> The 55-year-old social worker now spends her weekends on the dancefloors of illegal....
“Recently, I met a younger man with an amazing body. It was probably the best sex of my life.”
In dating app you can filter out old people. So this old person would not have a chance there!
Her only chance is in night club, where she can rape drunken guys! People who drink alcohol can not give a consent! And that guy wery likely regrets it, when he wakes up in the morning!
This is an absurd overextension of the word rape. Even if you were completely right that the young guy wouldn't have taken that decision sober and that he regretted it the next day (which you are just assuming based on 0 knowledge), as long as she didn't coerce him into getting drunk, he was of legal age, and he wasn't blackout-levels of drunk, it's absurd to call this rape.
Drunk but conscious people are very much able to consent. One of the main reasons people engoy being drunk in night clubs is the kind of reduced inhibitions that lead to talking to and having sex with people outside your regular dating choices.
Yes, absolutely. If a woman is getting drunk in a club and she goes home with some older dude that looks hot in the alcohol fumes and has sex that later she regrets, she did not get raped. Is that controversial in any way?
You were right maybe 20 years ago. But now many judicial precedents t say otherwise!
> Drunk but conscious people are very much able to consent
"Conscious" is highly individual state. I would strongly recommend you to look up current situation, it may prevent a very nasty situation, where judge has a different opinion!
Most guys I know take god knows what drugs, mixed with vodka and Redbull... Far from shining beacon of "consciousness". But they are still able to walk and talk, and somehow get home...
> If a person is prevented from resisting by an intoxicating or anesthetic substance, or a controlled substance, and this condition was known, or reasonably should have been known by the accused.
Look up statutory rape, duress... If you want some actual cases, search at relevant forums. I am really not going to give legal advice here.
> People who drink alcohol can not give a consent!
Your quote quote clearly does not say people who drink alcohol cannot give consent. In fact, it says:
> If a person is prevented from resisting by an intoxicating…
Do you not understand that that is not the same thing? You made the claim that someone drinking one beer cannot give consent. Nowhere does your quote support that claim.
This is how statutory rape works. Consent is invalidated by a law!
If person are intoxicated, they are prevented from resisting. So even if they give a verbal consent, this consent is invalidated by section 261 (a)(3), because they were prevented from resisting.
You ignored my post. Drinking a beer does not prevent one from resisting. Frankly you don’t seem to be understanding the statue you posted.
Your position is ludicrous. It would imply that a married couple in California can’t have sex without it being rape if one (or both?) drink a single glass of wine with dinner. Think over the argument you’re making.
Wow, how dehumanizing for older people. You seem to take offense only to the fact that this person is 55 years old? I don't see anyone calling it "rape" when the rest of the population is engaging in drunken sex at nightclubs.
Not only OnlyFans profiles, but also Instagram. Some want to get to a few thousand followers and use it, I know even some people in relationships that did it.
And then there's the bots which just start a generic conversation and recommend some Clash of Clans clone or something.
But as mentioned, you realize that in the first 5 mins of interaction.
OkCupid was really well thought out for making matches for relationships. The double connection nature of the questions that allowed not just answering questions but also what answers you'd accept and how strongly you felt about those answers was great. It also did a nice job of sussing out people's true personalities. The more questions they answered the more difficult it was to hide their true selves. One of my favorite examples of this was a question about why birds don't get harmed when they land on power lines. The question could be used to gauge a person's technical knowledge but the answer "They do but they express it poorly" was a signal of a sense of humor. Lots of questions were variations on each other but written differently which is another way of getting to a person's true core.
The OKCupid model doesn't have the same short-term profits and/or VC returns as desperate people shelling out for dating app subscriptions, so nobody will fund it.
How much does it actually cost? You set up a website. You put ads for chocolates and flowers on the site so you can recover your expenses. It's not like you have to build a state of the art fab. It's basically a messaging app, which is the sort of thing individuals have built as a side project.
Moderating it is spam filtering. You limit signups to IP addresses in the the country of your target market and then ban signups from any IP address that tries to send an excessively large number of messages or has an excessively high block rate.
At that point you're down to real users who are jerks, the solution to which is the block button and a message sorting algorithm that takes into account how many times it's been used against someone.
No, it won't be worth billions, that's kind of the point. It should be possible to do it efficiently so that the operating costs are low and it doesn't need to make billions in order to be sustainable and outcompete the incumbents.
As to why I don't do it, maybe I will -- but I wouldn't object if someone beat me to it. Because it still requires some combination of time and money, the amount of which can be feasible without being zero, and it's quite likely that of all the people in the world, someone who isn't me is in a better position to pull it off before I do.
> just make a new site that works like the old OkCupid
Is such a thing even possible in today's world where attention spans are measured in seconds thanks to a decade of social media and endless pursuit of "engagement"?
They all start with less than 5000 users. Everyone is constantly complaining about the incumbents. Go to where they're complaining and tell them you've done it properly. Since you actually have, they tell others.
That's not how network effects work. Your complainers will go back to their subreddit and complain that your dating app is empty and all the profiles they're matched up with are 500km away.
The only way to have a fighting chance is to start in a single metropolis (eg New York), and try to get everyone to coordinate trying at once. Since the demographics of people complaining about dating sites online is a bit small (and selects for the kinds of clients you don't want), you've got to advertise more broadly, eg with ads on Youtube or in the metro. That gets expensive.
You don't actually need everyone to sign up at once. Once someone signs up you send them emails when they get a match. When there aren't as many people they don't get as many emails, but now they're on the site, which creates more matches for people who join tomorrow.
People need some way to find out about it, but not everything has to be corporate. Wikipedia has this page which ranks near the top for search queries like "list of online dating sites":
You're an online dating service, so you get added to pages like that where people end up when they're looking to choose an online dating service. And then your site compares well against the other ones that are screwing everyone -- look how few of the heterosexual dating apps have free messaging. So people sign up and give it a try.
You make sure your site is listed in places like that where people go to find dating sites, and people find it. And the more people find it, the more useful it gets, because that is how network effects work. At which point people start recommending it and you get even more users.
Another possibility is allowing people to sign up for waiting lists, and as soon as you have enough people in certain locations, you let them in. There's lots of possibilities of launching this correctly.
Sure, there's a lot of clever ways to get an audience as a dating site, and I've seen many sites with clever marketing tactics. The success rate is still abysmal.
One problem that a new site/app would face is that, to be useful, it would need a geographical density of users. If you have 100k people signed up, but they're spread out across north America or Europe or wherever, then very few of those people will ever meet irl. So at best you have a messaging site for lonely people, but more likely just an unsustainable business. Achieving the necessary user density needs scale and advertising budget.
Something highly local might work in a big enough city like Paris/London/NYC.
There was a really nice app that would literally create a curated dating app profile for you and free appointments with a dating coach etc. I ran into a while back, unfortunately all of the users were so far away it was completely useless lol
Because it became 5x as hard to do this well in 2023. The legal and community landscape changed immensely. Moderation needs to be top, and for that, profits and engagement, which is why you see the Tinder-like model.
Online dating is now pay to win, how else would a dating site make money? It's not like the old days when throwing Google Adsense ads in between profiles could pay the bills.
Found my wife on OKCupid back when it was still good in 2011. Haven’t used a dating app since, but their decline makes me pretty sad, I have fond memories of using it.
OkCupid was full of weirdos, though. Source: I was one of them.
Tinder hit on to a psychological hack that allowed normal people to use it. It's something to do with plausible deniability. Setting up a real dating profile signals that you know what you want but implies that you are lonely/unhappy. Tinder gives that vibe of "I'm just swiping, look at all these losers, I'm just having fun". So normies went on it too.
It doesn't help that all the dating apps get bought up by the same company. Almost feels like a space that needs a non profit to run it, so it can be focused on making good relationships rather than hawking subscriptions to desperate people.
I CTO'd a fairly successful dating site for 4 years. I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments.
Instead, i think dating sites' issues are more fundamental. Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf. Now have everyone vote on which of the 11 profiles is the most "you". Do you believe yours comes in first? How about top 5?
When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others. Your friends and family see you as you present. Only you see yourself as you intent.
The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves. Any matchmaking app is thus matching my "Online Dating Approximation" with your "Online Dating Approximation". The hope is that if our approximations match, we can extrapolate us matching? Weak connection in my experience.
I think this is why Tinder and Bumble have had so much success with their frankly superficial model. At least the online vs reality is closer than more in-depth matching schemes. But we still hear tales of cat/hat-fishing, so maybe they suffer the same issues.
None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person. To be seen if any get there, but there is just no substitute for getting to know someone in person vs flipping through people online.
The story is about how Tinder and Bumble are in decline. The superficial model isn’t working anymore.
I think the issues are much more fundamental than you suggest. They’re societal and they’re subcultural within the apps. For one, people are much pickier now than they’ve ever been. On the other hand, the dating apps have this filtration problem: those who successfully form a relationship quit the app, possibly for life.
Unfortunately, it’s not random when people form successful relationships. Some people are just much better at it than others. This is where the filtration problem arises: over time, the concentration of people who aren’t good at forming relationships increases, as these are the folks who stay in the apps the longest. This makes it harder and harder to find a relationship through the apps, and frustration ensues.
The filtration problem isn't app specific, that's life. For example, looking for partners at 40 is very difficult, and the population of singles has been very filtered.
With respect to the apps, you have to realize the filtering problem comes to a steady state, where new "dateables" in equals "datables" out. This isn't necessarily a problem
I think the time constant might be larger than the lifetime of any of the dating apps so far.
Unless the "undateable" person gives up and accepts staying single forever, they may stay on the platform for a decade or more. Maybe with decreasing activity/time investment, but still an active user eligible for matching. That's longer than I'd expect a dating platform (or any random software startup in general) to thrive.
A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches
> A lot of these profiles stay on the site and appear active when the user has moved on. That’s good for the company but bad for actual people looking for matches
It would seem that the obviously good solution to this is to hide profiles if the user hasn't been active in a certain time period. Say, 30 days?
Of course, that's not good for the company metrics. They have to inflate their numbers somehow, and so including accounts that aren't being used anymore in their subscriber count makes them look good!
I imagine there’s a relationship between this accumulation of singles and population growth rates. It would be interesting to compare the demographic flows of online dating in countries with aging populations vs populations that are trending younger over time.
Maybe for some people. Personally I don’t find it very interesting. From the people I know on Instagram, the pictures they take and the stories they write are extremely curated and artificial.
It’s like deciding to date a famous actress based on a character she played in a movie. She may look like the character but personality and interest-wise she’s unlikely to be anything even remotely resembling the character!
This really takes the artificiality of the dating profile and explodes it to an incredible degree. I’d much rather meet someone through a common interest and start dating organically. That’s basically what the article is saying is coming back.
do we actually have any evidence this is true? people have complained about dating since we were neanderthals; articles like this have written themselves for the past decade
I've heard tinder users say they are picky because swiping yes on too many reduces your visibility (or something like that). That seems like a bad incentive to make people take chances on each other.
> Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf.
This works for what you like as well, your close friends or family will likely write down a better list of what you like than you would do. We aren't honest about what we like since we want to say "I like to exercise" or "I like to cook" instead of less noble things that would describe you better. This makes it really hard to match people who would like each other since they aren't honest about what they would like in a partner.
Anyway, the main problem is that you have to sell yourself online. It isn't natural to sell ourselves, we learn who people are by seeing what they do not by listening to them talk about themselves.
> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love.
Back in the day, okcupid did this for me. I'm quirky, and expect the same in dates. It wasn't just a biography, you could see their answers to all sorts of random crap. This gave a fuller picture of a person. Of course, I had already learned that falling in love online was a bright red flag, so my expectation was somewhat less than finding that monkey brain chemistry: I was looking for people who I could tolerate (and vice verse!) long enough to figure that part out.
After my first marriage ended, apps had all turned into tindr, and it seems that quirky folks end up in the generic loser pile, while the top 1-10% are doing bloodsport. Fortunate for me, I'm on the empathetic side of quirky and connecting with people in person is easy enough if I put myself out there. But there's the rub: solo tindr binges make me feel miserable, going out and living makes me feel alive -- and that's what people are attracted to.
I have not used any dating app in the past decade. OKC was last platform, while in graduate school. I LOVED the "percent match" but across multiple profiles (over a few years) I learned how "to game" their system by only answering certain impactful (but not damaging) questions.
If you have not read Christian Rudder's "DATACLISM" book (he is a co-founder of Match group, writing on their data analytics blog), it is FULL of "human condition", via charts/diagrams/analysis.
My past two relationships have been via dating neighbors, which I do not actually recommend (as more successful).
OkCupid was awesome. I met my wife there ten years ago. We were a 93% match! Had many of the same (or similar) answers to the personality questions.
Interestingly, a few months before meeting my now wife, I dated a girl I met on Meetup who also happened to be on Match. Our relationship only lasted a few months. We were a 72% match or something like that. Go figure!
Yes, the observation from someone in the industry is that the top 10-20% are "date bacon" and have no trouble meeting people, and everyone else is a loser.
In my brief recent experience in the app world, spam wasn't a huge problem. Maybe it's worse for men, but the spam accounts and messages I saw were all vapid normies who I'd never click on. I got much less of that than weird (but unfortunately real) aggro dudes who wanted me to see their dicks. (Often by insisting we move to another messaging platform with less consent control)
+1 for OkCupid. I met a lot of the most important persons there who even stayed friends. It is one of the sad examples of MBAs destroying an app they don't understand saying the "UX ix too tedious".
There was a post on HN once by a former OkCupid person who, as I read it, took a more nuanced view along the lines of: the market moved to cellphones and that kind of long form entry (or reading) isn't viable on a few-inch screen with point and grunt input.
Beyond an insider sharing the view, I find it compelling because it didn't require anyone to have been an idiot. I've certainly seen other effects that look like the widespread usage of cellphones dumbing down the internet in disappointing ways. ... and it explains why someone doesn't just recreate the magic that OkCupid had: they can't. For classic-OkCupid to exist the public needs widespread access to a communications tool suitable for sending things more nuanced than dick pics.
I think what also people miss - is that by OkCupid requiring long form essays. the demographic would tend to be educated college folks - quirky gals studying humanities, chemistry etc.
so you literally have a crowd of people who like reading, and are critical thinkers etc & most likely to be high earners too.
but like every thing - the power of the lowest common denominator rules ie endless swiping on who you think is hot.
this doesn't end with apps -- with forums gone -- you can hardly find places online where civilized discourse happens.
now everything is just for the 'gram. or to go viral on tiktok.
Competition is supposed to give us choice. Instead, when one competitor discovers a cheap trick, the rest have to follow suit to stay alive, or at least believe they do. Hence there are a half dozen dating apps that all offer the same fucking swipe right garbage. OKCupid was pretty good, before the ubiquity of smartphones.
OkCupid was great in the early 2010s when you used it mainly on a website and before it was bought and enshittified by the Match group just like all other dating sites.
It seems like it would be easy to recreate that magic -- it's just a website after all -- but getting the requisite network effects would be pretty much impossible. And if by some miracle you did succeed, Match group would just buy it and ruin it.
you should go get an MBA, it's the closest thing you'll ever find to surrounding yourself with more interesting OKCupid-from-back-in-the-day characters than you can possibly date through in 2 years!
Meaning, if you don't think MBAs understand OKCupid, they do. But they also understand match.com
Plenty of fish was the only good one. It sucked and did no matching at all. That meant there was an expectation that you basically exchange 2 messages and then meet in person. All the rest is bs: people are not the same in person as online, so the main job of a dating app is to get people in chairs in person asap
I tried that one in my last foray into online dating. It was how you describe: simple, no b.s. Only, it was pretty much dead and I quickly met up with the two active people on the site and abandoned it. (Slight exaggeration, I'm sure)
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. What the profile says is not just a list of bullet points of facts. How it says what it says is in my opinion a more reliable signal than the facts contained in it.
Anyone can say that they are funny, and loves to travel. Can they write it funny? The kind of funny wich meshes with your funny? Are they insightfull? Empathic? Judgemental? Confident? Do they have lots of insecurities? These scream of the page from between the words even if, and perhaps especially so if the person is unaware of them.
But of course that only works if they wrote the words themselves. Otherwise i might as well ask them for the phone number of that relative of them who wrote their profile.
There's also the fact people only have a somewhat accurate idea of what they'll actually like in a partner. Maybe you only think you'll like someone who's always direct, or who wants to be submissive in bed, or is financially responsible.
> When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others.
Sure, but this is not unique to dating sites. When meeting anyone on a first date IRL we present the best version of ourselves. It takes time for people to get to know each other, and whether they first meet online or in a bar is not much different. Meeting IRL obviously has more signals than seeing a digital profile, but a digital profile is somewhere in between a glance and a wink at a bar, and having an in-person conversation with someone.
The really insidious aspect of dating sites is how exploitative they can be, and "they only stay in business by keeping you single" is fairly accurate. On Tinder, you never truly know whether you're not getting likes because of your profile, or because their algorithm has decided to effectively shadowban you. Your only option would be to buy boost packs and super-likes to even get a chance to be seen.
There's a large market opportunity for a dating site that is actually transparent and not exploitative.
The problem in Korea at least isn't with meeting people (well, for 80% of the population), it is young couples feeling they can't meet the finances required to satisfy social norms, and thus deciding to delay the marriage-kids sequence indefinitely.
Several of my coworkers had been dating for 5+ years, but they were only making $50k annually (early career engineers). The socially expected family-sized condo costs $500k to $1M, and the young couple is expected to buy and furnish it before their wedding.
> I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments.
Yeah? I think your comment, as someone that got paid by this market, completely miss the mark. People aren't tired of dating apps because they don't know how to use it, this is just a patronizing comment of someone that made money out of it, probably pushing features that made you guys stay in the business because you kept single people in the app.
> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love.
Now you should review the comments and your opinion then you might get so some conclusion related to why none of those apps works long-term for the user, including the one you were responsible for.
> The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves.
I once asked my therapist what she thought of an idea where therapists did double-duty as matchmakers, serving as a kind of gatekeeper, where they only set you up with someone once they saw you really did the work and moved past whatever was holding you back in your relationships, thus protecting the market from "lemons". She said it wouldn't work and didn't go into the details; over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing.
Who you really are is someone who is always a work in progress. No dating profile could ever capture that - and it's unreasonable to expect one to ever succeed at doing so. And if someone isn't changing and growing - they should work on that before blaming their dating profile.
> So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing.
Clearly this. Many people think that therapy is just like going to a doctor that will fix you in a moment with the right pill (well, or in a few sessions). But really it's like having a personal trainer. They can guide you but you need to sweat it yourself if you want improvements.
>over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience.
And for me, I only got angrier at the artificial experience and more or less gave up, focusing on a career where I feel I do have impact.
I don't know, I guess everyone will process the ordeal differently. I never liked the idea of stuff like Twitter or Facebook to begin with, so I wasn't surprised that a social media website dedicated to the messiest part of courtship would drive me over the edge.
Huh? You were the CTO of a dating app, you start a line with “more fundamental…” What was the ratio of active women to active men? That seems to be most important.
Like dating apps are something like 5-95 active women to active men. If my dating app were 50-50, dude, I could make my app like the WeChat shake to match, and it will perform better than profiles or swiping or whatever big philosophical ideas you have.
On our app we were about 60% women to 40% men. Nonbinary made up a small enough % to round to zero. DAU/MAU were roughly the same, though you might see seasonal swings toward one or another.
I have a hard time with this. For one, a dating site where there is 3 women for every 2 men is such an anomaly in itself, and then when word gets out that "hey, it's a dating site that isn't a total sausage fest" (to be blunt), then I can't see that ratio doing anything but skewing rapidly in the direction of every other dating site.
For the reason you describe we consciously chose to never talk publicly about gender ratios. Having predominately female users (or even close to 50/50 actives) tends to attract people for the wrong reasons.
By "wrong reasons" i am referring to the intentions of those new users.
Say your users are predominantly seeking long-term relationships, and your branding supports that. Then a bunch of men, fueled by gender-ratio marketing, flood your app seeking hookups. You will see short-term a bump in engagement and payments. A/B testing will suggest everything is great. But long-term your product loses value as your users lose faith in your ability to deliver on what they signed up for. The (in this case women) leave and the product becomes another graveyard.
I think it's a conglomeration of issues _including_ unaligned incentives of the companies vs their users. The fact that they're nearly all self curated profiles is a symptom of the former.
The core "Apps" don't want the real you with all your idiocracies and flaws, that won't sell the most subscriptions. They want the heavily curated "you", which inevitably becomes a bait and switch for someone else when the idealized you is replaced by IRL you.
With the newer generations fully online for their lifespans, it may be an interesting (and dystopian) exercise to use a specially trained LLM with hooks into social platforms, long form writing, etc to "summarize" ones "life corpus" instead of relying entirely on self reporting and curated images.
I imagine random but surprisingly shared tidbits like your favorite spongebob character being Plankton. Or remembering your most embarassing MySpace post. Or your favorite toy growing up being one of those super balls that you bounced into oblivion one day, never to be seen again (hey, it said "super" after all).
Those buzzfeed-esque tiny details you probably wouldn't think about unless prompted. But it can say a lot about you and where/how you grew up.
Can't help but interpret this take as a little disingenuous. Most dating apps seem to follow the trajectory of "new app launched" -> "new app grows and gets popular" -> "new app bought out by match.com" -> "new app turns to shit"
I'd like to see one that doesn't employ all the dark patterns, but where instead the incentives of the org are aligned with the incentives of the users. If you manage to onboard enough users to get traction, establish yourself as the go-to place for dating, and tell every single little greedy MBA and investurd to pound sand - you may well have solve this problem once and for all and stay king of the castle.
Agreed. GP's comment ignores the reality that dating apps are aggressively monopolized by a single company, and that many of their acquisitions have resulted in demonstrable drops in quality.
It's not that nobody has figured out dating apps yet, it is that selling lonely men expensive add-ons is far too profitable.
The problem is that getting to that point requires quite a bit of capital. The hard part isn’t building the app, it’s buying users, largely through advertising, and then filtering the assholes through moderation staffing. Both of that costs a lot of money, up front. To date, nobody has come up with a way to monetize dating apps in a way that doesn’t negate the benefits of the app.
Personally I’d love to see someone figure out a way to do an activitypub based dating app, where people can build small community instances funded directly by the users.
The majority of well-matched people rapidly exit. The population begins to trend to weaker participants. And the longer the duration the more unhappy and therefore weaker the participants become.
New dating apps capture representative populations and rapidly all the good participants exit.
Ultimately some of us suck at dating apps. The apps would be legitimately better without serial failures on them. I would have been better off in the real world, where I met my wife at work.
I think another big problem is that women will try out a new site until they have one stalkerish experience, and then they're gone forever. So each new site has a shelf life.
I got really curious about those because Blade Runner 2049 made me think of them. I tried them and they're so... crude! It felt like talking to someone who's engineered to like you. I could be curt or speak my heart out and it would speak to me the same way.
To replace humanity with this... It's just not right.
I'm so happy that I dated pre-dating app era, between 2005-2010. There were dating apps but not that mainstream. I walked up to my wife and her friend with some BS reason at a club, kept on the conversation and boom 10+ years together.
I'm average looking, she has a beautiful face and has been dancing since the age of 4. I'd have 0 chance with these kind of girls on dating apps. Absolutely 0.
Another good thing, that time social media have not yet screwed up people's self esteem and that helped a lot -> she has not overrated herself, I have not underrated myself.
We've been dating in person for a couple of billion years, we are hard-wired for that as body language tells a lot more in a fraction of a second than any made up profile text and over edited photos.
At the same time I was using online dating site. It helped to accelerate the search and filter candidates. I could save time rejecting illiterate and/or less clever girls. Think about Google maps and real estate search - you don’t want a house on the highway.
I wouldn’t use that today. Full of fake profiles to lure paying customers and to keep them as long as they can. Free subscription is not existing anymore.
Whether you like it or not, the dating game is fundamentally built on the objectification of others. It sucks, but pretending that's not the case doesn't change the reality of it.
We're animals. We're programmed to want to bang attractive people.
You can still meet people today outside of dating apps. A good friend of mine met his gf at a surf hostel. I met my gf on a boat in the Maldives. I think most people would objectively say she is out of my league if they saw us in a photo together.
I think the hardest part about meeting someone is being in a situation to meet them. If your life is something like: sleep -> eat -> work -> repeat, it's very hard to meet someone.
Traveling really only makes sense if one of you wants to move or want to have a long distance relationship. Both of these are rare attributes for meeting people while traveling.
