If you like meeting new people, if you find first dates fun, etc., trial and error is really fun! I wouldn't want to optimize it away. :) Spontaneity is also romantic! There's something lovely about how a chance encounter can change a lifetime.
I feel like a lot of people don't like meeting new people and basically want to optimize the path from single -> married. I think that mindset makes it hard to find a partner because it makes everything too high stakes. If you're not having fun, she's not having fun.
I also think that most people don't actually know what they want. I buy that dating docs work as a "vibe check" (you're into Russian history? I know nothing about that but that sounds groovy! let's try out a date!) but I'm skeptical about reading too far into these things.
I think you've hit on something important here that a lot of people in this thread are missing, which is the value of *drama*. Dating someone unsuitable/crazy may not be a good long-term strategy for maximizing your zzzzzzzzz (sorry I fell asleep typing this sentence) - but it's absolutely fantastic for generating drama, learning about yourself & creating memories.
Right. Nerds don't want relationship drama, dating itself is drama enough. But for people with more skill, it becomes like any other game, with challenge and variety becoming important and a part of the enjoyment.
That first site really makes me want to run a study on response rates based on whether the ad was in red or blue.
Hopefully they randomize the order pinned by each cookie, but somehow that seems unlikely to me.
Hypothesis: the blue is so much easier to read that response rates are statistically significantly better, but the absolute magnitude is still pretty small.
I was not familiar with the term myself, but I googled "matrimonial biodata" and found lots of sites offering templates: https://createmybiodata.com/
I think the big things that might be unexpected are the detailed astrological charts - they care about birth time and place in addition to date, and calculate several different factors, that depend on the actual current position of stars and planets at the time and place of your birth, rather than using the place that the stars and planets would have been at that date 2000 years ago, the way European astrology works.
Looking more closely at those biodata templates, I'm interested if anyone knows more about the icon you can put at the top. The default image seems to be a stylized image of Ganesh with a swastika on his forehead. Looking at the options when I click "change", many of the options seem to indicate something about religion, but there are a larger number of options than I would have expected. (I think "shaivite" vs "vaishnavite" is the finest level of detail I've heard from my relatives.)
From my viewing of historical/mythological dramas, one important factor in seeing the charts is because of the influence of Mars in the natal chart (particularly for the bride). Mars is a malefic planet and someone with it prominent in their chart will have an adverse affect on their spouse (maybe even the groom will die early leaving the bride a widow, a most unlucky and undesirable state of affairs):
You get it in Western astrology too with websites offering "love compatibility" horoscopes, but nowhere near the same extent. Indian astrology does take account of the precession of the equinoxes, unlike Western, and the way the charts are constructed (the square shaped ones) is the traditional way mediaeval and Renaissance Western astrology used to do it, before the circular charts were adopted (see diagrams in posts below):
Those were super interesting! Besides "caste no bar," the phrase that stood out to me was how often skin tone (namely "fair," which I assume means "more white") was mentioned. My impression was that it's more of a selling point for women than for men to be fair.
I'm wondering about the "divorced after three months" guy, I assume he means "it's been three months since the divorce" and not "my first marriage only lasted three months" because that latter would be worrying.
There used to be similar sorts of ads in old magazines like "Ireland's Own", be that unabashed "looking for marriage partner" or "wanting a penfriend":
The charge for this column is 25p per notice in the adult section and 121/2p in the teenage section. All proceeds for 1974 will be donated to charity.
Adults
LONELY HEARTH: Is the owner of a large and well stocked dairy and tillage farm in West Waterford. He is aged 30 years and is a T/T and non smoker and is from a very respectable farming family. He is of average height and built and is good humoured, kindly disposed and considered good looking. Having decided to marry in the near future he desires to meet a young lady of 25 years or so who has decided to marry a farmer. She must be of respectable farming background, good humoured and good looking. Average height and build, have some farming experience. A dowry considered an asset but not a necessity. Replies with photo exchanged from only local counties. Strictly confidential.
MAN: 35 years old would like to meet a girl with view to marriage. He has his own home shop and land and is interested in cattle and shows. He shows films and likes nature study, herbs etc. He likes a quiet type of life with good cooking. R.C. He is easy to get on with. Snap please
NORTH WEST MOUNTIES: Farmer, north West Sligo 40 years, 6”tall, good family background, no commitments, non drinker and light smoker. Has about 30 acres of land, new bungalow with hot and cold running water, stock. Would like to get in touch with sincere girls aged 30 to 40 with view to marriage. Strictest confidence given and expected. Interests are listening to radio, reading, current affairs etc. Replies especially welcome from counties Sligo, Leitrim and Mayo or girls from those counties living in Dublin.
BEARD: Would like to meet a girl aged 20 to 30 with own large farm in need of managing or building up. He has a flair for horses and keeps and breeds some, also a large herd of cattle. Likes travel and showing horses. He is simple and honest and would like to meet likeable girl with view to early marriage. He is in his mid 30’s and would like to meet girls aged 25 to 35. Photo with first letter please, will be returned. Confidential.
PART TIME FARMER: and dealer, is a man with his own car, lorry and house. Would like to hear from farmers daughter or business girl view to marriage. Aged 18 to 28. He is self made in dealing with shop and farming people. He would be interested in any business that would make a living from selling. He has a sense of humour and would like to hear from girls that are attractive with own business or farm. Photo please.
ON HIS OWN: Deserted husband, returned from England some years ago. Is sincere, honest, hardworker, respectable, 28 years old 6 foot tall, dark haired, well built and is considered good looking. He has his own large modern farm, self feed silo and cattle cubicle house, tractor and machinery and a part time job. His interests include hunting and fishing, dogs and horses, and country and western music, and all outdoor sport. He is a great lover of the Irish red setter dog and keeps a lot of them. Has a separation and is waiting for an annulment in the near future. Would like to hear from girls of own age or from deserted wives or young widows with view to friendship and marriage. Please send snap in first letter. All letters answered. Replies welcome from any part of Ireland but especially from Leitrim, Sligo or Roscommon.
EASY GOING MAN: Over 30, with own home. Would like to be married. He has £25,000 tied up in livestock and land. He is quiet and lazy to a point of rushing at time as life passes by. He like to meet girls aged 20 to 32, wishing for a home and a happy life. He is not interested in anyone’s background as the future is all that matters. No objections to a girl with child. Snap please
HIGH NOON: Is aged 30, 5’10” good appearance. Has own house, good farm and own car. He is anxious to settle down and wishes to meet nice country girl aged 20 to 30 with same ambition. Farmers daughter, nurse or professional girl. Hobbies are dancing, CW music and Gaelic games. Snaps appreciated and all letters answered. Only those genuinely interested in marriage should apply.
HAPPY GO LUCKY: Is a 44 year old girl. She is tall and has a good figure and is very nice looking. She loves farming and would like to hear from C of I gentleman. Photo please. All letters answered.
HOME LOVER: is sincere, respectable lady, late forties, good education, own home, small farm, good family background, and having no ties, wishes to meet sincere respectable farmer, business or professional gentleman in 50 to 60 age group. Photo appreciated and returned. Strictest confidence will be given and expected.
CO. LIMERICK: Is a farmer aged 34 years, 5’10” in height. T.T. with a medium sized farm, well stocked, car, machinery, wishes to meet a respectable farmers daughter, teacher, nurse etc with farming background with good sense of humour, T.T. and non smoker with capital farm or otherwise with view to early marriage. Genuine replies. Photo first letter. Strictest confidence given and expected. Usual interests."
"Caste no bar" was the phrase I noticed in the ones I saw back in the day.
The *other* thing to maybe look for in this "world I know nothing about" is the Indian focus on maintaining lane discipline and encouraging others to do so. This was a thing 20 years ago and seems to still be a thing. The 'problem' is that at low speeds and with a mix of bicycles, mopeds, cows, buses, cars, etc maintaining lane discipline substantially cuts down the capacity of the road.
Dating docs feel weird because they are not "honest signaling." That is, it's possible to lie or mislead on them. Meeting someone in person has lots of honest signals though--how the react with body language, their mannerisms, how they speak, what words they use, etc.
It's the same as if someone directly tells you "I'm your friend' it feels weird and awkward, even if it's true. This is why friends say things like "what's up dumbass?" when they meet up. That's an honest signal, because if someone who wasn't your friend said that, it would actually be an insult. And it's why you typically respond in-kind with another insult.
I wouldn't exactly trust someone on a dating doc saying "I am very pretty". But I would learn that they were someone who prioritized being pretty, or someone who felt like it wouldn't get them in trouble to say that they were pretty.
I would trust someone who said "I am a Shia Muslim and only looking to date other Shia Muslims." There's not much reason to lie about this, it just helps you find your type. I think many of the values I care about are in this category.
This might be saying more about me than about other people, but I think I learn more about someone from reading their writing than watching their body language. Writing style is a good sign of intelligence, education level, class, sense of humor, and the internal structure of someone's thought. The exact way they choose to signal vs. countersignal traits can tell you a lot about which traits they value and expect from others. Meanwhile, whether they, I don't know, fidget their hands a bit when they talk to you might tell you that they're anxious. But everyone's anxious on first dates!
I don't disagree, I just think that it explains the strong intuitive "this feels weird" response people have. Though I think a lot of people definitely weight things like body language very highly compared to more analytical signals, and you're probably on the more extreme end there.
I definitely *don't* think that I learn more about someone from reading a piece of writing than I do meeting them.
Take your example profiles. Almost entirely, what I learn from reading those pieces of writing is *how they want a potential date to perceive them*, which is not the interesting question to me. I don't know my own most attractive traits; why would they know theirs? If anything, it has the opposite effect: a piece of writing in which someone is consciously, desperately trying to get you to perceive them as smart and successful (which several of your examples are doing) feels gauche, embarrassing, ungenuine to me.
The signalling problem is kind of inherent to dating; you can't just wish it away, hope for a world in which social interaction was more aboveboard.
For instance, I have a preference for dating people who are intelligent, and I *don't* want to date people who are desperate to signal their intelligence. The same applies, to many people, to things like financial success, among others.
In a world where having this kind of "dating document" was de rigeur, I would probably be going on dates with the people who rebelled against the entire idea of the system by sending a page of something completely unrelated, or possibly even whose bios were "." if I thought they fit the bill otherwise.
I just find it ... again, gauche. I don't trust the kind of person who would write this kind of document. If Hana were actually as intelligent as her profile clearly wants to convince me she is, or Larisa as successful, and they were reasonably pretty, they would have no need to write so much as one sentence on a dating site to convince people to be interested. The sheer fact that they're writing this at all is proof they're not.
Appearance and mannerisms, on the other hand, are *much* harder to fake. Almost impossible, for everything but a really small, talented slice of the population.
Yeah the problem for me is dating docs as an idea seem to have the same kind of smarmy, kinda desperate and high-risk of bullshitting as LinkedIn does.
What’s odd about dating docs is that just like with job referrals, most people including me wouldn’t bat an eye if a close friend recommended you date someone or set you up.
The thing it's most useful for me for was "I want someone who wants kids and a home life" (and, if I'm being honest, the implied "and is also comfortable with slightly weird and explicit communication").
I arguably don’t have a home life at the moment. It means working all day on weekdays and spending weekends at friends’ houses or on trips. At my apartment I have a housemate I barely know. I eat almost all of my meals at work. I mostly spend time in my apartment watching movies.
Reading that sounds a bit depressing (I actually think my life is fun!) but just want to highlight that it’s pretty easy to just not have a home life.
Wouldn't you expect 18%, not 9%, of marriages to be Republican and Democrat, given these numbers? 9% Republican to Democrat and 9% Democrat to Republican?
I agree and was about to write the same thing. I think Kenny Easwaran’s math is wrong. Assuming heterosexual for simplicity, there’s 30% chance the woman is D × 30% chance the man is R = 9%, AND there’s a 30% chance the woman is R × 30% chance the man is D = 9%. Add them up to get 18%.
Additionally, I suspect that partisan registration is somewhat higher in the same segments of the population where marriage is more common, although I don't have any ideas for validating that in the amount of time I'm going to spend on this comment.
Yes, I definitely forgot to count both directions! But even with an extra factor of 2, it appears not to be as much of a 100% filter as people assume it would be.
All of these calculations seem to be making the unrealistic simplifying assumption that party affiliation doesn't vary with sex. E.g. if we assume a symmetric 20% gender gap, we get 20% (20% * 20% + 40% * 40%) mixed D/R marriages with random mating.
I think Kayla’s take is the most sensible. The breakdown of whether dating docs are good vs shorter form apps like Tinder overlooks the main function of dating platforms: they try to make the “meeting potential romantic partner” market more efficient. It’s a cold market efficiency game. Also, dating docs assume that people can self-reflect well...a tall order to say the least -- looks at the mirror critically.
I also think people complain unduly about the “modernization” of dating. Yeah, chances are you’ll have to use an app to meet someone but after that you’re talking in person just how grandma Mathilda did.
Anyway, just some rambling thoughts. New to this Substack and have been enjoying your work, Scott!
I think the comments from the Indian and Orthodox Jewish communities, where family-arranged marriages are standard, suggests that this isn't even that much of a "modernization" - the main difference is that the partners themselves are doing it, rather than their families, and the people involved are writing and reading, rather than telling it to some third party who remembers it all.
There seems to be a difference of opinion between people who generally like going on dates and people who generally find it unpleasant. Interesting distinction.
I don't think it lines up with introversion/extraversion either. I'm an introvert but I like the idea of doing something fun with an attractive person who is attracted to me. Others...maybe have a higher level of social anxiety? Or they pick activities they don't like but feel obligated to do because they seem like typical date things? Like, if you don't enjoy restaurant dining, maybe pick a different type of date.
Yep, I think this is exactly the main issue and the reason the two camps seem to be talking past each other. The people who don't like dating don't understand why you wouldn't want to pre-filter the candidates for compatibility, and the people who like dating don't understand why you'd want to use a document to filter people out when you could just do it in person during a (mostly/probably) enjoyable date.
And I agree it's not introversion/extraversion. I'm also an introvert and mostly enjoyed all the dating I did on the way to finding my wife, even though many of the dates were with women who would have made a very bad long-term match for me.
I wonder if there’s a sociosexuality component here? If the “I would enjoy fucking/kissing/receiving attraction-inflected attention from this person” set is a lot bigger than the “I would consider this person as a long-term partner” set, the dating/filtering process will be fun. If it’s not, the process is probably dicier. (Scott, being ace, is presumably on the low end of this spectrum.)
I have a very low libido and I enjoy dating a lot!
I'd add that I see "made new (platonic) friend" as a really good outcome from a date. The mindset takes a huge amount of pressure out of the process. It makes dating a "let's hang out! if there's a spark, great! if we just like each other, also great!" thing.
As someone who isn't asexual or the least bit anxious, here's my perspective. I went on a number of dates from various people on dating sites who looked like they were good fits. About 10% of them were interesting. The other 90% were so tedious as to make the entire process unbearable. ANYTHING that would help me cut down on the number of dates, just to avoid that 90%, would be welcome.
I'm an introvert. I did not enjoy dating at all in my 20s, I think because I was worried about convincing the woman to like me and couldn't find time to enjoy myself until we were already practically a couple.
By the time of my 30s, when I knew I was ready to get married, I had come to enjoy dating. I think because I had developed genuine confidence, didn't feel I had anything to prove, and was happy just to hear the stories and perspectives of the sort of women that met my basic criteria, even if we didn't end up sharing much attraction. I normally just made the first dates a cup of coffee or a drink, one hour max. I cycled through a lot of these first dates, often 3+ women per week, and I can only think of one that I really disliked, where talking to her was like pulling teeth. Naturally, this pace meant not much screening beyond basic questions before we met up.
I met my wife less than 2 months into this process. Funny how that goes.
How were you were meeting enough women to do 3+ first dates a week? Were you just very successful on the apps or were you constantly going out to meet new women and asking them out?
I relied on a combination of the apps and reaching out to my network. I didn't cold-approach -- not that it's a bad idea. Also it might be boom or bust week to week but I never stopped looking, and I would schedule dates over a week in advance at times. And keep in mind that this only lasted for 6-7 weeks until I met my wife, I'm sure the dating pool would have dried up before much longer.
What I had going for me doesn't really scale to the ACX audience. I'm a conservative Christian with passable social skills/grooming/looks, who was respectful without being obsequious, and I signaled that I was ready to start a family. While far from rich, I owned my own home and had a good enough career to support a family on one income in the low-cost place I lived.
And while I would say I married and started having kids later than I wish I had, I was also probably the perfect age to have as many options as possible, as my dating pool consisted of women in their late 20s and early 30s, also very ready to start families, many of them in the "always a bridesmaid, never the bride" camp.
As I commented further down, what is the point of a dating doc? To optimize the journey from single -> married? Or just to suggest fun people to date?
IMO dating docs probably work very well if you're using them as a source of cool people that you might want to hang out with. If you're using them to identify your one true partner, this probably works much less well since most ppl don't have a perfect sense of their preferences.
(I'd also add that "enjoying meeting new ppl" is probably _the_ key dating skill. If dating is a horrible grind, things won't go well.)
Yes, for sure. I believe this is the crux for whether you will like dating docs or not.
People who don't enjoy first dates want to optimize them away as efficiently as possible, people who do enjoy first dates want to save a little mystery for later.
Former ones want to read an exhaustive summary, latter ones want a book cover blurb with no spoilers.
I've been on like 5 dates in my whole life, but I've had 5 or so honeys, 3 pretty serious long term relationships and maybe 10 causal hookups (I don't really like casual hookups). I have always met people at work, at school, at a setting for some activity, or through friends. That has always felt much more comfortable to me than freakin *dates*, and also like a more valid way to get a sense of what someone is like. I loathe the date feeling of smile and chat, while there's a sign hanging over each of our heads saying "We're here to decide if we're drawn to each other." You have no common experience to talk about, except for Wanting a Partner. I don't see how people *stand* dates!~
>You have no common experience to talk about, except for Wanting a Partner.
You discover common experiences. That's some of the fun of it. The delight of discovery and of making a connection with someone new. Getting past the usual social boundaries to create new and exciting intimacy. I agree that it can take a bit more work than "we're both in the same class/office so of course we have things to talk about."
Yeah, I grasp the concept, I just don’t like the way it feels, like auditioning for each other. I dislike the feeling so much that I’m not in a mode where I can delight in discovery, whereas it happens easily schmoozing with another climber while belaying.
That's not it. I like going on (some) dates, and I think dating docs are a great idea. (I don't have a dating doc only because it seems to be useless in my country.) It's just that I like going on dates with people who are *interesting*. The 90% of profiles on dating apps which have 0 information or are extremely superficial do absolutely nothing for me. Nor do I care that much about how a person looks like. In dating apps, I tend to read the profile first and only if I like it (which is rare) I would glance at the picture to check it's not, like, actively repulsive, before I click "like".
I don't think this is THE division line (but maybe one of the few).
I liked going on dates, but I have strong preference for long-form profiles, because I didn't like going on dates with people I have nothing to talk about. For example, a lot of people care a lot about celebrities, star gossip etc. I have zero interest in this area, and I would find conversation on this topic to be extremely boring. A well-filled dating profile let me filter out such people with almost 100% success rate - I've never been on a date with star-obsessed woman, and only met one that was too much into "successful businessmen" (like, she sent me some articles about "10 most successful young businessmen of the decade" or something like that).
I still think THE line lies where physical attractiveness matters a lot, or not much. I can't understand how you can get excited about a woman just by looking at her photos, and other people can't understand how can I get excited about a woman just by knowing she likes HPMOR.
As a side-note, it would be interesting to see if preference for dating docs/long form profiles correlates with face blindness. I have some degree of it, to the point where I don't recognize people I know very well if I meet them in a place where I don't expect to meet them. Maybe the reason I don't care about photos/physical appearance too much is because most people look to me like variations on a few base models anyway.
>I'm an introvert but I like the idea of doing something fun with an attractive person who is attracted to me.
Well that’s the key distinction isn’t it? All of the normal things you would say you like or don’t like to do are entirely contingent on attractiveness and sexuality. That’s why focusing on “describable dating preferences” is a dead end.
Anyway I actually don’t believe in compatibility much at all in terms of minor life choices. Very few women like sports in the way that men do, and yet sport obsessed men marry women who leave the room when the sports are on. There are a few deal breakers, except relating to the desire for children or marriage itself. Even religious people can marry atheists happily enough if they agree on how the children are raised, political differences shouldn’t matter at all, and opposites often attract.
GPS-enabled apps replaced charming people in a bar the same way that GPS-enabled ride hail replaced sticking your thumb out along the side of a street. The IRL version only identifies possible matches within line-of-sight, while the app versions enable matches within GPS radius.
And once singles bars lose their status as the most effective way to meet people, they suddenly lose a lot of their clientele, and stop being as effective even for the people who are still there.
(The standard story of the decline of gay bars is a one-two punch of apps replacing their role for finding hookups/dates, and general social acceptance enabling general bars to replace their role as the safe place to get a drink with your friends.)
Not that I go to a lot of bars, but when I have in recent years they all seem so packed as to feel massively overcrowded. How does that line up with bars losing status? Or is it that singles bars are gone and there are now only generic bars?
I don't know the general trend. I know that the number of gay bars has decreased in most cities. I have no idea what has happened to the number of "singles bars" for straight people (though I did read this amazing (long!) article a few years ago about the life and death of one particular type of singles bar: https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-death-of-flair/ ).
I would expect the general crowdedness of bars to be determined by the number of customers needed to sustain the operating expenses, and then the total number of bars to be determined by the number of people who want to go to bars divided by the crowdedness of each bar. The effect I'm talking about is going to affect the total number of people who want to go to bars, but crowdedness will still need to be determined by rent (which of course is going to vary from neighborhood to neighborhood).
“I would expect the general crowdedness of bars to be determined by the number of customers needed to sustain the operating expenses, and then the total number of bars to be determined by the number of people who want to go to bars divided by the crowdedness of each bar.”
Bars can’t really control the number of people who go in, and the viability of pubs and bars depends on the costs and revenues, like everything else. There are plenty of owner occupied pubs even in big cities like New York where the clientele will all get seats even in weekends. Those places are viable because the costs are relatively low - no rent, no debt etc. they don’t need the big crowds.
When I was a kid (ie 14-15) I worked on a relatives pub (illegally and largely unpaid) where the clients were about 3 an hour until 6 pm when it increased to 4-5 people. This was week days in the summer holidays. I didn’t work weekends but the place could only seat 15 people so I don’t think it ever rocked. Anyway, just tipping over was good enough, although those places are dying out now.
I believe the expectation is not that bars can control the number of people who can come in, but that bars will go out of business until the remaining number is small enough that they are getting enough customers to balance expenses.
Collector's Weekly has some incredible long-form articles. I'd read this one before, learning about TGI Friday's improbable origin as a "fern bar" for mingling singles.
I got there from an in-depth article on Tiki culture, which I had thought must be appropriating something specific; but it turns out to be a totally superficial aesthetic, no more authentic than steampunk.
Thanks. It’s interesting that “through friends” is the one that’s affected by the rise in apps. It’s hard to see the cause there, you would expect that apps would replace bars and pubs.
The "met online" category includes social media and other online exchanges, not just dating apps. People are probably increasingly meeting their friends-of-friends through algorithms rather than direct recommendations.
Finding dates spontaneously IRL is totally something that you can still do - I've had a lot of luck with that. That being said, you have to know your scene. I'm terrible at bars/parties but I've gotten random dates from ppl that I've met hiking, sailing, etc. Basically you need to find spaces (a) where you're comfortable and happy that also (b) have a good gender ratio. If you only like doing male dominated activities, maybe you should try exploring new facets of your personality.
Well this isn’t about me. Although I assume you are using the you as neutral (one should) . From my days of being single I found bars to be a bad bet, best bet was a house party. Why? Approaching a woman in a bar is a clear attempt at a hookup and can be rejected, at a house party it’s just mingling.
Just registering the observation "you still can meet girls IRL and that still works great (although only a specific type of person will do well a bar)" which is what I assume what you were getting at with your "bar" question.
To be honest my main point was that people don’t have to be as compatible as the dating documents seem to suggest. Men and women have different interests anyway. In the bar situation (or any situation where people can meet informally in a largely inebriated state) there’s no real discussion about compatibility. I met my partner in work but I remember many a friend meeting their now wives or partners through cheesy pickup lines in a sweaty pub. Getting the sex (or a makeout session) out of the way first makes the subsequent dates more relaxed. Time to get to know each other later.
However you need a thick skin because you will experience rejection. That being a painful thing for most people, they tend to avoid it when alternatives exist
What happened is that people who don't like bars or any other social gatherings finally found a way to meet other people without leaving their zone of comfort. It's a wonderful thing.
> Very few women like sports in the way that men do, and yet sport obsessed men marry
> women who leave the room when the sports are on.
That reeeeeally strikes me as an example of why preferences matter, and especially anti-preferences. That "leaves the room" part sounds like divorce waiting to happen. Partners shouldn't share every single activity and hobby, of course, but a good overlap, or at least tolerance is just more healthy.
That still sounds a bit strange to me, maybe because I've grown up in a very small flat where there was almost no way to "leave the room and do your own hobby" (well, for my parents - I had a room to myself, if a tiny one). Unless wife's hobby is incompatible with a turned on TV (e.g. she wants to watch something else, or needs peace and quiet), I'd imagine the partners would remain in the same room. My wife watches shows and knits while I play video games in the same room (I use headphones, or turn off sound at all - I don't much like sound in games), and we often trade snide remarks about what's on TV. As long as it is possible, I would prefer to remain by my wife's side, but I agree that some hobbies might require one to wander off.
My point was less that dating docs are too long (though often they are) and more that dating docs are a tool only for one half of the purpose of dating - finding a person who meets criteria you're absolutely certain about. They're a bad tool for exploring your preferences to see if those preferences are correct, something most people have to do.
"Well," a reasonable person might say. "Good. We've knocked out half the problem."
Except that people have a complicated relationship with their own romantic preferences. Nobody I know who is in a happy relationship is in a relationship with someone who met all of their "dealbreaker preferences" when they were single. The people got to know each other, realized that this person brought something to their lives they didn't even know they should be looking for, and that it was worth giving up one or more of the preferences they thought of as inviolate to be with their partner.
So if you go on dates only with people who violate none of your dealbreakers, either 1) you happened to get all your preferences right on first pass, or 2 and more likely) You're overscreening and siloing yourself into preferences the you of yesterday thought were mandatory, that the you of today might feel differently about if you just explored a bit further afield.
Again want to clarify that dating docs *can in principle* be used to both screen for your preferences and explore those preferences. In reality you're likely to fall in love with a person you're wishing into being and be continually disappointed when they never materialize, instead of interacting with actual human beings and discovering the unexpected value they could bring to your lives.
I think I'd disrecommend them for anyone under 26 or so, it does take some experience to not fall into this trap. Otoh my only criteria there are "wants kids" and "isn't offput by a short description of my interests", and it has worked fairly well overall.
Yeah for sure there are some things you should filter for. "Older than 18," "wants/doesn't want kids." "Looking to get married/not looking to get married." But those are just regular dating profiles. A "dating doc" strikes me as something that includes smaller details and preferences - that's where I see this concept getting into trouble.
> The people got to know each other, realized that this person brought something to their lives they didn't even know they should be looking for... You're overscreening and siloing yourself into preferences the you of yesterday thought were mandatory, that the you of today might feel differently about if you just explored a bit further afield.
Strong +1 to this, and not just for dating. It's pretty common to see a person who is struggling in life, often by their own admission, and are missing extremely subtle ways their behavior is causing those outcomes. It sucks because you need someone with the right knowledge to be in the right place at the right time to notice it, otherwise the person goes to the grave always wondering, for example, why women never talk to him or why he's always late to appointments or what-have-you.
This is pretty close to my thought as well, although I would go even a bit stronger. A highly detailed dating doc with a lot of self-description and a checklist of dealbreakers (as opposed to a reasonably well-thought-out online profile, so length and detail matter) suggests to me self-absorption and rigidity. That is even putting aside the question of whether the person has sufficient self-awareness and honesty to know and state their own true preferences (they might not). Even if they are self-aware and honest, much of a relationship is about creating a new unit where each party bends or adds to their preferences to make a new "relationship unit." A long, detailed dating doc communicates that you over-prioritize your current preferences and thus may not be flexible enough to make a relationship work. True deal-breakers should be only a few major categories - religion, kids, basic values, decent attraction. The rest you work out in a gradual process of "this person annoys me in person" or "we haven't had much fun in four dates" (at which point it presumably ends) or "hey, turns out I don't hate doing this" or "they've got their thing, I've got mine, but we've also got our own things together" at which point maybe you get serious. Making mountains out of molehills signals a fussy, inflexible, self-absorbed person. That's why I think they are actively not helpful, as opposed to merely cumbersome.
Nobody is saying you need literally no information. But the big deal-breaker categories (e.g. religion) can be pretty easily summarized in a short profile or, better, a date or two. Even kids, which contra Scott I think most people find off-putting to discuss super early, but saying "I love kids" in your profile as opposed to three paragraphs about your future kid plan. Once you've passed those, you need to figure out what "Relationship You" would want, rather than "Currently Single You." They're not necessarily exactly the same person, and if you are adamant that they have to be, you'll come off looking worse.
I totally agree, and I think people overscreen other major decisions too, like colleges/careers/friends/cities, when they should be exploring with an open mind.
> Nobody I know who is in a happy relationship is in a relationship with someone who met all of their "dealbreaker preferences" when they were single
Then the people you know are on one end of the self awareness spectrum. I am in a happy relationship with someone who met all my deal breaker preferences and 85% of my nice to haves list.
A good reminder that while "religious" versus "not religious" is a valid categorization in some contexts, "religious" is a hugely broad and diverse category.
This is a good point. The Roman Catholic and neo-Pagan are going to have extremely different views and experiences, but we'd classify them both as "religious". And that's without taking into account variations in how salient their religious views are to other aspects of their life.
