Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
If a woman doesn't want to feel like an option, shouldn't she stay far away from Tinder? It's not like there isn't a million other ways for women to meet men, if she has the slightest inclination.
Sex and sexuality are ultimately about power. People who have high sexual value can totally let that power get to their heads and start taking advantage of others. This isn't gender-specific, but simply the way the world works.
This article is super one-sided and makes it sound like all these women in New York have no choice but to be on Tinder. Can't have it both ways.
But I find it strange that the women are apparently such willing participants. If they don't want to get dick pics from the "fuckboys" (as the article calls them), why are they hanging out online with these people?
With it "smart" people, don't have to feel responsible for what they get "dumb" people to do.
hanging out, in some cases, for twenty hours a day, according to the article.
Everybody constantly gets evaluated in two seconds. Mates very nearly are commodities. People claiming otherwise are just uggos, or class-ists.
Once we get video of some interaction + voice + smell, that's really 99% of the mating game. Nobody really gives a shit about anybody's resume. They may claim to when asked, but in reality we're dealing with systems much lower down towards the cerebellum.
Thinking caps come in a range of fashion colors.
"When you meet somebody for the first time, you're not meeting them. You're meeting their representative."
The women on Tinder, and every other online dating site, they don't all want dick pics. It does get annoying. But, they still like to feel desired, and getting a bunch of responses from men validates that a woman is still sexually viable, attractive, and that men want her. You can say that it's a confidence booster.
I'm not a Tinder user, how does it reduce the biological risk? wouldn't the risk of an STD be just as great, if not greater, than the status quo?
And vetting them how, anyway? You might be able to find out whether someone is a felon, but I have no idea how I would (legally) find out whether someone has a transmissible STI.
This seems like a product of some kind of cognitive bias.
Fact is, I see very little correlation. Intelligent, well-paid, well-groomed, well-cultured men who bitch and moan and complain about having to use condoms only wondering if the girl is on birth control.
I don't think you can vet someone for STDs ahead of time. You can only practice safe sex and hope for the best.
The idea that non-promiscuous people having more sex can reduce STDs is more that the risk to a person having sex is lower, the more non-promiscuous people are options for them. Which is true - if only promiscuous people are looking to have sex with you, then every sex act is more risky.
But the risk for those non-promiscuous people goes up the more sex they have.
STDs exist that are like vampires in modern entertainment - once you become one, you are one forever, and you have a chance of turning others into one as well. Vampirism therefore spreads without limit, and so do STDs, if enough people have sex, for STDs that are incurable are not entirely preventable by condoms.
If people are having a lot more sex due to Tinder, as the anecdotes suggest in this article, there is no doubt that we will see a surge in STDs.
"Internet’s Dirty Secret: Assessing the Impact of Online Intermediaries on HIV Transmission"
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/26/technology/rhode-island-tind...
"Tinder and hookup apps blamed for rise in STDs"
With broadcast mediums and technology, we first made it easy to compare any potential with the pool of all potential partners, and so many women (the historical gatekeepers of sex and relationships, fair or not) began to hold out on local suitors because they didn't meet some platonic ideal they'd seen once somewhere.
Now technology has ticked again, and men have access to a marketplace of potential mates. Unfortunately, women are no longer the gatekeepers on relationships or sex, and the winning strategies in this new market happen to be uncouth and crass and, most importantly, effective.
Speaking frankly as a somewhat bitter and jilted engineer:
If they'd wanted traditional relationships, they should've been friendlier and less aloof when they were being courted earlier.
Now that we're older and wiser and more financially secure, and with the technology giving us a ripe marketplace for relationships, why settle for anything less than convenience and our own arbitrary standards?
Citation needed. Pretty sure women had standards before television and movies.
"If they'd wanted traditional relationships, they should've been friendlier and less aloof when they were being courted earlier."
Ah, the 'nice guy' argument. Plus a bit of generalizing. It disturbs me that you refer to women as 'they' as if they all collectively decided to ignore you.
Assume women are looking for mates (reasonable). Assume women will more favorably choose a mate the farther they are above some arbitrary standard (reasonable, though at the extreme end we see falloff--"I don't deserve him, he'd never date me, etc."--sames as we do in the other direction). Assume that these standards are the result of exposure to local norms (an example: as a friend returned from Kazakhstan explained to me, "A good Kazakh man is one who doesn't beat his wife after bedding down with a whore"). Assume that mass broadcast and the internet have redefined what local is (reasonable).
