Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The End of Love

theparisreview.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 103 posts

Re: The End of Love

#61

Post by Johanx64 »

sneak wrote: post #53
SoftTalker wrote: post #25

> I have been on first dates with 107 people in the past five years, without securing a long-term love relationship with anyone Time to take a good look in the mirror, honey.

I mean, it could also be that she is just fantastically bad at prescreening. It's easy to find a hundred garbage single people - that's why they're single, remember?

Her case is really clear cut, dry and simple. Aging single mother of 3, yet with very high expectations that don't match her fading looks, nor personality.

The vast amount of choices and nearly unlimited supply that hookup apps have on offer messes with her head

This is a common recurring theme with single aging middle aged woman with kids types.

Re: The End of Love

#62

Post by wrycoder »

ravenstine wrote: post #51

The author is their own worst enemy, and their article makes it abundantly clear. Hopefully, someday, they will reread what they wrote and see it as the postmortem that it is. On a broader note, maybe dating was never sustainable in the first place. The concept of dating is, for the most part, a 20th century invention. In any earlier time, it would have been considered low-key prostitution. As a man, the expectation…

Quote: I have been on first dates with 107 people in the past five years, without securing a long-term love relationship with anyone

That's a "first date" every two weeks or so.

Re: The End of Love

#63

Post by r0ze-at-hn »

SoftTalker wrote: post #25

> I have been on first dates with 107 people in the past five years, without securing a long-term love relationship with anyone Time to take a good look in the mirror, honey.

She does say that she has an avoidant attachment style. When someone gets close they pull away. I did notice they didn't really follow up on that thread, working to become a more secure person. Maybe one day.

Re: The End of Love

#64

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

SoftTalker wrote: post #25

> I have been on first dates with 107 people in the past five years, without securing a long-term love relationship with anyone Time to take a good look in the mirror, honey.

I read the whole stupid thing, because there had to be character development, right? An epiphany? Something?

No, she's still insufferable at the end.

Re: The End of Love

#67

Post by spadros »

fwlr wrote: post #47

The last paragraph: “How many [men] over six feet tall with graduate degrees who don’t smoke and drink only socially or not at all and either already have kids or don’t want kids and live within fifty miles of you who aren’t polyamorous and designate themselves as active, with liberal politics and no bathroom selfies or rote clichéd philosophizing? I thought I might stop at ninety-nine, or one hundred.” gives you a g…

Online dating may make women more vain and entitled. It’s still her responsibility to recognize that bias and work against it. If she truly wants a partner, at least. Otherwise it’s hard to have sympathy for someone inundated with choice who has rejected people for liking Starbucks and Marvel movies. Especially when she herself has been divorced twice and already has kids. She isn’t exactly a prime fruit, but she seems to expect a perfect man in return. If she had some empathy, gratitude, tolerance, and non-judgement, I’m sure many of those 100+ men would have been great partners.

Re: The End of Love

#68

Post by luckman212 »

ravenstine wrote: post #51

The author is their own worst enemy, and their article makes it abundantly clear. Hopefully, someday, they will reread what they wrote and see it as the postmortem that it is. On a broader note, maybe dating was never sustainable in the first place. The concept of dating is, for the most part, a 20th century invention. In any earlier time, it would have been considered low-key prostitution. As a man, the expectation…

You left off #5 :

5. In the modern world, technology (dating apps, ML/AI-assisted image enhancement shifting expectations of average attractiveness, and the destruction of socialization by TikTok/Insta/Snap) has rendered a significant portion of the male population undateable/unmatchable. This has tipped the scales largely in favor of the men in the desirable pool, as more women compete over that narrowing set. Purists may call this some sort of extreme Darwinism. The end result will be at least a generation or two of outsized suffering for males in the middle of the bell curve.

Re: The End of Love

#69

Post by gjm11 »

baggy_trough wrote: post #44

She should use Optimal Choice. Estimate the number of partners you can date, then date log(N) of them, then marry the next one that's better than any of the previous.

Not log N, but N/e.

More seriously, that's the optimal solution if your goal is to maximize the probability that you end up with the single best person in the pool. I don't think that's a good match for most people's objectives when dating.

(If instead each prospective partner has a score chosen uniformly randomly between 0 and 1, and you want to maximize your average partner-score, then you should use a similar strategy but with about sqrt(N) dates before taking the next that's better, instead of N/e. That's still not super-realistic but it's probably more realistic.)

Re: The End of Love

#70

Post by voidhorse »

The attitude of this writer is precisely why so many people struggle to find meaningful relationships.

The internet tricks them into living in some fantasy world in which perfection is not only possible, but accessible. To connect with someone is not to open oneself to the surprising richness of life and experience and to stumble into a fulfilling partnership in which you, crucially, grow but rather a little game with "goals", and "checklists", "non-negotiables". It's scrolling through dossiers and presentations and a constant comparison of the "real deal", which is never up to snuff, with these digital portraits.

If people took a second to just reflect on how rigid, robotic, and insufferable they've let themselves become, and instead opted for the natural, childlike openness that we all have inside, before we let ourselves start treating life like some kind of quarterly deliverable, they'd fare much better.

A relationship will never form if you refuse to budge. It's as much about being willing to change yourself, grow, and bob down the winding rivers of life without certainty as it is about finding someone that makes the current you happy.

Post reply on HN