Personally, I find the trend of assuming "religious" means "Christian" deeply irritating. But that's probably a me issue.
I asked in the other thread, but bumping here in case anyone has more good suggestions - what would a (straight) male version of Hana's profile look like?
(That is, something designed to be appealing to a mass majority-female niche group who would be all over it even though it's not obviously high status in normie society)
If you’re targeting the same IQ bracket, probably something like “guy who reads literary fiction” or “guy who genuinely appreciates/has insight about contemporary art.” Straight male English lit grad students are pretty low status relative to other guys in similar barrier-to-entry professions, but they have a pretty easy time finding willing partners.
I think that's right, but curious how you'd express it in terms of vibes. Like Hana doesn't just work because she's into economics, she works because she's fun and energetic about it in an appealing way.
I think it's impossible. Anything that hits all the right buttons would come off as fake. Men are much more willing to fake personalities to find women to sleep with than the opposite so women will be much more suspicious
I think it would be well written and quirky and show some kind of intellectual interest. Hana is appealing because it shows she's interested in economics, puns, and that she's a little bit funny and weird, and a male Hana would have a similar vibe.
Back in the Match/OK Cupid days, I did much better once a friend suggested that I rewrite my blurb so instead of coming across as "nice guy looking for a relationship," it read "funny guy with some specific weird interests looking for someone interesting."
Some truth to that (I put up a silly photo that at least one person advised against, and it got me a whole bunch of swipes). Maybe it shows self-confidence in some weird way?
my tinder bio is like this; it has a list of things i like talking about (including but not limited to 'housing policy', 'local politics', and 'why oxford comments are superior') and i've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it. it worked really well in Oxford, where it was a great conversation starter; it works less well in London, but still serves as a pretty good filter. it's also why i prefer tinder to hinge unlike anyone else I know
"Again, why do you want to know less about the most important decision you’ll ever make in your life"
This is the disconnect. Dates are supposed to be fun. If you've gone on three dates and they tell you something that's a dealbreaker, surely the first two were still fun? If you think the date is an ordeal, what are you pressing on for?
It's not the most important decision of your life. It's a date, where you have fun. Movies are popular date activities because they're fun even if the date sucks.
I think he is imagining a context where the number of dates one goes on is not limited by the number of people who are willing to go on a date, but by the number of nights you are able to spend out on dates. If I've decided I can go on dates up to three nights a week, but I've only found people to fill one or two of those nights, then your analysis seems right. But if I've decided I can only go on dates one night a week, and I have a few possible candidates, then spending three dates on the same person only to find out they aren't compatible was a possible waste of that time.
Saying anything is "supposed to be fun" indicates it may not be fun for everyone. Dating was the only show in town, there has been a technological change and now it isn't. "Why would you want to sit at home reading the Bible in your own language? Hearing it read in Latin is supposed to be fun..." (I actually believe this but it is what it is)
...IS church supposed to be fun? Even in English I've heard people badmouth other books by saying they read like Genesis. I've always thought it was supposed to be "Good For You", akin to making kids eat brussel sprouts. Can't have dessert until you finish your brussel sprouts. But with dating, the dessert is More Brussel Sprouts.
At best I find church "bigger picture fun" - museum fun or hike fun. Trying to make church fun fun is usually cringe (clown masses etc.).
I suppose what tech does generally is streamline experiences, enabling people who don't care especially about the experience to cut to the chase, but for people who are really invested in the experience itself, it's the inefficiencies that are part of the package: steam trains, narrow boats, vinyl...
> If you think the date is an ordeal, what are you pressing on for?
Clearly you don't know how social anxiety works. If I didn't force myself to go through dates which I knew would be uncomfortable I would just be alone forever
If dating is an ordeal, why do you NOT want to be alone? A relationship is just an unending series of dates with the same person. What are you pressing on for?
Not necessarily. Dates have an element of uncertainty and fear of rejection that an ongoing relationship mostly doesn't. Also, they are usually not at-home, which may be more of an ordeal than "we live together".
The anxiety fades the better I know the person I'm socializing with. First meetings (and dates in particular because of the high possibility of rejection) are always difficult but that doesn't mean I prefer being alone, it's just the initial stage that's hard.
I see what you're saying, but I think there's a difference in weighting of outcomes here. If I go on a date with someone and they're not interested, I'm more upset than if we didn't date at all - no date could be explained by just not clicking superficially, or timing, or whatever. Dating and ceasing feels more like a rejection of me personally, by someone who had the opportunity to get to know me a bit better.
As a result, on a date, I'm more concerned about getting to know the person and giving a good impression. Yes, it is fun - I'm not dating this person unless I at least sort of enjoy their company - but to claim that there is no stress involved is simply not true in at least my case.
In addition, I think your view is coming from a position of low dating scarcity (please do not read this as an attack, it is in no way intended as such). Without going into detail, I have had periods where I put a lot of work into finding dates only to have absolutely no success. If you're in that situation, then a date not working out is more costly than if you find it easier to find dates.
> Dates are supposed to be fun....It's a date, where you have fun. Movies are popular date activities because they're fun even if the date sucks.
But very often, they aren't!
If I suss out in the first few minutes of a first date that we're not going to be a fit even as casual friends (as often happens), the date transforms into an unpleasant test of my endurance at being performatively engaging, while dreading potentially having to explicitly reject the person at the end of the date if it turns out they're into me.
Plus, who's willing to make the investment of a movie on a first date? These days most people are unwilling to commit to more than a cup of coffee as a first date activity, and that's not especially fun by itself.
Most people consider it impossibly rude and cruel to reject someone 5-10 minutes into meeting them on a first date. I suspect a lot of women might even be afraid of the reaction it might provoke from a man.
Implicitly stating, "I find you so unattractive I'm not even going to stay an hour or two to see if your personality redeems your ugliness" just isn't an option.
I posit the problem is treating a date like a 2-hour ordeal you aren't allowed to walk away from. Especially if they're only buying a cup of coffee. That's, what, ten dollars for a fancy one? That's a five-dollar-an-hour customer service job you're inflicting on yourself. Make shorter dates. Drink a cup of coffee and any time past is at parties' discretion.
1. Many/most daters (but perhaps especially men anticipating paying for the date) don't want to do an activity that costs more than a fancy coffee, so the "activity" part of a date is unlikely to be fun in and of itself unless someone is wildly excited about coffee and,
2. Even a "coffee" date has a required duration to avoid insult - and that duration is considerably longer than it takes to swallow a beverage.
For both reasons, I personally don't ever want to meet in person unless I feel reasonably confident the conversation will be enjoyable for me.
I've experimented with going on dates before sussing out conversational ability/chemistry and it has never gone well. I come home very much feeling like the effort and time was totally wasted.
I don't think 2 is real. You can set whatever minimum you want, and the people who object to it are most likely the ones who would drain you on a date already. If you're worried about looking like you're just in it for free coffee you can pay for the coffee yourself when you leave.
I haven't been in the dating market for an age. Is meeting for a few minutes for coffee common? I preferred inviting people to do an activity that I wanted to do anyway, like going to see a band or something, but it's true that I've been on some excruciating dates where it was apparent that one of us wasn't interested.
It's very common, although I think most people do it for longer than a literal "few minutes."
The straight male friends I've discussed it with prefer coffee dates because they don't want to be expected to buy cocktails/dinner/event tickets/etc., and they argue that coffee can morph into lunch (or whatever) if the date is going well.
If the date doesn't go well, they can get out after 45 minutes to an hour.
Another point here: since the biggest thing dating docs filter for are people who want to date someone who likes weird and explicit forms of communication, they can only ever work for those kinds of people (unless they become mainstream).
How it's set up. If I remember the history correctly, Scott ran a survey at some point, people mostly wanted to not have "likes", and he pressured Substack into making it happen. The fact that some hearts still show up in some places (like email) is generally regarded as a bug.
I believe the objection was to sort-by-popular rather than to the hearts themselves, so I don't think <3 will get frowned upon too hard, though obviously there's a failure mode where it would get spammy.
More on "implicit filters": I met a lot of good dates on OKCupid, in part, because it required one to know English to register (and write a profile), and I'm not from English-speaking country. Therefore, just by looking for dates on OKC I filtered out a lot of less educated people (compared to a dating site in my own language). It might not have been such a big deal for me (a man), but my wife also says OKC was better than native language dating sites, because there women got spammed by stupid idiots.
Aside: I actually think that making men jump through more hoops to message a woman on a dating site is a good idea, or at least one worth trying. It's a well-known fact, I think, that women get too much messages, and so if you had at least to prove you have read her profile, that would be good. Maybe just answer a few questions based on info available in profile, like "what's my favourite book" or "what university I went to".
This makes total sense as a way to limit the dating pool to people more like you.
That was my read on why some people are opting for dating docs instead of Tinder, to filter the pool.
For the people that find dating docs unappealing, i think this means the filter is working. I don’t mean in terms of intelligence the your way of filtering works but more in terms of disposition and subculture.
I also agree with you that having ways to limit the overall dating pool may be more important for heterosexual women who seem to have a higher proportion of bad experiences on Tinder.
Oh my goodness - I would trade a LOT of my preferences to end up in a relationship with someone willing to write contracts or goal setting documents about the relationship and to do periodic reviews measuring the performance of each of us on key metrics.
>Really, why do you expect me to read an entire paragraph to establish some boring point about dating docs, but not to spend more than three seconds evaluating whether or not someone is the love of my life?
This response to the physical attraction section really seems like Scott making a typical mind error. It may seem bizarre to him, but yeah a ton of people actually do function like that, and prefer to sort by instant physical chemistry.
This seems plausible enough, but extrapolating from that to "people like Scott shouldn't have dating docs" seems like a typical mind fallacy going the other way?
For what it's worth, here's the ad I put in the personals (a thing they used to have in the free newspapers; or as my husband called them the "want ads") that brought me my husband 30 years ago:
Skinny, funny, smart woman, 30s, seeks very intelligent yet down-to-earth man for fun and possible seriousness.
Succinct yet somewhat revealing. I had to add the "very" because a surprising number of men have a too-high opinion of their intelligence. Or maybe that's not surprising!
I liked him pretty well on our first date, fell in love with his self-deprecating sense of humor on the second date, and, because I really liked him and was tired of one night stands, we didn't have sex until like the fifth date. If he'd pushed me to do so before that, it would have been a dealbreaker. I read that some people have sex before the first date just to see if they're compatible. Really?
For many people, it's the sense of humor that keeps them together more than any other factor. (Certainly true for us!) Seems like a dating doc is a better place to convey that.
> Really, why do you expect me to read an entire paragraph to establish some boring point about dating docs, but not to spend more than three seconds evaluating whether or not someone is the love of my life?
The base rate on loves of your life is somewhat lower than the base rate on interesting comments.
>Both of my siblings are married to people outside of our ethnicity. They tried for years to find a match within our ethnicity, but it seems they have higher market value (or something) outside of it.
>I'm facing the same issue. To be crass, I sometimes feel like I'm a 4 within my ethnic group and a 9 outside of it.
>To illustrate: The very same week that someone NOT conventionally desirable (just use your imagination here) rejects me within my ethnic group, I'll get superliked and eagerly messaged online - or approached and asked out at a social event in person - by some extremely handsome successful charming person OUTSIDE of my ethnic group.
YOU (hetero male) may think you are undesirable because you are not tall or especially attractive. hell, you may even substantially prioritize female appearance yourself.
What you don't realize is that there's a large pool of females, many of them very attractive, who don't care much about appearance but do care massively about reliability and similar bourgeois values, and by those lights you are indeed a catch.
In other words you are able to sell yourself at a much higher value than you imagine because the buyer is rating on different criteria than you are rating (and vice versa).
The same holds true even within smaller domains. For example your theory of what counts as an attractive woman is not actually universal, and you may find very appealing a woman who does not consider herself attractive. The classic version of this is "white girls want to have a small butt on themselves; black guys want a big butt on their partners".
If there's any *single* myth in dating it's that "boys all want one thing" and likewise "girls all want one thing". This may be true at the vague level of "I want you to be nice" or "I want you to be interesting" or "I want you to be smart" or "I want you to be attractive" but what EXACTLY those things mean is so variable that they are essentially meaningless by themselves. .
A lot of this is what I think is meant by "chemistry".
I'd say my wife and I have always had chemistry, which I understand to mean "From the beginning I found her more attractive than most men find her, and she likewise found me more attractive than most women do."
This is partly why the whole enterprise of dating is a numbers game and it helps to meet lots of people in person.
But there's a certain balance here; chemistry definitely gives you a lift in attractiveness, but there's still a rough and fuzzy consensus on where people fall on the attractiveness spectrum, and there are certain qualities that are in high demand, some that are in niche demand, and some that have practically no demand. Failure to recognize this, and to bet everything on finding a supermodel when you're a troll, is usually called "delusion."
That's what got the attention of DrZ, even tho we had been introduced previously (thanks, Ma for that purple dress & the 3" heels that meant it was shorter in the back than the front). That was 1970, after 7 years of friendship (while we had other relationships), we've been together since.
Boys want many things, and girls want many things. But for approximately all of them, attractiveness is *one* of the things they want. And attractiveness is something that can be assessed instantly. So if the algorithm is "target most attractive potential mate in the area, see if they have the other things I want, if not try the second-most-attractive...", that doesn't bode well for the people who genuinely are reliable and have all the other "bourgeois values" but are not attractive. They might in principle be "a catch", they just won't be caught.
Most of the techniques for meeting potential mates in the modern world, favor the attractiveness-first algorithm, see e.g. Tinder. And most of the places where you'll naturally figure out whether someone is reliable etc, are now deprecated as romantic opportunities, suitable for platonic friendship only. See e.g. work or school.
You are missing the point, which is that attractiveness is not an absolute, objective quality. It is viewer dependent.
Yes, there are aspects to it that are more or less objective (most people will agree that a person rated 8 on hot-or-not is above average in attractiveness) but the details vary vastly more than many people seem to want to believe. You and I may agree in our assessment of the attractiveness of 9/10 Hollywood actresses, but not about the tenth. And that tenth makes all the difference, because
(a) unless you have a somewhat pathological personality, the goal is not to get every boy on earth to lust after you, it is to get ONE boy on earth to lust after you.
(b) "good enough" holds for attractiveness as much as it holds for sense of humor, kindness, and everything else. Yes, I'd like a girl who rates 10/10 in hotness according to my lights, just as I'd like her to be 10/10 in kindness, humor, intelligence, patience, etc. But realistically I'll settle for somewhere around 7+ in all the characteristics I find important, and with luck I may get two or three of them hitting 9/10.
In other words, the issue is not that, unless you are Monica Bellucci and rate as 10/10 by basically every sentient being on earth, you are destined to be alone your entire life; it's that all you have reach is about 7+ for a reasonable fraction (20% or so) of the male population. And most women do in fact meet this bar.
It's women (and lazy sitcoms) who go around claiming that the ex-BF broke up with them because of <insert physical characteristic>. Ask the men involved and they'll give a personality based answer – she was controlling, she was boring, she was mean, she was frivolous, etc. You may or may not like this reasoning, but it is NOT "rejection based on appearance". I mean, hell, look at celebrity divorces. Whatever reason you may want to divorce Amber Heard, it's absolutely not because "she wasn't pretty enough".
I'd go even further, and say that attractiveness is among the *least important* factors in looking for a long-term partner. For me, they just need to meet some sort of minimum bar, and from there, other things matter more. with that said, this summer, i briefly dated someone who was objectively extremely hot, and I did really enjoy it haha. Although I think his good looks dazzled me to the extent where I couldn't objectively evaluate him (it was the same with my ex-boyfriend's personality, lol, i am terrible at objectively evaluating situations once I get a crush)
People are satisficing on a variety of metrics, the more you are willing to compromise on the more highly demanded metrics, the more selection power you buy yourself on other metrics. Let's consider a couple really obvious examples: a woman who doesn't mind dating shorter guys has a huge range of features to select from, whereas a hypothetical woman who will only date the tallest man available has zero bits of selection power left over (she has to take whatever other features the tallest man happens to have). Less absurdly: physical attractiveness is not a unidimensional scale, people seem to have certain faces that they are much more attracted to. So, if someone who is a "6" on the more broadly defined average attractiveness scale happens to match features you really like, they may be a personal "8" to you.
This is still probably a too short explanation but hopefully more helpful.
People being willing to move geographically for love has always seemed to me like a way for people with more preferences to widen their options.
I don’t know if it still exists but the New Yorker used to have classifieds that included people all over the world. I would think more global but niche options might be welcome for some people.
from my own (currently dating, young man) thoughts on how to arb the dating market it seems like the most general way to explain it is there are essentially two value functions judging each participant in the dating & relationship markets, the one imposed by the market in aggregate (probably best rounded off to attractiveness in the eyes of the average person) and the one imposed by each prospective partner. Each participant in the dating market can theoretically take advantage of the fact that their value function for a prospective partner differs from the aggregate market’s valuation of that person and arb the difference between these two valuations
Legacy of cultural values around the Chinese imperial exam system maybe? From what I understand, your best chance at upward mobility for a few hundred years was to write a good eight-legged essay.
I was trying to figure out how to apply this concept to dating, but the best I came up with was really more of an instance of comparative advantage than of arbitrage. (That is, don't lead with what *you* take to be your best asset, but instead lead with the asset that is best priced by the target market.)
Isn't that what "more physically-attractive-by-my-standards than average" means?
I agree though, my most successful relationships were ones where I felt my partner was more attractive to me than they were to other men (which includes both physical and non-physical attributes)
There's a lot of arbitrage going on though, with successful businesses built on bridging the gap between various Western markets on the male side and East Asian and Latin American and Eastern European markets on the female side.
Personally I've experienced some unexpected arbitrage gains after moving from my birth country to one where I belong to a high-status immigrant group, and I expect that most commenters here could do the same.
For me, in my experience, how much I think a photo album of a girl is sexy is fairly uncorrelated with how much I'll like that girl in real life, and the (short! why would anyone write a 15-page doc rather than talking?) biopic is far more correlated.
TBH I've actually found the opposite - although I am admittedly a bit shallow (not sure how to change that). I think the reason is that, I actually get along pretty well with most people, but with more attractive women I spend much more attention and energy early on in the interaction which facilitates that self-sustaining feedback loop of chemistry
Suppose that all people spend 1 year going on dates, but for women it's the year they're 20 but for men it's the year they're 23. Now suppose the birth rate is increasing by 20% each year. Then there are ~60% more 23-year-olds than 20-year-olds. Accordingly, the number of dates is D, but they're spread across W 20-year-old women but M =1.6 W = (5/3)W 23-year-old men. If each woman goes on 5 dates, i.e. D = 5W, fhen then for the math to work out each man will go on 3 dates, since D = 3M = 3(5/3)W = 5W.
Is the claim that in the Ultra Orthodox community the birth rate is such that the age gap between men and women upon marriage is enough to explain about a 50% delta in dates?
A 20%/year increase in births would result in an increase in annual births of almost 250x in 30 years. The math works out, but that doesn't seem to match the reality.
It works if you interpret 'average' in more of a 'mode' or 'median' sense, not mean. In this case there just have to be somewhat long tails. (Though it could also just be an inaccurate generalization)
This was my bad, I inaccurately described the situation. My intent wat to somehow say that because of the asymmetry in ages upon entering the dating pool, men have an easier time filtering for suggestions they are interested in. The actual dating average would of course be the same for men and women.
I think the driving anxiety behind much of the anti-dating doc sentiment is a reasonable fear at the prospect of de-gamifying all aspects of life. If mates can be found through the upload of explicit statements of photos and preferences, and food and resources acquired through simple two-click transactions, life threatens to become a flat, repetitive nothing. This underlying question of what our days will actually consist of when everything is made perfectly convenient underpins the general unease most people feel when considering the future of VR, dating apps, algorithmically generated entertainment, etc.
Presumably our days will be filled with things we actually want to do. If some people like dating they'll date, if some people don't they'll plug into the dating machine and get a match, if some people like painting they'll paint, if someone really needs a picture of a dog wearing a hotdog costume they'll prompt StableDiffusion9000.
This is interesting to me because the gamifying of life is so recent and this dating doc format harkens back to how things have more traditionally been done via matchmaking and arranged marriages.
I think the ‘price discovery process’ is underrated in dating in a way that a dating docs systems’ would not address. I think there may be an element of Chesterton’s fence.
This is not just via multiple dates with different people but also multiple dates with the same person. Repeated conversations and interventions in different contexts tell you a lot about the person and your relationship with them.
"This is true but I think the point is that dating docs should minimize the costly dates for Scott?"
Or maybe make it such that you only need to date 10 people to find a "match" rather than 100 ... or 1,000. If the folks using these docs think that 'normal' date selection/filtering is terrible then they might be trying to make a (rational) attempt at improving the chances to the point where dating might actually work for them.
I also think the comparable is not mutual friends, but swipe-left/swipe-right on pictures on Tinder. That is terrible.
Is the point of a dating doc to optimize the process of dating away? To bring you from single to married as efficiently as possible? Or is it to just efficiently identify fun people to try a few dates with?
going on a date may be fun but it is far far less fun than being in a good relationship and most of us are not going on sufficiently many random dates with strangers when single to come anywhere close to replacing a good relationship, so it's valuable to make the process of finding a good relationship happen faster and more reliably.
Interesting! I think that the whole process of "hunting" for a girl is fun. You do things you wouldn't otherwise do (art tours, life drawing, etc.), meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet, you get to flirt, you get certain types of romance, etc.
Just like some of the best bits of a relationship is the "vibe" (feeling wanted, loved, etc.), some of the best bits of being on the prowl is the "vibe" (feeling adventurous, being available, etc.).
I bet for every one guy that likes "being in a relationship" but doesn't like being on "the hunt", there's another guy that feels the opposite. Maybe dating docs are a solution for a particular type of person? IDK. :)
I wonder why it hasn't caught on as much in the non-Orthodox community. As far as I can tell nothing about it seems particularly religious / demanding of religious values, and it seems to leave a lot of room for individual choice (unless the reality is worse than the text description).
I'm looking to see if there are secular matchmakers near me, and there are, but they're all advertised as "LUXURY matchmaker for HIGH-VALUE CORPORATE singles!", which is an interesting branding decision that kind of turns me off.
The whole shidduch system is predicated on a lot of factors that are only found in the religious community.
For instance, separation of genders with no real physical contact with the opposite gender.
The shidduch system does not have to filter for sexual compatibility because the assumption is that two virgins coming together are not competing with their partner's prior sexual history and preferences.
As long as there is attraction they will build a sexual preferences together.
They are many other factors that can prevent the shidduch system work for non religious folks.
I'm sure there is a way to take parts of it and bring it to the secular community but I haven't seen it done successfully.
It relies on tightly-knit communities with a lot of trust and shared social values and goals, one of which is being serious about young marriage and reproduction
I knew someone who found her husband with the help of a matchmaker. The matchmaker is Jewish, but many of her clients are not. She charged something like $8000, so the people she was working with are not poor, but neither were they fuckin HIGH VALUE CORPORATE SINGLES. My acquaintance was a psychologist who mostly did research, and the person she married was a physician, also a researcher. They are a very compatible couple, have been together 20-some years now, & have 2 children.
I've long believed that there's a big-money startup idea somewhere waiting for the person who can translate the shidduch system to secular mores/values.
Reading conversations about dating with participants with all sorts of different personalities and subcultural backgrounds is interesting because it really highlights just how varied romantic experiences are.
One of the main things it illustrates is how little people realize that other people are super different. It's sort of like if people who were 4'6" tried to have conversations full of advice with people who are 6'4" about furniture, clothing, and airplane seats, without realizing that different things make sense to different people.
This reads to me like a significant underlying difference here is between people who think reading a document about a potentially interesting person is pleasant while a first or second date is unpleasant/stressful/difficult and people who think reading a document about a person is boring work but a first date with a new person is fun.
What I think you should have changed (or at least looked at a lot more carefully) is the downside of pickiness, namely people who land up alone because they refuse to "settle" (and who then land up unhappy because they only person available at age 45 is grossly inappropriate).
This is not *exactly* the same issue as dating documents, but I think it comes from the same place; a set of assumptions about how attraction works and how people should partner up that is very heavy on theory and very light on real-world experience.
With this in mind, I don't consider the sorts of parent-assisted examples that are provided (Orthodox Jewish, Indian, and, BTW also common among certain segments of Chinese; there are parks in Chengdu where you see large stacks of these "resumes" and people are handing them out) as especially relevant because in all those cases I expect the parents/community to be doing a strong job of pushing back against unrealistic expectations as to the sort of person you "deserve" and can realistically hope to find.
Yeah, I said something similar on the original. Anything beyond broad categorical filtration seems like it will simply reinforce unhealthy mindsets and behaviors around dating that make people, especially women, at least implicity feel as though nobody is good enough for them, putting them at significant risk of ending up alone. Even if you say 'I'll start out looking for someone amazing and then lower my standards if I have no luck', I think the initial dating 'phase' seems like it could prime you to view potential mates less favorably later on.
>This is an absurd question, Scott. I don't know if it's the asexuality or what, but the answer to your >puzzle, or whatever you want to call it, of the five dating ads is:
>1) Which of them is the best-looking?
>2) Which of them is the best at giving head?
>I don't care about *anything* any of them wrote. None of that has absolutely any relevance for a relationship. Have your weird hobbies, girl!
I honestly think this is actually the most sensible comment as far as matching the experience of the average non-internet-rationalist man, at least if the second point is taken somewhat figuratively.
Of any of the dating profiles you mentioned, I think if the girl is conventionally attractive and was sweet and affectionate enough (if not literally being especially skilled at fellatio), most men simply wouldn't care (at least in a negative sense) if the rest of a woman's life matches what he likes. As long as she's pretty, loving and her interests don't make your life difficult, then the rest is not that important. Now obviously, this is a simplification, and the fact that temperament and interests are likely to be strongly non-independant is an significant wrinkle. But many of the happiest relationships I know of are between men with their own interests and women with their own interests with little overlap between the two - the two just clicked and that was that.
"Do you just click" strikes me as key and highly illegible.
I think that being in the ballpark is useful - I wouldn't get along with a 50 year old militant tankie - but once you're there what makes ppl like each other is hard to quantify.
Yep. Not to criticize Scott too much, but every asexual person I've ever interacted with online has seemed incapable of even attempting to understand us allosexual folks, to the point of some sort of superiority complex.
It's especially odd among LGBT ace people, as they preach empathy every other sentence!
Yes, having sex in sufficient quantity and variety is completely non-negotiable in a romantic relationship. It is *the* differentiator between romantic and platonic interaction.
"Who's best at giving head" should be read as "who's best at sex"/"who's got the highest libido". On average men have a higher libido than women, so it's always a "catch" to find a girl who's higher than average.
Yes, it is meant to be taken somewhat figuratively – it happens to be a wholly non-figurative reference to my own personal preferences, but substitute your own vital sexual preferences, whatever those are.
As for the rest of the post, you nailed it. We understand each other.
I spend a lot of time browsing ArViX, PubMed, etc. reading abstracts. Whenever I find a cool paper from a team near me, I'll ask them if they want to get lunch and chat about their paper. (I'm a grad student - this is socially acceptable. :p) I've met dozens of people this way and made many new friends.
I've noticed is that "how interested am I in their paper" and "do we click" are basically uncorrelated! There's some illegible "je ne sais quoi" that determines whether we get along.
Similarly, I've gone on dozens of first dates. Finding girls "in the right ballpark" seems to be important - I don't think I'd like a 50 year old militant socialist - but after that there again seems to be basically no correlation between "do we click" and "do I like your bio". I have no idea why - I seem to be keying off stuff which is illegible to me from text. (What gives me "good vibes"? I'd actually have to think about this. Maybe I'm just unusually bad at reifying the stuff I like?)
I'd find 10 word dating docs really useful (are you evangelical? alternatively, do you like to talk about nerdy things? great, let's try a date!) Any longer would probably be superfluous.
> There's some illegible "je ne sais quoi" that determines whether we get along.
I was gonna say something like this. I haven't really found much correlation with how compatible I'd be with someone on paper, and in the real world. Maybe when I'm really seriously looking to settle down that will change but for now - a few pictures to see if I find them physically attractive and I'm pushing for an in person meet within 5-10 messages rather then wasting time on conversation. If the vibe is off I'll be polite and dip in like 30 minutes
I find Myers Briggs types to be the best indicator of clicking. You will click with 2 types the best and 2 more pretty well, so you’ve got 4/16 to click with.
Myers-Briggs ignores neuroticism (probably so they can write cheerier books), but it actually is otherwise a reasonable distillation of the other four factors in the five-factor model. The other problem is they ignore people can be in the middle.
>Or you could just have everyone list their values beforehand and only talk to the people who share yours. The list of values might not be perfect, but it’s sure better than going in blind. Seems like it would save a lot of time and avoid a lot of incompatibility.
>Likewise, I agree that lots of people don’t like answering personal questions right away. I’ve heard a suggestion not to bring up scary things like children until the third date at the earliest. Fine, so now you have three dates per person in poorly-lit expensive restaurants before they tell you that actually they hate children and you were incompatible all along. Why would you inflict this on yourself when you can just start with a list of who wants kids and who doesn’t?
My only problem with the whole thing is that, well, you can't. You can't just have everyone list their values, nor can you start with a list of who wants kids and who doesn't. Dating docs are a fine idea, but won't become widespread enough to matter in the timeframe between now and whenever the people still on the dating market are likely to have paired up.
I don't see any likely network or market effects that will make them widespread among more than the current very, very small and fairly homogenous and gender-imbalanced group they're now used by, so the entire thing seems very academic.
Facebook has grown by 300 million users a year since 2008, I don't see how an explosion of dating docs is that implausible, it just needs something large to serve as a coordinating event.