Most of the women I meet while traveling are also not single. They’re with their partners whereas many men will travel solo. Traveling solo isn’t a thing most women will do at all. Many men will.
You better watch out though I would actually be more worried with that type of relationship because your wife will now realize she has unlimited options and start to second guess. So many divorces happen now from things as simple as a facebook message leading to an affair.
That fear of missing out could hit hard and lots of people get blindsided by it.
Have we been dating in person for a couple of billion years?
Setting aside that people have not been around for billions of years, if you go back in history without the tech and the mobility we have today "dating" is a complete different thing. You didn't have such a large pool of potential partners, where you were born played a huge role and you also didn't have as much freedom to do your own thing as you did today.
It's completely different for introverts like me. I can figure out multivariate calculus or how a git merge works, but I do not have the faintest idea how to start a conversation with someone. Especially if it's two or more people already talking. The only avenues that worked for me are work and apps.
Darren Brown once had an interesting experiment, where he created a psychological profile and shared it with a broad room of people. Everyone agreed that it was a perfect approximation of their personality. ie. People don't really have a sense of who they are. (The few that do, are exceptional and don't need dating sites). Profiles are probably not the right artifact to use to determine a match.
Social cues will always be more valuable than personality, or kindness. For men, that is status and wealth and physical attractiveness. For women, it is beauty and age. Regardless if you like that or not, it may be what is missing in these utilities.
Further, I like how the Japanese make group dates. 3 boys and 3 girls go out on a date. Gokkon. Maybe this is something the West should consider. Safer, far more interesting, and allows people to broadly consider each other.
> In 1948, in what has been described as a "classic experiment",[10] psychologist Forer gave a psychology test – his so-called "Diagnostic Interest Blank" – to 39 of his psychology students, who were told that they would each receive a brief personality vignette based on their test results. One week later Forer gave each student a purportedly individualized vignette and asked each of them to rate it on how well it applied. In reality, each student received the same vignette, ... On average, the students rated its accuracy as 4.30 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). Only after the ratings were turned in, it was revealed that all students had received an identical vignette assembled by Forer from a newsstand astrology book.
Most people on dating apps have never had a long term relationship (say 5 years or more of cohabitation) and have never got to the stage where they're completely accepting of and comfortable with their partner.
Nobody writes on tinder that they're looking for a partner who will laugh every time they toot while watching TV.
We're all shopping for beautiful, successful people who don't fart.
I like your point but no: eugenics has external gatekeepers and I think it's done by force non-consensually. In normal dating, ideally the participants are the only gatekeepers.
Found my partner via dating apps. So did most of my friends. I don't think "hey I just met you" dating will ever be trending after COVID, #metoo and how everything is eaten up by digitalisation. Articles like these are just pissing against the wind.
I don’t think dating people met offline will ever _not_ be common. Basically all social groups I’ve ever been in have resulted in relationships between people who met offline. Of course your social circles and experience may my differ from mine.
Most dating apps are owned by Match Group. Aside from being ridiculously expensive to get full functionality out of, their full functionality has misfeatures, bugs, and huge gaps of missing features.
Also, the premise of finding love online has been flawed from the start, so that doesn’t help.
Lastly, particularly in the US, body size and fitness/health have become so bad that the visual-first approach that online dating is necessarily built upon has even less potential.
I have a theory that contemporary life causes many people great despair, relating both to dating/relationships and career, because our culture is not very supportive or accepting of personal growth.
So, if you get off to a good start in your dating life and career from your late teens and early 20s, you get plenty of approval and validation and compounding success as you progress through life, and acceptance that you deserve the success you're having ("they were always a high achiever, ever since school days").
Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot. I suspect this has become more of an entrenched belief since the discovery of evolution/DNA, and the generally accepted belief that most of our life outcomes are predetermined by our inheritance.
I think the dating apps (and employment recruitment platforms/techniques) intensify this further, by filtering based on a few simple characteristics, some of which really are genetically predetermined (height) and others that are downstream consequences of having had a blessed start in life (income/education level/job seniority/state of health).
Society generally, including/especially the dating/employment spheres, don't seem to offer much support for people who really sincerely trying to undertake a journey of personal improvement (outside of mainstream accepted practices like conventional fitness training and education). You're just expected to be "good to go". Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members).
I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth, and what kinds of social platforms, including dating and employment platforms, could emerge out of that and bring much more opportunity and satisfaction to people who currently feel the despair of being left behind.
I think you hit the nail on the head in a lot of aspects but I don't fully agree. Our society does endorse and actively support the virtues of personal growth. The issue is, as you pointed out, it only values the growth of those "chosen" to reach a high-percentile level at the end of their journey. There's nothing more abhorrent to our societal myths of a just road for everyone to take than someone who worked years to reach some level of success in a field they want to excel in but only hit a point barely above mediocrity.
> There's nothing more abhorrent to our societal myths of a just road for everyone to take than someone who worked years to reach some level of success in a field they want to excel in but only hit a point barely above mediocrity.
I think it depends on how we define mediocrity. Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur".
Ironically, despite being touted as individual work, this kind of success and excellence requires institutions to be recognized.
> Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur".
Or, unless you apply your skill into pursuing a bakery career, or a celebrity career (e.g. by running a baking channel on YouTube). Being good at something alone doesn't get you past being perceived as mediocre at best - you have to have an external institution attest for it. PhD, that's easy - the title is itself an attestation. Baking? Proof is in running a successful bakery[0], or in being called a great baker in mass media articles, or in running a popular baking show, etc.
I guess that's implicit in the whole philosophy of "self-improvement" being conditioned on how others see you.
--
[0] - However little sense this makes these days; "running business doing X" is 99% about "running business" and 1% about "doing X", and if you want money and control, you have to let other people to "do" X for you.
Never thought about it this way, but yeah makes a lot of sense. So the real approach should be: pick the kind of institution you care about first. Skill mastery might just end up being optional.
To be honest, I'm rather surprised how good we have it those days, when good skills and hard work at least have a quite good chance to lead to a decent life
Ironically, by relying on institutions so much, the value of their recognition becomes reduced over time, and we get stuff like credential creep, university bureaucratic bloat, and general mistrust in academia.
Not really no, I am quite far from the startup scene on the contrary. In French we'd call an entrepreneur anyone who runs a business, aside from a small shop owner maybe.
TeMPOraL nailed what I was trying to convey.
What is your experience like? Do you live in a place where high quality work alone is unanimously recognised as success?
Yeah I hear you, and no doubt Horatio Algers (and simplistic interpretations/retellings of his story arcs) have done plenty of harm in this respect.
I think we can do much better than “if you work hard and believe in your dreams you’ll make it”. There are many techniques people can learn than can amplify the impacts of their efforts and make them much better companions. They’re just not widely known/accepted as yet.
> Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot.
You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
> I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth
I think if you're motivated enough to do this, you're already motivated enough to go out and get the career success or love life or whatever you're after. Frankly doing that is probably simpler and more straightforward than "self discovery" or whatever. There's a Carlin bit for this https://youtube.com/watch?v=4s3bJYHQXYg
> You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
Right, this is why we can choose not to feel the pain of being punched in the face.
You're literally "made to feel" certain ways. During your formative years someone was shouting you suck and generally acting as you're a burden and unwanted? You'll feel that shit for the rest of your life no matter what you "decide to think". It becomes ingrained in you. It becomes who you are. You can work on it like GP said and improve the situation but don't act like it's trivial or just a change of perspective. It isn't. It's like your body needs healing after a fractured bone. Your mind also needs that time and setting.
I'm not saying that trauma isn't real, I'm saying that it doesn't have to impact your prospects in life. You don't have to let it define you. There's a capacity to sidestep it
Here's a personal example: having abusive family members tell me I won't be successful or independent, being hurt by it but knowing in the back of my head that I would get out of there. It's hope
And I get it: not all trauma is equal here, but if I have to choose one extreme I'd prefer the one that gives people some shred of agency
I get your point, but would also like to add that to a certain extent (and variable by person) pain from physical injuries can be influenced by psychology.
There was a time I was cycling at night down a half-finished cycle route, the kerb separating it from the guided busway had been placed but not the tarmac, but I couldn't see that at night (I had a light but it still wasn't visible).
I tried to leave the cycle path, bounced off the surprise rise of the kerb, and it hurt before I hit the ground. Picked myself up, stopped thinking about it, went on to the cinema, watched the film, when the lights came up I realised quite how badly I'd been grazed.
Sometimes I can switch the pain off on purpose, sometimes I can't. The dichotomy isn't even just with regards to physical pain, it's also a sometimes-yes-sometimes-no with emotional distress, so I can go into a "public performance" mode on a stage and goof about no trouble, but I can't seem to shake my deep dislike of mere phone calls.
People are weird, I'm a person therefore I'm weird. :)
That's not a psychological response, that's adrenaline. It numbs the pain response because in fight or flight situations, it's a distraction. It's not a choice, and it's fleeting and transient, a few minutes to twenty minutes.
>bounced off the surprise rise of the kerb, and it hurt before I hit the ground.
Sounds like a form of phantom pain. I don't know the exact term but it is a well studied phenomenon. one that, AFAIK, isn't fully understood.
But yes, your brain can very much lie to you. Just look up how much post processing your brain will do to help you see the way you see.
>Sometimes I can switch the pain off on purpose, sometimes I can't.
yeah, we have chemicals in our body to do that. It doesn't turn off pain automatically because it is in fact a good thing to realize when you're bleeding out of your leg. It only turns that off for you semi-voluntarily if your brain involuntarily determines (again based on other chemicals) that GTFO is more beneficial to survival than tending to your wound. I'm not going to say it's impossible to train these excretions of chemicals. I will argue that this is probably something you can train for years to do and fail, though.
There's so much about our bodies that still eludes the brightest minds. Even a function as basic as sleeping and why and how it benefits us is still not fully in our understanding.
I love Carlin and it’s a good gag with some truth in it.
But it assumes we’re all hardwired to be a certain way, which is the very assumption I’m arguing needs to change.
It’s true most self-help is ineffective, and it’s because you can’t change much in your life just by consciously making an effort to change, or just “trying harder”. There is a lot you can change by undoing subconscious self-sabotage patterns and undertaking “letting go” practices, over a long enough period of time. This kind of stuff is fringe now but is growing in popularity because people are finding it far more effective than mainstream self-help and therapy (I sure have).
> There is a lot you can change by undoing subconscious self-sabotage patterns and undertaking “letting go” practices, over a long enough period of time. This kind of stuff is fringe now but is growing in popularity
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is an excellent curriculum for training in the use of a set of tools along these lines (and many more skills besides).
I think you both might be talking about the same thing. CBT is much more detailed and comprehensive than "practicing letting go," but in a sense, accepting reality and then letting go (of our maladaptive beliefs and coping behaviors) is at its core. GP may have encountered CBT from an alternative source, and thus doesn't associate it with 'mainstream therapy.' Which I'm not even sure if CBT is prominent enough yet to be considered the main clinical paradigm.
>The correct solution to abuse is a punch to the face.
if you can afford it, sure. But that civil lawsuit you dismiss will suddenly crush you if you punch the wrong person in the face.
Maybe there is a bit too much soft footed training these days, but there's also a very good reason, financially and legally, to know when to hold your punches. At least be smart enough to get an explicit reason on record before you start swinging fists.
I like where you showed me that the civil way gets results.
Oh wait.
It may be ugly but people tend to leave someone alone after getting knocked out. Words are a warning, a substitute for violence. We use words because violence is ugly. When words don't work, you don't use more words. That's insanity.
0 tends to be more than a negative number. I'm not saying not to resort to violence. I'm just saying it has a higher chance to backfire than retreating.
The gist of it is to question existing thoughts or reactions, which sounds good on paper because how else do you grow without introspection? However, it does little to solve real mental or emotional issues. I felt like I was talking through a workbook and not connecting to a real human.
It's led to reduced trust in psychology and psychiatry. Maybe in another hundred years we'll have a clue or two.
first off sorry if my initial response reads brusque, I've been burnt by the self help stuff and learned the hard way to be skeptical of it, didn't think that the skepticism would lead to this much argument...
> There is a lot you can change by undoing subconscious self-sabotage patterns and undertaking “letting go” practices,
What do you mean by this, like buddhism or something like it? Is there some kind of literature on this?
You don't think mainstream self help or therapy uses the concept of forgiveness or breaking self destructive beliefs and patterns? I implore you to tell me what it is you think therapy actually does and contrast it with whatever this newfangled fringe approach is.
> You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
This is just not true about human psychology. Like it is not true at all.
People are affected by what is said about them. And those few unaffected generally tend to have much bigger issues in relationships, because their lack of caring usually makes them into very uncomfortable to be around.
To everyone here, this is how a confident person with a healthy dose of self-esteem feels and behaves like (with a pinch of salt as this depiction is a bit idealistic).
To @mvncleaninst, not everyone has the same emotional strength and tools to cope with these sort of situations, and trust me, I am not apologizing for mediocrity and lack of courage, I absolutely loathe when people try to excuse what's under their control with made-up stories, disorders and whatnot.
Depression is a real thing, some people have gone through real shit. An example, many people grow up in completely dysfunctional households, you have no idea how that can absolutely destroy someone's perception of it's own value. Same thing with poverty, a lot of people had dealt with both of these things and most likely many more. The wounds inflicted by these circumstances stay with people their whole lives, one cannot just "shrug off these things and carry on" as they have become imbued with them.
Life can break absolutely anybody; if you don't believe this is true, congrats. you've had it easy, so far.
From (George) Carlin's wikipedia entry:
"Because of my abuse of drugs, I neglected my business affairs and had large arrears with the IRS, and that took me eighteen to twenty years to dig out of."
It seems that your motivation expert actually does much worse than the average person on things that require planning and self-control. Colour me surprised. Is this part of his comedy act?
I like this post. It rings true with me. One trend I have noticed in my life: If people grew up under difficult circumstances, it seems to sap their grit (ability to grind). They mostly give up more easily. However, at 1-5% of those can turn the difficult circumstances into a super power and "out grind" anyone. It is weird how it happens.
> You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
That's like saying "You have someone punching you in the face, and you have the choice to be hurt by it or not. Being hurt by being punched in the face is a choice."
You don't choose to be hurt and you don't choose the consequences of being hurt.
>You don't choose to be hurt and you don't choose the consequences of being hurt.
Only the first part is true. We don't get to choose our emotional responses, but we absolutely can determine how we react to all manner of discomforts and challenges. For instance, you can discover and put in the work of practicing healthy and sustainable coping mechanisms for the inevitable fear, rejection, and hurt you will feel in life when other people treat you in ways that don't suit you. You can also choose to put in work towards changing your outlook and core beliefs, so you are much more resilient to being hurt by the words and actions of other people. Emotional resilience is a skill (but it is not at all the same as being emotionally repressed, which is a maladaptive defense mechanism).
Being physically or emotionally hurt is not the same as being harmed. People can be punched in the face and yet recover with grace and equanimity. Indeed, even if that graceful recovery involves running the fuck away from a pointless fight. This isn't easy stuff, but it is possible.
>you can discover and put in the work of practicing healthy and sustainable coping mechanisms for the inevitable fear, rejection, and hurt you will feel in life when other people treat you in ways that don't suit you.
Thats a skill and like sports, there are certain affinities to having and tailloring that skill. It's why we call it "emotional intelligence". There will be some absolute saints that can manage their emotions to an almost sociopathic level, and 90+% of people can train their lives and never truly obtain such skill. We are shaped by early experiences, memories, and traumas too much to truly say "anyone can do this".
Likewise, being punched in the face is a skill. But not necessarily one that is "mastered", just mitigated. the best boxers in the world will get punched enough to have permanent damage, even with modern safety regulations. That's just a fact. Meanwhile, most people who don't spend time fighting will have different biology that determines how well they can take a face punch. Someone more muscular will take it better than a meek lad. You may not even realize the former got punched the next day wihle the latter has a scar that never heals. You can't fully control that without a major lifestyle change.
Someone throwing insults or punches at you that hurt is not something you choose, it's something you feel. Why do you think the attacker bears no responsibility?
How so? If you're just walking on the street and you happen to get sucker punched out of nowhere by a person you never met nor will never meet again, what could you have done to choose "not to get hurt"? enroll in martial arts and train your peripheral vision to always be on guard?
I won't even entertain "you choose the consequences of being hurt". Mike Tyson says it best: "everyone's got a plan until they are punched in the face"
The only part I disagree with is the historical perspective. When was this time that people believed in personal growth? For most of history the nobels were nobels, peasants were peasants and that was that. If anything, the sense of having dynamic control of one's destiny throughout one's lifespan is a recent invention. (Well at least in the west)
Absolutely with you. The great dissonance is between people's expectations and their reality, not the past and the present. Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.
> Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.
Not really. A century ago people in many parts of the USA were dirt poor. I mean no savings, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. But they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted themselves. They had deep communal bonds, spiritual fulfillment, and a sense of meaning in their lives that is increasingly absent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average sharecropper’s wife would blow away your average urban girl boss in self reported happiness.
Reported happiness seems like a poor metric for comparison when the concept itself may be rather foreign to someone in the past. If your life is mostly hardship, you may not spend much time being introspective about how you feel about your plight. In a life of luxury, you have nothing but time to think about it and find things to critique. So, you may have an objectively better life, and overall more happiness, but report it as unhappy because there is more that you want to do that you feel should be achievable. Compared to someone who couldn’t comprehend their situation ever improving, so they. There is no basis for comparison of what it means to be happy between different life experiences.
It’s not about quality of life. Abuse victims will say they are happy, and stay with their abusers. War veterans can think fondly on their time at war, but neither are objectively good situations. Reporting that you are happy is not the same as being happy.
I guess what I’m describing is the difference of trauma/suffering (both physical and mental) vs not. There’s too much psychology in play when dealing with how we handle trauma to trust a self reported metric.
The psychology being subjective is my point. The physiological condition is not subjective. My statement wasn’t that something was “objectively good” but that experiencing pain and suffering was “not objectively good” or rather (objectively) not a good thing. Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.
> Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.
But that’s observably false. There are persons who don’t feel pain, and they are considerably more likely to seriously injure or even maim themselves than normal persons. That’s hardly “objectively better.”
Furthermore, the existence of masochism shows that some people prefer pain to its absence at least some of the time. Thus “Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better” is just your subjective opinion.
Since we’re talking about subjective reports regardless, we may as well rely on the subjective reports of the people having the experiences rather than the subjective opinions of others who aren’t having the experiences.
If you can’t agree that physically harming people is bad, I don’t think we’re going to see eye to eye on this. But, your example of masochism is exactly my point. You can’t trust their reported state because people can bend their psychology to believe it to be fine. Nevertheless, torture/murder/rape, etc are all still objectively bad.
As an example: there are genuine cases of masochists that are subjectively happier because pain is being inflicted on them. In many of these cases no serious harm is done to their body. Your claim "you can't trust their reported state" is either 1) a claim that the outside observer knows better than the individual what their subjective state is or 2) that the health of the subject is more important than their subjective happiness.
If you are arguing for #1, I disagree. If you are arguing for #2, you should be more clear about why/how you keep using the word "objectively".
People can feel less happy when there is a lack of challenge in their life. Consider the example of the guy that spends his life wasting away in front of video games, going for impulsive pleasures instead of long term rewarding goals.
I would guess that each person has a different ideal level and variety of suffering (or responsibility, or challenge, or whatever you want to call it), for which their personality is best suited. We are so far removed from the challenges of the past that we don't know what the subjective experience would be like.
I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled.
Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
> I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled.
Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely.
I'm sorry, but perhaps it wasn't clear from context that I'm talking about the USA. There has never been a wide scale famine in the United States even in its poorest communities. Even during the Great Depression there were virtually no deaths due to starvation[1].
> But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
Your goalpost-moving notwithstanding, I'm reminded of that famous Sufi tale with the refrain "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?" After all the environmental impacts of the population explosion that it kicked off are still just barely beginning to be felt. But for what it's worth the Green Revolution was part of the standard curriculum when I was in middle and secondary school, so I wouldn't say it's unrecognized.
They were not well fed a century ago. The US had to start putting iron and iodine in all the food because all the young men were too weak and sick with pellagra to be able to fight in wars.
Yes. It’s easily googled. And they look like a normal healthy weight for the early 20th century[1]. Mama there has a healthy belly. Where are you seeing concentration camp victims?
Yeah this is a good point. I guess genetic determinism is just the contemporary scientific justification for a mentality that’s existed in some for a long time or indeed forever. (I’d be interested to know if other human cultures were more and accepting and supportive of personal growth.)
Explanation or justification? Does current scientific consensus (let's say there's one) say that this mentality is okay or that it's a bias that we should be aware (and try to correct against)?
I see genetics being used as a “just so” explanation for all kinds of things that the science doesn’t really support, by people with different ideologies depending on the thing they’re trying to justify.
We take obviously mostly-genetically-determined traits like height, eye/hair/skin colour, facial features etc, then extrapolate to argue/assume that all kinds of other things must also be genetically determined, like cognition, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns, for which there is far less evidence of them being hard-coded in DNA. This will be confounded by the fact that we can often see commonalities in these factors from parents to children and between siblings, and assume these commonalities exist due to genetic coding, not recognizing that there are other forms of inheritance/conditioning that can explain these commonalities, but that even if these inherited patterns are deeply ingrained, they can be altered via the right practices (emotional “letting go” being the most important in my experience).
Genetics is not a credible science, ie, it's just another one of the many sciences that thinks correlation is causation. This is because it can't do experiments, so it can't really show causation.
(Identical twins are close to a natural experiment but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics.)
Who are you to tell us to not trust our eyes? When you're wrong at trivia, can you just claim "I meant [the right answer]"? If that's what you meant, perhaps you would have said it, but if you would had said it, it would have ruined your argument.
Simply put, you haven't made a convincing case that genetics, a science affecting all life, not just humans, is "not a credible science", despite indeed involving experiments all the time.
This is a far stronger claim than I think you mean. We have a ton of evidence that those bits of DNA in our cells govern cell expression and even know in some cases that bit X being malformed causes bad condition Y (sure, you could hypothesize that they both have a common cause, but how the heck would that work? Correlation being causation works if both common cause and backwards causation are implausible, as they are often in genetics).
> but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics
Uhhh... they have almost exactly the same genetics. To a similar extent that two random cells from your body will have the same genetics. Yes, there will be a handful of mutations, but that's very unlikely to have an effect on any particular trait.
Yes I’ve been exploring this topic (and undertaking personal growth work) for well over a decade.
I know all about the twin studies and the way they’re used to support all kinds of claims but that don’t actually hold up to scrutiny.
DNA just encodes proteins. It can’t explain/predict detailed behavioral patterns.
A prominent example of how genetics can influence aggressive/criminal behavior is due to variations in the MAOA (“Warrior”) gene, but the promotion/suppression of this gene is still strongly influenced by environmental factors [1].
Twin studies (particularly separated twin studies) claim to prove that all kinds of things are genetically encoded, because “they must be”, without considering how much is caused/influenced by other factors - the gestational environment and the experience of being separated from the birth family being the most obvious.
That’s not to say these behavioral patterns aren’t deeply ingrained and difficult/slow to change, but that’s very different from being hard-coded in DNA and impossible to change. For n=1 anecdata, I’ve significantly reduced my aggressive tendencies after years of growth work.
Are you willing to have a detailed discussion on this? I don't want to spend a few hours refreshing my knowledge of the research and gathering papers only to be ignored.
I read the abstract and skimmed the main content and couldn’t find anything that refutes what I’ve written or what I understand.
I’m fine to have a discussion if your intention is to achieve a shared understanding of the topic, which is what healthy debating is about and what this site seeks to cultivate (even if it rarely achieves it). It does seem a little like you’re more interested in “winning” an argument for a position you’re already invested in, but I’m happy to be shown otherwise and to engage in a discussion if you bring a spirit of shared learning to it.
Edit: rather than doing it here (in a thread that is already very long and stale) you can email me if you like (address in bio).
Further to my previous comment, before you write much on the topic, make sure you've properly read and considered what I've written (just the previous few comments relating to genetic determinism), in relation to the paper you shared. On reflection, I'm surprised you wrote "did you check out the paper I linked?", as if you assume it contains findings that contradict anything I've written, and it makes me think you might be intending to argue against something you assume I believe rather than something I actually believe. To be clear: (a) I believe very strongly in inheritance and common patterns of behaviour among family members; (b) I know of no research proving that behavioural patterns are entirely attributable to DNA code and/or are immutable, and (c) I'm aware of ways deeply ingrained patterns of behaviour can be significantly altered/abated when effective approaches are applied. The paper you linked doesn't make any specific claims relating to parts (b) or (c) of my statement.
