Shoshana Weissmann: I was hanging out with my married friend, who is a great father and husband, telling him how men cannot plan dates. He said, “What’s there to plan? They pick a bar, a restaurant, and a park for a walk nearby.” And I had to explain that grown men refuse to tell me when and where to meet until a few hours beforehand, if they feel like it. You could see him wilt a little inside.
I know some people do not believe me. This was a recent instance.
He also lied because he told me he had a perfect place in mind and forgot the name two days beforehand.
Art Vandelay: He’s right. There’s nothing much to plan for a first date. Just find a nice cool spot for a drink (or coffee), maybe a bite to eat, and off you go. Not being able to do this very basic thing is a red flag like you read about.
Shoshana Weissmann: Hell yes.
A lot of the alpha is on the simple things, and not messing them up.
There are often reports from women that men will go on a first date with them, and fail to ask the woman any questions or show curiosity about the person across from them, actual zero anything.
This is a huge unforced error. Asking only has upside, even when you have to steer things back that way intentionally. Such questions are almost always appreciated, failure to ask them taken as a bad sign. Also the information is highly useful in deciding how and whether to proceed, and is usually actually interesting. If you find the answers boring, then partly that is likely a you problem, learn how to find people interesting (see Dan Carnegie etc) but also a sign this match is not for you, so little has been lost.
Or maybe they’re not making it easy on you.
Aella: Men on dates: “Wow, I’m so curious about you” *Proceeds to ask two brief questions, no follow-ups, and then talks about themselves the rest of the time.*
Decrolssance: Weird. I’d much rather hear about the girl. But they’re always turning it back on me.
Aella: Fellas, this is a battle. She’s testing if you’re truly curious by throwing a softball at you to see if you drop your stated intentions to pursue it eagerly.
Robin Hanson: Men mostly want to idealize women and take them at their word, but this becomes harder when we also need to notice that they often test us via misleading signals.
Amanda Askell: More common: “Wow, I’m so curious about you.”
*Proceeds to ask so many questions that I begin to worry the goal is identity theft.*
Aella: Where do you find these guys? Can we swap?
Keep in mind that Amanda Askell works at Anthropic, so ‘he’s a spy’ is on the table.
The woman saying she is curious about you is partly that she probably is curious, but it also is a trap, potentially an intentional one. How do you steer things from there?
Good question. Presumably the goal is balance, and you may need to fight for that.
Then there are the parts that are about calibration, especially of being the right level of assertive and aggressive, and of course knowing which situations call for which, which is one of the hardest challenges. There is a lot of advice to men that is indeed essentially ‘don’t be pushy’ and lots of other advice from other sources that say ‘do be pushy’ so of course reverse all advice you hear.
Reddit poster: I realized I was being ghosted by girls because I followed Reddit advice.
I thought I was unattractive. I vented on this app many times after being ghosted, but I’ve been successful lately. To be honest, I’ve also started going back to the gym.
But anyway, I read on Reddit that one should always be respectful, do not kiss on a first date, do not flirt, etc. That’s exactly what I was doing. I would go on dates, ask about their work, school, vacations, etc.—all that wholesome vibe—and was getting ghosted.
In the last four weeks, I’ve been on a few dates and told myself to ditch all that advice, started flirting with them, going for a kiss at the right time, inviting them to my place, etc., etc. And yes, I’ve been quite successful lately. I no longer feel unattractive, lol.
Hey, this advice might not work for everyone, I don’t know, but all this worked for me better than being wholesome and waiting until the third date, etc.
elle: The problem with giving men advice like “don’t be pushy” is that the men who truly need to hear it won’t listen, and the men who would benefit from being more assertive will take it to heart.
Human Person: I am in the latter category. I’m terrified of invading someone’s space like that and assume I have no chance either way, and the mixture just makes me fight back every thought I have to initiate.
Damion Schubert: Ninety percent of advice given like “don’t be pushy” really just means “Jesus, tone it down until you’re not a creep.” You’ll never get anywhere if you aren’t assertive, but figuring out where the line between “assertive but nonthreatening” and “earning a restraining order” is critical.
This is frequently a skill issue. You need to be assertive at the right times, ideally in the right ways – if the times are sufficiently right you have a lot of slack here, if they’re only somewhat right you have less – and not at the wrong times in the wrong ways.
Other times it very much is a calibration issue. And the default response to not yet being skilled is to become miscalibrated, and to seek out miscalibrated advice.
Either you take, and are advised to take, lots of shots on goal so you at least have a chance and also a chance to learn and grow comfortable. In which case you will indeed often come off rather badly. Or you take barely any shots, which avoids many downsides but ends up wasting everyone’s time, with little chance of success and not much learning.
The good news is that if you are paying any attention there really is quite a lot of space between ‘assertive but non-threatening’ and ‘earning a restraining order.’
A common sense heuristic for the timid is that if you go home sad that things did not progress at all, and you never got any form of negative feedback (this can be subtle, ideally it mostly will be, but it has to be there), you probably weren’t assertive enough.
Also, flat out, you need to flirt on dates (no matter who you are), first or otherwise, and want as a man to be attempting kissing at least often. Anyone who says ‘don’t flirt’ or tells a man ‘never kiss on the first date’ (or never initiate one) is giving you terrible advice and you should essentially ignore everything else they say not to do – they might be right on other points, but them giving you that advice is not useful information.
Some basics for those who need them, or who would find it helpful to affirm them, or have them made more explicit.
It doesn’t always work this way, it doesn’t have to work this way. When dealing with a particular person you can and should pay attention and stand ready to throw this all out the window if they want to play differently. But one should be aware that it usually does directionally work this way. Going with it tends to lead to better outcomes, and going against it usually means swimming uphill.
Matt Bateman: A story about learning a masculine role in relationships, that may perhaps be useful to people similar enough to me.
In my early 20s or so I had no real conception of differentiated gender dynamics.
I was raised to believe that gender differences were ancien régime constructs.
…
So one day I decided to sit down and think about it. For the first time in my life, I put my mind to considering: what is the courtship game?
Let’s assume it *isa construct, purely a social artifact.
Still—what *isit? How does it work? What is there to be said for it?
I pondered romcom/sitcom-level things such as “guy is supposed to make move, guy is supposed to propose, guy is supposed to ‘lead’; girl is supposed to signal availability/interest, girl is supposed to gatekeep”, etc.
After some thought I was like… yeah ok I’m good with this.
By “I’m good with this” I did not and do not mean “I think everyone Must play this game in this way”, or “this is Biological Fact”, or “exceptions are Bad and there are no reasons ever to take exception”, or “critiques of this game are all wrong”.
I instead meant and mean “I like this game, I’m actually glad it was established, it’s nice for me that most people play it, I’m myself happy to play it; this is a good vehicle for me to find and participate in rather important forms of meaning and fun”.
Maybe this is blindingly obvious to some people? Most people? Plausibly I’m idiosyncratically dumb. But for me it was a revelation.
The level of relevant description was not where I expected to find it. The things that most people talked about most of the time seemed irrelevant.
Matt Bateman (the one Jakeup quotes): Whenever it felt like I was waiting, or things were coasting or simmering for too long, or it was unclear how to proceed, I would now think: oh right, *I’msupposed to *read the roomand *do somethinghere. That’s my role in the game.
Jakeup: this is a key point in a great thread. the classic moves in the game of courtship go like this:
1. girl sets the room and hints at possibilities
2. guy reads the room and issues invites to potential courses of action
3. girl picks a course of action to follow the guy
4. repeat
this game can break at any step, leaving both frustrated. a girl who doesn’t know what she wants. a guy who passively waits for instructions. a girl who’s stuck with a guy she doesn’t want to follow anywhere.
or when either of them invites outsiders into this private dance
it’s hard enough to read the inclinations of one person, scary enough to relinquish control and follow someone
if you further constrain yourself by insisting on maintaining a story that would stand up to criticism on social media or even just among friends, it becomes impossible
Matt is very wisely being extremely vague about what the moves of the game entail for him personally because arguing over specific techniques of seduction on twitter is *nothow you either learn the game or play the game
it’s why I spent the first month of Second Person explaining that my goal is to *unblockreaders to engage in their own practice of fucking around and finding out and that giving specific instructions actually stands in the way of that
Jacob expands this into a full blog post, framing modern dating as improv, in which there are no fixed hard rules but (for heterosexual pairings) the man’s role is generally to read the signals and the room, and make moves to advance the plot, including being willing to risk being explicitly rejected, while the woman’s is to provide a room and signals to be read and approving or rejecting proposals, and helping everything stay graceful.
But of course, none of that is in the form of rules. There used to be actual rules with actual people enforcing them, and now those rules are far more minimal – some things are actually off limits but you presumably knew about those rules already. If the situation isn’t typical, or typical isn’t working, you are free to switch the roles, take completely different rules (except for the big actually enforced ones, although even that can get weird these days), or do anything else you want.
And if they don’t understand how the game works or what their role is supposed to be, that’s fine, you figure out how they think the game works or how they want it to work, and you play by those rules instead. That especially applies when the man is kind of clueless, and you don’t want that to be a dealbreaker.
Billy Is Young has another thread of remarkably similar dating-as-a-male-101, and how you need to project yourself, and in particular not to attempt to present yourself as other than you are. Fully ‘be yourself’ is not always wise, but don’t be actively not yourself either. Don’t hold back your masculine energy or pretend not to be attracted.
Apparently there was a ‘predator sting’ in which a 22-year-old was invited to meet up with an 18-year-old, then the students berated him as a ‘sex offender,’ 25 students chased him and one student punched him in the back of the head. If you believe we live in a world where 18-to-22 is an unacceptable age gap and might get you chased by a mob of 25 people and punched in the back of the head, you’re going to have a much harder time dating.
In her case, she offers us some free instructions.
See? It’s easy.
Aella: All I want is a guy I just met to casually and confidently touch me on the arm or back, lean in with direct attention, unwavering eye contact, and then spend the rest of the night flirting with my friends.
I just want to slightly insult him and have him slightly insult me in return. I want him to be a little assertive, all the time, and completely comfortable with that.
I want him to be Schrödinger-fucking other girls, where he is simultaneously getting intimate with all other women but also has standards too high to sleep with anyone. I want him to enjoy me but be uncertain about me; I want to be unsure if I am good enough for him.
I want him to be completely, deeply, and unapologetically comfortable with himself and his desires. I want to somehow possess some rare jewel of a trait in my soul that he has been waiting his whole life to find.
Including this first level move, although you’ll usually need a different framing.
Aella: One of the hottest things a guy on a first date ever said to me was “I estimate 15 percent that I’ll end up interested in seriously dating you.”
All a girl wants is to feel like she has to work in order to catch a guy.
Joe’s AI Experiments: I work in the gambling industry and 15% is considered something of a magical number.
It’s high enough that people consider it possible, and don’t give up. They keep full emotional investment.
But 15% is rare enough that a win feels really special.
I’ve never heard the 15% claim but I’ve been sitting with it for a few minutes. It seems plausible in some settings, I can see it being a cool percentage chance to win a run for example, but in my sports betting experience going +500 seems like a bit much, although it also rarely is a natural thing to come up without a parlay.
For dating, it makes sense. 15% chance of serious interest is still a hot date.
A classic puzzle, inspired by a TikTok clip. A woman is invited back to a man’s place after a date, agrees but says ‘I’m not going to sleep with you.’ What does that mean?
Richard Hanania: What does it mean when a woman says “I’m not going to sleep with you” while also going back to your house? It means she probably will.
The most pathetic thing I’ve seen is men complaining about this. As if the job of women is to come up with a logically coherent philosophy instead of choosing the highest quality partners. Subtext is key to romance, it’s not an inconvenience to be regulated away.
Men with bad social skills don’t realize it’s their job to learn social skills. They believe women have to conform to what’s easiest and most convenient for them. They also want relationships without ambiguity or risks. Incel ideology is a cancer.
Rob Henderson: This could mean so many things. If, after a date, a woman accepts a man’s invitation to visit his home, and first says, “I’m not going to sleep with you,” this could, of course, mean that she has no desire to sleep with him.
But it could also mean something like “I’m going to share this information with you in order to gauge your response and if you behave weirdly, then I’m not going to sleep with you.”
It could also mean “I’m attracted to you and would like to sleep with you but I’m not feeling at my best so I’m not going to sleep with you tonight but want you to know I like you and trust you enough to be alone with you.”
It could mean “At this very moment I’m not entirely certain I want to sleep with you but let’s see how the rest of the evening unfolds.”
It could mean “I really like you and I’m absolutely not going to sleep with you but I have no way of forecasting how I’ll feel as we spend more time together.”
In the same way as you could imagine someone watching their figure entering a patisserie and thinking “I will absolutely not order a slice of their famous strawberry cake” and 20 minutes later find themselves savoring the last bite.
In the clip, the woman complains that she is the problem, because she did not want to sleep with him, but she wanted him to try a little, and he didn’t, so now she feels ugly.
Richard notes that a lot of younger men expressed great fear that they would be punished severely (as in life ruined) for judging wrong and going too far.
Any of these things could be happening. There is a substantial chance she does end up sleeping with you if you are down for that, and also a substantial chance she does not no matter how well you play. Your job is to navigate this ambiguity. Develop and use the relevant social skills, use ambiguous actions to see how she reacts, do the best you can. Understand that there is no perfect solution, you need to be willing to get it wrong in both directions and gracefully navigate both failure modes.
That is vastly harder if you have gotten it into your head that one move too far could ruin your life. Which in theory it could, but the chances of that happening (especially if no one involved is in college) if you act at all reasonably are very low.
Essentially, those men think their own sexuality is borderline illegal In Their Culture.
Sulla: Zoomers have an incredibly weird relationship with sex. On one hand, talk of sex and adjacent things has been completely de-stigmatized, nobody really cares or thinks its a taboo if you talk about it.
OTOH, acting sexual, especially for men, has become extremely taboo because of the possibility of making people “uncomfy” which must be prevented at all costs. Masculine sexual behavior especially has been made taboo – “safe horny” and “reddity horny” are okay. “Step on me mommy” etc. because its not “threatening.” They seek to turn the masculine man into a harmless femboy twink because the masculine man is “scary”
It’s basically a result of histrionic Zoomer behavior to minimize “discomfort” at all costs – “harm reduction” etc. Completely delusional, they need to grow up and stop being whiny babies.
Alaric the Barbarian: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
As of today, white male heterosexuality is the most suppressed pattern of behavior in The Culture.
It’s effectively illegal.
Shamed at every turn, policed by HR-world doctrine into narrow venues of acceptability, constantly bashed in media and on social media, crafted into something new and nonthreatening via a full-court press of incentives.
There’s space allowed for everything but this.
Andrew Rettek: to the extent this is true, the “law” is only strongly enforced in some places, and never universally. It really sucks for the guys who have their social lives in those places, and can’t get an exception for themselves.
My model is the same as Andrew’s here. There are particular places and times in which being terrified is a reasonable response. The obvious response, if you find yourself in such a place, is to tread very carefully while there, not get stuck there permanently, and do your best to get your dating and relationships elsewhere.
Once you are not in such a place, you need to realize that you are not now in such place, and undo the paranoid adjustments you felt forced to make.
If she (27yo) screams someone else’s name during sex, what to do? If that someone else appears to be a 16-year-old boy cartoon character called Ben 10 (but also could be another Ben she is cheating with and then tried to ‘save it’ with the cartoon character?) then does that change your answer? Some advise leaning into it. Mostly I think people let this kind of thing get to them more than it should, and you should essentially bank the credits for when you need them. But that’s an outside view.
Aella: Man i didn’t anticipate how much I was spoiled by having a long-time sex partner with incredible physical endurance. It turns out that it’s much easier to drop into sexual bliss when a part of you isn’t worried that the dude is getting tired.
Guys by endurance I mostly mean whatever cardio and muscles are required to keep going until I have an orgasm. Penis endurance is also nice but imo not as rare.
This includes jaw and tongue and back of neck ok.
What’s most interesting here is how much of the issue here is presented as worry about endurance, rather than in the actual endurance. That’s yet another way confidence matters. I’m also rather surprised by her observation that cardio and general muscle fatigue are the most common limiting factors here? I suppose it depends on how much endurance you need.
Aella’s studies report that watching porn is mostly positively correlated with predicting female sexual preferences, including the finding that more women like rough sex than men (of course check first, you can’t assume!). But she notes that anal is the big important exception.
Aella: On average, men who watch more porn, were more accurate in their predictions of what women liked in bed (according to ratings from the women themselves) This held both in my own survey and also a microtasker sample.
Anal is actually maybe one of the few exceptions here; in general, women are significantly more inclined to like rough porn than men are – but anal is one of the biggest gender gap preferences in favor of men. Way more men like anal sex than women do.
Fredrick von Ronge: It’s not the anal, it’s her submission to something she’s not into.
Aella: Actually generally no. ‘submission to something she’s not into’ is a more common preference among women than men.
Aella: since this tweet i did figure out how to make casual sex good [chart excludes escorting]Aella: Since this tweet, I did figure out how to make casual sex good. [Chart excludes escorting].The key for me has been:Stopping being ashamed about things I want in bed.Starting to be really selfish about what I want, giving up on compromise.Aggressively communicating and filtering for men who are into what I want.Building networks full of these people.Turns out, a lot of what makes casual sex bad was having sex with people who wanted me to do things I didn’t want to do, and me being too nice and not wanting to hurt their feelings, so I played along.
the key for me has been
stop being ashamed about things i want in bed
start getting really selfish about what i want, give up on compromise
aggressively communicate and filter for guys who are into what i want
build networks full of these people
Turns out a lot of what makes casual sex bad was having sex with people who wanted me to do things i didn’t want to do, and me being too nice and not wanting to hurt their feelings so i played along.
That must be quite the network, given her other statements about this meaning only guys inherently into things guys are rarely inherently into. The sex might be casual, the logistical operation and interview process is anything but, although presumably worth it.
I presume most people need to do much less aggressive filtering than this, and would be happy to do a bunch of compromising within a reasonably wide range, but should absolutely speak up far more about what they want.
This sadly does seem to be a reliable format for Peak Engagement on Twitter, but also seems like relevant information in this case.
Austin Allred (6.3m views): I fundamentally don’t understand OnlyFans. The scale is insane.
Who is paying for this? Why?
What I’m hearing is it’s not just about the porn necessarily, it’s about having paid “relationships” of some sort with the creator, which makes a lot more sense to me.
Makes me sad, but it makes sense.
Before I thought it was just the appeal of porn for non porn stars, which would make sense but break down at scale.
But sexual virtual fake paid relationships? Yeah that makes so much sense.
And is very sad.
Aella: Most income, as far as I know, comes from messages, not from basic subscriptions. It’s essentially interactive pornography, sexting with a hot girl where you masturbate together. That’s where the big money is.
Mason: OF semi-successfully repackaged something akin to actual cheating as porn, and it turns out there’s a huge market for cheating that societal norms haven’t caught up with.
The demand for cheating has been there since forever, so it’s weird to say societal norms ‘haven’t caught up with’ it yet. And I’d say it’s more that there’s demand for attention, I’d presume that single men use OnlyFans more if you hold other conditions constant, rather than less.
I think this all seems less sad rather than more sad, given the alternatives, if we hold the amount of money and time spent constant? At least you do get some sort of parasocial relationship, some amount of interaction. Although it also does seem more damaging to relationships.
If that appeals to you, Aella discusses how to succeed at OnlyFans, with a lot of distinct connections, versus as a cam girl, where you are aiming for 1-2 whales that like to win a dominance contest in front of other men. OnlyFans is about the illusion that you’re the only guy. The money in OF is in upselling via DMs, which (of course) are typically are handled by agency-hired minimal wage workers in warehouses, and agencies often charge 50% or more (on top of the OF 20%) for this and other services.
I presume AIs will replace those jobs rather soon, which greatly reduces marginal cost and also turnaround times, and presumably thus alters the business model.
The new dominant play is apparently ‘drips’ where you have a sequence of clips with escalating price tags, which you pretend to do in real time but you don’t have to pretend that hard, the men don’t notice or care. They want a minimal deeply uncredible version of the second level symbolic version of the thing – the conceptual indicator of a personal connection that would imitate an actual personal connection.
She also notes that by not doing internal discovery, OnlyFans forces creators to advertise elsewhere, which got so aggressive that various places (even Fetlife) got pretty hostile towards all the posting. This is a levels of friction situation of the type we’re going to see a lot of with AI – OF reduced frictions to doing the OF thing, so suddenly the previous levels of friction outside OF didn’t deter people enough, and if you didn’t ban it the level of tits-in-your-face was out of control.
It’s like there was this great business model lying around the whole time, that any (sufficiently hot woman) could use – spam the internet with hot pics, recruit men, charge a subscription for some sexy content, charge for individual interactions and marginal content. And the secret to unlocking this was to remove the friction, and also earning 20%, was just to take care of various basics on the backend?
Aly Dee asks, isn’t OnlyFans a bad deal, versus finding one ‘kind’ rich fan and putting a ring on it, given the prospects of a young woman who can succeed at OF if they’re willing to date older, and how easy it would be to be intentional about this? The obvious answer is that no, that isn’t obviously better depending on what you want, especially given the commitments involved, and also isn’t so easy to get given the adverse selection problems.
Max Tempers: 🚨 NEW: OnlyFans is now accessible in China, a move that could boost the UK economy significantly.
A Labour insider told me ‘This is exactly what Lammy’s progressive realism is about!’ as he attempts to justify the recent overtures to the East made by the government.
I have nothing against OnlyFans, but if this can ‘boost the UK economy significantly’ then that raises further questions. So many questions.
Are your preferences bad? If so, should you feel bad?
As in: Paper asks, is it bad to prefer attractive partners? No. Next question. Paper disagrees and claims there are strong philosophical arguments for both sides. The argument against seems to be the fully general anti-discrimination argument, that says humans are not allowed to express preferences, or to prefer better things to worse things, unless they have some special moral justification. And, yeah, no.
Aella looks at preferences by examining the relative prices of female escorts with various physical attributes. Nothing is too surprising, but you learn about which things have bigger magnitudes of impact. Even the things that mattered don’t seem to have that big an impact on price, to a level that I’m a little suspicious.
Aella also notes that as she charged higher prices, client quality improved, in particular there were far fewer assholes:
Aella: I’ve always liked about 80% of my clients, but now that I’ve raised my rates even higher, I think I like… all of them? I work less often, and mostly just for fun, but I think every single man I’ve seen in the last year has been pretty cool, and I feel warmly toward them.
When I first started, my rates were a lot lower, and most of the unpleasant clients I remember ever having occurred in those early months. Not that wealthy people can’t be unpleasant, but it’s more like, unpleasant people are less willing to pay a lot of money.
I bet that charging more also makes the same men act less like assholes. Consultants know that if you don’t charge enough, no one will respect or listen to you, so not only won’t you make much money, you won’t be able to do the job. When you charge a lot, people who do pay doubly respect you – you assert you’re worth that much, and also they agreed to pay it. There’s also the section effect, of course, where assholes are shopping cheap as they can.
A similar principle holds for regular dating. It doesn’t have to be money that acts as your asshole filter.
Sasha Chapin: I have become a much more effective person over the last two years via living with an extremely effective wife
If I had to break down what has changed, I would fail—I think effectiveness is a style that you can learn to mimic, like a tennis swing, more than a set of principles
How one finds a highly effective wife (or husband), without first yourself being highly effective, is the mystery. But yes, absolutely, being around effectiveness, hard work and high standards will rub off on you a lot. The need to be worthy can’t hurt either.
This also applies to everything else. Seek out those who have qualities you want to have yourself, and avoid those with qualities you want to avoid.
Olivia Rodrigo (the pop star): This is a very oddly specific question that I ask guys on first dates. I always ask them if they think that they would want to go to space. And if they say yes, I don’t date them. I just think if you wanna go to space, you’re a little too full of yourself. I think it’s just weird.
Crybaby: guess her type is down to Earth.
If that is her motivation, that is a good thing to want to avoid (especially in her position, since I imagine a lot of men who dare try and date a pop star are rather full of themselves) and this is potentially a good question to ask, but you have to pay attention to exactly how he answers. If the answer is ‘sure, if given the opportunity, of course I’d go’ and you turn them down for that because they’re too ‘full of themselves,’ then you fool. If the answer is ‘yes, I’m actively trying to go to space’ then sure, maybe that’s not what she wants.
Anna Gat: Being a stable and reassuring man is the sexiest thing you can be for a woman – our nervous system reacts immediately and deliciously.
If you’re trying to court someone and don’t know what would work, this is what would work! You’re welcome 👶🏾👶🏻👶🏽👶👶🏿👶🏼
Sarah Constantin: the most valuable, in-demand person in the world is someone who is Fine.
Now, that’s easier said than done!
But if you do happen to be Feeling Just Fine, Thank You, don’t worry about any of your other deficiencies. You are a catch, just for that alone.
Misha: why are you saying an obviously false thing like that.
Sarah Constantin: Because it is true in my experience.
Misha: How much experience do you have dating as a man?
Being a catch is not the same as being more likely to be caught.
I do think that these characteristics are valuable and worth pursuing for other reasons, and are underrated as male dating strategies, but for it to work you need to get into opportunities to demonstrate this style of value.
This won’t get you in the door. Merely being stable and fine on your own in the abstract is great down the line, but you still need a way in. This can’t take the role of ‘the thing that is attractive about you.’
To put this all in someone else’s terminology, and hopefully make it clearer, we’re going to have to pull out the visual aids, as I realized while editing the post we’ve been effectively talking about the two different axes on the latest men and women ranking scales chart. It’s a fun one, with lots of detail. As usual, take the right amount of seriously and literally, which is neither super high nor non-zero.
I have many quibbles with this even as a ‘baseline scenario.’ But I like that this is the quirky perspective of a particular person, who is clearly describing what they observe. And it emphasizes that, mostly, Good Things are Good, and that everything counts.
The discussion at the link, mostly unrelated to the graphic, is the latest iteration of the ‘the dating market broke because the men who can get multiple offers solved for the equilibrium’ argument, where without enforcement of various traditional social norms things collapse into dynamics that aren’t good for most people involved, where men have little felt incentive to commit and women have little leverage.
Also it seems there’s a part two? Which resonated a lot less, and feels like it says a lot more about the author than anything else, but seems fun so sharing anyway.
(As usual, the story might be fake but the hypothetical and the reactions are real.)
