I used to date mostly tall, lanky guys; until my 5’4” husband charmed me. He was the opposite of my “type” but I reasoned that since my “type” wasn’t working out all that well for me, maybe I should have a new type. We’ve been married for 30 years now.
My wife always said shorter guys just didn't ask. I never really believed it, but always thought a girl being willing to date shorter men reflected superior judgment and not desperation. 33 years for us and I think we both selected wisely.
Welcome to the free market of female sexual autonomy. There are winners and losers. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. You can sympathize with the losers, or celebrate and glorify the winners, as we do in sports and most highly competitive, economically scalable, winners-take-most tournament markets where steep pyramids and power law hierarchies always naturally pop up. Creative Destruction and Misery and Unfulfillment are flip sides of the same coin.
This is one of those interesting areas where even free-market-favoring econ types suddenly flip position on many typical disagreements and express patterns of rhetoric and concern that code very hard left. If you start with the goal of trying to match as many men and women as possible to one long-term mate early in life, then certainly recent trends point to a catastrophic and huge 'market failure' (actually it's the analogous 'social failure'), which is the traditional justification for some kind of major and sustained regulatory intervention.
The choice is between biting the bullet and giving up on the goal of "most-get-matched" as being something important enough to justify forcing significant changes in the current state of affairs, on the one hand, or literally calling for the "redistribution of the means of reproduction" by means of strict regulations constraining sexual autonomy, on the other. The latter choice was the one seen for most of human history since the dawn of civilization as an obvious necessity for, and the only regime compatible with, a civilized social order.
That would also require constraints on entertainment content. Almost every Disney Princess Movie works by leveraging the instinctive appeal to females of all ages of the idea of the coming-of-age-rebellion of the nubile debutante who, with the help of supernatural powers, magic, and/or witchcraft, circumvents her social and material limits and the imposed restrictions on her autonomy.
Until recently the specific autonomy involved was sexual in nature, and to the story's conclusion included the obvious bonus of snatching an upper class super-alpha male or lower-class alpha bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold in the process. But since it is no longer PC and 47th-wave-feminism-certified to portray that as either a prime motivation or victory condition, and not even "falling in love as a fortunate and unintended incidental benefit of the main motive" anymore, more recent scripts sacrifice some popularity and box office success by settling for something more along the lines of a "Joan of Arc saves the day" heroine plotline. These just get closer and closer to traditional boy quest stories, just sometimes with the added trope of rebellion at an undesired arranged marriage.
The extreme case is one in which only the gender is flipped in a story that would work better and would have in the past been presented as boy-quest. That's why Aladdin, though supposedly a story about Aladdin, is really "Aladdin and Jasmine", i.e., a princess movie, while Moana is not, because Moana, while technically a princess as daughter of the chief, might as well have been a prince insofar as the rest of the story is concerned.
The trouble is, by leveraging the pleasure of experiencing stories which appeal to, pre-civilized sexual instincts, mass-audience story-tellers are engaging, whether intentionally or inadvertently, in the equivalent of mass brainwashing and indoctrination that reconfigures the ranking in the moral order into one of "female sexual autonomy supremacy". Even if it was possible short of imposing a sharia theocracy, there is just no possibility of squeezing the sexual marketplace social failure toothpaste back in the tube when that 800-pound gorilla is using all his weight to squeeze it back out.
If it were a true free market then money would be allowed to change hands in it. I would expect the number of men who could participate would then increase dramatically.
As it stands, the apps that attract the most men are those like Ashley Madison, which after its data breach was discovered to be largely a fraud -- 90% of its female members were revealed to be 'bot accounts.
Dating apps are inhuman and I count my lucky stars I met my husband the old fashioned way (via underage sneaking into a goth themed night club).
I should think there are advantages to marrying a shorter chap, one being that he sees a more flattering angle of you. My husband is tall, and I'm eternally anxious about how massive my forehead must look to him. Like a furrowed moon rising in the night. Ah well.
This was in the movie A Beautiful Mind as an example of the applicability of game theory. In the movie the sex roles were reversed. An attractive women and her 4 less attractive friends enter a bar. The dominate strategy is for the four men to not pursue the most attractive woman but instead to attempt to woo her less attractive friends. We are not intuitive statisticians but also not intuitive game theorists. Women need to more closely read Jane Austen - the foremost relationship game theorist of her and probable this era.
The analogy doesn't extend to online dating. The major constraints that could in theory (not in practice) lead to a most-match-with-a-mate Nash equilibrium are features of the material world, not the digital world. Today people live more of their mental, psychological, and emotional existence in the digital world than in the flesh-and-blood material world, and as such the virtual is now more real to them than reality, where they feel increasingly awkward and uncomfortable. Most people over 40 have trouble appreciating this fact about younger generations and certainly aren't ready to grasp the major implications for our brave new world that has such people in it.