It follows then that standards are being influenced by members outside of the physical local community of women (for an example of similar issues, consider the body image research done with Barbies and other deconstructions of beauty).
That being the case, it seems perfectly reasonable that these same standards can be raised above local market rates.
Ah, the 'nice guy' argument.
Well, no, not really--the observation is that, at a time where there was a large supply of men looking for traditional arrangements, they held out, and now with the advent of technology, that supply has decreased because of the substitute good of hookups enabled by Tinder et al.
There's no point in being mad, for example, that carriages are hard to come by if you didn't buy until cars were widespread.
I'm a bit bitter because it all seems like such a waste: some of us were disappointed before, some of them are being disappointed now, and the sum total of unhappiness in the system (taken through time) has increased unnecessarily. It's just unfortunate, and could've been avoided.
It disturbs me that you refer to women as 'they' as if they all collectively decided to ignore you.
Don't read too much into it...it's just a useful and short pronoun in English to refer to women, saving a few characters.
Reality: Women made individual choices as to which relationships they wanted to pursue. And being rejected by a woman still doesn't give you the right to be an asshole.
"“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says."
"“No, like 90 percent,” said Ashley (the same as mentioned earlier). “I’m hoping to find the 10 percent somewhere. But every boy I’ve ever met is a fuckboy.”"
As for the rest...you keep wanting to insert the "all" qualifier into things as though that is some kind of legitimate critique. The use of "women" instead of "all women" is intentional, as it denotes a sort of large number instead of universality.
If I'd said "all women", "all men", etc., I would agree with your critique--but I didn't.
You're basically talking past my observations. Your inaccurate assumptions are not those that I used anywhere in my reasoning, least of all because of your insistence on prepending "all" in front of everything.
And being rejected by a woman still doesn't give you the right to be an asshole.
On Hacker News we do tend to shy away from namecalling. :)
Anyone who has ever seen a pretty woman's okcupid inbox can attest that being dog-piled by hundreds of desperate men is an odd definition of "power".
Tinder at least requires a mutual match.
The neat thing about Tinder is that nobody has to assess those first-contact messages, they just swipe people they think they'd be interested in and if they both like each other, they can talk. I've never used it but I'd say it's probably equalized a lot of things--men no longer spend all their time carefully composing introductory messages only to be ignored, women don't (necessarily) have to sort through hundreds of "wanna fuk?" messages to find the decent ones.
It's the stable marriage problem. There's higher risk initiating, but higher reward. Being in a receptive position means you're unable to even try for your highest preferred choice. You have to wait to see if that person chooses you.
It's not a clear cut power dynamic of one over the other, though.
I'm inclined to not believe that. Anyone on Tinder, woman or man, is very unlikely to want a traditional relationship. Or rather, people who want a traditional relationship shouldn't be seeking it on Tinder.
1) In terms of physical attributes, women have more options "outside their league", but those options are not interested in a relationship.
2) The men at the top of the physical attributes ladder normally have a slight-to-moderate advantage. Historically, men not at the top of this ladder could still use personality, wit, etc. to attract a mate.
With Tinder, this advantage is hugely magnified because men not at the top of the ladder don't even get an option to use other aspects of what they bring to the table before they are swiped left.
This is so backwards.
Women use tinder to get attention, not relationships. Rarely sex.
Men are the one's in the race to the bottom. They get ignored by all of them. The women use it to treat men like ants.
Yet these studies and willing betas still treat women like the victims.
As men, the larger issue is this cuckold-psychology where you have to sound charitable to females, even if it takes flat out denial of situations. Women still hold the power.
You have it backwards. A paradox of choice for females.
Men aren't picking, they're the one's pasting messages desperately to get responses. It's a hopeless situation.
Ever been to a night club? Male:Female ratio? You have any idea how much worse it is on a dating website?
It's interesting how you say I projected, I'm interested in the tendency of men to fib about their success with females.
Yes, I've seen hundreds of comments like yours, then I saw their accounts get banned out of frustration the next day.
Even if you did have success on a dating website (I have, and have had friends who married), by no means are they in favor of men.
If you need me to elaborate on the data, I can.