My boyfriend and I are both 28 years old and together for 2.5 years. Yesterday night we were drinking and one thing led to another and I tried to compliment him by saying he is not someone who I would hookup or be a fwb with but marry.
I thought everything was fine but he seemed extremely distraught after that. I realized how he understood it and tried to clarify it but he is still the same this morning.
He told me he needs space to think for a while and left the house. All my friends tell me I messed it up and guys tell me it’s not a compliment and most men will understand it differently. I think I destroyed our relationship and I am panicking right now.
Bern the Fallen: Now I know why this is ringing a bell it’s like the TOMC “I broke my wife and I don’t think it’s fixable.”
Story where a guy basically says the same kind of “compliment” about his wife and she walks. It’s the same sentiment but many aren’t comprehending it.
Can’t lie I love when there’s a gender flip on a situation, it can help people see it differently.
This shouldn’t be seen as a ♂️v♀️gotcha but an understanding of what the other person feels receiving such a compliment that comes off as backhanded due to the qualifier/comparison +.
Misha: I hope everyone has learned a lesson about how to not give a compliment to a guy. I think there’s too much unstated context for us to conclude things about him or their relationship here, but is there ANY context in which it improves a compliment to start off by saying you don’t want to fuck someone?
Rat Bastard: Remember that time Aella posted about a guy she was dating saying she’s “not that pretty” remember how all the replies suggested that like, she was being emotionally abused or something.
The original poster’s boyfriend is wildly overreacting, but perhaps he is simply too attuned to how women declare war, lol.
Women think it’s a compliment, actually, because they are focused on the “marriageable” aspect, and I think they are right that it is unfortunate that many men nominally want to get married but legitimately do not really care about being marriageable.
My “insult everyone” take here is that most men don’t NEED to care about being marriageable and they know it.
If you won’t fuck them, you won’t date them, which means you wont marry them so it’s all moot anyway, is the vibe.
It makes sense that these kinds of comments can be unfixable dealbreakers. The information can’t be taken back, and potentially colors everything.
Danielle Fong (referencing the chart in the previous section): basically, the girl is saying “you give me great investment” (husband, friend-zone quadrant)
But you are not hot enough to be a prince charming, a situationship, or the bad boy, you are not on the left column.
Now, depending, the guy can be fine with this ig, but, say he is putting up an unsustainable amount of effort (investment high) — this would not be a good sign. Drop off for a bit and you’re settling or worse. And “apparently” nothing.
This is stupid. I can tell you; work out and you’ll be getting the attention. Guys who can’t be hot are just being lazy. Skill issue, really.
Also, why is the guy so sensitive that he can’t take what is intended to be a compliment? Snowflake ick type thing. Second degree type two ick imo.
Malcolm Ocean (also referring to the chart from the previous section):
What she says: I would marry you but not hook up with you
What he hears: you’re disgusting, a sweeper, I wouldn’t even want someone to see us together
What she means: you’re charming/husbandzone so I don’t want to get attached if this isn’t going anywhere
‘Not being hot is a skill issue’ is a bold take. It’s not entirely wrong, especially if you go beyond exercise into various other areas, there is usually a lot of room for improvement. But a lot of it is not a fixable skill issue, especially for being hot to a particular individual person, and once impressions have solidified. Also, that’s a lot of additional investment, if you don’t otherwise want it.
My quick model is that I see there as being three distinct problems caused by this.
Feeling unattractive and unwanted really sucks. So does being with someone who might well stop wanting to have sex or sees it as a cost rather than a benefit, especially over a longer term once things are locked in.
If you are insufficiently attractive, then you have to compensate for this with other investment. It makes it more likely she’ll be unhappy long term. It weakens your effective bargaining power and you have to worry you are not secure in the relationship.
You have to worry a lot more that she’ll look for or find someone she thinks is better, and either have an affair or try to upgrade.
If she means what Ocean thinks she means, and you’re ‘too good’ to only hook up with for risk of getting attached or what not, then she’s communicating quite poorly but has opportunity to clarify and save it. The whole meaning can be turned around. And indeed, even if that isn’t what she meant but she is willing to lie to save the relationship , this is the best lie available.
I think most of the time that’s not what she’s saying.
Obviously successful pairings happen all the time with attitudes like this. Most successful pairings don’t involve maximum baseline physical attractiveness before growing into that, and if they did then that means everyone is paying way, way too much attention to looks. You still have to be very careful how you say that.
Indeed, one of our big problems is exactly that we don’t give not-maximally-physically-attracted pairings situations where they are set up to find each other and then succeed in spite of that. Instead, we do the opposite, we tell people and especially men that if they aren’t sufficiently attractive, they will never get the opportunity for the rest, and also will be in constant danger of losing everything.
I do know that the one here is complaining that people are telling her she is wrong, and she is tired of waiting for her soulmate to suddenly appear that ‘matches her energy,’ and yet she says she is not asking for a lot. I know that she says that ‘all her friends’ have their finances and husbands ‘that they’ve prioritized,’ which is evidence against this being so impossible, and perhaps that she made different choices on what to prioritize. She is clearly feeling entitled to a soulmate.
Mason: I think the truth is that being emotionally available and able to progress a relationship with a fellow imperfect human being without a neon blinking sign from God is actually a skill.
Which many people do not have and which they do not realize they could have.
Signull: Forget the pandemic; there is a literal epidemic of women who cannot find anyone they want to be with—it feels like we are at the precipice of a radical new cultural reality that is changing so fast that most people do not have the capacity to keep up.
Katherine Dee: A big part of this is a more generalized loneliness. Notice how in each of these videos they lament not having a community—it is not solely about romance, and it is cruel to omit that detail.
It is noteworthy that in the first clip, Katherine is wrong and the woman mentions all her friends rather than complaining about lack of community.
Perhaps not the central point, but: The actual story was about her going out to a comedy show. She seems to not have known what it means to sit in the front row. It often means you are going to get absolutely roasted. Instead, she got a free gift bag and praised for being brave and singled out. Then she went home rather than have a drink, because she had this gift bag.
You fool! This was actually a great situation. An entire room full of people heard comics call you brave and drew their attention. This is exactly when you go to the bar. So what if you have a gift bag. Good chance you get approaches, you have something to talk about, that is exactly what you came out for.
Another problem is, what if dating no longer gives you even a little excitement, even if you’re not going on that many? The obvious answer is ‘find better people to date, that actually excite you’ but that is not easy. Neither is ‘find people who are unpredictable and liable to say interesting things,’ or even ‘find activities that are inherently exciting even if your date isn’t.’
Rob Henderson: Two different young male friends, upon reading this lively passage from @GlennLoury ‘s incredible memoir, reacted with some variation of “I have never related to anything more in my life.”
Anna Gat: Without this we would be soooo bored 💄
If your strategy involves moving away from the dance, if it resolves the ambiguity too easily, then there is great risk that what remains is not exciting or fun.
I never went on enough dates, or rather never had enough unexciting date opportunities, to have this problem. My presumption is the right strategy is to think, I now have an excuse to go out and meet someone new, if I’m not enjoying it or seeing much value by default I get to mix it up, and you get to have gambler’s mindset that if it works it’s pretty great so you can afford a lot of uneventful along the way. Or maybe… just don’t be all that excited, and that’s kind of fine?
Nick Cammarata: I hate how well asking myself “if I had 10 times the agency I have, what would I do” works.
Chris Lakin: If you were serious about dating, you would be doing everything you could to break up as quickly as possible. Most relationships do not work out. If you are dating to marry, that does not require three years to figure out. One year, maximum, to determine if the relationship is doomed.
thinking about running an event where couples come stress test their partnership. “is your relationship doomed? come find out!” lmk if you have ideas. Matchmaking is out, Breaking Up Sooner is in
“second date should be a 3 day trip to Montreal together”
Emmett Shear: The people I know who are happily married almost universally were trying to make every relationship they were in work for the rest of their lives. They also quit as soon as they know it won’t work out that way, but inevitably it’s better to err on over persistent than under.
There is no case where I wish I’d followed this advice less, and several where I would have benefited from following it more.
The counterargument is that doing this is difficult and painful. Fair enough.
The other counterargument is that being in a long term relationship teaches you things you can’t learn other ways. But from what I’ve seen, often you then need to unlearn exactly those lessons.
Mostly it seems super wise, the moment you can tell it’s not going to work out, to act accordingly. That doesn’t automatically mean ending it right away, fun is valid, but if you’re out of the super fun period, it kind of does mean that.
Matthew Yglesias: If you’re paying attention, it’s pretty easy to tell if things aren’t going to work out.
More precisely, I would say there are a lot of cases where you can’t tell and it might work out, but yes there are many that are pretty doomed and it’s obvious early on, so don’t pretend not to notice.
(Definitely one for Remember to Reverse Any Advice You Hear and even more than usual I’m not endorsing the quoted text.)
Of course you have no available LTR options you like, if you did you’d have an LTR.
It’s a matching problem. Anyone medium term unmatched is not going to have easy access to matches they want. That might or might not mean they have unreasonably high standards.
rebecca: why is no one talking about the female loneliness epidemic??? hellloooo
Kangmin Lee: “Female loneliness epidemic.”
Allie: Most women have 100 options for casual sex and zero for serious relationships.
Casual sex does not make you feel less lonely.
Hoe Math: You mean “zero options that you like,” right?
Like, if you start with the men you like and ignore everyone else, you have zero options for a long-term relationship.
But if you count the men you do not like, then you have many options, right?
Ami: Are you supposed to date people you hate and find annoying? Genuine question.
Hoe Math: No, but do you remember when you were younger, perhaps 11, 12, or 13, and you liked boys who did not possess any of the traits you now look for in men?
Do you remember being perhaps 16, 17, or 18, and being impressed by guys who had an apartment and a car? Even though you would never think that is sufficient anymore?
Can you see how the more experience you gained, the higher your standards became?
Well, because of how modern society encourages women to be “liberated,” they are gaining more experience earlier in life than ever before.
That means they are “moving on” from men who would have been acceptable to them in a time when things did not progress so quickly.
It used to be common for women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s to see ordinary men doing ordinary things and think, “Perhaps he is single,” with only a slight tinge of attraction, a curiosity.
Now, nearly all women fully expect to be captivated from the first moment. They want men who have everything going for them.
What this means is that women are overlooking men who are truly on their level more than ever because they feel they are “above” those men.
When you are 16, he is so cool because he has a car and his own place. When you are 32, “So what? I have a car and my own place, too, and they are nicer than his!”
The artificial pressure placed on women to enter the workforce and the “liberation” movement have caused women to cease being impressed by ordinary men.
So no, you are not supposed to force it and date someone you hate. . . you are just not all supposed to be so bored by the average guy.
Ami: I love this answer so much. ❤️🥹
Everyone has at least some non-standard preferences, so you can reasonably hold out for a much better than random match given your general market value, even if you only do an average amount of search.
But that only goes so far, especially if you mostly want generically desired attributes and don’t have excellent search methods, and there are preference mismatches at the population level. The remaining market is going to at best suck, and potentially break down entirely.
This book review of How Not to Die Alone distills a very clear explanation of why dating advice for women is so typically unhelpful. They keep repeating the same three pieces of advice.
They’re all good advice, but neither complete nor usually all that actionable.
Jacob Falkovich: I used to joke that women only ever get three pieces of dating advice:
Don’t be ugly.
Don’t be insecure.
Don’t try to marry the fuckboi.
The first is delivered in private, or in glossy beauty magazines whose covers strongly imply that any man who reads them is gay. Popular dating advice books generally limit themselves to the latter two. One could think of other advice books could offer unrelated to insecurity and fuckbois. For example: that they could figure out what men want from them and do more of that. But books generally don’t, for two reasons.
First: telling women they need to fix themselves and/or to pay more attention to men goes against the spirit of our time. This sort of advice would feel entitled coming from a man and a break of solidarity coming from a woman; maybe an enby would get to it some day.
Second: telling women they’re fucking up and need to change goes against rule #2: don’t be insecure. And since that’s the main piece of dating advice women get, you’d be stupid to go against it.
Jacob then goes on to absolutely savage the ‘science’ that the book in question (How Not to Die Alone) is based on, while noticing that the advice is perfectly respectable and mostly seems right, but generic and in line with general expectations.
I actually think the central theme of much of the advice here seems to fall outside the three categories above, while also being good advice, which is:
Engage in deliberate practice, act intentionally and follow through on decisions.
The book knows better than to say anything is your fault. But have you considered making better more deliberate decisions, and journaling to record what you learned?
Whether or not it is useful to think of things as ‘your fault’ depends on how you react to that. If it helps you improve and learn and have hope because you can fix your fate, great. If it makes you insecure and afraid and hating yourself and you stop leaving the house, then that’s not great.
It’s weird that the book is doing that while also explicitly holding the reader blameless.
Jacob Falkovich (summarizing the book): Your problems are common, which means you’re normal. Your problems are a worthy subject of study for the world’s most prestigious researchers, which means you’re important. And the researchers have found that every single problem was caused by things outside your control, which means you’re blameless. You are normal, important, and blameless; there is nothing you need to fix.
Jacob (providing advice): But if you aren’t, thinking of yourself as a fuckup who’s constantly improving feels much more secure than the opposite. It makes every rejection a positive — an opportunity to learn! And every positive development is a validation of the progress you’ve made, which can only continue, as opposed to being about some default desirability you’re clinging on to.
Even if you’re a millennial, it’s not too late to not be yourself.
Cremieux: There are suspiciously few men who self-report being 5’11” and too many men report being 6′.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: I was 5’11” when measured and it had literally never occurred to me to misreport this.
Nat Rhein: As a 6’0″ I am now considering calling myself 5’11” because I’m more concerned with passing low-level “liar” filters than low-level “short” filters.
The funny part is this isn’t for a dating app. This is for a CDC survey. So the dating-related rate is presumably a lot higher.
Aella: I really don’t get why women want tall men so bad. Sure it’s a little nice but not *thatnice. the actual important thing is can he easily throw you around in bed? Height doesn’t matter when you’re screaming.
Tall is overrated and overvalued, I believe largely because it is easy to notice and measure, and the most legible to others. If you seek the tall man, you are ‘overpaying’ for it. So to the extent the dating market is ‘efficient,’ unless you have a relatively very strong height preference you should be sacrificing height to get more of other things you want.
Lyman Stone: Yes, we should incentivize people to get married. Marriage bonuses are an unalloyed good. There are zero social harms incurred by doing this.
First of all I feel like making your policy angle “trophy wives of wealthy men is a bad social outcome” is probably not a winning line in DC to begin with.
But secondly, we all find the sugar daddy dynamic icky— but is it actually less icky if the woman has no legal rights?
Marriage may actually provide her with some rights and protections. As a girlfriend she has far less.
Furthermore, marriage may induce the man to alter other behaviors in prosocial ways.
So yeah, we want them to get married.
C’mon @PTBwrites, don’t chicken out on marriage penalties! This line is silly. It’s perfectly fine, indeed actually good to eliminate marriage penalties in a way that incidentally generates marriage bonuses! We want marriage bonuses too!
Let’s just make this super clear though: My actual view is the French have this right. All tax brackets should double when you get married. They should multiply again for each kid you have. Married+4 kids earning $100k? You should be taxed like you earn $100k/6=$18k.
Robin Hanson: Well obviously not ALL of us find the sugar daddy scenario icky.
Lyman’s full proposal is instantly-reverse-the-fertility-crisis bazooka-level big. I don’t know I’d go that far, but on any realistic margin movement towards it is great. At minimum, we need to eliminate marriage penalties and have at least some marriage bonus. We want to encourage marriages.
Having one spouse support the other is fine and good, we shouldn’t punish that.
The ‘sugar daddy’ scenario is icky to many (not all!), but as Lyman says, a marriage if anything reduces the ick level and the power imbalances involved. Given sugar daddy is happening either way, sugar husband is an upgrade. You might prefer to have neither, but is that the primary effect you’re getting by punishing the marriage?
Brad Wilcox: Marriage-minded conservatives have largely stuck with the Republican Party (even under Trump) “because the Democratic Party has not provided them with a credible alternative, having moved hard to the cultural left in the wake of what@mattyglesias called the ‘Great Awakening.’”
The question was whether “extramarital sex is always wrong,” not whether an “extramarital affair is always wrong.”
Lyman Stone: this is a WILD split after the politics of the last 8 years!
Nonmonogamy is adultery. The fact that many liberals approve of adultery because they have found a relabeling of them that helps deal with cognitive dissonance doesn’t change the fact it’s adultery.
Be honest. Be open. Share everything. Don’t suppress anything. Only way it works.
Do not worry about what is ‘reasonable.’ Make choices.
Everyone must be fully bought in and not even ‘open to’ monogamy.
This is asking a lot. Which is good, if that is what it takes to make polyamory work. You have to ask for what would actually work, not what sounds nice (see also: AI alignment and everyone not dying, etc, sigh).
It is highly plausible to me that there is a small minority for whom this all comes relatively naturally. And that for them, if they practice it with discipline amongst themselves, this particular equilibrium can work better than the alternatives.
However this is very different from what is suggested by most polyamorous people I have met. Most such folks are making the case that polyamory should be a default, and are suggesting various things Aella warns do not work.
Here’s what happens when you don’t heed point three:
hazel: sometimes you can tell a polycule is a competition to be the one who gets chosen when the Main One decides to go monogamous
Snufkin: As a poly person who attracts monogamous people….this dynamic is the gremlin that follows you around at 200 paces back wearing a hat that says “no, it’s cool, I understand” while looking sad as hell
Aella: This is why I refuse to date anyone who is open to being monogamous.
Aella then tells this composite story, where your partner meets someone else that’s monogamous but willing to try poly, and there’s no plan but they end up falling for the other person, and then leaving you to be monogamous with them. Which does seem rather common, based on the experiences I know about, and it all makes sense.
That sets a high bar, with poly wanting to consist only of people who are fully committed to it, which Aella says she was the moment she heard about it, but presumably most people can’t possibly be confident until they try it out? That was constantly the actual argument for trying it out, that I used to hear all the time in San Francisco, and this is exactly the opposite.
The obvious problem is: Under this framework, everyone involved in your polyamory must be ‘all-in’ on it, and not even be open to monogamy.
But how can you be all-in without experiencing it first? I would assume most people, even if being all-in on polyamory would ultimately be right for them, won’t be able to know this in advance.
Is it not this simple, but I believe this is directionally correct.
Allie: I will scream until I am blue in the face: People do not cheat because you are not attractive enough.
If you were not attractive enough, they would not have dated you in the first place.
People cheat because they have personalities that cannot be satisfied, which is why they will remain unhappy.
Shoshana Weissmann: This, extremely this. Such people can grow and stop cheating, but dating a cheater is a real risk because of that.
From what I’ve seen, by far the biggest risk factor for cheating – for every meaning of the word cheating, not only sexually or within a relationship, both within a particular cheating format and for cheating in general – is prior cheating or otherwise being the type of person that cheats. It is an indication of who they are, and can make it part of their identity. The reverse is true as well.
Not all such actions are created equal. The circumstances still matter quite a lot, including evaluating past circumstances to predict implied future cheating risk. Details are important.
Attractiveness does matter too, especially in relative terms and not only in terms of physical attraction. If you’re dating out of your league you are taking on risk. But I think that is a bigger risk factor for them leaving than for cheating.
A key problem in our civilization is that it is legally dangerous to say anything negative about anyone in a documented way outside of certain specific bounds (e.g. leaving online reviews of products). Then again, one must consider the alternative.
Allie: There’s now an app where you can review your ex boyfriends and I can’t see this going well Yes, warn girls you know, especially if a guy is actively dangerous But if everyone trashes their exes online, no one is ever going to date.
Gilbert Kitchens: I’m sure there won’t be *anyexaggerations and lies told by spiteful exes.
Shoshana Weissmann: In the past they’ve also been shut down for legal reasons. And sharing this stuff can open you up to lawsuits
Allie: Has this happened with “are we dating the same guy” groups yet?? Those get NASTY.
Shoshana Weissmann: I think there might have been a lawsuit! YEAH someone had me join one at first and it was BRIEFLY helpful and then just became like “this guy is weird” but no real reason.
Tim Newman: They start out to warn women about violent, dangerous men and quickly get swamped with women writing about men who were mere assholes or just bad on a date.
In theory of course Tea (4.8+ on the App stores but the reviews I read make me rather suspicious in various ways) should be great and net positive for our romantic prospects via reducing uncertainty and Conservation of Expected Evidence.
Tea says it lets you run a background check, reverse phone lookup, reverse image search, criminal record lookup and sex offender search, including trying to figure out if the guy is already in a relationship. Not only does filtering out bad apples get rid of the bad apples and let you accept more marginal other dates, it also improves the dates you do go on because you can trust things more.
What about ‘reviews’ from exes? The same things should be true, if we take reviews as given. If you’re properly calibrated, you should on net come out more excited, and also have more information to help things go well.
The first obvious danger is that an ex could have it out for you, and there will be false positives here, but the alerts should be much better than random. A lot of the negative reviews are from not-crazy exes, and it’s not entirely random, shall we say, who ends up with crazy enraged exes. The accuracy rate doesn’t have to be that high to still be net positive, if everyone is reacting reasonably.
The second obvious danger is poor calibration. You don’t want Tea users to only or mostly update negatively on such reviews. There will doubtless be some of this, it’s unclear how much.
I’d also note that this likely constitutes positive selection for the men – the women who are now more positively inclined will tend to be the ones you want to date. Good.
Then there are the incentives, and how this changes dynamics while dating. How much do interactions change when the woman may be your future ex writing a tea-spilling future review? Some amount of this is good, since it rewards staying on good terms and treating her well. This can also be a threat, or held over your head, and have some decidedly nasty second-order effects.
My guess is that while things like Tea are not used that often, this is all clearly good, but that if this reached a critical mass where there was too much negative selection risk out there for the woman to not to use such tools, then the fact that all the false positives and unfortunate situations correlate (e.g. everyone you want to date is seeing the same info, and that can ruin your chances in general, and this can be used as a threat) makes things a lot less clear.
If you do talk with numbers to rate anything, in any context, you always have to be clear what the numbers refer to, and what those numbers are leaving out.
It is obviously correct, however, to keep an eye on the personality distinction he’s pointing at underneath all that, about a personality type of ‘I am the hotness and get to act like it’ that definitely exists and is mostly to be avoided for most people reading this, even if they’re right.
Wisdom about the 0-10 scale:
Felisa Navidad: When men are debating online whether some woman is an “8” or a “10” or w/e, I interpret it as basically the same kind of thing as when they are debating who would win in a fight, Batman or Superman.
BDSM and kink have gotten steadily more prevalent.
If you are looking for ways to give yourself more value on the dating market?
As I understand the situation, this very much is one of them.
The involved population tends to be relatively interesting in other ways.
The social conventions of BDSM spaces make many things much easier.
Huge supply and demand imbalance. Submissives greatly outnumber dominants.
Most dominants do not put in the work to be good at it. You can.
It takes remarkably little work to quickly get relatively good at many aspects.
That work is largely technical skills, very compatible with geeking out on it all.
Many have highly particular preferences. If you can satisfy them, that’s huge.
Most dominants do not treat submissives well. Or listen carefully. You can.
Being down for more things, and knowing how to execute on them properly, is a kind of low level dating superpower. And it is one you can learn. It also often helps with confidence.
You would of course also want to figure out which aspects you can actively enjoy, and which you cannot, and act accordingly.
Aella breaks out some conceptual subtypes here. Note that the darker and more ‘hardcore’ stuff tends to be less popular. Most of the demand is for relatively light aspects that don’t require being all that actively kinky.
Lovable Rogue: I think a lot of people who haven’t truly shopped around don’t realize how good the 99th percentile are in bed.
It’s actually not a dig because often times those people aren’t / don’t want to be good partners.
Aella: it’s insane cause we have a good concept of what ‘high skill’ looks like for skills we can see – piano, dancing, whatever.
What if we treated sex the same way? It turns out there *isa high skill ceiling, but people really have no idea how much better it can be.
It does require a few things tho. Like, maybe you only enjoy learning jazz on the piano. You *couldlearn how to do classical, but it would be a bit of a slog. It’s gonna be hard if you marry someone who only enjoys listening to classical no matter how skilled both of you are.
…
Those ppl are gonna get blown out of the water by those who Practice.
Of course the 99th percentile person – either for you in particular, or in general – is going to be very, very good in bed. As is the 99th percentile match. And yes, you can get a lot better with practice, both in general and as a match for a particular person. It would be absurd to think otherwise.
I find Rogue’s comment interesting, including the ‘how do you know enough 99th percentile people well enough to form a pattern, even by reputation?’ One can imagine this going either way – perhaps the way you get great at sex is you really want to be a great partner in every way, perhaps it’s so you can avoid doing that in other ways, or it trades off against developing other skills, or the way you get good involves not otherwise being that great a partner, shall we say.
Rolf Degen: 45 years after Clark and Hatfield’s initial experiment and 10 years after the latest replication, the present study showed that this gender difference persists. Significantly more men than women (27% vs. 4%) accepted an offer [of casual sex].
This effect was particularly large among single participants. In the sex condition [of study 1], 67% of male singles accepted the offer compared to 0% of female singles.
I assume the 0% vs. 4% is a random effect, the sample sizes are not that huge.
At the same time, our results question Clark and Hatfield’s finding that the gender difference is especially large when it comes to explicit sexual offers. Indeed, our results show that the gender difference is independent of the proposition’s explicitness as men were more likely than women to accept any of the three offers. Furthermore, acceptance rates of both men and women were much lower than those reported by Clark and Hatfield and also lower than those of previous replications.
Overall, it seems that the receptivity to casual sexual offers from both men and women has dramatically decreased over time..
These are huge gaps in acceptance rates, but no correlation between gender and explicitness – the more explicit the offer, the less likely everyone was to accept it, but you could shoot your shot either way, contradicting Clark and Hatfield’s results.
I find the new result very hard to believe in relative terms, and am highly tempted to either defy the data or wonder about the people conducting these studies – if I can choose who is asking in both cases then I bet I could equalize the explicitness effect?
I can totally believe that receptivity has declined over time across the board, sad.
Alexander: A few people made comments yesterday to the effect that men will have sex with promiscuous women, but not form long-term relationships with them.
Past promiscuity doesn’t seem to stop people from getting into long-term relationships or getting married. Perhaps unsurprising since a lot of people don’t even ask the “body count” question – 49% of men and 42% of women report having ever been asked at all in my surveys.