In the old dating scene in which people met -get this- in real life in the real world, one's scale of approach was very limited. First you could only hit on the girls who came to the same place at the same time. And then, unless you are a super elite level set opener, you could only hit on them one at a time. Furthermore, because your approach would likely be observed by everyone else among both your targets and competitors who will all talk about it, you would have a very hard time pulling off a successful rebound attempt on a second choice.
But it's -completely- different online.
You can scale your number of approaches to the very limits of your talent and energy. Instead of the very small number of targets at close proximity in space and time and who have readied themselves for possibility of being approached, you can now target a decent percentage of an entire local region's population! They don't have to be made-up, dressed, psychologically 'on', or whatever, their profiles are there 24/7. You can approach any of them at any time, and approach them all practically simultaneously!
And it's all """private""" (well, not to the dating app company and the private consultants to whom they provide the real insights about what does and doesn't 'work'). That is, it creates in both approacher and target a sense of privacy and secrecy without any social pressure resulting from who might be watching and how they might judge us.
So, in the scene from a beautiful mind, every single girl is -secretly- getting his on by every single guy, all simultaneously, and, while everyone strongly suspects that to be what's going on, the facts are plausibly deniable and it's rude and risky to probe.
In this very different situation, the script flips, because it doesn't matter which girls the guys try to go after, the guys' choices and preferences are irrelevant. Instead, it now becomes possible for every single girl to choose the same alpha in the modern hypergamous lek mating pattern, without knowing for sure that he's seeing the other four too. And the top alpha will be quite happy with this state of affairs. And human nature is such that no one is going to do anything out of sympathy for loser males.
What that means is that the situation is sufficiently stable to switch from a "most-match-with-a-mate" equilibrium to "winners take most" equilibrium. Nash wept.
Would a solution then be to have a dating app release in aggregate statistics about users behavior or even just the men given that women suffer greater from reputational injury. You build a reputational profile of the men on the site relative to the average user. Or the site handicaps the men, as is done in horse racing, to a point where every man has a equal probability of "winning". Think Jane Austen meets Ada Lovelace . The site can reveal to the women each man's weight and perhaps her own handicap can be revealed to her too. The more heavily weighted a man is the greater the prize and the more difficult to win. A woman can choose to ignore this value but now at her peril. It doesn't solve the problem of men using multiple sites but if this is an app women use men will go their too.
It's not clear what you mean by 'solution', but if you mean that the app would successfully impose the equivalent of the real-world's practical limitations on scaling, then no, nothing like that proposal would come anywhere close to a solution.
That's for lots of reasons, but one stands out if there is competition among rival dating apps, the regulatory "race to the bottom". You ever watch how they handle admission to a popular nightclub? See, everyone wants to go to where the alphas, hotties, and cool people are hanging out. And those people want to be able to fully capitalize on their status and attractiveness, and to be given VIP perks too! They don't want hassles, handicaps, limits, etc. They'll balk and they'll bolt to a less 'regulated' scene.
And everyone else who wants to be around them will dance right out the door with them. And then the next tranche, and the next, in a giant status-ordered conga line. And even if you weren't exactly attracted to the group that went elsewhere, the average quality of the people who haven't left yet keeps declining and your instincts are going to go into overdrive to generate a powerful impulse to flee from the risk of being associated with those socially radioactive losers.
Bart Kosko pointed out that this scene gets the idea of the Nash Equilibrium wrong. A more cunning man than Nash would defect to pursue the blond after his fellows had each turned to one of her friends.
Men greatly outnumber women on the apps. It's entirely possible that the number of men over six feet is two or three times the total number of women, especially if you restrict to "datable" people. So any given tall man will not receive that many likes from women, even though short men receive approximately zero.
So perhaps women can be selective on this front without much reducing their chances of a relationship.
Try reversing it then. Assume the men greatly outnumber the women, and then ask the men about their preferences and swiping behavior in relation to a woman's age or weight. It's going to look similar, and so the sex ratio is just not a big factor skewing the results away from true preferences.
My rough heuristic is that the closer behavior is to the four Fs of evolution (fighting, fleeing, feeding and f*cking), the more the behavior is hard-coded and consequently inelastic.
The way I understand the evolutionary psychology is physical appearance is not the number one criteria for women, see Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max's book "Mate". It's like number three or something. For example, if you are assertive, kind, and have a good job--a proxy for being a good provider and father-- you will do well.
Yeah, much of the complaints about female sexuality seem to be exclusive due to the design of the apps. At least from personal experience, the guys who have the most dating success irl don't seem to be very far from average attractiveness.