Many people don't like answering questions about themselves or filling out a profile so they flock to the quick meet app.
Honestly, I think it's completely their fault for expecting a long term relationship from Tinder.
who treats her like a priority instead of an option
Well I'm sorry but that's what humans are, options on legs. Be it on a job application or in dating. There's fierce competition, you gotta be good or at least better than your competition. This is the normal state of being, and nobody, not even girls (and especially not guys), is above it.
If you want real, emotional bonding, get off tinder and fancy clubs. Such bonds can form in places you least expect them and it cannot be forced.
Saved for future robot-training dataset, thanks.
Maybe but I think the problem is more general. It is not just women who get de-valued. Human relationships of all kinds suffer from a society that sees people more and more as means to an end thanks to the redundancy that social online networks of all kind enable. For example, it seems to me that people these days accept several private invitations that take place simultaneously only to decide last minute which of the available options they like best. I think this is rather sad. But then again I entered the world of grown ups not so long ago. Maybe society hasn't changed that much after all?
it's not a stretch to say that contraception technology has directly catapulted women's rights and are becoming more equal to the male counterpart.
Yes she could, or better still, she could get Bumble, which is the female version of Tinder, where the women get to keep guys as options :) http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/02/bumble-is-exactly-like-tind...
I think you have things very mixed up.
You're either someone's option right now until the next better option comes along or you yourself are doing that to someone else.
Tinder amplifies being "next best". You're never "the best" option and the best option for you becomes elusive.
It's the uncanny valley of dating.
We opt for convenience over depth because investment in another person requires acknowledging the risk of a temporal imbalance in the relationship that most people today are extremely uncomfortable with -- to a point, where I believe some choose polyamorous relationships over monogamous ones because there is a perception of de-risking loss.
Hopefully, Tinder will be a fad because even the most beautiful will age and by then maybe aspire for something more meaningful as the tedium of "dating" wears.
However, as someone said, the door swings both ways, but the way women devalue men is far more subtle. From the perspective of the heterosexual female, the goal is to acquire mating capital (i.e. "catch a husband or sugar daddy"). What's mating capital? It's a man who is an ideal mate: good genes and conditions to be a provider (good job/career or money/power).
A guy being primarily interested in a woman because she has a great body and a pretty face is really no different than a woman being interested in a financially stable guy with a good job that is taller than her.
The double standard in articles like the one posted is that somehow it's bad if heterosexual men are out to acquire sexual capital but somehow it's totally acceptable for women to seek out mating capital.
How often do you see that it's perfectly acceptable for a women to reject a guy based on his height or the fact that he might be showing early signs of male pattern baldness. I'm tall and still have my hair, so I benefit from such "de-valuing", but I also recognize that for the same crap that guys get judged negatively for.
I recently came out of a relationship where I was clearly not a good fit long term for my partner because we had different values, life goals and lifestyle preferences. For example, I'm poly and she was monogamous. I eventually persuaded her to date another guy, who ended up meeting her needs in all the ways I didn't. Yet she still preferred me because I "had my shit together" and was a better option when it comes to raising a child. Because of that she couldn't imagine being with the other guy.
At the end of the day, heterosexual women treat men as options too. The difference is that the capital that heterosexual women seek in men needs to be far more "durable" value than that which heterosexual men seek in women.
Men are less selective about who they have casual sex with, so the most attractive men consistently and constantly meet up with women they'd never actually date.
For the few men it works great. For most women it works well for a while, but ends in disappointment. For the vast majority of men, the deal is the worst; they are considered unsuitable because women can do better (in 10 minutes, for 10 minutes).
Plenty of women casually date with no interest in serious relationships, for the same reasons that men do: They value their independence, they're focused on their careers, they like to be able to travel or meet new people.
It's antiquated to think that women who go on Tinder are hopelessly pining for love and commitment, and it's equally antiquated to think that there aren't men out there who want those exact things, but can't get them because the women they're dating aren't interested.
In fact, I'll posit that there's a much more positive outlook on this: People nowadays are much more suspicious of moving too fast, of losing parts of your identity and independence for the sake of just being in a relationship. The warning signs are more visible, and we act on them with less hesitation, instead of letting resentment of a bad situation fester into something awful. We break up easier, divorce easier, and refuse to live unhappy lives because the idea of being alone is no longer terrifying.
And funnily enough we seem to be a hell of a lot less happy.
