'm convinced that a lot of stable marriages from people I know around me wouldn't have happened if they had tried first meeting online instead of happenstance in IRL situations, because person A wasn't the typical ethnicity that marries person B, or person A is much older than person B and wouldn't have fit in the filter, or person A isn't particularly photogenic, etc.
I'm not trying to paint online dating as a bad thing as there are quite a number of success stories.
I come from a strong family culture (dozens of cousins, off-spring, good communication, >95% stable long-lasting marriages, etc.), and we were taught that there is no perfect match. Love isn’t a feeling, it is an act of the will for the good of the other.
Ergo, it’s your job to make the relationship work.
Millennials without robust world-views haven’t yet figured out that the ‘fear of missing out’ is devastating to their pursuit of happiness.
Last year I purchased a condominium in the downtown core of where I live and I thought the process was very similar. At the time the market was very competitive. It's a sequence of potential "offers" for which you make a binary decision and you cannot go back and must consider them in chronological order and there is no guarantee if you pass on a okay condo now that you will find a spectacular one down the line and prices will not be even less palpable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
Optimality breaks down when humans get involved. Because what most humans need is to believe they did a good job picking, which is quite a bit different. If the best solution falls into your lap you may continue spending energy on that decision forever, and that longing for what might have been is a big opportunity cost (which is magnified if your partner ever finds out about it). We have this sort of intuition that we have to put a bit of sweat equity into a decision before it feels good. Which may relate to the somewhat debunked theory of 'ego exhaustion'.
You may know what fridge you want but you have to keep showing options to your spouse because they aren't okay with the decision yet, and if you rush it then you'll regret it. You can spend that energy now, or you can make emotional interest payments for the life of the fridge. At work you sometimes have to do the wrong thing so that people get why the more expensive option makes sense.
What my friend was doing and what I see other people do, including myself, is make a list of targets of opportunity. 5% of the options are acceptable and I will stop when I get access to the first one in that category, be it a fridge, an islander, or a partner. This person is smart, funny, likes cats, and your family adores them, and you have chemistry so why not. You feel good with your decision, or at least you do at the time. You might still leave them six years later because it turns out those other things you didn't like overshadowed everything else, once you had to live in the same house. How many other potential matches went away during that time?
> Did I write all of this to justify why I'm single?
Despite the demotion of most masculist search results in Google and YouTube, if one skips the first page of results, the answers to the Stable Marriage Problem exist within MRA, Red Pill, MGTOW, and Manoshpere online articles and videos.
This statement is contradictory. Probably the author is using "exponentially" to mean quick growth. I suppose this is alright in common parlance, but I find it disturbing when people describe a function as exponential just because it is a superlinear polynomial.
It seems people out there have taken to using "exponentially" as a pseudo-scientific word meaning "a lot". i.e. "you're making my job exponentially more difficult"
Edit: fixed typo :)
I say this not to be rude, but to note that if we needlessly scrutinize each other's grammar, no one will be happy.
so it depends on whether "log enough scale" applies to both axes...
Then there's functions like n -> 2^2^...^2 with an exponential tower of height n. That's doesn't become linear with any finite number of logs...
https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
This is the kind of statement people should put in their dating profiles if they want fewer but better matches. No, I’m not teasing you (ok just a little). Show quirky elements of yourself, just keep the mood sunny rather than salty.
As a guy who lives polyamorous, this is an interesting observation.
Many guys told me that they try the poly life, because if they don't have to be "the one" for a women, their potential partners would give them a chance even if they aren't a 100% fit.
Somehow, only a few guys end up with multiple women.
Also seems to hold up on Tinder:
https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
Even after reading through the profiles and discarding many of the men with a big enough pile there is only so much time in the day to talk with the guys so why not start with the more attractive ones?
When you value intimate encounters with people you care about, there is an upper limit, even if you have multiple women waiting to date you.
The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.
>The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.
I didn't say they are good or bad.
I just said if you don't want casual sexual encounters, for whatever reason, you don't have much optimization options.
But even being far below that limit (e.g. one new partner a month for a few years) will statistically place in the extreme tail.
I don't work much, and besides friends and alone time I can handle 4 partners.
I'd say that's untrue if you're participating in a fairly healthy poly community.
I'm not sure what this is called, but your statement is basically just redundantly agreeing with me.
Edited for clarification.
We were talking past each other because my comments were basically saying "It isn't like this in general" but you never intended to communicate that claim. You were only talking about specific situations.
