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The stable marriage problem and modern dating

arvarik.com

91–100 of 224 posts

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#91
post #2

This is especially interesting as same-sex dating is even more skewed toward online interaction, probably just due to the fact that we make up only ~5% of the population; any person we meet in public is straight 19 out of 20 times [1]. [1] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...

I am dying to hear some stories from that 5% who were meeting at church. And I wonder if the declining college number has to do with people waiting longer, or the fact that more people are coming out and so the age range of the survey is broader.

Same sex dating is, sadly, still not entirely safe. A little anonymity and being out of arm's reach probably makes people feel a lot more comfortable (have you ever gone on a date when you were uncomfortable for some other reason? Did it end well?)

I don't recall if it was Dan Savage or something I read earlier than that, about how screwed gay men are in a mixed orientation environment, because a heterosexual male can use prolonged eye contact across a bar as an intro to approaching a woman, while some men see eye contact as aggression. If that person turns out to be a homophobe, the author theorizes that the odds of a violent end to this encounter has just gone up considerably. A gay bar or an online dating site sets a context, a social filter. If you crash and burn it's over quickly and you can move on.

If smart phones were available sooner I wonder how much faster that line would have gone up.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#92
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I visit family in the midwest this phenomenon makes me twitch. It seems people out there have taken to using "exponentially" as a pseudo-scientific word meaning "a lot". i.e. "you're making my job exponentially more difficult" Edit: fixed typo :)

It seems like people out there are using "this phenomena" to mean "this phenomenon." I say this not to be rude, but to note that if we needlessly scrutinize each other's grammar, no one will be happy.

I'm smiling tho.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm wondering about is what the attractiveness distribution looks like for gay men and lesbians (and also bi/pan people, although there's probably less data to pull from there). I would guess that for gay dudes it matches the bell curve shape - anecdotally my experience of online dating more closely matches what my straight female friends see in terms of getting matches being easy. And also my conceptualiztion o…

Gay male with a fiancé here, and I love the boyfriend twins analogy. My partner and I are (gratefully) described as similarly good-looking -- curious store clerks like to ask us if we're siblings but then quickly realize we're probably a couple. > I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their l…

>See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their love interests sound foreign to us..

That sounds intriguing. Care to elaborate at all with any examples?

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#94

One factor that I didn't see addressed in the post which does make a significant impact is that men in general rate women more similarly than women rate men. See for example: https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences/m... As such, male advantage is probably a lot lower in the real world, if (hyperbolic) every woman has a different man on nr 1 of their preference list, and every man has the same woman…

I'm always surprised that while men apparently rate women's attractiveness on a bell curve, women seem to rate men on a Pareto distribution. Considering how much I hear about beauty standards and how they harm women, I almost never hear anything about male beauty standards. If society is to be improved by having more realistic female beauty standards, then there's apparently a lot more headroom for society to be impr…

There are two male beauty standards so to speak: male ideal for males and male ideal for women. Male ideal for males is overly bulked up dude with six pack. Male ideal for women is what you get in female journals or in boy bands.

But the other think is that the body shapes for males that showed up in entertainment were more various for males then for females. There was less perfection and more variety, but that is changing. Now it seems guys are moving toward similar restrictive requirements, so we may get there with guys too.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#95

>> The first graph demonstrates the O(n²) complexity of the algorithm. We can see that as the community grows larger, even by a small amount, the amount of iterations it takes to solve the matching problem grows exponentially. This statement is contradictory. Probably the author is using "exponentially" to mean quick growth. I suppose this is alright in common parlance, but I find it disturbing when people describe a…

> ”I find it disturbing when people describe a function as exponential just because it is a superlinear polynomial.”

This is the kind of statement people should put in their dating profiles if they want fewer but better matches. No, I’m not teasing you (ok just a little). Show quirky elements of yourself, just keep the mood sunny rather than salty.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#96
COVID is throwing an interesting wrench into dating. No more bars, clubs, large social gatherings, everybody working or studying remotely, most people wearing masks in public, meeting in person carries the risk of contracting the virus.

Meeting a new romantic interest in person first is bound to take a big hit. Most first encounters will have to be through online dating apps. If the OKCupid study is to be believed, 80% of men on these apps will be frustrated from the inability of dating "within their league". What is this going to lead to?

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#97
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

definitely see this in my scene. the most attractive guys have many partners while the lesser ones don't have that many. more attractive guys are fought over and rifts are created because of it. It's really funny because a lot of them consider themselves anarchists politically...yet the few attractive men seem to dominate.

I wonder how much of this is perception vs. reality. Many women trip over themselves around me, but I'm monogamous and have only chosen to be in a couple of relationships because finding a match is really hard. Just because someone gets a lot of attention, that doesn't mean they're going around having endless casual sex or unlimited girlfriends.

This.

When you value intimate encounters with people you care about, there is an upper limit, even if you have multiple women waiting to date you.

The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#98
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

definitely see this in my scene. the most attractive guys have many partners while the lesser ones don't have that many. more attractive guys are fought over and rifts are created because of it. It's really funny because a lot of them consider themselves anarchists politically...yet the few attractive men seem to dominate.

I wonder how much of this is perception vs. reality. Many women trip over themselves around me, but I'm monogamous and have only chosen to be in a couple of relationships because finding a match is really hard. Just because someone gets a lot of attention, that doesn't mean they're going around having endless casual sex or unlimited girlfriends.

On the other, the pool of potential partners they'd effectively sequester for some length of time isn't really impacted by whether these men would engage with them or not.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#99
post #89
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because long term marriage is a lot about your tendency to create long term emotional ties to people. It is also about your willingness to think about relationship itself and put work on it. It is also about selection, but much more about ability to weed out abusive people and selfish people and so on. Of course also compatibility, clean freak will never be happy with messy person. And those abilities form a lot in c…

Looking at divorce statistics you find that pattern doesn’t really hold up. There are spikes around various life transitions like retirement which still occur even with long term emotional bonds. Long term relationships are a continuous negotiation as people’s want’s and needs change. Edit: Collage education and getting first married at an older age significantly lower the odds of divorce. Which suggests having multi…

How do you know those divorced people had strong emotional bonds?

People often avoid divorce and keep dead marriage because of inertia or fear of change. The massive life trasitions bring on stresses that test all of of that. And things are changing anyway at that point.

Re: The stable marriage problem and modern dating

#100
post #42

Easy dating app: instead of making profiles and 'matching', just organize a bunch of dances, hikes, etc in a community and charge a nominal fee for membership. This will likely lead to much better matches than some silly algorithm.

This exists: https://www.eventsandadventures.com/

The downside is there's a lot of overlap between "people who are online dating" and "people who aren't good in group social settings".

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