Exactly. Which is why the average guy who wants to date more should be trying to meet women in person through their friend group or some co-ed group activity, not improving their online dating profile.
Nope. Imagine telling The Old Man and The Sea "Oh, no luck again Santiago? You should try fishing in the Dead Sea."
If you want to catch a fish, you don't have the luxury of picking the spot, you gotta go where they're swimming. And they are swimming online.
Look up one of those "how couples met" charts.
After WWII, besides "Friends" (which I'll get back to), the major ways couples met was via social network or mingling institutions: Family, School (often high school), Neighbors, Church. Today, those have all fallen to the point where even combined they only represent a small percentage of meetings.
Now, people have long met through friends, but it helps to have the right friends who know lots of other potential matches for you. 1975-1995 was peak for both "Through Friends" and "At Work", and combined they accounted for over half of meetings as far back as 40 years ago. This was the same period when "at a bar" became a significant source of couple meetings.
But while bar meetings still happen a lot (though in a different manner to that of the 70s, 80s, and 90s), at-work and through-friends couldn't last.
We all know what happened to trying to meet people at work. Ugh.
But it might surprise people to learn that "through friends" has been falling like a rock for 25 years. That's because that 1975-1995 "peak through friends" world was a place where - get this - friends met up in groups in person in the real world all the time. Whoa! The rate at which that happens today is -nothing- compared to the rate it used to. I was there, Gandalf! Getting together today is for the serious, focused "smaller, older, deeper" crowd.
And today, "At Bar or Online" started "going parabolic" around 2000 and now together are the origin of the vast majority of romantic relationships. Some reports put the percentage over ninety! This is self-sustaining, because you gotta go where everyone else is going, and it's common knowledge that everyone is online, so everyone gets locked into the new focal point forever.
See the more interesting question to me is why more men, especially men in college, don't do this. And I don't have very many good answers. Candidates include social media and civil rights laws, but I personally aren't swayed by either.
1)Fear of rejection--I know from experience, and am thankfully happily married now. 2)No one taught them any of this so they are just going by what their peers are doing. They often learn the wrong lessons--like tall guy who is playfully mean can get away with it because he's tall and good looking.
As the dating app market evolves, one reads more about "niche" apps that either explicitly specialize in people looking for LTR commitments or for more casual flings. I wonder if these have less skewed dynamics. One of the best points Torenberg makes is that the conflation of intentions on these apps is bad for everyone.
At the other end of the spectrum, I think it would be useful to have more ways that people potentially attracted to each other can become friends first, and to normalize asking out friends and taking rejection gracefully. My social circle may be both "out of date" and unrepresentative here, but it contains an awful lot of happy couples (my own marriage included) who were friends first, as well as plenty of people who asked each other out, fot turned down, and remained friends. And it seems to me that the emotional dynamics of doing things this way encourage less superficiality and more humane connection. In any case we could use more encouragement of friends-making to address the general loneliness problem, which goes beyond the decline of sex and marriage.
Generally, men don't care that much about a woman's height, but I've heard of one exception: Exclusive lower Manhattan dance clubs frequented by Wall Street bros and fashion models. Door men sometimes turn away beautiful short women to get across the message that this club is for fashion models and not real women. The Masters of the Universe compete with each other to show they can have a 5'11" fashion model on their arms, not some 5'4" head cheerleader-homecoming queen-type loser.
It's seems extremely negative sum, but people in Manhattan often enjoy thinking up seemingly pointless competitions.
I call BS on this. Speaking as a denizen of downtown NYC, Wall Street Bros are quite far down in the pecking order. The 5'11" fashion models are looking for cool guys. And there's very little overlap in the Venn diagram of Wall Street Bros and Cool Dudes.
When I was in my twenties, the most common qualities that women my age said they wanted in their online profiles were tall, fun, and funny.
When I was in my thirties, I saw a lot more divorced women with kids on the apps. They didn't say they were looking for tall, fun, and funny anymore. I don't know if they were exactly the same women, but it sure looked like the reality of trying to raise kids with someone had changed what people thought was important.
I remember reading somewhere: Men will date women they would not marry and will have sex with women they would not date. Women will marry men they would not date and will date men they would not have sex with.
I assume that a women's *dating* strategy is substantially different from their *husband hunting* strategy, and not surprisingly, it filters men a lot more strictly. In particular, the current sexual economy puts people into a long stretch of early adulthood when their mating instincts are activated but before the point where they can accurately judge the future career (worth) of a potential mate.
Back in the 1800s, you graduated from 8th grade and were precipitated into adulthood (job, marriage) immediately, so your only partner-hunting was targeted to finding a spouse. Now, a woman can easily become sexually self-governing at 17 as a college freshman, but she may be nearing 30, working as an associate lawyer at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe, before it becomes clear which male associate lawyers will make partnership. She may have as much as 10 years to cool her heels and occupy herself with the men she finds most sexually attractive.