I'm of the opinion that online dating has been creating some real market problems; as you mention, communities were small and people met within their own circles back in the 60s. But nowadays there are millions of people just a swipe away, and FOMO can be really strong, and as such, supply/demand curves are extremely skewed.
Fun article!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583
[2] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/
What would be the percentage of people not being in a unstable pairing in order for men to not have any advantage over women ?
Without removing that, and assuming everyone pairs up, the "advantage" remains.
It is due to the fact that they are the one choosing first
A more apt comparison is how Hinge works. People don't need to actively go out and 'like' people, they can just sit and wait for likes to come in and they can choose if they want to match or not.
I would be very interested to see Hinge data for how often men give out likes versus women.
As soon as women decide to also approach, this advantage disappears.
Yes, if you're willing to face repeated rejection, if you're willing to bother people who aren't interested in you and ignore the guilt of having done so, then it's better to be the initiator.
See for example:
https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences/m...
As such, male advantage is probably a lot lower in the real world, if (hyperbolic) every woman has a different man on nr 1 of their preference list, and every man has the same woman as nr 1 of their preference list, all women could theoretically have their best possible partner, while only one man can.
Considering how much I hear about beauty standards and how they harm women, I almost never hear anything about male beauty standards.
If society is to be improved by having more realistic female beauty standards, then there's apparently a lot more headroom for society to be improved by having more realistic male beauty standards.
very strongly disagree, maybe this is true in some subset of the dating world, or non western countries, but that's it.
For example in Asian cultures there is the idea of 666 standard for males, 6 feet tall, 6 figure salary, 6 pack, which make up less than 0.01% of the eligible population. It may be due to the gender ratio being off, but the standard leaves a lot of women unhappy in their later years
But the other think is that the body shapes for males that showed up in entertainment were more various for males then for females. There was less perfection and more variety, but that is changing. Now it seems guys are moving toward similar restrictive requirements, so we may get there with guys too.
You need some more factors for that.
For most people any one of these point can be a deal breaker, even if he's a 10/10.
That is addressed halfway through the post. Methinks you didn't actually read the article.
The article is good enough to be read to the very end.
People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, they settle down.
This article https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ is not about a guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person that matched that criteria.
Would this be an appropriate place to share that story? Because I'm intrigued
Based on OP's description, it sounded like a company taken over by gangs, but it's really a for-profit social enterprise.
What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married.
Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a dating history with a lot of partners "to find out what they don't want". That said, I'm aware of the negative selection bias there.
This is not against what OP says, you could have some people who date less people and some who prefer to date a lot. At the end, both of them will probably settle down when they find one they like a lot
It is also about selection, but much more about ability to weed out abusive people and selfish people and so on. Of course also compatibility, clean freak will never be happy with messy person.
And those abilities form a lot in childhood, in family and with friends. They are also about your deep seeted values.
A lot of short relationships suggest either lack of interest in long term relationship or inability to form it.
The way hn talks about these issue always strikes me like a bunch of people who think people are machines and kind of don't undestand how people form relationships. Like qualifying a partner that don't fit some checkbox on original list someone was forced to make as "settling down". There is chemistry alias emotional and hormonal side to the whole thing, people.
Also, if you dated a lot of people who were genuinly unsuitable for long term relationship, issue really is either your selection or what you signal to good prospective partners. Like, abusers pick up certain types and stable guys/gals avoid certain types.
This is not to discount that there are treatments that really do work. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is an excellent example.
This is also not to deny that people who seek therapy on average do better than people who do not. That is clearly true, but it is unclear whether it is explained by "therapy worked" or the selection bias that "people who are demonstrate putting effort into their problems are likely to do better."
But it is a lot easier to make the claim that therapy helps than it is to demonstrate it. And given the combination of the replication crisis and widespread poor use of statistics, it is hard to trust most of the research into mental health treatments.
That said, most people who have been through therapy believe that it helped them. This is not actually evidence of effectiveness. Because that was true even for therapies such a Freudian psychology that are demonstrably ineffective. And even widespread belief in the effectiveness of treatments is not evidence either - as https://psmag.com/social-justice/75-years-alcoholics-anonymo... points out there is remarkably little evidence for 12 step programs for addiction. Despite testimonials and general belief to the contrary.
Edit: Collage education and getting first married at an older age significantly lower the odds of divorce. Which suggests having multiple prior relationships increase the odds of marriage success. However, we don’t have good statistics for this stuff.