I don't see how this is relevant. It sounds like dating docs are successful enough to have the necessary network effects (i.e. enough people reading them for making one to be worthwhile) (and as I understand it, the way they're organised doesn't require all that much network effect anyway) within that small group and doesn't necessarily need to grow more to count as useful, and the "a list of who wants kids and who doesn't" thing doesn't actually have to include everyone to work. If one person lists their preferences clearly then that person (and those considering dating them) get the advantages of that.
People have pointed out that some people enjoy dates while others don't, but there is also great variability in how much people enjoy reading and writing!
This. “A slog” to get through all the dating docs?! Can’t relate. I’ve read many a dating doc even though I’m happily monogamously married. There’s something fun and voyeuristic about it lol
Many matchmaking apps tout their "success" rates in terms of dates, marriages, etc. Do dating docs keep track of KPIs, and if so, what are the results? How do docs compare to apps? IRL? A Jewish matchmaker? ChatGPT?
What is needed are head-to-head, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled romantic trials.
The world needs to know the most effective, most efficient way to find one's life/momentary partner. And once that's known, those potential partners using less effective, less efficient life/momentary partner finding methods can be eliminated from consideration, thereby creating a positive feedback loop making the most effective, most efficient life/momentary partner finding method, even more effective and efficient.
For some people, finding one's life/momentary partner could be almost as important as finding the most efficient, most effective method of finding one's life/momentary partner.
I mean, maybe if you're 20 and you think of dating as a fun sport?
But everybody I know in the dating market is 35-45 and looking for stable permanent relationships, having already done all the really stupid youthful things-- flings, screwing drug users, having kids with drug users, spending years in court fighting for custody of said kids, etc. Dating isn't fun anymore. Clock's ticking. They don't want to die alone.
At that point, you'd be stupid to even touch online dating apps without docs. The ones I know just list all the things that have scared off previous dates: kids, custody arrangements, STDs, sterilization procedures, employment status, religion (or lack of). Most other things are negotiable, the doc instantly narrows down the field so that they get hardly any responses, but the few they do get are pretty good prospects, so by the time they get to meeting up in person, very little time wastage for either party. Seems very practical. Romance is for the young anyway.
Does "everybody I know" include straight men? I know some 35-45 year olds who enjoy dating, but I agree that even they tend to settle down to at least friends with benefits to provide more time for golf, careers, kids, etc.
Yes, *most* of the people I know who are still in the dating market are straight men. No, I do not claim they are a representative sample. All I can say is: divorced and middle-aged with kids is a very, very different dating situation than 24, single, no responsibilities.
I was single in NYC and dating was kind of my hobby. I've been on a few hundred first dates. I understand the idea behind the dating docs but I genuinely don't think they're that useful at least for a man. Women get more matches and maybe an additional filtering mechanism would be useful for them in some cases (e.g. they're trying to get married very quickly or something)
Scotts right about the physical attraction range but there's another kind of attraction that I would just describe as vibes or pheromones. Like 30% of people will genuinely not like you when sitting across the table from you. Like 30% of people will love sitting across the table from you. This has nothing to do with values or even looks really and you know it within a minute or two. If a person passes then lots of deal breakers go out the window. For that reason I just think some kind of speed dating is the only way to make it more efficient. Reading through a bunch of dating docs is just as useless as swiping a bunch of pictures.
It may actually be smell, i.e. pheromones. The last two long-term relationships I had both told me I smelled great. They were both substantially brighter than average people and I think they may have read up on that theory and been able to classify it correctly.
Why are you downplaying looks/status/wealth in dating preferences? It is kind of odd of you to do that considering you wrote the "Radicalizing the romanceless" article where you acknowledged that morality and positive personality traits are completely irrelevant in sexual attraction (and thus 'nice guys' don't get laid), and without sexual attraction there cannont be a relationship. I think most people who virtue signal about how they are attracted more to personality traits than LMS are either ouright lying or under the Halo effect, which is when people ascribe positive qualities to people they already find attractive. Romantic relationships are also most of the time a lot more about power than they are about love or friendship, which is why you've probably never seen a straight relationship where the guy is of lower socioeconomic status than the woman.
Re-copied from somewhere else: I'm not trying to downplay looks!
Suppose you care both about physical appearance and values, that in both cases only 1/10 of people will meet your exacting criteria, and thatphysical appearance can't be determined from a dating doc (even though it includes photos, let's say 100% of your concern is about some ineffable sense of how they move or something).
You can either rule out the 9/10 of people who disagree with your values first, then go on real-life dates with the 1/10 of people who meet your values to see if you have chemistry.
Or you can go on in-person dates with everyone, look at them, ask them questions about their values, and have to go through 100 dates before you find someone who does both.
So you've dectupled the efficiency of your dating even if you assume that you care so much about physical appearance that only 1/10 of people who you're already able to prescreen with photos will meet your criteria.
And the same is true of status/wealth or whatever, even though those should if anything be even easier to put on / assess from a doc.
I've seen one. She was a doctor, he was...some kind of Ph.D? They were doing the whole poly thing, were in the kink community (I...kinda don't want to give more details for fear of making them identifiable), I think at least one somehow considered themselves queer... They are together for over a decade now I think, though they didn't have kids either.
I definitely agree power and status are attractive in men. I wonder what the net effects of the whole recent fashion for arguing power inequities in relationships are evil will be.
I think that mating works on a filter-then-choose model. People start by filtering out all the people they're not interested in, and getting filtered out by people who aren't interested in them, and then they explore the set of possible remaining partners until they find one they're compatible with.
So when I was single, I had a pretty good idea of which girls were good looking enough to be interesting to me and which ones weren't. Likewise, many of the really good-looking girls undoubtedly decided I wasn't good-looking enough for them. This (hopefully) left some kind of overlap set of women that I was attractive enough for who were also attractive enough for me. Similar filters would apply for things like age, social class (which incidentally explains the hypergamy stuff from the other month) and so forth.
But (and this is the key thing) once you're in the set of acceptable partners, compatibility is what matters most. For instance I don't think people are willing to trade off worse compatibility for better looks as long as both partners hit those minimum requirements. (And if they do, they regret it -- this is basically the plot of most novels.) Dating docs can potentially help with filtering, they can't help with compatibility, because compatibility is something you discover in person.
When I was single, a dating doc wouldn't have done me any good because my filters were (a) straightforward and (b) mostly socially unacceptable to express -- you can't go round writing "Must be at least this good-looking (insert picture of borderline-attractive woman) to ride". If you're weird enough to have other criteria then feel free to express them in a dating doc, I guess, but be sure that everything you write is _really_ something you want to use as a filter.
From what I've seen, I assume my demographic/archetype is in massive oversupply in that market so would not waste my time. I imagine women looking for a wealthy alpha-nerd could probably do pretty well
I just love that you can filter people by e/acc. Lol maybe we just need a dating search engine with a map like Zillow but with single people and filters.
Orthodox Jewish woman here! I agree with Sholom almost entirely, esp. the conclusion, but not this bit: “The average man will date 5-6 people before getting married, the average woman will date 3-4.”
Is this statistic coming from any research? It does not seem to match with my experiences or what I’ve read on the subject.
I think it in part depends on who is making the final choice. If it's the woman going "Yes, he's the one, I'll marry him" then she may make her mind up quickly. That means the rejected suitors have to go on more dates to find a match. But I'm just guessing here.
If there are many more women than men, then the women have to make their minds up faster and accept an offer of marriage or risk losing out, while the men can be choosier. So it could be the fifth date for him when he decides "yes, she's suitable" while it's the third date for her and the only one who made an offer.
Ummmm yea, I _definitely_ don’t want to read your restaurants overly long scroll-hijacking website with its history of your Italian grandma and the story of your time working in the pizza mines of Napoli. I just want to know what the hours and address are!
Maybe this whole thing is just a debate between people that are hyperlexic like Scott and people like me whose writing seems to require summoning words from another plane of existence using arcane rituals. Maybe THATs what you’re selecting for with these dating docs?
Should also say that if a dating doc was pretty short and just included basic information and a couple “why you should be interested in dating me” things rather than an extensive biography, that seems completely reasonable? But then you’ve just reinvented the dating profile, I had the impression that the whole point of using Google Docs was that you could make it 10 pages long and include every opinion you’ve ever held.
I did, none in my area. Most lived in NYC, DC, or the Bay Area. (As one might expect.) The ladies sounded lovely though.
It seems like a very clever way for a nerdy lady to find guys who will not only not be turned off by her intelligence, but actually find it a plus. For the much larger rest of the people in the directory...
For the first paragraph, yes! I basically go to 2 types of restaurants: places I've never been, and places I've been and liked. If I've never been, it's a miniature adventure for no real stakes. The worst outcomes are food poisoning and finding that it's vastly more expensive than I was expecting. In theory, my dating preferences are similar.
Yes! And another question: how much does the ability to write beautiful glowing prose describing your pizza actually correlate with making good pizza? Or alternatively, does the ability to write an autobiographical document with precisely the culturally acceptable balance of bragging and self deprecation actually correlate with being a good future spouse? (Beyond passing some minimum intelligence bar)
Regarding dating, if they can do it with flair and humor and a wink in their eye, I'd say it definitely correlates, among other things with the ability to navigate complicated social situations with grace. It's not the only factor by far, but it's one of them.
On the other hand, it may also be correlated with deception and manipulation. But on the third hand, so are most things.
What i have come to realise is people will compromise on their values/interests if they love the person enough.
I didn’t want to get married and the idea of kids didn’t make sense to me. But when i met my wife
Everything changed even though on our first 3dates i still held on to my beliefs, but when i fell in love with her after getting to know her i chaned my beliefs and ideology to accomodate hers because i love her enough
Another advantage of dating docs / long profiles is that they give you lots of potential conversation topics, and save you the time of fumbling around blind trying to come up with something to talk about.
Well, I'm on my second marriage so I know a thing or two about that. And we still talk about plenty of exciting stuff, even if it's not "getting to know you". But, when you just meet someone, I dunno. I can ask "do you like reading fantasy?" or "do you like math?" or (say) "are you interested in analytic philosophy?", but then what if they say "no"? It would be super-awkward.
Hmm, I can imagine this playing out as the romance novel trope, where the protags start out despising each other but then gradually fall madly in love despite themselves 🤔
Interestingly, for the multi-armed bandit problem there is a very clear optimal solution, which gives an interesting rule of thumb for practice: if you have X events in your lifetime, then you should dedicate roughly sqrt(X) (square root of X) events for exploration, the rest for exploitation.
For example, if you move into a new city and want to spend the next 10 years there, and you visit restaurants twice a week, then this makes 1000 restaurant visits. You should spend roughly sqrt(1000) = 30 times going to unknown restaurants, and the remaining 970 visits you should go to places that you like and enjoy.
There are a few correction terms for how many options there are, how similar they are to each other, and so on. This probably increases the number 30 a bit, but not too much.
If you don't know how long you will stay, you can distribute the 30 visits over time. For example, among the first 100 visits, you explore 10 different options. For the next 300 visits, you explore 10 new options, because sqrt{400} = 20 and then you have explored a total of 20 options in your total of 400 visits. And so on. If you are old, you should hardly explore new options. They are usually worse than the pretty good options that you have already found over time.
A tricky thing is that x and sqrt(x) don't have the same unit. So whether you measure the number of days you spend with your preferred person (365 in a year), or the number of seconds (30,000,000) will give you different answers. I don't know a fundamental solution to this riddle.
I think for the given two-armed case it's much simpler than that: just keep using the same machine as long as its likelihood of being the 60% one is at least 50%.
And I think your restaurant example is missing that e.g. the first time you go to an Ethiopian restaurant is a lot more interesting than the seventh, and there are a lot of different types of restaurants. On the other hand, some people enjoy being a regular. So I don't think the model of uniform enjoyment over time is realistic.
Yes, you can argue that reality is much more complicated. Restaurants also tend to open and close, and you might get recommendations from other people.
But your suggestion for the two-armed case only works if you know the two distributions in advance, i.e., that one gives a 60% payoff and the other a 40% payoff. The standard assumption is that you don't know how the distributions are. With your strategy you might be sticking with a 60% arm forever, even if there is an 80% arm.
There's a rigorous solution to the multi-armed bandit problem as I described it in my comment, giving a full mathematical expression of which machine you should use each time. And it's generalizable to, say, 10 or a million machines with different payout ratios.
It's a little different with (monogamous) dating because that solution assumes that you can continue switching throughout the experiment. There's a math puzzle literally called "The Marriage Problem" (Though now known better as "The Secretary Problem") meant to deal with cases where you 1) Can only use each...er...machine once, and 2) are ultimately forced to commit to a choice. (My mixed metaphors are already showing the flaws in this argument). Basically if you've got n choices, you should reject the first n/e potential partners and then "settle" for the first potential partner after that who's better than all those. This gives you a high probability of choosing the right candidate.
As tempted as I am to now wax poetic about how the heart wants what it wants and approaching your search in such a cold, calculated way would result in a tepid relationship, I don't think that's true. I don't think you should ignore the general principle behind this math - maybe don't marry the first person you date (I did and it worked out great though so hey!). And maybe don't hold out for ideal after you're about a third of the way through your dating life, if finding a partner is important to you.
But do be careful - Your happiness in a relationship is more a function of yours and your partner's attitude towards the relationship than some kind of perfection in partner selection. I want to be careful not to overstate that - compatibility matters. But imagining yourself, as you are, in a relationship is imagining yourself alone. Relationship you *should* grow a life along with your partner a bit. Soulmates, as in two ineffable souls who are destined to be together, don't exist. But soulmates, as in two minds that have grown up around each other, entwined with each other, making up for each other's weaknesses and augmenting each other's strength, do exist. You just build them.
And ultimately my multi-armed bandit example was an attempt to "speak rationalist" to people whose basic assumptions about dating are deeply flawed. To make explicit some tangible benefit to considering someone other than your "ideal" partner when seeking out dates. For a non-rationalist audience I'd simply say, "If your ideal relationship involves a partner who molds perfectly into your single life, just stay single."
The boss needs a new secretary. HR sends over three candidates:
Helen ticks all the boxes: secretarial school, types 90 words a minute, 15 years of experience, professional phone voice, not above grabbing coffee or picking up dry cleaning.
Anna dropped out of a prestigious college. What she lacks in core skills she makes up for with a fierce intelligence. She would be a real executive assistant, someone who can face clients and perform complex tasks.
Grace doesn't have a standout resume but she is just a wonderful person. Kind, thoughtful, supportive, she gets people through bad days and rallies teams. She would be as much a friend as a colleague.
Who does he pick? The one with the biggest tits.
Men are hardwired. Everything but looks is lies / cope. Only the selfie matters. Docs will never defeat the Tinder juggernaut.
I think a small number of very looks-obsessed men are typical-minding here. I'd like to test this on the next ACX survey, can you think of a question that you would trust not to be too confounded by desirability bias?
What about some asking people if they would date fictitious descriptions of women (like the ones in the OP), along with thumbnail but expandable pictures (AI). Must be able to do something statistically comparing who chose based on descriptions and who on pictures.
Also I think they're extrapolating the situation at age 20 out to forever. When you're looking to get married, money and drama-orientation matter much more.
There must be data somewhere on how many men in tenured marriages with kids and a mortgage leave their wives for a woman who is, say, 15+ years younger.
For a survey question directed towards men, perhaps:
"You recently met a very beautiful young woman, bonded over golf and tennis, and started dating. You have been given $100 to insure against two equally likely events: A. severe tendonitis that will make it impossible for her to play golf or tennis; and B. a highly visible but totally superficial three-inch scar along her left cheek. Each dollar spent reduces either risk by 1%. How do you allocate the $100 between the two risks?"
Or:
"You despise, and are openly competitive with, your co-worker Chad. Rank the following events from most to least infuriating:
A. Chad is promoted ahead of you.
B. Chad starts dating a very beautiful 23-year old ballerina.
C. Chad is glowingly profiled in a leading industry publication.
D. Your wife of 15 years confesses that she has a crush on Chad."
Or:
"Rank the following events based on what you think would secretly make your male best friend the most jealous:
A. You become CEO of your company.
B. You start dating a very beautiful 23-year old ballerina.
C. You are glowingly profiled in a major newspaper.
D. His wife of 15 years confesses that she has a crush on you."
It is the body type that is good at swimming I had in mind. Re: A story Nassim Taleb told about himself. He desperately wanted a swimmers body himself as a young man, and swam and swam. To no avail. Then it suddenly struck him: "Swimming does not get you a swimmer's body. Instead, it is people who have a swimmer's body that are good at swimming".
You correctly point out that male preferences for the female body are not uniform - and then go on to assume that your preference is the universal one? :)
Nah. Even granting the vague premise, the boss breaks out his chronoscope and looks into the future down the three potential paths. Of the two that involve the secretary having frequent sex with him, he picks the one where the sex is best.
Tit size is a crude and stupid way to attempt predict this. (But it's not like he's thinking with his brain, anyway.)
I'm a bi man who thinks this is interesting, but I should report a comment from a (female, straight) friend of mine. She said: "the most important thing about who I date is whether they are any good in bed. So my process is to fuck as many people as possible as early as possible, then, after excluding the majority who aren't any good in bed, start filtering the ones that are left for whether we're compatible."
That's a process for which the dating doc is completely pointless.
It's also a process that is going to leave you at 40 wondering "where have all the good men gone and why can't I find a guy who wants to commit?"
This is not moral condemnation, by the way. Women are as entitled to men to sow their wild oats, but it seems like a process that works fine in your 20s and 30s but not so well as you get older. She may find a guy (or I suppose a gal, I shouldn't assume she's straight) who is a superstar in bed *and* ticks the boxes on other axes *and* wants a serious relationship possibly leading to settling down, but my own view of it is that guys who are out there looking for fun are happy to meet a like-minded woman, may even form a relationship, but when/if it comes to marriage and kids settling down time, they want something a lot different and won't stay with the fun great in bed person.
But who knows? My knowledge of all this is purely theoretical and gleaned from reading the complaints of those who didn't find the right person, and that of course excludes all the relationships that did work out.
No children? Not necessary to live a full life, of course. But if you are female and poly, getting one of the males to commit to having children might be hard.
Or as lawyers say when they want to politely warn a client that their case is hopeless: "This is going to be steep".
Thanks to Yosef and Sholom for the detailed description of spouse-finding in the Orthodox/Ultra-Orthodox communities. There is one thing that puzzles me in Sholom's post, though. Quote:
"The 2nd - 5th date will be spent verifying compatibility on the smaller things you can't ask about in reference calls. The minutiae of religious passion and observance, interests, lifestyle preferences, how many children you want to have, are you actually doing well in your career ..."
My question Sholom, if you read this: Could you please specify what you mean by "career" in this context? Am I wrong that most men in the ultraorthodox community have quite generous stipends from the Israeli goverment to study the Torah full-time, and thus do not have "careers" in a standard sense? Is this wrong, and are many instead employed or self-employed like the rest of us? Or do you by "career" mean that some young men have gained/are gaining a higher prestige as experts on the Torah than others? (And that this is the aspect of a "career" that helps differentiate the wheat from the chaff from the point of view of matchmakers and the girls' families?)
My reason for asking: From a fertility perspective, Israel is a puzzle. It is the odd country out among modern societies. Average fertility per woman in Israel was 3.01 in 2022 (ref: Our World in Data). All other "modern" societies are below 2.1 children per woman on average. Although all religious groups in Israel have higher fertility than 2.1, I thought a main solution to the puzzle was the extraordinary high fertility in (Ultra) Orthodox communities (6-7 children per woman on average), and that these communities receive very substantial support from the government - implying that neither men nor women need have paid "careers" outside the family.
Such subsidies do not exist for urban, traditional communities in any other country I know about. Hence I throught they were a major reason why these mainly urban, traditional communities have been able to maintain a high fertility rate (compared to all other urban communities, everywhere), and therefore largely explain "Israeli exceptionalism". But you comment about the importance of having a "career" when looking for a spouse has made me wonder if perhaps I am wrong?
The government subsidies are not especially relevant. The <140,000 men who are studying full-time in kollels/yeshivas are typically supported by either their working spouses (thus also adding significance to women having high enough income for that) and/or temporary support from parents (also something that gets attention during the process).
Thanks Odd anon, this is very relevant information! So the atypical, high Israeli fertility rate remains a puzzle, that cannot be (mainly) explained by very generous government subsidies to traditional groups...back to square one ...
I'm a born-and bred American and the community I describe in my post is also American. There wouldn't be a reason for you to know this because we are very small, so don't feel bad, but the Orthodox Jewish world is extremely diverse. There are dozens and dozens of different communities with different traditions and communal practices.
In my particular community, men are expected to go work and support their families. This is the reference to "career". You are correct that that there are other Orthodox communities, including a large one in Israel, where men are instead expected to dedicate their lives to torah study for as long as possible. In those communities, success in torah study would be a similar but not equivalent question to the career one in mine.
It’s admittedly been a while since I was in the dating market - circa 2002 or so, when dating apps weren’t even a thing. The thing that strikes me about dating docs is that most people probably don’t have a sufficiently accurate understanding of themselves and their preferences to be able to write such a document accurately. Certainly I, in 2002, would not have been able to articulate which of my preferences were true deal-breakers, or which of my various properties were core to my selfhood and therefore unlikely to change.
I met my wife in college, which as you pointed out is already a pretty strong filter - but not too strong. Is the idea just to create a similar filter? If I were thrown back into the dating pool today, I think my filter would just be “pretty, female, college-educated, not deeply religious, not a Trump voter.” Everything else is down to in-person “vibes” - do they chew with their mouth open? Are their interests either boring or all-consuming? Are they just “weird” in an off-putting way? Very tough to tell from a doc. So I don’t think going on a bunch of random dates is really avoidable.
"This is an absurd question, Scott. I don't know if it's the asexuality or what, but the answer to your puzzle, or whatever you want to call it, of the five dating ads is:
1) Which of them is the best-looking?
2) Which of them is the best at giving head?
I don't care about *anything* any of them wrote. None of that has absolutely any relevance for a relationship. Have your weird hobbies, girl!"
I know I'm late to the party but this is so far outside my Overton window my eyes about popped out of my head.
"but do you think it's outside everyone's window? Perhaps more importantly, do you think it's outside the window of a significant chunk, or even a majority, of the dating age population?"
I honestly don't know! I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I've never heard of someone saying this sort of thing, or even something close to it--I think most people I know would find it outright offensive if someone said this at say, a party. That's not to say it's wrong or bad! Just really strange to me.
I've had several lasting relationships which started from similarly base criteria, evidently shared by my partners. "Best-looking" is obviously a subjective impression comprising a wide range of more- and less-legible factors, and good head facilitates pair bonding. I thought Scott's 20% figure was implausibly low.
I believe my first thought on meeting my now-wife was a sort of inarticulate "Daaaaaamn".
Idk, actually SSC is what even got me thinking about this--the article on bubbles was pretty eye-opening for me. The problem about being in a bubble though is you don't actually know all the degrees of freedom for things to be different. I know that Trump voters exist because I have a lot of external evidence, but it didn't ever occur to me this particular topic would be a bubble thing.
Another weird thing is the commenters _aren't even in the same bubbles_, it seems like we've just all managed to generate similar ones.
Scott's kind of generated a niche for himself with people who don't like progressivism but aren't comfortable with right-populism, be they Christian conservatives or liberaltarians who think the current left sounds a little too much like the Committee of Public Safety.
I once had an awkward conversation with a friend of mine who was a prototypical Bay Aryan. (Worked at PayPal before FANG was an acronym, for example.) He did not understand the fuss over health insurance; could not think of anyone he knew without it, or why such a person would exist. Not a hard-hearted snob, he was simply innocent.
Meanwhile the majority of my own circle were uninsured, and were still far from the worst off in society. I squandered the teachable moment by making a snide, flabbergasted comment about moneyed techies, but better I should have offered some examples of the many faceless people behind this man's scenes that day--the valet, the hotel maid, the line cook, the baggage handler, the greeter, the stocker, and so on--hanging on, with their dependents, over the void.
It's too bad the parent comment was deleted. It wasn't very flattering to bay-rats, but I believe it articulated a true and necessary point that wasn't addressed as effectively elsewhere.
> He did not understand the fuss over health insurance; could not think of anyone he knew without it, or why such a person would exist
Oh my god I have had this exact conversation with another FANG friend. I was talking to him about people who were uninsured, and his exact quote was "It's not like anyone has to forge critical healthcare under our system."
One of my friends just went deaf through something completely preventable via not having insurance.
The funny thing is I'm not even a bay area person--I live on the East Coast, my social circle has sprung up pretty organically. On the other hand, I think someone expressing that view out loud wouldn't be welcome (not saying it's a bad view, just that the people I tend to associate with would find it off-putting). Self-selection effects are interesting! I'm glad people are commenting on this, without ya'lls input I would assume the original comment was a joke.
Within a friend group this makes sense. But do you not interact with bartenders and waiters when you go out, or your hairdresser or Uber driver? Do you play any competitive sports or go to concerts? I assume you spent many years at college and probably a year in a dorm. I’m pretty curious how you don’t continuously come across people like this just going about your life.
Hmm, interesting question! I've never really thought about the degree to which someone could be partitioned. It could be I'm interacting with these people on the regular without knowing it. Certainly I'd be unaware if say, my waiter or my uber driver felt this way--it doesn't seem like something that would ever come up causally.
I probably over the course of college and high school met hundreds of people and can recall exactly one instance of this sort of sentiment expressed out loud. BUT I went to a magnet high school in a rich area, and a small technical school. I've never had a male dominated friend group, either, so if this sentiment is more popular with males, maybe there wouldn't room to express it.
It is very amusing to me that the person from whom I would maybe expect to be comfortable expressing views of this type was a guy who randomly got transferred into my dorm when my roommate was studying abroad, going to school on the GI bill after coming back from Iraq.
If you don't mind me asking (and I appreciate you being willing to respond, I'm finding this fascinating), what is your experience about how people talk about relationships / attractiveness / dating?
> I've never had a male dominated friend group, either, so if this sentiment is more popular with males, maybe there wouldn't room to express it.
That answers it. It's called "locker room talk" for a reason. Its a bit impolite to say things like that in a female-dominated or professional context.
Dumb question: Are there circles of friends or communities that dip below 30% female? I have lots of one-on-one guy hangouts, but I'm not sure one finds a gender-segregated space.
My social interaction with women is mainly through work, my wife's friends, and my friend's wives. This is the norm for most men almost everywhere in the world.
Talk about the opposite sex is mostly related to physical attributes, sex, and just joking around. A conversation with, for example a bartender, would start by noticing an attractive brunette, then we would swap funny or sexy stories about brunettes we've dated. To give a crude example: a girl I dated needed a finger in her butt to cum. This has been the starting point for hundreds of hours of shooting shit with guys. I would never even dream of bringing up shared values in a conversation like this, obviously.
Now, I also did a STEM degree at a prestigious school, and work in an elite rich person field. So I absolutely know where you are coming from. But it's a very small percent of the population who acts that way.
This is an exaggeration of a real thing - it’s not that literally nothing else matters, but sexual compatibility matters a lot to an enjoyable relationship and you’ll never get that from a “dating doc” unless you’re looking for something very particular.
Is the low effort part of it appealing then? Is that because people like the idea of having large quantities of people to look through quickly, like that will lead to a better match than looking a bit longer at a few people?
This isn't my dating era and so I met people where there were only ever a handful of choices, and this idea that you get something good by taking in a lot of volume quickly is foreign to me.
I’ve never actually used Tinder, but yeah, I can see “get to the date as fast as possible and see how it goes” as obviously more appealing for a lot of people than reading longwinded essays designed to exclude them.
The other thing is that for most heterosexual men who aren’t like top 10% in attractiveness, your ability to prefilter is pretty minimal - beggars can’t be choosers, so “is willing to date and possibly bang me” is criteria 1, 2, and 3.
Straight man, not bay area, not ace, not in some weird subculture, just want to voice a second for this comment. Assuming you're some kind of stallion your blowjob experience is gonna last an hour. What do you do then? Put her back in her enclosure and play Assassin's Creed?
For sure I like being in a relationship where my partner is good looking and up for/skilled at sex. But having that as your *sole* criteria seems legitimately insane to me.
Thanks for saying this. That was sort of my wondering -- like, to this person, what do you do the rest of the time? What do you talk about over dinner? What do you do when something hard comes up -- an illness, job loss, etc? What do you do if you go away for the weekend and you've already had your one two four blowjobs for the day? What happens then?
Normal things, like normal people. The things happening in your shared life. If you *need* the other person to share your tastes and interests to have this kind of conversation, you're a shallow, narrow-minded person. You're not very interested in the world if you can't talk to Larisa about skydiving or Sky about theosophy or Jane about her shows, just because everything Sky believes is horseshit and Jane's taste in cartoons is appalling and badly faked.
"What do you do when something hard comes up -- an illness, job loss, etc?"
This problem is exactly reversed. It's when you don't have the bond of mutual attraction that these things become hard to weather. Real pair bonding is stronger than "this is my skydiving buddy".
"What do you do if you go away for the weekend and you've already had your one two four blowjobs for the day?"
You enjoy Away, presumably. Are you suggesting that you believe that Cindy is incapable of enjoying Venice, Kyoto, the Rockies, whereas Hana is not, based on the shit they wrote about their hobbies? It's hard for me to read this any other way, but that's a strange and distorted view of your fellow man in that case. "Only someone capable of filling out a dating ad to my satisfaction can enjoy the beauty and majesty of human life!"
Yeah I deleted a comment to this effect bc I did not want to get sucked into Online Discourse about this topic, but as a woman who has no IRL rationalist friends -- (upper middle class) normies only -- I definitely recoiled from that comment. I don’t have any female friend who would view that as anything but a red flag. Nor do any of the happily coupled guys in my friend groups talk like that (a few of the unhappily single ones do though!) It’s just immature douchey humor at best, “women are replaceable with advanced sex bots with ChatGPT installed” at worst.