This is a bad defense because you're using "genetically determined", which is either meaningless or not true.
Height is not genetically determined unless you add "in an environment where nothing else that affects it happens". Like, say, someone cutting off your legs.
The only other thing to affect height is nutrition. Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others. Denying that is just straight stupidity because you can observe the trend just by going outside.
> The only other thing to affect height is nutrition.
And puberty blockers, pituitary gland diseases, and lack of sleep.
…and cutting your legs off.
> Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others.
See, one thing about statistics is they're not necessarily valid for individuals, because eg not all statistical distributions have any values at their averages.
Saying something is genetically determined is not necessarily the same as saying it's completely genetically determined. And it's not meaningless, because there are things that aren't genetically determined at all, or at least are only genetically determined to such a small amount that they wouldn't be described as being genetically determined.
Agreed, I think this is all downstream from recent macroeconomic forces in the west/America. Namely the "land of opportunity" in the post WW2 era has disappeared and the class structure has largely calcified and will carry over multiple generations. The anxiety people feel about not being one of the "top tier and chosen" is because that's the only avenue for social mobility left.
Or maybe it was always mostly BS and the information age where the message is less controlled/manipulated by a few elite owned sources is making that obvious.
In your analysis, it seems like the growing person should be recognized by the chosen class and be given a shot at relationships. Why though? If you don’t belong to the chosen class, find a partner that isn’t in the chosen class as well and grow together.
Maybe I am mistaken, but this has a subtext of "I want to be recognized, but I don’t want to deal with disadvantaged people myself".
Well, it’s not true of me, because I was lucky enough to find someone with whom to share a journey of growth (we got together in 2011, just before the dating apps took hold), and it’s worked out well for us.
But I see what life is like for friends who are trying to find serious relationships/life partnerships via the apps, and how much it’s all geared towards being/seeming “the best” and finding “the right person”, and how brutal it is for their self esteem and life outlook (a good friend is at the age where she’s probably missed the chance to have children, having tried to find the right guy via the apps for many years).
I often wonder how it could be better for her and other friends if there were apps/communities more geared towards finding people to grow with rather than finding someone who ticks the boxes now.
I'm sorry to hear that your friend is struggling to find a long term partner. When I think about dating apps, they are mostly about cold introductions. If possible, you should try to do some warm introductions from her. It seems easier to break someone's heart with shitty behaviour from a cold introduction, than a warm introduction. Cold intros are relatively anonymous so you can hide after your bad behaviour. With a warm intro, if someone does something awful, their friends will probably learn about it.
In some ways it may be even more difficult to find a partner to grow with than one who has already grown and will give you a chance, because there’s more questions involved. Do they have the same capacity for growth? Are they as tenacious? Will they keep up their efforts after receiving the gratification of acceptance? Etc, etc.
In the "good old days" dating was simpler, but also much, much worse for the average woman. People dated within their town almost exclusively. The best bachelors would be gone pretty quickly. That put a ton of pressure on the remaining women to quickly settle for an average guy in order not to be stuck with a terrible partner (an angry drunk or other kind of lowlife). Not marrying wasn't an option, and divorce wasn't an option. They had to choose, and their dating pool was small and constantly shrinking. Many women got stuck in unhappy marriages, but that was life.
I agree with you that many guys today struggle with dating because they haven't done the necessary work to be good partners, but the problem isn't that "contemporary life doesn't encourage self-improvement". The "problem", if you even want to call it that, is that women prefer being single over a bad relationship with a crummy guy. For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
Women don't prefer being single. Women want a relationship - but with a hot tall confident rich guy their friends will be envious of who makes them feel butterflies ("chemistry").
That's the definition of the ideal boyfriend for most younger women.
So the hot tall confident rich guys play the field, because they can. Worse, some of the hottest and most confident guys are narcissists - because narcissists and sociopaths are very good at seducing people with love bombing and future faking.
Inexperienced women get their hearts broken and decide that all men are jerks - partly because at this stage the kind funny not-so-hot guys don't register as realistic prospects on their dating radar.
There are subcultures within this, and there's certainly a niche of women who find clever, funny, and kind men more attractive than rich and tall etc men. But it's relatively small compared to most of the population.
At the same time there's a strongly gender-polarised and adversarial (actually hate-filled) culture in the US where wannabe manly men who hate everything woke etc are in a permanent war with feminists who are convinced that all masculinity is toxic.
It's not so much that "guys have to up their game" but that the entire culture is emotionally dysfunctional, and dating is stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence where healthy give-and-take relationships aren't modelled at all.
Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
>Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
Oh man this is such a big one. There's so much media out there that depicts total loser guys winding up with incredible women & vice versa. If you're a young man & didn't have dad or older brother guide you through your end of the responsibilities in a relationship, there's almost nowhere to get the correct information, and tons of 'malware' information out there. One might be inclined to point to feminist literature on the subject, but that will just make you a doormat.
> Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
The first thing that comes to mind is the relationship between Holden and Naomi in The Expanse. (Okay, so it's not a marriage. Does that really matter?)
I'm sure there are others, but they are difficult to recall precisely because they just are, without calling too much attention to themselves. So there's a selection bias in what we remember.
Naomi who has a kid she never tells him about and whose ex (who she also fails to mention) is the head of a lunatic fringe terrorist organization? Naomi who was also a part of that and was integral in executing an attack (also without a mention)? Naomi who disappears without a word to go infiltrate that organization in a move she thinks is likely to get her killed?
Holden is no peach of a partner either. Don’t play the “Holden does something the hardest way possible because he can’t ask for help” drinking game, you’ll be unconscious in a few hours.
> Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
The parents in "That '70s show" perhaps? I see the irony in this title tho.
Most often when a main character on a TV show has a relationship, it exists to increase the drama. So it makes sense that we’d see healthier relationships among side-characters.
A movie about unexceptional people doing unexceptional things? Nope can’t think of many movies that would have that. Exceptional people tend to be egotistical assholes that take extreme risks and they make movies about the ones that succeed or fail spectacularly
>Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
Sentimental and idealized are very vague, but there are a ton of US sitcoms that have this premise. But also, watching a couple just go about their day to day life that 90% of people go through seems boring as hell, who would watch that?
> Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
Married with children. Al was a shoe salesman. Peggy was hot in high school. They had kids. They took care of them. They didn't exactly love each other, but they didn't hated one another also. The most realistically portrayed family on TV in decades.
> Al was a shoe salesman. Peggy was hot in high school.
They were both hot in high school. They peaked in high school and married/created a family with their high school sweetheart. That's the entire point of the show.
> They had kids. They took care of them.
They were also neglectful and callous.
> They didn't exactly love each other, but they didn't hated one another also.
Did you watch the show? They most certainly verged on hating each other, and were never as ambivalent as you make out.
> The most realistically portrayed family on TV in decades.
The Middle. Malcom in the Middle. That 70's Show. Any of a dozen "prestige" television shows that aren't sitcoms.
> isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
TV shows are about drama. If you have "this relationship is too good" and "this relationship is too bad" as exit clauses here, of course you are going to have trouble.
Does Ben and Leslie from Parks and Rec count for you? Or is that "too idealized"?
Watch how many times Ben gets to do what Ben wants to do when it’s not his birthday, then tell me you’d want to be him. That relationship is about Leslie being enabled.
The last three paragraphs are on the money. So on the money. The level of conditioned hate is just bizarre.
I have witnessed some truly weird conversations in hypereducated blue-state America. I never say anything, but I always take mental notes.
One example:
So I go out to lunch with this friend, and they invite a friend of theirs. A woman, in her 20s, from an Ivy League school. I'm not sure why we were all having lunch together actually, in retrospect.
Anyway, she's talking about how she has this boyfriend. I think he's in the Air Force or something (which at some level is icky to these people). And she has some time off from her career for some reason, so she has some time. And she's spending a lot of it just being with him, to the point that, she'll cook dinner and stuff. And she implies that she's having a lot of sex with him, and that she's being very giving in all this, and you can tell that at some level she just finds him very attractive and takes pleasure in delighting him (as he, I assume, does likewise in making her happy). Which is basically the description of a good relationship, right?
But she also has to justify this feeling to herself -- that she likes making her boyfriend happy. And she has to justify to herself that she's doing things like cooking dinner that, on the one hand, she's voluntarily chosen to do, but that, on the other hand, she clearly also thinks are somehow "beneath her". So she explains it to us at the table like this: She's intentionally ruining her boyfriend, so that when they eventually break up -- because that's what you do, right? -- then he will not be satisfied in any of his subsequent relationships. She has to frame her natural impulse to be kind and giving, as a political act that is actually a kind of cruelty -- because that's what she assumes we will approve of.
None of us ask for this justification, this is just a monologue that she volunteers. I don't say anything, but -- what the fuck? I think this has become a normal (if unnatural) trained attitude.
I could give other examples too, but that's enough for now.
It's been a long time since I read something as aggressively condescending as the idea that "butterflies" are what women en masse consider to be "chemistry".
> Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
Those women also had far less competition. The men the next town over they now have access to come with a town full of women who are now able to access the men of the town the woman is in. Each time her dating pool increases, the competition increases too.
There's no free lunch, just tyranny of too many choices, endless analysis paralyses and FOMO.
I don't think is that simple, the happiness levels of women have not increased in recent years according to many studies, its more likely a complex issue and that aspect you mention may be a minor variable; I believe is more likely than us (our brains to be exact) have had not time to adapt to the new times where you have to watch hundreds of people with "better" partners than us just by scrolling through your feeds, and that is quite chaotic but soon enough we will adapt a bit better.
Our brain means we adapt faster than any other species so we are not as dependend on evolutionary self-selection as other species, its the major reason we "won" the evolutionary race (e.g. same reason we would be the only species to survive a meteorite collision against earth -even if not for long- without any evolutionary progress to increase our adaptability to space)
Some people argue with the ‘no true woman’ fallacy, or don’t trust them to know how to self reflect properly, but clearly something is dying in society.
You need to find some kind of proxy for life satisfaction otherwise you could just be measuring a change in society’s expectations regarding the answer to that question.
That is, if there’s less expectation to lie and say everything is fine, you could get declining life satisfaction numbers with no actual decline in satisfaction.
Anecdotally people I know from my grandparent’s generation are much less likely to admit to being unhappy.
> ...answers to subjective well-being questions have been shown to be correlated with physical evidence of affect such as smiling, laughing, heart rate measures, sociability, and electrical activity in the brain (Diener, 1984)
One of the most useful things you can do in debate is reveal yourself to be immune to evidence of anything you don't like. It is useful because it allows rational participants to stop wasting time with you.
The data says people are saying they are less happy over some time period. There are 2 competing hypotheses to explain the cause.
1) Society has changed in a way that has made people less happy. 2) Society has changed in a way that has made people less likely to lie about being happy.
If you stop to think it through for a second, you’ll quickly understand how the statement “we have some data from somewhere in the middle of the time period in question that self reported satisfaction and a actual satisfaction are correlated” isn’t evidence to support either side. That statement can easily fit either hypothesis.
This is quite easy to test in a longitudinal cross-cultural study of people over time. You'd probably find half a book shelf of research already which does exactly that, if only one bothered to look for it.
My grandparents too, but what I've found out that they really are much happier, because they have seen so much worse. Try to imagine how you'd feel yourself at the moment if you'd have seen WWII, deportations, 50 years of communist occupation etc?
Historically, the % of women that were able to reproduce is something like 90%+, while the % for men was in the low 20s or something. At least from now on it seems that women will "become equal" to men in regards to biological dread.
How historically is this, caveman era with harems?
I have not (yet) seen any relatively modern stable society where 80% of men don’t have children. Having that many men with not much to lose would, presumably, be a destabilizing force.
How about "modern" Muslim societies where polygamy is still a thing?
Also: Just because you are married, and your wife gives birth to a child does not necessarily mean that it's your child :) Nowadays, with contraception and paternity tests available, the number of guys unknowingly raising another man's child is around 2-3%, but it was much higher in the past.
It's basically just Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and sub-Saharan west African countries that have >1% rate of polygamy and only the African countries that have more than 5%. Not exactly the most stable countries.
There are so many factors at play and even when we try, we can only control for a minority of them. The average measured quality of life has gone down for everyone. A little steeper for women than men, yes, here are just some alternative seemingly plausible partial causes for that:
- The patriarchy is still here, but we now expect women to have a career while simultaneously taking care of children.
- Decades of hypersexualized media put the emphasis on sex during dating over caring relationships.
"I am eighteen years old, have a good set of teeth, and believe in Andy Johnson, the Star-Spangled Banner, and the 4th of July. I have taken up a State lot, cleared up eighteen acres last year, and seeded ten of it down.
My buckwheat looks first rate, and the oats and potatoes are bully. I have got nine sheep, a two year old bull, and two heifers, besides a house and a barn.
I want to get married. I want to buy bread and butter, hoop skirts, and waterfalls for some person of the female persuasion during life. That’s what’s the matter with me. But I don’t know how to do it."
It turns out greater choice and rising expectations are an increasing burden on one's psyche. Many of our lives are much better on many objective measures, yet we're more and more unhappy. We're optimizing for the wrong things.
Or maybe life satisfaction has been going down for every gender because we live in a horrible system that asks too much of the individual? With women in the workplace now they also get to suffer under the stress of capitalism on top of also being expected to shoulder the majority of domestic and childrearing tasks in the household.
I don't see this as a "biology is destiny" issue, I see this as a women are still facing pressures from the past and facing pressures of the present.
By that logic, men should be getting happier if now they don’t need to do either the breadwinning or the child raising?
I don’t think biology is deterministic, but it is a factor, for both sexes. (Note that surveys show little to no difference between men and women when it comes to the question of whether they want children and how many.) My suggestion is instead that we have a market failure. People have choices, but not necessarily the ones that will make them happy. The solution to market failure is, of course, regulation of the market, but western individualists don’t want to hear that.
> By that logic, men should be getting happier if now they don’t need to do either the breadwinning or the child raising?
That doesn't follow from what they said. Men never had to do the child raising. Men probably do more childraising and housework than they used to do in the past, because they've been sharing domestic labor more as a result of the spread of feminism. OP is saying that the amount of work between a heterosexual couple has risen: before, it was the man doing a full-time salaried job, and the woman doing housework, cooking, shopping, and childraising as her full-time, unpaid job; and now they're both working full-time, and they have to split the domestic labor between them somehow, or, it's all on the woman and the man does no more than he used to do.
This is a bit oversimplified, though. There were always working-class women who worked as maids or in shops, or, in the 20th century, as teachers and secretaries. Those lower-class women just weren't paid that much. They always had a "second shift" [1], but since the 60s, it's spread to all women.
I think part of it is the old feminist theory of the "second shift" [1]; they have careers now, but they're working twice as much as they used to, doing the bulk of the housework and childrearing, and keeping a full time job. Men these days share more housework than their fathers, which mitigates the problem.
However, with the rise of living costs, now both partners need a full-time job, and the domestic labor is still there; more work needs to be done than before, despite technology making the individual worker more productive. It's not a surprise that fewer people are able to have children; they have more work and are still just barely paying the bills.
In the 70s, there was a movement called the "International Wages for Housework Campaign," which argued that women should be paid a salary for domestic labor, which is essential to society, and that this is an essential component of Women's Liberation [2]. It's interestingly contrary to the view that feminists are all liberal individualists who don't believe in men and women being different.
This is the worse kind of antifeminist argument. "Women say that they prefer the modern world to a more patriarchal system, but actually they are wrong and really would prefer the old ways."
You’re assuming that “women” asked for the full package of changes we ended up with. I’d argue that their focus was more on being able to vote and being able to have bank accounts, and the sexual revolution was driven more by liberal men than by a broad coalition of women: https://blog.ninapaley.com/2019/08/23/andrea-dworkin-on-the-... (“Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.”). The package of changes was “women get to be able to act like men, in the workplace and in dating,” without regard to women’s distinct realities and preferences in both spheres.
More over, the disconnect here isn’t between what “women” want and what they say they want. The disconnect is between the beliefs and attitudes of a minority of elite liberal men and women, and the average woman, especially the average non-college educated woman.
This sentiment is all over & is very demoralizing to guys who got an education, have a decent job, go to the gym and still get rejected by women who seem to be their peers. I'm not a fan of incel ideology, but there is something to the 'she'll have her fun with bad boys then settle down with you in her 30s when she's looking for someone with a stable income' sentiment that goes around. 20s dating is hugely depressing for men and it shows with all the stats of young men 'dropping out' of life. I got lucky and met someone sweet a couple years ago, but it was extremely rocky for a long time, and it still is for most of my friends.
But men just have to 'step it up'. Six feet, six figures, bare minimum right?
The "six feet" women are a small and ever thinning slice of society, if this is a problem you might want to adjust either your targets or your social circle.
But otherwise, even if I'd found your analysis to be correct, I think a few decades of society adjusting to this freedom is well deserved after a millenia of patriarchy.
Quite a polarized way of considering the two sexes, as well as needlessly antagonistic towards contemporary males. They did not have a hand in the defects of a society that once was. Furthermore, two wrongs do not make a right.
Ordinary guys getting married to ordinary women = patriarchy.
The Sultan having a harem of 40,000 = not patriarchy.
That really seems to be the attitude. Women haven't changed at all and want the same thing they always have. It was a brief bit of egalitarianism in history that gave us a "tradition" that was in fact an anomaly.
As a side note, I laugh at the 6-6-6 thing. It doesn't help. They want something else.
What if they want nothing at all? As in, women naturally aren't that attracted to men but through historical male domination, women's level of attraction has been mostly irrelevant historically.
Women preferring taller men will not go away because its desirability is rooted in biology. Taller men make women feel physically safe. Unless culture reconstructs how women view safety in sexual selection, this will continue to be the case.
> but there is something to the 'she'll have her fun with bad boys then settle down with you in her 30s
No, there isn't. The reality here is there's a bunch of men who have "here's my list of positive traits" and are leaving something out, because everyone is the angel of their own story.
> The reality here is there's a bunch of men who have "here's my list of positive traits" and are leaving something out, because everyone is the angel of their own story.
Sure. Average men have flaws. But so do women. When I was dating around I met a bunch of girls who had a wild drugs & partying phase in college. A couple still had cocaine habits. I smoked some weed in high school then stopped. I’ve had sex with 7 women in my entire life, 5 of which were one or two night stands because we didn’t get on. I’m told I’m judgemental & picky because I’m not attracted to women with twice or more my sexual experience.
It’s true that a person’s sexual history does not define their worth as a person, just as height or weight doesn’t. But, what is ignored these days, every person absolutely has a right to their own preferences of attraction. But we insist that young men are terrible people if they don’t accept a history of promiscuity with anything less than enthusiasm.
How do you even know about the other person's history? I have no idea how many partners any of my dates and significant others have had. Could be one, could be one hundred, I don't care. I never ask, I got never asked about it, and would find it both weird and concerning if my current partner wanted to know.
>How do you even know about the other person's history?
I mean, it's kind of natural that you learn it as you get to know them. I don't ask 'what's your tally of sexual partners' out of any context on a first date. But someone describes their life and you pick up on it one way or another and then it comes up in conversation naturally. You can sometimes tell in the bedroom when exciting new things for you are old hat and boring to her. Sometimes they get dodgy about discussing it. And why? Are they ashamed? Or is it because they suspect I would prefer a partner who is more like me and they feel the need to conceal their decisions?
>Could be one, could be one hundred, I don't care.
Good for you! I wish I had such a lack of feeling on the subject, it would certainly make dating easier.
>find it both weird and concerning if my current partner wanted to know.
Why? This statement seems quite a bit like you're passing a harsh judgement on people like me for preferring partners with a similar amount of sexual experience. I see a similar sentiment on the internet all the time, that we're weird and concerning for anything less than unquestioningly embracing partners who may have had sex with 100 people.
> Why? This statement seems quite a bit like you're passing a harsh judgement on people like me for preferring partners with a similar amount of sexual experience.
I think exactly because the question of experience seems so easily to carry judgment (in either direction, too few / too many). I don't see how my or their experience should change anything in our current relationship, so if they asked, I would assume some judgment such as you have. And sexual judgment would be incompatible with my values.
I don't even know if my partner had long term relationships before me -- I suspect yes, and I assume they haven't been married. But I don't care about those facts either.
>I don't even know if my partner had long term relationships before me -- I suspect yes, and I assume they haven't been married.
Huh, well I guess different strokes for different folks. The idea of dating someone & not picking up, as a matter of course, on whether or not they've ever had a previous relationship is baffling.
The "she'll settle down in her 30s" is the wrong part of this plan. Women on her 30s fastly become lower on the totem pole than even men were in their early 20s. Girls should be taught that, but nowadays its a faux pax to tell the biological truth to people. The same should be explained to boys: it will get better when your life starts to come together in your late 20s. It would make the lives of a huge percent of the population, both male and female, a lot happier.
Then they should be taught earlier to get wealthy and successful first, not married, and be ready to buy when timing the market.
Fairy tales are fiction, dating marketplaces are just as ruthless as capital markets. Get sophisticated fast and first. It doesn’t guarantee success (never assured!), but it will improve your odds.
Everyone knows that too. But obviously, everyone is not going to be wealthy, and everyone is not going to be “successful”, especially by their mid to late 20s.
The question is, what are you willing to accept, both of yourself and the other person. The big wrench here is when a significant portion of the market accepts being single and pulls out of the market. Now you have a fundamental mismatch in the number of buyers/sellers, which is a nearly unsolvable problem, without getting into things like restricting people’s freedoms.
Strongly agree! At least if you’re wealthy/successful and alone, you have options, and is better than being poor and alone (imho). Relationships should be complimentary, not a critical component in one’s survival.
There are 8 billion people in the world. With enough resources, you should be able to find someone somewhere to enjoy a time window of partnership or closeness. Accumulate resources, which gives you options, which leads to freedom (including freedom to find love [or your idea of healthy companionship]).
> AI Waifus are about to solve that problem, and women are going to be the most negatively impacted.
No, AI waifus are going to mostly impact incels meeting the strict etymology of the term, which, who knows, might make them somewhat less socially dangerous if not any less socially maladjusted.
Sure, other people might toy with them, but no one who was having any success in the dating world is going to be taken out of it by them.
> Expect attempts to regulate out this industry led by mostly women’s groups.
Literally no one cares that the worst and least desirable men are going to entertain themselves with yet another form of fantasy of having a girlfriend, and other than where it involves using imagery of real people in a way that intersects with the kind of behavior addressed by revenge porn laws or otherwise involves material prohibited for reasons unrelated to the specific use in AI companions (simulated CSAM, for instance), I wouldn't expect any eftorts to regulate it on its own.
I have a very hard time believing heterosexual women are going to be negatively impacted by AI waifus. Thinking such things is a strong indicator one needs to go outside and touch grass.
No, AI relationship apps are more popular with women than men, because the main fantastical part about fictional men is that they're good writers and emotionally expressive.
Then a substantial portion of them become bitter and offer bad advice to younger women encouraging them follow in the same path, because misery loves company. Or because the sour grapes mentality has them conclude that they never actually wanted kids and their lonely spinster alcoholic lifestyle is actually what they wanted; they tell people they're happy and are models to be emulated. They set up a new generation for failure to validate themselves.
And “risky” here means potential of death or serious defect in child, or death for the mother. It’s irresponsible, unethical, and I don’t understand any parent that would risk the health of their child.
This is nuts. Remember, the minimum birth rate is 2.1. Every single woman you've ever met must have 2.1 children just to keep population constant. Every woman who decides to have one or two increases the burden on everyone else.
Just think about the timeline here. Start having children at 35, have your third kid at 38? By the time your youngest is 18 you'll be 56! This is supposed to be the standard life plan, the thing everybody does?
"What about immigration?"
Mexico, Brazil and India already have below-replacement fertility. China, Japan and South Korea have been below replacement so long their populations are now rapidly shrinking. Where are all these immigrants supposed to come from?
No one is obligated to have any children, let alone three. The population growth rate should have absolutely zero influence on your decision to reproduce.
Men who have to have the “glow up” in their late 20s are going to spend that time acting ultra misogynistic to try to take revenge for their earlier life of being rejected. Seen this exact dynamic happen too often in SV circles. Billy the beta is usually not happy to be billy the beta, and given an opportunity, even billy will prove he’s had a latent fuckboy in him the whole time.
I watched American dating on recent trip. Even as a spectator sport, it’s enthralling.
I would like to address the emotion you describe.
