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The stable marriage problem and modern dating

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Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#101

Post by automatoney »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #39
automatoney wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm wondering about is what the attractiveness distribution looks like for gay men and lesbians (and also bi/pan people, although there's probably less data to pull from there). I would guess that for gay dudes it matches the bell curve shape - anecdotally my experience of online dating more closely matches what my straight female friends see in terms of getting matches being easy. And also my conceptualiztion o…

Gay male with a fiancé here, and I love the boyfriend twins analogy. My partner and I are (gratefully) described as similarly good-looking -- curious store clerks like to ask us if we're siblings but then quickly realize we're probably a couple. > I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their l…

Y'know the boyfriend twin thing makes me wonder... how successful might a dating app be that just takes a front and profile photo, and then matches people by facial similarity?

The attraction comparison is mostly from me being pretty visual and noticing that many straight men are also quite visual.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#102

Post by centimeter »

YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #48
poorman wrote: post #40

Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked at horribly wrong. People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, th…

Do you have any data to back that up that you can share? I don't mean to call you out, it could very well be the case, people date in rather not-understandable ways to me. What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married. Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a…

Experimentally, you are correct if the goal is to have a long-lasting marriage. People with small numbers of sexual partners before marriage are much less likely to get divorced than those with many sexual partners.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#103

Post by willdearden »

There are a ton of papers on the properties of stable matching under random preferences. The classic paper (Pittel 1989 https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0402048?journalCode=s...) calculates the average rank of men and women for their partners under male-proposing Gale Shapley. They find the men's average rank is O(log(n)) and the women's average rank is O(n / log(n)). Depending on how you calculate percent advantage, that roughly matches your simulations.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#104

Post by Spooky23 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #25
Spooky23 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the article. Basically, dating in our modern world of few meaningful social connections is a vicious cycle for women. Men rate attractiveness on a normal distribution, women rate attractiveness on a pareto distribution. (ie. 80% of men are "meh" or worse to women.) I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a comple…

I don't think it's solely a lack of meaningful social connections, although that's a contributing factor. Women have more choices and are more picky versus historically, and men are economically disadvantaged due to globalization and wealth/income inequality. Here's a comment where I opine on this from a previous thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407388

I think the hockey stick growth of online dating is directly correlated to reduced social activity.

"Bowling Alone" captured part of the phenomena 20 years ago. That hasn't changed. Even things like little leagues and soccer clubs for kids are declining in many ways and much more commercial activities than they were in the past. Even worship has changed -- high growth religious services are scaled-up entertainment and child care focused vs. community.

Personally, I don't buy into the notion that people have changed. People are people. I think the environment has changed and people are playing interacting with it based on the funnel they get sucked into.

The online dating services are listing real estate agents -- their interest is in a higher number of conversions per customer. They will optimize for that metric over time.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#105

Post by ardy42 »

davidcollantes wrote: post #77

Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think people started to meet online before 2010.

>> The 2010’s showed a monumental rise in online dating, and the number of people who have met their significant other online is only going to continue to grow.

> Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think people started to meet online before 2010.

Certainly, but back then meeting online was highly unusual and there was a period where online dating had a bit of a stigma. It's probably only been in the last decade or so that it's been fully normalized.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#106

Post by k__ »

automatoney wrote: post #101
abnercoimbre wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gay male with a fiancé here, and I love the boyfriend twins analogy. My partner and I are (gratefully) described as similarly good-looking -- curious store clerks like to ask us if we're siblings but then quickly realize we're probably a couple. > I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their l…

Y'know the boyfriend twin thing makes me wonder... how successful might a dating app be that just takes a front and profile photo, and then matches people by facial similarity? The attraction comparison is mostly from me being pretty visual and noticing that many straight men are also quite visual.

When I use FaceApp to make a picture of me look female, it looks like my sister, which I don't find very attractive and many people say my sister is hot.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#107

Post by YetAnotherMatt »

eastbayjake wrote: post #62
YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any data to back that up that you can share? I don't mean to call you out, it could very well be the case, people date in rather not-understandable ways to me. What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married. Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a…

> I'm aware of the negative selection bias there I'm guessing those marriages are likely correlated with strong shared religious beliefs[1] and closeness to extended families that help share the burden of raising children. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857783/#:~:tex... .

None of them are religious.

Negative selection bias as in people who are less capable to maintain long term relationships are more likely to have a lot of dating history.

Conversely, people who are super easy going and great partners to be with may have very few people break up with them (and kind of succeed on the first try).

Or another way to put it: To have a long dating history with a lot of different partners, you need to have broken up (or been broken up with) quite a few times. This could be due to circumstances outside of your control, but that is probably not true for all people in that category.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#108

Post by DennisP »

poorman wrote: post #40

Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked at horribly wrong. People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, th…

What's the difference between "compatible" and "doesn't have attributes I don't want?"

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#109

Post by e28eta »

albntomat0 wrote: post #8
euix wrote: post #6

Some interesting stuff there. I think you could also frame it as a explore vs exploit problem. If we assume there is a successive series of partners you could meet but only in sequence and you choose whether to "attempt to exploit, i.e. form a relationship" or pass and continue to explore. At which point should you commit such that it maximizes the expected gain (marginalizing over your lifespan)? It's like RL game e…

What you describe is called the "secretary problem", among other names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

I enjoyed the book Algorithms to Live By, for folks who are interested in more things like this.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#110

Post by mensetmanusman »

colmvp wrote: post #41
EGreg wrote: post #3

Why would having a larger pool make dating harder? I think the author is confusing the probability of a “stable marriage” with the probability of a relationship . What this says is you’d expect cheating to go up. As Chris Rock says, “you’re only as faithful as your options.”

> Why would having a larger pool make dating harder? FWIW, I have found online dating way harder than dating someone I met through friends/work/school. YMMV but my theory is having access to that many more people leads one (including myself) to sometimes think there's someone more attractive/interesting out there instead of giving what's available to them a strong chance. I have two good friends who have been serial…

This.

I come from a strong family culture (dozens of cousins, off-spring, good communication, >95% stable long-lasting marriages, etc.), and we were taught that there is no perfect match. Love isn’t a feeling, it is an act of the will for the good of the other.

Ergo, it’s your job to make the relationship work.

Millennials without robust world-views haven’t yet figured out that the ‘fear of missing out’ is devastating to their pursuit of happiness.

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