Consistent with this, about 50% of both men and women report never asking.
This seems like the default, and Alexander covers the obvious mechanisms. One could also notice that this leaves out that being more promiscuous likely correlates with more shots on goal and opportunities and also various desirable traits, given how often the person was indeed desired. So there is some amount of balancing out.
One result is that being libertarian is only slightly correlated with body count, once you control for voting in Aella polls. Another is that self-described libertarians are 52% of Aella’s voters, which seems about right.
The result that actually stood out to me was that only 56% of voters had a body count of six or higher, and again these are Aella poll voters.
It’s good to be reminded that most people really don’t have sex with that many people.
The woman is more likely to be the one that pulls the trigger. That does not tell you what or who was ultimately responsible for that being the final outcome.
Regan Arntz-Gray: I’ve seen this repeated elsewhere and want to clarify that the “women initiate 70% of divorces” stat comes from survey data from How Couples Meet and Stay Together. It may be true of filing data as well, but this is what couples self report. Using the extended data set through 2022 I found women initiated 65% of divorces (note that when respondents indicated a mutual breakup it is counted as 50% female initiated and 50% male initiated, so the underlying numbers are 54% initiated by woman only, 23% by man only, 23% mutual).
But I still agree with Allie’s sentiment, that this doesn’t mean women *cause70% (or 65%) of divorces, or even that they’re more flippant about divorce. My read on it is that women *think moreabout their relationship in general and are therefore more likely to notice when it’s degraded to a point of no return, and to call it, asking for a divorce. I think the typical man can bury his head in the sand for longer.
As I discuss in the post linked below, women who have more options (highly educated or make more than their partner) are even more likely to be the ones who initiate. BUT your wife being more likely to initiate *in the event of divorcedoes not imply that you’re *more likely to get divorced*! There was very little difference in probability of breaking up within the survey period based on these “wife status markers” and the dataset is so small that these differences are insignificant (3.9% of all marriages broke up in the period, 3.5% if wife had a degree, 3.6% if she was more educated than her partner and 5% if she made more money than her partner).
Robin Hanson: Rating the relation as “degraded” or not ignores that the relation might be differently valued by the 2 sides. Plausibly women initiate divorce more as they more often correctly estimate that they could do better.
…
How many of these divorces were initiated by the woman, but only after years of her trying to get her husband to talk to her, to address issues that he wouldn’t recognize, to try therapy etc. I can’t say, but I don’t think it’s trivial – and who “causes” most divorces is either nonsensical (as in no one caused it, they were just a bad match and should never have gotten married) or is too complicated of a question to answer with this kind of survey data.
What does ‘cause’ mean in context? If a marriage fails, one can say that the person who initiated divorce caused the divorce, in some sense. Or one can say that whoever did whatever provoked or led to that caused the divorce, which may or may not be the same person. Either party cheating can lead to a divorce, and then there can be claims about what caused them to cheat. The same goes for other failures.
I still think ‘who filed for the divorce’ tells us a lot. And it tells us what economics and incentives would predict, that the better your outside options the more likely you are to initiate a divorce. It seems plausible that the person with better options also is likely to impose more demands, treat the other person worse in various ways, and put in less effort.
There isn’t a strict term for it, and I don’t know of a good pointer, but I’ve written about related phenomena before multiple times, with several
Defender (850k views): has anyone written about the phenomenon where autists go from really bad socializing to being way better than the average normie once they realize the game has rules that you can debug & create new rules?
you can create new social norms or cultural patterns. We just don’t think of them as “cultural patterns” if it’s between 2 friends or a small group
Alex Elliott: I should write about my experience with this with regards to dating back when I was single.
Abyssz: Me, but now they don’t believe I have autism..
Defender: ha!!! yes!!! this is it! I think even other autists, like, don’t believe it’s possible so they don’t try or are afraid to try.
Adelyn, Autistic Courtesan: A friend told me “there’s no point at which you need to stop learning masking, your skills can surpass normies and you’re just 90th percentile socialization.”
Why don’t we have better resources for this across this and many other systems? Because of the Implicit Coalition: The (implicit, of course!) alliance of enforcers who react quite badly if anyone is not part of the alliance of enforcers who punish anyone formally or explicitly knowing and doing things that everyone is supposed to keep secret or implicit.
Dating is a grey area where you definitely get smacked down hard for being ‘too strategic’ or doing actual thinking in the wrong ways, but also everyone understands the stakes are too high not to so all you have to do is not make what you are up to common knowledge.
Patrick McKenzie explains some aspects of this here:
Patrick McKenzie (QTing OP): If they have, hypothetically, they probably don’t describe it as that.
C.f. Professional Managerial Class Handbook on Cognitive Diversity (revised), pg 73.
That is not actually a book, but let’s say there is a very rich subgenre of advice, much of it written by and for very successful people, which says what that book would say, in some cases literally by way of extended D&D metaphors it assumes the audience will grok.
*sigh*
You can tell more than a little bit about me from immediately feeling the need to clarify that that was not an actual book.
On an entirely unrelated note, I alluded in this episode to the fact that many systems consider a forthright description of how the system actually operates to be deviant behavior, in part because it is a roadmap to successful attack of system.
I give the explicit example of AML/KYC regimes, where knowing the regime exists is formally a red flag if you “shouldn’t” know.
But less formal systems of social control, like say the social system that is a high school, also have immune defenses like this.
“Why? They were not designed, not like an AML/KYC policy is designed.”
A system which does not have immune defenses against memetic attacks, but which has value attached to it, will swiftly be rooted by people who understand power.
One of the first things the new guard will do is ban you saying that they are the new guard and describing how they have rooted the system. (Same way how a hacker who roots a box and puts it on a botnet might patch the vulnerability to keep it in *theirbotnet.)
And thus, solving for equilibrium, durable social institutions attached to value demonstrate surprising levels of convergent evolution in norms.
Well, you are, but you’re not alone in this particular way.
Rob Henderson: Young men are roughly twice as likely as young women to be single:
Derek Thompson: “Young people in America aren’t dating any more, and it’s the beginning of a real social crisis” is—I mean, let’s be honest—exactly the sort of social phenomenon I would want to report the shit out of.
But … what’s the best evidence that it’s true?
Just one e.g.: Median-marriage age is rising steadily, but it doesn’t look like the dating market suddenly broke in the 2020s. Maybe this line will break in a few years when more of the Gen-Z cohort enters the marriage-age zone, but it just goes back to the main question: What’s the best evidence *right nowthat dating is in some crisis mode?
Over the longer term, yes, the declines seem like a big deal.
Spenser: First marriage rate per 1,000 never-married singles (25–34): ~120 in early 1970s to ~70 in 2020 Proportion never married by age 30: About 15% never married in 1970 vs ~35% in 2020.
Data Takes: Here’s another way to visualize these marriage trends: Gen Z is noticeably behind even Millennials’ marriage rates *at the same age*
Daniel Cox: We’ve asked about the % of Americans who have had a relationship during their teen years. It’s far lower for Gen Z (both men and women) than other generations.
There’s evidence that teens are spending less time in person together. We asked about this as well. There’s a strong correlation btw. hanging out with friends and dating. Obv. reasons: increased opportunities, increased socializing experience.
There does clearly seem to be a teen loneliness epidemic, but that could be a mostly distinct issue, born of our unwillingness to allow them physical contact and experiences, plus the way they handle mobile phones. And this is again over the longer time period.
Jean Twenge: Dating is definitely in crisis mode among U.S. 17- and 18-year-olds. Data from Monitoring the Future; update of Figure 6.16 in *Generations*.
Again, it seems clear there is a big issue at relatively young ages, but that could still be something that mostly fades over time.
Alice Evans: Did you see this by John Murdoch?
Taken together, I see very strong evidence for the ongoing steadily worsening situation, but not strong evidence for a sudden crisis in the 2020s.
Cartoons Hate Her!: They actually think men are rejecting women for making too much money. I can’t imagine how little you’d have to leave your house to think this was true.
Matt Popovich: Finally, a chart whose mysterious realignment happens in 1945 instead of 1970.
So good news then, all we have to do is send 100% of women to college.
In all seriousness though, as more women attend college over time, the yellow line is horizontal, and that is meaningful. The selection and signaling effects are doing less work and the results are holding steady.
Whereas the purple line could be increasingly dire selection effects, or the increasingly dire signal it sends to have not gone to college.
From 2004: Survey of 10,000 Chinese couples in 1991 shows self-matched couples had fewer domestic conflicts and higher income versus parent-induced matches or friend introductions. It makes sense that parent introductions do worse. The paper considers agency costs versus market expansion.
I’d care more about population differences, with the paper attempting to fix this by using regional and generational differences but those are a lot of the population differences I’d worry about, including regional infrastructure for creating self-made matches. What is surprising to me is that friend introductions do not do well, as they do not come with the same pressure as parent matches.
I suppose the key is to still apply strong selection and mostly reject such matches, and people were accepting too many of them? That, or they didn’t actually control properly for selection effects, which seems likely.
Claim that assortative mating has greatly increased is 75% or so due to later marriage. If you are sorting later in life, uncertainty about income decreases, so you can more efficiently sort. A lot of the sorting is based on education and class markers rather than income, which complicates this explanation, but I buy that this is a major factor. I would also add that the later you are doing the matching, the more you likely prioritize income over other factors. Also it’s notable that we are sorting on income rather than wealth.
What are the sources I’ve found most interesting in this area?
Matchmaker Blaine Anderson (@datingbyblaine) has been interesting and is getting a bunch of mentions here. A lot of the notes are kind of obvious but it’s good to see it laid out, and often the details surprise. In particular, she’s good at calibrating how forcefully she says things. Alexander (@datepsych) also often makes it into these posts.
Also worth noting this, in both directions: Cartoons Hate Her explains if you want to know what gets a man to go for a woman, you should probably ask women rather than men, on the same principle of ‘ask the fisherman how to catch fish’ that should make you suspicious of women’s reports of how to attract women. And that the answer isn’t primarily ‘be nice and respectful’ or ‘shy and polite.’
From hackathon -> dateme docs -> 1st dates with 100+ intense questions, to proposal at Notion HQ
I’m thrilled to scale life together with this unicorn🦄☺️
The full story is less billboards and Twitter posts, and more Date-Me docs and meeting at Hackathons after seeing each others Date-Me docs and comparing Notion docs.
Since we all know that dating apps are terrible, the wise person seeks to meet prospective dates in other ways, ideally in the physical world.
Alas, this has gotten more difficult. Dating apps and shifting norms mean it is considered less appropriate, and riskier, to approach strangers, especially with romantic intent, or to even ask people you know out on a date, which has a fat tail of life changing positive consequences.
People especially men are increasingly more afraid of rejection and other negative consequences, including a potential long tail of large negative consequences. Also people’s skills at doing this aren’t developing, which both decreases chances of success and increases risk. So a lot of this edition is about tackling those basic questions, especially risk, rejection and fear.
There’s also the question of how to be more hot and know roughly how hot you are, and what other traits also help your chances. And there’s the question of selection. You want to go after the targets worth going after, especially good particular matches.
Not all approaches and opens are wanted, which is fine given the risk versus reward. Also it’s worth noting that this is actually a remarkably small amount of not being attracted to the approacher?
Alexander: I have updated this chart on the old article, because it was confusing some people.
As stated in the article, these responses were not mutually exclusive. 50% of women did not say that they didn’t want to be approached exclusively because a man was unattractive. Only 16% of the women who said they experienced an unwanted approach cited unattractiveness exclusively.
This was also not the full female sample – 34% of women did not have an unwanted approach experience at all.
I have added an UpSet plot to the article if you want to visualise the sets of responses. But what it basically boils down to is that 84% of women who had an unwanted approach experience cited something aside from a mere lack of attraction.
Remember, these are exclusively unwanted approaches.
Presumably, in the wanted approaches, the women was indeed attracted.
This still leaves the ‘there were other problems but you were sufficiently attractive that I disregarded them’ problem. Not getting any bonus points is already enough to make things tricky, you’ll need otherwise stronger circumstances. It does seem clear that men are far too worried about being insufficiently attractive to do approaches.
Big B (19.5m views): I hate when yall applaud men for doing the bare minimum.
Honey Badger Radio (20m views): Genuine question. What is the ‘bare minimum’ for women?
Punished Rose: 6’5”, blue eyes, still has all his hair, good job in position of power with many underlings, ubers me everywhere, buys me diamonds, kind to animals, wants 3-4 children, good relationship with mother, spontaneous and romantic, PhD with no corrections, homeowner.
Aella: I think it’s less how exactly men have their stat points distributed, and more how many total stat points there are. Women will often tolerate dump stats if there’s enough perks to balance out other areas.
You have to notice the perks for them to count, which is tough on dating apps if the dump stat is too visible, but mostly yeah, and I think it’s true for everyone. Each person will usually have some particular actual dealbreaker-level requirements or at least very expensive places to miss, plus some things really do override everything else, but mostly everything is trade-offs.
Amit Kumar: Smile at cute strangers and shouted upon 😂
Blaine Anderson: I surveyed >13,000 single women last year and exactly 95% said they wish they were approached more often IRL by men.
If women *shoutwhen you approach, you’re doing something wrong ❤️
Poll of my friend Ben Daly’s Instagram following, which is virtually all single 18-34 yr old women in the U.S. and U.K.
I have no idea if Approach Academy is any good, and doubtless there are lots of free resources out there too. Either way, it’s an important skill to have, and if you are single, don’t want to be single and don’t have the skill it’s worth learning.
If you’re literally not trying at all, that’s definitely not going to work. Alas, from what I can tell Alexander is correct here, in that even the very spaces where the You Had One Job was ‘actually approach women’ are increasingly coming out firmly against the one thing that ever works, and moving from an agentic narrative where you can make it work to an anti-agentic one where you shouldn’t try.
Alexander: Of everything I have ever posted, nothing has received more pushback from the manosphere than pointing out that half of young men have not asked a woman on a date in the past year, and a quarter have never asked a woman on a date ever.
The “male loneliness crisis” is largely self-imposed.
That you must approach women and ask them on a date, assuming you do not want to be perpetually single, would be the most obvious and basic advice you would have been given on early pickup artistry or relationship advice forums.
When I write of the relationship advice becoming increasingly negative, this is what I mean. Instead of ascribing agency to men and giving them the most obvious and “actionable advice” (“you need to talk to women”), the entire space is littered with narrative excuses for why men cannot!
“But what about MeToo?”
“Women do not want to be approached.”
“Women only want a ‘Chad’ type.”
“Women are not good enough to approach.”
“It is not men’s fault—the entire fabric of society needs to change to make it easy for men to approach.”
Anti-agentic narratives. Excuses. None of these are “actionable advice.” No one telling you these things is giving you a “solution.” They are just complaining and want to vent their victimhood.
Occasionally the feedback I receive is, “You describe things well, but provide no advice.”
Probably true! I do not really make self-help content. Yet I do regularly tell you all the very basic things that work:
You need to talk to women.
You need exciting, social hobbies that put you in contact with women and that women like.
You need to rid yourself of antisocial vices, hobbies, and habits.
You need to hit the gym and lose weight.
You need to fix your physical appearance.
You are all free to work the details of these things out however you please, but these are the basics that cover how you meet women and if you pass the initial bar of attraction. They are obvious and do not require you to know any hidden secrets or subscribe to any fringe ideological beliefs.
The manosphere overall, as well as individual subcultures within it like the Red Pill, have shifted from agentic messaging to anti-agentic messaging over time.
It used to be, “It’s really easy to put yourself in the top 10% of men.” Now you are much more likely to see lamentations that women only want the top 10% – and they are so unreasonable and unfair for that!
Narratives used to be primarily individualistic and agentic: you can self-improve and fundamentally change. You can get the results you want in life.
Now the narratives are collectivist and social: society is responsible for men’s romantic outcomes. They copy the language and paradigms of left-wing social justice movements. Men are victims – men are not at fault nor responsible for their own life trajectories. The only solution is a massive change to the culture, laws, and society at large.
Matthew Yglesias: We need industrial policy for asking girls out.
Do today’s young men know about negging? Peacocking? Do we need a Game Czar to address this crisis?
Matthew Yglesias: If you ask a bunch of girls out, some of them will go out with you, whereas if you don’t, none of them will.
As in, in order to open, you need to be there at all, and that’s the 80% for showing up.
Nick Gray: his is a message for single men that are tired of online dating
I made a post 6 months ago about what I should text a woman that I was going on a date with
The date was great. In fact we have spent almost every day since then together
Now she’s my girlfriend
Guys if you’re frustrated with online dating I have some advice
Delete your dating apps and start going out every single day
You need to the gym, go to the grocery store, go work from cafes
You need to try a new group fitness class every other day, go to yoga and pilates, and join meetups for things you’re interested in
Be someone who is out and about
Talk to strangers, make friendly conversation, add value, and don’t be sketchy
[continues but you can guess the rest, the central idea is ‘irl surface area.’]
Julian: Today my dad asked me if I ever approach beautiful women on the street to ask them out. I told him that I’ve literally never done that, and I saw true sorrow in his eyes.
“You see dad there’s this thing called hinge, it’s a lot easier really, it’s not as scary.” 😢
Having a tweet go viral is actually almost never good. now nearly 2 million people know I am scared of talking to women.
Twitter when I have a cool idea about AI safety to share: 😴💤🛌🥱
Twitter when my dad implies I have no rizz: 👀‼️🚨
Implies? Flat out tells you. Or you flat out telling him. Do better.
Val: How do people get girlfriends? I’m being serious.
Critter: A college friend of mine was single his whole life. He was getting depressed and asked for my advice. I told him to ask out 20 people on casual dates. He asked two; the second one became his girlfriend. It’s that simple.
“But no, I want to swipe from the bathroom and have a series of convoluted online conversations that go nowhere.” Okay, do that then. Enjoy.
My friend was average-looking, 5 feet 8 inches tall, and deaf, but keep enjoying your fantasy that you have it hard.
Nobody: Got a girlfriend once because I accidentally smiled and waved at her, thinking she was someone I knew.
Konrad Curze: I literally asked a coworker on a date once because I heard her talking about wanting to see a movie and not having a ride to the theater, so I just asked her if she wanted to go a bit before her shift ended. We’re not together anymore, but it really is that easy—just ask someone in person.
liberforce: I once talked to a complete stranger at the train station. She was a tourist in her first week in my country. After losing sight of each other, one year later we got married. We have been married for the past 10 years and have a 7-year-old son. Be polite. Be confident. Try.
Critter: “What is a low-key date?”
It’s a date that’s a small investment and easy to say yes to. Lunch this weekend. Studying together in the library. Getting coffee. Going to a local event.
Think of something you might say yes to if a friend asked, even if you… Do I ask friends/acquaintances?
Be careful; asking someone out can possibly damage your network of friends, employee relations, etc. I wouldn’t ask 20 coworkers out; you will get a reputation.
Only ask friends or coworkers if you have some confidence it’s a yes.
Asking strangers is cost-free, but we’re busy.
“Then who do I ask?”
I’ve gone on dates with waitresses (ask after their shift), Starbucks employees, and girls on the subway. If you’re attracted to someone, be cool and direct, and just ask.
“What do I say?”
Ask as if you were asking someone for the time or where the nearest gas station is.
“Hey, I think you’re really beautiful. Can I buy you lunch/coffee sometime this weekend?”
It’s *betterto chat them up first, but if you can’t, just ask.
“How do I avoid seeming creepy/awkward?”
This isn’t risk-free. Some may think you’re a creep, others will be flattered. Outcomes are hard to control; intent is what matters.
Try not to get too wound up; creepiness is a result of intensity. Timing matters, but just relax and ask.
Many such cases. When single, and it’s safe and appropriate, always be flirting.
Annie: this is why as a prolific slut I just flirt with any person up to my standards and escalate until I receive any sort of pushback.
That might actually be correct, if you’re good at noticing subtle pushback, at least within the realm of the deniable and until they clearly know you’re flirting. If they can’t tell you’re flirting, then you kind of aren’t flirting yet, so you’re probably fine to escalate a bit, repeat until they notice.
Online makes it even trickier, what even is flirting? It turns out Lolita’s likes here were on Instagram, where I am led to believe this is indeed how this works, whereas on Twitter the odds this is what is happening are lower – but yeah, DM her anyway if you’re interested.
The Catholic Engineer: Attention boys. This is how girls shoot their shot on Twitter. Take note.
Lolita: I just wanna let everyone know (since apparently this is everyone’s business now🤣) that he indeed texted me [on Instagram], he isn’t as [stupid] as men on twitter, thank God. ☝🏻😌
Divia: Tag yourself I’m the “I’m not sure how old you are” married person who follows and likes a few posts just because.
Linch: I feel someone calling themselves “Lolita” may have a non-standard opinion of good dating strategies, or norms.
Divida: lol yes ty I missed that part.
Ian Hines: I’m the guy who has apparently flirted with dozens of women without realizing it.
Andrew Rettek: By this standard a lot of unavailable women are flirting with me on Twitter.
Normie MacDonald: Something I routinely find myself telling people in regards to dating in relationships is that they have no reason to be creating these arbitrary meaningless ego saving rules for themselves. Ok congratulations you don’t “text first” you saved your imaginary dignity while the other girl gets an engagement ring
The dance matters. Ideally you want to do the minimum required to get an escalation in response, where that escalation will filter for further interest and skill. I would certainly try to do that first. But if it doesn’t work, and this wasn’t a marginal situation? Time to escalate anyway.
The deniability is not only key to the system working and enabling you to make moves you wouldn’t otherwise be able to make. It’s also fun, at least for many women.
Also, it’s essential. As in, you try to think of a counterexample, and you fail:
Emmett Shear: What is (flirting minus plausible deniability)?
Misha: “Hey there handsome.” Is flirtatious and undeniable.
As confirmed by Claude, there’s still plenty of plausible deniability there, and full uncertainty on how far you intend to go with it. Ambiguity and plausible deniability between ‘harmless fun’ flirting versus ‘actually going somewhere’ flirting is a large part of the deniability, and also the core mechanism.
Periodically we rediscover the classic tricks, which is half of what TikTok is good for. In this case, something called ‘sticky eyes,’ where you make eye contact until they make eye contact back, then act like you’re caught and look away. Then look at them, and this time when they match don’t look away, and often they’ll walk right to you.
I do not believe any of this below is how any of this worked in literal detail, but…
This is doing the rounds and, like all gender and feminist discourse, it’s fundamentally dishonest. You can read two dozen other restacks laying out the limitations of this article, all ignoring that she’s a freelance writer, ie poor, and she’s writing for clicks; hate the game, not the player.
I still cannot get over that stupid fucking hat. It worked.
Look, that hat worked. That stupid fucking hat got Mystery laid more than I’ve been laid in my entire life unless 90% of what was written in “The Game” is a lie. Women like the hat. Women slept with him over the hat. And we can’t be honest about it.
It worked on me. It worked on all of us. 20 effing years later that stupid hat is still the #1 image of PUAs and Mystery is still the most famous of them, not because of anything he did, but just because if you put that stupid fucking hat in a thumbnail, people will click on it because we can’t not pay attention to that stupid fucking hat.
That stupid fucking hat worked and I wouldn’t wear it and you wouldn’t wear it but it brought him more sex and fame than anyone reading this has ever got and we can’t be honest about it and that’s why the discourse never goes anywhere.
If you actually read the book, Mystery is an insanely broken individual but he lived a literal rockstar lifestyle because he was willing to wear that stupid fucking hat and I kinda envy him for it. Just the shameless “I want women, women want the hat, therefore I will wear the hat.”
But the discourse feels stuck because women are ashamed they like the stupid fucking hat and men would be ashamed to wear the stupid fucking hat so we all lie about it so we don’t have to live with the shame of who we are.
(Pictured: That fucking hat.)
The stupid fucking hat was successful for Mystery in particular, as it played into the rest of what he was doing, leading interactions down predictable paths he trained for in various ways, and that he figured out how to steer in the ways he wanted.
But also, yes, it was his willingness to wear the stupid fucking hat, if that’s what it took to make all that work. That doesn’t mean you should go out and wear your own literal stupid fucking hat, but… be willing, as needed, to wear the metaphorical stupid fucking hat. If that’s what it takes.
Cosmic Cowgirl: The only dating strategy worth your time is to be as weird as humanly possible and see who rocks with it
The best part abt this tweet is seeing all the people responding that the way they met their partners/spouses is by being weird ❤️ there is hope for us weirdos yet!
Not quite. You should be exactly as weird as you are. Being intentionally extra weird would backfire. But yes, you mostly want to avoid hiding your weird once you are finished ‘getting reps.’
Should you put your small painted war figurines in your profile? One woman says no but many men say yes.
Shoshana Weissmann: Hey men, please don’t put the small war figurines you’ve painted in your Hinge profiles. This does not help.
We will date you sometimes despite this, but…
Yes, they were well-painted. Please stop asking.
Jarvis: It can’t hurt.
Shoshana: No, Jarvis.
If you’re looking to maximize total opportunities, you definitely don’t put things like painted war figurines in your photo.
However they offer positive selection to the extent you consider the relevant selection positive, so it depends, and a balance must be struck. I would only include them if I really, really cared about war figurines.
Teach the debate: Andrew Rettek versus Razib Khan on letting your interest flags fly. Should you worry about most of the attractive women losing interest if you talk about space exploration, abstruse philosophy and existential risk? Only to the extent you’d be interested in them despite knowing they react that way. So gain, ideally, once you’ve got your reps in, no.
As usual, if you’re still on the steep part of the dating learning curve, one must first ‘get the reps’ before it wise to overly narrow one’s focus.
Eneasz Brodski suggests to straight men: Look for a woman who likes men. As in, a woman who says outright that by default men are good and cool people to be around. He says this is rare, and thus not all that actionable. I think it’s not that rare.
I would say that the specific positive version could be hard to act on, but the generalized negative version seems like fine advice across the board and highly actionable. If someone actively dislikes people in your key reference classes, whichever reference classes those might be, then probably don’t date them. The more of your reference classes they actively like by default, the better.
The same principles are true for women seeking men, and the same is true for physical goals. You should care relatively little about general appeal, and care more about appeal to those you find appealing as long term partners.
Antunes: Dear women, We don’t want you with muscles. We want you slim, delicate and cute. Take notes.