People often avoid divorce and keep dead marriage because of inertia or fear of change. The massive life trasitions bring on stresses that test all of of that. And things are changing anyway at that point.
Divorce spikes around various life transitions occur because predictable events create predictable stresses that predictably are hard on marriages. Examples include the death of a child, children leaving the home, financial crisis, retirement and long-term illness.
Pairs who proved compatibility by settling down fast last longer because they are more likely to survive these stress points. However stress points are still stress points and "more likely to survive" still means that lots won't.
Personal disclaimer. I married at 20 to my second girlfriend. I was her first boyfriend. We did divorce..but only after 25 years. You can decide for yourself whether a 25 year marriage is evidence that we were more or less stable than an average couple.
I don’t think a relationship that ends is always worse than one that continues. Many stay together out of habit, fear, finances, having kids etc, continue long enough and someone is likely to die. Simply lasting a long time is thus a very poor measure of success. Arguably being happy, raising well adjusted kids, financial success, and or a host of other things could be considered a much better benchmark.
So I will turn it around, what’s the odds you would each have found a better partner or even become a better partner by looking longer?
I'm biased. But given her dating history since, I don't know that she would have done better than me.
You can not use statistic thay way. General stat for divorce does translate into individual one like this.
I'm guessing those marriages are likely correlated with strong shared religious beliefs[1] and closeness to extended families that help share the burden of raising children.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857783/#:~:tex....
Negative selection bias as in people who are less capable to maintain long term relationships are more likely to have a lot of dating history.
Conversely, people who are super easy going and great partners to be with may have very few people break up with them (and kind of succeed on the first try).
Or another way to put it: To have a long dating history with a lot of different partners, you need to have broken up (or been broken up with) quite a few times. This could be due to circumstances outside of your control, but that is probably not true for all people in that category.
People that have dated few people might be more likely to share a similar approach to relationships.
https://youtu.be/zDn3zmumb8o?t=10
Finding out what you don't want is definitely important too. Some people figure that out quickly, some go through a lot of drama before they finally figure it out. And I can certainly see how people who have trouble figuring out what they don't want, may enter a marriage that doesn't work out. But I also think that people who marry with relatively little dating, are more committed to making it work.
My take on your comment.
Accepting the premise of: "you have both credibly committed"(a nice phrase) -> removes reason to be suspicious.
Removing suspicion -> removes fear. Removing fear -> removes anxiety/anger. Less suspicion, fear, anxiety and anger -> Less effort
Hence: "Committing to make it work makes it easier to make it work." (another nice phrase)
On the one hand you are committing to work. Who wants to sign up for more of that!? On the other hand, it really does reduce the overall workload. Long term relationships may be less scary than people realise.
When my wife does something that irritates me, my first question is "What error in communication led to our team play resulting in this?", because I have already accepted she is not doing it from spite.
Here is a movie that satirizes the 'whitelist' approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lobster
As it is often the case, it boils down to personality, character traits, and culture; if you are someone who is intrinsically and culturally driven to long-term, if not forever, relationships, fine. But if you are not, live your life and respectfully forget about what novelist and imaginative people have written about. I traveled the world on my own, dated everywhere, and fulfilled my childhood dreams of desire and be desired. I had a few multi-year relationships, but don't make me think about them or you'd ruin my day.
Had I listened to the spirit of the times or of the place, I would have ended up miserable, sad, and probably out of shape. Instead, when I am in bed and close to fall asleep, I often think about the exciting life I had, the amazing people I intimately knew, and the dreams I have for tomorrow. To each their own, always. And life has different phases and new desires will knock on my door, maybe a kid, maybe a long-term relationship, but always (I hope...) my choice.
What if it's yet another illusion that the conscious mind is in control and, in fact, it's not really related?
The attractiveness to women of differences in major histocompatibility complex genes is a documented thing, for example [1], More loosely we've all known people who were most attracted/committed to people who, intellectually by lists of criteria, etc., even they'd agree made no sense for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_odour_and_sexual_attracti...
I don't see how this suggests compatibility is an illusion. You just described another way of finding someone who is compatible. Personally I already had a mental checklist of everything I wanted out of a relationship, no dating around was necessary to know those things. Just basic introspection. I ended up marrying my second girlfriend and I would say the relationship is 100% perfect.
Say what?? Sounds like there's an interesting story here...