I’m willing to believe this kind of attitude is very clustered in the population & exists in non negligible quantities outside my circles, but it’s definitely not an “all normal people talk like this” thing. These are the assholes women are generally trying to avoid while online dating.
There was a reply that was sent to my email but which I can't see here; either a bug or they deleted? It was something to the effect of "most men talk like this, they just stop when you're around," which, yes, I know how this Discourse goes. Full argument against is too lengthy & frankly tedious to lay out, but I'll just note that IRL I have sufficiently non-judgmental and ~edgy vibes that ppl will routinely confide in me things as taboo or more as "I'm really attracted to young teenagers that I see with their moms."
I do wonder if there's a SES aspect to this. There's certainly a stereotypical middle American culture I hear about on the internet where the guys watch football and drink beer a lot and the women go on social media and clubbing a lot, everyone has "guys'/girls' nights" with their crew of same sex friends, and you could imagine the guys talking like this to bond or whatever. Whereas in my coastal, highly educated, liberal circles with mostly mixed-gender friend groups this would be very atypical, both in talk & in revealed preference, and would therefore indicate unusual degrees of assholishness.
Yeah it's completely unfalsifiable but I suspect men talk this way for the benefit of other men while still expecting more out of their partners than big breasts and blowjobs.
I'm more willing to believe "there are subcultures that talk this way and some unfortunate low EQ people don't pick up on the fact that it's a performance" than I am that most men are content to live with someone they have nothing in common with 23 hours a day for an hour of sex and a pretty view.
"I don’t have any female friend who would view that as anything but a red flag."
"I’m willing to believe this kind of attitude is very clustered in the population & exists in non negligible quantities outside my circles, but it’s definitely not an “all normal people talk like this” thing. These are the assholes women are generally trying to avoid while online dating."
Strong agree, it is heartening to hear that someone had the same reaction.
One of my friends pointed out "it's totally reasonable to have sex and attractiveness as your primary criteria," and a third friend's response was "Okay, sure. How much would you be willing to bet that this person also just happens to be a casual misogynist, independent of their dating preferences."
I also had this reaction, thank you for saying. So far out of my frame of reference as to seem like a cartoon of a college frat boy mouthing off while drunk.
Far be it from me to defend Anonymous and their crass expression, but the final sentence really pulls the comment together. If you evaluate the items in the five profiles as potential dealbreakers, not as deal makers, the calculus becomes more humane. Their followup reply makes this intent clear.
Some people want a partner who is really into anime. A greater number of people don't care, and might not discount an otherwise attractive prospect for their anime fandom. No woman has ever so much as blinked at my own interests and hobbies; I was being evaluated on other criteria.
The final sentence is the worst part! When I was dating, the thing I most wanted was to be seen, liked and loved for *the traits I identified with and was proud of.* So I did not view “If you’re hot and love sex I dgaf about anything else” as humane; rather dehumanizing. A sufficiently advanced sexbot can fulfill those stated requirements!
I *wanted* guys to be selective, and selective moreover on the things that made me unique; that’s how I could know I wasn’t just another hot face and body to them, that they really liked me *for me*. That may not be something as particular as hobbies, but it absolutely included the general life outlook and vibe you could get from each of those descriptions.
Basically I (and most women) would not read that comment and think that the issue with it was that it was "crass." The reason why husbands don't write "I love my wife, she is so hot and loves blowjobs" as their Valentine's Day post is not bc it's *crass*. It's bc everyone correctly understands that the crass wording is accurately signaling that that guy won't fall in love with you deeply and irrevocably for your soul, love you even when illness reduces intimacy, and effortlessly reject any idea of leaving you for a hotter younger woman after your looks fade bc *she's not you*.
Thanks for your perspective. I think it's perfectly reasonable, and I don't have a counterpoint. Echoing a few other commenters, I took the post as hyperbole that nevertheless pointed to something interesting and true to me: a lot of people make meaningful connections that are less cerebral and more based on chemistry.
I once had a very confusing experience with an exciting woman who mirrored many of my particular interests and tastes. We thought we were intellectual soulmates and so we should date. After six weeks we realized we were not a functional item: many subtle things were missing that differentiated a partnership from simply a good friendship.
My wife and I have very different inner lives. Where we overlap, we often clash. Our strength is in amalgam. Our chemistry is still pretty good, despite being sorely tested by our young children.
I am skeptical of the dating doc idea, because I think it gets me to the first case but not the second.
Sheer folly. Sexual relationships are about sexual attraction, not about validating your personal quirks or sense of uniqueness (you are not unique – none of us are. There are billions of humans). I won't pretend to be unfamiliar with this perspective, but it's specifically a prissy middle-class woman's idea, also extremely egocentric ("his attraction to me isn't about him or what he hopes to get from me – it's about ME, adoration, validation!"), and of very recent vintage. Look into the past, you won't find people of either sex being this confused about the purpose of relationships even in the 1920s, let alone in e.g. the 16th century or the second century BC.
"that guy won't fall in love with you deeply and irrevocably for your soul"
You can't fall in love with someone for their soul as the soul does not exist. However, the reason you don't ditch your wife as she ages is A, you age with her and your prospects diminish (crass, but true: look at how guys like Di Caprio, whose prospects are still good, behave. To his credit, he doesn't appear to have ever given a woman the impression that their relationship is permanent, e.g. by marrying), and B, the emotional bond formed by pair bonding (a product of carnal relations) and children (a product of... well, you get it). I'm not saying romantic love *doesn't exist*, I'm saying it's a product of sexual love and not of a woman's hobby of building matchstick cathedrals or whatever, a grossly shallow take on critical human relations. Rejecting a woman over stuff like that is a Seinfeld joke! Your hobbies don't matter! Except insofar as you enjoy them, which I approve of because I'm not Count Dracula and I want my girlfriend to be happy. In your conception, imagine the terrible fate of a woman who likes knitting. Where the hell is she ever going to find a boyfriend?! Men don't care about crochet, you will never be seen and loved for your yarn stash! This kind of shallow validational attitude to relationships is what causes the majority of divorces; without the glue of real physical attraction there's nothing keeping a couple together when the going gets rough.
Also, have you never heard of a woman buying sexy lingerie for Valentine's Day? Really? Really really?
What I don't understand is WHY some people have to be "against dating docs". I mean... If you want to use them - go ahead, if you don't - nobody's forcing you, Tinder bars and many other ways to get dates are still there (and still prevalent). Or do they imagine some kind of future where you just can't get a date if you don't have top-notch eloquently-written resume no matter how attractive or smooth you are? Or do they care about other people wasting their time and not getting any dates? The first is silly, the second I don't believe. I mean, I hate Tinder and I don't ever want to use it for dating, but I'm not saying "no one ever should use it, because it doesn't work for me".
Well, quite a few of the objections have been along the lines of "If you think all of these criteria in your dating doc will actually help you find a good relationship, you're wrong because you're underestimating the importance of physical attraction/illegible chemistry.", in which case they believe people using dating docs are shooting themselves in the feet and should be warned against it.
- For a lot of people, dates are fun. You go out, you have a nice meal in the company of an attractive person, they show interest in you, you show interest in them, you learn about their life, maybe you make out. (And I consider myself somewhat introverted, but I am very curious about other people, and I like it when they pay attention to me. I can see how this would sound awful to some people.)
- A lot of qualities are negotiable in a way that is difficult to describe on a dating doc. I have a strong aversion to dating smokers, but if a particular smoker were very beautiful, interesting, and talented and enthusiastic about sex, I would probably end up attracted to her.
- For a lot of people, one of the biggest things they are looking for once someone is over their baseline is "are you attracted to me?" That can only really be discovered by dating, and screening out a lot of people lowers the chances that you find someone who scores highly on that criteria. So I could write a dating doc that says "not morbidly obese, IQ > 120, not crazy, non-smokers and interesting remunerative careers preferred, must be open to kids if the relationship moves past casual sex," but what's really the point?
- Does a dating doc provide a roadmap for unscrupulous pickup artists to lie to you? One advantage of tinder dating is it's probably relatively easy to screen out fakes on the first date - either they've optimized their presentation for whatever their pick-up guide says is the most easily bangable woman or they change their presentation as they learn what you like.
"So I could write a dating doc that says "not morbidly obese, IQ > 120, not crazy, non-smokers and interesting remunerative careers preferred, must be open to kids if the relationship moves past casual sex," but what's really the point?"
I think I would be willing to commit to long term dating, sight-unseen, almost anyone matching this criteria, +/- a few things of my own.
On reflection, I would have to find a proxy for the IQ criterion, because I'm not opposed to dating someone who is offended by the concept of using IQ as a measure.
For me, if I were to put out an ad like that, I'd bid good riddance to anyone offended. What I'd hate to lose would be the people who would make incorrect assumptions about me, and that's why I wouldn't do it.
My biggest takeaway from reading through the comments is, wow, sex and attractiveness are VERY important to a lot of people, way more than I thought. I'm not ace, but generally, if someone is within certain appearance norms and they're cool, I start finding them hot. I _also_ find randos hot, but the idea of really liking someone of the opposite gender and not finding them attractive is alien to me.
Yeah, it's one thing to be like, "physical attraction is important" (dating docs are compatible with this idea), it's another to state something like "all straight men care about are boobs", as many of these comments do.
For sure, I would not date someone if I didn't find them attractive, but most women have at least some features that are attractive enough to, er, start the engine. Once you filter out the minority who don't the rest is just "who's fun to be around, who gets my heart racing, who's witty and shares my interests." I'm less looks-focused than a lot of people (I have other shallownesses for sure), so people might be more/less picky on this front, but I know almost no healthy people who don't care at all what their partner is actually like.
I think that's the normal mindset unless you've been brainwashed by the manosphere.
Also, IF "all [most] straight men care about are boobs," then as a woman that would make it MORE important to aggressively filter to find the rare ones who *aren't* like that. And since all the "I only care about boobs" types are saying "I would never bother with dating docs," that makes dating docs *more* preferable as a mode of dating!
I'm surprised that no one (unless I missed it) has thought about dating in Kahneman's System 1/ System 2 terms. On the one hand is the instinctive subconscious mind that automatically reacts to physical attractiveness and non-legible cues and signals, and on the other is the rational conscious mind that likes dating docs and linguistic filters. Which system dominates the other may vary from person to person, but I don't think we should be surprised when someone says "I'm System 1 all the way!" or "I'm 100% System 2!". What would be interesting is to see a survey that plotted people on a bell curve from 1 to 2. I suspect that most readers here would be a couple of deviations towards System 2.
When I was in my last year at college, both the guys who I’d shared an apartment with were moving away, one of them pretty last minute, so I found myself with a spare bedroom, high rent, and few options. So I put a roommate ad up on Craigslist (this was mid-oughts).
In the ad I mentioned that I was a “straight male” with no roommate gender preference. I was basically just trying to state a basic fact that other people might find important in deciding if they wanted to live with me, without seeming obsessed with gender or orientation (plus the ad needed to be pithy).
The first guy that answered the ad, who I ended up rooming with, was gay. We basically went on a roommate date - I showed him the area, the route to his classes, and had lunch at a place nearby. Seemed like a nice guy and we’d get along.
Anyway at the end he sort of hesitatingly mentioned that he was gay, and if I’d have a problem with that. I said I didn’t and we moved on (and in together, I suppose). But it sort of nagged at me because I was worried I had scared him by noting that I was straight in the ad (when really I was just trying to filter out women who’d be bothered by rooming with a straight (and at the time quite single) guy, and in fact he was the second gay guy I’d roomed with).
Happy ending, we got along most of the time, dude was clean and quiet and always paid the rent and by the end of the year I was also getting along with his giant male nurse boyfriend who would stay over occasionally but always be a good guest so pretty much the best case scenario for a Craigslist roommate.
It's a fair question on his end, you might be worried he was attracted to you (and might not take no for an answer), you might be homophobic....sounds like things ended well.
"There are two ways you can go about it – either “over the counter” (finding a partner by yourself) or “exchange traded” (said exchange could be anything from newspaper classifieds to Tinder to Shaadi.com). Brokers are frequently used in the OTC market – either parents or friends (who set you up) or priests.
The general rule of markets is that the more bespoke (or “weird” or “unusual”) an instrument is, the better the likelihood of finding a match in the OTC markets than on exchanges. The reason is simple – for an exchange to exist, the commodity being traded needs to be a commodity."
If you're looking for anything far from the middle of the bell curve, the commodity dating market is a bad choice.
This makes sense to me. And it seems like the dating docs are intentionally aimed at avoiding the commodity dating market because their personalities and/or cultural norms put them outside the bell curve.
A lot of the misgivings or distaste about dating docs seems to be from people who like the commodity dating market just fine and who don't see why someone would want to try something different.
This feels in a way like people who like pineapple on their pizza and people who hate it. It seems to evoke strong opinions but is just a matter of taste at the end of the day.
>I’m never sure how seriously to take comments like these, but I think it’s useful to think about the implications of 20% of the population meaning things like this 100% seriously.
I don't think the majority of guys think like the commenter you are replying to, but if you can't understand the mindset of someone who says this, you really aren't in a position to evaluate the dating scene. Some dudes legitimately care more than anything else about having sex with as many women above a baseline level of attractiveness as possible.
Not sure how many men *want* to have as much sex as possible but surveys *consistently* show that the median number of sex partners is <15 in a lifetime for American men. The median number of sex partners for a frat member is ~2 per year. There's a small % of men and women having lots of sex partners but most people are monogamous or serially monogamous.
Exactly. Sex is very expensive in the US (for straight males), and if you're not top 20% in terms of looks/money/status it's about impossible to have +15 partners. The vast majority of men who can have a lot of sex partners are certainly not monogamous, even if they are married. It surprises me how many people in the US, even "progressives" have so many childish beliefs about sex and relationships, in a lot of other cultures it was assumed and accepted that a high status man would fuck around with a lot women and have a few mistresses if married.
"Some dudes legitimately care more than anything else about having sex with as many women above a baseline level of attractiveness as possible."
That's not even what I'm talking about, Daniel. It's not about quantity. It's about quality. When you find a girl who's enthusiastic, skilful and easy to live with, lock her down, don't move on to the next girl.
Imagine you’re reading an essay writer for the first time. Remove all the punctuation marks from their essay, turning it into a single run on sentence. Remove the spaces, even.
Imagine you’re looking at the dating profile pics, but every pic is an enthusiastic nude.
Imagine you’re reading a research paper. End every sentence in the abstract with an exclamation mark.
Imagine you are meeting a friendly dog on the street. Don’t approach gently. Shout hello at the dog as loudly as you can and run toward it.
This is how your dating docs look to the rest of us. They come on *so very, very* strong. That really works for some people, but for plenty of people, including your own matches, that intensity level is very off putting unless it comes *later*, after a little bit of basic social grace.
In principle, the information is great. I’m in year six of a good marriage that came from OkCupid, and the profile and the match questions and the match scores helped a lot.
But we still didn’t start the first date with a preference dump. Because that is a strong, strong signal of poor communication skills.
Edit: My wife points out that you're putting a huge personal information dump out into semi-public. If you normalize this practice, you're normalizing stalker's guides!
You cannot ask on a date how they feel about their parents (and if a woman, in particular how she feels about her father), or how they treat their siblings. Nor can you write about this on a dating app. But this is the deeper-level stuff that will color how your relationship develops in the longer run, because it is imprinted in us from our childhood and early adolescence. So find that out.
By contrast, interests change across time, and so do life philosophy, political attitudes, even religion. So getting a long text from your potential date about such things is only marginally more useful than whether you like his/her looks. And "funny to be with/writes entertaining about him/herself" is unlikely to get you past the first year, because being constantly entertaining is exhausting. Deep emotional connection during sex is longer-lasting than being technically good in bed, but even that is likely to become rarer and less important as a glue.
"She is easy to live with" is the best (indirect) compliment I have ever heard a man (married for decades) give to a woman. I have no firm evidence base here, but I believe this and other long-lasting marriages (that are not a shared hell) tend to move into "good silence" mode. Because there are two types of silence in a relationship: the tense type, and the good type. Thinking (or rather feeling) that your partner is basically ok despite all his/her inevitable flaws, irritating quirks, annoying attitudes etc. is key. Also, it will help if both of you share the stiff upper lip British attitude that life is not to be enjoyed, but to be endured. Raising small children will push your relationship beyond its breaking point if you are totally alien to this thought.
Couldn't you say on a first date, "tell me about your family"? Or a question like "do you have brothers or sisters?" can lead pretty quickly into hearing about the overall family dynamic including parents.
A person who says, "nope, single child," you can come back with (if you have siblings), "how is it to be raised as a single child? was it lonely or did you like it?" and that should lead pretty quickly into how they feel about their parents. Or if you were a single child too, you can say, "I hated (or loved) it. How was it for you?"
I agree with you that knowing about family of origin dynamics will potentially convey a lot of useful information. Anyone who speaks with disdain about their opposite sex parent (in a heterosexual context) would be a flag. Not a deal breaker necessarily, but something I'd want to know more about. (I myself spoke to others with disdain about my opposite sex parent and I've been happily married for over 20 years) (though I probably would have been easier to live with these past over 20 years if I hadn't had a father I would speak with disdain about).
Yes, you are right, there are ways to find out the really important stuff without coming across as weird yourself. And I also fully agree that early family relationships do not 100 percent predict your future fate in your relationships to others. It is just a very important factor to be aware of, both in ourselves and in others.:-)
"Absent any other matching criteria, attractive men are mostly going to go for attractive women, and vice versa. There’s some disagreement about who’s physically attractive, but not that much. If you’re a 5/10, you can either spam super-hot people’s profiles hoping a 9/10 has some bizarre preference-blip and decides you’re attractive enough to date, or just date other 5/10s or below, in which case congratulations, you’ve narrowed your dating pool down to half the population."
I think you're vastly overestimating the degree to which physical attraction is reasonably modeled by a one-dimensional spectrum. Sure, there *is* a reasonable grouping based on said one dimension that's a good predictor of "what percentage of randomly sampled people with appropriate gender preferences will find this person attractive, and how much." But this hides a HUGE degree of differential in exactly what different people find attractive. Many of my personal 8-10s would likely rate as 4-6s on a global scale, because I don't find fat unattractive, for instance. My physical attraction has more to do with (admittedly lossy/imperfect) cues of intelligence or creativity that surely count for *something* among the general populace, but not nearly as much as they do for me. Other things that seem to be very popular generally among people who like women (women who are super thin without being muscular) are a bit negative for me. Sure I'm an outlier in these respects, and maybe I'm a much bigger outlier generally than most people are, even about their particular outlier preferences. But from what I can tell, a LOT of people are outliers in some way or another, and it really is possible for more than half of people to end up matched with someone they consider a 7+.
I also think there are definitely values cues contained in how someone presents themselves physically. Again, this is a pretty lossy signal, but it's hardly no signal.
Another part of the deal is that if I were looking at swiping on tinder, I would might even avoid swiping on most of the obvious 9s and 10s, even if they were in the subset that fell well within my 9-10 range. I'd look specifically for the folks that *I* found very attractive, where I also know that lots of other people would not likely put them near the top of their list.
I'm not saying this is definitely a better way to look for dates than something else that speaks more directly to values, but I think it does have the effect suggested by Loweren, where even a "useless" date is at least spent in the company of someone you find attractive, who also finds you attractive. And I really don't think it has the failure mode that you've proposed for most people. There are enough physical/visual signals of other traits we care about, and enough dimensions of physical attractiveness that this can actually work well for a lot of people, if not everybody.
The main argument against it is that "hey, the dominant model (Tinder, etc.) already does this, so if something else would work better for a significant minority, why shouldn't it *also* be an option?"
Right? I'm largely attracted to androgynous people. Gender/sex doesn't matter. Muscles nice, long hair great, athletic or slim good, but none of these are required.
More important to me: are they interesting, curious, passionate (about anything), compassionate, kind, self-aware, honest, and weird?
Physical is important, of course. No spark? No sexual connection? Then we're friends, not lovers. (Friends are very important to me.) But the physical flexes a lot. I've had long-term/short-term partners who were manly men/very femme women too.
The personality/mental traits? They flex a bit, but at 48, I'm picky. If they're missing more than a couple of items from my above list, we can be friends, fwb, a fling, etc., but they're very unlikely to become a long-term partner.
Infuriatingly, Orthodox Jewish resumes have strict codes about how to say things indirectly and what things simply can't be said, so that including too much information is high risk. Agree that the minimum is schools + references, just noting that anything more than that can filter in annoying unintended ways.
Tbh i would like the idea of a 2 part dating doc. A first maybe at most 4-5 sentences to get a very rough idea of the person than after a date all the details if im interested. For me atleast it seems like it is pretty relevant if I click with a person in a way that means im romantically interested or am only interested in a platonic friendship
I guess this is late, but I didn't realize you had plucked out my comment until just now: for the record, I was and remain 100% serious. Physical relationships are founded on physical attraction. That's what really matters on a bedrock level, strong animal attraction. Obviously there are personality traits that are of crucial importance in a relationship, but those have to do with serious deep-level issues like propensity to cheat, which never get mentioned in dating ads of any kind – such at least is my experience. The stuff in those ads is just completely superficial hobby-level stuff and let me be frank: inability to tolerate these kinds of wholly irrelevant difference in an important relationship is bigotry in the real sense – narrow-mindedness, parochialism. If you experience a deep attraction to a woman but reject her, or she you, because she votes for the wrong guy (something which doesn't even meaningfully affect which guy gets in) or likes cartoons or has some dream about social glory and clout as a lawyer, or because you want to be a fireman or whatever, the rejector is a shallow, silly person with poor evaluation skills.
PS: I actually previously thought you understood this; your conclusions in an old essay on why Henry the wifebeater has more romantic success than a kind nerd seemed to be aware that this is how it works. If the dick is good a woman can put up with a lot.
EDIT: Also, it's not 20% of the population that thinks like this. It's 20% of *your readership*, Scott. (Or, actually most of those 20% seem to mean that all the girls are unbearable based solely on their self-descriptions, which... well, see above for my thoughts on this.) It's far, far more of the general population. You, we, are the bubbled ones.
I think there are some underlying assumptions people have about dating docs that I think are not necessarily true:
1. “The people using dating docs are only using dating docs.” I often hear, “what happened to good old-fashioned meeting people in person at an activity like a party?” Well, you can find partners through different channels, why limit yourself to one? I personally use most dating apps, social media, in-person and I have a dating doc (here, if you’re interested: https://jacquesthibodeau.com/lets-go-on-a-date/).
2. “Dating doc people have a hard time finding dates so they turn to this weird approach.” This isn’t the case for me. If I’m actively dating new people, my schedule ends up being packed with dates. It’s like a full-time job. I think some date-me doc people are struggling for sure, but lots of people who don’t have any dating doc also struggle.
3. “You will lose potential partners because dating docs are weird.” I don’t think any of the dates I’ve gone are with women who would come across my dating doc before we met. After that, it doesn’t matter. If it is the case that they get turned off by someone having a dating doc, I don’t really care.
I think Kenny’s comment should be 18%. It feels weird to double count Republican -> Democrat and Democrat -> Republican, but otherwise it can’t possibly add up to 100%.
If you like meeting new people, if you find first dates fun, etc., trial and error is really fun! I wouldn't want to optimize it away. :) Spontaneity is also romantic! There's something lovely about how a chance encounter can change a lifetime.
I feel like a lot of people don't like meeting new people and basically want to optimize the path from single -> married. I think that mindset makes it hard to find a partner because it makes everything too high stakes. If you're not having fun, she's not having fun.
I also think that most people don't actually know what they want. I buy that dating docs work as a "vibe check" (you're into Russian history? I know nothing about that but that sounds groovy! let's try out a date!) but I'm skeptical about reading too far into these things.
I think you've hit on something important here that a lot of people in this thread are missing, which is the value of *drama*. Dating someone unsuitable/crazy may not be a good long-term strategy for maximizing your zzzzzzzzz (sorry I fell asleep typing this sentence) - but it's absolutely fantastic for generating drama, learning about yourself & creating memories.
Right. Nerds don't want relationship drama, dating itself is drama enough. But for people with more skill, it becomes like any other game, with challenge and variety becoming important and a part of the enjoyment.
There was a version of this in the '80s: https://www.facebook.com/TheTabOfficial/videos/before-tinder-there-was-80s-video-dating/677842862363426/
Well there's this
https://youtu.be/leDLtQHFzKE?si=YS6tro9sly4jGwo4
Tinder, Hinge and Bumble support videos now.
Boy, I'd love a link to the Indian marriage ads-that sounds like a window a world I know nothing about.
And Scott's line about being surprised that the Unitarian minister was straight was hysterical!
Here's the first site that came up that wasn't specifically selected for hilarity: https://www.deshvidesh.com/matrimonial-classified/
And here's one page that was selected for hilarity, though some of the humor is lost on someone like me who never lived within Indian cultures: https://www.shaadidukaan.com/blog/hilarioul-matrimonial-ads-that-will-give-you-laughing-riot.html
That first site really makes me want to run a study on response rates based on whether the ad was in red or blue.
Hopefully they randomize the order pinned by each cookie, but somehow that seems unlikely to me.
Hypothesis: the blue is so much easier to read that response rates are statistically significantly better, but the absolute magnitude is still pretty small.
When people say "respond with biodata", what are they looking for?
I was not familiar with the term myself, but I googled "matrimonial biodata" and found lots of sites offering templates: https://createmybiodata.com/
I think the big things that might be unexpected are the detailed astrological charts - they care about birth time and place in addition to date, and calculate several different factors, that depend on the actual current position of stars and planets at the time and place of your birth, rather than using the place that the stars and planets would have been at that date 2000 years ago, the way European astrology works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_astrology#R%C4%81%C5%9Bi_%E2%80%93_zodiacal_signs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakshatra
Looking more closely at those biodata templates, I'm interested if anyone knows more about the icon you can put at the top. The default image seems to be a stylized image of Ganesh with a swastika on his forehead. Looking at the options when I click "change", many of the options seem to indicate something about religion, but there are a larger number of options than I would have expected. (I think "shaivite" vs "vaishnavite" is the finest level of detail I've heard from my relatives.)
Darn, much less cyberpunk than I was hoping.
Bio as in biography, not biology
From my viewing of historical/mythological dramas, one important factor in seeing the charts is because of the influence of Mars in the natal chart (particularly for the bride). Mars is a malefic planet and someone with it prominent in their chart will have an adverse affect on their spouse (maybe even the groom will die early leaving the bride a widow, a most unlucky and undesirable state of affairs):
https://astrotalk.com/astrology-blog/can-someone-who-is-manglik-marry-a-non-manglik-person-insideastro/
You get it in Western astrology too with websites offering "love compatibility" horoscopes, but nowhere near the same extent. Indian astrology does take account of the precession of the equinoxes, unlike Western, and the way the charts are constructed (the square shaped ones) is the traditional way mediaeval and Renaissance Western astrology used to do it, before the circular charts were adopted (see diagrams in posts below):
https://www.sebfalk.com/post/masculine-mars-planetary-degrees-in-medieval-astrology
https://homegrown.co.in/homegrown-explore/how-astrology-played-a-major-role-in-choosing-the-date-of-indias-independence
Those were super interesting! Besides "caste no bar," the phrase that stood out to me was how often skin tone (namely "fair," which I assume means "more white") was mentioned. My impression was that it's more of a selling point for women than for men to be fair.
Pale skin is a feminine sex characteristic. It is desirable in women, and undesirable in men, in every culture.
Compare Greek black-figure pottery, in which female figures are as obvious as can be since they are white rather than black.
Solely from a pun-based standpoint, I was hoping that the opposite of "caste no bar" would be "caste iron bar".
I'm wondering about the "divorced after three months" guy, I assume he means "it's been three months since the divorce" and not "my first marriage only lasted three months" because that latter would be worrying.
There used to be similar sorts of ads in old magazines like "Ireland's Own", be that unabashed "looking for marriage partner" or "wanting a penfriend":
https://www.irelandsown.ie/they-met-through-irelands-owns-pen-pals-page/
Indeed, such things engendered the wits of my nation to spoof "Lonely Hearts columns":
https://www.boards.ie/discussion/71214/irelands-own-magazine-lonely-hearts-column
And seemingly the column was still going up to 2017, possibly to the present day:
https://twitter.com/etienneshrdlu/status/873270072483119105?lang=en
The 70s version in the Irish Farmers' Journal was as blunt about requirements as the Indian matrimonials:
https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2056724329/lonely-hearts-ads-from-1970s-thankfully-things-have-changed
"GETTING IN TOUCH
The charge for this column is 25p per notice in the adult section and 121/2p in the teenage section. All proceeds for 1974 will be donated to charity.
Adults
LONELY HEARTH: Is the owner of a large and well stocked dairy and tillage farm in West Waterford. He is aged 30 years and is a T/T and non smoker and is from a very respectable farming family. He is of average height and built and is good humoured, kindly disposed and considered good looking. Having decided to marry in the near future he desires to meet a young lady of 25 years or so who has decided to marry a farmer. She must be of respectable farming background, good humoured and good looking. Average height and build, have some farming experience. A dowry considered an asset but not a necessity. Replies with photo exchanged from only local counties. Strictly confidential.
MAN: 35 years old would like to meet a girl with view to marriage. He has his own home shop and land and is interested in cattle and shows. He shows films and likes nature study, herbs etc. He likes a quiet type of life with good cooking. R.C. He is easy to get on with. Snap please
NORTH WEST MOUNTIES: Farmer, north West Sligo 40 years, 6”tall, good family background, no commitments, non drinker and light smoker. Has about 30 acres of land, new bungalow with hot and cold running water, stock. Would like to get in touch with sincere girls aged 30 to 40 with view to marriage. Strictest confidence given and expected. Interests are listening to radio, reading, current affairs etc. Replies especially welcome from counties Sligo, Leitrim and Mayo or girls from those counties living in Dublin.