Firstly, I doubt it’s just men. I don’t know the simplest adjective, but I’d call the dating scene as “optimized” and “casino like”. Persistence and luck are not small components here.
If anyone’s self worth ends up getting linked to the outcome of such a system, dropping out isnt unsurprising.
It is also quite pointless, to tell someone who is lonely or young, to not treat the process personally.
Yes that’s true. Dating wasn’t that great for me in my 20s - five foot four, decent job, in great shape physically (part time fitness instructor), somewhat outgoing.
Got married at 28 to someone who was physically attractive. But had nothing much going for her and divorced at 32.
Dating was somewhat better then. But didn’t really want anything serious and had close female friends who I travelled with and really gave me the emotional support and no drama.
I got remarried at 36 and have been happily married for 13 years.
That being said, short men do have what I call the “two strikes rule”. You can’t be short and anything. Meaning short and fat, broke, ugly, bad personality, etc. I fought the and part
Zoomer women will be progressive as hell political in how they claim to vote, but the moment in turns into interpersonal relations, they turn into eugenicist facists (six feet, six inches, six figures).
Dating is clearly impossible and hating women is the bestest and smartest course of action. All the couples you see around you must have something you lack. Give up and drop out already. Everybody eventually dies so everything is pointless anyway.
That’s because tinder makes them think that those people are in their dating pool. In reality those men will happily sleep with them like they did with the 50 other women but aren’t interested in more.
Also 200k is the new 6 figures, 100k doesn’t cut it anymore
Well, considering that on these apps (and likely in the general population) men want to be in a relationship more than women, it's almost irrelevant what women should do to improve, there's already a brutal competition for them.
That said, the problem with these apps is that their business model depends on long term user value. (If you register for free, quickly find someone, then you paid nothing to them. Maybe they were able to show you a few ads.) And those who are on it for long tend to have problems. And especially big issue are those who don't give up, but are ruining the mood for others. (Which leads to even fewer women on the platforms.)
> men want to be in a relationship more than women
Is this a commonly held opinion? I’d be curious to read any material on this, because nothing (to me at least) suggests one gender wants it more than the other. Is it simply because there are more men than women on the popular dating apps?
Okay, maybe want is not the best word, but consider the lengths men go to get dates, get laid, to propose, etc. It would be hard to untangle the biological drive from the social pressure. (Plus then there's still the mix of desire for sex and for long term relationships.)
The problem I see is that we have seen progress for women in this space, but not for men.
Women are objectified. The attention a woman receives is related to what she is, not what she does. It's very straightforward to apply this to dating: just look good and confident.
Men are subjectified. The attention a man gets receives is related to what he does, not what he is. It's very tricky to navigate this in dating. How does someone present their interests in a way that is attractive?
This is further complicated by the most common narratives we hear about men's behavior. Masculine behavior is a looming threat. Every man must prove himself not a predator. But how?
yes although you can be in your 30s and subsidize your bad boy lifestyle and persona to the 20s women and ignore the “now I’m ready to settle down” older woman. its even more fun and attractive if some women felt out of grasp in your 20s.
The interesting fact is that mostmost men are "below average" "bad" partners according to how women perceive men (I don't remember the exact numbers but it is something ridiculous like only 5% of men are worth considerations).
I guess that's the result of watching television for 4-5 hours a day, where every actor/actress is super humanly handsome. This changes your baseline, and makes guys/girls in the real world ugly by comparison.
I hate that stupid OK cupid article because what is always missed is that it's not always the same set of guys for all women. Almost no guy was overwhelmingly considered attractive or unattractive by women. Women are picky, but what they are interested in about men varies widely. Men are are the opposite of that. They have a very liberal acceptance criteria and it doesn't vary much between men. This makes perfect sense from a biological perspective. Men want to have sex with as many women as possible. They don't have much pressure to be picky. Women can only be pregnant so many times, so they're very picky, but that pickiness would definitely vary because what would be an ideal partner would vary based what they have going on in environment and genes.
It didn't miss that. It just changes nothing. Women can be as varied as they like but if all that variance is falling within 20% of men then it's still pretty whack which is the point.
So sure one woman could pick x number of guys and another could pick a completely different set y. If x+y is only 20% then it means nothing. If anything, it just makes things worse for any individual guy.
In real life, you're way overstating the variance anyway. I think you kind of see that yourself when you use qualifiers like "overwhelmingly attractive".
The women selected by modern Hollywood as sex icons are, for the most part, nothing special. There are at least three women working at my local grocery store that make Scarlett Johansson look like a hag. They're more beautiful than anybody I've seen in a movie in many years, and I've seen hundreds if not thousands of women like them out in public.
I know these sort of tastes are subjective, but I've talked to a lot of guys who feel the same way. The women in media are mid, most women who are young and physically fit can match if not greatly exceed the looks of women in media. However I acknowledge that women themselves often do not feel this way; they compare themselves to the female celebrities and feel bad about themselves even though most men would rate them higher than the celebrities. They rate themselves lower than men would rate them because media is toxic and purposely makes women feel insecure to sell more beauty products, lifestyles, etc.
What you have realized is that attraction is more than just physical beauty. There are plenty of non-verbal and biochemical cues that generate attraction. That's why you find these women in real life more beautiful than women on screens.
It's why the article linked in the root of this thread was even written.
Human attraction happens best in person because there is more to it than just looks.
I understand that, but it's also true just in terms of physical beauty as well. Hollywood women are nothing special, not anymore anyway. There are no more Audrey Hepburns in Hollywood. Hollywood's beauty standards for sex-icon women have severely deteriorated.
Charitable explanation: Hollywood has become better at selecting for acting talent instead of beauty.
Uncharitable explanation: Fewer Hollywood casting directors are straight men.
Because women are more picky. Men choose quantity over quality :P For a man any reasonably good looking, reasonably slim woman is good as a potential sex partner (so they will swipe right on Tinder). Women want the best of the best.
There's also something to be said for women that read a lot of romance novels or fanfics and have warped "love maps". Probably not a big % of the population, but it changes the psychological waters of relationships with them.
My other favorite: men (in media) who are doing things ultra creepy/illegal, but given a 'pass' because "omghot". Twilight: "older guy lurks around high school girl's home, peering in her bedroom window at night". Fifty Shades: "guy stalks young college student to find her address and work, and steals her car".
(Don't even start me on the whole Christian Grey character, which will forever go down as one of the most over-the-top 'perfect male'. Let's see: 33 year old man is deca-billionaire in telco after coming from foster home. And it was so effortless to become said deca-billionaire that he also found time to become a commercial helicopter pilot, a concert pianist, someone who doesn't break a sweat cranking out Michelin-tier meals for idle snacks and brunches... and looks like an underwear model.
> For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
I see variations of this statement all the time. This weird, almost gleeful misandry masquerading as a historical perspective. It needs to stop. It has poisoned all our interactions and it is hurting people.
I feel like anyone who feels this way should sit and talk to the older women in their lives and ask themselves would they want that. I've talked to happily married women in their 60s and 70s and I hear nothing but abuse and more abuse. I watched my mom and aunt fall into poverty when they got a divorce and have the marry the first man that seemed decent to keep their kids fr starving. My unmarried aunt is dissatisfied by never having children and never marrying, but she's always have independence and never been hit and never worried she would be homeless. When I consider old spinsters vs old married people well, it makes think I'd rather be a spinster if I can't find a decent guy. Of course there are true happy couple in there but they are so few it really makes me grateful no fault divorce exists.
For me, I dated a lot of men. Sometimes we're not a match, but a lot of the time these guys seemed angry I didn't need them. One guy actually became physically abusive when he came over to my house and saw how much nicer I lived than him. We'd been dating for weeks. Another guy, dumped me for paying for a whole date. Another guy, withdrew his interest upon learning my profession and considering I'd definitely make more than him whatever I made.
You know the advice female relatives give me? Hide how much I make. That is the state of heterosexual dating. It's where my friend who is a self made millionaire gets asked by her boyfriend when she's going to become a housewife so he can marry her. Women aren't perfect, but there's definitely got to be some kind of change for men as a collective. I know some great male partners, but I also know that they're out weighed by so many men I know personally.
> Women aren't perfect, but there's definitely got to be some kind of change for men as a collective. I know some great male partners, but I also know that they're out weighed by so many men I know personally.
This is a bit like saying: “White people aren’t perfect, but there's definitely got to be some kind of change for black people as a collective. I know some great black folks, but I also know that they’re outweighed by so many blacks I know personally.”
(I suspect that this is the reason your comment has been downvoted.)
I'd be quite happy marrying an affluent woman as it means I'd have at least a potential chance of leaving corporate tech and having the time to write a novel (which is all my childhood self ever wanted.)
I think guys who are intimidated by successful women have a ton of growing up to do, clearly. Surely it would be amazing to be with someone ambitious and intelligent?
This was really interesting to read. I believe everything you said, but I have never met anyone like what you are describing. I only get complaints from friends that women expect them to pay for everything on a date.
I don't know anybody that complains that their wife/gf makes more than them. It's pretty rare, but those in that position are very grateful for the freedom to work lower paying jobs with higher satisfaction.
Yeah but would you date/marry a house husband? If you are earning big bucks you kind of need someone to stay home and take care of the kids/house/laundry/dinner etc. For one most mothers never trained their boys for that role but even if some did would you seek that man out for dating? I would guess not, so it’s an adverse selection problem with adverse results
I would. I'm intensively jealous of the women I know who have nabbed one. The issue is the one time I found a supposed homemaker guy he was still the same kind of abuse and stopped cooking/cleaning. It was kinda galling. How are you gonna threaten me with physical violence and I pay for everything and now I'm even cooking and cleaning every day please.
That is a very short term view. It’s essentially ‘Uber driving for relationships’.
Those same women will then complain bitterly when they get older or become a single mom, and no one pays attention to them anymore and have to start actually doing the work.
Like an Uber driver whose car has been worn to a nub with zero equity in anything, still living paycheck to paycheck, and no new skills. But 10 years down the tubes, and they never had to work for ‘the man’, and saw a lot of cool stuff.
The social construct of marriage tries to even this out - that ‘crummy’ man stays around and provides in many ways (social, financial, physical) even after she’s no longer hot and ‘marketable’. And who will help support and protect her while she has kids. The things that make them ‘crummy’ is exactly what is needed to support all that.
It’s the social/relationship equivalent of a retirement fund/pension. It’s not exciting up front.
Pay in now, (and keep him around) so you’re not eating dogfood in 20 years and have kids who can help you too. Instead of being terribly lonely, mentally ill, and then dying alone and getting eaten by your cats.
Which society has also been nuking social safety net wise, much to everyone’s likely long term regret frankly.
It’s folks losing the plot society wide. It’s how we end up with a lot of very sad stories later.
> Which society has also been nuking social safety net wise
If you mean "marriage with no possible divorce is a social safety net", then I have to protest that "safety" is pretty relative here. It's a system with absolutely no safeguards against the husband (or wife) becoming abusive or violent, especially if your society is patriarchal enough to encourage honor killings.
Wow there’s so much to unpack here. We live in a world that is largely heterosexual and monogamous, meaning it takes two to tango. If there’s a bunch of women ending up single, then that necessitates about an equal amount of single men too. The “bitterness” will be bourne by both fronts equally, and the “hot and marketable” comment cuts both ways.
Rather than play the blame game and make gross uber analogies, It’s worth pointing out why some people would rather be single. Is it because they’d rather not be in unhappy marriages? If so, the focus should be on how to improve marriage for both parties.
Is it because on top of needing to have a career, they’re also expected to shoulder much of the burden of raising kids? Let’s think of how we can make it more fair to everyone, or work on supporting parenthood as a society.
> Wow there’s so much to unpack here. We live in a world that is largely heterosexual and monogamous, meaning it takes two to tango.
Is it really?
The world may be largely monogamous and heterosexual, but is that the case for Westernized societies? I remember reading stats on how native Western EU cultures rank highest in terms of infidelity and divorce rates, with Luxembourg enjoying a massive 40% divorce rate. The world may be monogamous, but I doubt that's only because repressive Old World societies are propping it up.
Costs became unmanageable and out of reach for the average folks once women entered the workforce, essentially doubling the supply of labor overnight. This could have been balanced out with men not being looked down upon for staying at home with the kids (although that raises more questions, considering men weren't really biologically wired for the task).
There's a reason most rich families have mostly stay-at-home wives/moms even today. The man earns the dough, while the woman stays home or works a very chill job, while her primary focus remains the house and the family (including its finances, social standing, kids - which tends to be a very high amount btw, etc). And in my experience, the ones that aren't structured this way tend to fall apart quickly.
> I remember reading stats on how native Western EU cultures rank highest in terms of infidelity and divorce rates, with Luxembourg enjoying a massive 40% divorce rate.
The entire country of Luxembourg has a smaller population than most big cities, with only slightly more than half of that population having the Luxembourgish nationality. It’s hardly representative for “native Western EU cultures”.
It seems Portugal and Spain rank at the top for divorces (80%+!), followed by Luxembourg, then Russia and Ukraine. The EU average is 45%,just like the US average.
‘Crossing the streams’ with social roles is also an issue of insecurity. Which we can all point fingers at people and say ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’, but people don’t work that way.
I’ve personally seen women get really distressed when they see an actual good male parent (better than them, it appeared) with kids.
And I’ve seen the same with men (to the point of aggressive harassment) with a women who were better than them at ‘manly’ stuff, like welding/fabricating, or car repair.
All of them denied it, but for anyone paying even a little attention it was pretty blatant.
As a side note - it may be worth reframing ‘the world being largely monogamous and heterosexual’ to something more like ‘societies strongly enforcing monogamy and heterosexuality’.
Anyone who has ever spent any time in a gay club can report that many/most of the other patrons were heterosexual/monogamous too. At least until they entered the club.
Society doesn’t exist for long without a supply of children, and has very strong incentives to enforce certain behaviors.
These factors all interrelate, as does interpersonal expectations, societal roles, etc.
What you’re pointing out, IMO, is that expectations and roles aren’t realistic. People keep stepping on each others toes, fighting to justify themselves, burning out, etc.
But then, there have always been the ‘confirmed bachelors’ and ‘old maids’ no? It would be interesting to see the percentages over time however.
One thing that is easily confirmed by data and just by looking around - older, established men have no shortage of ‘market value’, as do young pretty women.
Also, there has never been a time where raising kids or stable long term relationships was easy, or when there was no abuse somewhere.
Without gender misbalance and polyamory you can’t assign a higher “market value” to either, as an older single woman will also have a single male counterpart. What you’re seeing is confirmation bias.
Ok, your point is? The article is discussing dating and relationships not sexual partners. Your original post was commenting on relationships/marriage as well. How you concluded that this was revolving around sex is unclear.
Look, I’ll reiterate it one more time: For every person who is single, statistically there should be another single counterpart of the opposite sex. That some people choose to stay single rather than get into a bad relationship/marriage says a lot about what it’s like to be in one for one or both parties. It’s worth having some introspection on why this is happening, instead of making gross comparisons and assumptions.
You’re the one making statistically unsound assumptions here. None of what you’re saying has any basis in actual fact.
Plenty of people are in relationships (formal) that don’t have sex with each other anymore. A few never had sex, but are in relationships where the social assumption is they did/are.
Plenty of people (including women) have multiple partners, some long term, some transitory. (Many to one). Sometimes they know of each other. Usually they do not.
Plenty of people have one or more partners of different ages (sex or relationship wise).
Plenty of people have no meaningful relationships (sex or formal) of any kind for long periods of time or ‘anymore’. Often by choice, sometimes involuntarily. I know several men who flat out ‘noped out’ in their 40’s because they got tired of what they perceived as predatory behavior. And at least one woman who did the same. All of them had been married for long periods of time.
Hell, one female sex worker can have anywhere from 20 to 100 clients (monthly) last I read on a regular basis.
It’s not that uncommon for some edge case men to sleep with that many women every couple months. I’m sure they’d be ecstatic if they could be paid for it, but male sex workers predominantly have male clients.
Many people consider things like this to be some kind of dating, or at least related/impactful to it. All of it interplays with relationships. The social expectation is that dating, relationships, and sex are all interrelated.
So what are you trying to say exactly besides ‘that’s all gross so I don’t want to believe it’?
If you think that’s bad, don’t get into the medical field! You won’t necessarily get the truth, but if you have even a decent idea of the STD transmission odds, it’s clear what the lies are!
Seems like past 30, very few men stay/are single. Women > 50 start getting single dramatically faster, though I've noticed it often really starts kicking off ~ 40. (Some of this due to men dying sooner than women, and a lot of it later, but if you don't think menopause has something to do with it - you've never had a partner with menopause).
But also notably, women are not often single - unlike young men - until they're really old. Weird eh? Even though there are more women than men in the population by a measurable %.
My observation is that if not stably paired, women have it pretty rough past 30, and end up dating older and older men or 'settling' for folks they never would have given the time of day when younger. Women are also more likely to do 'Mistress' type arrangements.
Men have it really rough when young, until they figure themselves out, and then most of them have it easier (the more money, fame, popularity, infamy, etc. the better) unless they're actively driving women away.
Most homosexual relationships I've seen often end up playing out this same dynamic, but with members of the same gender. The notable exception being 'twins' [https://inmagazine.ca/2021/01/doubling-down-on-boyfriend-twi...], which was always interesting to watch. It wasn't just men either.
Trans, same but with one partner trans (of course).
> If there’s a bunch of women ending up single, then that necessitates about an equal amount of single men too.
A minority of those single men have numerous (sometimes >hundreds) short-term relationships. But far more of those single men have very few or even no relationships at all. I think this disparity is far more extreme for men than for women.
If that upper echelon of single and promiscuous men were socially pressured to stop man-whoring and settle into healthy long-term relationships, then the rest would have better odds. Of course those men will never voluntarily change their ways unless there exists a strong social pressure to change. In the past, this pressure existed in the form of men without partners [wives, but it doesn't have to be wives] being viewed with suspicion if they wanted to attain social standing at work or in their community. This pressure has all-but evaporated into nothingness.
And of course, people lie all the time too. There are a great many men (and women) that do things they would never, ever admit to. Regularly.
I never cheated, but I was very shocked at how much attention I got as a married man.
Take the ring off? Complete 180.
It’s also pretty easy to look at the reported partner counts between the sexes and see that it’s literally impossible that both are true at the same time.
> The best bachelors would be gone pretty quickly. That put a ton of pressure on the remaining women to quickly settle for an average guy in order not to be stuck with a terrible partner
So average women with average men, I don't see the issue. The problem is now a lot of women aims very high, even out of their league, when they don't have much to put on the table.
The average kind of sucks for everyone. Being average single is a lot better than average income family. Raising your average family of 4 on an average 61k salary just seems like hell in any major metro. Better just Netflix and seek other validation.
I don't see many men, old or young, doing much to improve their standing as a bachelor, given what is in their control. I've had to do a lot of listening and learning to be a man women would be interested in. Modern male culture in the US typically does NOT do that.
At the same time, I think you're right that women have more power over their life decisions more than ever. This is great and I want that for the women of earth.
> I agree with you that many guys today struggle with dating because they haven't done the necessary work to be good partners, but the problem isn't that "contemporary life doesn't encourage self-improvement". The "problem", if you even want to call it that, is that women prefer being single over a bad relationship with a crummy guy. For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
---
What if there actually are plenty of men who have 'stepped their game up' and are perfectly qualified peers to women and would make suitable partners, but the women just have wildly unrealistic expectations?
Or the women just aren't that interested in men in general?
Could those be factors, rather than men just being so beneath women?
Nah. Men who think like that are thinking like victims. Shifting the blame elsewhere.
No one owes you any love, except your family.
If you want to find love or a partner out there, you’ve gotta find it and earn it. It could take a long time, or not happen - but if you aren’t in good shape, don’t have any money saved up and aren’t interesting, don’t be surprised if you end up alone or with someone below your standards.
I'm saying perhaps a major part of the reason so many men are single is not necessarily because they are lazy losers who refuse to level up like you suggest, but because they can't meet modern women's unrealistic standards or women just aren't that interested in them even after they've leveled up.
Many men can 'level up' to the maximum realistic extent, and still have few women interested in them. That doesn't make these men lazy losers who refuse to put in the work.
I'm not suggesting they are owed a woman for leveling up to the maximum realistic extent, I'm just saying it's very unfair of you to call them lazy losers for their effort not bearing fruit.
Yeah but they will fail because they stuck at marketing. It’s like business sometimes you have the right product but you just can’t get it in front of your customers so they actually buy it
> In the "good old days" dating was simpler, but also much, much worse for the average woman. People dated within their town almost exclusively. The best bachelors would be gone pretty quickly.
Honestly, the ability to tell “the best bachelor” without experience together of the type that used to be frowned on before marriage was always weak; what has changed is that the social and economic compulsion/incentive (on both sides) to marry has become a lot weaker and the volume of exposure much greater, and norms limiting the kind of experience that reveals fundamental incompatibility before marriage have weakened.
When you're fresh out of high school and the push is to make a rush for the best bachelor or the cream of the crop in your small town, oftentimes you'd end up with the guy "who peaked in high school", because you only had high school to really go off of. The worst part is those guys were considered the best bachelors, and the "peaked in high school" bit wasn't discovered until later/too late.
I don't think things have changed much. Your explanation pretty much blames men which has been in vogue. The dating apps just expanded the size of the "town". Women still look for the top tier guys. I don't believe they are choosing to be single but convincing themselves they can do better when in reality they can't. Dating apps feed the illusion of choice that mr. right is easily obtainable.
I mean they can, kind of. Top tier guys will have sex with multiple women, some of which will be "lower" on the rankings than them. This leads women to believe they are in their league, since they are having sex.
Then time comes to settle down and those guys don't settle with those girls. Cue "Where have all the good men gone?" and "Why are men so scared to settle?". It's the same problem the average male faces, just in reverse.
I don't disagree with your point, but still: there was plenty of pressure on the men, too, and "many men got stuck in unhappy marriages, but that was life".
Also, early pressure to marry "the best bachelor" often meant "the guy on the football team", "the guy that peaked in high school" (you just didn't know it yet).
Often they were the ones who became the angry alcoholics.
The first paragraph put into words what i've always been intuitively convinced of, but it seems difficult to make people understand it who haven't had to live through it.
There are numerous studies confirming the effect you're speaking of, altough I'm not sure if dating apps have an influence on that.
It was shown that certain national ice hockey teams were comprised mainly of players who were born at the beginning of the year. It is theorized that this is because the date that cuts one class for another is at the beginning of the year. If you're born in January, and you start playing hockey at 5, you're gonna be significantly older than a child that's born in december. As a result, you'll be recognized and helped more by your coach, which improves your chances of becoming better, and drags into adulthood, up until you're in the national team. The same applies for academic and professional careers and I'm sure dating as sell.
Humans are the same as we were for millennia, the problem is that we seem to be having a bit of a self-denial crisis nowadays. We just can’t accept our flaws anymore, apparently, so we build these fake meaningless narratives that “everyone is special” and “all bodies are beautiful” etc. The truth is that dating is brutal; it works very well for a few people, but for the majority of average people it is a hard competition to which nobody actually know the rules. It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being.
So you find yourself in this situation where everyone is so nice and polite, so sophisticated and accepting, so inclusive, but for some reason nobody gives a single ** about having a romantic relationship with you. How’s that possible? Well it’s possible because it’s all fake. Deep inside, in our intimacy and our inner circles, we’re the same as we were a thousand years ago. The apps simply make it obvious and pull it to the surface.
Ugly people with lumpy bodies have been successfully reproducing for millennia. Many of them even had/have shit personalities to top it off. Dating sucks because in modern times we are coddled and are terrified of failure, many of us spend way too much time behind computer screens and on social media so our people skills have atrophied, and we also spend relatively little time around other people in fun and recreational environments so the opportunities are just missing in a massive way.
The apps completely change how we perceive ourselves and our potential sexual partners. I can't believe I have to say this, but the biggest things that have changed with regards to dating in the past 10 years vs the past 1,000 are social patterns and technology.
>It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being.
This kind of attitude is so harmful. If your life's purpose is 100% dependent on some idealized stranger granting you validation you are in for a bad time. Sex is great, biological imperatives are powerful, but you wont find animals falling into existential dread and despair because they haven't gotten laid yet (or recently). That is a particularly human trait, and it comes from obsessive and self-defeating beliefs about the world rather than reality itself. You might feel like this belief is out of your hands, but it very much is not. Your beliefs are one of the few things in this world that are entirely up to you to change and improve upon (or not).