The rich: Dear women, muscles are hot, and there are many fit gym rats who would love a workout partner. Appealing to the average man is a bad idea; better to appeal to a small group that is very interested in you (with favorable gender ratios).
Daniel: I still think he’s wrong about the average man not wanting a fit woman.
In particular, the men like Antues who actively mock anyone who disagrees on this? Turning them off actively is not a bug. It’s a feature.
Isabel: Question for women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, etc: what are women in their twenties not considering that they should be considering?
Mason: Waste zero time on men who don’t want the same things you want, you will not look back fondly on relationships built on the hope that someone else would change.
The original thread has much other advice, also of the standard variety. I would modify Mason’s note slightly, do not waste time on the chance someone else will change what they want. But of course there are other ways for time to be well spent.
Freia: Every woman i talk to is like nooo too much muscle is weird and they’re imagining competition season mr. olympia in their head or something but every guy i talk to is like yeah i started lifting and all of a sudden women found me 10 times funnier.
This is an easy one.
Up to a point more muscle is good.
Too much ‘unnatural’ or ‘gym style’ muscle is weird.
If you never do muscle poses you do not have too much such muscle.
If you are musclephotomaxing, you may have too much muscle for other purposes.
Choose your fighter.
Rachel Lapides: The undergrad creative writing class I’m teaching has 19 girls and 1 boy.
I think a lot of you in the replies would benefit from a class or two.
Vers La Lune: This needs to be said. Reading is not an attractive hobby to women. Back in 2018ish I A/B tested it and hid my books and actively lied about not reading a book since college and it worked 10x better than honesty.
It’s attractive hobby “in theory” but most people don’t read shit anyway, maybe they read Literotica fairy smut or something but you’ll never see panties drier than if you reference David Foster Wallace or some history book or something.
The rest of that chart is fine. Knowing languages and instruments are absolutely the most attractive to them.
Robin Hanson: Would this result hold up in a larger randomized trial?
I think Vers is right about this. Reading is attractive in theory.
In practice, it is not unattractive. But that is a different thing. You need to have a hook that is attractive in practice.
Reading can and does help with that. Reading leads to knowledge and skills and being interesting, which are themselves attractive. You want to be readmaxing. But that, too, is a different thing.
When 98.2% of women said reading was ‘attractive’ in a binary choice, that was answering the wrong question. Associating with reading simply is not exciting. It does not offer a joint experience or a good time. It won’t work.
Whereas the other top activities represent skills and demonstrations of value and joint activities. So they’re great for this.
The flip side are the actively unattractive hobbies. Reading is not unattractive, it will almost never actively cost you points, but Magic, anime and crypto definitely will be highly unattractive and turn off a large percentage of women, if you force them to deal with those things front and center. If you don’t center them, my guess is they are like reading, they don’t end up counting much for or against you then.
Of course, there will be some women that does find almost any hobby attractive, and the positive selection as noted above is palpable. But you only get so many such filters, so choose carefully which ones you deploy. It’s not strictly limit one, but it’s close.
JD Vance gave up Magic: the Gathering because girls weren’t into it. I notice how much I dislike that reaction, but I understand it. It’s a real cost, so how much was he into casting a paper version of Yawgmoth’s Bargain, when he could instead get the same experience going to Yale Law School?
Liv Boeree points out that one place women can look for a good man is in their friend group, where you might already have some known-to-be-good men in your friend zone. And she can say that, because that this is how she met Igor. So she advises to make sure to take a second look at those guys at some point.
I’d add to that ‘because only you can make that move, they mostly can’t.’
We alas lack a good mechanism whereby people can attempt to be ‘unfriendzoned,’ or indicate their interest in being unfriendzoned, without risking destroying the friendship. There are obvious possible coordination mechanisms (e.g. to ensure that only reciprocal interest is revealed) but no way to get others to implement them. The rationalists have tried to fix this at least once, but I think that faded away even there.
Here’s a very different strategy, from Bryan Caplan, that we have discussed in prior episodes. Why would you, a man, even look for her, a woman, in America? Your hand in marriage is a green card easily worth six figures and you’re going to waste that on someone who already lives here? When you could instead be (in relative terms) instantly super high status to boot?
His answer is adverse selection. You have to worry the woman does not actually like you. He does not discuss strategies to minimize this risk, such as avoiding services for women actively seeking such arrangements.
You want to seek the women who are not actively seeking for you to seek them. Tricky.
The other obvious problems are logistics and cultural compatibility. And also, as one commenter warns, how you look to her from afar might not be a good prediction of how you look to her once she arrives.
Mason: I don’t have a big problem with passport brokers, to be honest.
I get the sense that most of them are just average men who want to settle down after some bad luck in love and are very excited, and naive, about encountering a pool of young women who want to do that quickly.
I’d guess that about 90 percent of the time there isn’t anything overtly political or misogynistic about it, even if there are a number of reasons it may not be a good idea.
The perhaps 10 percent who see themselves as actively snubbing Western women who are too damaged to love are, yes, distasteful.
But so are the largely female onlookers who seem, more than anything, angry at the idea of an average-looking, average-earning man getting someone “out of his league.”
If there’s something disturbingly transactional about dating women from poorer countries online, there’s an equally economic paradigm implicit in the idea that two people can’t truly love each other unless they’re matched on social class and relative status.
I think the important problems are entirely practical issues of logistics, cultural distance and adverse selection. Those are big problems, and reason most people should choose different strategies.
‘Could’ backfire massively and ruin your life or career is not ‘could plausibly’ or ‘is likely to’ but if you don’t know that, it will have the same impact on your decisions.
Air Katakana: We need to talk about the real reason no one is getting married: western society has gone so woke that a man showing any interest in a woman in any situation could lead to his career and life being ruined. The only place you can even feasibly meet someone now is via dating apps.
Harvey Michael Pratt: Like seriously who are these people who don’t know how to express romantic interest without seeming threatening I’ve heard this one over and over and just don’t get it.
Misha: It’s not just about seeming threatening, I think it’s about the distribution of outcomes feeling like it’s net negative.
Imagine in the past it was something like
Every time you hit on someone, roll a d20. On a 1, she slaps you. On a 16 or higher, you get a date.
Now, it’s more like
On a 1 you get fired, on a 2-5 you get mocked or have a really awkward time, on a 20 you get a date.
Now obviously, all these numbers are fake and the real numbers are probably something else.
But on a visceral level it’s hard to believe in the real numbers, and our expectation of the risk/reward of interacting in certain ways is influenced by our social environments.
I think this is particularly pernicious for guys who haven’t been in relationships because they have no direct experience of positive outcomes, they only have negative outcomes and stories you see about other people’s negative outcomes are more viral.
Even if we round down the risk of getting canceled/mocked/fired to zero (which I think is probably correct) you can still expect to be rejected a ton of times before you get a relationship, which is extremely discouraging.
I do think part of the problem is overromanticizing of the past though. You’re much more likely for various reasons to hear about all the relationships that came before instead of the people who died alone. I don’t know if it was ever actually easy to get married.
My understanding is that sufficiently far in the past, asking was actually deadly. You risked violence, including deadly violence, or exile. You indeed had to be very careful.
Then there was a period where you were much more free to do whatever you wanted. You really could view the downside mostly as ‘you get slapped,’ which is fine even if the odds are substantially worse than above.
Now things have swung back somewhat. The tail risk is small but it’s there. And the reports are among the sufficiently young that many think trying to date people you actually know Just Isn’t Done, except of course when it is anyway.
I also presume, given other conditions, that we are now trending back down on the risks-other-than-rejection of asking front.
Partly of course it is a skill issue.
The rejection part sucks, too, of course. But you can try to have it suck less?
One of the most important dating skills is learning to handle and not fear rejection.
Rudy Julliani: This is worse than a gunshot to the head.
Allie: This type of rejection is a super normal part of dating and was delivered about as politely as it could’ve been.
Zoomers are so emotionally strung out that this kind of thing feels catastrophic when it should just be “aww darn, I had high hopes for that one.”
Shoshana: dude fuck what I’d give for men to be this adult and straightforward!
Allie: Half the time people just ghost these days!
The replies are full of ‘at least she was honest and did not ghost you.’
So first of all, wow those are low standards.
We don’t actually know she was honest, only that you can safely move on.
I do totally see how ‘you did nothing wrong’ can be worse than a ‘you suck.’
But seriously, you need to be able to take this one in stride. One date.
Being unusually averse to rejection, as Robin Hanson reports here, really sucks and is something one should work to change, as it is highly destructive of opportunity, and the aversion mostly lacks grounding in or correlation to any consequences beyond the pain of the rejection.
Robin Hanson: I’m unusually averse to rejection. Some see that as irrational; I should get over. I guess as they don’t think it makes sense to have preferences directly over such a complex thing; prefs should be on simpler outcomes. But how do I tell which outcomes are okay to matter?
Zvi: It’s not simple, its terminal outcomes (final goods) versus signals for how things are going (learning feedback systems and intermediate goods and correlations with ancestral Env. dangers, etc)?
You know what actually feels great?
When you ask, and you get turned down, and you realize you played correctly and that there’s no actual price to getting a no except that you can’t directly try again.
Nothing was lost, since they weren’t into you anyway. Indeed you got valuable experience and information, and you helped conquer your fears and build good habits.
That includes looking back afterwards. Indeed, I’m actively happy, looking back, with the shots I did take, that missed, as opposed to the 100% of shots that I didn’t take. Many of those, I do regret.
Kali Karmilla: The most depressing part of dating apps isn’t even getting rejected. It’s having to reject so many people. They put themselves out there, asking for someone to care for them, and you have to be like, “Not my type” a hundred times in a row. Makes me feel evil, honestly.
I don’t think the human mind was built to realize that so many people are lonely at one time, and it certainly wasn’t built to see that and react with indifference (swipe left, and they stop existing). I do not know, man; it’s just sad. I wish I were frozen in ice like a cartoon caveman.
Me: It feels like dating apps are asking me to dehumanize other people.
This person: It’s okay because people are just like commodities, and the apps are just digital marketplaces. 👍
Brother, I never want to be like you in my life.
If you reject someone in the swiping stage, and you feel evil about it, don’t. It’s unfortunate that you need to be doing this rather than the algorithm handling it, but it’s no different than being at the club with 100 other people and ignoring most of them. You’re being fooled by having the choices be one at a time and highlighted.
Of course so many people are lonely at one time. There are so many people.
If you reject someone after a match, then that is like actually rejecting them, so yes treat them like a real person with actual feelings, but everyone involved signed up for this, and stringing things along when you don’t want to be there or keep talking to them is not better. If you can’t get there with someone, tell them that, and send them home.
Anything else is cruel, not kind.
Tracing Woods: Worse than this, I think, is the occasional decision not to immediately reject someone you should have, playing with their heart a bit on the way to rejection. People expose their hearts incredibly quickly while dating, and it’s easy to stumble into hurting someone.
My worst moments when dating, looking back, were when I went on a first date with someone who was clearly desperate for an affection I could not honestly provide. Everyone wants to be loved, but nobody wants to be pity-dated.
Of all the lessons of The Bachelor, this might be the biggest one, to not string people along, you see this on various similar shows. The candidates who are rejected early mostly shrug. Some are hit hard, but not that hard. The farther along they go, the worse it gets, also much time is wasted.
Same goes in real life. If you know you must reject, mostly the sooner and clearer the better, with the least interaction beforehand. It will suck less, for both of you.
I do admit that sometimes the person you reject does not make it easy on you, including those who don’t accept it.
Holly Elmore: Having people not accept the rejection feels like having to strangle them or walking away and letting them bleed out. It’s way more intense than any one instance of being swiped left on or hearing “no”.
Yes, of course having to tell people no sucks. Having to dump someone sucks a lot.
But it’s still way better than getting dumped when you didn’t want to be.
Allie: A lot of the best things in life fall into the “scary but worth it” category
– Leaving home
– Falling in love
– Driving
– Buying a house
– Marriage
– Children
– Travel
We used to focus on the “worth it” aspect, now we hyper focus on the “scary” and we’re paralyzed by the fear
Shoshana Weissman: Damn straight. Lotta people paralyzed by fear of doing normal good things that all involve some risk but lots of payoff.
Yep. Normal good things are scary. You have to do them anyway.
The other stuff matters, but hey, it couldn’t hurt.
Alexander: Revisiting the original list, we also see very strong agreement between men and women – both men and women know that these things aren’t actually attractive to men!
It turns out that what is attractive essentially falls into two categories: “don’t be fat” and “basic grooming.”
As a woman you need to not be overweight, work out, shave, and have nice teeth – all of which is just as true for men.
I mostly believe this list. My guess is ‘dye your hair blonde’ is underrated, because they are asking in a context where you know and are thinking about the fact that the color is fake and that you’re ‘being fooled,’ which is not real world conditions, and I predict what is likely a smaller similar miscalibration for breast implants.
Women were highly unsuccessful in attempting to pick photos to look hotter.
Aella: the actual finding (after paranoid checking against dumb mistakes): I had women submit an “average” photo of themselves, and a photo of them “at their best,” total n=102.
Men rated the “at their best” photos about 0.3/10 points hotter than the “average” photos. But there was pretty decent variance.
About a third of women had their “hotter” photos rated either equal to or worse than their “average” photo.
Here is the full post. One way to make people less biased is to ask them how they compare to others of the same gender, another is to ask people who is in their league.
The more unattractive you were, the more ‘delusional’ you were, as in your estimate was too high by a higher margin. I don’t buy Aella’s explanation for this, though, because I don’t think you need it – this result is kind of mathematically inevitable, once you accept everyone is overestimating.
And wow, loss aversion is a thing here:
My followers (incomes $30k-$300k) would, on average, pay $12,517 (median $3k) to gain 1 point of attractiveness. They would pay on average $94,083 (median $10k) to avoid losing 1 point of attractiveness. (n=462)
Counter to my prediction, there was basically no correlation between how hot someone rated themselves as, and the amount they would pay to gain a point or avoid losing a point.
And also, people say they’d pay more to be 6/10 than 10/10, I presume they’re confused.
Only paying $12k for a permanent extra point of attractiveness, were it for sale, is insane. Go into debt if you have to, as they say. You’ll get it back plus extra purely in higher earnings from lookism on the job. If you can do it multiple times, keep hitting that button (and if they let you go above 10, do that and then go to Hollywood!).
At $94k the trade stops being obvious for those on the lower end of the income spectrum, but if you can afford it this still seems like quite the steal, as many times as they’ll sell it to you.
(I’d be a little scared to know what happens beyond 10, but you bet that if it was for sale I would find out.)
Aella runs the ‘which AI faces are hot according to the opposite gender’ test with male faces, and reports the results. Male average ratings for AI-generated female faces clustered around 5.5 then fell off sharply with a slightly longer left than right tail, whereas female ratings of male AI faces averaged about 4.7 and had a longer right tail that died suddenly.
The patterns as you go from 1 up to 9 on the normalized hotness scale are very clear, especially at the top, where there is clearly one top look. Can you pull it off?
Emmett Shear: Percentage reporting yes on experiencing “god mode”, according to my poll.
SF: women 50%, men 28%
NYC: women 43%, men 67%
Other: women 56%, men 37%
It turns out SF is just about normal for women in this metric and varies relatively little, the main story is SF sucks for men lol.
The main story of San Francisco is that it is a rough place all around, with only 39% god mode, versus 46% for those in neither NYC nor SF. The men are 9% less likely to report ‘god mode’ and the women are 6% less likely, which is within the margin of error here. Whereas New York has 55% god mode, which is much better than 46%, and a major slant towards men.
Note that this is a stable equilibrium, because in their system one partner must pay but not both for a match to occur:
Jake Kozloski (Keeper): Single women are typically surprised to learn that 85% of our paying matchmaking clients are men. They often assume men aren’t interested in commitment.
Cody Zervas (Keeper): Men assume the platform is mostly men and women assume it’s mostly women. Both are surprised to hear we have the other.
Jake Kozloski: Yes on the flip side our total pool is 80% women which tends to surprise men who are used to the terrible ratios on dating apps.
It makes sense that men are more likely to pay for such a service, knowing that women won’t pay for it, and also that they have more ability to pay and can feel less bad about doing so. They have to pay.
It then makes sense that women are more likely to be willing to sign up for free, since many men already paid. And indeed, you could argue that they’re better off not paying. Who wants to match with the guys who signed up for Keeper… for free?
Thus the ultimate version of the guy picking up the check.
And as a result, the women greatly outnumber the men, because it’s a lot more attractive to sign up for free. Which in turn makes it more attractive for men to pay.
As time goes by, the fundamental things in life are still the same, and yet they change quite a lot with the times. But they don’t yet change so fast that the previous three editions of this are invalid. AI isn’t transforming the world that quickly, not yet.
In the meantime, there’s always more to say, and I both find it enjoyable and am hopeful that it might help some of you out there, so here we are once again.
Meanwhile, I am sorry to report that many of you are still sihngle.
I spent sufficiently long between updates and got sufficient material that this one is being split into conceptual sections.
This one will focus in particular on the awfulness that are dating apps, and directly related considerations.
Hinge puts a limit on number of open conversations, Shoshana Weissmann praises the incentive design because it pushes you to unmatch rather than ghost, or unmatch if you are being ghosted. This makes sense. I wonder what the right limit would be? A reader informs me you can also archive the matches, which will dim the impact here.
Bumble apologized for ads it ran saying that celibacy wasn’t the answer. They did penance by donating to the Domestic Violence Hotline and similar organizations. I agree this might not have been the most diplomatic approach. Yet the details of the reaction were bizarre to me. They were accused of ‘undermining daters’ freedom of choice?’ What?
If they won’t say it, I will: With notably rare exceptions, if you are an adult and are not asexual, celibacy is not the answer.
It could be high time for a rival that does it better, but one must still solve the matching and coordination problems, and the desire of many of the most desirable users to sit there and swipe. People do not want to pay for good matchmaking, either with money or with actual effort and attention, in this or in other fronts.
You might be having trouble on dating sites, but do not underestimate the value of ‘not being a lunatic’ if you can get past the first few seconds of filter. Or how many people seem determined to fail in those few seconds.
Shoshana Weissmann: Opened my Hinge likes after the hike. Here’s a guy who photoshopped a cartoon orgy around him in the bath.
Yesterday an ENM couple tried to match me and the guy was in a Pikachu costume. I literally say monogamy twice on my profile because nobody respects me about it. Pikachu I don’t choose you.
Rich Braun: I’m a couple decades older than you, but when I was single and on the apps a few years ago I was amazed how many out-of-my-league women were willing to give me a shot.
Your tweets have helped me understand that simply not being a lunatic put me in the top tier.
Rob Henderson warns that at least one popular dating app is known to use ‘seeding’ meaning when a man first signs up you match with bot profiles of hot women who then ghost you, to get you started. That seems like the kind of thing the FTC should be investigating, if it is true, and indeed in the past they have done some investigation, but such claims have mostly not been substantiated.
It also raises the question, would that work? On the one hand, yes, Hot Women Near You and all that. On the other hand, being ghosted sucks even worse than not matching. The hope is presumably that you think it was something you said so it’s your fault.
Business Insider’s alternative suggestion is a government app like in Tokyo, and oh no. Except perhaps being the government solves some trust issues, allowing the site to verify information and thus be a better product?
In Tokyo, the city government is even releasing its own dating app, part of a campaign called Tokyo Futari Story (“futari” means couple). The service, which the city has budgeted several million dollars to develop and promote, will require users to verify their income, prove they’re unmarried, sit for an interviewwith the app’s staff, and sign a statement saying they’re intent on getting married.
Anyone who would suggest our government should be writing such software really needs to talk to someone such as Patrick McKenzie first, and learn some of the many reasons why we will absolutely be unwilling to attempt to do that. But also the talk about ‘equality’ and ‘eugenics’ should help explain why no one would dare touch it, even in worlds where they would ever try to make any software at all.
One danger of dating apps is that it raises the false implication that one should not date outside of the apps. Of course one should do so when possible, and use the apps only as supplements and last resorts.
Mark Travers (2021): 68 percent of romantic relationships start from friendship…romances where partners start as friends are more likely to be the rule than the exception…On average, friends-first partners were friends for almost 2 years before becoming romantic partners.
Tim Carney: This is important, and I wonder if dating apps have convinced people that one ought not date friends.
There is a list of preferences in the linked post on ways to find relationships, which corresponds to how social and friend-based techniques are, with blind dates and dating apps at the very bottom. Dating apps are a place where you go explicitly to find dates, and some young’uns get convinced that romantic interests should ONLY be pursued in such settings.
Charlie Gowans-Eglinton takes a decade on the apps, becomes disillusioned by the horror shows, sees them now as ‘a way to seem proactive’ rather than a solution to finding someone, as all the men are so terrible and the pickings so slim, due to adverse selection, the need for a thousand bad dates. I still don’t understand how the numbers could fail so utterly to add up? Yes, we hear so many stories like the next two sections about lack of basic skills and generally being terrible, but… if all the good guys were really snapped up quickly then we’d observe a very different world.
Yes, there are obvious downsides.
Jonathan Deer: Would rather not get a gift then someone think I’m down bad enough to get me a tinder gift card #disrespectful #buttless
Pierre Pumpernickel: If somebody gave me this for Christmas I would drive to an Applebees and kill myself in the parking lot.
Alison: That’s beyond calling you bitchless. That’s calling you bitchless, broke, and so bitchless that you need to pay to win.
Brits With Knees: if anyone wants to get me this lmk
This is actually great and super thoughtful gift.
It is something the person needs, but would never ever buy for themselves. This person clearly would never, ever pay, on principle. But I have little doubt the value is there, if only to find out if the value is there.
Brooke suggests that good dating app game is easy to identify when you care about it, so find someone who does to help you learn what to work on, and then try even a little.
Aaron Bergman: I took one good picture with a good haircut, and now I have probably three times the number of Hinge matches. What the heck?
Brooke Bowman: It’s probably worth scrolling through a dating app from the account of a friend who is interested in your gender.
The rarer, nicer photos of men stand out so much.
The vast majority are blurry selfies or just bad photos in general, and they all kind of blend together.
Ram Vasuthevan: Like, look; are they taken professionally?
Brooke Bowman: Some are, yes, but it doesn’t take that much to stand out from the crowd! A nice haircut, decent clothes, and being in focus can help. Ask a friend to take some, or take selfies in different parts of the house to see what the lighting looks like.
Seems like good advice if you’re not getting good initial conversions.
Yes, you should also be paying up, every boost helps, but don’t forget the basics.
It is a weird one, because in a matching market this should go the other way?
Shoshana Weissmann: NY dating apps are an insane place.
Rob Bernard: “I’m a man with physical man needs..” This is either an alien trying to convince us it is human, or it’s Matt Berry’s Laszlo on What We Do in the Shadows.
The Gentleman Sausage: I enjoy long walks in the beach while listening to human music.
Shoshana Weissmann: You’re joking but I saw this yesterday. Online dating is hell.
Coach Crash: You should see what is out there at my age. I understand if you’re a young widow but don’t include pics that look like they’re from the police investigation into his death.
GirlKW77: lol. I just watched a segment on my local news station that was interviewing people who were knowingly having “intimate” relationships with online AI dating bots. Kid you not.
He only swipes right about three times a day, and ends up on four dates a week, an absurd conversion rate, so yes it can be done. Obviously there’s the mystery of how you get that many right swaps in the first place, but past that this does match my experiences too – if you put in the effort, conversation rates to first dates can actually be remarkably high. If you don’t have a good text game, well, you’re reading giant walls of text or you wouldn’t be here, text should be your friend.
He also has a 70% rate on getting second dates. That’s actually way too high if you’re meeting multiple new people each week, you need to cut your losses when it isn’t a great match. A 70% rate only makes sense if you have ‘first date scarcity,’ if a promising first date is time consuming to get you want to not give up so easily.
In particular, this chart and similar statistics have cool bonus implications.
Men like 53% of the profiles they view.
Yet even so, women only match 36% of the time when they like a man.
Men only match 2% of the time when they like a woman.
Women like 5% of profiles they view according to that chart, but 14% according to Zippia. That’s a huge gap, although the main points hold either way.
A lot of the explanation is that ~75% of Tinder users are men, which is actually a better ratio than many other apps. So even if you never showed a woman a profile of a man who would actively say no to her, about half the male likes never even get seen.
There are also selection effects. The more people want to match with you, the less of them you want to match with in return, because you know you have options. Tinder, like all such apps, does do the first order obvious thing of putting those who already matched with you early into your queue, in addition to attempting to otherwise make predictions including using things like Elo. Despite that, the majority of women’s swipes still fail to get them matched. Which tells me quite a lot of women want to be swiping well beyond the set of people who pre-matched with them.
The symmetry here is remarkable, the way this is worded doesn’t require it at all and this rules out theories that there are guys who sleep with lots of women per year on the first date as they would have skewed the numbers. 5% is rather grim given how many young people start that year single.
Nuance Enjoyer: Moreover, 3/4ths of the gap in the Pew survey was driven by disparities in cohabitation and marriage, leaving little room for the popular ‘de facto polygynous soft harems’ explanation.
Over the course of an entire year, a majority of 18-34 year olds have sex with exactly one opposite-sex person, and a majority of the rest don’t have sex at all.
Also, the linked Vox article reminded me of the ‘super like’ feature, where your like is visible to them while swiping, you show up faster, and the match is instant if they return interest. They have to be purchased.
Costly signals are great, and so super likes reportedly triple your chances. Of course, you also get the reactions that say super likes are cringe or creepy, how dare you actually express real interest, but the statistics say it works, and I’m guessing that there is positive selection in driving away people who dislike clear communication. You probably also do worse on people who think they’re better than everyone, which plausibly includes some people you’d want quite a lot (since they are sometimes in fact better!) but also isn’t a feature I’d want to seek out.
You don’t have to pay $500/month for Tinder Select and go straight to their inbox. But if you’re not paying for a small number of super likes, that seems like a huge mistake, given you can buy in bulk for $1.50 or get them free with your subscription package.
Yes, $75 per additional match might sound steep, but is it for the ones you want most, in a world where matching is rare? If you’re doing reasonably well, it seems basically impossible for it to be worth being on the app at all, and also not being worth super liking when you see someone you do in fact super like.
I’d apply a similar principle to other paid options, for any app you would already be using on a regular basis. If you’re paying your time, you need to also pay your money. The big advantages of paying are the (often under the hood) ways to increase your chances of success.