BEARD: Would like to meet a girl aged 20 to 30 with own large farm in need of managing or building up. He has a flair for horses and keeps and breeds some, also a large herd of cattle. Likes travel and showing horses. He is simple and honest and would like to meet likeable girl with view to early marriage. He is in his mid 30’s and would like to meet girls aged 25 to 35. Photo with first letter please, will be returned. Confidential.
PART TIME FARMER: and dealer, is a man with his own car, lorry and house. Would like to hear from farmers daughter or business girl view to marriage. Aged 18 to 28. He is self made in dealing with shop and farming people. He would be interested in any business that would make a living from selling. He has a sense of humour and would like to hear from girls that are attractive with own business or farm. Photo please.
ON HIS OWN: Deserted husband, returned from England some years ago. Is sincere, honest, hardworker, respectable, 28 years old 6 foot tall, dark haired, well built and is considered good looking. He has his own large modern farm, self feed silo and cattle cubicle house, tractor and machinery and a part time job. His interests include hunting and fishing, dogs and horses, and country and western music, and all outdoor sport. He is a great lover of the Irish red setter dog and keeps a lot of them. Has a separation and is waiting for an annulment in the near future. Would like to hear from girls of own age or from deserted wives or young widows with view to friendship and marriage. Please send snap in first letter. All letters answered. Replies welcome from any part of Ireland but especially from Leitrim, Sligo or Roscommon.
EASY GOING MAN: Over 30, with own home. Would like to be married. He has £25,000 tied up in livestock and land. He is quiet and lazy to a point of rushing at time as life passes by. He like to meet girls aged 20 to 32, wishing for a home and a happy life. He is not interested in anyone’s background as the future is all that matters. No objections to a girl with child. Snap please
HIGH NOON: Is aged 30, 5’10” good appearance. Has own house, good farm and own car. He is anxious to settle down and wishes to meet nice country girl aged 20 to 30 with same ambition. Farmers daughter, nurse or professional girl. Hobbies are dancing, CW music and Gaelic games. Snaps appreciated and all letters answered. Only those genuinely interested in marriage should apply.
HAPPY GO LUCKY: Is a 44 year old girl. She is tall and has a good figure and is very nice looking. She loves farming and would like to hear from C of I gentleman. Photo please. All letters answered.
HOME LOVER: is sincere, respectable lady, late forties, good education, own home, small farm, good family background, and having no ties, wishes to meet sincere respectable farmer, business or professional gentleman in 50 to 60 age group. Photo appreciated and returned. Strictest confidence will be given and expected.
CO. LIMERICK: Is a farmer aged 34 years, 5’10” in height. T.T. with a medium sized farm, well stocked, car, machinery, wishes to meet a respectable farmers daughter, teacher, nurse etc with farming background with good sense of humour, T.T. and non smoker with capital farm or otherwise with view to early marriage. Genuine replies. Photo first letter. Strictest confidence given and expected. Usual interests."
There is an old joke about country newspaper personals ads:
"Single man seeks single woman with own boat and motor. Send picture of boat and motor. "
holy shit i kind of love all these people
This site looks legit and matches what I remember from 20 years ago when I was in India and saw these in a local newspaper.
https://www.deshvidesh.com/matrimonial-classified/
"Caste no bar" was the phrase I noticed in the ones I saw back in the day.
The *other* thing to maybe look for in this "world I know nothing about" is the Indian focus on maintaining lane discipline and encouraging others to do so. This was a thing 20 years ago and seems to still be a thing. The 'problem' is that at low speeds and with a mix of bicycles, mopeds, cows, buses, cars, etc maintaining lane discipline substantially cuts down the capacity of the road.
https://www.shaadi.com/ is an incredibly popular website that you might find interesting to browse!
Dating docs feel weird because they are not "honest signaling." That is, it's possible to lie or mislead on them. Meeting someone in person has lots of honest signals though--how the react with body language, their mannerisms, how they speak, what words they use, etc.
It's the same as if someone directly tells you "I'm your friend' it feels weird and awkward, even if it's true. This is why friends say things like "what's up dumbass?" when they meet up. That's an honest signal, because if someone who wasn't your friend said that, it would actually be an insult. And it's why you typically respond in-kind with another insult.
I wouldn't exactly trust someone on a dating doc saying "I am very pretty". But I would learn that they were someone who prioritized being pretty, or someone who felt like it wouldn't get them in trouble to say that they were pretty.
I would trust someone who said "I am a Shia Muslim and only looking to date other Shia Muslims." There's not much reason to lie about this, it just helps you find your type. I think many of the values I care about are in this category.
This might be saying more about me than about other people, but I think I learn more about someone from reading their writing than watching their body language. Writing style is a good sign of intelligence, education level, class, sense of humor, and the internal structure of someone's thought. The exact way they choose to signal vs. countersignal traits can tell you a lot about which traits they value and expect from others. Meanwhile, whether they, I don't know, fidget their hands a bit when they talk to you might tell you that they're anxious. But everyone's anxious on first dates!
I don't disagree, I just think that it explains the strong intuitive "this feels weird" response people have. Though I think a lot of people definitely weight things like body language very highly compared to more analytical signals, and you're probably on the more extreme end there.
I definitely *don't* think that I learn more about someone from reading a piece of writing than I do meeting them.
Take your example profiles. Almost entirely, what I learn from reading those pieces of writing is *how they want a potential date to perceive them*, which is not the interesting question to me. I don't know my own most attractive traits; why would they know theirs? If anything, it has the opposite effect: a piece of writing in which someone is consciously, desperately trying to get you to perceive them as smart and successful (which several of your examples are doing) feels gauche, embarrassing, ungenuine to me.
The signalling problem is kind of inherent to dating; you can't just wish it away, hope for a world in which social interaction was more aboveboard.
For instance, I have a preference for dating people who are intelligent, and I *don't* want to date people who are desperate to signal their intelligence. The same applies, to many people, to things like financial success, among others.
In a world where having this kind of "dating document" was de rigeur, I would probably be going on dates with the people who rebelled against the entire idea of the system by sending a page of something completely unrelated, or possibly even whose bios were "." if I thought they fit the bill otherwise.
I just find it ... again, gauche. I don't trust the kind of person who would write this kind of document. If Hana were actually as intelligent as her profile clearly wants to convince me she is, or Larisa as successful, and they were reasonably pretty, they would have no need to write so much as one sentence on a dating site to convince people to be interested. The sheer fact that they're writing this at all is proof they're not.
Appearance and mannerisms, on the other hand, are *much* harder to fake. Almost impossible, for everything but a really small, talented slice of the population.
Yeah the problem for me is dating docs as an idea seem to have the same kind of smarmy, kinda desperate and high-risk of bullshitting as LinkedIn does.
What’s odd about dating docs is that just like with job referrals, most people including me wouldn’t bat an eye if a close friend recommended you date someone or set you up.
The thing it's most useful for me for was "I want someone who wants kids and a home life" (and, if I'm being honest, the implied "and is also comfortable with slightly weird and explicit communication").
What would not having a home life be like? I.e. eating in restaurants every day?
I'm guessing probably someone who doesn't want to live with their partner.
Basically. I assume it means "I want to spend most nights in with my partner/family rather than going out all the time."
I arguably don’t have a home life at the moment. It means working all day on weekdays and spending weekends at friends’ houses or on trips. At my apartment I have a housemate I barely know. I eat almost all of my meals at work. I mostly spend time in my apartment watching movies.
Reading that sounds a bit depressing (I actually think my life is fun!) but just want to highlight that it’s pretty easy to just not have a home life.
> "is also comfortable with slightly weird and explicit communication"
This is key
Wouldn't you expect 18%, not 9%, of marriages to be Republican and Democrat, given these numbers? 9% Republican to Democrat and 9% Democrat to Republican?
In other words, if this was a population of 100 people, you would expect 9 mixed marriages out of 50 marriages, which is 18%. (re: Kenny's comment)
I agree and was about to write the same thing. I think Kenny Easwaran’s math is wrong. Assuming heterosexual for simplicity, there’s 30% chance the woman is D × 30% chance the man is R = 9%, AND there’s a 30% chance the woman is R × 30% chance the man is D = 9%. Add them up to get 18%.
Yup, I rushed to this comments section intending to post the same thing.
+1, came here to post this too
Yep, with a 40-30-30 breakdown and random pairings, you'd expect:
48% an Independent and a partisan
18% a Republican and a Democrat
16% two Independents
9% two Republicans
9% two Democrats
Additionally, I suspect that partisan registration is somewhat higher in the same segments of the population where marriage is more common, although I don't have any ideas for validating that in the amount of time I'm going to spend on this comment.
Yes, I definitely forgot to count both directions! But even with an extra factor of 2, it appears not to be as much of a 100% filter as people assume it would be.
Came here to say the same :-)
All of these calculations seem to be making the unrealistic simplifying assumption that party affiliation doesn't vary with sex. E.g. if we assume a symmetric 20% gender gap, we get 20% (20% * 20% + 40% * 40%) mixed D/R marriages with random mating.
I think Kayla’s take is the most sensible. The breakdown of whether dating docs are good vs shorter form apps like Tinder overlooks the main function of dating platforms: they try to make the “meeting potential romantic partner” market more efficient. It’s a cold market efficiency game. Also, dating docs assume that people can self-reflect well...a tall order to say the least -- looks at the mirror critically.
I also think people complain unduly about the “modernization” of dating. Yeah, chances are you’ll have to use an app to meet someone but after that you’re talking in person just how grandma Mathilda did.
Anyway, just some rambling thoughts. New to this Substack and have been enjoying your work, Scott!
I think the comments from the Indian and Orthodox Jewish communities, where family-arranged marriages are standard, suggests that this isn't even that much of a "modernization" - the main difference is that the partners themselves are doing it, rather than their families, and the people involved are writing and reading, rather than telling it to some third party who remembers it all.
Hmmm that’s a good point
There seems to be a difference of opinion between people who generally like going on dates and people who generally find it unpleasant. Interesting distinction.
I don't think it lines up with introversion/extraversion either. I'm an introvert but I like the idea of doing something fun with an attractive person who is attracted to me. Others...maybe have a higher level of social anxiety? Or they pick activities they don't like but feel obligated to do because they seem like typical date things? Like, if you don't enjoy restaurant dining, maybe pick a different type of date.
Yep, I think this is exactly the main issue and the reason the two camps seem to be talking past each other. The people who don't like dating don't understand why you wouldn't want to pre-filter the candidates for compatibility, and the people who like dating don't understand why you'd want to use a document to filter people out when you could just do it in person during a (mostly/probably) enjoyable date.
And I agree it's not introversion/extraversion. I'm also an introvert and mostly enjoyed all the dating I did on the way to finding my wife, even though many of the dates were with women who would have made a very bad long-term match for me.
I wonder if there’s a sociosexuality component here? If the “I would enjoy fucking/kissing/receiving attraction-inflected attention from this person” set is a lot bigger than the “I would consider this person as a long-term partner” set, the dating/filtering process will be fun. If it’s not, the process is probably dicier. (Scott, being ace, is presumably on the low end of this spectrum.)
Exactly this; well put. It explains the individual variance, aside from the obvious confounders like social anxiety.
I have a very low libido and I enjoy dating a lot!
I'd add that I see "made new (platonic) friend" as a really good outcome from a date. The mindset takes a huge amount of pressure out of the process. It makes dating a "let's hang out! if there's a spark, great! if we just like each other, also great!" thing.
As someone who isn't asexual or the least bit anxious, here's my perspective. I went on a number of dates from various people on dating sites who looked like they were good fits. About 10% of them were interesting. The other 90% were so tedious as to make the entire process unbearable. ANYTHING that would help me cut down on the number of dates, just to avoid that 90%, would be welcome.
Max I second that motion!
Very good point.
I'm an introvert. I did not enjoy dating at all in my 20s, I think because I was worried about convincing the woman to like me and couldn't find time to enjoy myself until we were already practically a couple.
By the time of my 30s, when I knew I was ready to get married, I had come to enjoy dating. I think because I had developed genuine confidence, didn't feel I had anything to prove, and was happy just to hear the stories and perspectives of the sort of women that met my basic criteria, even if we didn't end up sharing much attraction. I normally just made the first dates a cup of coffee or a drink, one hour max. I cycled through a lot of these first dates, often 3+ women per week, and I can only think of one that I really disliked, where talking to her was like pulling teeth. Naturally, this pace meant not much screening beyond basic questions before we met up.
I met my wife less than 2 months into this process. Funny how that goes.
I think this is the way to do it!
How were you were meeting enough women to do 3+ first dates a week? Were you just very successful on the apps or were you constantly going out to meet new women and asking them out?
I relied on a combination of the apps and reaching out to my network. I didn't cold-approach -- not that it's a bad idea. Also it might be boom or bust week to week but I never stopped looking, and I would schedule dates over a week in advance at times. And keep in mind that this only lasted for 6-7 weeks until I met my wife, I'm sure the dating pool would have dried up before much longer.
What I had going for me doesn't really scale to the ACX audience. I'm a conservative Christian with passable social skills/grooming/looks, who was respectful without being obsequious, and I signaled that I was ready to start a family. While far from rich, I owned my own home and had a good enough career to support a family on one income in the low-cost place I lived.
And while I would say I married and started having kids later than I wish I had, I was also probably the perfect age to have as many options as possible, as my dating pool consisted of women in their late 20s and early 30s, also very ready to start families, many of them in the "always a bridesmaid, never the bride" camp.
As I commented further down, what is the point of a dating doc? To optimize the journey from single -> married? Or just to suggest fun people to date?
IMO dating docs probably work very well if you're using them as a source of cool people that you might want to hang out with. If you're using them to identify your one true partner, this probably works much less well since most ppl don't have a perfect sense of their preferences.
(I'd also add that "enjoying meeting new ppl" is probably _the_ key dating skill. If dating is a horrible grind, things won't go well.)
Yes, for sure. I believe this is the crux for whether you will like dating docs or not.
People who don't enjoy first dates want to optimize them away as efficiently as possible, people who do enjoy first dates want to save a little mystery for later.
Former ones want to read an exhaustive summary, latter ones want a book cover blurb with no spoilers.
I've been on like 5 dates in my whole life, but I've had 5 or so honeys, 3 pretty serious long term relationships and maybe 10 causal hookups (I don't really like casual hookups). I have always met people at work, at school, at a setting for some activity, or through friends. That has always felt much more comfortable to me than freakin *dates*, and also like a more valid way to get a sense of what someone is like. I loathe the date feeling of smile and chat, while there's a sign hanging over each of our heads saying "We're here to decide if we're drawn to each other." You have no common experience to talk about, except for Wanting a Partner. I don't see how people *stand* dates!~
>You have no common experience to talk about, except for Wanting a Partner.
You discover common experiences. That's some of the fun of it. The delight of discovery and of making a connection with someone new. Getting past the usual social boundaries to create new and exciting intimacy. I agree that it can take a bit more work than "we're both in the same class/office so of course we have things to talk about."
Yeah, I grasp the concept, I just don’t like the way it feels, like auditioning for each other. I dislike the feeling so much that I’m not in a mode where I can delight in discovery, whereas it happens easily schmoozing with another climber while belaying.
That's not it. I like going on (some) dates, and I think dating docs are a great idea. (I don't have a dating doc only because it seems to be useless in my country.) It's just that I like going on dates with people who are *interesting*. The 90% of profiles on dating apps which have 0 information or are extremely superficial do absolutely nothing for me. Nor do I care that much about how a person looks like. In dating apps, I tend to read the profile first and only if I like it (which is rare) I would glance at the picture to check it's not, like, actively repulsive, before I click "like".
I don't think this is THE division line (but maybe one of the few).
I liked going on dates, but I have strong preference for long-form profiles, because I didn't like going on dates with people I have nothing to talk about. For example, a lot of people care a lot about celebrities, star gossip etc. I have zero interest in this area, and I would find conversation on this topic to be extremely boring. A well-filled dating profile let me filter out such people with almost 100% success rate - I've never been on a date with star-obsessed woman, and only met one that was too much into "successful businessmen" (like, she sent me some articles about "10 most successful young businessmen of the decade" or something like that).
I still think THE line lies where physical attractiveness matters a lot, or not much. I can't understand how you can get excited about a woman just by looking at her photos, and other people can't understand how can I get excited about a woman just by knowing she likes HPMOR.
As a side-note, it would be interesting to see if preference for dating docs/long form profiles correlates with face blindness. I have some degree of it, to the point where I don't recognize people I know very well if I meet them in a place where I don't expect to meet them. Maybe the reason I don't care about photos/physical appearance too much is because most people look to me like variations on a few base models anyway.
>I'm an introvert but I like the idea of doing something fun with an attractive person who is attracted to me.
Well that’s the key distinction isn’t it? All of the normal things you would say you like or don’t like to do are entirely contingent on attractiveness and sexuality. That’s why focusing on “describable dating preferences” is a dead end.
The comment about the Unitarian minister made me laugh out loud at the coffee shop where I am reading this.
(My wife and I attended a Unitarian church for 10 years. It rang true)
Whatever happened to charming people in a bar?
Anyway I actually don’t believe in compatibility much at all in terms of minor life choices. Very few women like sports in the way that men do, and yet sport obsessed men marry women who leave the room when the sports are on. There are a few deal breakers, except relating to the desire for children or marriage itself. Even religious people can marry atheists happily enough if they agree on how the children are raised, political differences shouldn’t matter at all, and opposites often attract.
Pick-up artists happened.
GPS-enabled apps replaced charming people in a bar the same way that GPS-enabled ride hail replaced sticking your thumb out along the side of a street. The IRL version only identifies possible matches within line-of-sight, while the app versions enable matches within GPS radius.
And once singles bars lose their status as the most effective way to meet people, they suddenly lose a lot of their clientele, and stop being as effective even for the people who are still there.
(The standard story of the decline of gay bars is a one-two punch of apps replacing their role for finding hookups/dates, and general social acceptance enabling general bars to replace their role as the safe place to get a drink with your friends.)
Not that I go to a lot of bars, but when I have in recent years they all seem so packed as to feel massively overcrowded. How does that line up with bars losing status? Or is it that singles bars are gone and there are now only generic bars?
I don't know the general trend. I know that the number of gay bars has decreased in most cities. I have no idea what has happened to the number of "singles bars" for straight people (though I did read this amazing (long!) article a few years ago about the life and death of one particular type of singles bar: https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-death-of-flair/ ).
I would expect the general crowdedness of bars to be determined by the number of customers needed to sustain the operating expenses, and then the total number of bars to be determined by the number of people who want to go to bars divided by the crowdedness of each bar. The effect I'm talking about is going to affect the total number of people who want to go to bars, but crowdedness will still need to be determined by rent (which of course is going to vary from neighborhood to neighborhood).
“I would expect the general crowdedness of bars to be determined by the number of customers needed to sustain the operating expenses, and then the total number of bars to be determined by the number of people who want to go to bars divided by the crowdedness of each bar.”
Bars can’t really control the number of people who go in, and the viability of pubs and bars depends on the costs and revenues, like everything else. There are plenty of owner occupied pubs even in big cities like New York where the clientele will all get seats even in weekends. Those places are viable because the costs are relatively low - no rent, no debt etc. they don’t need the big crowds.
When I was a kid (ie 14-15) I worked on a relatives pub (illegally and largely unpaid) where the clients were about 3 an hour until 6 pm when it increased to 4-5 people. This was week days in the summer holidays. I didn’t work weekends but the place could only seat 15 people so I don’t think it ever rocked. Anyway, just tipping over was good enough, although those places are dying out now.
I believe the expectation is not that bars can control the number of people who can come in, but that bars will go out of business until the remaining number is small enough that they are getting enough customers to balance expenses.
Collector's Weekly has some incredible long-form articles. I'd read this one before, learning about TGI Friday's improbable origin as a "fern bar" for mingling singles.
I got there from an in-depth article on Tiki culture, which I had thought must be appropriating something specific; but it turns out to be a totally superficial aesthetic, no more authentic than steampunk.
People go on dates to bars with people they met on Tinder, would be my guess.
One more step down into hell and possible partners on dating apps are going to have star ratings & reviews, like Amazon products.
Nothing at all. Bars and restaurants are now the second most common way couples meet. (https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.1908630116/asset/4090305d-036e-4c5a-8f36-cc007248d45a/assets/graphic/pnas.1908630116fig01.jpeg)
Thanks. It’s interesting that “through friends” is the one that’s affected by the rise in apps. It’s hard to see the cause there, you would expect that apps would replace bars and pubs.
The "met online" category includes social media and other online exchanges, not just dating apps. People are probably increasingly meeting their friends-of-friends through algorithms rather than direct recommendations.
Makes sense.
Maybe shy people switched from friends to apps while non-shy people stuck with bars.
Finding dates spontaneously IRL is totally something that you can still do - I've had a lot of luck with that. That being said, you have to know your scene. I'm terrible at bars/parties but I've gotten random dates from ppl that I've met hiking, sailing, etc. Basically you need to find spaces (a) where you're comfortable and happy that also (b) have a good gender ratio. If you only like doing male dominated activities, maybe you should try exploring new facets of your personality.
Well this isn’t about me. Although I assume you are using the you as neutral (one should) . From my days of being single I found bars to be a bad bet, best bet was a house party. Why? Approaching a woman in a bar is a clear attempt at a hookup and can be rejected, at a house party it’s just mingling.
Mixed gender activities are a good idea as well.
Ya - that's the neutral you.
Just registering the observation "you still can meet girls IRL and that still works great (although only a specific type of person will do well a bar)" which is what I assume what you were getting at with your "bar" question.
To be honest my main point was that people don’t have to be as compatible as the dating documents seem to suggest. Men and women have different interests anyway. In the bar situation (or any situation where people can meet informally in a largely inebriated state) there’s no real discussion about compatibility. I met my partner in work but I remember many a friend meeting their now wives or partners through cheesy pickup lines in a sweaty pub. Getting the sex (or a makeout session) out of the way first makes the subsequent dates more relaxed. Time to get to know each other later.
Um.. nothing? You can still do that if you want.
However you need a thick skin because you will experience rejection. That being a painful thing for most people, they tend to avoid it when alternatives exist
What happened is that people who don't like bars or any other social gatherings finally found a way to meet other people without leaving their zone of comfort. It's a wonderful thing.
> Very few women like sports in the way that men do, and yet sport obsessed men marry
> women who leave the room when the sports are on.
That reeeeeally strikes me as an example of why preferences matter, and especially anti-preferences. That "leaves the room" part sounds like divorce waiting to happen. Partners shouldn't share every single activity and hobby, of course, but a good overlap, or at least tolerance is just more healthy.
I think they meant “leaves the room” because they are bored and are going off to do their own hobby, not because they are upset.
That still sounds a bit strange to me, maybe because I've grown up in a very small flat where there was almost no way to "leave the room and do your own hobby" (well, for my parents - I had a room to myself, if a tiny one). Unless wife's hobby is incompatible with a turned on TV (e.g. she wants to watch something else, or needs peace and quiet), I'd imagine the partners would remain in the same room. My wife watches shows and knits while I play video games in the same room (I use headphones, or turn off sound at all - I don't much like sound in games), and we often trade snide remarks about what's on TV. As long as it is possible, I would prefer to remain by my wife's side, but I agree that some hobbies might require one to wander off.
My point was less that dating docs are too long (though often they are) and more that dating docs are a tool only for one half of the purpose of dating - finding a person who meets criteria you're absolutely certain about. They're a bad tool for exploring your preferences to see if those preferences are correct, something most people have to do.
"Well," a reasonable person might say. "Good. We've knocked out half the problem."
Except that people have a complicated relationship with their own romantic preferences. Nobody I know who is in a happy relationship is in a relationship with someone who met all of their "dealbreaker preferences" when they were single. The people got to know each other, realized that this person brought something to their lives they didn't even know they should be looking for, and that it was worth giving up one or more of the preferences they thought of as inviolate to be with their partner.
So if you go on dates only with people who violate none of your dealbreakers, either 1) you happened to get all your preferences right on first pass, or 2 and more likely) You're overscreening and siloing yourself into preferences the you of yesterday thought were mandatory, that the you of today might feel differently about if you just explored a bit further afield.
Again want to clarify that dating docs *can in principle* be used to both screen for your preferences and explore those preferences. In reality you're likely to fall in love with a person you're wishing into being and be continually disappointed when they never materialize, instead of interacting with actual human beings and discovering the unexpected value they could bring to your lives.
I think I'd disrecommend them for anyone under 26 or so, it does take some experience to not fall into this trap. Otoh my only criteria there are "wants kids" and "isn't offput by a short description of my interests", and it has worked fairly well overall.
Yeah for sure there are some things you should filter for. "Older than 18," "wants/doesn't want kids." "Looking to get married/not looking to get married." But those are just regular dating profiles. A "dating doc" strikes me as something that includes smaller details and preferences - that's where I see this concept getting into trouble.
> The people got to know each other, realized that this person brought something to their lives they didn't even know they should be looking for... You're overscreening and siloing yourself into preferences the you of yesterday thought were mandatory, that the you of today might feel differently about if you just explored a bit further afield.
Strong +1 to this, and not just for dating. It's pretty common to see a person who is struggling in life, often by their own admission, and are missing extremely subtle ways their behavior is causing those outcomes. It sucks because you need someone with the right knowledge to be in the right place at the right time to notice it, otherwise the person goes to the grave always wondering, for example, why women never talk to him or why he's always late to appointments or what-have-you.
...guilty on non-romance grounds tbh. Maybe I should take my own advice beter.
This is pretty close to my thought as well, although I would go even a bit stronger. A highly detailed dating doc with a lot of self-description and a checklist of dealbreakers (as opposed to a reasonably well-thought-out online profile, so length and detail matter) suggests to me self-absorption and rigidity. That is even putting aside the question of whether the person has sufficient self-awareness and honesty to know and state their own true preferences (they might not). Even if they are self-aware and honest, much of a relationship is about creating a new unit where each party bends or adds to their preferences to make a new "relationship unit." A long, detailed dating doc communicates that you over-prioritize your current preferences and thus may not be flexible enough to make a relationship work. True deal-breakers should be only a few major categories - religion, kids, basic values, decent attraction. The rest you work out in a gradual process of "this person annoys me in person" or "we haven't had much fun in four dates" (at which point it presumably ends) or "hey, turns out I don't hate doing this" or "they've got their thing, I've got mine, but we've also got our own things together" at which point maybe you get serious. Making mountains out of molehills signals a fussy, inflexible, self-absorbed person. That's why I think they are actively not helpful, as opposed to merely cumbersome.
Nobody is saying you need literally no information. But the big deal-breaker categories (e.g. religion) can be pretty easily summarized in a short profile or, better, a date or two. Even kids, which contra Scott I think most people find off-putting to discuss super early, but saying "I love kids" in your profile as opposed to three paragraphs about your future kid plan. Once you've passed those, you need to figure out what "Relationship You" would want, rather than "Currently Single You." They're not necessarily exactly the same person, and if you are adamant that they have to be, you'll come off looking worse.
I totally agree, and I think people overscreen other major decisions too, like colleges/careers/friends/cities, when they should be exploring with an open mind.
> Nobody I know who is in a happy relationship is in a relationship with someone who met all of their "dealbreaker preferences" when they were single
Then the people you know are on one end of the self awareness spectrum. I am in a happy relationship with someone who met all my deal breaker preferences and 85% of my nice to haves list.
Re: the zinger directed at Unitarians:
A good reminder that while "religious" versus "not religious" is a valid categorization in some contexts, "religious" is a hugely broad and diverse category.
This is a good point. The Roman Catholic and neo-Pagan are going to have extremely different views and experiences, but we'd classify them both as "religious". And that's without taking into account variations in how salient their religious views are to other aspects of their life.
Personally, I find the trend of assuming "religious" means "Christian" deeply irritating. But that's probably a me issue.
I asked in the other thread, but bumping here in case anyone has more good suggestions - what would a (straight) male version of Hana's profile look like?
(That is, something designed to be appealing to a mass majority-female niche group who would be all over it even though it's not obviously high status in normie society)
You should watch anime that speaks to your heart, not because it (the anime) is high status in some sub-culture.
If you’re targeting the same IQ bracket, probably something like “guy who reads literary fiction” or “guy who genuinely appreciates/has insight about contemporary art.” Straight male English lit grad students are pretty low status relative to other guys in similar barrier-to-entry professions, but they have a pretty easy time finding willing partners.
I think that's right, but curious how you'd express it in terms of vibes. Like Hana doesn't just work because she's into economics, she works because she's fun and energetic about it in an appealing way.
Musicians and other artists have always been much more successful with women than their economic value and physical attributes would indicate.
I think it's impossible. Anything that hits all the right buttons would come off as fake. Men are much more willing to fake personalities to find women to sleep with than the opposite so women will be much more suspicious
Hm, that's a good point (Hana comes off kinda sketchy even to me for this reason, would probably be worse if you genderflipped).
I think it would be well written and quirky and show some kind of intellectual interest. Hana is appealing because it shows she's interested in economics, puns, and that she's a little bit funny and weird, and a male Hana would have a similar vibe.
Back in the Match/OK Cupid days, I did much better once a friend suggested that I rewrite my blurb so instead of coming across as "nice guy looking for a relationship," it read "funny guy with some specific weird interests looking for someone interesting."
Some truth to that (I put up a silly photo that at least one person advised against, and it got me a whole bunch of swipes). Maybe it shows self-confidence in some weird way?
my tinder bio is like this; it has a list of things i like talking about (including but not limited to 'housing policy', 'local politics', and 'why oxford comments are superior') and i've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it. it worked really well in Oxford, where it was a great conversation starter; it works less well in London, but still serves as a pretty good filter. it's also why i prefer tinder to hinge unlike anyone else I know
"Why would you inflict this on yourself"
"plus you’ve wasted lots of your own time"
"Again, why do you want to know less about the most important decision you’ll ever make in your life"
This is the disconnect. Dates are supposed to be fun. If you've gone on three dates and they tell you something that's a dealbreaker, surely the first two were still fun? If you think the date is an ordeal, what are you pressing on for?