Actually yes, it does -- though only for women. Men are happier than in the past.
That's just as much a reflection of what women are looking for. If a woman is attracted to a guy who is "high value" relative to her then she is attracted to a guy who has options. She is attracted to guys she has a power differential with. These women could choose to settle for a relationship where they have the options and power but that's not what they want.
Should I expect to have no say on how much serious I want a relationship to be in the future? In the name of "gender equality"? Holy crap.
In NYC where there are a lot more single women than men, men when interviewed were generally not interested in long term relationships and I think there was more casual sex (there were a lot more single mothers too I think).
In the west coast where there are a lot more single men than women both women and men converged on wanting a long term relationship.
I'll try and find whatever this was - thought it was interesting.
So if you feel like you are getting a bad deal on the dating scene because you are hooking up with people you really don't like and your life is a constant churn, that should tell you that you are being too desperate. Put on the brakes. Let the people who are impatient, demanding and rude move along. Learn to live by yourself and to relate to people non-sexually. Then apply those skills to develop more meaningful relationships. Otherwise, you're just putting convenience first - then complaining that the result was optimized for convenience over other priorities. Other people you'd never think about can't even get any dates, and you're bitching that being non-selective doesn't give you all the results of being selective.
This is a first-world problem for beautiful people with ample disposable income. In many parts of the world, including New York, you might be lucky if you can pick strawberries or make clothes for $2/hr to support a large family you didn't choose to have. Most people who ever existed had no option to participate in "hookup culture."
Nowadays, if a single guy doesn't use Tinder and other apps, it's missing a huge pool of single girls available to meet for a drink (or other things).
It's never been so easy to meet new people, so guys don't value so much the girls they met like before, but it's the same for girls. If the pool of single girls it's huge, imagine the pool of single guys on this apps.
I know a lot of girls who uses Tinder only to inflate their ego and play with guys. They have never met one guy through Tinder. Sometimes they even mark a date with a guy and "disappear" before that just for fun.
Fortunately, there still exists descent people with desires to be with high quality people. I think it would be quite tragic if someone with decency caved in to societal pressure and joined Tinder, looking for that special snowflake and becoming heart broken when they realize what they've become.
Probably most of the people aren't going to find a man/woman for the life on Tinder but if you put a little effort on your matches you will find interesting people. The problem is that after some time and some "tinder scars" people put less and less effort in meeting better their matches.
Women use an "I'm not going to be serious" app and complain that all the men on it don't want to be serious.
In the 60's there were the "happenings" where people metaphorically swiped right and left. In the 70's it was discos, the 80's had pick-up bars. I'm pretty sure Vanity Fair had long features on each of those phenomena as well. Each generation starts to mature and are pretty sure that they are the first to discover sex, which of course their parents never had, and the older generation sees "little precious" out doing their thing and the end of the world is nigh. 20 years on the youngsters are bouncing the kids on their knees and the old ones are pushing up grass and so it goes. As the Thorton Wilder said, "Once in a thousand times it's interesting".
I'm not sure whether the author of the article would be more shocked by the revelation that many Tinder dates actually don't end in sex[1] or the revelation that ten years ago, the same demographic of men was bragging about the ease of chatting to multiple potential one night stands per night in bars
[1]especially ones with men that consider getting a female phone number (with emojis!) to be a major accomplishment
To me, it feels very sensational, exaggerated and very selective in its use of interviewees and their quotes to describe a specific type of online dating experience, and then projects that as if it's the average experience. It isn't.
I've used online dating, and a lot of my friends have and do - including tinder. Obviously you come across a few odd situations and people, just as you do in 'real life' but I have never come close to experiencing anything like what's described in this piece.
It paints an utterly depressing scene which just doesn't match up with my experience of online dating at all. For people who've never used Tinder, it's basically nothing like this, and it's not just my own experience or the way I use it - I've never seen any of my friends use it like the people in this article describe.
It's basically just another way to get chatting with people. I'm not saying people like the people in this article don't exist, but they're rare, and if you want nothing to do with people like this, all you have to do is not engage with them in the first place. If you do engage with them, then know that the consequences will probably be as depressing as this article makes out they will be.
The broad conclusions the people in this article draw about 'the online dating world' are simply not true for most people - they're only true for those who subject themselves to it. If that's not what you want, just don't, and you'll be fine. Problem solved.