I think we’re saying the same thing basically but my perspective was a bit too negative. Dating is brutal but we still do it, ugly or not, of course. We’ve been doing it for millennia and we never needed politically correct fashion ads to make that work. The problem is when you find yourself surrounded by this comforting mumbo jumbo of “every body is beautiful” and then when you get out there it doesn’t apply. I’d much rather have someone tell me “it’s a jungle out there, get ready, people will treat you like shit but find your path and be strong and unique in who you are”.
Your comment about the harmful attitude is correct, I 100% agree. But again, if you listen to what is implicitly conveyed in social media (where every human being is basically reduced to a single one-dimensional score), you would have a hard time reaching that conclusion. Nobody really “says” that, but as a human being you read between the lines. I guess it sounded like I was saying “date apps are fine, it’s us who are the problem” but I didn’t mean it, I think social media is very harmful.
The experiences with people need to be high quality if you want people to socialize often.
Speaking for myself, I'm not really interested in being around loud, raucous places where I have to spend money just to exist and socialize there. Those are businesses, not communities.
Third places and real communities don't really exist anymore.
I legitimately can't remember the last time I went to a public event and enjoyed myself.
>I legitimately can't remember the last time I went to a public event and enjoyed myself.
A public event you didn't pay for? Really depends. I can still enjoy a decent meetup here and there. But meetup issues come from the meetup itself or the people being inconsistent. Hard to build relationships when it's a revolving door that claims to meet "every 2 weeks" but ends up averaging 4-8 weeks.
> Third places and real communities don't really exist anymore.
I joined a book club last year, and it was great for a few months, but I noticed that most people, unless truly dedicated, petered off, or would only come and 'taste' for a month then ghost. I'm not saying I'm any better. When you've gone to 5 book clubs that have fallen apart, why would you risk committing and being sad when it falls apart again?
I believe our ability to commit is deteriorating; the how and why is a whole nother topic.
I think you answered yourself, in a sense. Our ability to commit is deteriorating, but the reason why is (partly) the risk of commitment itself. You risk being hurt or disappointed if you commit to the wrong event or wrong person. Figuring out what's "good" to commit to is possibly more individual than we realize.
I personally find it weird when people talk shit about someone being unwilling to commit, as if one should jump straight into serious obligations without any forethought. You didn't do that of course, but I see it come up in discussions sometimes, mostly concerning relationships. Commitment is more complicated than most people see it imo.
I have seen numerous interviews with people who are religious. They have that community. I know, I know, I'm not encouraging you to become religious, but it is pretty hard to beat as a community. However, for non-religious people, yes, I think in-person/in-real-life community is in broad decline. When I go to public events now, most people are looking at their phones, or talking with the one friend they came with. Drinking helps to lower the barrier a bit. Try a wine tasting event. They aren't very loud and only modestly business oriented. Mostly they are about mixing and pretending that you really are there to drink a little too much and chat with someone cute. Also, don't worry if the first wine tasting event doesn't feel right. You can use the first event as a springboard to find other small, inclusive wine tasting events. Those are the secret sauce and the gender balance can be good -- way better than craft beer festivals (sausage fest).
>you wont find animals falling into existential dread and despair because they haven't gotten laid yet (or recently)
I don't think I've heard of any animal falling into existential dread or despair, for any reason. But quality of life is absolutely impacted by ability to breed.
Years ago there was this elephant at the zoo pacing at his enclosure. I spent 30 minutes watching, and while it didn't explicitly mention anything about feeling existential dread or despair, it certainly looked like it did.
Have you ever watched a nature program? 99% of animals are spending 99% of their time trying to survive and reproduce. They aren’t asking themselves “why?” hence the absence of any existential crises.
That is the universal behavior, and it is totally valid for any being capable of knowing this to be depressed about it.
I think it's a bit of both. Humans are the same, but the tech and environment and especially quality of life isn't anymore. what was good enough in the 50's to attract a mate in a local town isn't good enough for the entire state or even country. I'm sure if Tinder existed in the 50's there'd be similar-ish issues.
At the same time, part of this is because there's been a lot of change in how and where we interact. There isn't really a "poker night" in a lot of modern 30's life with neighbors you chat with every day. young adults can't afford (in time nor money) to get out to a night life more than a few times a month, and even those night life places feel more like people come with established groups. Modern society doesn't pay enough and gets more and more expensive. It's no surprise it can feel soul crushing.
You raise a good point. I'll summarise: "Kids these days are broke." Get-off-my-lawn joking aside, the purchasing power of younger generations is definitely less than before. As a result, young people go to bars / restaurants / concerts / holidays much less, further reducing their social (and dating) opportunities. I blame global trade which makes a few much richer at the expense of stalled or slightly declining prosperity for the masses.
>Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members).
You are confounding social and professional outcomes. Social to me is much more genetic (looks, personality, etc.) than professional. Yes, IQ matters some for professional success. Grit, aka "The Grind" is probably the number one indicator of success. I'm not saying everyone can grind to wealthy, but almost everyone can grind to middle class. And the grind applies to all types of jobs -- professional or not, high income or not, corporate or start-up.
Also, you wrote your post (I assume) from the perspective of a man. Even the most unattractive women on dating apps get far more attention than the most attractive men. This has been shown time and time again. Also, most men are invisible to women, but the reverse is not true. (Do not read this post as disparaging towards women.)
What is really happening is that visual-only dating apps are refining the purest biological imperatives: women only seek the best physical mates (top 20%), where as men pursue whatever they can. As a result, most men get zero attention on dating apps. The craziest irony to me: I grew up before the Internet and dating apps became a thing. RARELY did I hear women talk about finding an attractive mate. They wanted to find someone compatible and supportive with good long term intentions. These visual-only dating apps have weirdly inverted the world as most women chase the very best men... who treat them terribly, but are very good looking and have a lot of practice seducing women. Rinse and repeat; almost everyone on dating apps except for the very top are much less satisfied than life before dating apps.
I'm surprised I haven't seen any push by a dating app to do the modern version of an old-fashioned matchmaker. Heck, it'd be a great space for AI buzzword stuff and not even all that unethical if LLMs can do a better-than-random success rate at matching up profiles.
Yes, and they're expensive. Often they don't have access to a secret repository of top quality clients but they still work for filtering out people who are investing minimal effort into finding someone. If you spend $500 to get three matches, you're going to put in a lot more effort into setting up a date, showing up for it, and following up (provided they weren't tossing red flags everywhere) than you would if you got the same three matches on a free dating site. The same goes for the matches. If they also put down $500, they're much more invested in trying to make something of value come out of it because they've already sunk in money. And it filters out the bots, the attention seekers, the social media clout manipulators, porn site promoters, etc. that thrive on the low cost of connection.
From what I've seen, it works well for people who just needed something to get both parties to take finding a relationship seriously while it ends up being a bitterly disappointing waste of money for those who think because it costs 100x as much as an online dating site, they're going to get matches that are 100x further up the dating hierarchy.
Yes, they exist but often for men they are a complete waste of time. Unless you’re an exec, wealthy, and generally handsome - most matchmakers will not take you up. It is simply because they know you will not be able to match with any women they provide or find in the wild. They don’t want to get bad reviews and so they only take clients that they are confident they could match.
It is somewhat ironic since people they are confident they could match are the people who need a matchmaker least of all.
I found this modelling really good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3lypVnJ0HM
TLDR: Once you have a two to one ratio of straight men to straight women. Men get matched 1/2 as much, respond by lowering there standards and spamming women. Women start off with twice as many matches, but get choosier and match even less. Women feel overwhelmed and get chased off the apps. Men quit from not getting any interest.
To me this is an argument that everyone should pay for online dating. In other words, eliminate the freemium model. This would remove most of the dead profiles, and the paid users would have incentive to meet people ASAP instead of quietly lurk forever.
Everything we do online is soul-altering. The online world is a different place. Vastly bigger in some ways and ridiculously narrower in others. We are the guinea-pig generations. We rushed into it without much preparation and simply figure out what works and what not by trial-and-error, paying with our life coins.
What complicates things enormously is that these altered realities reallocate wealth and power. The mental and emotional health of users was not the first priority. But we are now past the first phase.
From social media and search to dating apps and everything else online, now people asking probing questions about how the new tech has been put to use and for whose benefit.
Will there ever be better "dating apps". Its a good question. The answer will depend on if we ever harness the economics behind technology to server people rather than the other way around
As much as articles lament the alienating despair of algorithmically processed dating-app and social media culture, the popularity of these apps never declines. In fact, year after year they become more popular, even among those who claim to hate the apps, hate social media, and hate the way they've become a slave to a machine that commodifies their personhood.
Humans crave hierarchical signaling. Instagram, TikTok, Match group, the entire industry have invested millions of dollars into implementing every cutting edge brain-hack they can think of. They've nurtured in us a dependence on their contorted, amplified presentation of society and our sociosexual value. Year in, year out, just as the house always wins, the dopamine sink always leans in their favor.
It's primally addicting to seek concrete quantifiers of status or worth: how many DM's you get, how many likes, how many matches. As complex as the human social brain is, its measures of meaning can often collapse on single numbers because they signal something irreducible: just exactly how cool, hot, likable, valuable or important you really are. The end game of all gossip is to glean something close to these numbers, in one way or another. In real life there's always layers of illusion and nuance, but online we are presented the truth, unflinchingly.
I think people really have to grapple with something often hard to accept: there's no reason why the human social consciousness has to be good, ultimately kind, or benign. There's a possibility that the essential elements of our psyches that apps and social media have exploited aren't really all that pleasant when laid out in the open. Maybe all our whims and lusts can end up being very bad to many people through no fault of their own. Maybe there is an essential, evolutionary ugliness to human nature behind the façade of cordial, inoffensive pleasantries. In the end, we become miserable, because our mental heuristics have been granted power they never should have. Algorithmic bliss has allowed us to be far too human.
I live in a rural, remote area without any clue how to break into a social scene. I think you're extrapolating and generalizing way too hard. It's not hierarchical for me, I just want to meet someone local to hang out with and date. Dating apps are, unfortunately, pretty much my only local connection.
Also I have body image issues and do not enjoy working out around other people.
That sounds rough. I'm sorry to hear it. I still strongly encourage you to get exercise on your own. It will do wonders for your self-esteem and mental health. If one, you get fit enough, then you can go to the gym. Don't worry, the gym is much less social than you imagine it is. Most people are wearing headphones these days.
It’s not weird at all, and that’s not even how it works. My trainer introduced me to other people and mixed groups (guys, gals, coupes, etc).
Those groups all have their own networks, etc. If you vibe with some of them and become part of their groups, you naturally get introduced to new people.
This also works if you move to a new area and even if you’re already in a relationship (I’m married), great for making new connections.
If that's true, doesn't that support OP's point? That behaviors that amplify hierarchy signalling can cause seriously fucked up social dynamics to develop?
> As much as articles lament the alienating despair of algorithmically processed dating-app and social media culture, the popularity of these apps never declines. In fact, year after year they become more popular
Your claim is literally contradicted by the article: "The most up-to-date figures show the world’s most popular dating app, Tinder, saw its users drop by 5% in 2021, while shares in both Bumble and Match Group, which owns Tinder, have declined steadily over the last couple of years."
Considering the lockdowns made dating app usage surge in 2020, a more meaningful figure would be a comparison between 2019 and 2021. The fact that it dropped 5% from 2020 to 2021 given the lockdowns in 2020 makes that figure meaningless.
I think it is much simpler than this. I know a guy that is 35, is ripped and takes model level photos of himself. He will basically brag how he is picky on tinder. He is also 5'7" and has the most average salary.
Whoever has the best looking pictures gets most of the attention. I practically grew up on the old dating sites and my weight fluctuated wildly from eating out when I was young. I can remember it was like two different experiences depending if I was on a diet and weighed 15lbs less. 15lbs was the difference between a massive amount of attention vs basically none.
The idea that all that matters is how good your picture looks is so obvious but it doesn't fit the romantic stories we tell ourselves so we pretend like there are all these deep flaws in dating apps. They are doing exactly what we should expect them to do. Guys with great pictures are getting all the sex and attention at the expense of basically everyone else. Duh.
I'm shredding now right now and some stats on Reddit that the two most successful types of pics are 1) shirtless if you have a nice body and 2) pics with an animal.
So I'm gonna take a nice shirtless pic while holding my cat in one arm and have fun with it lol.
I found my current partner of 2 years on bumble. I was on the site for a month.
I sometimes wonder if people just have too higher expectations, waiting for 'the one'. Relationships are hard. You have to work through differences, you can't expect to find someone where differences are absent.
I'm not pro marriage per se, but I think we need more, work on the relationship you have, rather than ending it and looking for something better.
Many people I know who have converted a match to a stable relationship (at least one side) were completely green to the apps when it happened. For many it was one and done. And my best experiences were with completely green folks. I think the rest of us are cynical and that is a bad quality while dating.
How do people here even make time for dating in the first place? At least for me atm, doing part time graduate school, job, and interview prep, I feel so burned out after it that I don't want to do anything
And I'm probably not even in as deep as some people here, some of this computer stuff is so ridiculously time consuming. I'm not even working on anything remotely hard, but still: how the hell do you make time? Without sacrificing your own projects?
It's something I've been thinking about for a while now. How do all of the people maintaining all of this hard, important shit get to where they are and still manage to have some semblance of a life? Not only just maintaining the stuff, but learning all of the background necessary to get there
It's fairly easy to make time for dating I find. I mean it requires the odd evening out and the odd day sacrificed which is manageable. The problem is that when you are successful you have no free time for your projects and stuff suddenly at all and that goes on forever.
Source: was married for a couple of decades and have had a couple of 6-12 months long relationships since. I have kids already, a full time job and am doing a second degree part time so I'm sure if I can manage it anyone can ;)
That PhD won't keep you warm at night, or meaningfully get you a better job, but at least it'll let you pretend intellectual superiority over others. That's the important thing.
I've been there. Keep your nose to the grindstone, and you might accomplish your goals. Stop to smell the roses, and you're brain may relax enough to find a solution that's been eluding you. But since you sound new to both, my advice is: don't mix date-finding with job-hunting. Both are full of blows to the ego, and rejection and desperation form a vicious cycle.
If you don’t have time for dating you probably won’t have the time for a meaningful relationship. Maybe once you get the job offer you want and are done with grad school you will have the time?
Honestly, for all their flaws this is something that dating apps do make easier: fitting dating into a busy schedule. It doesn't take that much time to set up a profile, do a bit of swiping and have a few conversations.
Of course, the actual dates take time, but it is not difficult to make time for a date with someone you like because it's something you want to do. Actually getting to that point is what took a lot of time before dating apps because you basically had to spend a lot of time in a situation (like a bar) where you might encounter someone compatible and hit it off with them. (Back in the day people just did this at their job but I think that is less acceptable in Western society now.)
Currently, in the same boat. Grad school + full-time job + TA work (I know I'm an idiot for doing TA work on top of this). I have no social life, I barely have time to cook.
I'm doing well by mapping out my days. I have all my projects written down, with dating being one of them. And then I just plan at what day I do what. Of course life gets in the way, but more often than not I stick to my plans. You'll always struggle if you're trying to do more than you can fit into a day, but writing and explizit planning helps setting the priority.
> As Illich saw it, the rise of universalizing social technologies — that is, institutions managed by strangers — transgressed the traditional bounds of diverse vernacular communities and harnessed human endeavor to a trajectory of limitless growth, creating a “radical monopoly” over the ways and means of living that blunted any alternative to industrializing the desires of consumer society. In the process, persons and communities alike were deprived of the practical knowledge to shape tools according to their own defined needs and choices. Robbed of such competence, they became servants to the logic of those institutions instead of the other way around.
> His greatest insight was that when conviviality is swapped for productivity, monopolizing institutions that chart a singular path at mass scale become counterproductive to their original intent beyond a certain threshold.
> In his book “Energy and Equity” Illich illustrated this point in terms all could easily understand. As anyone who has driven on a freeway would agree, individual mobility turns into collective congestion when everyone has a car.
“People are so much more magic in real life.” - I agree with that wholeheartedly.
It’s wonderful to meet new people, whether you’re looking to find a partner or not. But some life situations make it easier to do that than others. I met the love of my life at Uni - she wouldn’t have given me a second glance on a dating app, but the environment of University allowed us to be friends, and then evolve into more.
How do you emulate the Uni vibe in “adult life” though, with thousands of people having lots of things in common that they can start chatting on,with activities involving people they know and don’t know that they can dip in and out of, and with parties where they can let go of inhibitions?
Yes, people are much more magic in real life, and oftentimes the magic happens from being in different situations with them.
One major problem with the dating apps is that their search is terrible. Searching just doesn't work how you want it to work. It gives way too many results that don't fit your criteria. I think this is deliberate? They don't want you to search, they want you to use their "algorithmic" matching. (This seems reminiscent of how social networks want you to use an "algorithmic" timeline rather than your own self-curated reverse chronological list.) For example, I live in a medium sized city, and I only want matches within the metro area, but the apps will give matches throughout the state and in a neighboring state, with no way to filter them out, as if I'm going to spend hours driving just for a date, and then start a difficult long-distance relationship. And I also got "likes" from way outside my geographical range. I got likes from other states and even other countries, WTF? The irrelevance is frustrating. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
And of course the ghosting is frustrating too. You manage to wade though the terrible search results to find someone who seems compatible, make the effort to write an intelligent, personalized message to them based on reading their profile, and then... nothing. It appears that a lot of people sit on the dating apps indefinitely for whatever reason, and they become "black holes" where no light ever comes out, while still clogging up the search results. If you have no feeling of urgency to meet people, then why bother being on the dating apps? The "freemium" model may be partly to be blame here, because it's free to have an account forever, as long as you don't use the "advanced" features.
I've seen it claimed that eHarmony is better about this, but I tried eHarmony, and it was absolutely not any better than the other dating apps. They all seem to be basically the same now, and are equally terrible.
> make the effort to write an intelligent, personalized message to them based on reading their profile, and then... nothing
Way back in the day I tried this, and got both ends of the spectrum. Still lots of ghosts, but then also curiously, multiple girls who said that my message was "unfair" or "selfish". When I enquired why, it was because it "created an obligation - you wrote this more detailed message and now I can't just reply with 'no thanks' or 'cool, tell me more', I have to sit down and think and write a reply". Great as a filter maybe, less great for the ego.
So then I wrote a template message. A couple of common paragraphs, and then a couple of inserts where I could put "choose 1 of 3 options to put in here". More soul depressing, but ended up more successful (relatively speaking).
> multiple girls who said that my message was "unfair" or "selfish". When I enquired why, it was because it "created an obligation
Oy, another reason why online dating is so terrible. They're purposely on a dating site, looking to meet people; they created a detailed personal profile describing themselves, which attracted someone's attention; yet it's "unfair" or "selfish" to write a non-generic message? WTF!
I guess that's a case of bullet dodged. Not sure I want someone with that attitude. But after you dodge all the bullets, what's left?
It should actually be a lot easier to say "not interested" online to strangers than it is to say it to someone's face in person. On the other hand, it should also be a lot easier online to be at least semi-interested and have a little conversation before you judge someone as a hard no.
I think this goes back to my point that a lot of people seem to be on the dating apps without having any serious commitment to dating. They're just waiting for their knight in shining armor or prince with glass slipper to come along (who never does).
The dating app model has rarely worked, but it's a fascinating thing that happened, and there should be more research into why these companies were so successful in peddling it.
Simply, it's not workable if it has contributed to real success (happy ever after) occasionally, while simultaneously causing greater damage in other areas, like making cheating on existing relationships easier or discouraging meeting people in the old ways.
For instance, last I heard is that there's a ratio of 10 to 1, men to women, on them. Necessarily, this isn't published (to sell "superlikes" etc). Completely absurd setup.
But it speaks volumes about modern culture. That there's been no education on the best ways to successfully meet a good life partner, honestly factoring in things like your rank, regarding attractiveness and socioeconomic status and so on.
The best model is most likely: maximising your meeting of friends of friends. But who's out there touting that? Parents are asleep at the wheel.
Something to take into consideration with the 10 to 1 ratio (in heterosexual dating) is that if true it results in a "not great" experience for men but probably in an even worse experience for women.
While men may barely get any attention, women get too much and have to bomb through a lot to basically find the needle in the haystack.
Another thing I find interesting about dating apps is that almost all dating apps are owned and operated by Match Group Inc. (even on an international level). I have long had a running joke with my friends that if we ever want to get semi-rich we just have to create a mediocre dating app and have it bought up by Match Group.
Dating apps themselves have a weird premise because if they work for people, they leave the app so a working app results in a loss of customers.
They just overall seem like a very weird phenomenon and I also wonder why people sign up there considering all of this.
Almost all businesses try to move from "pay once" to a subscription model. Printer manufacturers give you the printer and make money on the ink. Video game consoles sell consoles at a loss and make it back on games. Razors make the money from blades. I use YNAB (a budgeting app) and it moved from an EXE you buy once to a web app with a subscription. Microsoft office. Water heaters. Now car manufacturers are trying to charge you subscriptions for optional features that are already installed, like heating seats or self-driving.
How is it possible? Well more men use dating apps than women. That's how demographics work. It also isn't that steep in reality, but more than half of dating app users are heterosexual men on most platforms (a site exclusively for lesbians obviously would not have those kind of numbers).
If men needs 10 times as much time spent on a dating app to find a partner then you would see 10 men for every woman on it, even if the same number of women and men are looking for a partner.
And looking at how much harder it is for men to find a match 10 times as much time to find a partner for men seems reasonable.
I know dozens of people in marriages or long-term relationships that started on dating apps. We all do, assuming we're not much over 50 and have a largish social circle. The dating app model world all the time, just not every time.
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[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadIn dating app you can filter out old people. So this old person would not have a chance there!
Her only chance is in night club, where she can rape drunken guys! People who drink alcohol can not give a consent! And that guy wery likely regrets it, when he wakes up in the morning!
Drunk but conscious people are very much able to consent. One of the main reasons people engoy being drunk in night clubs is the kind of reduced inhibitions that lead to talking to and having sex with people outside your regular dating choices.
> Drunk but conscious people are very much able to consent
"Conscious" is highly individual state. I would strongly recommend you to look up current situation, it may prevent a very nasty situation, where judge has a different opinion!
Most guys I know take god knows what drugs, mixed with vodka and Redbull... Far from shining beacon of "consciousness". But they are still able to walk and talk, and somehow get home...
Please provide links to precedents supporting this claim of yours:
> People who drink alcohol can not give a consent!
> If a person is prevented from resisting by an intoxicating or anesthetic substance, or a controlled substance, and this condition was known, or reasonably should have been known by the accused.
Look up statutory rape, duress... If you want some actual cases, search at relevant forums. I am really not going to give legal advice here.
> People who drink alcohol can not give a consent!
Your quote quote clearly does not say people who drink alcohol cannot give consent. In fact, it says:
> If a person is prevented from resisting by an intoxicating…
Do you not understand that that is not the same thing? You made the claim that someone drinking one beer cannot give consent. Nowhere does your quote support that claim.
If person are intoxicated, they are prevented from resisting. So even if they give a verbal consent, this consent is invalidated by section 261 (a)(3), because they were prevented from resisting.
Your position is ludicrous. It would imply that a married couple in California can’t have sex without it being rape if one (or both?) drink a single glass of wine with dinner. Think over the argument you’re making.
I don't know how prevalent this phenomenon is, but that's at least 0.9 on the Mad Max scale.
(As a demi/gay man, online dating is incredibly alien to me.)
Some of them don't even bother with a bio, it's just a few photos and a link.
And then there's the bots which just start a generic conversation and recommend some Clash of Clans clone or something.
But as mentioned, you realize that in the first 5 mins of interaction.
At that point you're down to real users who are jerks, the solution to which is the block button and a message sorting algorithm that takes into account how many times it's been used against someone.
Now tell me all the reasons you won't do it.
As to why I don't do it, maybe I will -- but I wouldn't object if someone beat me to it. Because it still requires some combination of time and money, the amount of which can be feasible without being zero, and it's quite likely that of all the people in the world, someone who isn't me is in a better position to pull it off before I do.
This isn't going to be bring in anywhere near the amount of money you're thinking it will.
Is such a thing even possible in today's world where attention spans are measured in seconds thanks to a decade of social media and endless pursuit of "engagement"?
Dating apps were easier to bootstrap back in the day before the whole market was swallowed up.
The only way to have a fighting chance is to start in a single metropolis (eg New York), and try to get everyone to coordinate trying at once. Since the demographics of people complaining about dating sites online is a bit small (and selects for the kinds of clients you don't want), you've got to advertise more broadly, eg with ads on Youtube or in the metro. That gets expensive.
