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Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

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Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#121

Post by baobabKoodaa »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #113
rubyist5eva wrote: post #15

Whatever happened to just asking pretty girls you see on dates? That’s how I met my wife. Total stranger, gave her my number and asked her out for coffee. Been married ten years now.

There are dozens (probably hundreds) of articles demonizing men for interacting with women in public they do not know. Your comment sounds a lot like "Look the hiring manager in the eye and give him a firm handshake" advice that's half a century out of date. We no longer live in the type of high trust society where such casual interactions are welcomed or even socially acceptable. Perhaps that still exists in a small…

> in the typical contemporary urban center, you're just as likely to end up on someone's "I don't owe you my attention" tiktok video as you are to have a mutually positive interaction.

I'm surprised to hear you describe those odds as undesirable. 50% chance of a positive interaction is an order of magnitude higher than I would have estimated. Even if there's only a 5% chance of a positive interaction, parent poster's advice is still worth it. If you are respectful other other people, those negative interactions will be short and not too bad for either party. The upshot of find love and a lifelong partner more than offsets those short negative interactions that you have to wade through.

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#122

Post by Mountain_Skies »

Starting with being one of Match's first profiles in my area in the mid 90s through a couple of years ago, I've given online dating a try several through various stages of life. The one constant I've found is that paid services, even if it's just a small amount, gets rid of the tire kickers and validation seekers. When everyone has something invested into the process, everything is primed for moving forward. Paid services unfortunately have their own incentives to keep you around even after finding mutually attraction and compatibility but the free (and freemium) sites are designed to suck up your time and attention, which are monetized, instead of you paying directly.

Two other random observations about the differences between using matching sites versus people I've met more organically: Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. That difference is quite stark but otherwise personality and lifestyle differences are minimal. The other is that tall women are vastly overrepresented on dating sites. My guess is that if you're a 6' tall woman who wants to not be taller than her significant other but still wants to be able to wear heels, the numbers don't work very well with more traditional dating. You have to be able to cast a wide net when 96% of men are already shorter than you are in two inch heels.

For myself, my best relationships have been those I've met in person rather than through online dating. In most of those cases, we wouldn't have been a match if we had been using an app and running in similar social circles itself was a good filter. The best relationship from someone I met online was a woman I met on LiveJournal in an alumni area, which was somewhat of a pseudo social circle filter itself.

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#123

Post by Ajef »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #122

Starting with being one of Match's first profiles in my area in the mid 90s through a couple of years ago, I've given online dating a try several through various stages of life. The one constant I've found is that paid services, even if it's just a small amount, gets rid of the tire kickers and validation seekers. When everyone has something invested into the process, everything is primed for moving forward. Paid ser…

> Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions.

This is interesting. Can you provide a little information on the context:

- what is the number of people you've encountered to form this opinion?

- Is this all in one region/sub-population or do you suspect socio-economic differences to play into this?

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#124

Post by gajjanag »

webmobdev wrote: post #79
betwixthewires wrote: post #6

> He's offering prizes of up to $7,000 in value to anyone who can help him get a date, and ultimately, a wife. That's the gist of the article. I don't like online dating either. But this "social experiment" is just, I dunno, grimy?

Being an indian, I find this funny - in our culture (and I guess most asian cultures), it is quite common for the elders in our social network do so much unsolicited match-making that it can sometimes be irksome. :) India even has matchmaking websites for those wanting to find a suitable partner for marriage (half of the posts in it will be from parents / relatives of the prospective bride / groom). It's actually qui…

> Apart from charging for membership, these sites also abuse lax privacy laws and sell the individual profiles to data brokers and marketing divisions of various industries.

Am curious - do you think the Match group is any different? Their market cap suggests that they also do the same...