Doesn't this make short men who choose to use dating apps instead of networks the idiots? They may as well get mad they're not finding any women on Grindr.
TLDR: If you are smart enough to judge what you want, you do not need an app collecting information on other facets of the person. Women are using the "date short guys" strategy, but those women are not on the apps. They are, in no small likelihood, currently in relationships with a short guy, secretly laughing at the weenies trying to find love on their phones.
I think that dating apps are in the perfect crosshairs of "bad product meets easy distribution / media coverage."
Pew says that 45% of actively-looking singles have used apps in the past year (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/08/for-valentines-day-5-facts-about-single-americans/). This means that the majority don't use apps! I think that is a sort of filter: Even in today's online age, most people are still not using apps, and are using their friends/social network. For the majority, the online dating market is not the default, one must opt into it. My theory is that, the people opting into this new market were not the ones with the best opportunities for relationship-building in the old one.
This squares with our knowledge of the users: When given the option to filter out by height < 6 foot, a substantial number take it. This is wildly unlike real life (is 5'11 really a no go?) Is someone willing to toss out that many candidates truly there for a superior matching experience? You're filtering as much for guys who will lie about their height as guys above that height!
In other words, when it comes to relationships, dating apps are a lemons market. This explains a lot of what you hear about on the apps from users. It also explains why the apps are constantly encouraged to do more underwriting of and for their users. Couple this with the fact that the apps are vacuuming up user data, and it's clear to see why the apps are always in the culture wars! The market is full of lemons, but the product spits out a ton of high-quality lemon data, so the lemon reporting is too juicy to pass up.
"80% of women will never see you if you are 5'11" would be devastating in totality, but when we factor in that men are most of the people on the apps, this reads as "~20% of women won't see you, because they are on their phones looking for guys", which isn't as big a problem. Likewise, "30% of the men on the app where you can send a photo of your genitals, will do so" is less surprising than "5% of men will do this, given a venue where this is the norm, and you go there." It doesn't make everyone in the market a lemon, but it means you're going to run into more lemons, and less of what you want. If you're serious about courtship, start with all the places people actually get into relationships, even if it isn't in the op-ed section it will be in the marriage bulletins!
Online singles are glorious warriors in the trenches of the culture war. Odysseus' tale is great because he struggled to make it home. May all wanderers someday find rest.
Did you know male pattern baldness is a genetic advantage because it tricks women into believing a man is older and thus more stable than he actually is??
This has been analyzed exhaustively by the PUA-adjacent blogosphere 10-15 years ago. To summarize, conscious risk-and-benefit calculation (1 and to an extent 4) does not play much of a role. Your formulation of 3 is incomplete, as the best possible option is a fling with a tall man while securing support from a reliable provider short man. This correction also has implications for 4 (data is interpreted somewhat differently from what you suggest). 2, completed 3 and 4 all play a role, with the influence of each depending on the particular social situation a woman finds herself in.
Very well said. Yes, the PUA blogs and forums cracked the code and provided adequate answers to all these and many related questions years ago.
The combined body of the highest quality analysis and insights from the PUA equivalent of "Fifth Solvay Conference" superstars constitutes a genuine intellectual achievement in the field of "theoretical and applied intersexual dynamics" analogous to the emergence of the Standard Model for particle physics. I am not being at all ironic when I say it is as important for a young man today to master that suppressed art and science as it is for a soldier to learn survival skills and self-aid.
Years before the revolting corpse flower of the current dating scene reached its current state of full bloom, all those guys knew enough to reach prescient consensus on the precise character of the sexual market apocalypse that is our new normal.
I'm not sure where that 90% statistic comes from. The numbers I've seen before were that women who filter on height (which is just a fraction of all women using the apps), mostly filter for >6 feet tall.
Most women do not actually put in a height filter. So in that statistic you only get the minority of women who think this is a critical trait.
I used to date mostly tall, lanky guys; until my 5’4” husband charmed me. He was the opposite of my “type” but I reasoned that since my “type” wasn’t working out all that well for me, maybe I should have a new type. We’ve been married for 30 years now.
My wife always said shorter guys just didn't ask. I never really believed it, but always thought a girl being willing to date shorter men reflected superior judgment and not desperation. 33 years for us and I think we both selected wisely.
These dating apps sound like recipes for abject misery and unfulfillment all around.
Welcome to the free market of female sexual autonomy. There are winners and losers. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. You can sympathize with the losers, or celebrate and glorify the winners, as we do in sports and most highly competitive, economically scalable, winners-take-most tournament markets where steep pyramids and power law hierarchies always naturally pop up. Creative Destruction and Misery and Unfulfillment are flip sides of the same coin.
