The author is most likely narcissistic, she even has her own wikipedia page which is as expected not noteworthy
The End of Love
71–80 of 103 posts
Re: The End of Love
#72> One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there. I judged this a stupid reason to stop messagi…
Agreed. Put another way, she’s acting entitled and vain. If she could practice some tolerance, gratitude, empathy, and non-judgement, she might be able to find love. As it is, I read this as an entitled woman expecting the world to come to her.
I see where you’re coming from. Not sure if it’s pure entitlement. I just think she is in her own way without realizing it. She jas certain schemas that she runs on autopilot without realizing it.
Then again, I am not good with English emotional words, I know what they mean but I don’t feel much when they’re said, second language
Re: The End of Love
#73People are really complicated.
This author doesn’t seem complicated at all, a very basic and common personality type, who always sees “the system” as the problem, never herself.
Vain and narcissistic. Expects perfection from her partners despite being twice divorced and having kids already. Can’t take ownership for her problems and blames the “system”, as you say. No gratitude, tolerance, empathy, or non-judgement.
Re: The End of Love
#74The 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…
As a man, it's hard to imagine the kind of bubble that some women must exist in for those combined preferences to seem completely reasonable. Men have their own idiotic preferences, but they're usually self-contained whilst many women have an all-encompassing "he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that, he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that, he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that..." attitude. People should…
On some level, the author recognizes that whole set of preferences is completely unreasonable - that’s the point of listing them all out like that. But you can also see that whole set of preferences is necessary and functional to survive a dating app - she states it produced 100 potential suitors. 99% of women across 99% of history wouldn’t have had 100 potential suitors across their entire life. Hence why I quoted that final paragraph, it neatly encapsulates the problem: “I applied unreasonably picky standards and still found 100 men”.
Re: The End of Love
#75The 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…
I don't think dating apps are designed to make women picky per se but they definitely end up distorting their perception and turn them into overly picky for sure.
This has always been the case with all dating apps from the start (except for maybe a few that tried to actively designed around it). This phenomenon emerges automatically from how dating platforms and people work: 1. men are expected to do the approach/first move (this is socially and evolutionary encoded in both sexes) 2. men initially put the bar somewhat lower and mostly care about looks at first (I'd say it makes a lot of sense, especially in online dating, but only if you disregard that the photos end up manipulated) 3. women (and also men) will start manipulating their photos. Even just selecting your best photos is manipulation. (I'm not saying it's wrong or unreasonable.) 4. men will do more approaches than IRL because it's cheap and safe and also can be done in parallel 5. women will receive a lot more approaches than IRL because men do more apporoaches
and this turns on the cycle: 6. women will feel that they have a lot higher desirability than what they were used to IRL/before starting to date online. They'll become picky, will feel higher status and start to be mean with some of the men who approach. Actually they don't have to be actively and explicitly mean, not being nice with the rejection is bad enough for men (see 7.). And being nice to all the unwanted approachers is hard. I mean it can be hard work so it's frustrating. 7. men will start to see that their efforts don't pay off. I mean it will pay off for the top say 5-20% but not for the others. So they get frustrated and try to further minimize the investment in each approach 8. this makes women feel even worse about all the unwanted approaches and they'll be even less considerate about those who they don't want (while porbably increasing the bar). They'll start complaining and putting stupid requirements (messages, really) on their profile, like the usual "those who do X and are Y need not bother to swipe right", etc. 9. this further frustrates men
etc. The cycle is on. Online dating, at least the naive approches, don't work because it makes the wrong thing easy and efficient. (And yes, due to the business models of these platforms they are not motivated to solve the issue. After all, the more users they have the better it is for them. They are getting paid for keeping people on the platform and not getting them off i.e. hook them up.)
Re: The End of Love
#76The 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 see…
Applying the same reasoning to casinos: “Casinos may make gamblers more impulsive. It’s still their responsibility to recognize that bias and work against it. If they truly want to financially secure, at least.” It seems a little heartless to me. Casinos are big powerful institutions with lots of resources to spend on crafting psychological exploits to make gamblers more impulsive, and we don’t fully blame gamblers for this - we regulate casinos pretty intensely, provide services to help gambling addicts, etc. The problem is more acute in this domain too, since dating apps have more of a monopoly on dating than casinos have on money.
