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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

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women are, in general, hypergamous, meaning they are looking for men who are "above" them along some dimension: wealth, status, looks, education, etc. I can not find the link, but I read somewhere once that something like the "top" 80% of women are competing over the "top" 20% of men. In other words, the "bottom" 80% of men are un-dateable for those women. That is how you end up with the situation described.

Sounds like you've read the OkCupid blog post that used to be online, before Match decided to buy OkCupid and censor them.

I think you are right.

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

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being on the other side of that though is: join app, wade through many low quality matches because the ratio is like 10:1, become extremely choosy because every right swipe is a match. It produces really bad psychological effects for both cohorts.

There is an approximately equal amount of men and women in the population. How is it possible that so many matches are "low quality" for women?

There was an OKCupid study that found that women on OKCupid rated 80% of men as below average.

https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

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

#54

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.

They are all looking at their phones now.

I'd argue many are throwing a different signal - wearing earbuds or headphones. Looking at your phone could be anything from talking to a friend to checking the weather. Listening to music sends a much stronger signal of "I'm busy, come back later or not at all".

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

#55

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.

Everyone overthinks things but this really is a good option. I’ve also been with my wife over ten years so maybe I’m not the authority any more. But even back then online dating was a thing but I had zero success with it. But it always seemed as a man, women basically gave you +2 in attractiveness just for having the confidence to go up and introduce yourself. Seemed crazy to throw those free points away so I just psyched myself into forcing myself to “just do it” if someone caught my eye.

Besides meeting my wife this way, there was one girl who rather coldly rejected me that I later ran into via another social circle. I apologized if I had made her uncomfortable and she told me that even though she wasn’t interested she was also somewhat flattered and that the incident made her day.

I think with sexual harassment in the world and all these apps everyone overthinks things and think just walking up to a stranger is for boomers or pick up artists. Really it’s just the normal human interaction that worked for a couple million years and still works today. And at least for typical heterosexual dynamics, the ability to make eye contact and say “Hi, my name is” will always be more impactful than a Bluetooth signal.

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

#56
post #41
post #30

This makes a nice news story, but based on the criteria mentioned, it is doomed to failure. 1. There are very, very few life-long partnerships. And of the ones that are, some of them are for reciprocal benefits (not love); some are because the people are too scared or complacent to leave; some are because the two are completely lacking in ambition and hope for a better future. Most people change over time, and most p…

That's way too cynical a view. It's often accurate, but it certainly does not describe all relationships. I've been married 8 years now and it's not at all like that. It's not a fairytale either, but it's a real love. While we've both grown and changed a lot, we haven't grown apart. There's hope, and it's a tough dating world out there, but if you have your attitude is over before you start.

8 years? Not being flippant, but 8 years is one chapter. More than 8 years of my marriage were so great I couldn't imagine anything better (and I have not topped it with anyone since). I'm saying that you can and should enjoy relationships, but if you expect the impossible, it will end badly. It doesn't have to end badly! It could end naturally, with great respect and friendship.

No, my attitude is that one can have many meaningful chapters (perhaps more than one with the same partner). The problem is this shared assumption that relationships should never end. If one person can grow a lot in life, and you have two people together, the idea that they will both grow in the same ways which keep them sharing the same connection is _very_ ideallistic.

Add children, which certainly changes the parents, and you have even more variables. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do what is right for you at the time, have children, have a happy family, and enjoy it. It just means you should not think it's the end of the world if (when) people's directions begin to diverge.

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

#57

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.

> Total stranger, gave her my number and asked her out [...]

I'm really, genuinely glad this worked out for you.

When feminists talk about the objectification of women, though, I think this is a prime example. (Admittedly there are no details.) The assumption that bothers me is that it is ok to approach a "pretty girl" about entering into a relationship.

Isn't this problem as old as the hills?

> Why can't I walk down a street free of suggestion?

> Is my body my only trait in the eyes of men?

> -- Suggestion, Fugazi, 1988

[1] https://genius.com/Fugazi-suggestion-lyrics

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

#58
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has he given up on scale? He's already got a news article and (many) thousands of eyeballs on him. Maybe the scale is in the publicity. Still, by no means easily reproducible by anyone else trying to do the same.

I completely agree. I was factoring in that his attempt is novel and noteworthy but doesn't generalize. I wouldn't expect copycats to achieve similar results.

I think this scales in quality vs. quantity and it might actually work better that it does for this guy when folks copy this approach. Dating apps clearly have more eyeballs, but the suggestions he receives through this are likely to have some context and social status.

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

#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.

Durable relationships with friends are ones that just work because you don't freight it with external meaning. That we use a noun for a "relationship" between people at all is probably the root of a lot of its difficulty. Relationships as things are intractable, whereas relating and choosing how you relate is the simplest thing in the world. It's as though we codified relating into a noun so we could trade it, which makes sense when you look at "being in a relationship" as a proxy for being property, and matchmaking services that want to sell you one.

Intimacy does require a shared perimeter of safety, trust, and exclusivity relative to that specific personal intimacy, and you need to maintain it, but reducing it to role-playing expectations just turns it into a power struggle in the guise of a game.

For a lot of people, marriage is basically a dead institution, but we still go looking for someone to "make" a marriage with, as though it's a thing you make that is abstracted from the people involved. The same can be said for family, where we relate to "the family" as our reflection against an ideal of family, instead of each person directly.

Maybe I've been into the stoics too much, but the simple mental rephrasing of "my partner," to "the partner I have" changes how you relate to them, from being an extension or reflection of yourself to being an experience in your life, and it takes a lot of pressure off how you relate to them.

That last statement is a destroyer of codependent relationships, which is probably good because someone spending thousands of dollars to find someone to represent their idea of a "relationship," in which they like their reflection in it is just going to suffer. That is, until they don't need to check a reflection to know they're good.

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

#60
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an approximately equal amount of men and women in the population. How is it possible that so many matches are "low quality" for women?

There was an OKCupid study that found that women on OKCupid rated 80% of men as below average. https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

That's funny at first glance but it might be more accurate than we would like to admit. Maybe there were a lot of below average men (compared to the general population) on OKC when that study was conducted
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