It's not the most important decision of your life. It's a date, where you have fun. Movies are popular date activities because they're fun even if the date sucks.
I think he is imagining a context where the number of dates one goes on is not limited by the number of people who are willing to go on a date, but by the number of nights you are able to spend out on dates. If I've decided I can go on dates up to three nights a week, but I've only found people to fill one or two of those nights, then your analysis seems right. But if I've decided I can only go on dates one night a week, and I have a few possible candidates, then spending three dates on the same person only to find out they aren't compatible was a possible waste of that time.
Doubtful. "Inflict" implies the experience itself is unpleasant, and he opens with saying you could theoretically date everyone.
Saying anything is "supposed to be fun" indicates it may not be fun for everyone. Dating was the only show in town, there has been a technological change and now it isn't. "Why would you want to sit at home reading the Bible in your own language? Hearing it read in Latin is supposed to be fun..." (I actually believe this but it is what it is)
...IS church supposed to be fun? Even in English I've heard people badmouth other books by saying they read like Genesis. I've always thought it was supposed to be "Good For You", akin to making kids eat brussel sprouts. Can't have dessert until you finish your brussel sprouts. But with dating, the dessert is More Brussel Sprouts.
At best I find church "bigger picture fun" - museum fun or hike fun. Trying to make church fun fun is usually cringe (clown masses etc.).
I suppose what tech does generally is streamline experiences, enabling people who don't care especially about the experience to cut to the chase, but for people who are really invested in the experience itself, it's the inefficiencies that are part of the package: steam trains, narrow boats, vinyl...
> If you think the date is an ordeal, what are you pressing on for?
Clearly you don't know how social anxiety works. If I didn't force myself to go through dates which I knew would be uncomfortable I would just be alone forever
If dating is an ordeal, why do you NOT want to be alone? A relationship is just an unending series of dates with the same person. What are you pressing on for?
Not necessarily. Dates have an element of uncertainty and fear of rejection that an ongoing relationship mostly doesn't. Also, they are usually not at-home, which may be more of an ordeal than "we live together".
The anxiety fades the better I know the person I'm socializing with. First meetings (and dates in particular because of the high possibility of rejection) are always difficult but that doesn't mean I prefer being alone, it's just the initial stage that's hard.
I see what you're saying, but I think there's a difference in weighting of outcomes here. If I go on a date with someone and they're not interested, I'm more upset than if we didn't date at all - no date could be explained by just not clicking superficially, or timing, or whatever. Dating and ceasing feels more like a rejection of me personally, by someone who had the opportunity to get to know me a bit better.
As a result, on a date, I'm more concerned about getting to know the person and giving a good impression. Yes, it is fun - I'm not dating this person unless I at least sort of enjoy their company - but to claim that there is no stress involved is simply not true in at least my case.
In addition, I think your view is coming from a position of low dating scarcity (please do not read this as an attack, it is in no way intended as such). Without going into detail, I have had periods where I put a lot of work into finding dates only to have absolutely no success. If you're in that situation, then a date not working out is more costly than if you find it easier to find dates.
> Dates are supposed to be fun....It's a date, where you have fun. Movies are popular date activities because they're fun even if the date sucks.
But very often, they aren't!
If I suss out in the first few minutes of a first date that we're not going to be a fit even as casual friends (as often happens), the date transforms into an unpleasant test of my endurance at being performatively engaging, while dreading potentially having to explicitly reject the person at the end of the date if it turns out they're into me.
Plus, who's willing to make the investment of a movie on a first date? These days most people are unwilling to commit to more than a cup of coffee as a first date activity, and that's not especially fun by itself.
"being performatively engaging"
Why, if you already know the date's a bust? Cut loose. The more annoying you become the less likely you'll have to explicitly reject them at the end.
Most people consider it impossibly rude and cruel to reject someone 5-10 minutes into meeting them on a first date. I suspect a lot of women might even be afraid of the reaction it might provoke from a man.
Implicitly stating, "I find you so unattractive I'm not even going to stay an hour or two to see if your personality redeems your ugliness" just isn't an option.
I posit the problem is treating a date like a 2-hour ordeal you aren't allowed to walk away from. Especially if they're only buying a cup of coffee. That's, what, ten dollars for a fancy one? That's a five-dollar-an-hour customer service job you're inflicting on yourself. Make shorter dates. Drink a cup of coffee and any time past is at parties' discretion.
I'm arguing two things here:
1. Many/most daters (but perhaps especially men anticipating paying for the date) don't want to do an activity that costs more than a fancy coffee, so the "activity" part of a date is unlikely to be fun in and of itself unless someone is wildly excited about coffee and,
2. Even a "coffee" date has a required duration to avoid insult - and that duration is considerably longer than it takes to swallow a beverage.
For both reasons, I personally don't ever want to meet in person unless I feel reasonably confident the conversation will be enjoyable for me.
I've experimented with going on dates before sussing out conversational ability/chemistry and it has never gone well. I come home very much feeling like the effort and time was totally wasted.
Other people's experience may vary.
I don't think 2 is real. You can set whatever minimum you want, and the people who object to it are most likely the ones who would drain you on a date already. If you're worried about looking like you're just in it for free coffee you can pay for the coffee yourself when you leave.
I haven't been in the dating market for an age. Is meeting for a few minutes for coffee common? I preferred inviting people to do an activity that I wanted to do anyway, like going to see a band or something, but it's true that I've been on some excruciating dates where it was apparent that one of us wasn't interested.
It's very common, although I think most people do it for longer than a literal "few minutes."
The straight male friends I've discussed it with prefer coffee dates because they don't want to be expected to buy cocktails/dinner/event tickets/etc., and they argue that coffee can morph into lunch (or whatever) if the date is going well.
If the date doesn't go well, they can get out after 45 minutes to an hour.
Another point here: since the biggest thing dating docs filter for are people who want to date someone who likes weird and explicit forms of communication, they can only ever work for those kinds of people (unless they become mainstream).
lol. Is the reason I can't heart this that are not a paid subscriber, or is that just how it's set up? Anyway, that would describe me and my husband!
How it's set up. If I remember the history correctly, Scott ran a survey at some point, people mostly wanted to not have "likes", and he pressured Substack into making it happen. The fact that some hearts still show up in some places (like email) is generally regarded as a bug.
Oh, okay. I'm new here. I like being able to acknowledge comments that I like, but I don't suppose a <3 would be particularly appreciated!
I believe the objection was to sort-by-popular rather than to the hearts themselves, so I don't think <3 will get frowned upon too hard, though obviously there's a failure mode where it would get spammy.
Hearts themselves are a problem, because people inevitably start optimising their comments to generate maximum likes.
Oh, ok, that's weird but 🤷🏼
<3
A good point.
More on "implicit filters": I met a lot of good dates on OKCupid, in part, because it required one to know English to register (and write a profile), and I'm not from English-speaking country. Therefore, just by looking for dates on OKC I filtered out a lot of less educated people (compared to a dating site in my own language). It might not have been such a big deal for me (a man), but my wife also says OKC was better than native language dating sites, because there women got spammed by stupid idiots.
Aside: I actually think that making men jump through more hoops to message a woman on a dating site is a good idea, or at least one worth trying. It's a well-known fact, I think, that women get too much messages, and so if you had at least to prove you have read her profile, that would be good. Maybe just answer a few questions based on info available in profile, like "what's my favourite book" or "what university I went to".
This makes total sense as a way to limit the dating pool to people more like you.
That was my read on why some people are opting for dating docs instead of Tinder, to filter the pool.
For the people that find dating docs unappealing, i think this means the filter is working. I don’t mean in terms of intelligence the your way of filtering works but more in terms of disposition and subculture.
I also agree with you that having ways to limit the overall dating pool may be more important for heterosexual women who seem to have a higher proportion of bad experiences on Tinder.
Oh my goodness - I would trade a LOT of my preferences to end up in a relationship with someone willing to write contracts or goal setting documents about the relationship and to do periodic reviews measuring the performance of each of us on key metrics.
Yes! Hilarious!
>Really, why do you expect me to read an entire paragraph to establish some boring point about dating docs, but not to spend more than three seconds evaluating whether or not someone is the love of my life?
This response to the physical attraction section really seems like Scott making a typical mind error. It may seem bizarre to him, but yeah a ton of people actually do function like that, and prefer to sort by instant physical chemistry.
This seems plausible enough, but extrapolating from that to "people like Scott shouldn't have dating docs" seems like a typical mind fallacy going the other way?
Sure! I'm pretty live-and-let-live and would never tell anyone not to date in their preferred way.
For what it's worth, here's the ad I put in the personals (a thing they used to have in the free newspapers; or as my husband called them the "want ads") that brought me my husband 30 years ago:
Skinny, funny, smart woman, 30s, seeks very intelligent yet down-to-earth man for fun and possible seriousness.
Succinct yet somewhat revealing. I had to add the "very" because a surprising number of men have a too-high opinion of their intelligence. Or maybe that's not surprising!
I liked him pretty well on our first date, fell in love with his self-deprecating sense of humor on the second date, and, because I really liked him and was tired of one night stands, we didn't have sex until like the fifth date. If he'd pushed me to do so before that, it would have been a dealbreaker. I read that some people have sex before the first date just to see if they're compatible. Really?
For many people, it's the sense of humor that keeps them together more than any other factor. (Certainly true for us!) Seems like a dating doc is a better place to convey that.
That's the kind of length of dating doc I could get on with.
Question: 30 years later, how much of the description of you, of him, and of the intention of the relationship is still true?
I would say almost all of it! I don't think I could objectively call myself skinny.
> Really, why do you expect me to read an entire paragraph to establish some boring point about dating docs, but not to spend more than three seconds evaluating whether or not someone is the love of my life?
The base rate on loves of your life is somewhat lower than the base rate on interesting comments.
I don't have the patience to write a full explanation, but the words missing from dating discourse most often is 'arbitrage.'
I don't understand this as written and would prefer the full explanation. Hopefully this personal request will overcome your lack of patience!
I don't understand, either, but maybe this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/datingoverthirty/comments/87axok/dating_outside_of_your_ethnicity_arbitrage/
Without clicking on this link, are any of the replies complaining about 'white privilege'?
Not even close.
>Both of my siblings are married to people outside of our ethnicity. They tried for years to find a match within our ethnicity, but it seems they have higher market value (or something) outside of it.
>I'm facing the same issue. To be crass, I sometimes feel like I'm a 4 within my ethnic group and a 9 outside of it.
>To illustrate: The very same week that someone NOT conventionally desirable (just use your imagination here) rejects me within my ethnic group, I'll get superliked and eagerly messaged online - or approached and asked out at a social event in person - by some extremely handsome successful charming person OUTSIDE of my ethnic group.
Yeah that's my take.
YOU (hetero male) may think you are undesirable because you are not tall or especially attractive. hell, you may even substantially prioritize female appearance yourself.
What you don't realize is that there's a large pool of females, many of them very attractive, who don't care much about appearance but do care massively about reliability and similar bourgeois values, and by those lights you are indeed a catch.
In other words you are able to sell yourself at a much higher value than you imagine because the buyer is rating on different criteria than you are rating (and vice versa).
The same holds true even within smaller domains. For example your theory of what counts as an attractive woman is not actually universal, and you may find very appealing a woman who does not consider herself attractive. The classic version of this is "white girls want to have a small butt on themselves; black guys want a big butt on their partners".
If there's any *single* myth in dating it's that "boys all want one thing" and likewise "girls all want one thing". This may be true at the vague level of "I want you to be nice" or "I want you to be interesting" or "I want you to be smart" or "I want you to be attractive" but what EXACTLY those things mean is so variable that they are essentially meaningless by themselves. .
A lot of this is what I think is meant by "chemistry".
I'd say my wife and I have always had chemistry, which I understand to mean "From the beginning I found her more attractive than most men find her, and she likewise found me more attractive than most women do."
This is partly why the whole enterprise of dating is a numbers game and it helps to meet lots of people in person.
But there's a certain balance here; chemistry definitely gives you a lift in attractiveness, but there's still a rough and fuzzy consensus on where people fall on the attractiveness spectrum, and there are certain qualities that are in high demand, some that are in niche demand, and some that have practically no demand. Failure to recognize this, and to bet everything on finding a supermodel when you're a troll, is usually called "delusion."
yeah this kind of mutual fit is what I think happens in the happy path for arbitraging the dating market.
This is a good point.
Also, I acknowledge this might be weird to say, but there are plenty of white guys who like a big butt too.
(As one expert on this subject matter put it in the early '90s, "even white boys got to shout")
That's what got the attention of DrZ, even tho we had been introduced previously (thanks, Ma for that purple dress & the 3" heels that meant it was shorter in the back than the front). That was 1970, after 7 years of friendship (while we had other relationships), we've been together since.
This is so spot on. +10
Boys want many things, and girls want many things. But for approximately all of them, attractiveness is *one* of the things they want. And attractiveness is something that can be assessed instantly. So if the algorithm is "target most attractive potential mate in the area, see if they have the other things I want, if not try the second-most-attractive...", that doesn't bode well for the people who genuinely are reliable and have all the other "bourgeois values" but are not attractive. They might in principle be "a catch", they just won't be caught.
Most of the techniques for meeting potential mates in the modern world, favor the attractiveness-first algorithm, see e.g. Tinder. And most of the places where you'll naturally figure out whether someone is reliable etc, are now deprecated as romantic opportunities, suitable for platonic friendship only. See e.g. work or school.
You are missing the point, which is that attractiveness is not an absolute, objective quality. It is viewer dependent.
Yes, there are aspects to it that are more or less objective (most people will agree that a person rated 8 on hot-or-not is above average in attractiveness) but the details vary vastly more than many people seem to want to believe. You and I may agree in our assessment of the attractiveness of 9/10 Hollywood actresses, but not about the tenth. And that tenth makes all the difference, because
(a) unless you have a somewhat pathological personality, the goal is not to get every boy on earth to lust after you, it is to get ONE boy on earth to lust after you.
(b) "good enough" holds for attractiveness as much as it holds for sense of humor, kindness, and everything else. Yes, I'd like a girl who rates 10/10 in hotness according to my lights, just as I'd like her to be 10/10 in kindness, humor, intelligence, patience, etc. But realistically I'll settle for somewhere around 7+ in all the characteristics I find important, and with luck I may get two or three of them hitting 9/10.
In other words, the issue is not that, unless you are Monica Bellucci and rate as 10/10 by basically every sentient being on earth, you are destined to be alone your entire life; it's that all you have reach is about 7+ for a reasonable fraction (20% or so) of the male population. And most women do in fact meet this bar.
It's women (and lazy sitcoms) who go around claiming that the ex-BF broke up with them because of <insert physical characteristic>. Ask the men involved and they'll give a personality based answer – she was controlling, she was boring, she was mean, she was frivolous, etc. You may or may not like this reasoning, but it is NOT "rejection based on appearance". I mean, hell, look at celebrity divorces. Whatever reason you may want to divorce Amber Heard, it's absolutely not because "she wasn't pretty enough".
I'd go even further, and say that attractiveness is among the *least important* factors in looking for a long-term partner. For me, they just need to meet some sort of minimum bar, and from there, other things matter more. with that said, this summer, i briefly dated someone who was objectively extremely hot, and I did really enjoy it haha. Although I think his good looks dazzled me to the extent where I couldn't objectively evaluate him (it was the same with my ex-boyfriend's personality, lol, i am terrible at objectively evaluating situations once I get a crush)
People are satisficing on a variety of metrics, the more you are willing to compromise on the more highly demanded metrics, the more selection power you buy yourself on other metrics. Let's consider a couple really obvious examples: a woman who doesn't mind dating shorter guys has a huge range of features to select from, whereas a hypothetical woman who will only date the tallest man available has zero bits of selection power left over (she has to take whatever other features the tallest man happens to have). Less absurdly: physical attractiveness is not a unidimensional scale, people seem to have certain faces that they are much more attracted to. So, if someone who is a "6" on the more broadly defined average attractiveness scale happens to match features you really like, they may be a personal "8" to you.
This is still probably a too short explanation but hopefully more helpful.
People being willing to move geographically for love has always seemed to me like a way for people with more preferences to widen their options.
I don’t know if it still exists but the New Yorker used to have classifieds that included people all over the world. I would think more global but niche options might be welcome for some people.
from my own (currently dating, young man) thoughts on how to arb the dating market it seems like the most general way to explain it is there are essentially two value functions judging each participant in the dating & relationship markets, the one imposed by the market in aggregate (probably best rounded off to attractiveness in the eyes of the average person) and the one imposed by each prospective partner. Each participant in the dating market can theoretically take advantage of the fact that their value function for a prospective partner differs from the aggregate market’s valuation of that person and arb the difference between these two valuations
1. City-based: moving from Silicon Valley to NYC is a *huge* boost for men (and vice versa for women)
2. Race-based: from personal experience, geeky white men are much more attractive to Asian women than to white women.
3. Country-based: arranged marriages to people living in countries with a lower GDP/capita
Legacy of cultural values around the Chinese imperial exam system maybe? From what I understand, your best chance at upward mobility for a few hundred years was to write a good eight-legged essay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay
I was trying to figure out how to apply this concept to dating, but the best I came up with was really more of an instance of comparative advantage than of arbitrage. (That is, don't lead with what *you* take to be your best asset, but instead lead with the asset that is best priced by the target market.)
Isn't that what "more physically-attractive-by-my-standards than average" means?
I agree though, my most successful relationships were ones where I felt my partner was more attractive to me than they were to other men (which includes both physical and non-physical attributes)
There's a lot of arbitrage going on though, with successful businesses built on bridging the gap between various Western markets on the male side and East Asian and Latin American and Eastern European markets on the female side.
Personally I've experienced some unexpected arbitrage gains after moving from my birth country to one where I belong to a high-status immigrant group, and I expect that most commenters here could do the same.
For me, in my experience, how much I think a photo album of a girl is sexy is fairly uncorrelated with how much I'll like that girl in real life, and the (short! why would anyone write a 15-page doc rather than talking?) biopic is far more correlated.
TBH I've actually found the opposite - although I am admittedly a bit shallow (not sure how to change that). I think the reason is that, I actually get along pretty well with most people, but with more attractive women I spend much more attention and energy early on in the interaction which facilitates that self-sustaining feedback loop of chemistry
''Most interesting to me: “The average man will date 5-6 people before getting married, the average woman will date 3-4”."
The totals have to be equal if all dating is within the pool. How is this possible?
The men are older and the exponential growth of orthodox community means there are always more women than men. As I understand it it’s a real issue
I'm still not following this. Unless many of the women date but don't get married. Can you elaborate if that isn't it?
Suppose that all people spend 1 year going on dates, but for women it's the year they're 20 but for men it's the year they're 23. Now suppose the birth rate is increasing by 20% each year. Then there are ~60% more 23-year-olds than 20-year-olds. Accordingly, the number of dates is D, but they're spread across W 20-year-old women but M =1.6 W = (5/3)W 23-year-old men. If each woman goes on 5 dates, i.e. D = 5W, fhen then for the math to work out each man will go on 3 dates, since D = 3M = 3(5/3)W = 5W.
Yes.
Is the claim that in the Ultra Orthodox community the birth rate is such that the age gap between men and women upon marriage is enough to explain about a 50% delta in dates?
A 20%/year increase in births would result in an increase in annual births of almost 250x in 30 years. The math works out, but that doesn't seem to match the reality.
In my experience, Orthodox men DO receive more matches than women, but AFAIK, the specific numbers given don’t have research behind them.
It also seems possible if there's an asymmetry in who leaves the pool. (I have no idea whether it would be more likely for men or women to leave.)
Or if the "pool" has fuzzy borders and orthodox men are more open to dating orthodox-adjacent women.
It works if you interpret 'average' in more of a 'mode' or 'median' sense, not mean. In this case there just have to be somewhat long tails. (Though it could also just be an inaccurate generalization)
This is "before getting married". So clearly 2 of the unmarried man's dates are actually with married women.
Or with other men!
This was my bad, I inaccurately described the situation. My intent wat to somehow say that because of the asymmetry in ages upon entering the dating pool, men have an easier time filtering for suggestions they are interested in. The actual dating average would of course be the same for men and women.
I think the driving anxiety behind much of the anti-dating doc sentiment is a reasonable fear at the prospect of de-gamifying all aspects of life. If mates can be found through the upload of explicit statements of photos and preferences, and food and resources acquired through simple two-click transactions, life threatens to become a flat, repetitive nothing. This underlying question of what our days will actually consist of when everything is made perfectly convenient underpins the general unease most people feel when considering the future of VR, dating apps, algorithmically generated entertainment, etc.
Presumably our days will be filled with things we actually want to do. If some people like dating they'll date, if some people don't they'll plug into the dating machine and get a match, if some people like painting they'll paint, if someone really needs a picture of a dog wearing a hotdog costume they'll prompt StableDiffusion9000.
This is interesting to me because the gamifying of life is so recent and this dating doc format harkens back to how things have more traditionally been done via matchmaking and arranged marriages.
I think the ‘price discovery process’ is underrated in dating in a way that a dating docs systems’ would not address. I think there may be an element of Chesterton’s fence.
This is not just via multiple dates with different people but also multiple dates with the same person. Repeated conversations and interventions in different contexts tell you a lot about the person and your relationship with them.
You can go on more than one date with someone who has a dating doc too.
This is true but I think the point is that dating docs should minimize the costly dates for Scott?
In a perfect world of dating docs, rationalists would get together off the dating doc(s) alone.
"This is true but I think the point is that dating docs should minimize the costly dates for Scott?"
Or maybe make it such that you only need to date 10 people to find a "match" rather than 100 ... or 1,000. If the folks using these docs think that 'normal' date selection/filtering is terrible then they might be trying to make a (rational) attempt at improving the chances to the point where dating might actually work for them.
I also think the comparable is not mutual friends, but swipe-left/swipe-right on pictures on Tinder. That is terrible.
I think that’s right, in the same way a real life matchmaker might give you two or three people to meet. The pool is smaller but ideally more apt.
Should they tho? Isn't dating fun?
Is the point of a dating doc to optimize the process of dating away? To bring you from single to married as efficiently as possible? Or is it to just efficiently identify fun people to try a few dates with?
going on a date may be fun but it is far far less fun than being in a good relationship and most of us are not going on sufficiently many random dates with strangers when single to come anywhere close to replacing a good relationship, so it's valuable to make the process of finding a good relationship happen faster and more reliably.
Interesting! I think that the whole process of "hunting" for a girl is fun. You do things you wouldn't otherwise do (art tours, life drawing, etc.), meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet, you get to flirt, you get certain types of romance, etc.
Just like some of the best bits of a relationship is the "vibe" (feeling wanted, loved, etc.), some of the best bits of being on the prowl is the "vibe" (feeling adventurous, being available, etc.).
I bet for every one guy that likes "being in a relationship" but doesn't like being on "the hunt", there's another guy that feels the opposite. Maybe dating docs are a solution for a particular type of person? IDK. :)
I got married through the shidduch system.
It definitely has its flaws but it sucks the least from any other method IMHO
I wonder why it hasn't caught on as much in the non-Orthodox community. As far as I can tell nothing about it seems particularly religious / demanding of religious values, and it seems to leave a lot of room for individual choice (unless the reality is worse than the text description).
I'm looking to see if there are secular matchmakers near me, and there are, but they're all advertised as "LUXURY matchmaker for HIGH-VALUE CORPORATE singles!", which is an interesting branding decision that kind of turns me off.
There's an assumption of a fairly small pool of potential partners in the first place.
The whole shidduch system is predicated on a lot of factors that are only found in the religious community.
For instance, separation of genders with no real physical contact with the opposite gender.
The shidduch system does not have to filter for sexual compatibility because the assumption is that two virgins coming together are not competing with their partner's prior sexual history and preferences.
As long as there is attraction they will build a sexual preferences together.
They are many other factors that can prevent the shidduch system work for non religious folks.
I'm sure there is a way to take parts of it and bring it to the secular community but I haven't seen it done successfully.
An additional point; Jewish matchmaking is more of a side hustle and does not really pay well. Most people do it for altruistic religious reasons.
It relies on tightly-knit communities with a lot of trust and shared social values and goals, one of which is being serious about young marriage and reproduction
I knew someone who found her husband with the help of a matchmaker. The matchmaker is Jewish, but many of her clients are not. She charged something like $8000, so the people she was working with are not poor, but neither were they fuckin HIGH VALUE CORPORATE SINGLES. My acquaintance was a psychologist who mostly did research, and the person she married was a physician, also a researcher. They are a very compatible couple, have been together 20-some years now, & have 2 children.
The app Loop and the site keeper.ai each attempt to replicate parts of the shidduch system. Worth checking out.
I've long believed that there's a big-money startup idea somewhere waiting for the person who can translate the shidduch system to secular mores/values.
Reading conversations about dating with participants with all sorts of different personalities and subcultural backgrounds is interesting because it really highlights just how varied romantic experiences are.
One of the main things it illustrates is how little people realize that other people are super different. It's sort of like if people who were 4'6" tried to have conversations full of advice with people who are 6'4" about furniture, clothing, and airplane seats, without realizing that different things make sense to different people.
"Just look at the photo, they don't lie" is falsified every single time you see an arrestee's mugshot next to the selfie they put on Instagram.
Even more devoutly glad than I was before that I'm an old married man and well out of the dating treadmill.
This reads to me like a significant underlying difference here is between people who think reading a document about a potentially interesting person is pleasant while a first or second date is unpleasant/stressful/difficult and people who think reading a document about a person is boring work but a first date with a new person is fun.
What I think you should have changed (or at least looked at a lot more carefully) is the downside of pickiness, namely people who land up alone because they refuse to "settle" (and who then land up unhappy because they only person available at age 45 is grossly inappropriate).
This is not *exactly* the same issue as dating documents, but I think it comes from the same place; a set of assumptions about how attraction works and how people should partner up that is very heavy on theory and very light on real-world experience.
With this in mind, I don't consider the sorts of parent-assisted examples that are provided (Orthodox Jewish, Indian, and, BTW also common among certain segments of Chinese; there are parks in Chengdu where you see large stacks of these "resumes" and people are handing them out) as especially relevant because in all those cases I expect the parents/community to be doing a strong job of pushing back against unrealistic expectations as to the sort of person you "deserve" and can realistically hope to find.
Yeah, I said something similar on the original. Anything beyond broad categorical filtration seems like it will simply reinforce unhealthy mindsets and behaviors around dating that make people, especially women, at least implicity feel as though nobody is good enough for them, putting them at significant risk of ending up alone. Even if you say 'I'll start out looking for someone amazing and then lower my standards if I have no luck', I think the initial dating 'phase' seems like it could prime you to view potential mates less favorably later on.
Minor correction: autantonym, not autoantonym (there are one fewer 'o's :p). Thanks for the mention.
>This is an absurd question, Scott. I don't know if it's the asexuality or what, but the answer to your >puzzle, or whatever you want to call it, of the five dating ads is:
>1) Which of them is the best-looking?
>2) Which of them is the best at giving head?
>I don't care about *anything* any of them wrote. None of that has absolutely any relevance for a relationship. Have your weird hobbies, girl!
I honestly think this is actually the most sensible comment as far as matching the experience of the average non-internet-rationalist man, at least if the second point is taken somewhat figuratively.
Of any of the dating profiles you mentioned, I think if the girl is conventionally attractive and was sweet and affectionate enough (if not literally being especially skilled at fellatio), most men simply wouldn't care (at least in a negative sense) if the rest of a woman's life matches what he likes. As long as she's pretty, loving and her interests don't make your life difficult, then the rest is not that important. Now obviously, this is a simplification, and the fact that temperament and interests are likely to be strongly non-independant is an significant wrinkle. But many of the happiest relationships I know of are between men with their own interests and women with their own interests with little overlap between the two - the two just clicked and that was that.
"Do you just click" strikes me as key and highly illegible.
I think that being in the ballpark is useful - I wouldn't get along with a 50 year old militant tankie - but once you're there what makes ppl like each other is hard to quantify.
Yep. Not to criticize Scott too much, but every asexual person I've ever interacted with online has seemed incapable of even attempting to understand us allosexual folks, to the point of some sort of superiority complex.
It's especially odd among LGBT ace people, as they preach empathy every other sentence!
Empathy for people like them. If you're one of the groups they don't like, forget it.
Of course the right does it too, they just don't pretend they have anything else but The One True Way.
Yes, having sex in sufficient quantity and variety is completely non-negotiable in a romantic relationship. It is *the* differentiator between romantic and platonic interaction.
"Who's best at giving head" should be read as "who's best at sex"/"who's got the highest libido". On average men have a higher libido than women, so it's always a "catch" to find a girl who's higher than average.
Yes, it is meant to be taken somewhat figuratively – it happens to be a wholly non-figurative reference to my own personal preferences, but substitute your own vital sexual preferences, whatever those are.
As for the rest of the post, you nailed it. We understand each other.
I spend a lot of time browsing ArViX, PubMed, etc. reading abstracts. Whenever I find a cool paper from a team near me, I'll ask them if they want to get lunch and chat about their paper. (I'm a grad student - this is socially acceptable. :p) I've met dozens of people this way and made many new friends.
I've noticed is that "how interested am I in their paper" and "do we click" are basically uncorrelated! There's some illegible "je ne sais quoi" that determines whether we get along.
Similarly, I've gone on dozens of first dates. Finding girls "in the right ballpark" seems to be important - I don't think I'd like a 50 year old militant socialist - but after that there again seems to be basically no correlation between "do we click" and "do I like your bio". I have no idea why - I seem to be keying off stuff which is illegible to me from text. (What gives me "good vibes"? I'd actually have to think about this. Maybe I'm just unusually bad at reifying the stuff I like?)