Still, it’s a lot, and I don’t really believe it. But if you’re spending an hour a day and still running the no-pays, you’re making a very serious mistake.
(If you’re spending that hour mostly chatting with matches, why haven’t you moved to regular texting or other messaging apps with most of them yet?)
The other claim is that the apps are increasingly hard to use without paying. I would respond that the users spend 51 minutes a day on them. If you are spending 51 minutes a day, and yet refuse to pay a modest amount of real money, then the problem is you. Your time is valuable. The claim is this is not ‘equitable’ when money is charged, but seriously, what? Of course the post then goes on to call Singapore’s attempt to help college students date ‘eugenic’ so there you have it. How dare they.
Frictionless dating apps create male haves versus have nots.
The men with little female interest don’t get to date or commit at all.
The men with lots of interest have multiple women interested in them and can always find more, so they see no reason to commit.
Thus, you get a bunch of these situationships, where the man won’t commit.
The men who both can get dates and want to commit get snapped up quickly.
Which means the men mostly say ‘why won’t women date us at all?’ and the women mostly say ‘why won’t the men commit to us?’
Even if you’re not on the apps yourself, the incentives are there anyway.
This is largely a Levels of Friction problem, where the selection process has low marginal costs and starts with superficial attributes, which makes it easier to steer towards going after high-value targets and creating divergence.
A great asset of OKCupid was scale. You answered the questions once, created a profile once, and you could check for lots of matches in detail, as could others. Getting that scale back is the key barrier.
The date-me doc does this as one-to-many even if there aren’t that many, but exposes your info and puts the filtering job on them (even if they don’t have to answer a bunch of specific questions).
What about the date-me survey? They have to answer the questions but you have to design and execute all the filters.
Aella: Reminder I have a survey to date me! I’ve found partners via this method before; if you think we might be compatible, feel free to fill it out <3
Kepe: wow, I haven’t seen a single reply supporting her. I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again, this is absolutely an amazing idea and anyone saying it isn’t is exactly who should be filtered out.
Is that even so bad? I mean, yes, on average that’s 25,000 questions per date with a model influencer you know you’re into. I say that depends on the questions. And lo and behold, we’ve got them.
What’s your astrological sign?
Number of ex-girlfriends, the number that are ‘crazy’, and exes you still text/talk to (drink ones count)
Do you have kids?
Do you want them?
Are you married/dating someone now?
Do you have a full time job?
If you were picking three adjectives to describe yourself would one of them be douchey?
Do you live with your parents?
Do you own a working car?
Do you have Twitter?
Do you currently have a booty call?
If we lived together would I get the walk in closet?
Is it acceptable to hit on my friends?
Do you like watching Avatar (ATLA)?
Who is the best artist: The Weeknd, Future, Drake or Travis Scott?
These are not exactly the hardest questions.
I presume I know the right answers for nine of them, and so do you: #3, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #11, #12 and #13. Mostly that seems entirely fair, especially if the car is a proxy.
That leaves six ‘real’ questions, one of which also has a clear right answer?
Most of the applicants were also based in Texas and had the star sign of Aquarius.
Not a wise filter, in either direction, and expensive with a 92% failure rate, but sure. Five to go.
One of them is the most important question: Do you want kids? We don’t know which answer she wants but you should 100% be asking.
The last two questions are taste questions, you’re allowed two, sure.
Are you supposed to have or not have Twitter? Unknown, I can see it either way.
The final question is about ex-girlfriends, and we can all guess what answers she is looking for here and why this is a reasonable question to ask if you have the leverage.
So why did only 3 of 5,000 applications make it through? That seems like… not a lot, especially given most of them got the astrological sign correct, and if you’re going to fail the gimme questions you can decide not to turn in the survey. This must mean not a lot of men got the gimme questions right, and didn’t understand?
Or alternatively she was looking for at least one very counterintuitive answer.
Similarly, we have other basic principles in the stories below, that anyone should be able to handle: Show up on time. Be able to plan a date. Treat all people like people. Answer questions honestly and be able to handle honest answers. Be actually single and not married. Don’t be weirdly super intense.
Perhaps the biggest divide is between three groups:
Those who think that ‘being a decent normal person’ works fine.
Those who feel like they’re being decent normal people and failing.
Those who the first group points to as no being decent normal people.
Jeff: I need some stories about bad dates to cleanse my palate.
Shoshana Weissman: I am messaging a man right now who showed a lot of interest initially, and now he is not responding—acting standoffish. He asked why I don’t drink, out of curiosity, and I explained that it is because I have several autoimmune diseases. I manage fine, but my body does not like alcohol. He basically replied that that was too much information. So, don’t ask? When is the answer to that question ever simple?
Kevin Baum: Tip for single men: You can do remarkably well with online dating if you are remotely normal instead of being like this man.
Christopher Eichhorn: Absolutely correct—I got many replies (and a wife!) on dating apps and was off the market within a couple of weeks of joining. I am not suave or stylish. I do not have “game,” and I have never read pickup artist material. I simply treated women like normal human beings.
T.K.: I feel like any single men just need to follow the examples of good dating experiences and avoid that behavior. Show up on time, be able to plan a date, be able to handle an honest answer to a question you ask, and do not be “kind of” divorced. All simple things.
I definitely buy that lots of men, especially on dating apps but also everywhere, are doing quite a lot of shooting themselves in the foot in a ‘why can’t you just be normal and a decent human being’ ways. If you can avoid doing that, it’s a huge edge.
The problem is that this is often a negative selection game, with complex rules. Whatever the basic principle is that you missed, that’s the one that gets put into a story like this, and it’s often not easy to learn which one you are messing up. Debugging is hard, and you don’t have good tools.
And yes, you also need opportunity to ‘treat women like human beings’ in the first place, or the ability to do so won’t do anyone any good.
Blaine Anderson (dating couch and matchmaker, responding to another 1m+ view claim that’s even stronger): Dating fun fact: Android gives many women slight ick!
If a woman likes you, Android won’t make her STOP liking you.
But iOS girlies 100% feel pangs of disappointment when your first text is green.
For single men using Android:
This is NOT a recommendation you switch to iOS.
This is just an informed opinion from someone who speaks with single women for a living 😌
Especially if you use Android, and find this thread moronic…
Stick to Android to distance yourself from judgmental iOS women 😂
Don’t kid yourself. That’s a recommendation to switch to iOS.
I use a Pixel 9 Fold, which very much costs more than an iPhone. I think it is a substantially better phone. There is very little financial cost in getting an iPhone these days, most carriers will basically give you one with a contract, and you can get used ones a few years old for very little money if you don’t want Apple Intelligence.
The question is, should you let this matter, or even preference falsify here?
You are combining two effects:
Negative reactions from a large percentage of women. How big is this effect? It is hard to tell. Every little bit helps and this is something you can control. If you are going to want to date in the judgmental-iOS pool, it matters.
Positive selection effects. If she’s looking down on you for not having an iPhone, none of the reasons for this speak well of her – it’s presumably either she has taste you disagree with and thinks your taste is actively bad, she has attachment to a blue bubble or what her friends will think, or she’s thinking you must be poor.
At minimum, the more ick there is here, the worse the sign. Whereas the women who will be vaguely disappointed that you have an iPhone? That’s a great sign.
I might like to think I wouldn’t be one to switch to iPhone simply for the dating advantages despite the selection issue. We spend a lot of time on our phones, the experience matters. But also I know myself, and I know that’s actually kind of dumb.
So yeah, if I was single I’d probably at least try out using an iPhone again.
A young lady who is single has reached out to me, and during our email exchange she asked if perhaps I would be willing to give her a shoutout in the hopes I could help her find someone. I decided to follow the Maxis ‘red card rule’: She was the first person to ask, so the answer was yes (but people I don’t know who ask again would by default get a no so this doesn’t get out of hand). Asking rocks.
So here’s the description she sent me.
About Me: I studied at MIT and started a health company which I sold a few years ago. I don’t need to work-work again, so I’m focused on passion projects related to writing, art, learning languages, executive coaching, volunteering, etc. I love rock climbing, hiking, cycling, cooking, being with friends, babies, and love 🙂 (I have eggs frozen and definitely want kids).
I’ve mostly fallen for/dated mechanical or aerospace engineers who love to be active outside, and are super smart, kind, and passionate about their work.
If you know anyone in their 30s or early 40s who fits that description, I’d love to hear more about them. I live in the Bay Area but am open to moving for the right person and am working on dual EU citizenship. Photo below. Thank you so much!
You can reach out to her at anitsirhc491 at gmail.com. Good luck!
I was planning on including one more, but they’re not ready yet. So they’ll be in #5.
To be explicit: On the SS version of this post you can share your own dating doc, but if you’re going to do it, do it there. And here’s Nadia’s dating survey, she’s in LA.
The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over again expecting different results. Another definition of insanity is dating in 2024. Can’t quit now.
A guide to taking the perfect dating app photo. This area of your life is important, so if you intend to take dating apps seriously then you should take photo optimization seriously, and of course you can then also use the photos for other things.
Misha Gurevich: possibly evil idea: Dating app that trawls social media and websites and creates a database of individuals regardless of if they opt in or not, including as many photos and contact information as can be found.
Obviously this would be kind of a privacy violation and a lot of people would hate it.
but I imagine a solid subset of singles who are lonely but HATE the app experience would be grateful to be found this way.
No big deal, all we are doing is taking all the data about private citizens on the web and presenting it to any stranger who wants it in easy form as if you might want to date them. Or stalk them. Or do anything else, really.
And you thought AI training data was getting out of hand before.
All right, so let’s consider the good, or at least not obviously evil, version of this.
There is no need to fill out an intentional profile, or engage in specific actions, other than opting in. We gather all the information off the public web. We use AI to amalgamate all the data, assemble in-depth profiles and models of all the people. If it thinks there is a plausible match, then it sets it up. Since we are in danger of getting high on the creepiness meter, let’s say the woman gets to select who gets contacted first, then if both want to match in succession you put them in contact. Ideally you’d also use AI to facilitate in various other ways, let people say what they actually want in natural language, let the AI ask follow-up questions to find potential matches or do checks first (e.g. ‘I would say yes if you can confirm that he…’) and so on.
There is definitely not enough deep work being done trying to overturn the system.
– Sick of men inboxing women (“the patriarchy is so creepy and icky!”)
– Starts dating app to reverse the natural order (women now make the first move! So empowering! So brave & stunning!)
– Women complain it’s exhausting
– Reinstate the natural law
Hardcore Siege: It’s such ridiculous headline. I have never gotten an opener on Bumble besides “hey”, women never actually work go start a conversation or have a good opener, they’re literally just re-approving the ability of the man to start the conversation.
Outa: Anyone that’s used it would tell you that 99% of the time they would just leave a “hey” or “.”
Casey Handmer: AFAIK no one has yet made a dating app where the cost of sending messages is increased if you’re a creep. This would be technologically easy to do, and would let the market solve the problem.
Several interesting things here.
Many ‘women never actually initiated the conversation’ responses. Women say ‘hey’ to bypass the requirement almost all the time. That is not obviously useless as a secondary approval, but it presumably is not worth the bother.
This was among women who self-selected into the app with mandatory female openers, so yeah, women really really do not want to open.
If you are willing to open for real and put effort into it, that is a huge advantage.
Never open with ‘hey’ under other circumstances, but this makes it tough to be that upset with guys who do open with ‘hey.’ We see the shoe on the other foot.
Bumble had something slightly unique about it. Now it doesn’t. It seems that the hill climb wants what it wants, and any service that tries a variant inevitably ends up back at the same old swipe.
Casey’s alternative suggestion requires telling creeps exactly how creepy the algorithm thinks they are, and also charging for messages, so it presumably is a non-starter. We keep trying various versions of ‘what if we used adjusting prices to correct for externalities’ to solve problems, because that is how problems get solved, and it keeps failing because people do not like it. But yes, using a feedback system would totally work on a mechanical level if people were ok with it.
Bumble does still have at least one interesting feature, which is that you can potentially see who passed on your profile. This is huge. You can look for correlations and patterns. Even if all you knew was how many views you got and what percentage swiped how, that is a big game for being able to make decisions and improve.
Long suffering dating app user Shoshana Weismann explains how a proposed Colorado bill, and other similar bills, would make this horrible experience even worse. It would require dating apps to file an annual report listing all misconduct reports, which would then become public. As in, her model of how this law would work is that if someone complains to the dating app about you, that would go in the public record. I am skeptical that is what would actually happen based on my quick reading, but none of the alternative interpretations are good, they are merely less bad. I assume Governor Polis would never sign this either way.
Justine Moore: It would be fun to have a dating app where you chat for a while, set up a date, and when you show up IRL you find out if it’s a real person or an AI bf/gf.
And then you have to decide if you move forward with the relationship.
Also could be the next big reality show??
mb: Isn’t this the plotline of every catfish episode
Justine Moore: yes but like everything, it needs to be reinvented with ~AI~ 🪄
Cassette AI: “Dude I just matched with a model”
“No way”
“Yeah large language”
Love it. Sure, why not. It would not shock me if the good match rate was substantially higher, because everyone is forced to put in an effort to avoid embarrassment or being thought of as an AI, so even with 50% of matches being fake you still might come out ahead. Also, who is to say you need 50% AIs in order to keep people on their toes?
Roko explains that while (in his view) women ultimately do not care that much about looks, dating apps start off filtering for looks, which are fast to check and hard to fake, so looks take on massively outsized importance on apps. If you have other things to offer, you get filtered out before you can provide evidence of that, whether that is wealth, intelligence, sense of humor or anything else.
I would add, just like real life. This is not a new problem.
Nor is it a one-way issue. Even if men ultimately care about looks a lot more than women, their first impressions will care about looks even more.
This means everyone gets oversized reward for optimizing physical appearance to the extent they can modify this, along with other superficial app profile components, and get less return for actually being of value.
This is not good for civilization. As Roko says it means the market cannot clear.
It also means that highly attractive men are overvalued, the same way tall men are overvalued, whereas less attractive men are undervalued, even after adjusting for true and long term preference, doubling down on what I noted last time.
A great universal strategy is to look for a differential between what you value and what the market values. Ideally, you would train two AIs.
One AI evaluates potential matches based on typical market preferences, ideally via revealed preference data, with a large emphasis on looks. Another AI evaluates potential matches based on your own quirky preferences.
You are ideally looking for people who score well on your metric and relatively less well on the market metric. If someone is super high on both you can and should go for it but it will get rough fast, and you will always have to worry about potential rivals. Instead, focus on investigating to find an especially good match.
Also note that this is not only about looks, and includes attributes over which you have more control. As noted last time, Rob Henderson finds that women in their twenties swipe right (‘like’) twice as often for a man with a master’s degree over a bachelor’s degree. A masters is a lot easier to get than a PhD, and a lot less valuable, and this is compared to a bachelor’s, so the returns to all education look high even if every other form of return is worth nothing.
Matthew Yglesias: My advice to the young men out there is [identifying as Republican] is going to make it a lot harder to find girls who want to go out with you.
Mike Solana: Man it’s really bad when all you have left is “vote for democrats or the craziest women alive won’t sleep with you.”
Mason: Matt completely misunderstands women here. They won’t admit it on pain of death, but the great majority of young liberal women would absolutely swoon for a man 2-8 years their senior who teases them about their politics while opening doors and paying for dinner.
…
I promise you, your problem isn’t who you voted for. It’s who you are and how you behave. Sorry.
If honestly identifying your political beliefs would make someone not want to date you, then you presumably do not want to date them. This is even more true if those people are doing this as part of a strategy to force falsification of your beliefs.
I thought of four potential arguments the other way.
If you are looking for something highly casual and short term, then you might not care about such questions. I would first respond that even in the short term hiding yourself and what you believe can get expensive, but not always and not for everyone. I would then give the real objection. One should essentially never care only about the pure short term. The possibility of a potential long term outcome is a lot of what makes things exciting and fun, and also has much of the value.
At that age you need reps and you need to know what it is like out there, and getting off the ground is hard, so you should suck it up as needed at first.
Perhaps this political preference is a superficial filter, like looks on dating apps. It is not that she does not care, it is that it is not actually important to her. So you do not have to falsify your beliefs so much as dodge the question and avoid emphasis, until you connect to each other as people. There is some of this. Certainly I can respect a position of the form ‘I don’t mind dating a [Republican / Democrat / Libertarian] but I do mind dating one who won’t shut up about it.’
You want to maintain strong perception of market value and social proof. I don’t love it, and you are making the problem worse and defecting, but I understand it.
The men, this data claims, are getting more conservative, in many ways even more conservative than older men. The women are getting more left-wing. Neither finds the other’s politics alluring, even more than usual.
Paul Graham speculated this is due to a lack of male-female interaction, to which Nevin Climenhaga responded one could test this by looking at the impact of what siblings people have, and Scott Alexander decided to check his data. No effect:
Science Banana: I haven’t been keeping track but this is at least the third dataset I’ve seen failing to replicate the finding for the US.
Ryan Burge: The finding that young women are becoming a lot more liberal [from the above graph] while young men are becoming a lot more conservative DOES NOT REPLICATE in the Cooperative Election Study. In fact, the two lines have run in almost perfect parallel for the last 15 years.
Skeptic Research Center Team: Our snapshot of five generations of the American public indicates that the gap between men and women is smaller in younger generations because men and women are both becoming more liberal (see chart on the left below). Importantly, our data also indicate that a growing percentage of Americans are identifying as moderate (see chart on the right below).
Regardless of of size of the gap, no one questions there is a substantial gap.
Since time began, the argument ‘modify who you are and what you believe and stand for and falsify your preferences because it will get you laid’ has been strong. Normally it is given a fig leaf of some kind, so I do appreciate the refreshing honesty on display. Yes, it is rather horrifying, but given the choices available I’ll take the explicit version.
Falsifying your preferences in such ways too aggressively creates negative selection. You also have to walk tricky paths, since full embrace of the explicit doctrines will imply many actions that cripple your dating opportunities and experiences. And once you start playing such games, the rabbit hole never really ends. So in general, I think this is very much not the way.
Going too hard in the other direction is also not the way. Teasing is one thing, but one needs to be able to get along, up to the point where there are those with whom you would not want to get along. There are certain things that, if said out loud especially too early, will be red flags and dealbreakers, and cripple your prospects. So do not say those things in such ways, keep it to yourself, even if the view is held by a lot of others as well. Pick your battles, then pick less battles than that. To some extent it is a skill issue where you can learn how to do it right. To some extent it isn’t.
You hopefully have much better things to talk about than politics anyway. If someone is all about the politics, they are a bad pick, even if your politics are aligned.
An interesting perspective from Scott Alexander for Valentine’s Day: Love is the one area of life where we have decided to entrust everything to the free market, so long everyone involved consents, and decided not to force anyone to do anything. Somehow, despite doing less of this in many other places, we continue to do it with love and sex and dating. So we should celebrate this oasis while we still have it.
I mean, in general, no, that would not be the greatest idea. You need to be very willing to abort mission if it is not working. But, if you do anything that is you, in a personal and friendly and fun way, that they are vibing with, that can work. If you make an effort, you too can demonstrate value. This is no mere ramble.
Rosey: This is innovation I’m sorry you can’t see that.
It is almost a free action if you wanted the drink anyway. Waste not, want not.
Should you go the extra mile? Remember, if she wanted to, she would. In this case, see a cute guy at the grocery store, get his name by spying the credit card, Google him to confirm he is single, find his mother, join her book club, befriend her, casually mention that she is single, have the mom do a setup.
So which is it?
F House Bunny: Let’s not sugar coat this. She’s a stalker. A massive one. Too dumb to realise what she’s admitting.
Bennett’s Phylactery: This is actually normal & good woman behavior.
I say it is mostly the second one. Certainly I would have, at all points in my life, been fine with this type of procedure. Nowadays she would see I am married and I would never know. Back in the day, I now have an option, and one that has made real investment up front. So yeah, sounds great.
Is it creepy? Well, sure, it’s a little creepy, and would be too creepy if you did this full set of actions fully gender flipped. But the right amount of creepy is not zero, and gender flipping matters. Play to win the game.
Scott Lincicome: This list raises far more questions than it answers. Far more.
Manifold Love points out that ‘wait until you have indisputable evidence of her interest to even flirt’ is not actually the safe play. It means you are unwilling or unable to calibrate your response to the situation and play the mutual escalation dance, that you show you lack skill and are afraid and think proceeding would not be safe (so why should she disagree with your assessment?). And it means she can’t get a read on you.
Maeby: Oh nothing too fancy just a nitpick about wording!
– if u tell an average guy “women need to know they’re safe,” the guy will think “ok got it be as nonviolent and asexual as possible” So a better way to say it is “women need to know they’re EMOTIONALLY safe/attuned to”
I would not quite say ABF (Always Be Flirting) but yeah, outside of particular contexts where you need to avoid it, even if you have zero intention of ever going anywhere with it, basically always be flirting in a highly calibrated to the situation way? It’s the way to Git Gud and makes life more interesting and allows good things to happen.
Manifold Love: pro-tip: if a woman measures her hand against yours, this is almost always flirtation.
The Manifold Love Twitter account in general has a steady stream of advice and coverage of related issues. At the time I checked it was largely amounting to ‘get out there, flirt, date, fail, pay attention to the specific person in front of you,’ which of course is very good advice, the archives seem to move around a bunch. It is mostly written by GoblinOdds, it seems, where you get more of a person figuring things out attitude. Both seem pretty good if you want that product.
Dan Kras goes on experiments in speed dating and AI matchmaking. About 57% of participants got at least one two-way match from the events he hosted, which sounds like an excellent use of time, and average rating out of 5 was about 4.4. Good product. Unfortunately, the events consistently lost money.
The AI matchmaking was based on the principle that there are some very good predictors of compatibility, especially if people tell you a bunch of things, and then you can charge for good matches since they are worth a lot. I’m not sure how much it even counts as AI. As is usually the case, it failed because it is a new dating app, and it did not have critical mass of users to start making matches.
How should you think about how often to ask?
Uncatherio: I thought you guys-interested-in-women would find it helpful to know – around here, available ladies are 3x more likely to prefer being approached more rather than less, so additional advances on the margin are likely welcome!
Among women available to men, the preference here is over 4x, although of course quality always matters, ‘hello human resources’ and all that. However, if you include the women ‘not available to men’ in the group, and assume for them it is false, this jumps closer to 1:1, so it helps a lot to do some research.
Either way it is also not the correct question. The right question, in terms of whether you are providing value by asking, is: How big is the upside for the women who want to be asked more, versus the downside for those who want to be asked less? This is a question with typically much more upside than downside, which is why women want to be asked more even though they will still (presumably) turn down the majority of the additional offers, but with exceptions where the downside is large. So the main thing to do is guard against the big downsides. That principle can extend.
So, for example, this would be a ‘big downside, don’t do that’ situation:
In general I am pro-flirting, and I am pro-asking, and pro carpe diem and all that.
But of course there are obvious exceptions, so yes, new candidate for worst advice ever has dropped, he insists he is sincere, and everyone had fun with it for a few days:
Simon Ohler: someone on the vibecamp forum asked: “I have a raging crush on my boss who is married and I’m EXHAUSTED by this and want it to end. How to get over a crush?”
I enjoyed giving an answer and here it is:
Hi. This is a tough one.
See it like this: A crush is a package that you carry, and it has a recipient. For some reason you have it, and you have to carry it, and it doesn’t really go away, until you post it. Until then, it will exhaust you.
In my opinion and experience, the best way to get over a crush is to post the package. This means, first and foremost, to speak the truth about it. Ideally to the person who it concerns.
As you described, this is a bit risky because this is your boss. But I think a very healthy thing to do is to not rule out speaking to them outright.
Because once you begin to plan how to have this conversation, maybe how to stack a bunch of caveats before the reveal, how to prepare them to receive this unusual news – as you plan this, you will already give an energetic outlet to the crush, and the delivery process for the package starts.
Honesty is the best therapy. Crushes happen. Most crushes are not really about the other person. They are about you. They are a projection. Hence the name, and why they can RAGE.
Maybe it’s repressed eros in you, that is coming out sideways, by taking your boss into its grip. Maybe it’s something in you telling you that you should get out of this job, and a good way would be to tank your relationship with your boss. Who knows? Maybe you know? Surely your body knows?
Your boss will have had a crush before. If you make clear that you just need to get this off of your chest, you might be able to move through this and see another day, without your boss feeling too horrible. Maybe they will even support you. It’s certainly easier to deal with a truth that’s on the table, than to deal with the shifty behavior of someone who is hiding something.
Maybe as you plan, you realistically decide that it would indeed endanger your livelihood too much, if you told your boss. In that case, you need to put your eros to work elsewhere. How to do that is another topic.
One last advice I can give: Talk to your crush. And in this case, I don’t mean your boss, but your feeling. What does it want? What’s in the package? It’s clearly not a reasonable reproductive reciprocated strategy. So what is it? Talk to it until it reveals itself and what it wants, really. Maybe that way you and your boss can dodge an uncomfortable conversation.
Many blessings
S
Yeah, under no circumstances do you tell your married boss that you have a crush on them. In fact I’m going to go ahead and say that you almost always only need one of (boss, married) for this to apply. Both is overkill.
But do not give up all hope. Sometimes they are wrong.
My first podcast appearance went well. My first formal speech won a school prize. My first Magic tournament was a victory. My first post was not even intended to be a post, and people liked it anyway.
And without getting into details, my first [something else that importantly and especially is supposed to never go well the first time] was a roaring success.
Practice makes perfect. It is not exclusive. Hard work. Clean living. Beginner’s luck!
Amdr3jH: Good friend is mid 20s. In shape, gets over 5 million impressions per month, and roon likes on average 3 of his tweets per week + all his replies.
He gets consistently ghosted, ignored for days, or is told after a date or two that “this isn’t working.”
Modern women are broken.
Modern people and life are broken in all sorts of ways. But as always, you are the common denominator. If your dates never work then that means the problem is you.
Yes, he checks some important boxes, if the story is true. There are any number of things that he could still be doing importantly wrong. One of them, presumably, is that I am guessing he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, which stacks the deck against him. What he is offering is oversupplied there relative to demand. There are some other obvious suspects here as well.
Shoshana Weissmann: If you monetize my true dating stories all I ask for is a cut.
Definitely Not Advice (@stillnotadvice): Good friend is mid 30’s. Pretty face, no kids but wants a family, makes over $110k/year, has a huge property in the middle of nowhere.