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#125

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

quantumBerry wrote: post #83
blunte wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems obvious that the result is rational from a biological perspective Only if you believe in the relatively modern human concept of two monogamous people being the only parents of a child. Biologically speaking, a woman wants the sperm which will provide her the most survivable and resilient child, plus any number of other adults around who will help care for and protect that child. This idea of a woman being…

A woman takes 9 months to birth a child, and up until very recently had some serious risk during childbirth. The dude just has to shoot his load. This imbalance in reproductive investment predates modern human concept of monogamy. > if a woman knows she is only ever allowed to have one partner If each woman and each man can only choose one partner, i would expect the choosiness of men and women to become much more eq…

I was about to quibble with

> Females have a biological incentive to be more choosy than men as their reproductive investment is much higher

until I saw you had also written

> If each woman and each man can only choose one partner, i would expect the choosiness of men and women to become much more equal

which is the missing piece I was going to add.

> In reality we know that humans historically have not really been monogamous creatures, even in societies that are nominally so.

But, to shift emphasis a little, in those societies, many many people really were monogamous, there absolutely were, and are, functioning lifelong pair-bonds, there were men who devoted a lot of themselves to being good husbands and fathers, and, I'd like to think, there still can be. But yes, such men will need to be choosy, because they're making the biggest investment of their lives.

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#126

Post by MiddleEndian »

klipt wrote: post #10
tomtimtall wrote: post #4

Interesting experiment. Traditionally when people reach the point of wanting to pay money to get a wife, they travel to some less well off country and buy a wife from there.

You say that like spending money on marriage is a bad thing. But effectively, if you marry someone who earns less than you, you're paying money to maintain that marriage for the rest of your life anyway.

This is not necessarily true, beyond the fact that you must pay to live no matter what. If you have one person making, say, $300k/year and another making $60k/year, together you share a bedroom, share a fridge, share a stove, share a living room, etc. Your total costs could lower than they would be otherwise.

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#127

Post by techbio »

motohagiography wrote: post #59

$7000? Sounds like dating apps are wildly underpriced, or they are not fit for purpose. Likely a bit of both. A girlfriend of mine once used a matchmaking service for profesionals that was priced in the $10k range and the stories she told me about them all seemed to have the similar theme, where if you want a person to represent something in your life (wife, partner, husband, etc.), it's a recipe for disappointment.…

A relationship is a noun and not a verb because it is formed into something stable the people in it can commit to, and because our limits into knowing another person's heart and mind are so profound, and feelings change with, for example, external events, committing to shared goals and life is more realistic than one irrational human to another. Free love isn't free for all.

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#128

Post by SnowProblem »

nly wrote: post #99
vgel wrote: post #46

I wonder what, if anything, will replace dating apps. As someone who tried dating apps for a while, I never had much luck with them. I ended up meeting my wife in person at the LGBTQ center at my college, we were friends for awhile, started dating, then got married a couple years later. I'm not sure what dating apps optimize for. It's easy to say "for hookups!", but it seems like a very low% of matches on those apps…

> I wonder what, if anything, will replace dating apps. A friend of mine, John, first met his future wife while accompanying a third friend to an evening of speed dating. The thing is, neither John nor his now wife, actually participated . They were both there, begrudgingly providing moral support to their respective friends, and smugly watching the whole spectacle from the sidelines, when they struck up conversation…

Hey, this is exactly how I met my now wife and we've never heard anyone else with this story before! Long shot, but did this happen in Los Angeles?

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#129

Post by noir_lord »

erikerikson wrote: post #2

The value of internet dating for people looking for a serious connection is access to scale and therein the bypass of the happenstance of initial conditions. This approach gives up on scale. At first I was challenged with how to effectively gain the value of that access to scale. But then I selected a dating app (okcupid) that allowed for depth and designed my profile to ward off others and select for the subpopulati…

Met my partner through okcupid (about 8 years ago I gather it's gotten a little worse since) - at the time it was leagues ahead of the other offerings though.

Re: Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion

#130

Post by CyberDildonics »

dazc wrote: post #115
CyberDildonics wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that? Nothing really matters until you meet up in person and once you do, how you planned it doesn't really matter. It isn't some backpage transaction, there isn't any commitment or investment before you meet up. If you want to leave you leave.

The 'fast-food of realtionships' sums it up pretty well. However, if you disagree and have found otherwise then I respect that too. Personally, it's not for me but then I have been single for a while so I'm not really qualified to criticise.

Again, you are just saying the same thing but not actually explaining why you are saying that.
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