This is one of those interesting areas where even free-market-favoring econ types suddenly flip position on many typical disagreements and express patterns of rhetoric and concern that code very hard left. If you start with the goal of trying to match as many men and women as possible to one long-term mate early in life, then certainly recent trends point to a catastrophic and huge 'market failure' (actually it's the analogous 'social failure'), which is the traditional justification for some kind of major and sustained regulatory intervention.
The choice is between biting the bullet and giving up on the goal of "most-get-matched" as being something important enough to justify forcing significant changes in the current state of affairs, on the one hand, or literally calling for the "redistribution of the means of reproduction" by means of strict regulations constraining sexual autonomy, on the other. The latter choice was the one seen for most of human history since the dawn of civilization as an obvious necessity for, and the only regime compatible with, a civilized social order.
That would also require constraints on entertainment content. Almost every Disney Princess Movie works by leveraging the instinctive appeal to females of all ages of the idea of the coming-of-age-rebellion of the nubile debutante who, with the help of supernatural powers, magic, and/or witchcraft, circumvents her social and material limits and the imposed restrictions on her autonomy.
Until recently the specific autonomy involved was sexual in nature, and to the story's conclusion included the obvious bonus of snatching an upper class super-alpha male or lower-class alpha bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold in the process. But since it is no longer PC and 47th-wave-feminism-certified to portray that as either a prime motivation or victory condition, and not even "falling in love as a fortunate and unintended incidental benefit of the main motive" anymore, more recent scripts sacrifice some popularity and box office success by settling for something more along the lines of a "Joan of Arc saves the day" heroine plotline. These just get closer and closer to traditional boy quest stories, just sometimes with the added trope of rebellion at an undesired arranged marriage.
The extreme case is one in which only the gender is flipped in a story that would work better and would have in the past been presented as boy-quest. That's why Aladdin, though supposedly a story about Aladdin, is really "Aladdin and Jasmine", i.e., a princess movie, while Moana is not, because Moana, while technically a princess as daughter of the chief, might as well have been a prince insofar as the rest of the story is concerned.
The trouble is, by leveraging the pleasure of experiencing stories which appeal to, pre-civilized sexual instincts, mass-audience story-tellers are engaging, whether intentionally or inadvertently, in the equivalent of mass brainwashing and indoctrination that reconfigures the ranking in the moral order into one of "female sexual autonomy supremacy". Even if it was possible short of imposing a sharia theocracy, there is just no possibility of squeezing the sexual marketplace social failure toothpaste back in the tube when that 800-pound gorilla is using all his weight to squeeze it back out.
If it were a true free market then money would be allowed to change hands in it. I would expect the number of men who could participate would then increase dramatically.
As it stands, the apps that attract the most men are those like Ashley Madison, which after its data breach was discovered to be largely a fraud -- 90% of its female members were revealed to be 'bot accounts.
"Cause I don't care too much for money
Money can't buy me love."
Somebody please feed that last sentence to Stable Diffusion.
Sort of like social media in general?
Dating apps are inhuman and I count my lucky stars I met my husband the old fashioned way (via underage sneaking into a goth themed night club).
I should think there are advantages to marrying a shorter chap, one being that he sees a more flattering angle of you. My husband is tall, and I'm eternally anxious about how massive my forehead must look to him. Like a furrowed moon rising in the night. Ah well.
This was in the movie A Beautiful Mind as an example of the applicability of game theory. In the movie the sex roles were reversed. An attractive women and her 4 less attractive friends enter a bar. The dominate strategy is for the four men to not pursue the most attractive woman but instead to attempt to woo her less attractive friends. We are not intuitive statisticians but also not intuitive game theorists. Women need to more closely read Jane Austen - the foremost relationship game theorist of her and probable this era.
The analogy doesn't extend to online dating. The major constraints that could in theory (not in practice) lead to a most-match-with-a-mate Nash equilibrium are features of the material world, not the digital world. Today people live more of their mental, psychological, and emotional existence in the digital world than in the flesh-and-blood material world, and as such the virtual is now more real to them than reality, where they feel increasingly awkward and uncomfortable. Most people over 40 have trouble appreciating this fact about younger generations and certainly aren't ready to grasp the major implications for our brave new world that has such people in it.
In the old dating scene in which people met -get this- in real life in the real world, one's scale of approach was very limited. First you could only hit on the girls who came to the same place at the same time. And then, unless you are a super elite level set opener, you could only hit on them one at a time. Furthermore, because your approach would likely be observed by everyone else among both your targets and competitors who will all talk about it, you would have a very hard time pulling off a successful rebound attempt on a second choice.
But it's -completely- different online.