She consistently gets ghosted, ignored for days, or is told after a date or two that “this isn’t working.”
Modern men are broken.
Alan: Good friend is mid 20s. In shape, makes over $300k/year, has a condo overlooking a great downtown.
He gets consistently ghosted, ignored for days, or is told after a date or two that “this isn’t working.”
Modern women are broken.
Charles Cooke: Maybe someone should introduce those two?
Dating is a mix of positive and negative selection.
If you are consistently failing at the ‘get a date at all’ stage, then that is tough. The modern world can make this difficult. But if you can’t find a way to get at least some dates through the apps, and you live in a populous region and have reasonable looks and a job and no obvious big red flags, that should be fixable.
If you are often getting to the first date, then failing consistently, I am positive you are doing something wrong. There is something you do not know, a skill you lack.
Then this thread introduces part 6, which is about what things women want versus what men think they want. It includes this graph, which I include because this is a great way to label what looks a lot like a random distribution.
Sasha Chapin: so background, i was a Canadian leftist who was successfully persuaded by a particular niche brand of feminism that masculinity is bad I would’ve thought it creepy to integrate my sexuality and my walking-around self so that they were smoothly connected rather than mutually unintelligible, and I think that’s the most important part of this series the funny thing is, this actually makes you less creepy.
The most striking thing about the original 4Chan chart is the description assuming dramatic described correlation between features. There are five or six distinct features described as if they always line up, when they most obviously don’t. The chart makes sense exactly because it is looking almost entirely at faces. The other thing that stands out is the idea that 10s only exist in the context of your particular preference. I don’t see why you would frame it that way.
The new test mostly tells us that facial attractiveness ratings are what you would expect, and there is reasonably good consensus about it.
It is true. Not fully or all the time, but it is mostly true.
Brittany Venti: One of the biggest lies told about relationships was that men want lingerie. Imagine the disappointment you have playing dress up games your whole life, only to grow up and find out that men literally don’t care about lingerie and that it’s mostly for the woman to feel cute.
Aella: This was one of the biggest misconceptions I had going into sex work. I’d put a lot of effort into dressing like what i thought a ‘sexy woman’ looked like – lacy lingerie, red lipstick, etc. – but none of that got men as hard as a $5 short skirt and tight t-shirt with no bra.
In general, the most successful outfit for seducing men is one that is a plausibly-accidentally-accessible version of clothes you might already be wearing. Jeans that slip too low when you bend over, nipples visible through casual shirt, etc.
I think of it as there being a thing called Fashion, which is about Glamour and Impressiveness and Status and such. Then there is a different thing called Sexy. Fashion is abstract and elegant and rivalrous. Sexy is practical and lived-in and non-rivalrous. There is a correlation between the two, but it is highly imperfect. Men like both, especially when others are watching, but mostly what men care about is Sexy.
A lot of people think quite a lot of things are inappropriate. Different worlds.
Helaine Olen: What’s really fascinating about this is that it’s women not men who are more likely to say this stuff is inappropriate.
If accurate, a quarter of people think it is not okay to have a private work meeting with someone of the wrong gender? Over a third of women are ruling out a car ride? I mean, wow. Inappropriate is not the same as not allowed, but still, wow. I presume that it isn’t actually that high and something about the framing warped responses, but even that shouldn’t be possible.
If someone actually does have a real problem with either of those in practice, that seems like a straight-up dealbreaker. For the meals, if this is ‘alone in your house’ then I could potentially see it, but if it applies to a restaurant it’s straight up nuts.
Derek Thompson: One of the more curious trends to jump out of the data is that many Americans have traded people for pets in our social time.
The average time that Americans spend with their pets has roughly doubled in the past 20 years —both because more people have adopted pets and because they spend more time with them. In 2003, the typical female pet owner spent much more time socializing with humans than playing with her cat or dog.
By 2022, this flipped, and the average woman with a pet now spends more time “actively engaged” with her pet than she spends hanging out face-to-face with fellow humans on any given day.
I realize that other people like cats and dogs a lot more than I do, and get things out of them that I do not. I still feel confident in saying: Do not be the person who does this. This is a not a good idea. If you are a wilderness tracker out with your hunting dog, I mean fine, that’s a choice. But for an ordinary pet? Please, no, it will not go well.
Selena: there are few things worse than dating a man who is cautious with his money,
If you notice this hesitancy on a date then just end it, his potential for greatness is non-existent.
Women intuitively understand that frugality is a psychiatric ailment.
DSM V criteria, medical fact.
You know this is true because the most frugal person you know never truly excels, they never get rich, they are completely risk averse. Frugality bleeds into every fibre of their being.
– to earn more you must spend more– to think more you must write more– to learn more you must teach more– to be loved you must love more NOBODY gets rich from saving money or investing in a 401k
Jessica Taylor: Contemporary people respond more positively to classism when it is voiced by a straight woman framing it as mate preference.
Moderation in all things. The most miserly, frugal person you know is presumably far too frugal. They are at best penny wise and pound foolish. If not, your local culture has a big problem.
Being not frugal enough? That is a much bigger problem. Being broke is expensive.
It is so sad that many people think you cannot get rich or ahead by holding down a job, saving money and investing in a 401k. This simply is not true.
When you see people who do not understand the need to care about or save money? Who think that if you have it, you should be willing to spend it? Or even worse, you should spend whatever even if it does not make sense or get anything worthwhile, and if you don’t have it? Because vibes? Run. Run as fast as you can.
That said, there is an important sense in which you do need to be fine with spending money. If you do not do this it will ruin the vibe. It is legitimate to care about this.
What you must avoid is allowing concerns about money to dominate thinking within the moment. It cannot be allowed to disrupt the flow of the evening. If they see you worrying about money, or worse they are forced to worry themselves, or do a bunch of calculations, that is double plus not good.
The fool’s way of doing this is to become a money pump, able to be talked into spending arbitrary amounts of money. To spend on anything and everything as if it is nothing, to show off that you are willing to spend it. That does not help you. You get nothing in exchange. You brand yourself a fool.
The wise man’s way is to engineer a situation in which the problem never comes up. Never let them see you sweat. Sweat the money in private, before the date or activity begins. Decide what you are willing to spend on or do. Choose so as to avoid proximate or conspicuous alternatives that would pressure you to spend. To the extent they are presented anyway or unavoidable, dismiss them without reference to cost.
Then, when the moment comes, embrace it and enjoy it.
This is the philosophy of Out to Get You. Engineer a situation in which you can safely Get Got or inconspicuously Get Compact. Otherwise Get Gone.
This goes beyond dating. It also goes beyond money.
You want to enjoy the moment too. I was brought up to always sweat all the details, always be critiquing and complaining and worrying. There is a lot of value and wisdom in that, it is far superior to the alternative of the unexamined life.
However, there is also a time and a place. Sometimes taking yourself out of the moment like that is terrible. When that happens, cache the issue and set it aside until later. Update on it if worthwhile, or don’t if it isn’t.
From the comments last time, Michael Roe points out another reason to stick to places that are reasonably priced, which is that it avoids putting the other person under pressure to reciprocate next time. Or, I would add, to avoid generating worries about expectations or a reason to feel bad. In general, showing people a nice time is good, but it is not good form to take people to places they themselves could not afford at all even if you are paying, with a partial exception if you are so visibly rich it is common knowledge that you can and will laugh the price off entirely.
Breakups suck.
Kyle: During college i can remember 6 male friends who went through long term relationship breakups. 3 of them lost their minds for a year and completely derailed their lives and the other 3 initiated the breakups [they’re doing well now].
Eigenrobot: how messed up people can get when a serious relationship goes under feels under-considered to me in discussing life trajectories.
Contemplate this on the tree of woe. Be careful with your heart, not that it will help
Hereward the Woke: Given that the end of even fairly juvenile or early-stage relationships can mess you up, it’s actually quite bad that our normative relationship model involves many people going through multiple might-as-well-be-divorces.
Different people get different kinds of derailed for different lengths of time. Being sad for a while afterwards and not dating anyone else for a bit is standard procedure and basically fine. Healthy, even. The key is not letting it derail the rest of your life.
Whenever one is in a relationship, one must sometimes worry about when it would be worthwhile to break up with them, and even more one must worry about when the other person might find it worthwhile to break up with you.
(While noting that this is explicitly a joke per account rules, also I mean obviously.)
Eliezer Yudkowsky: in a world of greater legibility, romantic partners would have the conversation about “I’d trade up if I found somebody 10%/25%/125% better than you” in advance, and make sure they have common knowledge of the numbers
(Marriage makes sense as a promise not to do that period; but if so, you want to make sure that both partners are on the same page about that. Not everyone assumes that marriage means that.)
Her: I am never, ever letting you go unless I find someone 75% better.
Me: Works for me.
Oh hello there Performative Allistic Twitter.
I guess people may legit not know how to express this without help, so, to reiterate: As you go on dating, you both accumulate human capital specialized on each other, and it becomes harder for someone else to be 25% better.
Furthermore if you’re marrying or have kids, you both may just not want to worry about the other finding someone 75% better. But this kind of commitment is only meaningful if you’re dating someone with the power to admit and speak aloud which algorithm they use.
Someone who performs “But I would never! Only a terrible person would think so coldly!” may very much be running a tradeup algorithm even after they marry you and have a kid, and they wouldn’t know it themselves.
Etienne: why is everyone reacting to this as if it was meant as an alternative to explicit lifelong commitment, when it’s quite obviously meant as an alternative to “trading up” anyway but without ever discussing expectations first.
shill: the responses to this tweet are hilarious because they make it very obvious when someone just does not get the mindset here. I’ll give you a hint: “125% better” etc. is not a precise measurement
…
Beatrice Leydier: why would you dump your partner for someone 25% better when you can just slowly nag them into becoming 25% better like a normal person.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: I sent this to gf and she messaged back “on it.”
You know what, I’ll give up and provide this thread’s actual context: GF is ex couples counselor (also ex Google SRE), and saw a reality show about troubled couples deciding whether to break up after dating a different attractive person for 3 weeks.
Nate Soares: reactions to this are like a microcosm of why you usually can’t trust humans with consequentialism.
“it ignores how relationships get better with investment” nope, that’s an increase in your value to each other that makes it harder to find someone worth trading up for.
“it ignores that the shiny new relationship has a high risk of failure” nope, that’s a reason why one might wrongly overestimate the value of a shiny new person.
it’s notable that so many people object “but ‘value’ doesn’t capture…” rather than cautioning “people might neglect the value of…”. as if the word “value” must cover only the shallow and superficial features; as if no word is allowed to capture the deeper intangibles.
It seems many people intuitively think that words like “value” can only apply to the legible and easily articulable aspects of things.
Which sure would explain why many people hate on consequentialism; [legible-consequence]alism is a much worse moral theory than [comprehensive-consequence]alism.
Mason (responding to OP): This is a recipe for off the charts neuroticism and a surprise mood disorder.
Ruxandra Teslo (responding to OP): This is such a cursed worldview.
Aella: this is the way most people operate, just nobody likes admitting it to themselves.
My apologies guys, i was wrong. i forgot about how most people actually date people either well above or below their own attractiveness level, how women don’t resonate with the message ‘you go girl, get a high quality man’ and thus it’s not present in culture at all. [goes on like this]
The alternative to having no idea where you stand is having a better idea where you stand. Relationships without very deep commitments have a threshold where the situation is bad enough that one person would leave the other even without the ability to trade up, either ‘on spec’ or because nothing is already an improvement.
Knowing you are on the edge of that is quite stressful. But not knowing if you are or not, and not knowing where the threshold might be, is not obviously better.
Is ignorance bliss, or is it paranoia? Could go either way.
I do think part of being in a typical relationship is, past the early stages, a promise not to actively pursue trading up. Until marriage you are not promising to be with them forever, or to stay barring some calamity. However you are promising that you will not engage in various activities without ending the relationship first. You cannot cheat. You cannot work to line up your next relationship. These things are not okay.
If you can actively pursue and negotiate (or even try out) other suitors first, thus allowing a trade-up to be risk-free, then that is a different type of relationship. That needs to be explicit.
Is there a threshold where you would break those rules? Presumably yes. The right amount of information on that threshold is usually not zero. It also usually is not an exact formula. And there are many cases like this where in sufficiently extreme cases one likely breaks the rules, but part of the mechanism design is that you must bear the cost of breaking the rule. It is not always correct to say ‘well, if X happens I would do Y, so we should change the rules so X allows me to do Y,’ especially if you have a say in whether X happens.
Since many who read this consider it: What about under polyamory?
Aella: One underrated benefit of polyamory is u don’t have to dump anyone when you meet someone 25% better for you
One feature of polyamory is that it means continuous auditions of potential replacements by all parties. You are not trading up in the sense that you can have multiple partners, but one thing leads to another and there are only so many hours in the day.
If you are monogamous, and you meet someone plausibly 25% better, by default what happens is nothing. There is no pressure to explore that possibility, to see if you might be able to upgrade, or even find out if the person is available. It is not an issue.
If you are polyamorous, and you meet someone plausibly 25% better, or even someone 0% better (I mean the person you are with is pretty good, no?) you are honor bound to try and make it happen. This is a problem, and can become a much bigger problem (or opportunity, or both) if you succeed. You get a lot more information.
Yes, you do not have to flat out dump the original person. But if the new person is indeed better, it is not as if the original relationship is going to continue as before.
The argument goes, people write books because they have issues, and are screwed up, and are likely destined for terrible relationships no matter what, imagine reading what ‘monogamy advocates’ were saying and how that would turn out. Most people who actually practice polyamory would give boring advice and are doing great.
I buy that the people writing polyamory books (and, by extension, blog posts) have issues, and more issues on average than other poly people. That does not mean we cannot judge what they have to say, whether or not the original article in The Atlantic was doing so fairly.
As usual, if you were making a bad generalization, stop doing so, whether or not the conclusion was true. If it is true, get there for the right reasons.
Also, few people (reading this, anyway) hate polyamory, they simply disagree about expected outcomes on a variety of fronts. I continue to think that there is a time and a place and a person where polyamory is the correct choice, but that the majority of the time someone thinks it is a good idea right here, right now, that they are wrong.
Scott then follows up with a highlights from the comments, where the arguments against polyamory seem convincing. In particular, there are fewer children, and those children that there are generally end up in worse positions and at more risk, and the whole thing is a giant time sink even when done right without overall looking better even after those costs are paid. He also promises that this link is a doozy.
yatharth: oh, I see. Societies evolved taboos and rituals around sex, not because they were a morally inferior, irrational species, but because sex routinely fucked social relations up, and the cultures that survived were the ones that had guardrails in place,
Aella: this is partially why people who pull off polyamory successfully are hyper-skilled with communication, emotional regulation and self-awareness. Not saying monogomous people aren’t that, only that you don’t *haveto be that in order to pull off monogamy.
I’m sure you all know that one couple who have the emotional processing ability of a cantaloupe but have somehow stayed married for 20 years. If they’d tried poly (in today’s climate, with zero cultural support or general knowhow), their relationship woulda fallen apart.
Most people are not hyper-skilled in anything. Certainly they are not hyper-skilled in communication, emotional regulation and self-awareness.
(Almost?) nothing successful at a mass scale requires hyper-skill. If your social relational system, or any other product or service, requires hyper-skill, your system is at best for a very small group of people. Even if the product is so good for the select few that it is worth doing a lot of work to qualify, and there are many such cases, encouraging widespread adaptation of something this demanding is to do most people a disservice.
Also people hate thinking and complexity and the inability to fully relax.
Brooke Bowman: I want all of my male friends to be in happy, fulfilling relationships for the entirely selfish reason that it is SO NICE to have friendships where there’s no weirdness around ‘are they into me’ or ‘do they think I’m into them’
Ah this was polyamory erasure sorry everyone.
Tbf I do struggle with feeling anxious around poly friends for this reason, but that’s a skill issue.
I mean I suppose like almost everything else it is in some sense a skill issue. But a sufficiently difficult skill issue reduces to an issue. If you too are poly then oh boy is the skill threshold here high. It really is great not to have to worry about who is or is not into whom, or what dynamics might be going on, and to not feel like you are missing out on constant potential opportunity.
I may have trapped priors, but all this reinforces to me that polyamory is generally a deeply bad idea for humans, albeit with notably rare exceptions that are extraordinarily good fits.
Also, there was a polyamorous dating show about couples seeking to add a third person, and yeah, missed opportunity.
Kevin: Why did they call the poly dating show “Couple to Throuple” when they could have called it “The Three-Body Problem”?
What should you be looking for in a romantic partner?
He notes that similarity between partners is the rule but does not predict satisfaction, speculating it is necessary but insufficient. If it is so commonly prioritized or chosen and does not correlate, that could mean it is typically beneficial, it could also represent how we meet people and how matches are made in the dating market. I would assume people are roughly correctly rating similarly?
Authenticity and openness with your partner tends to be reciprocal and strongly predicts relationship satisfaction. That makes sense, this is underrated.
Attractiveness of your partner relative to your options predicts happiness. If you are more attractive than your partner and could do better, you will be less happy. Well yes, that makes sense ceteris paribus, but this is not obviously underrated as a consideration. In general the principle is, if you could do better, you’ll feel it, and that is in terms of whatever it is you care about.
As he points out, this also suggests that trying to ‘date up’ too aggressively is a mistake, as dates once gained must be maintained. If you do this you need to ensure it is an unusually good match on details, and invest heavily.
Plan ahead. The endgame for most people should be a family and children, so consider potential dates in that light from the start. That doesn’t mean never have fun but keep your eye on the ball.
Here are some red flags he notes from Shawn Smith’s book Gatekeeper: Shifting responsibility for managing emotions, forcing you to play guessing games, assaulting your character (e.g. ‘you always do that’ or ‘you never listen’) and the silent treatment.
Some green flags? Clarity, maturity including emotional maturity meaning things like calming yourself, accepting reality, not acting on impulse and keeping commitments, stability, inquisitiveness.
That all seems directionally right as far as it goes. That does not tell you how to prioritize.
Then there is this article in The Cut by Grazie Sophia Cristie that made the rounds about the argument for intentionally marrying an older man, in this case meeting him at 30 when she was 20.
The author starts out saying they buy lottery tickets without even checking to see if they win, and mentions asking for cigarettes, which do not seem like the ways one provides evidence of a tendency to make good choices.
I did like this line, which seems right, in at least some senses?
When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.
The basic argument she makes is straightforward, and goes something like this: Dating a younger man means teaching and crafting them into someone women want. Then they probably leave you for another woman anyway. When you date within your own age group, the playing field is level, and you waste the years when your stock is highest. Why not skip all that, free ride on the efforts of others, find a man who highly values what you offer and cash in (in many senses) while the getting is good? A man who will tell you who he is and what he wants, so you can evaluate up front if you want to match with that. Providing what a (modestly) older guy wants will make him love you, and it will pay big dividends.
Also she endlessly complains about younger men, including her own brother, failing at what she sees as basic life skills. How dare they not know the proper way to do laundry, or pack a suitcase. Idiots. It is odd how important this sort of thing seems to her, and she is not alone.
Diana Fleischman (responding to article): Men are changed by women, often for the better. And a civilized man is a gift women give to one another, but rarely acknowledge.
Salome Sibonex: Counterpoint: You didn’t “civilize” your boyfriend, he satiated your neuroticism.
Women are more neurotic, thus less tolerant of certain things not going their way, like social niceties or home decor. I AM this woman! I make my boyfriend’s life prettier and cleaner, but this is largely for my benefit. I don’t need to flatter myself by thinking my neuroticism is a superior sensibility that civilizes degenerate men.
This is important because it prevents me from being resentful when some of these preferences aren’t met. Instead of thinking my partner “uncivilized”, I realize we have different preferences and sensitivities for those preferences going unmet.
Men generally care less about how suitcases are packed or whether their towel is on the floor, so they give in when women do. If both sides are reasonable, both will benefit—no self-righteousness necessary.
This moralized conceptualization of what are essentially basic sex differences encourages women to think of themselves as long-suffering under-appreciated saints, which is an unpleasant mindset and makes the reality of a relationship seem unduly negative.
This is naturally a case where somewhere in the middle, the truth lies. The right amount of attention to such matters is not zero, even purely for one’s own benefit. A lot of such actions, however, are not at all about that.
What Grazie Sophia Christie actually wanted, in general, seems like a guy with his life together, and who ran a smooth operation, and take charge and enable life to happen. That is only partly an age thing. Not that many people have that these days, no matter how old. This was a highly unusually put together guy for 30 years old.
She worries that by doing this she is defecting, ‘taking advantage of his disadvantage.’ As long as she understands what she is doing and honors the deal she is making, I do not see a problem. Her husband is doing fine. This is very much gains from trade.
However, she is very clearly defecting in the broader game. By her own model, if women did this more often, the guys in their 20s wouldn’t become the guys in their 30s that she wants them to be. She sees others as doing the work, and she wants to then reap the benefits. It is her choice how much to care about this.
How much of her model is accurate? Not zero. My guess is not much.
There are subcultures where the population growth rate is so rapid that a typical age cap causes balance issues, but if the population is roughly stable then there is nothing out of equilibrium about having age gaps. Yes, this means the youngest men miss out, but focusing on career at that age until you have yourself more together seems fine, and yes men can learn the necessary skills other ways, including now via asking a chatbot (VR experiences coming soonish), or learn them rapidly later on when they are more ready for them. And of course it also means that older women miss out if they don’t already have a match, even more than they already do, but this could be offset by having more long term matches.
David Karsten: Three thoughts, from having been on the dating app market for the first time ever this year:
1. The fact that many folks don’t want to really succeed, they want to just “have a match happen” cannot be overstated, at every level. You’d be amazed how many people don’t want to spend $30 a month for a dating app membership, even though they’d value finding a partner at $X thousands of dollars a month. You’d be amazed how many people don’t follow up with those they text. Etc.
2. As a result, you cannot _possibly_ imagine how not-in-it-for-the-long-term the average guy on these apps are. Functionally every woman has a story about a real jerk, and often defensive comments on their profile accordingly. Being even moderately decent has above-average returns.
3. The incel movement is a detailed UX complaint about Tinder, as far as I can tell. Other apps vary quite a lot! Sometimes switching to a new app and keeping the same strategy has outsized returns.
This is great news. You can both switch apps and use superior tactics, such as ‘caring at all,’ ‘not being a jerk’ and ‘responding when they text.’ Then you can enjoy the oversized returns.
Grant McKinney says they count as not even trying, they’ve never ‘made a serious attempt at flirting,’ in terms of not trying to have it go anywhere. I pointed out that the best flirting is done because it is fun, so Grant was doing it right except for pulling back rather than continuing to escalate (or accept escalations) in increasingly risque directions when things go well.
Brett Bellmore reports the upside of online dating in getting around social phobias, and also suggests that if you are serious you consider foreign dating sites.
Brett Bellmore: My personal experience may be relevant: I literally did not date until I was in my early 40’s. In my case this was due to a traumatic childhood event; Apparently the school nerd was NOT supposed to chat up a member of the cheer leading squad; The penalty was immediate and physical, and induced a pretty severe social phobia. Jr high could be a rough place in the 70’s. Having Asperger’s didn’t help, of course.
Online dating got me past this, as my social phobia didn’t kick in unless I was face to face with a woman, and by the time the online relationship had progressed to us meeting, I’d relaxed a bit. I really can’t recommend it too much, it didn’t just get me a date, it got me married.
Here’s some serious advice: Try foreign dating sites, if you’re really looking for a wife, not just some fun. The US has become somewhat matriarchal, and when a guy from a semi-matriarchal society meets a girl from a still somewhat patriarchal society, you get a very beneficial culture clash: You both end up exceeding the other’s expectations by simply doing the minimum your own culture demands.
As well, the economic principle of comparative advantage kicks in. You may be nothing special by local standards, and still a superb catch to some girl in a 2nd world country, which means your bidding power is higher than you might think. I certainly didn’t end up married to this cutie by being a movie star…
As well, the international sites specialize in women who ARE looking for a husband, not a one night stand. Tinder might be a good place to go if you don’t like eating out alone, but is it a good place to look for a wife?
Anyway, that’s my experience.
This is the one I found my wife at, but there are a whole series of allied sites they run for different countries: Filipina Hearts.
The problem with foreign dating sites is of course adverse selection. This is the ultimate lemon market and potential trick. You run a huge risk they (either the website or the woman or both) are there to scam you or only after the visa. Claude directed me to some ‘review websites’ I will not be linking to, as they did not put my mind at all at ease on your behalf, and provided the usual advice of being generally wary of signs of trouble.
Gunflint suggests the ‘fake wedding band’ trick, as the ring puts women at ease. I am of course strongly opposed on principle, also the adverse selection is terrible and lying even by implication is bad for your soul and your future relationship, and also you risk romantic comedy hijinks ensuing if you are foolish enough to double down.
Mike Hind: I got plenty of matches on Tinder by emphasising what I offered rather than what I was looking for. That one weird trick makes you stand out.
Marthinwurer: I have now added “I can fix your furniture” to my tinder bio.
myst_05: I can confirm “btw I’m good at [DIY]” works well.
First emphasizing what you offer them is always good marketing. This is especially true if you are having trouble getting enough matches. It has a different positive selection effect, you want them to want what you are happy to offer. It does mean you get less selection in them having what you want.
Shout points out that being asked your body count is not only something you can often strategically avoid, when you can’t avoid it this is an opportunity to send a message that matches your strategy and forward goals. Also notes that a lot of the concerns that result are ‘you will get bored with me and my lack of experience’ so if your number is coming in high you want to head that off right away or even use addressing that as a way to dodge the question.
Bob Jones requests a way for a guy to tell if they are bottom 25/10/1% desirability, and how to handle it if you are, and when one should consider giving up.
I affirm my partial answer there, which is that unless you have major health (including mental health) issues the chance you are reading this yet still unfixibly in the bottom 10% (or even 25%) is almost zero. I would add that most of the things that one needs to fix to get out of the extreme low end, things like being able to talk to people and being in a decent financial position and fitness and hygiene are almost all things you should prioritize fixing anyway, even if you had zero interest in sex or dating.
It is still useful to know where you are at. John suggests that Bumble lets you know who passed on your profile as I also noted above, which helps you know where you are at although getting a baseline is still tricky.
The life of a professional bridesmaid. All she had to do was put up a Craigslist ad and she was inundated with requests, media inquiries and even marriage proposals. So if you are thinking of doing this, the market is probably still wide open.