Same. Most of the people I've talked to that use it experience a typical "funnel": a bunch of available people, a smaller pool that you're interested in, a smaller pool that's also interested in you, and finally a few dates that go from there. Not an orgyastic meat-market where all your wildest sex dreams come true.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a piece crafted by a PR team hired by Tinder.
It's possible to feel alienation to the people in the article while believing it is true. There most definitely are serial sluts like this in the world (both male and female), so it doesn't really surprise me.
Anyway, I imagine most people on HN have similar thoughts about these people, but thought it was too obvious to mention.
I used to have a roommate who refused to sleep alone. He'd sleep with 10-20 people per month on a rotating basis. I know other people who haven't had a date in two years. To each their own.
I realize the article was exaggerated, but I have run into people like that in real life.
Depressing.
He was Danish, we called it the 'Scando Sweep'.
if you don't believe it, it's probably because you've been raised/brainwashed with false beliefs about women and have a set of skewed expectations.
In 2008/9 I used a french website "adopt a guy" (adopte un mec). It was really disruptive because it gave women much more powers. Men can only "charm" women, and women must "adopt" men if they want to talk to them.
To be honest I was really surprised, it worked so much better. Women were more confident and it showed, I was having more discussions. Granted, I had to be patient, but the experience was much better.
Obviously dating websites should not treat men and women equally.
I think it'd be more accurate to say that he feels that not every human is TREATED equally. Especially where sex and intimate relationships are concerned.
When I was younger, a lot of guys wondered how so many really scummy guys could get lots and lots of beautiful women ??? I did too. After many years I've come to realize that... well... sex and intimate relationships just might work differently than polite society believes they do.
There are probably entire industries built on exploiting the chasm between propriety and desire.
Some.
For Tinder specifically, you can't reveal your preferences, save by "is this better than nothing" and how much effort you put into initial messages. Compare this to a ranking + deferred acceptance system, where you can match every guy and every girl such that there's no alternate pairing that both the guy and the girl would both prefer.
The end result is a lot of wasted effort and low signal-to-noise. The alternative is something that looks a lot like ranking a bunch of potential matches, and magically getting the best coffee or dinner date you can each night. Much more efficient.
Unfortunately, efficient marketplaces don't automatically out-compete thick ones. It's why I haven't done anything about the problem - the difficult part of Tinder's success to reproduce isn't the app or the matching algorithms or the UI, but rather convincing enough people to participate on their platform.
I highly recommend this book for more information on the topic: smile.amazon.com/Who-Gets-What-Why-Matchmaking/dp/0544291131
As I've realized this over the past few months (a big factor was reading the biographies of some of my heroes, e.g. Dirac, Feynman, etc., and realizing that they spent a lot of their time working alone in their offices uninterrupted, and communicating with people either in real life over meals, walks, etc. or by postal mail), I've been trying to pull out of most technological communications; using text only for coordinating/logistics ("want to grab dinner tomorrow night?") and email for longer form communication.
Then instead of dicking around on Reddit for an hour or chatting with people on Jabber, I go hang out in a local bookstore, read a book in a coffee shop, grab a beer (without my phone) alone at the local bar, go have a meal with a friend. I've had interesting encounters and great conversations with complete strangers; I was the first surprised, given that I'm not particularly gregarious and it's hard for me to strike up conversation with a stranger. But it turns out that there are plenty of people out there who will happily talk to you for a bit.
I just recently moved to a new place, and have been thinking about how I can structure my living space to encourage good habits (e.g. practicing music regularly, reading books, working on electronic projects) and discourage bad ones (e.g. spending too much time on social media, reading superficial online articles, etc.). One of the things I did was not connecting my iMac (which I still use for composing music in Ableton, programming, reading PDFs, etc.) to the internet; if I need to look up restaurant times or something, I'll use my phone. I do try to leave my phone in a drawer out of sight most of the time, and have removed most of the distracting apps on it. It's only been a week, but I like what it's doing so far.
I'm in the second half of my 20s, I work in tech, so I don't think I'm a case of a grumpy old luddite. I'm just starting to realize that technology makes things like hooking up easier, but certain things aren't meant to be made easier. People designing those social apps and sites have, for the vast majority, no regard for your time and your attention - so maybe you just shouldn't give it to them.