You can scale your number of approaches to the very limits of your talent and energy. Instead of the very small number of targets at close proximity in space and time and who have readied themselves for possibility of being approached, you can now target a decent percentage of an entire local region's population! They don't have to be made-up, dressed, psychologically 'on', or whatever, their profiles are there 24/7. You can approach any of them at any time, and approach them all practically simultaneously!
And it's all """private""" (well, not to the dating app company and the private consultants to whom they provide the real insights about what does and doesn't 'work'). That is, it creates in both approacher and target a sense of privacy and secrecy without any social pressure resulting from who might be watching and how they might judge us.
So, in the scene from a beautiful mind, every single girl is -secretly- getting his on by every single guy, all simultaneously, and, while everyone strongly suspects that to be what's going on, the facts are plausibly deniable and it's rude and risky to probe.
In this very different situation, the script flips, because it doesn't matter which girls the guys try to go after, the guys' choices and preferences are irrelevant. Instead, it now becomes possible for every single girl to choose the same alpha in the modern hypergamous lek mating pattern, without knowing for sure that he's seeing the other four too. And the top alpha will be quite happy with this state of affairs. And human nature is such that no one is going to do anything out of sympathy for loser males.
What that means is that the situation is sufficiently stable to switch from a "most-match-with-a-mate" equilibrium to "winners take most" equilibrium. Nash wept.
Would a solution then be to have a dating app release in aggregate statistics about users behavior or even just the men given that women suffer greater from reputational injury. You build a reputational profile of the men on the site relative to the average user. Or the site handicaps the men, as is done in horse racing, to a point where every man has a equal probability of "winning". Think Jane Austen meets Ada Lovelace . The site can reveal to the women each man's weight and perhaps her own handicap can be revealed to her too. The more heavily weighted a man is the greater the prize and the more difficult to win. A woman can choose to ignore this value but now at her peril. It doesn't solve the problem of men using multiple sites but if this is an app women use men will go their too.
It's not clear what you mean by 'solution', but if you mean that the app would successfully impose the equivalent of the real-world's practical limitations on scaling, then no, nothing like that proposal would come anywhere close to a solution.
That's for lots of reasons, but one stands out if there is competition among rival dating apps, the regulatory "race to the bottom". You ever watch how they handle admission to a popular nightclub? See, everyone wants to go to where the alphas, hotties, and cool people are hanging out. And those people want to be able to fully capitalize on their status and attractiveness, and to be given VIP perks too! They don't want hassles, handicaps, limits, etc. They'll balk and they'll bolt to a less 'regulated' scene.
And everyone else who wants to be around them will dance right out the door with them. And then the next tranche, and the next, in a giant status-ordered conga line. And even if you weren't exactly attracted to the group that went elsewhere, the average quality of the people who haven't left yet keeps declining and your instincts are going to go into overdrive to generate a powerful impulse to flee from the risk of being associated with those socially radioactive losers.
Bart Kosko pointed out that this scene gets the idea of the Nash Equilibrium wrong. A more cunning man than Nash would defect to pursue the blond after his fellows had each turned to one of her friends.
https://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/oped_4.pdf
As I was reading Kling's essay, one of my thoughts was, "Not enough women today have read Jane Austen."
related:
- Insights from 2,961 First Dates: https://dkras.substack.com/p/sex-differences-attractiveness-and
- On the Future of Dating: https://dkras.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-future-of-dating
See also https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-mutual-friend
Men greatly outnumber women on the apps. It's entirely possible that the number of men over six feet is two or three times the total number of women, especially if you restrict to "datable" people. So any given tall man will not receive that many likes from women, even though short men receive approximately zero.
So perhaps women can be selective on this front without much reducing their chances of a relationship.
Try reversing it then. Assume the men greatly outnumber the women, and then ask the men about their preferences and swiping behavior in relation to a woman's age or weight. It's going to look similar, and so the sex ratio is just not a big factor skewing the results away from true preferences.
You mean the outnumbered men would then be equally selective when it comes to the women's appearance? I certainly agree.
My rough heuristic is that the closer behavior is to the four Fs of evolution (fighting, fleeing, feeding and f*cking), the more the behavior is hard-coded and consequently inelastic.
The way I understand the evolutionary psychology is physical appearance is not the number one criteria for women, see Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max's book "Mate". It's like number three or something. For example, if you are assertive, kind, and have a good job--a proxy for being a good provider and father-- you will do well.
Yeah, much of the complaints about female sexuality seem to be exclusive due to the design of the apps. At least from personal experience, the guys who have the most dating success irl don't seem to be very far from average attractiveness.
Exactly. Which is why the average guy who wants to date more should be trying to meet women in person through their friend group or some co-ed group activity, not improving their online dating profile.