She says she makes ‘over $100k’ stepping up to make weddings not become horrible disasters, filling in for those who do not have people they can count on. Cost starts at $2.5k, given the other costs involved sounds like the service is worth every penny and more. Alas, despite overwhelming demand she is having trouble getting the business to scale, finding the right new people is hard. It seems like a fine job, with odd but good hours overall, and a rewarding experience, but also a demanding and stressful one. Everything is so high stakes for everyone around you, all the time.
One thing that surprised me was that she succeeded while looking this good. One of the big dangers with bridesmaids is that they risk outshining the bride.
Alexander (Keeper.ai): Why are so many young men single? Are they excluded from a brutal mating market by society? Probably not: 45% of men age 18-25 [and 29% of all men per the graph] have never approached a woman in person. These men are significantly more risk-averse than those men who do approach women.
Not never in the last year. Never as in never. Not once.
For the last year it’s over 60% across the board.
Alexander: What about men who do approach? Most are successful to some extent. 68% reported making at least one successful romantic connection.
Alexander, from later: A few people asked what approach means here. I asked: When was the last time you asked a woman in person for a date on the street/in a bar or club/at school or class/at work/at a hobby or social gathering / other location. Common meeting places and not necessarily strangers.]
This is actually a whitepill: it isn’t the powerful forces of society at large that explain young male singledom. It’s much more mundane. Young men are simply not trying.
Robin Hanson: I gotta blame women as much as men for [the graphs below].
Alexander: What about men who do approach? Most are successful to some extent. 68% reported making at least one successful romantic connection.
If you want to date women you are going to have to, at some point, go talk to one of them. Often it works, at least somewhat. 80% got at least one contact. That can be very good even if it does not go anywhere romantically. Americans nowadays could really use Platonic friends as well. Almost half of approachers got laid, 28% got a two month relationship out of it.
13% got a long term one they wouldn’t have otherwise had. That is not a huge conversion rate, but notice how often this is from only one first date. The implied odds from a series of first dates (until an LTR candidate is found) are much, much better.
It certainly appears to be true, as Robin Hanson is presumably referring to, that women more often these days choose not to make this easy, ramping up the fear and cost of rejection by choosing to deliberately inflict social or emotional costs as part of the rejection, as opposed to not doing that or even doing the opposite. The old situation where women had legitimate fears forcing them to do the opposite was quite bad. But deliberately choosing to make things harder and more painful is not going to match up incentives the way anyone would like.
Alexander goes on to notice that high internal locus of control (LoC) is associated with dating success, although I am sure this is bidirectional causation.
Alexander: Some people will read this and say “but I’m in the bottom 1% of men and I have approached a thousand women, no bites.” OK – you’re a special case. But your situation is not why 50% of Zoomers are single.
The selection effects are the obvious objection. Obviously those who choose to not approach would have somewhat worse odds. How strong are these and other selection effects? There is certainly a very strong correlation between actually approaching and counterfactual success rate of the marginal approach, for many obvious reasons.
“Men are afraid of losing their job / me too / legal consequences / etc.”
1. Most men cited fear of rejection.
2. This is risk aversion. You live in the same environment as everyone else. You’re afraid to approach; other men are not.
It is not only risk aversion. It is also anticipation of consistent failure. Which sucks and is self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing. Even if the only thing you have to fear is fear itself, failure increases your fear, so you should have some additional fear of failure.
It is still worth emphasizing that as long as you use caution where you work and with those who are central to your social circles, and treat everyone involved well or even not too badly, the risks other than the sting rejection are statistically minimal. It’s all about rejection.
Which, to be clear, sucks. But it sucks so much less than it is given credit for.
Auudrey Horne: there’s a type of Christian girl i know who never gave herself the chance of finding love, but wrapped herself up in a protective nest of tea, cats, crafts and YA fiction.. never dating or trying to date, and not bitter about it either.
Miri Vinnie: This is probably the most common type of never-married woman among the over-35 college educated, in my experience Usually very sweet and thoughtful. View marriage as something that could be nice, but stubbornly disinterested in compromising their introverted lifestyle to find it
FrankenMishra: gotta start putting my phone number into paperbacks in the SFF section at used bookstores.
Women post sexier pictures of themselves on Instagram in areas of greater income inequality. This is because these areas have fewer high status men to date or marry, thus greater intrasexual competition. All else being equal, for every one standard deviation increase in income inequality in a city, the number of sexy selfies goes up by 31-34%. (“Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media”)
I would clarify the mechanism. It is not that there are fewer high status men. It is literally that there is greater inequality between the perceived value of men, and also that the returns to finding the right man look better compared to the value of one’s own marginal production otherwise. This in turn drives up returns to sexiness.
If this is the future, such companions have no future. Not that there seems to be anything much better out there as of yet. It has been almost a year since the AI news turned into a torrent, and no one has been able to deliver a reasonable product on any level.
As far as I’ve heard? They’re no good for actual companionship. They’re no good for interesting conversation. They’re no good for practice and training. They’re no good for sexting or porn. No virtual or augmented reality. Nothing.
Regular generative AI, like GPT-4 or Claude-2, are highly useful. Character.ai seems useful, at least to its users, although I do not see the appeal. This isn’t useful. Not yet.
Which, given how predatory every version has been so far, seems like a good thing. I continue to hold out hope that eventually life-affirming, positive versions of such things will become available. For now, there is insufficient power to even try.
We also have seen remarkably little progress in AI helping you in your quest in other ways. Where are all the tools to help you navigate dating sites and give you a better interface or user experience? To improve your profile? To help provide context to help you evaluate others? To make sense of cryptic text messages and provide reads on the situation? To help you plan dates? To alert you if and only if incoming messages and matches are worth your time? To automatically filter out bad matches or those who don’t pass certain filters you’ve selected? To provide practice and plausible responses, or provide feedback?
I consider everything on the above list as clearly ethical and practical AI applications if done responsibly. It’s time to build.
Last time there was also talk of some options that were more full service, some of which were also decidedly less ethical. If you lacked qualms about it, there is no reason you could not have an AI do everything for you until such time as an in-person date was arranged, then text you the details, as some people are clearly working on.
My current thinking about the ethical lines on this are:
The key rule is that it is never acceptable to make someone talk to an AI thinking they are talking to a human. If you are having your bot talk to potential dates without you in the loop, you must clearly disclose to them that you are doing this.
You also shouldn’t be spamming people and wasting their time, even with an initial email, unless you have a clear indication of interest. If you are going to gate your matches with a bot, your profile needs to reflect this on top of the bot identifying itself.
You shouldn’t hide or lie about what you are doing, so you shouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t want your dates to find out about.
That still should leave a lot of room for creativity. I am very disappointed, hackers.
What about those who report trying over and over, only to meet abject failure?
Such cases definitely exist. There are many ways to sink your chances, if you are not doing deliberate practice and looking to fix your problems then you won’t improve.
Olivia Reingold: [Jammall] says he once went six months without getting a single match on a dating app, even though he pays $30 in monthly fees between OkCupid, Bumble, and Hinge. If you count high school, when he went to the movies with a classmate, Jammall says he’s been on a total of three dates his entire life.
If he is looking at as many profiles as he can and swiping right a reasonable portion of the time, this should never happen. As a paying customer, a large portion of the women he swipes right on will see his profile. He can view hundreds of profiles a day.
So if you go even one month with zero preliminary matches, and you are neither being super selective or highly unusually ugly, you know you are doing something very wrong with your profile or your profile pictures.
Jammall could easily also be completely lost later in the process, and given lack of experience he likely is, but for this stage he can and should seek out some help and keep trying different things. Then he can try and fail at later stages, and learn.
And now, driving home from his date, it hit him like a ton of bricks: Why do I even do this at all?
He walked into his apartment near Cape Canaveral, greeted the cats, and slumped down on his couch.
“I’m so far out of the loop,” he told me he realized at the time. “Compared to my peers, who have gone out with women, and know how to interact with them, I’m too far gone. I can’t learn that stuff.”
He trails off, then adds: “I’m just not going to try anymore. It’s not worth it.”
Well, not with that attitude. Definitely not with those cats. I have it on very good authority that if you are male and want to date females, it is a bad idea to own cats. Seriously, pro tip, lose the cats. At minimum hide them from your profile.
I do not buy that his only earning $55k/year is sinking him this much. I do think his being 5”5’ is a big handicap, also makes it very important to create good photos.
The post author then signs up for a dating app as a male, sees a few obnoxious female profiles, takes them at face value as the general case and despairs. Why is that a problem? If a woman presents herself that way on a dating app, that is valuable information for all concerned, whether or not she will hold to those standards in the end.
Aella: guys this is just a signaling game. a woman demanding ridiculous things from a partner is a demonstration that she is high worth. The pickiness is performative, like a cool designer handbag that says ‘look how successful i am’. The other woman demands 6’0″? Well *Idemand 6’3″.
Don’t worry, she’s gonna settle down with a knockoff 5’9″ dude making 70k/year and develop a mythical narrative for why he’s truly the exception, really special in ways less obvious actually, so that she can convince herself she caught a fish too big for her friends.
The words being cheap talk does not stop them from also being a filter that keeps you out in a dating app even if you could survive them in physical space. But that should not much matter, because the app won’t waste your time. If you are 5’10” and the woman is filtering for 6”, or you are out of her geographic radius or short on her income requirement or anything else, my understanding is you will never see each other at all. As long as you are in an area with enough candidates, you will be fine.
Strangely, I am informed Bumble lets you pay to see the profiles that already filtered you out, perhaps so you can gather some intel or hate-look. If I was on the market, I would pay for the opposite feature. I’d pay even more to have the women filter first.
If they are not using the hard filter, and one is available, then that tells you something.
The next example of a dropout:
That’s the insecurity that keeps Santiago, a 25-year-old from Albuquerque, New Mexico, up at night. The last time he dated anyone was in 2021—but that ended when he suspected she was cheating on him. Now, with the wounds still raw, he fears he’s “not worthy” of a girlfriend anymore.
“After being depressed for so long, I feel like it’s a handicap,” says Santiago, who works at a department store and has been on one date only since his breakup. “It makes me feel like, ‘Oh, he’s damaged goods.’ ”
That sounds very much like the problem is in Santiago’s head. He thinks he is damaged goods because he felt bad because he suspected (and only suspected) his girlfriend was cheating on him and this kept him from trying to date?
So yes he is damaged goods. But only because he sees himself that way.
And then there’s the problem of not knowing how to approach a woman. He suspects his coworker might have a crush on him, and yet he worries that one wrong move and he’ll be labeled “creepy.”
…
So Santiago does nothing.
I do realize that is difficult, that it is effectively both on the guy to make the first move and also they can get massively blamed for getting it wrong. There is an art to navigating such situations, and safely learning the art of safe navigation is tricky, and you have large model uncertainty, so one will be naturally reluctant to find out where the downside risks are high. Which speaks to the need to get into lower-risk in-person situations, something Americans increasingly don’t do.
The next complaint is that the average date comes with a $159 price tag, in NYC that goes up to $230. I don’t buy it? What are you doing on these dates?
Sure, you can spend a lot on fancy drinks and dinner if you want to, but there is no need. Mostly. There is a particular type of date where that is required. But if it is required and it is financially painful for you to do, it’s a bad match anyway.
The third dropout is a man who has an ‘online friend with benefits’ who never wants to speak on the phone or meet in person, because they claim they are mute, and he doesn’t want to call them out on it and suspects they are lying and are actually a guy or something. They have known each other for 20 years and hang together online all day.
Well, this person also refuses to use a webcam. Presumably there is a reason.
Once again this feels like a choice. He says he’d be losing a close friend, but it’s not a long term plan to have a friend like this if it never goes anywhere and also cuts off other possibilities.
All three concrete examples are guys making very clear and fixable mistakes. The general trends listed are ones we all know well, and yes they are worrying.
The post ends with worry that women also are not well-served by this equilibrium. That is certainly what they self-report. The self-reports I know about involve lots of going on tons of dates and the dates going nowhere, all the guys being truly terrible. Which again makes me wonder about whether people are updating based on the feedback they are getting, and trying different strategies.
Meanwhile, people do get together. There are other ways to be.
PoliMath: I see this all over my online world and *not at allin my social observations I know a bunch of young people dating and getting married very few of the guys are over 6 feet and making 6 figures and very few of the girls have those demands.
I moved to Tennessee but even in Seattle there were plenty of people getting married at my church who didn’t work in tech.
Arnold Kling asks the perennial question, if height is so dramatically overvalued by most women on dating apps such that 90% of their swipes are for 6’0” and above, far in excess of height’s value in the physical world, why not date short men instead? Why not take advantage of everyone else’s use of the easily available filter, and go the other way?
Last time, I pointed out that this could be explained by ‘the height filter is right there’ while other things you would want to filter for are not available as filters.
There is that. What I did not sufficiently emphasize is that filtering this way does active harm if you do not highly valuable height. If one was willing to search in a pool of people less tall, you would have far more leverage to seek out other traits you want, and generally have an easier time of it. Let others outbid you.
A substantial number of women should likely actively do the opposite, if they live in an area with essentially infinite potential matches and don’t see this as a priority, and only look under six feet. Obviously don’t do that with people you meet in real life, but an infinite top of the funnel changes the equation.
Tom Cullis disagreed, on the theory that you would end up drawing from the same distribution of non-height attributes except now height is lower. Yes, you’d trade height for funny or cute or smart or what not, but you don’t get to make the trade. I think you still essentially do get to make it?
What do we do about the comparison element of the dating matching problem, where women have more education than men and are increasingly as or more successful, but most women want men with as much or more education and that are and/or who are as or more successful than they are, and definitely have a steady job?
Rob Henderson at the link notes that Master’s Degrees in particular have remarkably strong value on the dating market. The natural result of these dynamics are tons of options for the few men who would otherwise make strong relationship material.
So they don’t need to commit, leaving no good options.
The obvious response for a man would be to consider getting a Master’s degree or PhD. If it really is worth this much on the dating market, especially when seeking educated women, and everyone is struggling to find someone, that seems like a strong reason. Hopefully you can find a degree that has some other application as well. Ideally it also holds your interest.
The swiping is incompatible with the real thing the dating docs are trying to do, presenting you with detailed holistic choices. Ideally it should not even load on your phone, you need a full screen and to do it with intention.
I continue to think this is a solvable problem now that we have AI. The dating app of the future, or at least the actually good dating app that people like my readers will use, will be able to onboard people quickly and painlessly if they want that, learning about them over time, while allowing those who want to do so to geek out and go nuts making the algorithms and systems be all they can be and finding their exact match.
One could also build the new systems on top of an existing swipe-based system. What is stopping this from happening?
Basic conclusion was there was no good options. Attempts to foster artificial community or otherwise use social graphs did not work. The women were universally unwilling to invest up-front time on optimization, preferring scrolling and expecting things to fall into place for them, so even though they expressed preference (like everyone else) for ~2012 OkCupid, they wouldn’t have used it if it was offered. Then on the actual dates and in the interactions, he reports the women didn’t express or go for what they actually wanted.
The constraint ‘people who want an exceptionally unusually strong match among many choices in a lemon market are unwilling to invest any upfront time’ does not have any clear solutions. I am hoping that the solution is that AI will be able to infer those preferences within a few years, perhaps?
Everyone’s experiences are so different on the apps, while also all the same.
Shoshana Weissmann: I’ve taken to asking men who disappear for no reason on Hinge why they do. And I actually am learning. Basically, they’ve had negative experiences on Hinge and even though their experience with me isn’t, it’s the mental associations built on the platform. Whereas I’m like “COME ON it can’t all be bad!”, they have a fatal exhaustion with it all. Many are still very weird/bad actors, but there’s a real chunk of normals who are like this. It kind of makes sense and at least explains some stuff.
All the reports I read from men are that the big negative experience is not being able to find worthwhile women who will engage. Potentially finding one and then disappearing invalidates the whole exercise. Why play a numbers game if you don’t take advantage when your number comes up?
Sheena Vasani (Verge): Tinder announced a $499 per month invite-only subscription, Tinder Select, on Friday, Bloomberg reports. As part of the premium plan, subscribers can message people they’ve not matched with, while the “most sought-after” users will see their profiles. Tinder says it only offers the plan to less than 1 percent of its users it considers “extremely active” and that the applications will open up on a rolling basis.
…
If selected to apply, users will have to meet the company’s “5-point Select Screen.” That means their profile must include a verified photo, a biography, five interests, at least four images, and details about what kind of relationship they’re looking for.
The Match Artist: But what do you get for the price tag?
Two times a week you can send a message without matching with that particular person.
If you like someone and they don’t have any premium version of Tinder, they will see your unblurred picture making you more intriguing, as well as having your profile on the top of their likes for the next week.
If you’d like, you can add “select” to your profile establishing yourself as a premium option for your potential matches.
The select mode will show you to the most desired profiles as judged by Tinder.
Since you have to apply for Select if accepted, you’ll be less than 1 percent of users with Select, showing off that you’re the highest tier on the dating app.
You’ll also be given first access to new features that Tinder is rolling out.
You might think that this price is absolutely outrageous, and I get it. But based on my experiences with many of our clients, if dating is important to them, they will prioritize this part of their life as much as they are able to. It’s not desperate, it’s just giving yourself the best chance you have with the tools you have at your disposal.
…
Sarah Perez (TechCrunch): Inspiration for this members-only club within Tinder comes from Match’s July 2022 acquisition of another high-end dating app, The League, which could cost users up to $1,000 per week. During its Q2 2023 earnings, Tinder CPO Mark Van Ryswyk said The League indicated there was a market for daters who were willing to pay for quality matches and experiences. But Tinder Select doesn’t rely on human matchmakers, nor does it offer anything that’s really worth the cost of the $500 per month membership.
However, Select members are promised to be shown to Tinder’s “most sought after profiles” so they can enjoy more quality matches.
Jay Kirell: Tinder just rolled out a new “creepy sucker” membership tier.
For just $6000 a year you can engage like a Star Trek villain and creep up cloaked and undetected into her inbox.
I know it sounds bad and creepy. But what if this was actually brilliant price discrimination and also a win for everyone?
The first thing to notice is that $500/month is both quite a lot of money in some ways, and also essentially nothing in other ways.
If you are actively on Tinder, trying to find a partner, that is a lot of time and attention and emotional energy, and in various ways money, you are spending. A lot of people refusing to pay for their dating apps are making a major mistake, and are likely way too attached to the idea of not having ‘paid for it.’ If it can be done, upgrading the quality of your experience is a big game. You should happily pay for it the same way you would pay for, say, nicer clothes or a nicer apartment.
The question is, can you get your money’s worth? Let’s explore.
There are five benefits.
The unexciting benefit is early access to new features. We do not know how early, but I’m willing to say the expected value here is low.
So that leaves four that matter. All four are double edged swords.
Two times a week you can send a message without matching with that particular person.
If you like someone and they don’t have any premium version of Tinder, they will see your unblurred picture making you more intriguing, as well as having your profile on the top of their likes for the next week.
If you’d like, you can add “select” to your profile establishing yourself as a premium option for your potential matches.
The select mode will show you to the most desired profiles as judged by Tinder.
The first three abilities reveal to varying degrees that you are using Tinder Select.
If your profile is on top and unblurred, not everyone will know what that means, but some of them will.
If you message someone without a match, their first response might be ‘this is a bug’ or ‘I don’t remember matching with him’ but most likely it will be ‘this guy used Tinder Select to message me directly,’ especially if they’ve seen it a bunch because they’re a ‘most desirable’ match.
If you put the badge on your profile, then that’s what it is for.
What reaction will you get?
My expectation is that reactions will be all over the place.
Some will quite understandably think versions of ‘this is creepy,’ especially for the direct messaging, or ‘this is cheating or unfair,’ or ‘this means you had to pay so you’re low value.’
Others will, also quite understandably, think versions of ‘this is a person who sent a costly signal,’ ‘this is someone who values their time,’ ‘this is someone who cares a lot about finding the right person,’ or of course ‘they are rich’ or ‘they are willing to spend a lot of money to get what they want and might spend quite a bit on me.’
If someone kind of spends $50 to message me on such an app (or off of it), I am sad I did not get that money and not zero suspicious that you felt you had to pay, but you certainly have my attention. I expect you to have perhaps put actual thought into your message and who is going to read it. Unless quality of such messages is proven reliably terrible, which I do not expect but is still possible.
Which effect is larger? I don’t know. Also that is the wrong question, unless the answer is extremely lop sided.
The right question is, are you going to get positive or adverse selection?
Whose interest do you lose? Whose do you gain? Which was attention you want?
That will likely depend on you and what you are looking for.
Are you looking for someone who does not care about money or is deeply suspicious of it, and wants to live frugal? Who cares deeply about things like equality and fairness? Then perhaps you very much do not want to buy Tinder Select even at $0.
If you are looking for something else very different, and you can afford it, you might want Tinder Select at $500/month. In extreme cases you might want it even more if it was $5,000/month.
The obvious danger of them knowing is that you will be a target for escorts and those ‘seeking arrangements’ of various types, for gold diggers, and those who outright want to steal from you or blackmail you or worse, and also some people who will be mad at you and want to troll you. I can see some people who would otherwise not do so thinking it was now ok to effectively steal from or take advantage of you. Some of that you might be okay with, but some of it you definitely aren’t.
You will need to keep your guard up. One question is whether Tinder does anything to protect against this?
Putting the badge on your profile could have the worst effects here, and keeping it off might be a good mitigating factor – if you were a juicier target, you wouldn’t have hidden it.
This could all be a risk worth taking, if the selection is otherwise favorable from your perspective. It is very easy to see how many of the people you drive away might be people you want to drive away. Or if the other features compensate.
The easiest way for selection to be favorable is if you are having very little luck by default, especially if you want to go after ‘high value’ matches that are, in the app’s context, out of your league. Without the boost, you are going to bat 0%, never get a chance, you were never in it. With the boost, you increase variance. You sometimes get a chance. It is a numbers game.
The warnings go double there, of course. You are going to face a substantial amount of potential enemy action, and likely not be so skilled at identifying it or defending yourself against it.
My guess is that for most people in a position to pay, but far from all, the net result is net positive if you know to keep your guard up. One thing that is clear is that this will change things quite a lot. Thus the experiment seems highly tempting. If you do not like the results, you can go back easily enough.
How much is it worth to message people directly? That depends once again on how people react and who is how likely to engage. If they often treat this as ‘if they want to spend $50 to message me then you have my attention and we’ll see’ and your looks are not your strongest feature, then I would say this is extremely valuable, and it cultivates the good habit of treating matches as worthy of detailed attention. If you use this and open with ‘yo’ or ‘wassup’ or some standard line you are (acting like) an idiot. I presume you will lose half or so of them to some combination of ‘wow what a creep’ and ‘thank you, next’ no matter your message, but if you only lose half you are in business.
The value here likely goes up dramatically if your ultimate goal is a long term relationship, especially marriage and kids. That makes the right match super valuable. If you are going for short term, the marginal value of a 10/10 match is much lower.
Next up is going unblurred to the top of the list. This actually seems pretty great. Most users do not pay. If you take the time to find a match, and they never look, then your match goes completely to waste along with your time, plus you get to be sad and feel mildly rejected. This makes that a lot less likely. The unblurred image presumably helps your cause as well.
I think this is pretty valuable. If I had a lot more money than time, this alone would justify the payment. Many professionals can earn $500 in only a few hours of work or less. This can save them many hours of swiping to get the same amount of response.
The fourth ability also seems great if you want it. Potentially this alone is the true killer app. It has the bonus that it doesn’t reveal that you paid. You get to see the highest value potential matches according to Tinder.
Which raises the obvious question. What is a high value potential match? I asked GPT-4 for a speculative list, which was pretty good, break apart some elements and discuss:
Profile Activity and Engagement. If they are 100% to view their ‘likes me’ box, and someone else is 50%, and they otherwise act identically once they see it, then that doubles the value. This is likely a double-digit percent efficiency gain on its own.
Profile Completeness and Quality. You get better information to work with, and know that the person is taking this at least a little seriously. If this is often not otherwise the case, that’s a substantial win.
Who They Swipe Right On and Engage With: If the algorithm is going to show you people more likely to match with you, or even better more likely to actually have it go anywhere, that is huge. This could be observed behavior, explicit preference or both, or other factors.
Responsiveness to Messages: This in particular. Do they ghost a lot of people? I would pay a lot to ensure that I’m not waiting weeks (or ideally even days) for an answer.
Elo Score: The apps are notorious for using Elo-like systems so that you only play inside your league especially in the swipe phase. This one is a double-edged sword. If you are low Elo, a high Elo person is highly unlikely to swiple right, so even if they are truly higher value at some point you don’t want to waste your time. Most people will still likely want to ‘date up’ on this if given the choice. My guess is you want to either date modestly higher than what the app will naturally show you if your profile is optimized, or you want to aim super high where the payoff is so big you are happy to take your 1% or 0.1% shot, and maybe you have a story even if they say no.
Demographics. Various features are generally considered better.
Location, Location, Location: The app should be doing this already, but if it isn’t doing it hard enough then every little bit helps.
Mutual Interests. The algorithm, again, really should be checking for this anyway.
User Feedback: I don’t trust it entirely, but reviews really do work.
Paying Users: For obvious business reasons, but also perhaps for legitimate reasons. They should get a boost, because paying means you are taking this seriously and have the ability to pay. If you didn’t also measure engagement I would take this as a very good sign. If you also measure engagement in various ways a lot of this gets screened off.
One hopes that this is highest value for you in particular, rather than highest value in general. Otherwise, a handful of people will get a ton of Tinder Select interest. That is not an ideal outcome for anyone, and would make this a much worse deal.
If it is indeed the case that you match with those the algorithm thinks are highest value to you in particular, especially if they are doing a good job of it, then this could easily make your time spent on app vastly more valuable.
The price is high. Needless to say, a lot of people are not in position to pay this kind of money, and unless you are completely loaded it only makes sense if you spend a lot of time on the app. And of course it is one hell of a price discrimination scheme. And of course, if Tinder is inferior to other apps for other reasons, that could be a hole you can’t dig out of this way.
But I do suspect that, given the stakes involved, if you were already using Tinder or considering using it, it is a price a select few should be willing to pay.
Eigenrobot: >through friends trending to zero. Dear God.