I remember reading an article a long time ago (http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/) about the misconception we have about the Amish refusing to use technology. We think that the Amish refuse to use ALL technology; but really, it's that our society accepts technology unconditionally as soon as it's available, whereas Amish society accepts it only after it's proven a clear benefit, and that they understand how to use it in a way that won't disrupt their community. For instance, they found that phones are useful: if someone hurts themselves, it's good to be able to call the hospital. But if you put a phone in every home, then people start using it a lot, and local community ties suffer. Their solution to that is to have a single phone booth per village, a couple minutes' walk out. Another example is vehicles: it's very useful to have a tractor to work on the farm, but then people start using them as vehicles to go spend time outside of the village, again weakening community ties. Their solution to that is to have tractors with steel wheels so that they can only drive in the fields, not the open road.
Of course you can push that philosophy as strongly as you want to the point of the absurd, and there are many things you can criticize about it. But overall, I do find that mindset very refreshing and interesting, and that's what I'm trying to bring to my life.
The only thing stopping people from doing this in person is a lack of familiarity.
That said, talking in person allows you to hone communication skills you might not get to practice online.
I don't know. I think, perhaps, in the 'real world' we learn to become very good at choosing who we associate with, and don't spend time with 'destructive' people (for lack of a better term), but perhaps this has yet to be learnt properly online.
For myself, I literally have never seen an argument on my Facebook feed. I have about 150 Facebook friends. I don't see flame wars on Twitter; I follow people I find interesting, that's all. I subscribe to subreddits with sane moderation policies. Generally, the internet I encounter on a day-to-day basis is actually quite a civil, friendly place.
I just don't think the online world is that much different from the real world. You choose where to spend your time, who to spend it with, and that shapes the experiences you have–just like the real world. Is it really so different?
I'm glad it's working for you though!
Then last year, I went on a 2-month long backpacking trip. I don't have facebook et al. and blogs are too tiring, so I decided to get snapchat just for the trip. A year later, I've gotten ~20 people to join snapchat, just to keep in touch with me. : )
For me, it's the model of human communication that matters: I don't necessarily want you to remember exactly what I said to you 12.27465 years ago. I know most of the HN and Reddit crowd aspire for the perfect object Vulcan mind, with perfect recollection either, but for me, the value of interpersonal communication lies in the fact that it's REALLY fallible. Not only do we NOT remember things as they are, even if we do remember something right, the act of remembering it messes up the actual memory. For me, that's essential. Our social interactions haven't evolved to reflect a perfect recollection but to accommodate our limitations. We are imperfect, and I like my mode of communication to reflect that.
This may sound like exaggeration, but snapchat could be the social network for adults in the longer term [not the 'look at my kid' kind, but 'we're having fun, but don't want it too seem like we're bragging' kind.
I feel that the ease of communication has really cheapened it. It's kind of sad talking to people on Google Hangouts who live in the same city but never actually hanging out IRL. Before you had to make a real effort to meet the person for dinner or at a bar.
It's even more strange to me as you can find some group online for whatever niche group and have stimulating discussion and never leave the house.
Of course they did, there was no such thing as internet back in the 30s. Feynman in particular, I'm positive he would have had a big social network presence if he had lived today.
But I think we can all sympathise with that feeling. I think it's not so much a problem with the medium (communicating over the internet is faster and cheaper than meeting people live, and it lets me engage in conversation with you, for instance, who probably live halfway across the world from me, so why not use it?). I think it's a problem of saturation. With our phones and computers ringing dozens (hundreds?) of times a day, with mounds of interesting stuff to read in websites like reddit or HN or your favourite newspaper, with information overwhelming us 24/7, maybe it's not such a bad idea to, once in a while, silence the phone, ignore your 1000s of facebook friends for a while, and just take a walk and read a newspaper in a park.
I personally have been winding down a lot of internet crap, and have refused to purchase a cell phone capable of doing anything more than having verbal conversations, and have been a lot happier for it.
FWIIW, I also realized a long time ago (longer than Tinder) that online dating is hopeless for anything more than a booty call, and is frankly a waste of time for that as well, at least for me. I prefer not to be the hamster wheel of a dopamine loop. There's always another one. These things are not designed to make you happy: they're designed to make you come back to the website. It's easier to go outside and talk to someone who smells nice.