Nope. Imagine telling The Old Man and The Sea "Oh, no luck again Santiago? You should try fishing in the Dead Sea."
If you want to catch a fish, you don't have the luxury of picking the spot, you gotta go where they're swimming. And they are swimming online.
Look up one of those "how couples met" charts.
After WWII, besides "Friends" (which I'll get back to), the major ways couples met was via social network or mingling institutions: Family, School (often high school), Neighbors, Church. Today, those have all fallen to the point where even combined they only represent a small percentage of meetings.
Now, people have long met through friends, but it helps to have the right friends who know lots of other potential matches for you. 1975-1995 was peak for both "Through Friends" and "At Work", and combined they accounted for over half of meetings as far back as 40 years ago. This was the same period when "at a bar" became a significant source of couple meetings.
But while bar meetings still happen a lot (though in a different manner to that of the 70s, 80s, and 90s), at-work and through-friends couldn't last.
We all know what happened to trying to meet people at work. Ugh.
But it might surprise people to learn that "through friends" has been falling like a rock for 25 years. That's because that 1975-1995 "peak through friends" world was a place where - get this - friends met up in groups in person in the real world all the time. Whoa! The rate at which that happens today is -nothing- compared to the rate it used to. I was there, Gandalf! Getting together today is for the serious, focused "smaller, older, deeper" crowd.
And today, "At Bar or Online" started "going parabolic" around 2000 and now together are the origin of the vast majority of romantic relationships. Some reports put the percentage over ninety! This is self-sustaining, because you gotta go where everyone else is going, and it's common knowledge that everyone is online, so everyone gets locked into the new focal point forever.
Appreciate the detailed reply, but I don't think social science evidence etc. is the proper lens for this. And that's true of a lot of the comments.
What's a better lens than evidence?
See the more interesting question to me is why more men, especially men in college, don't do this. And I don't have very many good answers. Candidates include social media and civil rights laws, but I personally aren't swayed by either.
1)Fear of rejection--I know from experience, and am thankfully happily married now. 2)No one taught them any of this so they are just going by what their peers are doing. They often learn the wrong lessons--like tall guy who is playfully mean can get away with it because he's tall and good looking.
Assertive and having a good job seem to be 2 or those 4 Fs to my way of thinking about it.
Yes, but I don't agree with Brian's premise about these behaviors being hard coded and therefore mostly inelastic.
As the dating app market evolves, one reads more about "niche" apps that either explicitly specialize in people looking for LTR commitments or for more casual flings. I wonder if these have less skewed dynamics. One of the best points Torenberg makes is that the conflation of intentions on these apps is bad for everyone.
At the other end of the spectrum, I think it would be useful to have more ways that people potentially attracted to each other can become friends first, and to normalize asking out friends and taking rejection gracefully. My social circle may be both "out of date" and unrepresentative here, but it contains an awful lot of happy couples (my own marriage included) who were friends first, as well as plenty of people who asked each other out, fot turned down, and remained friends. And it seems to me that the emotional dynamics of doing things this way encourage less superficiality and more humane connection. In any case we could use more encouragement of friends-making to address the general loneliness problem, which goes beyond the decline of sex and marriage.
Generally, men don't care that much about a woman's height, but I've heard of one exception: Exclusive lower Manhattan dance clubs frequented by Wall Street bros and fashion models. Door men sometimes turn away beautiful short women to get across the message that this club is for fashion models and not real women. The Masters of the Universe compete with each other to show they can have a 5'11" fashion model on their arms, not some 5'4" head cheerleader-homecoming queen-type loser.
It's seems extremely negative sum, but people in Manhattan often enjoy thinking up seemingly pointless competitions.
I call BS on this. Speaking as a denizen of downtown NYC, Wall Street Bros are quite far down in the pecking order. The 5'11" fashion models are looking for cool guys. And there's very little overlap in the Venn diagram of Wall Street Bros and Cool Dudes.
When I was in my twenties, the most common qualities that women my age said they wanted in their online profiles were tall, fun, and funny.
When I was in my thirties, I saw a lot more divorced women with kids on the apps. They didn't say they were looking for tall, fun, and funny anymore. I don't know if they were exactly the same women, but it sure looked like the reality of trying to raise kids with someone had changed what people thought was important.
I remember reading somewhere: Men will date women they would not marry and will have sex with women they would not date. Women will marry men they would not date and will date men they would not have sex with.
I assume that a women's *dating* strategy is substantially different from their *husband hunting* strategy, and not surprisingly, it filters men a lot more strictly. In particular, the current sexual economy puts people into a long stretch of early adulthood when their mating instincts are activated but before the point where they can accurately judge the future career (worth) of a potential mate.
