> I’ve found women are eager to set up a meeting within the first five or so messages, sometimes even hinting at it by the 2nd message That's probably because they've had enough experience to become aware of "the great lie" with all of these approaches to dating, and are tired of wasting time with it. That is, the fantasy that the online conversation actually has any real meaning whatsoever. No matter how much time y…
While I agree with this in spirit, it isn’t the experience I had back in the early days of OLD before it became mainstream - I regularly got pushback for suggesting meeting up too early… there seemed to be a trust issue or maybe being too expedient meant looking for a hookup. It’s certainly a component for sure, esp as the marketplace is so hard for guys meaning they’re willing to go to greater lengths to stand out……
Back in the old days meeting somebody from the internet was "scary" because it was so new, and unusual.
These days I can think of many many friends who've had relationships start via online dating, and the stigma/weirdness has completely gone away.
For starters, the pool of people on say, Tinder, for example, is already disproportionately imbalanced in terms of represented populations (as I said, 10:1). Assuming an even distribution of “attractiveness” (which obviously isn’t straightforward to quantify and varies by locale), there’s already a huge discrepancy: even a woman of average attractiveness (of ten women 1-10, she ranks a 5) has fifty (given ten women,…
Thanks for the detailed reply. This matches my experience fairly well. With the dynamics of the game laid out the way you said, do you see any reason to right swipe on someone of a relatively similar attractiveness to you? Or given it’s current parameters, does it always make more sense for women to try to match “up” and aim for men objectively more attractive than them?
Admittedly, I’ve had a very unusual experience on Tinder. Attraction is important, but it’s not the be all end all for me, as there are way more important things. That being said, I also know I rank pretty high on their scoring mechanics, based on the characteristics of who they show to me, and how I am shown to others (for example, Tinder primes people to swipe right by showing a high scoring user when you first open the app, many close friends have informed me “Tinder keeps showing me you when I open the app”, but there are other considerations you can use to assess your internal score). So I match with interesting choices on other attributes. And of the crowd I match with I have built a workflow to manage the volume (literally, I have over three thousand matches as of writing this, historically a total of over 7,000 in the year and a half I’ve used the app) — I reverse engineered their API so I could pull the matches and messages and create JIRA tickets automatically so I could bucket conversations based on initial intentions. It sounds pretty horrible once I write that out, but on the other hand I feel it’s pretty horrible that people don’t get a fair shake because of the way this game is rigged, and this ensures better “fairness”, at least in some way. Also not to mention, about half don’t message first, and of those that do, about a fifth of the time they’re pretty unsavory openers.
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 m…
It seems that your definition of "good husbands and fathers" implicitly disallows non-monogamous interactions.
I would bet that men (from couples) who have clear and open communication can be otherwise very loving partners and devoted parents without also having to be monogamous. If you zoom out just a bit and look at what is physically occurring, why should it be that physically touching someone else would prevent you from continuing to be a good parent and partner?
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.
Easiest way to go viral on TikTok as a sexual harasser so it seems...
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.
Yea---but do you want to go through life wondering if it's a comfortable life, or he truely likes you?
Obviously, empirically, an extremely large group of people do yea.
While I agree with this in spirit, it isn’t the experience I had back in the early days of OLD before it became mainstream - I regularly got pushback for suggesting meeting up too early… there seemed to be a trust issue or maybe being too expedient meant looking for a hookup. It’s certainly a component for sure, esp as the marketplace is so hard for guys meaning they’re willing to go to greater lengths to stand out……
Back in the old days meeting somebody from the internet was "scary" because it was so new, and unusual. These days I can think of many many friends who've had relationships start via online dating, and the stigma/weirdness has completely gone away.
>and the stigma/weirdness has completely gone away.
Well, not completely - anecdata but plenty of places on this planet (in the West too) where online dating = you are too desperate and you have no other options = stigma (especially for straight men).
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…
This would be true if the world were not as highly interconnected as it is. Nobody wants to risk this "failure" being broadcasted and possibly following them through virality. People today are not allowed to "fail safely" so to speak. Not without social penalties even outside their immediate social circle.
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 think most dating apps right now target desperate people, since they pay huge amounts of money they could actually make up the majority of sales. There are other apps but I don’t think they’re successful or profitable enough to really stand out.
I think just meeting in-person will replace dating apps. There was a downward trend in chatting up strangers and in-person events, but I think that’s going back upward now. Because most people got lonely during the pandemic, and now that the vaccines are out hanging out is getting back to normal.
The fundamental issue is that dating apps don’t actually give you much information or preferences vs in-person, and most people who are attractive and looking for partners get in-person matches anyways.