I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer
right by my bed, and I'd never have to leave it.
But I use a typewriter, and afterward I mark up the pages
with a pencil. Then I call up a woman named Carol out
in Woodstock and say, "Are you still doing typing?"
Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds
out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat
back and forth, and I say,"Okay, I'll send you the pages."
Then I go downstairs and my wife calls, "Where are you
going?" "Well," I say, "I'm going out to buy an
envelope."And she says, "You're not a poor man.
Why don't you buy a thousand envelopes? They'll deliver
them, and you can put them in the closet and get one
whenever you want."And I say, "Hush." So I go to the
newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and
lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line
because there are people buying candy and all that sort of
thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter
has a jewel between her eyes, and when it's my turn, I ask
her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my
envelope and put the pages in it and seal it up and go to
the postal convenience center down the block at the corner
of Forty-Seventh Street and Second Avenue, where I'm
secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep
absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel
about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and I
got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I
address the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of
the post office, and I go home. And I've had a hell of a
good time. I tell you, we are here on earth to fart
around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.
— Kurt Vonnegut, (Harper's Magazine Nov. 1995)Are there people who are optimizing their workflow while secretly pining for a less efficient more personal approach to buying envelopes that could read this and see the light?
The quote is saying we're all just here on a rock flying through space. Be a part of your neighborhood/communities. Enjoy life, engage strangers not as soulless husks of flesh but as humans like yourself.
Perhaps there are merits to a lifestyle of pure efficiency, but there are valuable interactions lost if you stick to your own little world.
The more I stay away from social media (and to some extent, the internet), the better person I become. Instead of putzing around on the internet, I read books and listen to informative podcasts. Instead of looking at how other people live and lamenting my own life, I just do what makes me happy without worrying about opportunity cost.
I too work in tech. I feel like people can live however they want to live, and perhaps they will even have enough time to change their ways if they change their minds, but that life is just not for me - the easiest way for me to know that for a fact is that I simply can't bear to hang out with such people.
I too haven't connected my studio pc to the internet. However, the fact that it is still running XP admittedly facilitated that decision. ;)
All in all, I could have written your post. I am still baffled that I became (to some degree) so anti-technology so early.
While I don't fancy becoming an Amish I sort of subscribe to their conservative philosophy regarding technology in that now I run Debian on my laptop.
West coast scene is not like this at all, especially not in Man-Francisco or Man-Jose (unless you like men of course).
Sometimes the best choice is to not play at all.
You might be preaching to the choir here.
Do you work in the teledildonics space?
My god I want to go back.
now i live in LA, which is fine but not stellar in this area.
new york is basically paradise for young single men. it's next-level.
Worth considering whether one values career opportunities (assuming you want to do tech) more or values other aspects of life more (assuming you want a more active dating life).
I have guy friends who want to settle down in SF, but refuse to move here from New York until they've found someone they want to marry and who is willing to move with them.
Well... stop swiping?
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/dating-app-coffee-meets-bag...
(I have no interest in this company nor have I used it; I have been told it works well for higher quality dates by male friends)
Hard to say what is accurate.
Back in the day, rude invitations with dick pics were odd enough to mock. Now, according to this article, they've become almost accepted. Funny.
That's the way it's always worked online.
We've seen what modern media can do to self esteem, particularly in young women. What happens when we're all now literally competing with the nearest ten thousand most attractive people in your state? I predict that the effects these apps will have on self-esteem, dating, social values, and even the institution of marriage will be catastrophic.
The "Tinder problem" does exist though, and perhaps it'll lead to a segregation of those who want something meaningful and those who don't. Not sure if that will be a good or a bad thing.
I've had several polite messages ("How are you? What's your opinion on <xyz>?" etc.) turned down explicity and rudely. Just because they seem nice in a profile doesn't mean they'll be friendly and that they "want to get to know other people".
There are a lot of people who are on just looking for hookups.
That variety is nice.
Last month, I was spending SEVERAL hours a day swiping on friends' behalf on Tinder. We'd swipe till our eyes hurt, and we'd swipe again. You get a limited number of swipes (and total 'targets') per day, so once someone ran out of their daily quota, I'd swipe for someone else.