I'd find 10 word dating docs really useful (are you evangelical? alternatively, do you like to talk about nerdy things? great, let's try a date!) Any longer would probably be superfluous.
> There's some illegible "je ne sais quoi" that determines whether we get along.
I was gonna say something like this. I haven't really found much correlation with how compatible I'd be with someone on paper, and in the real world. Maybe when I'm really seriously looking to settle down that will change but for now - a few pictures to see if I find them physically attractive and I'm pushing for an in person meet within 5-10 messages rather then wasting time on conversation. If the vibe is off I'll be polite and dip in like 30 minutes
I find Myers Briggs types to be the best indicator of clicking. You will click with 2 types the best and 2 more pretty well, so you’ve got 4/16 to click with.
Myers-Briggs ignores neuroticism (probably so they can write cheerier books), but it actually is otherwise a reasonable distillation of the other four factors in the five-factor model. The other problem is they ignore people can be in the middle.
Any way to figure out which 2 and 2?
>Or you could just have everyone list their values beforehand and only talk to the people who share yours. The list of values might not be perfect, but it’s sure better than going in blind. Seems like it would save a lot of time and avoid a lot of incompatibility.
>Likewise, I agree that lots of people don’t like answering personal questions right away. I’ve heard a suggestion not to bring up scary things like children until the third date at the earliest. Fine, so now you have three dates per person in poorly-lit expensive restaurants before they tell you that actually they hate children and you were incompatible all along. Why would you inflict this on yourself when you can just start with a list of who wants kids and who doesn’t?
My only problem with the whole thing is that, well, you can't. You can't just have everyone list their values, nor can you start with a list of who wants kids and who doesn't. Dating docs are a fine idea, but won't become widespread enough to matter in the timeframe between now and whenever the people still on the dating market are likely to have paired up.
I don't see any likely network or market effects that will make them widespread among more than the current very, very small and fairly homogenous and gender-imbalanced group they're now used by, so the entire thing seems very academic.
Facebook has grown by 300 million users a year since 2008, I don't see how an explosion of dating docs is that implausible, it just needs something large to serve as a coordinating event.
That "just" is doing a whole lot of work here. That coordinating event (or process, or platform) is exactly what I am suggesting is unlikely.
Just because Facebook grew that fast doesn't mean any given thing will.
I don't see how this is relevant. It sounds like dating docs are successful enough to have the necessary network effects (i.e. enough people reading them for making one to be worthwhile) (and as I understand it, the way they're organised doesn't require all that much network effect anyway) within that small group and doesn't necessarily need to grow more to count as useful, and the "a list of who wants kids and who doesn't" thing doesn't actually have to include everyone to work. If one person lists their preferences clearly then that person (and those considering dating them) get the advantages of that.
People have pointed out that some people enjoy dates while others don't, but there is also great variability in how much people enjoy reading and writing!
This. “A slog” to get through all the dating docs?! Can’t relate. I’ve read many a dating doc even though I’m happily monogamously married. There’s something fun and voyeuristic about it lol
Same. This is where i think the dating docs are filtering the overall dating pool in a useful way for the people writing them.
Many matchmaking apps tout their "success" rates in terms of dates, marriages, etc. Do dating docs keep track of KPIs, and if so, what are the results? How do docs compare to apps? IRL? A Jewish matchmaker? ChatGPT?
What is needed are head-to-head, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled romantic trials.
The world needs to know the most effective, most efficient way to find one's life/momentary partner. And once that's known, those potential partners using less effective, less efficient life/momentary partner finding methods can be eliminated from consideration, thereby creating a positive feedback loop making the most effective, most efficient life/momentary partner finding method, even more effective and efficient.
For some people, finding one's life/momentary partner could be almost as important as finding the most efficient, most effective method of finding one's life/momentary partner.
I'm curious why it's even controversial.
I mean, maybe if you're 20 and you think of dating as a fun sport?
But everybody I know in the dating market is 35-45 and looking for stable permanent relationships, having already done all the really stupid youthful things-- flings, screwing drug users, having kids with drug users, spending years in court fighting for custody of said kids, etc. Dating isn't fun anymore. Clock's ticking. They don't want to die alone.
At that point, you'd be stupid to even touch online dating apps without docs. The ones I know just list all the things that have scared off previous dates: kids, custody arrangements, STDs, sterilization procedures, employment status, religion (or lack of). Most other things are negotiable, the doc instantly narrows down the field so that they get hardly any responses, but the few they do get are pretty good prospects, so by the time they get to meeting up in person, very little time wastage for either party. Seems very practical. Romance is for the young anyway.
Does "everybody I know" include straight men? I know some 35-45 year olds who enjoy dating, but I agree that even they tend to settle down to at least friends with benefits to provide more time for golf, careers, kids, etc.
Sorry, read that sloppily.
Yes, *most* of the people I know who are still in the dating market are straight men. No, I do not claim they are a representative sample. All I can say is: divorced and middle-aged with kids is a very, very different dating situation than 24, single, no responsibilities.
I was single in NYC and dating was kind of my hobby. I've been on a few hundred first dates. I understand the idea behind the dating docs but I genuinely don't think they're that useful at least for a man. Women get more matches and maybe an additional filtering mechanism would be useful for them in some cases (e.g. they're trying to get married very quickly or something)
Scotts right about the physical attraction range but there's another kind of attraction that I would just describe as vibes or pheromones. Like 30% of people will genuinely not like you when sitting across the table from you. Like 30% of people will love sitting across the table from you. This has nothing to do with values or even looks really and you know it within a minute or two. If a person passes then lots of deal breakers go out the window. For that reason I just think some kind of speed dating is the only way to make it more efficient. Reading through a bunch of dating docs is just as useless as swiping a bunch of pictures.
It may actually be smell, i.e. pheromones. The last two long-term relationships I had both told me I smelled great. They were both substantially brighter than average people and I think they may have read up on that theory and been able to classify it correctly.
In case anyone was wondering why I decided she was a keeper after the first date...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeAWhoreToGetYourMan
She's a little embarrassed about it now, but it worked ;)
Why are you downplaying looks/status/wealth in dating preferences? It is kind of odd of you to do that considering you wrote the "Radicalizing the romanceless" article where you acknowledged that morality and positive personality traits are completely irrelevant in sexual attraction (and thus 'nice guys' don't get laid), and without sexual attraction there cannont be a relationship. I think most people who virtue signal about how they are attracted more to personality traits than LMS are either ouright lying or under the Halo effect, which is when people ascribe positive qualities to people they already find attractive. Romantic relationships are also most of the time a lot more about power than they are about love or friendship, which is why you've probably never seen a straight relationship where the guy is of lower socioeconomic status than the woman.
Re-copied from somewhere else: I'm not trying to downplay looks!
Suppose you care both about physical appearance and values, that in both cases only 1/10 of people will meet your exacting criteria, and thatphysical appearance can't be determined from a dating doc (even though it includes photos, let's say 100% of your concern is about some ineffable sense of how they move or something).
You can either rule out the 9/10 of people who disagree with your values first, then go on real-life dates with the 1/10 of people who meet your values to see if you have chemistry.
Or you can go on in-person dates with everyone, look at them, ask them questions about their values, and have to go through 100 dates before you find someone who does both.
So you've dectupled the efficiency of your dating even if you assume that you care so much about physical appearance that only 1/10 of people who you're already able to prescreen with photos will meet your criteria.
And the same is true of status/wealth or whatever, even though those should if anything be even easier to put on / assess from a doc.
I've seen one. She was a doctor, he was...some kind of Ph.D? They were doing the whole poly thing, were in the kink community (I...kinda don't want to give more details for fear of making them identifiable), I think at least one somehow considered themselves queer... They are together for over a decade now I think, though they didn't have kids either.
I definitely agree power and status are attractive in men. I wonder what the net effects of the whole recent fashion for arguing power inequities in relationships are evil will be.
I think that mating works on a filter-then-choose model. People start by filtering out all the people they're not interested in, and getting filtered out by people who aren't interested in them, and then they explore the set of possible remaining partners until they find one they're compatible with.
So when I was single, I had a pretty good idea of which girls were good looking enough to be interesting to me and which ones weren't. Likewise, many of the really good-looking girls undoubtedly decided I wasn't good-looking enough for them. This (hopefully) left some kind of overlap set of women that I was attractive enough for who were also attractive enough for me. Similar filters would apply for things like age, social class (which incidentally explains the hypergamy stuff from the other month) and so forth.
But (and this is the key thing) once you're in the set of acceptable partners, compatibility is what matters most. For instance I don't think people are willing to trade off worse compatibility for better looks as long as both partners hit those minimum requirements. (And if they do, they regret it -- this is basically the plot of most novels.) Dating docs can potentially help with filtering, they can't help with compatibility, because compatibility is something you discover in person.
When I was single, a dating doc wouldn't have done me any good because my filters were (a) straightforward and (b) mostly socially unacceptable to express -- you can't go round writing "Must be at least this good-looking (insert picture of borderline-attractive woman) to ride". If you're weird enough to have other criteria then feel free to express them in a dating doc, I guess, but be sure that everything you write is _really_ something you want to use as a filter.
From what I've seen, I assume my demographic/archetype is in massive oversupply in that market so would not waste my time. I imagine women looking for a wealthy alpha-nerd could probably do pretty well
I just love that you can filter people by e/acc. Lol maybe we just need a dating search engine with a map like Zillow but with single people and filters.
Are there any women into e/acc? I mean, maybe there are two, but they're already married to guys who own Silicon Valley companies.
Orthodox Jewish woman here! I agree with Sholom almost entirely, esp. the conclusion, but not this bit: “The average man will date 5-6 people before getting married, the average woman will date 3-4.”
Is this statistic coming from any research? It does not seem to match with my experiences or what I’ve read on the subject.
Yeah I think for that gender discrepancy to be true the Orthodox population would have to be growing substantially faster than it is.
What would be your estimates for those numbers?
I think it in part depends on who is making the final choice. If it's the woman going "Yes, he's the one, I'll marry him" then she may make her mind up quickly. That means the rejected suitors have to go on more dates to find a match. But I'm just guessing here.
If there are many more women than men, then the women have to make their minds up faster and accept an offer of marriage or risk losing out, while the men can be choosier. So it could be the fifth date for him when he decides "yes, she's suitable" while it's the third date for her and the only one who made an offer.
It is entirely a silly math mistake on my part.
FYI frum rationalists, I’m in the parsha...
Ummmm yea, I _definitely_ don’t want to read your restaurants overly long scroll-hijacking website with its history of your Italian grandma and the story of your time working in the pizza mines of Napoli. I just want to know what the hours and address are!
Maybe this whole thing is just a debate between people that are hyperlexic like Scott and people like me whose writing seems to require summoning words from another plane of existence using arcane rituals. Maybe THATs what you’re selecting for with these dating docs?
I don't have anything to contribute but I found this point interesting and probably at least partially correct.
Should also say that if a dating doc was pretty short and just included basic information and a couple “why you should be interested in dating me” things rather than an extensive biography, that seems completely reasonable? But then you’ve just reinvented the dating profile, I had the impression that the whole point of using Google Docs was that you could make it 10 pages long and include every opinion you’ve ever held.
I just don't understand all these takes about dating docs people feel the need to make without having read them
I did, none in my area. Most lived in NYC, DC, or the Bay Area. (As one might expect.) The ladies sounded lovely though.
It seems like a very clever way for a nerdy lady to find guys who will not only not be turned off by her intelligence, but actually find it a plus. For the much larger rest of the people in the directory...
For the first paragraph, yes! I basically go to 2 types of restaurants: places I've never been, and places I've been and liked. If I've never been, it's a miniature adventure for no real stakes. The worst outcomes are food poisoning and finding that it's vastly more expensive than I was expecting. In theory, my dating preferences are similar.
Yes! And another question: how much does the ability to write beautiful glowing prose describing your pizza actually correlate with making good pizza? Or alternatively, does the ability to write an autobiographical document with precisely the culturally acceptable balance of bragging and self deprecation actually correlate with being a good future spouse? (Beyond passing some minimum intelligence bar)
Regarding dating, if they can do it with flair and humor and a wink in their eye, I'd say it definitely correlates, among other things with the ability to navigate complicated social situations with grace. It's not the only factor by far, but it's one of them.
On the other hand, it may also be correlated with deception and manipulation. But on the third hand, so are most things.
What i have come to realise is people will compromise on their values/interests if they love the person enough.
I didn’t want to get married and the idea of kids didn’t make sense to me. But when i met my wife
Everything changed even though on our first 3dates i still held on to my beliefs, but when i fell in love with her after getting to know her i chaned my beliefs and ideology to accomodate hers because i love her enough
Another advantage of dating docs / long profiles is that they give you lots of potential conversation topics, and save you the time of fumbling around blind trying to come up with something to talk about.
Well, I'm on my second marriage so I know a thing or two about that. And we still talk about plenty of exciting stuff, even if it's not "getting to know you". But, when you just meet someone, I dunno. I can ask "do you like reading fantasy?" or "do you like math?" or (say) "are you interested in analytic philosophy?", but then what if they say "no"? It would be super-awkward.
I've certainly noticed "do you like analytic philosophy?" is a sure-fire way of scoring babes! :-)
Well, it would work on me... UNLESS you accept Searle's "Chinese Room" argument: in that case, no way, I have standards! ;)
LOL
LOL. Yeah, it wouldn't work out for us. On my side, it wouldn't be a deal breaker, but I probably couldn't shut up about how wrong you are. ;-)
(I kid! I kid!! Sort of.)
Hmm, I can imagine this playing out as the romance novel trope, where the protags start out despising each other but then gradually fall madly in love despite themselves 🤔
I'd love to see a poll on age gaps and see if we can make a heatmap of age gap appropriateness by age range.
20 vs 30 is quite different from 30 vs 40.
I'm also wondering how much people care about age gaps themselves, and how much they care about external opinions on age gap.
Lastly, is there any variance based on cultural background (could keep this as simple as politics, religion, and country/state)
Interestingly, for the multi-armed bandit problem there is a very clear optimal solution, which gives an interesting rule of thumb for practice: if you have X events in your lifetime, then you should dedicate roughly sqrt(X) (square root of X) events for exploration, the rest for exploitation.
For example, if you move into a new city and want to spend the next 10 years there, and you visit restaurants twice a week, then this makes 1000 restaurant visits. You should spend roughly sqrt(1000) = 30 times going to unknown restaurants, and the remaining 970 visits you should go to places that you like and enjoy.
There are a few correction terms for how many options there are, how similar they are to each other, and so on. This probably increases the number 30 a bit, but not too much.
If you don't know how long you will stay, you can distribute the 30 visits over time. For example, among the first 100 visits, you explore 10 different options. For the next 300 visits, you explore 10 new options, because sqrt{400} = 20 and then you have explored a total of 20 options in your total of 400 visits. And so on. If you are old, you should hardly explore new options. They are usually worse than the pretty good options that you have already found over time.
A tricky thing is that x and sqrt(x) don't have the same unit. So whether you measure the number of days you spend with your preferred person (365 in a year), or the number of seconds (30,000,000) will give you different answers. I don't know a fundamental solution to this riddle.
I think for the given two-armed case it's much simpler than that: just keep using the same machine as long as its likelihood of being the 60% one is at least 50%.
And I think your restaurant example is missing that e.g. the first time you go to an Ethiopian restaurant is a lot more interesting than the seventh, and there are a lot of different types of restaurants. On the other hand, some people enjoy being a regular. So I don't think the model of uniform enjoyment over time is realistic.
Yes, you can argue that reality is much more complicated. Restaurants also tend to open and close, and you might get recommendations from other people.
But your suggestion for the two-armed case only works if you know the two distributions in advance, i.e., that one gives a 60% payoff and the other a 40% payoff. The standard assumption is that you don't know how the distributions are. With your strategy you might be sticking with a 60% arm forever, even if there is an 80% arm.
Yeah, my solution was for the problem as stated in the post. I don't think it's a good model of the dating market.
There's a rigorous solution to the multi-armed bandit problem as I described it in my comment, giving a full mathematical expression of which machine you should use each time. And it's generalizable to, say, 10 or a million machines with different payout ratios.
It's a little different with (monogamous) dating because that solution assumes that you can continue switching throughout the experiment. There's a math puzzle literally called "The Marriage Problem" (Though now known better as "The Secretary Problem") meant to deal with cases where you 1) Can only use each...er...machine once, and 2) are ultimately forced to commit to a choice. (My mixed metaphors are already showing the flaws in this argument). Basically if you've got n choices, you should reject the first n/e potential partners and then "settle" for the first potential partner after that who's better than all those. This gives you a high probability of choosing the right candidate.
As tempted as I am to now wax poetic about how the heart wants what it wants and approaching your search in such a cold, calculated way would result in a tepid relationship, I don't think that's true. I don't think you should ignore the general principle behind this math - maybe don't marry the first person you date (I did and it worked out great though so hey!). And maybe don't hold out for ideal after you're about a third of the way through your dating life, if finding a partner is important to you.
But do be careful - Your happiness in a relationship is more a function of yours and your partner's attitude towards the relationship than some kind of perfection in partner selection. I want to be careful not to overstate that - compatibility matters. But imagining yourself, as you are, in a relationship is imagining yourself alone. Relationship you *should* grow a life along with your partner a bit. Soulmates, as in two ineffable souls who are destined to be together, don't exist. But soulmates, as in two minds that have grown up around each other, entwined with each other, making up for each other's weaknesses and augmenting each other's strength, do exist. You just build them.
And ultimately my multi-armed bandit example was an attempt to "speak rationalist" to people whose basic assumptions about dating are deeply flawed. To make explicit some tangible benefit to considering someone other than your "ideal" partner when seeking out dates. For a non-rationalist audience I'd simply say, "If your ideal relationship involves a partner who molds perfectly into your single life, just stay single."
Somehow this all reminds me of an old joke:
The boss needs a new secretary. HR sends over three candidates:
Helen ticks all the boxes: secretarial school, types 90 words a minute, 15 years of experience, professional phone voice, not above grabbing coffee or picking up dry cleaning.
Anna dropped out of a prestigious college. What she lacks in core skills she makes up for with a fierce intelligence. She would be a real executive assistant, someone who can face clients and perform complex tasks.
Grace doesn't have a standout resume but she is just a wonderful person. Kind, thoughtful, supportive, she gets people through bad days and rallies teams. She would be as much a friend as a colleague.
Who does he pick? The one with the biggest tits.
Men are hardwired. Everything but looks is lies / cope. Only the selfie matters. Docs will never defeat the Tinder juggernaut.
I think a small number of very looks-obsessed men are typical-minding here. I'd like to test this on the next ACX survey, can you think of a question that you would trust not to be too confounded by desirability bias?
Yep, didn't the ACX survey show that the median person here is in the top 1% of the population by IQ and in the top 5% by income?
What about some asking people if they would date fictitious descriptions of women (like the ones in the OP), along with thumbnail but expandable pictures (AI). Must be able to do something statistically comparing who chose based on descriptions and who on pictures.
Also I think they're extrapolating the situation at age 20 out to forever. When you're looking to get married, money and drama-orientation matter much more.
There must be data somewhere on how many men in tenured marriages with kids and a mortgage leave their wives for a woman who is, say, 15+ years younger.
For a survey question directed towards men, perhaps:
"You recently met a very beautiful young woman, bonded over golf and tennis, and started dating. You have been given $100 to insure against two equally likely events: A. severe tendonitis that will make it impossible for her to play golf or tennis; and B. a highly visible but totally superficial three-inch scar along her left cheek. Each dollar spent reduces either risk by 1%. How do you allocate the $100 between the two risks?"
Or:
"You despise, and are openly competitive with, your co-worker Chad. Rank the following events from most to least infuriating:
A. Chad is promoted ahead of you.
B. Chad starts dating a very beautiful 23-year old ballerina.
C. Chad is glowingly profiled in a leading industry publication.
D. Your wife of 15 years confesses that she has a crush on Chad."
Or:
"Rank the following events based on what you think would secretly make your male best friend the most jealous:
A. You become CEO of your company.
B. You start dating a very beautiful 23-year old ballerina.
C. You are glowingly profiled in a major newspaper.
D. His wife of 15 years confesses that she has a crush on you."
Big breasts are a turnoff for many of us (ceteris paribus, that is). The ideal woman has the body of a swimmer.
It is the body type that is good at swimming I had in mind. Re: A story Nassim Taleb told about himself. He desperately wanted a swimmers body himself as a young man, and swam and swam. To no avail. Then it suddenly struck him: "Swimming does not get you a swimmer's body. Instead, it is people who have a swimmer's body that are good at swimming".
You must have looked at different swimming & diving competitions than I.
That said, we all have our preferences.
You correctly point out that male preferences for the female body are not uniform - and then go on to assume that your preference is the universal one? :)
Nah. Even granting the vague premise, the boss breaks out his chronoscope and looks into the future down the three potential paths. Of the two that involve the secretary having frequent sex with him, he picks the one where the sex is best.
Tit size is a crude and stupid way to attempt predict this. (But it's not like he's thinking with his brain, anyway.)
I'm a bi man who thinks this is interesting, but I should report a comment from a (female, straight) friend of mine. She said: "the most important thing about who I date is whether they are any good in bed. So my process is to fuck as many people as possible as early as possible, then, after excluding the majority who aren't any good in bed, start filtering the ones that are left for whether we're compatible."
That's a process for which the dating doc is completely pointless.
It's also a process that is going to leave you at 40 wondering "where have all the good men gone and why can't I find a guy who wants to commit?"
This is not moral condemnation, by the way. Women are as entitled to men to sow their wild oats, but it seems like a process that works fine in your 20s and 30s but not so well as you get older. She may find a guy (or I suppose a gal, I shouldn't assume she's straight) who is a superstar in bed *and* ticks the boxes on other axes *and* wants a serious relationship possibly leading to settling down, but my own view of it is that guys who are out there looking for fun are happy to meet a like-minded woman, may even form a relationship, but when/if it comes to marriage and kids settling down time, they want something a lot different and won't stay with the fun great in bed person.
But who knows? My knowledge of all this is purely theoretical and gleaned from reading the complaints of those who didn't find the right person, and that of course excludes all the relationships that did work out.
She's in her mid-40s, and has three partners who are fully committed to her. Seems to have worked fine for her.
By "three partners" I'm presuming you mean poly, which is a different kettle of fish to the main run of monogamous people.
No children? Not necessary to live a full life, of course. But if you are female and poly, getting one of the males to commit to having children might be hard.
Or as lawyers say when they want to politely warn a client that their case is hopeless: "This is going to be steep".
Two, by two different men.
Impressive!
Thanks to Yosef and Sholom for the detailed description of spouse-finding in the Orthodox/Ultra-Orthodox communities. There is one thing that puzzles me in Sholom's post, though. Quote:
"The 2nd - 5th date will be spent verifying compatibility on the smaller things you can't ask about in reference calls. The minutiae of religious passion and observance, interests, lifestyle preferences, how many children you want to have, are you actually doing well in your career ..."
My question Sholom, if you read this: Could you please specify what you mean by "career" in this context? Am I wrong that most men in the ultraorthodox community have quite generous stipends from the Israeli goverment to study the Torah full-time, and thus do not have "careers" in a standard sense? Is this wrong, and are many instead employed or self-employed like the rest of us? Or do you by "career" mean that some young men have gained/are gaining a higher prestige as experts on the Torah than others? (And that this is the aspect of a "career" that helps differentiate the wheat from the chaff from the point of view of matchmakers and the girls' families?)
My reason for asking: From a fertility perspective, Israel is a puzzle. It is the odd country out among modern societies. Average fertility per woman in Israel was 3.01 in 2022 (ref: Our World in Data). All other "modern" societies are below 2.1 children per woman on average. Although all religious groups in Israel have higher fertility than 2.1, I thought a main solution to the puzzle was the extraordinary high fertility in (Ultra) Orthodox communities (6-7 children per woman on average), and that these communities receive very substantial support from the government - implying that neither men nor women need have paid "careers" outside the family.
Such subsidies do not exist for urban, traditional communities in any other country I know about. Hence I throught they were a major reason why these mainly urban, traditional communities have been able to maintain a high fertility rate (compared to all other urban communities, everywhere), and therefore largely explain "Israeli exceptionalism". But you comment about the importance of having a "career" when looking for a spouse has made me wonder if perhaps I am wrong?
In Israel, 53% of ultra-orthodox men and 80% of ultra-orthodox women participate in the workforce: https://en.idi.org.il/articles/47009
The government subsidies are not especially relevant. The <140,000 men who are studying full-time in kollels/yeshivas are typically supported by either their working spouses (thus also adding significance to women having high enough income for that) and/or temporary support from parents (also something that gets attention during the process).
Thanks Odd anon, this is very relevant information! So the atypical, high Israeli fertility rate remains a puzzle, that cannot be (mainly) explained by very generous government subsidies to traditional groups...back to square one ...
I'm a born-and bred American and the community I describe in my post is also American. There wouldn't be a reason for you to know this because we are very small, so don't feel bad, but the Orthodox Jewish world is extremely diverse. There are dozens and dozens of different communities with different traditions and communal practices.
In my particular community, men are expected to go work and support their families. This is the reference to "career". You are correct that that there are other Orthodox communities, including a large one in Israel, where men are instead expected to dedicate their lives to torah study for as long as possible. In those communities, success in torah study would be a similar but not equivalent question to the career one in mine.
Many thanks for your comment Sholom. This clarifies.
It’s admittedly been a while since I was in the dating market - circa 2002 or so, when dating apps weren’t even a thing. The thing that strikes me about dating docs is that most people probably don’t have a sufficiently accurate understanding of themselves and their preferences to be able to write such a document accurately. Certainly I, in 2002, would not have been able to articulate which of my preferences were true deal-breakers, or which of my various properties were core to my selfhood and therefore unlikely to change.
I met my wife in college, which as you pointed out is already a pretty strong filter - but not too strong. Is the idea just to create a similar filter? If I were thrown back into the dating pool today, I think my filter would just be “pretty, female, college-educated, not deeply religious, not a Trump voter.” Everything else is down to in-person “vibes” - do they chew with their mouth open? Are their interests either boring or all-consuming? Are they just “weird” in an off-putting way? Very tough to tell from a doc. So I don’t think going on a bunch of random dates is really avoidable.
"This is an absurd question, Scott. I don't know if it's the asexuality or what, but the answer to your puzzle, or whatever you want to call it, of the five dating ads is:
1) Which of them is the best-looking?
2) Which of them is the best at giving head?
I don't care about *anything* any of them wrote. None of that has absolutely any relevance for a relationship. Have your weird hobbies, girl!"
I know I'm late to the party but this is so far outside my Overton window my eyes about popped out of my head.
"but do you think it's outside everyone's window? Perhaps more importantly, do you think it's outside the window of a significant chunk, or even a majority, of the dating age population?"
I honestly don't know! I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I've never heard of someone saying this sort of thing, or even something close to it--I think most people I know would find it outright offensive if someone said this at say, a party. That's not to say it's wrong or bad! Just really strange to me.
I've had several lasting relationships which started from similarly base criteria, evidently shared by my partners. "Best-looking" is obviously a subjective impression comprising a wide range of more- and less-legible factors, and good head facilitates pair bonding. I thought Scott's 20% figure was implausibly low.
I believe my first thought on meeting my now-wife was a sort of inarticulate "Daaaaaamn".
Wow, I thought the 20% was outrageously high. Guess I'm learning something new about the world today!
I’d wager it’s at least 50% of men who would agree with the above.
Even after a decade of hanging around these spaces I’m consistently amazed at how removed from the normal world the average reader/commenter is.
Idk, actually SSC is what even got me thinking about this--the article on bubbles was pretty eye-opening for me. The problem about being in a bubble though is you don't actually know all the degrees of freedom for things to be different. I know that Trump voters exist because I have a lot of external evidence, but it didn't ever occur to me this particular topic would be a bubble thing.
Another weird thing is the commenters _aren't even in the same bubbles_, it seems like we've just all managed to generate similar ones.
We're all on the same blog.
Scott's kind of generated a niche for himself with people who don't like progressivism but aren't comfortable with right-populism, be they Christian conservatives or liberaltarians who think the current left sounds a little too much like the Committee of Public Safety.
I once had an awkward conversation with a friend of mine who was a prototypical Bay Aryan. (Worked at PayPal before FANG was an acronym, for example.) He did not understand the fuss over health insurance; could not think of anyone he knew without it, or why such a person would exist. Not a hard-hearted snob, he was simply innocent.
Meanwhile the majority of my own circle were uninsured, and were still far from the worst off in society. I squandered the teachable moment by making a snide, flabbergasted comment about moneyed techies, but better I should have offered some examples of the many faceless people behind this man's scenes that day--the valet, the hotel maid, the line cook, the baggage handler, the greeter, the stocker, and so on--hanging on, with their dependents, over the void.
It's too bad the parent comment was deleted. It wasn't very flattering to bay-rats, but I believe it articulated a true and necessary point that wasn't addressed as effectively elsewhere.
Bay Aryan? Indian dude from the Bay Area? I hadn't heard that one before, but it's so clever.
> He did not understand the fuss over health insurance; could not think of anyone he knew without it, or why such a person would exist
Oh my god I have had this exact conversation with another FANG friend. I was talking to him about people who were uninsured, and his exact quote was "It's not like anyone has to forge critical healthcare under our system."
One of my friends just went deaf through something completely preventable via not having insurance.
The funny thing is I'm not even a bay area person--I live on the East Coast, my social circle has sprung up pretty organically. On the other hand, I think someone expressing that view out loud wouldn't be welcome (not saying it's a bad view, just that the people I tend to associate with would find it off-putting). Self-selection effects are interesting! I'm glad people are commenting on this, without ya'lls input I would assume the original comment was a joke.