People need some way to find out about it, but not everything has to be corporate. Wikipedia has this page which ranks near the top for search queries like "list of online dating sites":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_dating_se...
You're an online dating service, so you get added to pages like that where people end up when they're looking to choose an online dating service. And then your site compares well against the other ones that are screwing everyone -- look how few of the heterosexual dating apps have free messaging. So people sign up and give it a try.
You make sure your site is listed in places like that where people go to find dating sites, and people find it. And the more people find it, the more useful it gets, because that is how network effects work. At which point people start recommending it and you get even more users.
Something highly local might work in a big enough city like Paris/London/NYC.
Edit: Match and others definitely did get patents, so I may be confusing them, but I guess no matter who, you'd get sued by someone.
Tinder hit on to a psychological hack that allowed normal people to use it. It's something to do with plausible deniability. Setting up a real dating profile signals that you know what you want but implies that you are lonely/unhappy. Tinder gives that vibe of "I'm just swiping, look at all these losers, I'm just having fun". So normies went on it too.
I CTO'd a fairly successful dating site for 4 years. I think a lot of the critiques of dating sites/apps miss the mark. The "they only stay in business by keep you single" sort of comments.
Instead, i think dating sites' issues are more fundamental. Thought experiment: write a dating profile for yourself in the 3rd person. Then have you 5 closest friends and family members each write one on your behalf. Now have everyone vote on which of the 11 profiles is the most "you". Do you believe yours comes in first? How about top 5?
When we fill out profiles, we naturally try to highlight some parts of ourselves and hide others. Your friends and family see you as you present. Only you see yourself as you intent.
The result of this all is that our dating profiles are a limited, and often misleading, approximation of ourselves. Any matchmaking app is thus matching my "Online Dating Approximation" with your "Online Dating Approximation". The hope is that if our approximations match, we can extrapolate us matching? Weak connection in my experience.
I think this is why Tinder and Bumble have had so much success with their frankly superficial model. At least the online vs reality is closer than more in-depth matching schemes. But we still hear tales of cat/hat-fishing, so maybe they suffer the same issues.
None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love. The subtle things that make us truly love a person. To be seen if any get there, but there is just no substitute for getting to know someone in person vs flipping through people online.
I think the issues are much more fundamental than you suggest. They’re societal and they’re subcultural within the apps. For one, people are much pickier now than they’ve ever been. On the other hand, the dating apps have this filtration problem: those who successfully form a relationship quit the app, possibly for life.
Unfortunately, it’s not random when people form successful relationships. Some people are just much better at it than others. This is where the filtration problem arises: over time, the concentration of people who aren’t good at forming relationships increases, as these are the folks who stay in the apps the longest. This makes it harder and harder to find a relationship through the apps, and frustration ensues.
With respect to the apps, you have to realize the filtering problem comes to a steady state, where new "dateables" in equals "datables" out. This isn't necessarily a problem
Unless the "undateable" person gives up and accepts staying single forever, they may stay on the platform for a decade or more. Maybe with decreasing activity/time investment, but still an active user eligible for matching. That's longer than I'd expect a dating platform (or any random software startup in general) to thrive.
It would seem that the obviously good solution to this is to hide profiles if the user hasn't been active in a certain time period. Say, 30 days?
Of course, that's not good for the company metrics. They have to inflate their numbers somehow, and so including accounts that aren't being used anymore in their subscriber count makes them look good!
It’s like deciding to date a famous actress based on a character she played in a movie. She may look like the character but personality and interest-wise she’s unlikely to be anything even remotely resembling the character!
This really takes the artificiality of the dating profile and explodes it to an incredible degree. I’d much rather meet someone through a common interest and start dating organically. That’s basically what the article is saying is coming back.
do we actually have any evidence this is true? people have complained about dating since we were neanderthals; articles like this have written themselves for the past decade
This works for what you like as well, your close friends or family will likely write down a better list of what you like than you would do. We aren't honest about what we like since we want to say "I like to exercise" or "I like to cook" instead of less noble things that would describe you better. This makes it really hard to match people who would like each other since they aren't honest about what they would like in a partner.
Anyway, the main problem is that you have to sell yourself online. It isn't natural to sell ourselves, we learn who people are by seeing what they do not by listening to them talk about themselves.
Back in the day, okcupid did this for me. I'm quirky, and expect the same in dates. It wasn't just a biography, you could see their answers to all sorts of random crap. This gave a fuller picture of a person. Of course, I had already learned that falling in love online was a bright red flag, so my expectation was somewhat less than finding that monkey brain chemistry: I was looking for people who I could tolerate (and vice verse!) long enough to figure that part out.
After my first marriage ended, apps had all turned into tindr, and it seems that quirky folks end up in the generic loser pile, while the top 1-10% are doing bloodsport. Fortunate for me, I'm on the empathetic side of quirky and connecting with people in person is easy enough if I put myself out there. But there's the rub: solo tindr binges make me feel miserable, going out and living makes me feel alive -- and that's what people are attracted to.
Since then I've only been meeting people in real life. I agree that using tindr felt miserable and probably still does.
If you have not read Christian Rudder's "DATACLISM" book (he is a co-founder of Match group, writing on their data analytics blog), it is FULL of "human condition", via charts/diagrams/analysis.
My past two relationships have been via dating neighbors, which I do not actually recommend (as more successful).
Interestingly, a few months before meeting my now wife, I dated a girl I met on Meetup who also happened to be on Match. Our relationship only lasted a few months. We were a 72% match or something like that. Go figure!
Yes, the observation from someone in the industry is that the top 10-20% are "date bacon" and have no trouble meeting people, and everyone else is a loser.
Then there's the spam problem.
Beyond an insider sharing the view, I find it compelling because it didn't require anyone to have been an idiot. I've certainly seen other effects that look like the widespread usage of cellphones dumbing down the internet in disappointing ways. ... and it explains why someone doesn't just recreate the magic that OkCupid had: they can't. For classic-OkCupid to exist the public needs widespread access to a communications tool suitable for sending things more nuanced than dick pics.
so you literally have a crowd of people who like reading, and are critical thinkers etc & most likely to be high earners too.
but like every thing - the power of the lowest common denominator rules ie endless swiping on who you think is hot.
this doesn't end with apps -- with forums gone -- you can hardly find places online where civilized discourse happens.
now everything is just for the 'gram. or to go viral on tiktok.
match.com doesn't own the local bar, and that's why it's probably a better way to get laid
It seems like it would be easy to recreate that magic -- it's just a website after all -- but getting the requisite network effects would be pretty much impossible. And if by some miracle you did succeed, Match group would just buy it and ruin it.
you should go get an MBA, it's the closest thing you'll ever find to surrounding yourself with more interesting OKCupid-from-back-in-the-day characters than you can possibly date through in 2 years!
Meaning, if you don't think MBAs understand OKCupid, they do. But they also understand match.com
There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. What the profile says is not just a list of bullet points of facts. How it says what it says is in my opinion a more reliable signal than the facts contained in it.
Anyone can say that they are funny, and loves to travel. Can they write it funny? The kind of funny wich meshes with your funny? Are they insightfull? Empathic? Judgemental? Confident? Do they have lots of insecurities? These scream of the page from between the words even if, and perhaps especially so if the person is unaware of them.
But of course that only works if they wrote the words themselves. Otherwise i might as well ask them for the phone number of that relative of them who wrote their profile.
Sure, but this is not unique to dating sites. When meeting anyone on a first date IRL we present the best version of ourselves. It takes time for people to get to know each other, and whether they first meet online or in a bar is not much different. Meeting IRL obviously has more signals than seeing a digital profile, but a digital profile is somewhere in between a glance and a wink at a bar, and having an in-person conversation with someone.
The really insidious aspect of dating sites is how exploitative they can be, and "they only stay in business by keeping you single" is fairly accurate. On Tinder, you never truly know whether you're not getting likes because of your profile, or because their algorithm has decided to effectively shadowban you. Your only option would be to buy boost packs and super-likes to even get a chance to be seen.
There's a large market opportunity for a dating site that is actually transparent and not exploitative.
actually kinda shocked China or Korea haven't made this a state thing in order to help boost marriages and childbirths
Several of my coworkers had been dating for 5+ years, but they were only making $50k annually (early career engineers). The socially expected family-sized condo costs $500k to $1M, and the young couple is expected to buy and furnish it before their wedding.
Yeah? I think your comment, as someone that got paid by this market, completely miss the mark. People aren't tired of dating apps because they don't know how to use it, this is just a patronizing comment of someone that made money out of it, probably pushing features that made you guys stay in the business because you kept single people in the app.
> None of the dating apps ive seen have really keyed into the "monkey brain" side of love.
Now you should review the comments and your opinion then you might get so some conclusion related to why none of those apps works long-term for the user, including the one you were responsible for.
I once asked my therapist what she thought of an idea where therapists did double-duty as matchmakers, serving as a kind of gatekeeper, where they only set you up with someone once they saw you really did the work and moved past whatever was holding you back in your relationships, thus protecting the market from "lemons". She said it wouldn't work and didn't go into the details; over time, I came to appreciate that getting better at relationships meant diving in, imperfect as I am, and getting better through experience. So such a gatekeeper would have a moral hazard/catch-22, not being able to set people up on dates would prevent them from progressing.
Who you really are is someone who is always a work in progress. No dating profile could ever capture that - and it's unreasonable to expect one to ever succeed at doing so. And if someone isn't changing and growing - they should work on that before blaming their dating profile.
Clearly this. Many people think that therapy is just like going to a doctor that will fix you in a moment with the right pill (well, or in a few sessions). But really it's like having a personal trainer. They can guide you but you need to sweat it yourself if you want improvements.
And for me, I only got angrier at the artificial experience and more or less gave up, focusing on a career where I feel I do have impact.
I don't know, I guess everyone will process the ordeal differently. I never liked the idea of stuff like Twitter or Facebook to begin with, so I wasn't surprised that a social media website dedicated to the messiest part of courtship would drive me over the edge.
Like dating apps are something like 5-95 active women to active men. If my dating app were 50-50, dude, I could make my app like the WeChat shake to match, and it will perform better than profiles or swiping or whatever big philosophical ideas you have.
Like men wanting to meet women through an app?
Say your users are predominantly seeking long-term relationships, and your branding supports that. Then a bunch of men, fueled by gender-ratio marketing, flood your app seeking hookups. You will see short-term a bump in engagement and payments. A/B testing will suggest everything is great. But long-term your product loses value as your users lose faith in your ability to deliver on what they signed up for. The (in this case women) leave and the product becomes another graveyard.
The core "Apps" don't want the real you with all your idiocracies and flaws, that won't sell the most subscriptions. They want the heavily curated "you", which inevitably becomes a bait and switch for someone else when the idealized you is replaced by IRL you.
With the newer generations fully online for their lifespans, it may be an interesting (and dystopian) exercise to use a specially trained LLM with hooks into social platforms, long form writing, etc to "summarize" ones "life corpus" instead of relying entirely on self reporting and curated images.
PS I'm half joking half not.
What kind of things should I imagine here?
Those buzzfeed-esque tiny details you probably wouldn't think about unless prompted. But it can say a lot about you and where/how you grew up.
I'd like to see one that doesn't employ all the dark patterns, but where instead the incentives of the org are aligned with the incentives of the users. If you manage to onboard enough users to get traction, establish yourself as the go-to place for dating, and tell every single little greedy MBA and investurd to pound sand - you may well have solve this problem once and for all and stay king of the castle.
It's not that nobody has figured out dating apps yet, it is that selling lonely men expensive add-ons is far too profitable.
Personally I’d love to see someone figure out a way to do an activitypub based dating app, where people can build small community instances funded directly by the users.
People do meet partners on dating apps https://old.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/17fr0hy/anyone_who...
The majority of well-matched people rapidly exit. The population begins to trend to weaker participants. And the longer the duration the more unhappy and therefore weaker the participants become.
New dating apps capture representative populations and rapidly all the good participants exit.
Ultimately some of us suck at dating apps. The apps would be legitimately better without serial failures on them. I would have been better off in the real world, where I met my wife at work.
To replace humanity with this... It's just not right.
I'm average looking, she has a beautiful face and has been dancing since the age of 4. I'd have 0 chance with these kind of girls on dating apps. Absolutely 0.
Another good thing, that time social media have not yet screwed up people's self esteem and that helped a lot -> she has not overrated herself, I have not underrated myself.
We've been dating in person for a couple of billion years, we are hard-wired for that as body language tells a lot more in a fraction of a second than any made up profile text and over edited photos.
At the same time I was using online dating site. It helped to accelerate the search and filter candidates. I could save time rejecting illiterate and/or less clever girls. Think about Google maps and real estate search - you don’t want a house on the highway.
I wouldn’t use that today. Full of fake profiles to lure paying customers and to keep them as long as they can. Free subscription is not existing anymore.
We're animals. We're programmed to want to bang attractive people.
I think the hardest part about meeting someone is being in a situation to meet them. If your life is something like: sleep -> eat -> work -> repeat, it's very hard to meet someone.
Traveling makes it much easier on my opinion.
Most of the women I meet while traveling are also not single. They’re with their partners whereas many men will travel solo. Traveling solo isn’t a thing most women will do at all. Many men will.
"do married people watch gen z dating and feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam"
That fear of missing out could hit hard and lots of people get blindsided by it.
Setting aside that people have not been around for billions of years, if you go back in history without the tech and the mobility we have today "dating" is a complete different thing. You didn't have such a large pool of potential partners, where you were born played a huge role and you also didn't have as much freedom to do your own thing as you did today.
Social cues will always be more valuable than personality, or kindness. For men, that is status and wealth and physical attractiveness. For women, it is beauty and age. Regardless if you like that or not, it may be what is missing in these utilities.
Further, I like how the Japanese make group dates. 3 boys and 3 girls go out on a date. Gokkon. Maybe this is something the West should consider. Safer, far more interesting, and allows people to broadly consider each other.
> In 1948, in what has been described as a "classic experiment",[10] psychologist Forer gave a psychology test – his so-called "Diagnostic Interest Blank" – to 39 of his psychology students, who were told that they would each receive a brief personality vignette based on their test results. One week later Forer gave each student a purportedly individualized vignette and asked each of them to rate it on how well it applied. In reality, each student received the same vignette, ... On average, the students rated its accuracy as 4.30 on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). Only after the ratings were turned in, it was revealed that all students had received an identical vignette assembled by Forer from a newsstand astrology book.
Nobody writes on tinder that they're looking for a partner who will laugh every time they toot while watching TV.
We're all shopping for beautiful, successful people who don't fart.
Or what about the old fashioned match maker that knows all their clients personally?
Also, the premise of finding love online has been flawed from the start, so that doesn’t help.
Lastly, particularly in the US, body size and fitness/health have become so bad that the visual-first approach that online dating is necessarily built upon has even less potential.
"Filters". Also known as "electronic makeup" or "automatic photoshop" makes a severe mockery of that though.
So, if you get off to a good start in your dating life and career from your late teens and early 20s, you get plenty of approval and validation and compounding success as you progress through life, and acceptance that you deserve the success you're having ("they were always a high achiever, ever since school days").
Whereas if you're not in the top tier of "chosen" people and experience a few painful rejections and setbacks, you're made to feel that's just what you deserve and what you're stuck with, and there's not much you can do to improve your lot. I suspect this has become more of an entrenched belief since the discovery of evolution/DNA, and the generally accepted belief that most of our life outcomes are predetermined by our inheritance.
I think the dating apps (and employment recruitment platforms/techniques) intensify this further, by filtering based on a few simple characteristics, some of which really are genetically predetermined (height) and others that are downstream consequences of having had a blessed start in life (income/education level/job seniority/state of health).
Society generally, including/especially the dating/employment spheres, don't seem to offer much support for people who really sincerely trying to undertake a journey of personal improvement (outside of mainstream accepted practices like conventional fitness training and education). You're just expected to be "good to go". Someone who may have been dealt a rough hand in life but is trying very hard to improve themselves, including their social skills, their emotions, their health/fitness, their career prospects - all of which will lead them to becoming better romantic partners over time - can find themselves getting little support and encouragement along the way, and indeed can get a lot of discouragement from some quarters (including friends and family members).
I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth, and what kinds of social platforms, including dating and employment platforms, could emerge out of that and bring much more opportunity and satisfaction to people who currently feel the despair of being left behind.
I think it depends on how we define mediocrity. Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur".
> Is it mediocre to spend as much time it requires to get a PhD becoming a good pastry chef or carpenter? In the west very likely yes, unless you're an "entrepreneur".
Or, unless you apply your skill into pursuing a bakery career, or a celebrity career (e.g. by running a baking channel on YouTube). Being good at something alone doesn't get you past being perceived as mediocre at best - you have to have an external institution attest for it. PhD, that's easy - the title is itself an attestation. Baking? Proof is in running a successful bakery[0], or in being called a great baker in mass media articles, or in running a popular baking show, etc.
I guess that's implicit in the whole philosophy of "self-improvement" being conditioned on how others see you.
--
[0] - However little sense this makes these days; "running business doing X" is 99% about "running business" and 1% about "doing X", and if you want money and control, you have to let other people to "do" X for you.
To be honest, I'm rather surprised how good we have it those days, when good skills and hard work at least have a quite good chance to lead to a decent life
I think you live in some weird startup-obsessed bubble or something because that is quite unlike my experience living in "the west"
TeMPOraL nailed what I was trying to convey.
What is your experience like? Do you live in a place where high quality work alone is unanimously recognised as success?
I think we can do much better than “if you work hard and believe in your dreams you’ll make it”. There are many techniques people can learn than can amplify the impacts of their efforts and make them much better companions. They’re just not widely known/accepted as yet.
You aren't "made to feel anything", it's a two way street. You have someone who says something negative, and you have the choice to listen to it or disregard it. That's a choice
> I think a lot about how the world would be better if more people were encouraged and empowered to go on long-term journeys of deep personal growth
I think if you're motivated enough to do this, you're already motivated enough to go out and get the career success or love life or whatever you're after. Frankly doing that is probably simpler and more straightforward than "self discovery" or whatever. There's a Carlin bit for this https://youtube.com/watch?v=4s3bJYHQXYg
Right, this is why we can choose not to feel the pain of being punched in the face.
No.
Here's a personal example: having abusive family members tell me I won't be successful or independent, being hurt by it but knowing in the back of my head that I would get out of there. It's hope
And I get it: not all trauma is equal here, but if I have to choose one extreme I'd prefer the one that gives people some shred of agency
There was a time I was cycling at night down a half-finished cycle route, the kerb separating it from the guided busway had been placed but not the tarmac, but I couldn't see that at night (I had a light but it still wasn't visible).
I tried to leave the cycle path, bounced off the surprise rise of the kerb, and it hurt before I hit the ground. Picked myself up, stopped thinking about it, went on to the cinema, watched the film, when the lights came up I realised quite how badly I'd been grazed.
Sometimes I can switch the pain off on purpose, sometimes I can't. The dichotomy isn't even just with regards to physical pain, it's also a sometimes-yes-sometimes-no with emotional distress, so I can go into a "public performance" mode on a stage and goof about no trouble, but I can't seem to shake my deep dislike of mere phone calls.
People are weird, I'm a person therefore I'm weird. :)
How about minus one second and plus 169 minutes? (It was the first of the Hobbit trilogy).
Sounds like a form of phantom pain. I don't know the exact term but it is a well studied phenomenon. one that, AFAIK, isn't fully understood.
But yes, your brain can very much lie to you. Just look up how much post processing your brain will do to help you see the way you see.
>Sometimes I can switch the pain off on purpose, sometimes I can't.
yeah, we have chemicals in our body to do that. It doesn't turn off pain automatically because it is in fact a good thing to realize when you're bleeding out of your leg. It only turns that off for you semi-voluntarily if your brain involuntarily determines (again based on other chemicals) that GTFO is more beneficial to survival than tending to your wound. I'm not going to say it's impossible to train these excretions of chemicals. I will argue that this is probably something you can train for years to do and fail, though.
There's so much about our bodies that still eludes the brightest minds. Even a function as basic as sleeping and why and how it benefits us is still not fully in our understanding.
But it assumes we’re all hardwired to be a certain way, which is the very assumption I’m arguing needs to change.
It’s true most self-help is ineffective, and it’s because you can’t change much in your life just by consciously making an effort to change, or just “trying harder”. There is a lot you can change by undoing subconscious self-sabotage patterns and undertaking “letting go” practices, over a long enough period of time. This kind of stuff is fringe now but is growing in popularity because people are finding it far more effective than mainstream self-help and therapy (I sure have).
Can you please recommend further reading?
I've gone to therapy with the CBT method and it's total garbage meant to keep you meek and accepting of the bullshit people pile on you in life.
The correct solution to abuse is a punch to the face. Civil actions and words have no effect.
What I’m referring to is nothing like that whatsoever, and I’m not talking about/advocating CBT, or anything that involves adopting meekness.
if you can afford it, sure. But that civil lawsuit you dismiss will suddenly crush you if you punch the wrong person in the face.
Maybe there is a bit too much soft footed training these days, but there's also a very good reason, financially and legally, to know when to hold your punches. At least be smart enough to get an explicit reason on record before you start swinging fists.
Oh wait.
It may be ugly but people tend to leave someone alone after getting knocked out. Words are a warning, a substitute for violence. We use words because violence is ugly. When words don't work, you don't use more words. That's insanity.
Really? I've never done it but have heard some negative stuff, like what do they teach you?
It's led to reduced trust in psychology and psychiatry. Maybe in another hundred years we'll have a clue or two.
> There is a lot you can change by undoing subconscious self-sabotage patterns and undertaking “letting go” practices,
What do you mean by this, like buddhism or something like it? Is there some kind of literature on this?
This is just not true about human psychology. Like it is not true at all.
People are affected by what is said about them. And those few unaffected generally tend to have much bigger issues in relationships, because their lack of caring usually makes them into very uncomfortable to be around.
To @mvncleaninst, not everyone has the same emotional strength and tools to cope with these sort of situations, and trust me, I am not apologizing for mediocrity and lack of courage, I absolutely loathe when people try to excuse what's under their control with made-up stories, disorders and whatnot.
Depression is a real thing, some people have gone through real shit. An example, many people grow up in completely dysfunctional households, you have no idea how that can absolutely destroy someone's perception of it's own value. Same thing with poverty, a lot of people had dealt with both of these things and most likely many more. The wounds inflicted by these circumstances stay with people their whole lives, one cannot just "shrug off these things and carry on" as they have become imbued with them.
Life can break absolutely anybody; if you don't believe this is true, congrats. you've had it easy, so far.
From (George) Carlin's wikipedia entry:
"Because of my abuse of drugs, I neglected my business affairs and had large arrears with the IRS, and that took me eighteen to twenty years to dig out of."
It seems that your motivation expert actually does much worse than the average person on things that require planning and self-control. Colour me surprised. Is this part of his comedy act?
That's like saying "You have someone punching you in the face, and you have the choice to be hurt by it or not. Being hurt by being punched in the face is a choice."
You don't choose to be hurt and you don't choose the consequences of being hurt.
Only the first part is true. We don't get to choose our emotional responses, but we absolutely can determine how we react to all manner of discomforts and challenges. For instance, you can discover and put in the work of practicing healthy and sustainable coping mechanisms for the inevitable fear, rejection, and hurt you will feel in life when other people treat you in ways that don't suit you. You can also choose to put in work towards changing your outlook and core beliefs, so you are much more resilient to being hurt by the words and actions of other people. Emotional resilience is a skill (but it is not at all the same as being emotionally repressed, which is a maladaptive defense mechanism).
Being physically or emotionally hurt is not the same as being harmed. People can be punched in the face and yet recover with grace and equanimity. Indeed, even if that graceful recovery involves running the fuck away from a pointless fight. This isn't easy stuff, but it is possible.
Thats a skill and like sports, there are certain affinities to having and tailloring that skill. It's why we call it "emotional intelligence". There will be some absolute saints that can manage their emotions to an almost sociopathic level, and 90+% of people can train their lives and never truly obtain such skill. We are shaped by early experiences, memories, and traumas too much to truly say "anyone can do this".
Likewise, being punched in the face is a skill. But not necessarily one that is "mastered", just mitigated. the best boxers in the world will get punched enough to have permanent damage, even with modern safety regulations. That's just a fact. Meanwhile, most people who don't spend time fighting will have different biology that determines how well they can take a face punch. Someone more muscular will take it better than a meek lad. You may not even realize the former got punched the next day wihle the latter has a scar that never heals. You can't fully control that without a major lifestyle change.
