How to Pick Your Life Partner (2014)

I can’t share my life with someone, and not be married?

The 37% rule has been the most beneficial heuristic that I've applied to dating.

https://plus.maths.org/content/mathematical-dating

Marriage, monogamy, and (romantic) love are conservative notions that are close to being (or should be) marginalized in my opinion.

Romantic love, especially, is an extremely superficial and hollow idea exalted to high heavens by the group-think of the masses. I gave up religion, and over the years realized that love is the second, way more sneaky and no less damaging, delusion that humanity indulges in. It has to go the way of the religion.

I hope most of you would agree that at least 70%-90% of being in love has something to do with the appearance of your person-of-interest (most of it visual). No matter how you cut it, no matter how much of an intellectual you are and how much you prefer to connect deeply with a person, in the end, given two individuals, you fall in love with the one that is more visually attractive. What a coincidence!

And what is visual attraction? In other words why do we find some people more beautiful than others? Because we have a biologically ingrained form of discrimination based on looks. It's lookism plain and simple.

Note that I do not buy the silly notion that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder' and that 'I don't find that person attractive but I'm sure someone else will'. This is somewhat backed by data (e.g., the OKCupid survey), but I have developed this belief on my own. Humans of all races have a built-in instinct to find some visuals more appealing and attractive than others. It is sad but true. To take it to an extreme, if we find some visuals disgusting (e.g., spilled guts, slimy things) we don't all of a sudden go "I'm disgusted by slimy spilled guts of animals, but that's just me, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who have the exact opposite reaction, that they love to look at slimy spilled guts".

What I'm trying to say is that standards of visual attraction, while not physically objective, are largely biology objective, and yet, it's a bad thing, because it's a symptom of biological imperfection. It's a genetic defect in our biology and 99.99% of humans are afflicted by it.

I personally think social individualism is a concept that needs to gain traction in modern society. It is the 'atheism of love'.

The only place I think that really applies is if you're in a small town. If you can't get past the first few dates after trying with 10-20 candidates in a big city (requiring 100-200 solicitations), you're probably facing one of a few very solvable problems, off the top of my head:

- fails at basic hygiene (solved by showers, haircuts, clothes, cleaning your room, home improvement projects, eating vegetables, etc)

- fails at basic rapport (solved by practicing with non-romantic partners)

- underlying mental health issues (solved by your therapist/psychiatrist)

- fails at having an appealing life to join (solved by identifying personal goals and practicing working towards them)

There are exceptions, of people who are extremely physically unattractive, or who have truly insoluble mental health issues. But it's a really tiny percentage of people. I'm talking you literally make babies cry with your appearance, or you have a history of torturing animals, or something like that.

Most people have just a couple of actual dealbreaking items on their filter, so out of 20 candidates there should be one or two whose filters are on things you accidentally do right.

And I'm not saying those four things I listed above are quick to solve. They take time. It might take 2 years of daily effort. I'm just saying they're easy to solve: there's no trick. Anyone who can bake a cake can do the steps necessary to solve them.

The hell are you talking about