Back in the 1800s, you graduated from 8th grade and were precipitated into adulthood (job, marriage) immediately, so your only partner-hunting was targeted to finding a spouse. Now, a woman can easily become sexually self-governing at 17 as a college freshman, but she may be nearing 30, working as an associate lawyer at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe, before it becomes clear which male associate lawyers will make partnership. She may have as much as 10 years to cool her heels and occupy herself with the men she finds most sexually attractive.
Doesn't this make short men who choose to use dating apps instead of networks the idiots? They may as well get mad they're not finding any women on Grindr.
TLDR: If you are smart enough to judge what you want, you do not need an app collecting information on other facets of the person. Women are using the "date short guys" strategy, but those women are not on the apps. They are, in no small likelihood, currently in relationships with a short guy, secretly laughing at the weenies trying to find love on their phones.
I think that dating apps are in the perfect crosshairs of "bad product meets easy distribution / media coverage."
Pew says that 45% of actively-looking singles have used apps in the past year (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/08/for-valentines-day-5-facts-about-single-americans/). This means that the majority don't use apps! I think that is a sort of filter: Even in today's online age, most people are still not using apps, and are using their friends/social network. For the majority, the online dating market is not the default, one must opt into it. My theory is that, the people opting into this new market were not the ones with the best opportunities for relationship-building in the old one.
This squares with our knowledge of the users: When given the option to filter out by height < 6 foot, a substantial number take it. This is wildly unlike real life (is 5'11 really a no go?) Is someone willing to toss out that many candidates truly there for a superior matching experience? You're filtering as much for guys who will lie about their height as guys above that height!
In other words, when it comes to relationships, dating apps are a lemons market. This explains a lot of what you hear about on the apps from users. It also explains why the apps are constantly encouraged to do more underwriting of and for their users. Couple this with the fact that the apps are vacuuming up user data, and it's clear to see why the apps are always in the culture wars! The market is full of lemons, but the product spits out a ton of high-quality lemon data, so the lemon reporting is too juicy to pass up.
"80% of women will never see you if you are 5'11" would be devastating in totality, but when we factor in that men are most of the people on the apps, this reads as "~20% of women won't see you, because they are on their phones looking for guys", which isn't as big a problem. Likewise, "30% of the men on the app where you can send a photo of your genitals, will do so" is less surprising than "5% of men will do this, given a venue where this is the norm, and you go there." It doesn't make everyone in the market a lemon, but it means you're going to run into more lemons, and less of what you want. If you're serious about courtship, start with all the places people actually get into relationships, even if it isn't in the op-ed section it will be in the marriage bulletins!
Online singles are glorious warriors in the trenches of the culture war. Odysseus' tale is great because he struggled to make it home. May all wanderers someday find rest.
6O% of all relationships were initiated online in 2O23. A large part of that actually comes from social media but the apps take up a large part.
Short men will sire short sons, who will be at a disadvantage.
Women have always had to tradeoff male genetic fitness vs male investment.
That's called the "sexy sons" theory. Women choose men who will give them sons that will be at an advantage of attracting a mate.
Did you know male pattern baldness is a genetic advantage because it tricks women into believing a man is older and thus more stable than he actually is??
So will short women, genius.
6. Women want to have a son who will grow up to be President, and the taller of the two major candidates always wins.
Did you forget that half of progeny of tall men will be daughters and tall daughters will be at a disadvantage? Genius
This has been analyzed exhaustively by the PUA-adjacent blogosphere 10-15 years ago. To summarize, conscious risk-and-benefit calculation (1 and to an extent 4) does not play much of a role. Your formulation of 3 is incomplete, as the best possible option is a fling with a tall man while securing support from a reliable provider short man. This correction also has implications for 4 (data is interpreted somewhat differently from what you suggest). 2, completed 3 and 4 all play a role, with the influence of each depending on the particular social situation a woman finds herself in.
Very well said. Yes, the PUA blogs and forums cracked the code and provided adequate answers to all these and many related questions years ago.
The combined body of the highest quality analysis and insights from the PUA equivalent of "Fifth Solvay Conference" superstars constitutes a genuine intellectual achievement in the field of "theoretical and applied intersexual dynamics" analogous to the emergence of the Standard Model for particle physics. I am not being at all ironic when I say it is as important for a young man today to master that suppressed art and science as it is for a soldier to learn survival skills and self-aid.
Years before the revolting corpse flower of the current dating scene reached its current state of full bloom, all those guys knew enough to reach prescient consensus on the precise character of the sexual market apocalypse that is our new normal.
I'm not sure where that 90% statistic comes from. The numbers I've seen before were that women who filter on height (which is just a fraction of all women using the apps), mostly filter for >6 feet tall.
Most women do not actually put in a height filter. So in that statistic you only get the minority of women who think this is a critical trait.