Yes you do. You totally do.
I won't even entertain "you choose the consequences of being hurt". Mike Tyson says it best: "everyone's got a plan until they are punched in the face"
Not really. A century ago people in many parts of the USA were dirt poor. I mean no savings, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. But they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted themselves. They had deep communal bonds, spiritual fulfillment, and a sense of meaning in their lives that is increasingly absent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average sharecropper’s wife would blow away your average urban girl boss in self reported happiness.
Filtering your sense of happiness through some quality of life lens is absurd if you think about it.
But that’s observably false. There are persons who don’t feel pain, and they are considerably more likely to seriously injure or even maim themselves than normal persons. That’s hardly “objectively better.”
Furthermore, the existence of masochism shows that some people prefer pain to its absence at least some of the time. Thus “Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better” is just your subjective opinion.
Since we’re talking about subjective reports regardless, we may as well rely on the subjective reports of the people having the experiences rather than the subjective opinions of others who aren’t having the experiences.
If you are arguing for #1, I disagree. If you are arguing for #2, you should be more clear about why/how you keep using the word "objectively".
I would guess that each person has a different ideal level and variety of suffering (or responsibility, or challenge, or whatever you want to call it), for which their personality is best suited. We are so far removed from the challenges of the past that we don't know what the subjective experience would be like.
In a good year they might eat well. In a drought year, maybe not at all.
Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
I'm sorry, but perhaps it wasn't clear from context that I'm talking about the USA. There has never been a wide scale famine in the United States even in its poorest communities. Even during the Great Depression there were virtually no deaths due to starvation[1].
> But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
Your goalpost-moving notwithstanding, I'm reminded of that famous Sufi tale with the refrain "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?" After all the environmental impacts of the population explosion that it kicked off are still just barely beginning to be felt. But for what it's worth the Green Revolution was part of the standard curriculum when I was in middle and secondary school, so I wouldn't say it's unrecognized.
[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-p...
[1] https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/sharecropper-family...
We take obviously mostly-genetically-determined traits like height, eye/hair/skin colour, facial features etc, then extrapolate to argue/assume that all kinds of other things must also be genetically determined, like cognition, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns, for which there is far less evidence of them being hard-coded in DNA. This will be confounded by the fact that we can often see commonalities in these factors from parents to children and between siblings, and assume these commonalities exist due to genetic coding, not recognizing that there are other forms of inheritance/conditioning that can explain these commonalities, but that even if these inherited patterns are deeply ingrained, they can be altered via the right practices (emotional “letting go” being the most important in my experience).
Here's a random study on criminality I was looking at a bit ago: https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf
(Identical twins are close to a natural experiment but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics.)
If you have to limit it to "humans only", the claim falls apart anyways, because genetics isn't human-specific
Simply put, you haven't made a convincing case that genetics, a science affecting all life, not just humans, is "not a credible science", despite indeed involving experiments all the time.
Below is where you can make that case.
This is a far stronger claim than I think you mean. We have a ton of evidence that those bits of DNA in our cells govern cell expression and even know in some cases that bit X being malformed causes bad condition Y (sure, you could hypothesize that they both have a common cause, but how the heck would that work? Correlation being causation works if both common cause and backwards causation are implausible, as they are often in genetics).
> but not a very good one as even they don't have the same genetics
Uhhh... they have almost exactly the same genetics. To a similar extent that two random cells from your body will have the same genetics. Yes, there will be a handful of mutations, but that's very unlikely to have an effect on any particular trait.
DNA just encodes proteins. It can’t explain/predict detailed behavioral patterns. A prominent example of how genetics can influence aggressive/criminal behavior is due to variations in the MAOA (“Warrior”) gene, but the promotion/suppression of this gene is still strongly influenced by environmental factors [1].
Twin studies (particularly separated twin studies) claim to prove that all kinds of things are genetically encoded, because “they must be”, without considering how much is caused/influenced by other factors - the gestational environment and the experience of being separated from the birth family being the most obvious.
That’s not to say these behavioral patterns aren’t deeply ingrained and difficult/slow to change, but that’s very different from being hard-coded in DNA and impossible to change. For n=1 anecdata, I’ve significantly reduced my aggressive tendencies after years of growth work.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3469457/#:~:tex....
(Also, did you check out the paper I linked?)
I’m fine to have a discussion if your intention is to achieve a shared understanding of the topic, which is what healthy debating is about and what this site seeks to cultivate (even if it rarely achieves it). It does seem a little like you’re more interested in “winning” an argument for a position you’re already invested in, but I’m happy to be shown otherwise and to engage in a discussion if you bring a spirit of shared learning to it.
Edit: rather than doing it here (in a thread that is already very long and stale) you can email me if you like (address in bio).
Height is not genetically determined unless you add "in an environment where nothing else that affects it happens". Like, say, someone cutting off your legs.
And the same goes for every other trait.
And puberty blockers, pituitary gland diseases, and lack of sleep.
…and cutting your legs off.
> Assuming the same nutrition, certain ethnicities will trend taller than others.
See, one thing about statistics is they're not necessarily valid for individuals, because eg not all statistical distributions have any values at their averages.
But you should be clearer than that about what your theory of causation is.
Or maybe it was always mostly BS and the information age where the message is less controlled/manipulated by a few elite owned sources is making that obvious.
Maybe I am mistaken, but this has a subtext of "I want to be recognized, but I don’t want to deal with disadvantaged people myself".
But I see what life is like for friends who are trying to find serious relationships/life partnerships via the apps, and how much it’s all geared towards being/seeming “the best” and finding “the right person”, and how brutal it is for their self esteem and life outlook (a good friend is at the age where she’s probably missed the chance to have children, having tried to find the right guy via the apps for many years).
I often wonder how it could be better for her and other friends if there were apps/communities more geared towards finding people to grow with rather than finding someone who ticks the boxes now.
I agree with you that many guys today struggle with dating because they haven't done the necessary work to be good partners, but the problem isn't that "contemporary life doesn't encourage self-improvement". The "problem", if you even want to call it that, is that women prefer being single over a bad relationship with a crummy guy. For the first time in history, women have the economic independence to walk away from a bad deal, and guys have up their game as a consequence.
That's the definition of the ideal boyfriend for most younger women.
So the hot tall confident rich guys play the field, because they can. Worse, some of the hottest and most confident guys are narcissists - because narcissists and sociopaths are very good at seducing people with love bombing and future faking.
Inexperienced women get their hearts broken and decide that all men are jerks - partly because at this stage the kind funny not-so-hot guys don't register as realistic prospects on their dating radar.
There are subcultures within this, and there's certainly a niche of women who find clever, funny, and kind men more attractive than rich and tall etc men. But it's relatively small compared to most of the population.
At the same time there's a strongly gender-polarised and adversarial (actually hate-filled) culture in the US where wannabe manly men who hate everything woke etc are in a permanent war with feminists who are convinced that all masculinity is toxic.
It's not so much that "guys have to up their game" but that the entire culture is emotionally dysfunctional, and dating is stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence where healthy give-and-take relationships aren't modelled at all.
Can you think of one movie or TV show which models a realistically happy working adult marriage which isn't either sentimental and idealised, or doesn't end in drama, tragedy, and betrayal?
Oh man this is such a big one. There's so much media out there that depicts total loser guys winding up with incredible women & vice versa. If you're a young man & didn't have dad or older brother guide you through your end of the responsibilities in a relationship, there's almost nowhere to get the correct information, and tons of 'malware' information out there. One might be inclined to point to feminist literature on the subject, but that will just make you a doormat.
The first thing that comes to mind is the relationship between Holden and Naomi in The Expanse. (Okay, so it's not a marriage. Does that really matter?)
I'm sure there are others, but they are difficult to recall precisely because they just are, without calling too much attention to themselves. So there's a selection bias in what we remember.
Star Trek and parodies are really coming in clutch for good examples of married life.
Holden is no peach of a partner either. Don’t play the “Holden does something the hardest way possible because he can’t ask for help” drinking game, you’ll be unconscious in a few hours.
Bruh.
The parents in "That '70s show" perhaps? I see the irony in this title tho.
Sentimental and idealized are very vague, but there are a ton of US sitcoms that have this premise. But also, watching a couple just go about their day to day life that 90% of people go through seems boring as hell, who would watch that?
Before Sunrise trilogy comes to mind
They were both hot in high school. They peaked in high school and married/created a family with their high school sweetheart. That's the entire point of the show.
> They had kids. They took care of them.
They were also neglectful and callous.
> They didn't exactly love each other, but they didn't hated one another also.
Did you watch the show? They most certainly verged on hating each other, and were never as ambivalent as you make out.
> The most realistically portrayed family on TV in decades.
The Middle. Malcom in the Middle. That 70's Show. Any of a dozen "prestige" television shows that aren't sitcoms.
Come on. This entire argument is ridiculous.
TV shows are about drama. If you have "this relationship is too good" and "this relationship is too bad" as exit clauses here, of course you are going to have trouble.
Does Ben and Leslie from Parks and Rec count for you? Or is that "too idealized"?
Pro-tip: if someone says that you should just do what they say because they know better than you, run as fast as you can because they’re a demon.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upkQ6XYe3dE
I have witnessed some truly weird conversations in hypereducated blue-state America. I never say anything, but I always take mental notes.
One example:
So I go out to lunch with this friend, and they invite a friend of theirs. A woman, in her 20s, from an Ivy League school. I'm not sure why we were all having lunch together actually, in retrospect.
Anyway, she's talking about how she has this boyfriend. I think he's in the Air Force or something (which at some level is icky to these people). And she has some time off from her career for some reason, so she has some time. And she's spending a lot of it just being with him, to the point that, she'll cook dinner and stuff. And she implies that she's having a lot of sex with him, and that she's being very giving in all this, and you can tell that at some level she just finds him very attractive and takes pleasure in delighting him (as he, I assume, does likewise in making her happy). Which is basically the description of a good relationship, right?
But she also has to justify this feeling to herself -- that she likes making her boyfriend happy. And she has to justify to herself that she's doing things like cooking dinner that, on the one hand, she's voluntarily chosen to do, but that, on the other hand, she clearly also thinks are somehow "beneath her". So she explains it to us at the table like this: She's intentionally ruining her boyfriend, so that when they eventually break up -- because that's what you do, right? -- then he will not be satisfied in any of his subsequent relationships. She has to frame her natural impulse to be kind and giving, as a political act that is actually a kind of cruelty -- because that's what she assumes we will approve of.
None of us ask for this justification, this is just a monologue that she volunteers. I don't say anything, but -- what the fuck? I think this has become a normal (if unnatural) trained attitude.
I could give other examples too, but that's enough for now.
Something is just very broken.
Friday Night Lights
There's no free lunch, just tyranny of too many choices, endless analysis paralyses and FOMO.
https://docs.iza.org/dp4200.pdf
Some people argue with the ‘no true woman’ fallacy, or don’t trust them to know how to self reflect properly, but clearly something is dying in society.
That is, if there’s less expectation to lie and say everything is fine, you could get declining life satisfaction numbers with no actual decline in satisfaction.
Anecdotally people I know from my grandparent’s generation are much less likely to admit to being unhappy.
> ...answers to subjective well-being questions have been shown to be correlated with physical evidence of affect such as smiling, laughing, heart rate measures, sociability, and electrical activity in the brain (Diener, 1984)
1) Society has changed in a way that has made people less happy. 2) Society has changed in a way that has made people less likely to lie about being happy.
If you stop to think it through for a second, you’ll quickly understand how the statement “we have some data from somewhere in the middle of the time period in question that self reported satisfaction and a actual satisfaction are correlated” isn’t evidence to support either side. That statement can easily fit either hypothesis.
I have not (yet) seen any relatively modern stable society where 80% of men don’t have children. Having that many men with not much to lose would, presumably, be a destabilizing force.
Also: Just because you are married, and your wife gives birth to a child does not necessarily mean that it's your child :) Nowadays, with contraception and paternity tests available, the number of guys unknowingly raising another man's child is around 2-3%, but it was much higher in the past.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/12/07/polygamy-...
It's basically just Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and sub-Saharan west African countries that have >1% rate of polygamy and only the African countries that have more than 5%. Not exactly the most stable countries.
- The patriarchy is still here, but we now expect women to have a career while simultaneously taking care of children.
- Decades of hypersexualized media put the emphasis on sex during dating over caring relationships.
If she wants a doctorate she has to be married before she enters the workforce.
She has time for maybe 1-3 long term relationships before she ages out of childbearing age.
So yes women have more options but they also have less time to pick the right one.
"I am eighteen years old, have a good set of teeth, and believe in Andy Johnson, the Star-Spangled Banner, and the 4th of July. I have taken up a State lot, cleared up eighteen acres last year, and seeded ten of it down.
My buckwheat looks first rate, and the oats and potatoes are bully. I have got nine sheep, a two year old bull, and two heifers, besides a house and a barn.
I want to get married. I want to buy bread and butter, hoop skirts, and waterfalls for some person of the female persuasion during life. That’s what’s the matter with me. But I don’t know how to do it."
https://dustyoldthing.com/ad-looking-for-wife-in-1865/
Still did better than most in the dating pool today.
I don't see this as a "biology is destiny" issue, I see this as a women are still facing pressures from the past and facing pressures of the present.
I don’t think biology is deterministic, but it is a factor, for both sexes. (Note that surveys show little to no difference between men and women when it comes to the question of whether they want children and how many.) My suggestion is instead that we have a market failure. People have choices, but not necessarily the ones that will make them happy. The solution to market failure is, of course, regulation of the market, but western individualists don’t want to hear that.
That doesn't follow from what they said. Men never had to do the child raising. Men probably do more childraising and housework than they used to do in the past, because they've been sharing domestic labor more as a result of the spread of feminism. OP is saying that the amount of work between a heterosexual couple has risen: before, it was the man doing a full-time salaried job, and the woman doing housework, cooking, shopping, and childraising as her full-time, unpaid job; and now they're both working full-time, and they have to split the domestic labor between them somehow, or, it's all on the woman and the man does no more than he used to do.
This is a bit oversimplified, though. There were always working-class women who worked as maids or in shops, or, in the 20th century, as teachers and secretaries. Those lower-class women just weren't paid that much. They always had a "second shift" [1], but since the 60s, it's spread to all women.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_burden
However, with the rise of living costs, now both partners need a full-time job, and the domestic labor is still there; more work needs to be done than before, despite technology making the individual worker more productive. It's not a surprise that fewer people are able to have children; they have more work and are still just barely paying the bills.
In the 70s, there was a movement called the "International Wages for Housework Campaign," which argued that women should be paid a salary for domestic labor, which is essential to society, and that this is an essential component of Women's Liberation [2]. It's interestingly contrary to the view that feminists are all liberal individualists who don't believe in men and women being different.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_burden
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wages_for_housework
More over, the disconnect here isn’t between what “women” want and what they say they want. The disconnect is between the beliefs and attitudes of a minority of elite liberal men and women, and the average woman, especially the average non-college educated woman.
This sentiment is all over & is very demoralizing to guys who got an education, have a decent job, go to the gym and still get rejected by women who seem to be their peers. I'm not a fan of incel ideology, but there is something to the 'she'll have her fun with bad boys then settle down with you in her 30s when she's looking for someone with a stable income' sentiment that goes around. 20s dating is hugely depressing for men and it shows with all the stats of young men 'dropping out' of life. I got lucky and met someone sweet a couple years ago, but it was extremely rocky for a long time, and it still is for most of my friends.
But men just have to 'step it up'. Six feet, six figures, bare minimum right?
But otherwise, even if I'd found your analysis to be correct, I think a few decades of society adjusting to this freedom is well deserved after a millenia of patriarchy.
The Sultan having a harem of 40,000 = not patriarchy.
That really seems to be the attitude. Women haven't changed at all and want the same thing they always have. It was a brief bit of egalitarianism in history that gave us a "tradition" that was in fact an anomaly.
As a side note, I laugh at the 6-6-6 thing. It doesn't help. They want something else.
No, there isn't. The reality here is there's a bunch of men who have "here's my list of positive traits" and are leaving something out, because everyone is the angel of their own story.
Sure. Average men have flaws. But so do women. When I was dating around I met a bunch of girls who had a wild drugs & partying phase in college. A couple still had cocaine habits. I smoked some weed in high school then stopped. I’ve had sex with 7 women in my entire life, 5 of which were one or two night stands because we didn’t get on. I’m told I’m judgemental & picky because I’m not attracted to women with twice or more my sexual experience.
It’s true that a person’s sexual history does not define their worth as a person, just as height or weight doesn’t. But, what is ignored these days, every person absolutely has a right to their own preferences of attraction. But we insist that young men are terrible people if they don’t accept a history of promiscuity with anything less than enthusiasm.
I mean, it's kind of natural that you learn it as you get to know them. I don't ask 'what's your tally of sexual partners' out of any context on a first date. But someone describes their life and you pick up on it one way or another and then it comes up in conversation naturally. You can sometimes tell in the bedroom when exciting new things for you are old hat and boring to her. Sometimes they get dodgy about discussing it. And why? Are they ashamed? Or is it because they suspect I would prefer a partner who is more like me and they feel the need to conceal their decisions?
>Could be one, could be one hundred, I don't care.
Good for you! I wish I had such a lack of feeling on the subject, it would certainly make dating easier.
>find it both weird and concerning if my current partner wanted to know.
Why? This statement seems quite a bit like you're passing a harsh judgement on people like me for preferring partners with a similar amount of sexual experience. I see a similar sentiment on the internet all the time, that we're weird and concerning for anything less than unquestioningly embracing partners who may have had sex with 100 people.
I think exactly because the question of experience seems so easily to carry judgment (in either direction, too few / too many). I don't see how my or their experience should change anything in our current relationship, so if they asked, I would assume some judgment such as you have. And sexual judgment would be incompatible with my values.
I don't even know if my partner had long term relationships before me -- I suspect yes, and I assume they haven't been married. But I don't care about those facts either.
Huh, well I guess different strokes for different folks. The idea of dating someone & not picking up, as a matter of course, on whether or not they've ever had a previous relationship is baffling.
Who doesn’t like to believe they are on an upward path so maybe they will be able to do better?
Fairy tales are fiction, dating marketplaces are just as ruthless as capital markets. Get sophisticated fast and first. It doesn’t guarantee success (never assured!), but it will improve your odds.
The question is, what are you willing to accept, both of yourself and the other person. The big wrench here is when a significant portion of the market accepts being single and pulls out of the market. Now you have a fundamental mismatch in the number of buyers/sellers, which is a nearly unsolvable problem, without getting into things like restricting people’s freedoms.
There are 8 billion people in the world. With enough resources, you should be able to find someone somewhere to enjoy a time window of partnership or closeness. Accumulate resources, which gives you options, which leads to freedom (including freedom to find love [or your idea of healthy companionship]).
Expect attempts to regulate out this industry led by mostly women’s groups.
No, AI waifus are going to mostly impact incels meeting the strict etymology of the term, which, who knows, might make them somewhat less socially dangerous if not any less socially maladjusted.
Sure, other people might toy with them, but no one who was having any success in the dating world is going to be taken out of it by them.
> Expect attempts to regulate out this industry led by mostly women’s groups.
Literally no one cares that the worst and least desirable men are going to entertain themselves with yet another form of fantasy of having a girlfriend, and other than where it involves using imagery of real people in a way that intersects with the kind of behavior addressed by revenge porn laws or otherwise involves material prohibited for reasons unrelated to the specific use in AI companions (simulated CSAM, for instance), I wouldn't expect any eftorts to regulate it on its own.
Yeah, right. It’s too late. None of them did, and if they did, it would be at great risk to them and child.
35 + courtship period + marriage + 9 months = no kids.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418963/
And “risky” here means potential of death or serious defect in child, or death for the mother. It’s irresponsible, unethical, and I don’t understand any parent that would risk the health of their child.
>If you only want one or two kids
This is nuts. Remember, the minimum birth rate is 2.1. Every single woman you've ever met must have 2.1 children just to keep population constant. Every woman who decides to have one or two increases the burden on everyone else.
Just think about the timeline here. Start having children at 35, have your third kid at 38? By the time your youngest is 18 you'll be 56! This is supposed to be the standard life plan, the thing everybody does?
"What about immigration?"
Mexico, Brazil and India already have below-replacement fertility. China, Japan and South Korea have been below replacement so long their populations are now rapidly shrinking. Where are all these immigrants supposed to come from?
I would like to address the emotion you describe.
Firstly, I doubt it’s just men. I don’t know the simplest adjective, but I’d call the dating scene as “optimized” and “casino like”. Persistence and luck are not small components here.
If anyone’s self worth ends up getting linked to the outcome of such a system, dropping out isnt unsurprising.
It is also quite pointless, to tell someone who is lonely or young, to not treat the process personally.
Got married at 28 to someone who was physically attractive. But had nothing much going for her and divorced at 32.
Dating was somewhat better then. But didn’t really want anything serious and had close female friends who I travelled with and really gave me the emotional support and no drama.
I got remarried at 36 and have been happily married for 13 years.
That being said, short men do have what I call the “two strikes rule”. You can’t be short and anything. Meaning short and fat, broke, ugly, bad personality, etc. I fought the and part
Geez.
Also 200k is the new 6 figures, 100k doesn’t cut it anymore
It's always about how men need to change to appease women's desires, and never about how women need to change in any way.
That said, the problem with these apps is that their business model depends on long term user value. (If you register for free, quickly find someone, then you paid nothing to them. Maybe they were able to show you a few ads.) And those who are on it for long tend to have problems. And especially big issue are those who don't give up, but are ruining the mood for others. (Which leads to even fewer women on the platforms.)
Is this a commonly held opinion? I’d be curious to read any material on this, because nothing (to me at least) suggests one gender wants it more than the other. Is it simply because there are more men than women on the popular dating apps?
Women are objectified. The attention a woman receives is related to what she is, not what she does. It's very straightforward to apply this to dating: just look good and confident.
Men are subjectified. The attention a man gets receives is related to what he does, not what he is. It's very tricky to navigate this in dating. How does someone present their interests in a way that is attractive?
This is further complicated by the most common narratives we hear about men's behavior. Masculine behavior is a looming threat. Every man must prove himself not a predator. But how?
in fact you can do this in your 40s, 50s, 60s
as long as you don't fall on hard times
I guess 80% in 2009 is better than 95% that I remembered.
So sure one woman could pick x number of guys and another could pick a completely different set y. If x+y is only 20% then it means nothing. If anything, it just makes things worse for any individual guy.
In real life, you're way overstating the variance anyway. I think you kind of see that yourself when you use qualifiers like "overwhelmingly attractive".
I know these sort of tastes are subjective, but I've talked to a lot of guys who feel the same way. The women in media are mid, most women who are young and physically fit can match if not greatly exceed the looks of women in media. However I acknowledge that women themselves often do not feel this way; they compare themselves to the female celebrities and feel bad about themselves even though most men would rate them higher than the celebrities. They rate themselves lower than men would rate them because media is toxic and purposely makes women feel insecure to sell more beauty products, lifestyles, etc.
It's why the article linked in the root of this thread was even written.
Human attraction happens best in person because there is more to it than just looks.
Charitable explanation: Hollywood has become better at selecting for acting talent instead of beauty.
Uncharitable explanation: Fewer Hollywood casting directors are straight men.
(Don't even start me on the whole Christian Grey character, which will forever go down as one of the most over-the-top 'perfect male'. Let's see: 33 year old man is deca-billionaire in telco after coming from foster home. And it was so effortless to become said deca-billionaire that he also found time to become a commercial helicopter pilot, a concert pianist, someone who doesn't break a sweat cranking out Michelin-tier meals for idle snacks and brunches... and looks like an underwear model.
I see variations of this statement all the time. This weird, almost gleeful misandry masquerading as a historical perspective. It needs to stop. It has poisoned all our interactions and it is hurting people.
For me, I dated a lot of men. Sometimes we're not a match, but a lot of the time these guys seemed angry I didn't need them. One guy actually became physically abusive when he came over to my house and saw how much nicer I lived than him. We'd been dating for weeks. Another guy, dumped me for paying for a whole date. Another guy, withdrew his interest upon learning my profession and considering I'd definitely make more than him whatever I made.
You know the advice female relatives give me? Hide how much I make. That is the state of heterosexual dating. It's where my friend who is a self made millionaire gets asked by her boyfriend when she's going to become a housewife so he can marry her. Women aren't perfect, but there's definitely got to be some kind of change for men as a collective. I know some great male partners, but I also know that they're out weighed by so many men I know personally.