Within a friend group this makes sense. But do you not interact with bartenders and waiters when you go out, or your hairdresser or Uber driver? Do you play any competitive sports or go to concerts? I assume you spent many years at college and probably a year in a dorm. I’m pretty curious how you don’t continuously come across people like this just going about your life.
Hmm, interesting question! I've never really thought about the degree to which someone could be partitioned. It could be I'm interacting with these people on the regular without knowing it. Certainly I'd be unaware if say, my waiter or my uber driver felt this way--it doesn't seem like something that would ever come up causally.
I probably over the course of college and high school met hundreds of people and can recall exactly one instance of this sort of sentiment expressed out loud. BUT I went to a magnet high school in a rich area, and a small technical school. I've never had a male dominated friend group, either, so if this sentiment is more popular with males, maybe there wouldn't room to express it.
It is very amusing to me that the person from whom I would maybe expect to be comfortable expressing views of this type was a guy who randomly got transferred into my dorm when my roommate was studying abroad, going to school on the GI bill after coming back from Iraq.
If you don't mind me asking (and I appreciate you being willing to respond, I'm finding this fascinating), what is your experience about how people talk about relationships / attractiveness / dating?
> I've never had a male dominated friend group, either, so if this sentiment is more popular with males, maybe there wouldn't room to express it.
That answers it. It's called "locker room talk" for a reason. Its a bit impolite to say things like that in a female-dominated or professional context.
Dumb question: Are there circles of friends or communities that dip below 30% female? I have lots of one-on-one guy hangouts, but I'm not sure one finds a gender-segregated space.
My social interaction with women is mainly through work, my wife's friends, and my friend's wives. This is the norm for most men almost everywhere in the world.
Talk about the opposite sex is mostly related to physical attributes, sex, and just joking around. A conversation with, for example a bartender, would start by noticing an attractive brunette, then we would swap funny or sexy stories about brunettes we've dated. To give a crude example: a girl I dated needed a finger in her butt to cum. This has been the starting point for hundreds of hours of shooting shit with guys. I would never even dream of bringing up shared values in a conversation like this, obviously.
Now, I also did a STEM degree at a prestigious school, and work in an elite rich person field. So I absolutely know where you are coming from. But it's a very small percent of the population who acts that way.
"Even after a decade of hanging around these spaces I’m consistently amazed at how removed from the normal world the average reader/commenter is."
I haven't been here that long, but I concur. Baffled by these scenes.
This is an exaggeration of a real thing - it’s not that literally nothing else matters, but sexual compatibility matters a lot to an enjoyable relationship and you’ll never get that from a “dating doc” unless you’re looking for something very particular.
But you'll never get it from Tinder either? Tinder or dating doc are just the initial filter that leads to who you have coffee and later sex with.
Sure, but Tinder requires much less effort-per-swipe than reading a dating manifesto.
Is the low effort part of it appealing then? Is that because people like the idea of having large quantities of people to look through quickly, like that will lead to a better match than looking a bit longer at a few people?
This isn't my dating era and so I met people where there were only ever a handful of choices, and this idea that you get something good by taking in a lot of volume quickly is foreign to me.
I’ve never actually used Tinder, but yeah, I can see “get to the date as fast as possible and see how it goes” as obviously more appealing for a lot of people than reading longwinded essays designed to exclude them.
The other thing is that for most heterosexual men who aren’t like top 10% in attractiveness, your ability to prefilter is pretty minimal - beggars can’t be choosers, so “is willing to date and possibly bang me” is criteria 1, 2, and 3.
Straight man, not bay area, not ace, not in some weird subculture, just want to voice a second for this comment. Assuming you're some kind of stallion your blowjob experience is gonna last an hour. What do you do then? Put her back in her enclosure and play Assassin's Creed?
For sure I like being in a relationship where my partner is good looking and up for/skilled at sex. But having that as your *sole* criteria seems legitimately insane to me.
Thanks for saying this. That was sort of my wondering -- like, to this person, what do you do the rest of the time? What do you talk about over dinner? What do you do when something hard comes up -- an illness, job loss, etc? What do you do if you go away for the weekend and you've already had your one two four blowjobs for the day? What happens then?
"What do you talk about over dinner?"
Normal things, like normal people. The things happening in your shared life. If you *need* the other person to share your tastes and interests to have this kind of conversation, you're a shallow, narrow-minded person. You're not very interested in the world if you can't talk to Larisa about skydiving or Sky about theosophy or Jane about her shows, just because everything Sky believes is horseshit and Jane's taste in cartoons is appalling and badly faked.
"What do you do when something hard comes up -- an illness, job loss, etc?"
This problem is exactly reversed. It's when you don't have the bond of mutual attraction that these things become hard to weather. Real pair bonding is stronger than "this is my skydiving buddy".
"What do you do if you go away for the weekend and you've already had your one two four blowjobs for the day?"
You enjoy Away, presumably. Are you suggesting that you believe that Cindy is incapable of enjoying Venice, Kyoto, the Rockies, whereas Hana is not, based on the shit they wrote about their hobbies? It's hard for me to read this any other way, but that's a strange and distorted view of your fellow man in that case. "Only someone capable of filling out a dating ad to my satisfaction can enjoy the beauty and majesty of human life!"
Yeah I deleted a comment to this effect bc I did not want to get sucked into Online Discourse about this topic, but as a woman who has no IRL rationalist friends -- (upper middle class) normies only -- I definitely recoiled from that comment. I don’t have any female friend who would view that as anything but a red flag. Nor do any of the happily coupled guys in my friend groups talk like that (a few of the unhappily single ones do though!) It’s just immature douchey humor at best, “women are replaceable with advanced sex bots with ChatGPT installed” at worst.
I’m willing to believe this kind of attitude is very clustered in the population & exists in non negligible quantities outside my circles, but it’s definitely not an “all normal people talk like this” thing. These are the assholes women are generally trying to avoid while online dating.
There was a reply that was sent to my email but which I can't see here; either a bug or they deleted? It was something to the effect of "most men talk like this, they just stop when you're around," which, yes, I know how this Discourse goes. Full argument against is too lengthy & frankly tedious to lay out, but I'll just note that IRL I have sufficiently non-judgmental and ~edgy vibes that ppl will routinely confide in me things as taboo or more as "I'm really attracted to young teenagers that I see with their moms."
I do wonder if there's a SES aspect to this. There's certainly a stereotypical middle American culture I hear about on the internet where the guys watch football and drink beer a lot and the women go on social media and clubbing a lot, everyone has "guys'/girls' nights" with their crew of same sex friends, and you could imagine the guys talking like this to bond or whatever. Whereas in my coastal, highly educated, liberal circles with mostly mixed-gender friend groups this would be very atypical, both in talk & in revealed preference, and would therefore indicate unusual degrees of assholishness.
Yeah it's completely unfalsifiable but I suspect men talk this way for the benefit of other men while still expecting more out of their partners than big breasts and blowjobs.
I'm more willing to believe "there are subcultures that talk this way and some unfortunate low EQ people don't pick up on the fact that it's a performance" than I am that most men are content to live with someone they have nothing in common with 23 hours a day for an hour of sex and a pretty view.
"I don’t have any female friend who would view that as anything but a red flag."
"I’m willing to believe this kind of attitude is very clustered in the population & exists in non negligible quantities outside my circles, but it’s definitely not an “all normal people talk like this” thing. These are the assholes women are generally trying to avoid while online dating."
Strong agree, it is heartening to hear that someone had the same reaction.
One of my friends pointed out "it's totally reasonable to have sex and attractiveness as your primary criteria," and a third friend's response was "Okay, sure. How much would you be willing to bet that this person also just happens to be a casual misogynist, independent of their dating preferences."
No one was willing to take the bet.
I also had this reaction, thank you for saying. So far out of my frame of reference as to seem like a cartoon of a college frat boy mouthing off while drunk.
Far be it from me to defend Anonymous and their crass expression, but the final sentence really pulls the comment together. If you evaluate the items in the five profiles as potential dealbreakers, not as deal makers, the calculus becomes more humane. Their followup reply makes this intent clear.
Some people want a partner who is really into anime. A greater number of people don't care, and might not discount an otherwise attractive prospect for their anime fandom. No woman has ever so much as blinked at my own interests and hobbies; I was being evaluated on other criteria.
The final sentence is the worst part! When I was dating, the thing I most wanted was to be seen, liked and loved for *the traits I identified with and was proud of.* So I did not view “If you’re hot and love sex I dgaf about anything else” as humane; rather dehumanizing. A sufficiently advanced sexbot can fulfill those stated requirements!
I *wanted* guys to be selective, and selective moreover on the things that made me unique; that’s how I could know I wasn’t just another hot face and body to them, that they really liked me *for me*. That may not be something as particular as hobbies, but it absolutely included the general life outlook and vibe you could get from each of those descriptions.
Basically I (and most women) would not read that comment and think that the issue with it was that it was "crass." The reason why husbands don't write "I love my wife, she is so hot and loves blowjobs" as their Valentine's Day post is not bc it's *crass*. It's bc everyone correctly understands that the crass wording is accurately signaling that that guy won't fall in love with you deeply and irrevocably for your soul, love you even when illness reduces intimacy, and effortlessly reject any idea of leaving you for a hotter younger woman after your looks fade bc *she's not you*.
Thanks for your perspective. I think it's perfectly reasonable, and I don't have a counterpoint. Echoing a few other commenters, I took the post as hyperbole that nevertheless pointed to something interesting and true to me: a lot of people make meaningful connections that are less cerebral and more based on chemistry.
I once had a very confusing experience with an exciting woman who mirrored many of my particular interests and tastes. We thought we were intellectual soulmates and so we should date. After six weeks we realized we were not a functional item: many subtle things were missing that differentiated a partnership from simply a good friendship.
My wife and I have very different inner lives. Where we overlap, we often clash. Our strength is in amalgam. Our chemistry is still pretty good, despite being sorely tested by our young children.
I am skeptical of the dating doc idea, because I think it gets me to the first case but not the second.
Sheer folly. Sexual relationships are about sexual attraction, not about validating your personal quirks or sense of uniqueness (you are not unique – none of us are. There are billions of humans). I won't pretend to be unfamiliar with this perspective, but it's specifically a prissy middle-class woman's idea, also extremely egocentric ("his attraction to me isn't about him or what he hopes to get from me – it's about ME, adoration, validation!"), and of very recent vintage. Look into the past, you won't find people of either sex being this confused about the purpose of relationships even in the 1920s, let alone in e.g. the 16th century or the second century BC.
"that guy won't fall in love with you deeply and irrevocably for your soul"
You can't fall in love with someone for their soul as the soul does not exist. However, the reason you don't ditch your wife as she ages is A, you age with her and your prospects diminish (crass, but true: look at how guys like Di Caprio, whose prospects are still good, behave. To his credit, he doesn't appear to have ever given a woman the impression that their relationship is permanent, e.g. by marrying), and B, the emotional bond formed by pair bonding (a product of carnal relations) and children (a product of... well, you get it). I'm not saying romantic love *doesn't exist*, I'm saying it's a product of sexual love and not of a woman's hobby of building matchstick cathedrals or whatever, a grossly shallow take on critical human relations. Rejecting a woman over stuff like that is a Seinfeld joke! Your hobbies don't matter! Except insofar as you enjoy them, which I approve of because I'm not Count Dracula and I want my girlfriend to be happy. In your conception, imagine the terrible fate of a woman who likes knitting. Where the hell is she ever going to find a boyfriend?! Men don't care about crochet, you will never be seen and loved for your yarn stash! This kind of shallow validational attitude to relationships is what causes the majority of divorces; without the glue of real physical attraction there's nothing keeping a couple together when the going gets rough.
Also, have you never heard of a woman buying sexy lingerie for Valentine's Day? Really? Really really?
What I don't understand is WHY some people have to be "against dating docs". I mean... If you want to use them - go ahead, if you don't - nobody's forcing you, Tinder bars and many other ways to get dates are still there (and still prevalent). Or do they imagine some kind of future where you just can't get a date if you don't have top-notch eloquently-written resume no matter how attractive or smooth you are? Or do they care about other people wasting their time and not getting any dates? The first is silly, the second I don't believe. I mean, I hate Tinder and I don't ever want to use it for dating, but I'm not saying "no one ever should use it, because it doesn't work for me".
Well, quite a few of the objections have been along the lines of "If you think all of these criteria in your dating doc will actually help you find a good relationship, you're wrong because you're underestimating the importance of physical attraction/illegible chemistry.", in which case they believe people using dating docs are shooting themselves in the feet and should be warned against it.
Some thoughts:
- For a lot of people, dates are fun. You go out, you have a nice meal in the company of an attractive person, they show interest in you, you show interest in them, you learn about their life, maybe you make out. (And I consider myself somewhat introverted, but I am very curious about other people, and I like it when they pay attention to me. I can see how this would sound awful to some people.)
- A lot of qualities are negotiable in a way that is difficult to describe on a dating doc. I have a strong aversion to dating smokers, but if a particular smoker were very beautiful, interesting, and talented and enthusiastic about sex, I would probably end up attracted to her.
- For a lot of people, one of the biggest things they are looking for once someone is over their baseline is "are you attracted to me?" That can only really be discovered by dating, and screening out a lot of people lowers the chances that you find someone who scores highly on that criteria. So I could write a dating doc that says "not morbidly obese, IQ > 120, not crazy, non-smokers and interesting remunerative careers preferred, must be open to kids if the relationship moves past casual sex," but what's really the point?
- Does a dating doc provide a roadmap for unscrupulous pickup artists to lie to you? One advantage of tinder dating is it's probably relatively easy to screen out fakes on the first date - either they've optimized their presentation for whatever their pick-up guide says is the most easily bangable woman or they change their presentation as they learn what you like.
"So I could write a dating doc that says "not morbidly obese, IQ > 120, not crazy, non-smokers and interesting remunerative careers preferred, must be open to kids if the relationship moves past casual sex," but what's really the point?"
I think I would be willing to commit to long term dating, sight-unseen, almost anyone matching this criteria, +/- a few things of my own.
On reflection, I would have to find a proxy for the IQ criterion, because I'm not opposed to dating someone who is offended by the concept of using IQ as a measure.
For me, if I were to put out an ad like that, I'd bid good riddance to anyone offended. What I'd hate to lose would be the people who would make incorrect assumptions about me, and that's why I wouldn't do it.
My biggest takeaway from reading through the comments is, wow, sex and attractiveness are VERY important to a lot of people, way more than I thought. I'm not ace, but generally, if someone is within certain appearance norms and they're cool, I start finding them hot. I _also_ find randos hot, but the idea of really liking someone of the opposite gender and not finding them attractive is alien to me.
Yeah, it's one thing to be like, "physical attraction is important" (dating docs are compatible with this idea), it's another to state something like "all straight men care about are boobs", as many of these comments do.
For sure, I would not date someone if I didn't find them attractive, but most women have at least some features that are attractive enough to, er, start the engine. Once you filter out the minority who don't the rest is just "who's fun to be around, who gets my heart racing, who's witty and shares my interests." I'm less looks-focused than a lot of people (I have other shallownesses for sure), so people might be more/less picky on this front, but I know almost no healthy people who don't care at all what their partner is actually like.
I think that's the normal mindset unless you've been brainwashed by the manosphere.
Also, IF "all [most] straight men care about are boobs," then as a woman that would make it MORE important to aggressively filter to find the rare ones who *aren't* like that. And since all the "I only care about boobs" types are saying "I would never bother with dating docs," that makes dating docs *more* preferable as a mode of dating!
I'm surprised that no one (unless I missed it) has thought about dating in Kahneman's System 1/ System 2 terms. On the one hand is the instinctive subconscious mind that automatically reacts to physical attractiveness and non-legible cues and signals, and on the other is the rational conscious mind that likes dating docs and linguistic filters. Which system dominates the other may vary from person to person, but I don't think we should be surprised when someone says "I'm System 1 all the way!" or "I'm 100% System 2!". What would be interesting is to see a survey that plotted people on a bell curve from 1 to 2. I suspect that most readers here would be a couple of deviations towards System 2.
Yeah I think this comment sums up the entirely debate nicely.
An anecdote that might be related.
When I was in my last year at college, both the guys who I’d shared an apartment with were moving away, one of them pretty last minute, so I found myself with a spare bedroom, high rent, and few options. So I put a roommate ad up on Craigslist (this was mid-oughts).
In the ad I mentioned that I was a “straight male” with no roommate gender preference. I was basically just trying to state a basic fact that other people might find important in deciding if they wanted to live with me, without seeming obsessed with gender or orientation (plus the ad needed to be pithy).
The first guy that answered the ad, who I ended up rooming with, was gay. We basically went on a roommate date - I showed him the area, the route to his classes, and had lunch at a place nearby. Seemed like a nice guy and we’d get along.
Anyway at the end he sort of hesitatingly mentioned that he was gay, and if I’d have a problem with that. I said I didn’t and we moved on (and in together, I suppose). But it sort of nagged at me because I was worried I had scared him by noting that I was straight in the ad (when really I was just trying to filter out women who’d be bothered by rooming with a straight (and at the time quite single) guy, and in fact he was the second gay guy I’d roomed with).
Happy ending, we got along most of the time, dude was clean and quiet and always paid the rent and by the end of the year I was also getting along with his giant male nurse boyfriend who would stay over occasionally but always be a good guest so pretty much the best case scenario for a Craigslist roommate.
It's a fair question on his end, you might be worried he was attracted to you (and might not take no for an answer), you might be homophobic....sounds like things ended well.
I think it really depends on what you mean by “dating doc”. There are a few failure modes that seem obvious:
1) you have a bunch of high-status “must haves” that make you sound arrogant and full of yourself. High maintenance partners are a turn off.
2) you sound like a robot
3) you’re a shitty writer, which is fine most of the time (most people are shitty writers) but bad if you introduce yourself with long-form writing
4) It’s very hard to express the degree to which certain preferences are negotiable (and very dependent on how good the person is on other axes)
But a well written, not overly long “here’s the things I value and I’d prefer a partner that does the same” would be fine.
I imagine that a lot of the difference comes down to how people think of themselves in relation to the broader marriage market.
This post is quite good: "People are worried about marriage market liquidity" https://www.noenthuda.com/2020/07/22/people-are-worried-about-marriage-market-liquidity/
"There are two ways you can go about it – either “over the counter” (finding a partner by yourself) or “exchange traded” (said exchange could be anything from newspaper classifieds to Tinder to Shaadi.com). Brokers are frequently used in the OTC market – either parents or friends (who set you up) or priests.
The general rule of markets is that the more bespoke (or “weird” or “unusual”) an instrument is, the better the likelihood of finding a match in the OTC markets than on exchanges. The reason is simple – for an exchange to exist, the commodity being traded needs to be a commodity."
If you're looking for anything far from the middle of the bell curve, the commodity dating market is a bad choice.
This makes sense to me. And it seems like the dating docs are intentionally aimed at avoiding the commodity dating market because their personalities and/or cultural norms put them outside the bell curve.
A lot of the misgivings or distaste about dating docs seems to be from people who like the commodity dating market just fine and who don't see why someone would want to try something different.
This feels in a way like people who like pineapple on their pizza and people who hate it. It seems to evoke strong opinions but is just a matter of taste at the end of the day.
>I’m never sure how seriously to take comments like these, but I think it’s useful to think about the implications of 20% of the population meaning things like this 100% seriously.
I don't think the majority of guys think like the commenter you are replying to, but if you can't understand the mindset of someone who says this, you really aren't in a position to evaluate the dating scene. Some dudes legitimately care more than anything else about having sex with as many women above a baseline level of attractiveness as possible.
It's not "some" dudes, it's the vast majority of men, pretty much.
Not sure how many men *want* to have as much sex as possible but surveys *consistently* show that the median number of sex partners is <15 in a lifetime for American men. The median number of sex partners for a frat member is ~2 per year. There's a small % of men and women having lots of sex partners but most people are monogamous or serially monogamous.
The assumption here is that any dude who wants to have lots of sex partners does.
Exactly. Sex is very expensive in the US (for straight males), and if you're not top 20% in terms of looks/money/status it's about impossible to have +15 partners. The vast majority of men who can have a lot of sex partners are certainly not monogamous, even if they are married. It surprises me how many people in the US, even "progressives" have so many childish beliefs about sex and relationships, in a lot of other cultures it was assumed and accepted that a high status man would fuck around with a lot women and have a few mistresses if married.
I...wound up doing it (not at the same time)...and I'm kind of awkward and not super cute...
Well, certainly not in the top tier as far as looks or status in the alpha-male sense goes.
(punches balance of Vanguard account into https://dqydj.com/net-worth-by-age-calculator-united-states/)
Oh. *That's* what they were after.
(vanishes in a puff of logic)
"Some dudes legitimately care more than anything else about having sex with as many women above a baseline level of attractiveness as possible."
That's not even what I'm talking about, Daniel. It's not about quantity. It's about quality. When you find a girl who's enthusiastic, skilful and easy to live with, lock her down, don't move on to the next girl.
Imagine you’re reading an essay writer for the first time. Remove all the punctuation marks from their essay, turning it into a single run on sentence. Remove the spaces, even.
Imagine you’re looking at the dating profile pics, but every pic is an enthusiastic nude.
Imagine you’re reading a research paper. End every sentence in the abstract with an exclamation mark.
Imagine you are meeting a friendly dog on the street. Don’t approach gently. Shout hello at the dog as loudly as you can and run toward it.
This is how your dating docs look to the rest of us. They come on *so very, very* strong. That really works for some people, but for plenty of people, including your own matches, that intensity level is very off putting unless it comes *later*, after a little bit of basic social grace.
In principle, the information is great. I’m in year six of a good marriage that came from OkCupid, and the profile and the match questions and the match scores helped a lot.
But we still didn’t start the first date with a preference dump. Because that is a strong, strong signal of poor communication skills.
Edit: My wife points out that you're putting a huge personal information dump out into semi-public. If you normalize this practice, you're normalizing stalker's guides!
You cannot ask on a date how they feel about their parents (and if a woman, in particular how she feels about her father), or how they treat their siblings. Nor can you write about this on a dating app. But this is the deeper-level stuff that will color how your relationship develops in the longer run, because it is imprinted in us from our childhood and early adolescence. So find that out.
By contrast, interests change across time, and so do life philosophy, political attitudes, even religion. So getting a long text from your potential date about such things is only marginally more useful than whether you like his/her looks. And "funny to be with/writes entertaining about him/herself" is unlikely to get you past the first year, because being constantly entertaining is exhausting. Deep emotional connection during sex is longer-lasting than being technically good in bed, but even that is likely to become rarer and less important as a glue.
"She is easy to live with" is the best (indirect) compliment I have ever heard a man (married for decades) give to a woman. I have no firm evidence base here, but I believe this and other long-lasting marriages (that are not a shared hell) tend to move into "good silence" mode. Because there are two types of silence in a relationship: the tense type, and the good type. Thinking (or rather feeling) that your partner is basically ok despite all his/her inevitable flaws, irritating quirks, annoying attitudes etc. is key. Also, it will help if both of you share the stiff upper lip British attitude that life is not to be enjoyed, but to be endured. Raising small children will push your relationship beyond its breaking point if you are totally alien to this thought.
Couldn't you say on a first date, "tell me about your family"? Or a question like "do you have brothers or sisters?" can lead pretty quickly into hearing about the overall family dynamic including parents.
A person who says, "nope, single child," you can come back with (if you have siblings), "how is it to be raised as a single child? was it lonely or did you like it?" and that should lead pretty quickly into how they feel about their parents. Or if you were a single child too, you can say, "I hated (or loved) it. How was it for you?"
I agree with you that knowing about family of origin dynamics will potentially convey a lot of useful information. Anyone who speaks with disdain about their opposite sex parent (in a heterosexual context) would be a flag. Not a deal breaker necessarily, but something I'd want to know more about. (I myself spoke to others with disdain about my opposite sex parent and I've been happily married for over 20 years) (though I probably would have been easier to live with these past over 20 years if I hadn't had a father I would speak with disdain about).
Yes, you are right, there are ways to find out the really important stuff without coming across as weird yourself. And I also fully agree that early family relationships do not 100 percent predict your future fate in your relationships to others. It is just a very important factor to be aware of, both in ourselves and in others.:-)
"Absent any other matching criteria, attractive men are mostly going to go for attractive women, and vice versa. There’s some disagreement about who’s physically attractive, but not that much. If you’re a 5/10, you can either spam super-hot people’s profiles hoping a 9/10 has some bizarre preference-blip and decides you’re attractive enough to date, or just date other 5/10s or below, in which case congratulations, you’ve narrowed your dating pool down to half the population."
I think you're vastly overestimating the degree to which physical attraction is reasonably modeled by a one-dimensional spectrum. Sure, there *is* a reasonable grouping based on said one dimension that's a good predictor of "what percentage of randomly sampled people with appropriate gender preferences will find this person attractive, and how much." But this hides a HUGE degree of differential in exactly what different people find attractive. Many of my personal 8-10s would likely rate as 4-6s on a global scale, because I don't find fat unattractive, for instance. My physical attraction has more to do with (admittedly lossy/imperfect) cues of intelligence or creativity that surely count for *something* among the general populace, but not nearly as much as they do for me. Other things that seem to be very popular generally among people who like women (women who are super thin without being muscular) are a bit negative for me. Sure I'm an outlier in these respects, and maybe I'm a much bigger outlier generally than most people are, even about their particular outlier preferences. But from what I can tell, a LOT of people are outliers in some way or another, and it really is possible for more than half of people to end up matched with someone they consider a 7+.
I also think there are definitely values cues contained in how someone presents themselves physically. Again, this is a pretty lossy signal, but it's hardly no signal.
Another part of the deal is that if I were looking at swiping on tinder, I would might even avoid swiping on most of the obvious 9s and 10s, even if they were in the subset that fell well within my 9-10 range. I'd look specifically for the folks that *I* found very attractive, where I also know that lots of other people would not likely put them near the top of their list.
I'm not saying this is definitely a better way to look for dates than something else that speaks more directly to values, but I think it does have the effect suggested by Loweren, where even a "useless" date is at least spent in the company of someone you find attractive, who also finds you attractive. And I really don't think it has the failure mode that you've proposed for most people. There are enough physical/visual signals of other traits we care about, and enough dimensions of physical attractiveness that this can actually work well for a lot of people, if not everybody.
The main argument against it is that "hey, the dominant model (Tinder, etc.) already does this, so if something else would work better for a significant minority, why shouldn't it *also* be an option?"
Right? I'm largely attracted to androgynous people. Gender/sex doesn't matter. Muscles nice, long hair great, athletic or slim good, but none of these are required.
More important to me: are they interesting, curious, passionate (about anything), compassionate, kind, self-aware, honest, and weird?
Physical is important, of course. No spark? No sexual connection? Then we're friends, not lovers. (Friends are very important to me.) But the physical flexes a lot. I've had long-term/short-term partners who were manly men/very femme women too.
The personality/mental traits? They flex a bit, but at 48, I'm picky. If they're missing more than a couple of items from my above list, we can be friends, fwb, a fling, etc., but they're very unlikely to become a long-term partner.
Infuriatingly, Orthodox Jewish resumes have strict codes about how to say things indirectly and what things simply can't be said, so that including too much information is high risk. Agree that the minimum is schools + references, just noting that anything more than that can filter in annoying unintended ways.
Tbh i would like the idea of a 2 part dating doc. A first maybe at most 4-5 sentences to get a very rough idea of the person than after a date all the details if im interested. For me atleast it seems like it is pretty relevant if I click with a person in a way that means im romantically interested or am only interested in a platonic friendship
I guess this is late, but I didn't realize you had plucked out my comment until just now: for the record, I was and remain 100% serious. Physical relationships are founded on physical attraction. That's what really matters on a bedrock level, strong animal attraction. Obviously there are personality traits that are of crucial importance in a relationship, but those have to do with serious deep-level issues like propensity to cheat, which never get mentioned in dating ads of any kind – such at least is my experience. The stuff in those ads is just completely superficial hobby-level stuff and let me be frank: inability to tolerate these kinds of wholly irrelevant difference in an important relationship is bigotry in the real sense – narrow-mindedness, parochialism. If you experience a deep attraction to a woman but reject her, or she you, because she votes for the wrong guy (something which doesn't even meaningfully affect which guy gets in) or likes cartoons or has some dream about social glory and clout as a lawyer, or because you want to be a fireman or whatever, the rejector is a shallow, silly person with poor evaluation skills.
PS: I actually previously thought you understood this; your conclusions in an old essay on why Henry the wifebeater has more romantic success than a kind nerd seemed to be aware that this is how it works. If the dick is good a woman can put up with a lot.
EDIT: Also, it's not 20% of the population that thinks like this. It's 20% of *your readership*, Scott. (Or, actually most of those 20% seem to mean that all the girls are unbearable based solely on their self-descriptions, which... well, see above for my thoughts on this.) It's far, far more of the general population. You, we, are the bubbled ones.
I think there are some underlying assumptions people have about dating docs that I think are not necessarily true:
1. “The people using dating docs are only using dating docs.” I often hear, “what happened to good old-fashioned meeting people in person at an activity like a party?” Well, you can find partners through different channels, why limit yourself to one? I personally use most dating apps, social media, in-person and I have a dating doc (here, if you’re interested: https://jacquesthibodeau.com/lets-go-on-a-date/).
2. “Dating doc people have a hard time finding dates so they turn to this weird approach.” This isn’t the case for me. If I’m actively dating new people, my schedule ends up being packed with dates. It’s like a full-time job. I think some date-me doc people are struggling for sure, but lots of people who don’t have any dating doc also struggle.
3. “You will lose potential partners because dating docs are weird.” I don’t think any of the dates I’ve gone are with women who would come across my dating doc before we met. After that, it doesn’t matter. If it is the case that they get turned off by someone having a dating doc, I don’t really care.
I think Kenny’s comment should be 18%. It feels weird to double count Republican -> Democrat and Democrat -> Republican, but otherwise it can’t possibly add up to 100%.