At times I was lonely and miserable and wanted somebody in my life badly and in those times nobody ever was even remotely interested in me. The moment I did well and / or was also in a relationship it seemed like potential partners were all over me (it seemed almost unfair). Point I'm trying to make is people usually "date" for the wrong reasons. The moment they're in to find somebody to "complete themselves" they create a an unconscious demand on their partner which is the pre-programmed disaster that it will turn out to be. The moment I notice my date is "actively looking" I run.
To me the whole concepts of "dating" is very sterile. It's not in my culture maybe to have a formal process where you sniff each other with prepared questions and then after 3 years you check "where this is going". What has worked well for me is not ever to look for partners actively and the trick was always "the less I look the more opportunities I find" (strange that).
I think why most relationships don't last is because we literally suffocate everything that is good out of it. Usually it happens slowly so we don't notice (or tell ourselves things will get better - they usually don't). For most people it's just a way to build many small co-dependencies into a neurotic prison which they can be unhappy in but tell themselves "at least I feel secure". Some even think it's their mission to fix their partner (and all they do is set themselves up for pain).
A timeless classic on the psychology of relationships: Scott Peck "The Road less Traveled" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr... (one of my top 10 fav books I ever read (and I read a lot).
edit: my experience working for a dating startup called Friendscout24 (a total horror show) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18713837
The downside is there's a lot of overlap between "people who are online dating" and "people who aren't good in group social settings".
Source (among many): https://www.complaintsboard.com/events-and-adventures-possib...
some examples: if you end up "not single" you cannot cancel your membership and are obligated to keep paying through the agreed term, BUT are not allowed to participate in any events as they are "for singles only".
The apps are particularly bad at this. Bumble in particular heavily promotes the profiles of people who are traveling. So when I go on vacation I get the dopamine hit of 10x more matches than usual, but with a decreased chance of actually forming a lasting connection. On the flip side when I'm not traveling probably 15% of the profiles I see are people at the nearest airport or flight attendants who live in other cities.
Suppose you had people in two groups A and B where each individual in group A wants to pair up with an individual in group B and visa versa. If you can assign a "compatibility score" to each possible pair, then the goal is to find the set of pairs, where a pair consists of an individual from A and an individual from B, that maximizes the sum of the compatibility scores. In other words, the assignment problem is about finding the best 1:1 mapping between groups A and B when given a compatibility score for every possible pair between the groups of individuals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem
"Love... casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him... Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends..."
That's Schopenhauer demonstrating his well attested misogyny.
There's something to learn by putting yourself in someone's shoes, and seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).
Women writing from their perspective != misandry any more than men writing from their perspective is misogyny. Those words have specific definitions that you are abusing to make a false equivalency.
And what's wrong with calling out historical misogyny when it is presented as wisdom? That's not to say Schopenhauer has nothing useful to offer, but his misogyny isn't one of those things. It's no different from calling out racism in a similar historical context - like acknowledging that Winston Churchill was a great statesman and also simultaneously a very racist person.
Schopenhauer's misogynistic perspective has long been the default of much of society, so it doesn't need to be treated with kid gloves.
> seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).
18th century misogyny doesn't deserve the same hearing out as BLM protests against contemporary police brutality. That logic would also excuse the presentation of 18th century racism as a valid perspective today.
Here is the description:
> Find a stable matching between two equally sized sets of elements where each element has a preference ranking of all the elements in the opposite set.
> A matching is stable if there are no unstable pairings.
> An unstable pairing happens in the following example:
> A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 and A prefers 2.
Let's arbitrarily call the lettered set the males and the numbered set the females.
That definition of an unstable pairing cannot possibly be correct, because it is defined entirely in terms of male preferences.
For a pairing to be unstable you need a male who prefers a different female, and you need that female to prefer him over her current male. Only then are they both willing to ditch the current partner to form the new pair.
A correct definition of unstable pairing must involved conditions on both male preferences and female preferences.
It should be something like this:
> A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 over 2 and 1 prefers B over A.
[1] https://www.arvarik.com/visiting-the-stable-marriage-problem
i tried to apply the results and thinking about matching and stability to a many to many matching problem between students and courses offered. i basically just wrote a bunch of bullshit in latex but it was fun. i cant remember now but i think there is often a set of stable matches, although maybe it can be empty- and finding them requires pretty savage computation. i remember some of the newest papers were just big nasty algorithms for finding the set of stable matches.
> Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think people started to meet online before 2010.
Certainly, but back then meeting online was highly unusual and there was a period where online dating had a bit of a stigma. It's probably only been in the last decade or so that it's been fully normalized.
Meeting a new romantic interest in person first is bound to take a big hit. Most first encounters will have to be through online dating apps. If the OKCupid study is to be believed, 80% of men on these apps will be frustrated from the inability of dating "within their league". What is this going to lead to?
Statistically speaking, higher bandwidth costs for pornhub.com and if things were open some more crazy mass shooters?
Edit: reference is Ashlagi et al (2015). "Unbalanced Random Matching Markets: The Stark Effect of Competition" http://web.mit.edu/iashlagi/www/papers/UnbalancedMatchingAKL...
I think I will start to charge Tinder for my time...
1. Over several generations of successful partnering, Human cognition has become really good at estimating someone's "rank" as a potential mate (in the stable marriage problem sense).
2. Language, modern UX design schemes and dating apps do not have sufficient bandwidth to communicate all the signals needed to "rank" a potential mate.
3. Dating apps present the lowest bandwidth signals first (photograph, age, height etc) and expand out to higher bandwidth signals after an initial screening (Language, communication, cultural similarity etc in messages).
Putting these ideas together, it's possible that dating apps will reward an entire generation for optimizing for those narrow range of signals that work well on dating apps (and not reward investing into developing a well rounded personality). I would think that being good at Instagram, TikTok and Photoshop might almost become evolutionary advantages for today's 14 year olds as they grow older and start seeking partners.
How will this change our society after 5-6 generations of descendants who all found partners on dating apps? Should schools begin to teach 8 year olds how to photoshop away their bad hair days because one day it will become an essential skill to being successful at one of the most important human experiences?
So assuming you're not having babies with everyone you match with on tinder, having a large number of matches isn't actually an increase in fitness. I haven't seen any evidence that people who don't do well on dating apps don't actually end up reproducing... in fact it's possible less success in that realm could be correlated with stronger relationships when you do find someone - since you don't feel you have a million other options waiting in the wings.
Now having large number of matches means you have more to choose from, so perhaps you're likely to get a "better" partner - but this seems like it would be a fairly weak and therefore slow-acting selection bias.
A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in stable relationship, as can (to a lesser exteny) a woman who is so unstable that her children are adopted.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/europe/jan-karbaat-fertility-...
My answers would be:
1. it's debatable
2. there are multiple viable strategies
3. any theory about what increases fitness needs testing and ones like this are very hard to prove or disprove since the signals are noisy.
> A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in stable relationship
Theoretically can have, sure. But that doesn't instantly translate to that being a higher fitness strategy. For example - does that strategy work in practice, or only in theory? And if it does, what is the success of those offspring? An individual's reproductive success is only as good as their offspring's reproductive success. It's quite possible kids from stable homes are more likely to have more kids than those from unstable homes for a million subtle reasons.
The rest can be usually be surmised with a quick chat about where you grew up/live, the universities you attended, the firm you work at, and what you do for a living. After that, any nuances would probably require spending time with the other person, when the other person finally lets their guard down and you can see who they might be in the long term.
It could also be trivial for one of these dating apps to pull credit reports and incorporate them when offering matches, as well as asking the candidates to submit their last 3 to 5 years of tax returns.
The higher bandwidth signals (shared values, etc.) are what is used to determine a suitable match for reproduction, especially in more developed societies. You can see those values occasionally supersede actual romantic compatibility when it is common in some professionally competitive places (less time for dating - Bay Area, New York...) for two people in their 30s to agree to have a child together outside of marriage and with shared custody only because they
a) want a child b) have not yet found a suitable romantic partner c) the reproductive "partner" has shared values
That, in my opinion, is more likely to change humanity, especially as the above article demonstrates how much harder dating has become for everyone.
Edit: I think it may be relevant to the discussion. Im in my early 40s and she's in her late 30s so marrying was bound to happen at some point around this age.
The way I've heard this phrased is that you don't want to marry someone with the same strengths as you, you want to marry someone who has the strengths you are lacking. You want someone who will complement you.
I can see how someone could easily get stuck in the idea of "dating" as a thing.
I got married at 23, so I guess that's a stage of my life I didn't spend much time in.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html
Someone with a mind to settle down can find someone to settle down with pretty quickly it seems. I'm sure there is more to it than that, but I'm not sure what.