> Women aren't perfect, but there's definitely got to be some kind of change for men as a collective. I know some great male partners, but I also know that they're out weighed by so many men I know personally.
This is a bit like saying: “White people aren’t perfect, but there's definitely got to be some kind of change for black people as a collective. I know some great black folks, but I also know that they’re outweighed by so many blacks I know personally.”
(I suspect that this is the reason your comment has been downvoted.)
I think guys who are intimidated by successful women have a ton of growing up to do, clearly. Surely it would be amazing to be with someone ambitious and intelligent?
I don't know anybody that complains that their wife/gf makes more than them. It's pretty rare, but those in that position are very grateful for the freedom to work lower paying jobs with higher satisfaction.
Those same women will then complain bitterly when they get older or become a single mom, and no one pays attention to them anymore and have to start actually doing the work.
Like an Uber driver whose car has been worn to a nub with zero equity in anything, still living paycheck to paycheck, and no new skills. But 10 years down the tubes, and they never had to work for ‘the man’, and saw a lot of cool stuff.
The social construct of marriage tries to even this out - that ‘crummy’ man stays around and provides in many ways (social, financial, physical) even after she’s no longer hot and ‘marketable’. And who will help support and protect her while she has kids. The things that make them ‘crummy’ is exactly what is needed to support all that.
It’s the social/relationship equivalent of a retirement fund/pension. It’s not exciting up front.
Pay in now, (and keep him around) so you’re not eating dogfood in 20 years and have kids who can help you too. Instead of being terribly lonely, mentally ill, and then dying alone and getting eaten by your cats.
Which society has also been nuking social safety net wise, much to everyone’s likely long term regret frankly.
It’s folks losing the plot society wide. It’s how we end up with a lot of very sad stories later.
If you mean "marriage with no possible divorce is a social safety net", then I have to protest that "safety" is pretty relative here. It's a system with absolutely no safeguards against the husband (or wife) becoming abusive or violent, especially if your society is patriarchal enough to encourage honor killings.
Nothing is perfect of course. Lots of pensions destroyed/raided, and retirements screwed up by greed too.
And going crazy in the other direction marriage wise definitely has very real downsides too!
I’d be curious to see how the majority of cases went though, overall.
We’re discovering the downsides of going too far in our current direction now, and I suspect this winter is going to be a doozy.
We currently are getting the worst of both worlds near as I can tell on both fronts (men and women), but it often gets worse before it gets better!
Wow there’s so much to unpack here. We live in a world that is largely heterosexual and monogamous, meaning it takes two to tango. If there’s a bunch of women ending up single, then that necessitates about an equal amount of single men too. The “bitterness” will be bourne by both fronts equally, and the “hot and marketable” comment cuts both ways.
Rather than play the blame game and make gross uber analogies, It’s worth pointing out why some people would rather be single. Is it because they’d rather not be in unhappy marriages? If so, the focus should be on how to improve marriage for both parties.
Is it because on top of needing to have a career, they’re also expected to shoulder much of the burden of raising kids? Let’s think of how we can make it more fair to everyone, or work on supporting parenthood as a society.
Is it really?
The world may be largely monogamous and heterosexual, but is that the case for Westernized societies? I remember reading stats on how native Western EU cultures rank highest in terms of infidelity and divorce rates, with Luxembourg enjoying a massive 40% divorce rate. The world may be monogamous, but I doubt that's only because repressive Old World societies are propping it up.
Costs became unmanageable and out of reach for the average folks once women entered the workforce, essentially doubling the supply of labor overnight. This could have been balanced out with men not being looked down upon for staying at home with the kids (although that raises more questions, considering men weren't really biologically wired for the task).
There's a reason most rich families have mostly stay-at-home wives/moms even today. The man earns the dough, while the woman stays home or works a very chill job, while her primary focus remains the house and the family (including its finances, social standing, kids - which tends to be a very high amount btw, etc). And in my experience, the ones that aren't structured this way tend to fall apart quickly.
The entire country of Luxembourg has a smaller population than most big cities, with only slightly more than half of that population having the Luxembourgish nationality. It’s hardly representative for “native Western EU cultures”.
It seems Portugal and Spain rank at the top for divorces (80%+!), followed by Luxembourg, then Russia and Ukraine. The EU average is 45%,just like the US average.
I’ve personally seen women get really distressed when they see an actual good male parent (better than them, it appeared) with kids.
And I’ve seen the same with men (to the point of aggressive harassment) with a women who were better than them at ‘manly’ stuff, like welding/fabricating, or car repair.
All of them denied it, but for anyone paying even a little attention it was pretty blatant.
Anyone who has ever spent any time in a gay club can report that many/most of the other patrons were heterosexual/monogamous too. At least until they entered the club.
Society doesn’t exist for long without a supply of children, and has very strong incentives to enforce certain behaviors.
What you’re pointing out, IMO, is that expectations and roles aren’t realistic. People keep stepping on each others toes, fighting to justify themselves, burning out, etc.
But then, there have always been the ‘confirmed bachelors’ and ‘old maids’ no? It would be interesting to see the percentages over time however.
One thing that is easily confirmed by data and just by looking around - older, established men have no shortage of ‘market value’, as do young pretty women.
Also, there has never been a time where raising kids or stable long term relationships was easy, or when there was no abuse somewhere.
It’s actually remarkably easy to measure ‘market value’ in these situations.
What market are you referring to that you think I’m not?
Look, I’ll reiterate it one more time: For every person who is single, statistically there should be another single counterpart of the opposite sex. That some people choose to stay single rather than get into a bad relationship/marriage says a lot about what it’s like to be in one for one or both parties. It’s worth having some introspection on why this is happening, instead of making gross comparisons and assumptions.
Plenty of people are in relationships (formal) that don’t have sex with each other anymore. A few never had sex, but are in relationships where the social assumption is they did/are.
Plenty of people (including women) have multiple partners, some long term, some transitory. (Many to one). Sometimes they know of each other. Usually they do not.
Plenty of people have one or more partners of different ages (sex or relationship wise).
Plenty of people have no meaningful relationships (sex or formal) of any kind for long periods of time or ‘anymore’. Often by choice, sometimes involuntarily. I know several men who flat out ‘noped out’ in their 40’s because they got tired of what they perceived as predatory behavior. And at least one woman who did the same. All of them had been married for long periods of time.
Hell, one female sex worker can have anywhere from 20 to 100 clients (monthly) last I read on a regular basis.
It’s not that uncommon for some edge case men to sleep with that many women every couple months. I’m sure they’d be ecstatic if they could be paid for it, but male sex workers predominantly have male clients.
Many people consider things like this to be some kind of dating, or at least related/impactful to it. All of it interplays with relationships. The social expectation is that dating, relationships, and sex are all interrelated.
So what are you trying to say exactly besides ‘that’s all gross so I don’t want to believe it’?
If you think that’s bad, don’t get into the medical field! You won’t necessarily get the truth, but if you have even a decent idea of the STD transmission odds, it’s clear what the lies are!
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...
Young men, and old women tend to be single more.
Seems like past 30, very few men stay/are single. Women > 50 start getting single dramatically faster, though I've noticed it often really starts kicking off ~ 40. (Some of this due to men dying sooner than women, and a lot of it later, but if you don't think menopause has something to do with it - you've never had a partner with menopause).
But also notably, women are not often single - unlike young men - until they're really old. Weird eh? Even though there are more women than men in the population by a measurable %.
My observation is that if not stably paired, women have it pretty rough past 30, and end up dating older and older men or 'settling' for folks they never would have given the time of day when younger. Women are also more likely to do 'Mistress' type arrangements.
Men have it really rough when young, until they figure themselves out, and then most of them have it easier (the more money, fame, popularity, infamy, etc. the better) unless they're actively driving women away.
Most homosexual relationships I've seen often end up playing out this same dynamic, but with members of the same gender. The notable exception being 'twins' [https://inmagazine.ca/2021/01/doubling-down-on-boyfriend-twi...], which was always interesting to watch. It wasn't just men either.
Trans, same but with one partner trans (of course).
A minority of those single men have numerous (sometimes >hundreds) short-term relationships. But far more of those single men have very few or even no relationships at all. I think this disparity is far more extreme for men than for women.
If that upper echelon of single and promiscuous men were socially pressured to stop man-whoring and settle into healthy long-term relationships, then the rest would have better odds. Of course those men will never voluntarily change their ways unless there exists a strong social pressure to change. In the past, this pressure existed in the form of men without partners [wives, but it doesn't have to be wives] being viewed with suspicion if they wanted to attain social standing at work or in their community. This pressure has all-but evaporated into nothingness.
I never cheated, but I was very shocked at how much attention I got as a married man.
Take the ring off? Complete 180.
It’s also pretty easy to look at the reported partner counts between the sexes and see that it’s literally impossible that both are true at the same time.
So average women with average men, I don't see the issue. The problem is now a lot of women aims very high, even out of their league, when they don't have much to put on the table.
I don't see many men, old or young, doing much to improve their standing as a bachelor, given what is in their control. I've had to do a lot of listening and learning to be a man women would be interested in. Modern male culture in the US typically does NOT do that.
At the same time, I think you're right that women have more power over their life decisions more than ever. This is great and I want that for the women of earth.
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What if there actually are plenty of men who have 'stepped their game up' and are perfectly qualified peers to women and would make suitable partners, but the women just have wildly unrealistic expectations?
Or the women just aren't that interested in men in general?
Could those be factors, rather than men just being so beneath women?
No one owes you any love, except your family.
If you want to find love or a partner out there, you’ve gotta find it and earn it. It could take a long time, or not happen - but if you aren’t in good shape, don’t have any money saved up and aren’t interesting, don’t be surprised if you end up alone or with someone below your standards.
I'm saying perhaps a major part of the reason so many men are single is not necessarily because they are lazy losers who refuse to level up like you suggest, but because they can't meet modern women's unrealistic standards or women just aren't that interested in them even after they've leveled up.
Many men can 'level up' to the maximum realistic extent, and still have few women interested in them. That doesn't make these men lazy losers who refuse to put in the work.
I'm not suggesting they are owed a woman for leveling up to the maximum realistic extent, I'm just saying it's very unfair of you to call them lazy losers for their effort not bearing fruit.
Honestly, the ability to tell “the best bachelor” without experience together of the type that used to be frowned on before marriage was always weak; what has changed is that the social and economic compulsion/incentive (on both sides) to marry has become a lot weaker and the volume of exposure much greater, and norms limiting the kind of experience that reveals fundamental incompatibility before marriage have weakened.
Then time comes to settle down and those guys don't settle with those girls. Cue "Where have all the good men gone?" and "Why are men so scared to settle?". It's the same problem the average male faces, just in reverse.
These are average women too.
Also, early pressure to marry "the best bachelor" often meant "the guy on the football team", "the guy that peaked in high school" (you just didn't know it yet).
Often they were the ones who became the angry alcoholics.
what you describing is human nature, the reality of it that people won't tell you directly.
i don't think it's just something modern, most people have always been superficial, judgemental, tribal and so on.
It was shown that certain national ice hockey teams were comprised mainly of players who were born at the beginning of the year. It is theorized that this is because the date that cuts one class for another is at the beginning of the year. If you're born in January, and you start playing hockey at 5, you're gonna be significantly older than a child that's born in december. As a result, you'll be recognized and helped more by your coach, which improves your chances of becoming better, and drags into adulthood, up until you're in the national team. The same applies for academic and professional careers and I'm sure dating as sell.
So you find yourself in this situation where everyone is so nice and polite, so sophisticated and accepting, so inclusive, but for some reason nobody gives a single ** about having a romantic relationship with you. How’s that possible? Well it’s possible because it’s all fake. Deep inside, in our intimacy and our inner circles, we’re the same as we were a thousand years ago. The apps simply make it obvious and pull it to the surface.
The apps completely change how we perceive ourselves and our potential sexual partners. I can't believe I have to say this, but the biggest things that have changed with regards to dating in the past 10 years vs the past 1,000 are social patterns and technology.
>It’s completely asymmetric gender-wise and failing on it is basically failing on being.
This kind of attitude is so harmful. If your life's purpose is 100% dependent on some idealized stranger granting you validation you are in for a bad time. Sex is great, biological imperatives are powerful, but you wont find animals falling into existential dread and despair because they haven't gotten laid yet (or recently). That is a particularly human trait, and it comes from obsessive and self-defeating beliefs about the world rather than reality itself. You might feel like this belief is out of your hands, but it very much is not. Your beliefs are one of the few things in this world that are entirely up to you to change and improve upon (or not).
Your comment about the harmful attitude is correct, I 100% agree. But again, if you listen to what is implicitly conveyed in social media (where every human being is basically reduced to a single one-dimensional score), you would have a hard time reaching that conclusion. Nobody really “says” that, but as a human being you read between the lines. I guess it sounded like I was saying “date apps are fine, it’s us who are the problem” but I didn’t mean it, I think social media is very harmful.
Speaking for myself, I'm not really interested in being around loud, raucous places where I have to spend money just to exist and socialize there. Those are businesses, not communities.
Third places and real communities don't really exist anymore.
I legitimately can't remember the last time I went to a public event and enjoyed myself.
A public event you didn't pay for? Really depends. I can still enjoy a decent meetup here and there. But meetup issues come from the meetup itself or the people being inconsistent. Hard to build relationships when it's a revolving door that claims to meet "every 2 weeks" but ends up averaging 4-8 weeks.
I joined a book club last year, and it was great for a few months, but I noticed that most people, unless truly dedicated, petered off, or would only come and 'taste' for a month then ghost. I'm not saying I'm any better. When you've gone to 5 book clubs that have fallen apart, why would you risk committing and being sad when it falls apart again?
I believe our ability to commit is deteriorating; the how and why is a whole nother topic.
why take a risk on a book club when you can shitpost online? and watch netflix at the same time?
I personally find it weird when people talk shit about someone being unwilling to commit, as if one should jump straight into serious obligations without any forethought. You didn't do that of course, but I see it come up in discussions sometimes, mostly concerning relationships. Commitment is more complicated than most people see it imo.
I don't think I've heard of any animal falling into existential dread or despair, for any reason. But quality of life is absolutely impacted by ability to breed.
My pets certainly seem to appreciate companionship.
At the same time, part of this is because there's been a lot of change in how and where we interact. There isn't really a "poker night" in a lot of modern 30's life with neighbors you chat with every day. young adults can't afford (in time nor money) to get out to a night life more than a few times a month, and even those night life places feel more like people come with established groups. Modern society doesn't pay enough and gets more and more expensive. It's no surprise it can feel soul crushing.
What makes you think so?
Also, you wrote your post (I assume) from the perspective of a man. Even the most unattractive women on dating apps get far more attention than the most attractive men. This has been shown time and time again. Also, most men are invisible to women, but the reverse is not true. (Do not read this post as disparaging towards women.)
What is really happening is that visual-only dating apps are refining the purest biological imperatives: women only seek the best physical mates (top 20%), where as men pursue whatever they can. As a result, most men get zero attention on dating apps. The craziest irony to me: I grew up before the Internet and dating apps became a thing. RARELY did I hear women talk about finding an attractive mate. They wanted to find someone compatible and supportive with good long term intentions. These visual-only dating apps have weirdly inverted the world as most women chase the very best men... who treat them terribly, but are very good looking and have a lot of practice seducing women. Rinse and repeat; almost everyone on dating apps except for the very top are much less satisfied than life before dating apps.
From what I've seen, it works well for people who just needed something to get both parties to take finding a relationship seriously while it ends up being a bitterly disappointing waste of money for those who think because it costs 100x as much as an online dating site, they're going to get matches that are 100x further up the dating hierarchy.
It is somewhat ironic since people they are confident they could match are the people who need a matchmaker least of all.
Link: https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/whyyoushouldneverpa...
What complicates things enormously is that these altered realities reallocate wealth and power. The mental and emotional health of users was not the first priority. But we are now past the first phase.
From social media and search to dating apps and everything else online, now people asking probing questions about how the new tech has been put to use and for whose benefit.
Will there ever be better "dating apps". Its a good question. The answer will depend on if we ever harness the economics behind technology to server people rather than the other way around
Humans crave hierarchical signaling. Instagram, TikTok, Match group, the entire industry have invested millions of dollars into implementing every cutting edge brain-hack they can think of. They've nurtured in us a dependence on their contorted, amplified presentation of society and our sociosexual value. Year in, year out, just as the house always wins, the dopamine sink always leans in their favor.
It's primally addicting to seek concrete quantifiers of status or worth: how many DM's you get, how many likes, how many matches. As complex as the human social brain is, its measures of meaning can often collapse on single numbers because they signal something irreducible: just exactly how cool, hot, likable, valuable or important you really are. The end game of all gossip is to glean something close to these numbers, in one way or another. In real life there's always layers of illusion and nuance, but online we are presented the truth, unflinchingly.
I think people really have to grapple with something often hard to accept: there's no reason why the human social consciousness has to be good, ultimately kind, or benign. There's a possibility that the essential elements of our psyches that apps and social media have exploited aren't really all that pleasant when laid out in the open. Maybe all our whims and lusts can end up being very bad to many people through no fault of their own. Maybe there is an essential, evolutionary ugliness to human nature behind the façade of cordial, inoffensive pleasantries. In the end, we become miserable, because our mental heuristics have been granted power they never should have. Algorithmic bliss has allowed us to be far too human.
Another one is gym membership with a trainer. The trainer will know lots of people and can make introductions.
Also I have body image issues and do not enjoy working out around other people.
If you go to a CrossFit gym then there’s a community vibe but at a typical gym - there isn’t one at all.
Those groups all have their own networks, etc. If you vibe with some of them and become part of their groups, you naturally get introduced to new people.
This also works if you move to a new area and even if you’re already in a relationship (I’m married), great for making new connections.
Your claim is literally contradicted by the article: "The most up-to-date figures show the world’s most popular dating app, Tinder, saw its users drop by 5% in 2021, while shares in both Bumble and Match Group, which owns Tinder, have declined steadily over the last couple of years."
Whoever has the best looking pictures gets most of the attention. I practically grew up on the old dating sites and my weight fluctuated wildly from eating out when I was young. I can remember it was like two different experiences depending if I was on a diet and weighed 15lbs less. 15lbs was the difference between a massive amount of attention vs basically none.
The idea that all that matters is how good your picture looks is so obvious but it doesn't fit the romantic stories we tell ourselves so we pretend like there are all these deep flaws in dating apps. They are doing exactly what we should expect them to do. Guys with great pictures are getting all the sex and attention at the expense of basically everyone else. Duh.
So I'm gonna take a nice shirtless pic while holding my cat in one arm and have fun with it lol.
I sometimes wonder if people just have too higher expectations, waiting for 'the one'. Relationships are hard. You have to work through differences, you can't expect to find someone where differences are absent.
I'm not pro marriage per se, but I think we need more, work on the relationship you have, rather than ending it and looking for something better.
I stated my hypothesis as 'expecting too much' but I'm not particularly wedded to that specific hypothesis.
It's just my observations suggest it isn't just the apps per se.
I'm not blaming you btw. It's just you aren't going to find a solution if you're looking at the wrong thing.
"The new rules of dating mean approaching strangers in public is more frowned upon than it was previously"
I wonder if dating apps have helped promote this viewpoint to boost business?
And I'm probably not even in as deep as some people here, some of this computer stuff is so ridiculously time consuming. I'm not even working on anything remotely hard, but still: how the hell do you make time? Without sacrificing your own projects?
It's something I've been thinking about for a while now. How do all of the people maintaining all of this hard, important shit get to where they are and still manage to have some semblance of a life? Not only just maintaining the stuff, but learning all of the background necessary to get there
Source: was married for a couple of decades and have had a couple of 6-12 months long relationships since. I have kids already, a full time job and am doing a second degree part time so I'm sure if I can manage it anyone can ;)
Of course, the actual dates take time, but it is not difficult to make time for a date with someone you like because it's something you want to do. Actually getting to that point is what took a lot of time before dating apps because you basically had to spend a lot of time in a situation (like a bar) where you might encounter someone compatible and hit it off with them. (Back in the day people just did this at their job but I think that is less acceptable in Western society now.)
> As Illich saw it, the rise of universalizing social technologies — that is, institutions managed by strangers — transgressed the traditional bounds of diverse vernacular communities and harnessed human endeavor to a trajectory of limitless growth, creating a “radical monopoly” over the ways and means of living that blunted any alternative to industrializing the desires of consumer society. In the process, persons and communities alike were deprived of the practical knowledge to shape tools according to their own defined needs and choices. Robbed of such competence, they became servants to the logic of those institutions instead of the other way around.
> His greatest insight was that when conviviality is swapped for productivity, monopolizing institutions that chart a singular path at mass scale become counterproductive to their original intent beyond a certain threshold.
> In his book “Energy and Equity” Illich illustrated this point in terms all could easily understand. As anyone who has driven on a freeway would agree, individual mobility turns into collective congestion when everyone has a car.
From https://www.noemamag.com/a-forgotten-prophet-whose-time-has-...
It’s wonderful to meet new people, whether you’re looking to find a partner or not. But some life situations make it easier to do that than others. I met the love of my life at Uni - she wouldn’t have given me a second glance on a dating app, but the environment of University allowed us to be friends, and then evolve into more.
How do you emulate the Uni vibe in “adult life” though, with thousands of people having lots of things in common that they can start chatting on,with activities involving people they know and don’t know that they can dip in and out of, and with parties where they can let go of inhibitions?
Yes, people are much more magic in real life, and oftentimes the magic happens from being in different situations with them.
And of course the ghosting is frustrating too. You manage to wade though the terrible search results to find someone who seems compatible, make the effort to write an intelligent, personalized message to them based on reading their profile, and then... nothing. It appears that a lot of people sit on the dating apps indefinitely for whatever reason, and they become "black holes" where no light ever comes out, while still clogging up the search results. If you have no feeling of urgency to meet people, then why bother being on the dating apps? The "freemium" model may be partly to be blame here, because it's free to have an account forever, as long as you don't use the "advanced" features.
I've seen it claimed that eHarmony is better about this, but I tried eHarmony, and it was absolutely not any better than the other dating apps. They all seem to be basically the same now, and are equally terrible.
Way back in the day I tried this, and got both ends of the spectrum. Still lots of ghosts, but then also curiously, multiple girls who said that my message was "unfair" or "selfish". When I enquired why, it was because it "created an obligation - you wrote this more detailed message and now I can't just reply with 'no thanks' or 'cool, tell me more', I have to sit down and think and write a reply". Great as a filter maybe, less great for the ego.
So then I wrote a template message. A couple of common paragraphs, and then a couple of inserts where I could put "choose 1 of 3 options to put in here". More soul depressing, but ended up more successful (relatively speaking).
Oy, another reason why online dating is so terrible. They're purposely on a dating site, looking to meet people; they created a detailed personal profile describing themselves, which attracted someone's attention; yet it's "unfair" or "selfish" to write a non-generic message? WTF!
I guess that's a case of bullet dodged. Not sure I want someone with that attitude. But after you dodge all the bullets, what's left?
It should actually be a lot easier to say "not interested" online to strangers than it is to say it to someone's face in person. On the other hand, it should also be a lot easier online to be at least semi-interested and have a little conversation before you judge someone as a hard no.
I think this goes back to my point that a lot of people seem to be on the dating apps without having any serious commitment to dating. They're just waiting for their knight in shining armor or prince with glass slipper to come along (who never does).
Simply, it's not workable if it has contributed to real success (happy ever after) occasionally, while simultaneously causing greater damage in other areas, like making cheating on existing relationships easier or discouraging meeting people in the old ways.
For instance, last I heard is that there's a ratio of 10 to 1, men to women, on them. Necessarily, this isn't published (to sell "superlikes" etc). Completely absurd setup.
But it speaks volumes about modern culture. That there's been no education on the best ways to successfully meet a good life partner, honestly factoring in things like your rank, regarding attractiveness and socioeconomic status and so on.
The best model is most likely: maximising your meeting of friends of friends. But who's out there touting that? Parents are asleep at the wheel.
After all, did you get "how to get a good husband/wife" subject in high school?
They teach only that which is useless.
That's not nearly so weird as you make it out to be. Plenty of businesses that sell durable goods could be described much the same way.
And looking at how much harder it is for men to find a match 10 times as much time to find a partner for men seems reasonable.
I know dozens of people in marriages or long-term relationships that started on dating apps. We all do, assuming we're not much over 50 and have a largish social circle. The dating app model world all the time, just not every time.