I do agree with you that if she did have less judgment, some of those 100+ men would have been great partners. She mentions a French economist she dated who said “if he was going to be sent to a deserted island and had to choose between me and “someone gorgeous,” of course he would choose me, because I would be more interesting to talk to forever and he could still have sex with me too. But in the real world, surrounded by other people who’d be looking at him-with-me, he knew he would feel ashamed of me because he could have been with a more beautiful woman.” This mixture of acceptance and rejection may have just been his way of softening the blow of his rejection of her, but it may have also been his awkward unromantic way of saying “I will settle for you”. Willingness to settle like that might be the model we have to adapt to survive a dating market warped by high-powered dating apps.
Re: The End of Love
#77> I don’t want to meet someone so we can share a life of leisure. I do like going to the movies, I do love experiencing art and music with someone, I do enjoy hiking, I would love to have someone to cook with. But I would rather meet someone because we are running an abortion medication supply chain, or because we are joining an ecocommune in South America, or because we are building something worthwhile, growing something, teaching something, helping some people, or otherwise doing something hard together. Please let’s not play board games, let’s not get comfortable, let’s not talk about opening the relationship so our bourgeois lives can become even more prosaic. Please God don’t let’s try new restaurants.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get the sense this person doesn't know who she's looking for, but she already knows that most normal humans with a normal existence will never fit her needs, of which she's not fully sure either.
> When the other participants turned on their cameras one by one, they were all middle-aged white ladies too.
Is this a taste of what's to come from the latest wave of hyper-successful and hyper-educated women outpacing men in everything outside of suicides and incarceration? Their standards can understandably no longer be met by the mating marketplace, they refuse to settle because they know their theoretical worth, and the markets keep not clearing. What an interesting historic time.
Re: The End of Love
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a man, it's hard to imagine the kind of bubble that some women must exist in for those combined preferences to seem completely reasonable. Men have their own idiotic preferences, but they're usually self-contained whilst many women have an all-encompassing "he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that, he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that, he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that..." attitude. People should…
On some level, the author recognizes that whole set of preferences is completely unreasonable - that’s the point of listing them all out like that. But you can also see that whole set of preferences is necessary and functional to survive a dating app - she states it produced 100 potential suitors. 99% of women across 99% of history wouldn’t have had 100 potential suitors across their entire life. Hence why I quoted t…
She didn't find 100 suitors, what she got instead is 100 guys that passed her unrealistic standards and matched, out of which most probably found her single mom "closing in on fourty" looks still good enough to cream her, but not much beside that.
Of those 100 very few would be willing to be seen with her in public, and clearly not interested in commiting. It's subtle, but you can clearly pick it up reading her lamentations
How many men that are 6ft+, are educated and have their shit together put in 40yo single moms with 3kids and colorful past as their commitment filter?
Re: The End of Love
#79Ah, this was pretty tiring. Couldn't read the whole thing, but the book she was quoting from was probably the worst part. E.g. this quote is especially upsetting and dumb:
> Men have not been compelled to use sexuality as a leverage to receive social and economic resources and thus have no reason to implicate their whole self in sexuality
What if these people would care to read a bit of biology (like etology, evolution) and also evolutionary psychology? The claim in the quote is kind of 100% upside down. The reality is something like: "Men have been compelled to use their economic and social resources as a leverage to receive sex and thus have a very strong reason to implicate their whole self in work (or any other way available to acquire these)"
Because this is how it works. But even if we disregard the evolutionary dynamic the base claim is false: women aren't compelled to use sexuality to receive social or economic resources in modern Western societies. They can, you know work. And actually most of them do. This was (is) one of the most fundamental goals of feminism. While you could argue that the author simply depicts women as helpless prostitutes.
Now it's true that most women/women on average will chose men who are financially and (or?) socially are at least on par with them, preferably having a higher status/salary/earning potential. (And this is has been observed in a wide range of societies according e.g. to David Buss [1].) And that preference is what makes men 'compelled' to compete hard for the economic and social resources. (BTW, this is, I think, at least one of the reasons behind men having higher salaries and roles.)
So again, the reality seems to be the exact opposite of what the quote from book says. (And no, I'm not blaming women at all.)
Re: The End of Love
#80Articles like this make me incredibly depressed. It seems common place now to see blog posts written by women saying “woe is me, I’ve dated a crapton of men and get so much attention, but I can’t find the one ”. If women become this entitled and vain from online dating, the dating pool is only going to stagnate more. If the author could practice some tolerance, empathy, gratitude, and non-judgement, I’m sure many of…
The whole time I was reading the article I was thinking of the hundreds of thousands of men on these apps who are not 6ft and above, who don't have PhDs, who do not drink 3rd wave coffee and are lucky to maybe get a couple of matches on the apps in a month.
This woman is suffocating in choice, while the armies of men who are not good enough for her would be happy to get 1/100th of the activity she's seeing. We really do live on different planets.