Strikes me that this is more of a symptom than the root cause of problems. the plausible underlying illness being “apparently society no longer exists in meatspace”
this seems bad inasmuch as “have you seen how people act on the internet”
The good news is that the graph they were looking at seems to be somewhat manipulated, the real version is somewhat better, although not a ton better.
Online going up this much remains scary, through friends collapsing even relative to other non-online remains scarier. My understanding is that the kids these days do not think of this kind of action as acceptable. They find it icky, and they fear the resulting drama because nowadays everything is drama, and things going badly has become a potentially much more catastrophic outcome. So much of what can happen in dating, and everything else, has become ‘this is so bad that it makes you a bad person’ so it needs to happen in an isolated realm. To the point where you actively do not want ‘the credit’ for anything.
Alex Godofsky: The mysterious part of this, to me, is the collapse in “through friends”. Do you people just not have friends anymore?
Sawyer: Hypothesis, not necessarily endorsed: It’s about perception-of-culpability. Before (gestures vaguely) wokeness-and-stuff, if it didn’t work out between them, even if it went really badly, nobody was gonna *blameyoufor that.
It just wasn’t an area that was subject to moralizing; copenhagen ethics did not attach, asymmetric justice just didn’t come up. Any *riskinesswas of the form “what if my friend is sad” and thus balanced by “what if my friend is happy”.
I think there’s been a broader norm change towards seeing people as “complicit” in- (only!) bad outcomes; so there’s moral risk now, with no counterbalancing prospect of moral reward. Idk if wokeness is the point-of-entry for this or just another symptom.
David Chapman: “Join a local religious group and attend regularly” is the best dating advice. Worked for me reliably across several diverse religions.
If you have such traditional options available, you want what is available there and you do not overly mind the associated costs, you should use them. By all reports, they still work.
More generally, in person efforts are still the way to go when you can, combined with seeking help from one’s network, including family and friends. Which requires having such a network, and making it clear that you are ready for, worthy of and safe to help.
The Baked Goods Theory of Social Interaction states that any social life without a regular weekly place to offload a tray of baked goods is unstainable. This is without considering dating at all, and it seems right. Also we all need more home baked goods.
Despite this I do not think, no matter how much they suck, that one should entirely abandon dating apps unless the dance cards are filling up without them. If nothing else, they are reps.
Shooks: The first dating blackpill I was forced to swallow was that anything of consequence you text a woman has a >80% chance of being shown to her friends.
judahrip: I am literally always counting on it.
skooks: The fool copes and seethes, the wise man uses this to his advantage.
Andrew Rettek: learning this was pretty devastating for me, in large part because I was too… mushy before the first date (which never happened with her)
Even if they don’t show their friends, if you text them a lot without them texting back in between, they can and likely will ghost you, also emoji stuff counts, as the (let’s face it bad, but watchable if you don’t care, and worth watching if you need to learn this and other important related lessons) movie Ghosted illustrates.
Texting means that your communications are on the record. Everything about them can and will be scrutinized and overthought.
Act accordingly. Treat every text, and every decision not to text, as a strategic move. Think through what you will say. Time your communications to send the right message, including neither too eager nor too irresponsive.
Yahoo’s Sabina Wex says a new trend is for men who pay and then are turned down for a second date to retroactively go Dutch for the first one and ask for payment.
Don’t do this. I presume there is also a ‘trend’ where the woman refuses such a request.
The same post also say that there is a new trend of posting credit scores on dating profiles. Does knowing someone has good credit outweigh that they posted that fact on their profile? Up to you.
I do not like the implications, but there is high value of information here. Actively low scores seem like long term red flags that you are going to fight about and have trouble with money. They likely are better predictors of ‘this person’s relationship to and access to money is going to be a serious problem for my lifestyle if we get into a long term relationship’ than income or wealth. That matters a lot.
He notes the usual asymmetry of the attractiveness ratings men and women give each other.
I also notice the dramatic lack of 9s and 10s and even 8s. Why so stingy? I doubt it was the particular sample filtering out the top end.
Men especially are doing this strange thing where they’re happy to go up to 7, but after that there’s a big drop of. With all the usual caveats about how awful it is to assign numbers to people, if you were going to assign numbers, use the entire range.
There are many other graphs and stats on offer here as well, covering the usual basics. Noteworthy is this result, which he describes as ‘attractive men have more sexual partners but attractive women don’t’ but I think this instead says more about what the outliers look like, because the right side of the graph contains far fewer people.
Also noted is that men and women say that of the three considerations to follow, politics is most important, then religion, then a big gap to ethnicity, with women caring more about all three than men. I am guessing a lot of people are lying about their value on ethnicity, for social desirability reasons and partly as self-deception.
Here’s one potential dating method. First, have a single chooser look at six naked bodies and determine which ones look better while offering brutally honest detailed critiques. Then they strip down for their final two, then finally there is a date with their clothes on.
As shill says, that’s a lot more yes than I would have expected. How hot is this girl?
I can see the other side of the argument here, if you believe she is world class hot.
One approach is that in theory, if one is sufficiently hot or otherwise resourceful, one never (well, hardly ever) has to actually leave one’s house.
You would work from home, perhaps with a job whose description was largely some variation on ‘be world class hot.’ Buy a nice place with some private outdoors. Get others to visit you when you want company. Otherwise enjoy the benefits of world class hotness, without ever having to go out in public, so the event never happens.
Alternatively, if there is a ‘without a bodyguard or other reasonable protection’ clause in the risk here, which makes practical sense, you could use that instead. You could even also interpret this as ‘driving from A to B is fine, you just can’t get out to pump gas’ at which point you have a lot more options. So you can work around it all.
There are also other approaches. Which seem worse to me.
Abstract: This paper studies two mechanisms that jointly contribute to thinness premium in the marriage market: the economic mechanism and the non-economic mechanism.
My empirical findings from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) reveal that all else being equal, thinner females are more likely to marry richer males. A one-unit increase in BMI (Body Mass Index), roughly equivalent to a six-pound increase for a 5’6″ figure, is associated with a 3.9% decrease in the husband’s annual labor income for noncollege wives and a 4.3% decrease for college-educated wives.
Using the Simulated Method of Moments to estimate a two-stage static matching equilibrium model, this paper determines whether the observed preference for thinner female partners in the marriage market is a result of assortative mating due to the thinness premium in the labor market or is driven by non-economic factors such as a preference for smaller body sizes or other traits associated with smaller body sizes, such as self-discipline, active social interactions, and positive social image.
The estimation results indicate that the positive correlation between a husband’s income and his wife’s thinness is primarily attributed to a male preference for thinner spouses. Women with a BMI below 25 only earn 4% more income than those with a BMI above 25 (assuming all other factors are equal), but having a wife with a BMI below 25 significantly enhances a husband’s utility, akin to a 1.15 times increase in his consumption.
These are massive effect sizes. Standard deviation of BMI is about 6, and every point decreases the husband’s labor income by 4%. A 15% increase in consumption is also a big deal, but note that the difference on average here is about 10 points of BMI, so that’s only a relatively small 1.5% per point. Whereas feeling good yourself is pretty great. In my experience as someone who has lost a lot of weight, from about 42 (yes, really) to 22.5, I would say that I would happily cut my consumption by more than half to avoid having to go back, even if no one treated me differently, purely on physical lived experience, not counting health impacts. And indeed, I did cut my consumption of food roughly in half.
And otherwise get your own house in order. Again, Worth It for its own sake.
Elle: A lot of youngish guys ask me why they’re not as romantically eligible as their peers, & I am more than happy to provide the advice I can in specific situations (usually via @SWENGDAD’s excellent project) however ~80% of the time the answer is literally just “get in shape.”
this isn’t because “women are shallow” (though you will definitely get more interest if you are fit)
It codes for physical and mental health in so many different ways.
It makes you look like you care about yourself!
The same is true of fixing your teeth, getting a good haircut, spending money on good clothes, etc.
If you can’t look after yourself, you don’t come across as ready for a healthy relationship it’s so simple I’m mildly annoyed I have to say it.
Felix: Would you give this advice to similarly struggling youngish women struggling to date?
Elle: very rarely; hardly any women who struggle to date struggle because there isn’t anyone who finds them attractive. “Work on improving your mental health” might be the equivalent.
Returns to being seen (including by yourself) as actively hot are high. Returns to taking care of the essentials, and getting rid of dealbreakers to reach the upper half of the distribution, are higher.
What about being too weird rather than insufficiently hot or fit?
Bobdaduck: I think most guys would view that as a pretty sincere asset. In my experience girls say guys are too weird, not the other way around.
As he notes, ‘weird’ often refers to something other than weirdness, which either lacks a better name or that everyone involved wants to keep vague.
Or one can say, there are lots of different particular kinds of weirdness one can be.
A good person worth dating will not object to weirdness in general. They will enjoy most specific weirdness, and only start to worry when rather high weirdness point thresholds have been exceeded to the point they inflict large social costs.
Many forms of weirdness serve as highly positive selection, even in general and especially for your preferences in particular. Driving away the wrong people can be as important as attracting the right ones.
But even the best of us will often have issues with particular weirdness that does not vibe with them without this indicating a general issue, which is a real cost. Your variation on something being weird does not make it good, and is in expectation a net cost.
Reddit post: I [27F] hate how men value me because of my bodycount. So I have been with 58 different men which I know is higher than average but I wanted to have fun and enjoy new experiences and it’s my life so I did! But I’ve settled down the last year and been really trying to find someone special to settle down with and start a family.
All of my friends now are either married or in relationships now and whenever I meet a match with a man or meet one in real life and they always ask what my body count is and I tell them they always make a disgusted face and unmatch or ghost me. I even met one guy who I liked so much and I thought was so sweet who told me he wasn’t interested in a woman with such “high mileage” and ended up dumping me. I cried my eyes out for days over that. I’m more than just then men I’ve slept with. I have a decent job, fun hobbies and interests and I’m still young but I guess I’m just a ho in most men’s eyes.
There are many ways to respond to this. Here are two maximalist ones.
Carl Benjamin: The question we must ask young women is this: who told you it was acceptable to have a high body count? That person has ruined your life and dating prospects. You should be angry with them and ensure future generations of women are not deceived by them as you were.
Aella: Idk man, it sounds like now she has a naturally great filter that’s keeping out incompatible, sexually insecure men. I have a huge body count but have never had an issue finding long term relationships with high quality guys. You just gotta find the slutcloud subculture!
I have no doubt the filter is doing great work for Aella. She wants to date guys who are into what she terms ‘the slutcloud subculture’ and she wants the lifestyle to match.
That is very much not the type of guy or lifestyle the Reddit poster wants. The filter is not only driving away a lot of men. The selection effects are actively negative as well.
I also reject Carl’s argument. This certainly is not going to help given her revealed preferences, but the approach of ‘get constantly asked, answer the question and get rejected’ is clearly not working and needs to change.
My first thought is that this question does not come up all that often, in my experience, and when it does it is mostly out of curiosity. So the first strategy is to try and make the question not get asked or to deflect it casually. Notice what leads men to think to ask, avoid those paths.
If they do ask, say you want to preserve the mystery, or let’s not get into that. If pushed, perhaps give out a little information (e.g. ‘At least one and that’s all you’re going to get’ or what not) since if that alone scares them off that might really be a sign you dodged a bullet, and stop there. Mostly, they might think ‘oh it’s probably a high or weird number’ but they will mostly learn you wish your number was lower. Which is true, is compatible with it being 3, and seems strategically good.
The filter ‘makes it a dealbreaker not to know your bodycount’ seems way less harsh and also more positive of a filter than ‘makes it a dealbreaker when the answer comes back 58.’
Part of this is that I suspect the willingness to answer the question freely is a lot of what is being reacted negatively to. That sucks, but the world is what it is, so one must adapt.
You can of course also lie. I am a big fan of never ever lying… but I understand.
3. Society’s ideal bodycount for them I asked my followers, and also paid microtasker survey takers. Absolute numbers are different but the trend is similar: Women want more sex partners
*question: My ideal self, fully realized, self assured, without shame, would probably have had sex with _____ people
*tip: At your current age. You can also input a number lower than your current partner count. It’s ok to make a vague guess.
[She is working on a full post.]
There is a log tail of getting more tail, so means seem less interesting than medians. I don’t know how one says what is ideal, either for yourself or for society. In some senses, the ideal number is clearly one (or if you’re not together with the right person yet, zero). In terms of what leads to the best overall outcomes given general conditions, the answer is clearly more than one.
If the societal ideal is 5 or more, then the whole thing is deeply silly, but this is the game of love, so whoever you are, you’re going to have to roll a bit with the crazy.
It is odd that such a reproductively useful skill so often underwhelms. It certainly does not come naturally to most people. Somehow it used to be far less important? Or perhaps it got our ancestors into trouble?
Rob Henderson: Reminds me of this paper indicating poor flirting skills is a common reason ppl cite for why they are single. The paper suggests flirting skill was not an important skill for our ancestors; not under much selection pressure. Rizz is rare for a reason.
William Costello: It was also by far the most common reason that incels said they were single in one of our studies.
Incels top reasons for being single?
1. Not good at flirting
2. Not good looking enough
3. Socially awkward
4. Too shy
Being bad at flirting, socially awkward and too shy are all self-reinforcing inequalities of skill. If you have the skill it is easy to get more of it. If you lack the skill, it is difficult to get started.
Recent cultural changes have made flirting poorly and being too socially awkward potentially life-threatening mistakes, or at least makes them seem that way to those who lack the skill and can’t tell when the danger levels are high, which makes this problem much worse.
This is exactly where I expect AI to make things radically better.
It does not exist yet, and unfortunately the big labs including OpenAI are Fun Police so you can’t use their models, but making a solid text-only flirting simulator that offers rewind, detailed analysis, constructive feedback and scores that allow Number Go Up is definitely within easy grasp. Same goes for any other social interaction. By the end of 2024, we should be able to combine this with full multimodal experiences, so you move from text to a full VR experience, and you can practice your body language, your tone of voice and timing, your movements, everything. And you can do it all without another human ever seeing it, so no shame and also almost no cost.
Perhaps one thing to take away from the whole SBF and FTX fiasco is that this is highly fixable if you put your mind to it, no excuses?
Jacob: We need a new science of autistic rizz to explain how SBF seduced every single person he talked to from Caroline to investors and journalists to Tom Brady and Michael Lewis and none of you are allowed to say now you don’t have friends or a girlfriend because you’re a weird-looking nerd.
I think people are so used to nerds either acting bitter or low status that no one, especially the natural socialites who are celebrities or celebrity-adjacent, has any immunity to autistic swagger. It’s the scatterbrained professor archetype that girls always crush on in college.
It’s why Steve Sailer would be voted sexiest man in Dimes Square. You have to fully commit to whatever your bit is, whether it’s crypto pumping or noticing crime stats, and never give any hint that you’re doing it for money, fame, or women — only for autism’s sake.
it’s crazy how many replies to this are from people who:
1. despise anyone who’s rich
2. seem to believe that everyone would love and respect them if only they were rich
Heretofore unimaginable levels of cope.
The money very clearly was central to a lot of what Sam did. The charm offensive only fully took off after the Forbes billionaire listing.
But also Sam gave himself massive handicaps. He actively despised the very concept of caring about appearance. He never stopped fidgeting. Hell, he never stopped playing video games when taking media and celebrity calls, did little prep, paid no attention, gave zero anythings. Kept zero promises. He had to consciously plan all his smiles.
The other tactics here deserve a lot more attention than they are getting. Something was working.
If i had to summarize what i learned about seducing men from 10 years of sex work into two basic points, it would be:
1. Be someone who validates their sense of identity when you approve of them. Reaffirm their aesthetic sense of self. Be a good fashion piece.
“Be a good fashion sense” most commonly means “be hot” – guys love having the identity of “can make a hot girl happy.” But it often applies to other things too – do they want to be the guy who attracts mysterious girls? hilarious ones? smart ones? trad housewife ones?
2. Be easily influenced by them; reactive, let them clearly impact you. If they make a joke, laugh; if they tease, pout. It’s important to demonstrate that you are hyper attuned to their small movements; any little stone they throw causes great ripples.
Be like a valuable musical instrument that lets the world know what kind of man you’re with by the fact you’re letting him please you. He plucks a string, you sing; whether the song is good or bad is less important than the fact you are perfectly responsive to his hands.
(it’s easy to get a man to sleep with you, but as a sex worker the goal is to get him to want you sexually so much he’s willing to part with money. This really makes the game a lot harder, and ends up incentivizing sort of a female version of pickup artistry)
Constantin Marcato: This is very, very good and perceptive. I would love to hear the equivalent of this for seducing women.
Aella: for women imo first point is the same, second point is reversed. Be someone who validates their ego, but be *immovable*, be solid, be unreactive to prods.
Also what you do after the seduction might not be ideal. Correlation does not imply causation but it whispers to look over here. What does lack of correlation imply?
Aella: OK, I am asking ladies ‘how much do u like [thing men do in bed]’ and ‘how frequently do men actually do [thing] in bed’ you’d hope this would be a roughly linear shape, where the more women like it the more men do it, however the scatterplot currently looks like this.
There’s some correlation there. The five highest items on the y-axis are all to the right on the x-axis and so on. It is still worth asking why there is not a lot more.
One can think about things that do not make it onto the graph. There are things women would rate much lower than this. They do not appear on the chart because men rarely or never do those things. Then there are the things that are sufficiently common and general that they didn’t get asked about on the survey. Presumably those go over pretty well versus their absence.
That explains some of it. Within the range of things one needs to ask about, presumably then there will be a trade-off of preferences of men and women, since without such a trade-off if it wasn’t in the grand middle it would either not happen or become semi-universal. There’s also presumably wide variance in preferences for everyone involved.
The rest is lack of knowledge and communication, both about preferences in general and preferences in particular, and presumably some amount of indifference to women’s preferences in some cases. If women aren’t observing men doing the things they like most more often than this, then either the men don’t know what is preferred, or they don’t care (enough). Some don’t care, but in my experience most do, so the men don’t know, regardless of who is to blame. Better communication is needed.
Franklin Veaux: I have an old friend who says there are 4 kinds of music: that which sounds easy to play and is, that which sounds hard to play and is, that which sounds easy but is hard, and that which sounds hard but is easy.
A similar idea might apply to sex as well.
For obvious reasons I have a lot more opinions about what sounds fun than about what is actually fun, and like everyone I have many large disagreements here on how things sound (in general, or to myself in particular). Would be cool to see the survey version, with demographic breakdowns, and so on.
Also because they can’t either. Clue-by-fours are often necessary.
Spellgage: Fellas, if a girl does something like this for you, odds are good that she is begging you to propose to her. She has in fact practically proposed to you.
Guys will receive a hand-sewed masterwork and not sense the romantic tension.
Felix James Miller: A girl did this for me with the DC metro map (for which we both had affection). Reader, I married her.
Mithos: My now-girlfriend knew I was upset by the 2016 election the night it happened and offered me to move me in with her. I said, “Oh, like roommates?” She’d also give me a lot of ideas for my own writing, which I also took to be friendliness. Eventually, I got the memo. Eventually.
Odi Aut Amo: In high school, a girl crocheted me a bulbasaur plushie and would get us Starbucks before practice with “Link” and “Zelda” written on them. I honestly thought she was just trying to be nice.
We got married in June.
Strive to, when it is obvious, take the hint. Most hints are pretty obvious, as are most cases of KHYF (Kiss [Him/Her] You Fool) are pretty obvious, and the most obvious cases are typically the ones with the most value.
The best news is that massive hints also mean you have margin for error. You (probably) do not need to bring you seduction A-game, you do not need to take a bold risky gesture, you only need to do something that makes it socially non-awkward to create clarity, ideally you still do the escalation two-step but even if you are not highly skilled you can still do so in a way that leaves everyone involved a line of retreat.
The Rich: the more expensive a wedding is the more likely you are to get divorced but number of wedding attendees is associated with lower divorce rates
cheap wedding, lots of people.
I have not verified the source but wow these are large effects. They are doubly large effects given they run in opposite directions. Also given that richer people will spend more on weddings, and also tend to have lower divorce rates. Huge if true.
Something like half of weddings have about 100 or more guests, so the second graph is more saying that a much smaller wedding bodes quite badly. A bigger one is still claiming to be a big deal, a 50% cut in the divorce rate. On the flip side, the cheap weddings are the rare ones, with the majority of couples spending $20k or more.
Alas, I interpret this mostly as an observation that we lack sufficiently strong controls, because that result is obvious nonsense. If a man gets married and then gets divorced, that is a huge blow on many levels, frequently including devastating financial consequences (including many cases of being forced to work and then having their wages confiscated, whatever you choose to call that) and having a person who quite often hates your guts and is determined to make you suffer. The idea that you are still at ‘baseline,’ that you might as well have loved and lost full on including by law and finance, boggles the mind. Choosing to get married is a sign of a happy and likely-to-be-happy man on so many different levels.
I do think the broader result is true, that putting a ring on it is on the margin an overdeterminedly correct happiness (and other life outcome) strategy despite the risks involved. That does not mean you are on a freeroll. You very much are not.
Caesararum: If you smoke and really want to fuck up a relationship, make sure not to smoke in front of your significant other, but light up as soon as they leave. That’ll ensure you start associating their presence with anxiety and their departure with release.
Naia: useful exercise in relationship literacy: try thinking through as many different ways of generalizing from this example as you can. There are a *lotof them.
This isn’t as expensive as all that so long as you don’t go full brass ring. You can get a short 5-7 day run for $15k or so according to Claude 2. Or you can pay $40 for 15 seconds, which seems to be what happened, and then they got newspaper coverage.
The biggest lesson here is that you should absolutely be buying more short spots in Times Square. It is so easy to put yourself or your ideas out there. That deal is terrific.
I continue to think that monogamy is right for a large majority of people. Sam Black is the person I know with what I find the most persuasive defense of polyamory. Which is that Sam has clearly made it work in practice, and that it makes sense for some people in some contexts, but a lot of structures make sense for the right context and no one structure is for everyone. A lot of what made it work for Sam is that Sam was happy to put in (and enjoy) the necessary work. I think polyamory mostly cannot work without this, among other requirements.
Robin Hanson, quoting The Times UK: “In the late 1940s .. average time span for [sex] penetration was just less than two minutes. .. in the mid-Seventies the figure had increased to 12-15 minutes. .. most recent figures … four minutes.”
I worry that a lot of what increased in the 1970s was better described as ‘lying.’ Either way, this brings useful perspective. This is one of the most prominent, but there are a lot of metrics where there is a number that people typically consider to represent you sucking quite a lot, but which also turns out to be about average. On many metrics, the average person could reasonably be described as turning in a quite poor performance. Reality does not grade on a curve. But also maybe give yourself a break.
Shoshana Weisssmann: I know he copied and pasted it which I don’t love, but I don’t hate this line.
Washington Post’s Drew Harwell looks at an at-scale OnlyFans business. It’s odd how little insight such pieces provide into why the product sells. The zero marginal cost products seem massively overpriced given alternatives. The personal branding seems generic at best. You can chat and sext, but at this scale it’s obviously with someone random. Market seems both like a huge grind and simultaneously highly inefficient. How long before the customers are mostly or entirely conversing with an AI?
Alyssa Vance goes into an epic, truly epic, amount of detail to debunk the implications of the ‘sexless epidemic’ and of this famous graph in particular:
She points out among many other things that the sample sizes here are super low, and the trends turned around in later years.
The full post is interesting for those who want to dive deeper, I won’t further rehash.
Jake Kozloski (CEO Keeper.ai): Christian Rudder (Founder of OkCupid) claimed in his book Dataclysm that their hit rate from first date to marriage was 0.6%
No word yet from anyone on how the service went for any user, for better or for worse.
Shout advocates for the getting out and meeting people strategy, rather than wasting time on dating apps. His suggestion is persistence in physical spaces, meeting people gradually, slow escalation, and to only ask out a small minority of women you meet so as not to be a creeper.
Isha Yirass Hashem suggests men offer to substitute at daycare centers, says everyone is overthinking it. There’s a lot of logic here – obvious imbalanced gender ratio, get to show yourself around young children and that you are choosing to be there. You of course have to want what is on offer at such a place.
SCPantera reports finding his wife on eHarmony. I remember trying it as well. It seemed relatively promising versus many other apps for those who want what it offers, and I liked the process design, although I never found a strong candidate.
Walruss points out that the early period of marriage, especially the part involving wedding planning, involves quite a lot of forced stressors and risky changes, so it is unsurprising that happiness in that period is touch and go.
Several commenters noted that the increase in ‘bar/restaurant’ meetings is likely that many online people choose to then first meet up in a restaurant or bar.
Elle notes some pitfalls men should watch out for. Don’t be flakey, either online or with texts. Take real interest in what she says. Don’t go on rants about feminism or things being unfair to men. Be willing to pay for at least the first date (but, I would add, do not insist too hard if they actively want to go Dutch instead, there’s a standard dance for this).
Also a few comments get covered under Good Advice.
Last time I closed with some basic advice. The message was, essentially, figure out what you want and then go for that, while seeking to filter out and avoid what you do not want.
I continue to think ‘what you want’ should for most people be a long-term end goal of a lifelong monogamous relationship and having children, but with exceptions, and that we must each decide for ourselves.
The biggest basic thing I realize I forgot to mention was that you should absolutely get your house in order on all fronts, if you have not done so. This is both highly helpful and usually its own reward. Having friends and in-person activities is part of this as well.
Another key point is to consider changing locations. The wrong location makes things much harder. Any area with few candidates makes it very hard. Among the big cities, the gender ratios differ a lot and this makes a big difference. Myst points out that Manhattan is 54% female, whereas San Jose is only 47% female, and mentions Greensboro, NC as a low-cost place with a Manhattan-like gender ratio.
After young people pair off, even a small mismatch can result in effectively very lopsided ratios that impact dynamics a lot. I do think being in New York made my experiences dramatically easier, whereas a guy in San Francisco is very much playing in hard mode, especially for nerdy engineers.
Malloc reports that moving away from Berkeley is the only thing that worked for him. Eva reports this very much worked in reverse for her, as she moved to Silicon Valley and now has her pick of nerdy guys.
Colleges, of course, now have the most lopsided gender ratios of all, especially with many of the men attending effectively opting out of dating due to the downside risks.
I plan to keep compiling what comes my way in these areas. With this much material accumulated, it made sense to get it all out there. But the speed premium is low, and there are a lot of distinct areas, so going forward I intend to do smaller posts with more specialization around a sub-theme at least a large portion of the time.
