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Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

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Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#111

Post by KolibriFly »

lordnacho wrote: post #27

Everyone is playing the secretary problem. If you're popular, you have to turn down a lot of candidates before you try to find one that's in whatever you measure to be in your league (better than all the ones you saw previously, but I wonder how many people are really going with that). If you're on an app, that's a lot of people. At the same time, there's a bunch of people who aren't so popular who are now done check…

There's less "maybe someone better is one swipe away" and more "this is who's here tonight"

Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#112

Post by eastbound »

whynotmakealt wrote: post #84
eastbound wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only new factor that COVID brought in No it also brought kids who missed one year of socialization, positive social experiences, mingling. Just one year? It changed habits forever in favour of remote classes, in which schoolm don’t play their role in giving a cohesive experience for students.

As a kid in final days of high school. This is so true. I was talking to this about this to my mum just a few days ago and she said that no it didn't impact, but I was so shocked because honestly I feel like its just not even the kids but everyone which got impacted but I genuinely feel like that there was this sense of loneliness in covid I am not sure but before covid everyone was friends with everybody else kind o…

> she said that no it didn't impact

Depending on the shape of the discussion, maybe she denied it so you don’t fell into the “I’m victim, it’s over now” trap. Grownups do that. Don’t take it bad. I’m 45 and single, and grownups tell me all the time that it’s not too late for me. I think they deny the obvious to console me, but living in a situation where everyone denies your actual situation is disorienting, and makes things worse than facing the truth.

> boys and girls sit apart

That’s a sudden transition in about 1 year at the age of ~12 (I don’t know what 6th grade is). It’s forever; after that they only rejoin again as couples ;) You can still make girls into friends, and groups like at the workplace include women easily (hopefully), but there’s always a tension on who’s going to date whom, and is this guy trying to creep on me, etc. which makes both genders more natural apart.

Just to help you distinguish between Covid effects and normal life.

What’s probably specific on Covid was: Dating fell off (2021), dating at the workplace is a big nono (2017), cost of living (2022), radicalization of opinion and realization that pro-Covid and doubters don’t fit together (2020). On the last point, I remember leftists and rightwings living together before that, and it might have started in 2017 with the Trump election, but each other deny the sanity of the other group. i.e. really radicalized.

Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#113

Post by est »

zug_zug wrote: post #11

I think it's actually very simple... the paradox of choice. You introduce somebody to your attractive single friend there's a real chance they hit it off and form a relationship. You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity. I think there are certain basic psychological facts…

> You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity.

And then there's "average person fallacy"

Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#114

Post by atoav »

foofoo12 wrote: post #87
zug_zug wrote: post #11

I think it's actually very simple... the paradox of choice. You introduce somebody to your attractive single friend there's a real chance they hit it off and form a relationship. You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity. I think there are certain basic psychological facts…

> one makes more money There's this joke about a man in his 40s. He goes to the gym and asks the instructor which machine he should use to look more attractive to young ladies. The instructor looks at him and says "you'd do well by using the ATM outside".

When I ask myself who in my friends circles has had the happiest, longest lasting relationships it almost never were the guys with the money.

Don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean the inverse is true and you score big time if you are an ugly bum. It just means other qualities matter often more than men think. Being a kind guy, having humor, being emotionally reliable (meaning you're emotionally stable and not easily provoked, angered), being fun to be around, things like that.

I was one of those guys who always had more female friends than the average dude and I can assure you the stuff girls talk about when they consider partners are more often about how a guy is, than what he has.

Not that there aren't women who decide based perceived wealth, of course they exist. But why on earth would you consider catering to those? Got nothing else going for you except money?

Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#115

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

adaml_623 wrote: post #110
CuriouslyC wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dating apps 100% suck. I'm a good looking guy and I put the effort into getting great pictures and optimizing my profile to the point I was able to get dates 5+ nights a week and date 2-3 new women a week, and while it was validating, the quality of dates was significantly worse than what I used to get from just approaching women in places like bookstores, after yoga classes, etc when that wasn't as culturally abnorm…

This anecdote does not really feel like an argument that dating apps suck. Sounds like you were using them wrong somehow

I mean, that’s not really an informed skepticism is it? Respectfully, you’d have an idea of what the commenter means if you’re attractive.

In my own experience I quite agree. When you have more than a hundred matches, it just sucks, because the fact that you have that many matches means you’ve cast your net too wide. You swiped right solely on the basis of looks but the good dates are good because other factors like personality and similarity in interests and sense of humor turn out to actually matter. Those are things best gauged via face-to-face interaction.

Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#116

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

KolibriFly wrote: post #106
zug_zug wrote: post #11

I think it's actually very simple... the paradox of choice. You introduce somebody to your attractive single friend there's a real chance they hit it off and form a relationship. You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity. I think there are certain basic psychological facts…

The paradox of choice feels like one of those concepts that sounds trivial until you live it. Dating apps amplify it to an absurd degree

It’s impressive to me how many people mistake relationships for a choice issue when it’s entirely a building in common thing. Obviously, having a shared vision or the ability to built one initially matter but the rest is very much work.

At this point in my life, I’m fairly convinced that some people would be able to build a successful relationship with nearly anyone while other are doomed to fail even with the "perfect" person.

The problem of dating is not so much dating. It’s expectations which are totally unaligned with the reality of life.

Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#117

Post by NoahZuniga »

gassi wrote: post #2

I think the author missed an important factor: misaligned incentives. Dating apps make money when users spend time (and money) on the platform. Users who find a partner tend to leave the platform, so dating companies are incentivized to prevent that from happening. Those companies then have more opportunities to up-sell those users on premium features, which they're more likely to purchase due to repeated failure and…

This is pretty obviously addressed in the article. The premise of the article is why don't users migrate to better platforms when the large ones are extracting as much money as possible (because the incentives are misaligned)

Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#118

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

Animats wrote: post #78
johnfn wrote: post #38

Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps dont suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them? (A sad fact is that dating will just suck for some % of the population. Is it possible that if there were no apps the same % would be saying how IRL dating sucks?) I know many people in stable LTRs or married who met through dating…

> Controversial take, but have we considered that possibly dating apps don't suck, and that this perception is driven by a vocal minority of the people who have the worst experience on them? Yes. The reality is well known. PlentyOfFish used to publish statistics. About 10% of dating app users are "date bacon" and find matches they like. Everyone else is a dissatisfied loser. The losers provide the repeat business and…

> What women want

There are 4 billions women on this planet.

The average women as a concept is meaningless for someone looking for a person to date. Even if you could only find someone far in the metaphorical tail, variance and population size are so high we are talking millions of people. Lesbian manages to find people to marry for god sake.

This kind of weird generalisation really needs to die. It helps absolutely no one.

Re: Dating: A mysterious constellation of facts

#120

Post by m_fayer »

_factor wrote: post #81
zug_zug wrote: post #11

I think it's actually very simple... the paradox of choice. You introduce somebody to your attractive single friend there's a real chance they hit it off and form a relationship. You introduce them to 100 attractive friends, one makes more money, one has a more stable job, one is flirtier, etc then it's both exhausting and none of them seem like a great opportunity. I think there are certain basic psychological facts…

When I was a kid, I had one video game and played it all the way through. When the system was emulated and access to every single game ever created became available, I lost interest.

Part of my self-administered IT education in my early 20s was to feed my film nerdery through exquisite data hoarding. Automation, NASs, media servers, all of it.

Curiously, I found that the better I got, the less movies I actually watched. It became more about collecting than engaging.

I think this is a corollary to your point: vastly increasing access and reducing our objects of desire to a standardized neatly storable form can easily divert us into hoarding behavior, to the detriment of actual engagement with what’s being hoarded.

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