The process is TIRING! -- looking at attractive/ people at their best putting on their best show is tiring! It's doesn't seem to be screen fatigue -- there's likely an upper boundary on how many faces/people you can process in a day. We'd end up not checking people's profiles and swipe based on the amount of skin showed on profile pictures. It sounds ridiculous, but being judgmental of people's face/facial features apparently gets tiring at some point.
This leads me to believe that the interactions don't come for free -- they may be cheap, but the costs exist.
So as someone who spent all that time on Tinder, it is not clear to me what 'friction' Tinder removes as compared to dating sites say, 10 years ago. Having a hookup app on your lap, and on your cellphone is not that different. Or sites on the desktop 15 years ago. I know people who think 'mobile' hookup apps are the most godawful things to have happened in the world (and that because, as a lot of people have said here, because they reduce the cost of interaction), but that's not significantly different from say, 10/15 years ago, is it?
If 'hookup stats' are really higher, it could be because not everyone agrees on the definition. For a lot of my friends, going over to sleep at someone's house constitutes a hookup. I'd imagine something like that would have happened 20 years ago anyway in an offline setting, but you'd have met the person in a bar, or a club or what have you. That you happened to have met them on Tinder doesn't make it an 'apocalypse' for the dating type.
All the friends I swiped for ended up going on multiple dates, some in the same week. Two ended in a committed relationship, and one who never wanted to be in a relationship was almost dragged into one. I mention this because without tinder, he would never have been out their anyway. So here's my theory: tinder is bringing out all the 'marginals' -- people on the relationship margin who would otherwise not have been 'out there' anyway. Since their ratio to the general population has increased because of increased visibility, it seems that more people are NOT into dating. That's a fallacy because it does not control for the marginals: they'd not be 'relationship minded' without tinder anyway.
Now, I don't strongly believe anything but I wasn't implying that the smaller cost is because of the speed at which the "sex" happens. I believe that people consider it smaller than before because even with the regular dating sites you had to sign up, upload photos, fill in your profile details, etc etc, to even get something started. All tinder asks for is a facebook account and a couple of swipes (or maybe just one :D). Sure, a match might not end up as an erotic partner but at least there was something.
Hope I made my point more clear.
Such paradigm is not a consequence of a misogyny; quite the other way around.
Downvoting me won't change this.
Women try and find the best man they can possibly get. Just because 50% of the population is female and 50% is male doesn't mean that they're going to pair off equally. Women want the top 20%! [1] There are evolutionary reasons for this that push our species forward, mating always has and always will be a competition.
Now think of the perspective of these top 20% guys. They get all the sex and need not give out their exclusive commitment. And why would they? From an economic perspective, they can maximize their sexual strategy this way (spread the seed, as it were). Monogamy just slows that down.
Furthering the economics analogy, these dating apps increase the liquidity and efficiency of the market. Want Chad, the good looking investment banker guy? Keep swiping, you'll find him. No need to wait around for Bobby from your programming class to finally ask you out (he probably doesn't even lift weights).
There are two groups clearly disadvantaged by this current setup:
1) Those 80% of "below average" males. Because one of the top males can satisfy many young women (you read the story, some guys sleep with 100+ girls a year), these men get left out. Traditionally, marriage existed as an incentive for the vast majority of men to be productive in exchange for reproduction opportunities. I'm sure the discerning reader wouldn't be surprised to learn that a girl sleeping with a bunch of top 20% dudes and later "settling down" has a harder time staying in a happy marriage [2].
2) Which leads us to #2, unmarried women entering their 30s, or whatever arbitrary later age makes them less attractive to the top 20% men. The reality of male preference for physical attractiveness necessarily means that women who engaged in hook-up culture during their earlier years will have to lower their standards.
We had a period of time where strict monogamy throughout adulthood dominated, and now that's becoming less so (hugely declining marriage rates as one indicator, [3]). The question is whether or not this is a natural evolution for our society, or a sign of decline.
---
[1] - "As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. " http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati...
[2] - "They claim this finding is especially true for women, writing in the report, "We further found that the more sexual partners a woman had had before marriage, the less happy she reported her marriage to be."" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/21/more-sexual-partner...
[3] - http://national.deseretnews.com/article/4535/US-marriage-rat...
I strongly disbelieve this, and I think most historians would agree with me.
We had a period of time in which what was written and widely disseminated in the polite (read: legal, and likely to be preserved) media did not include references to anything other than strict monogamy. When such references were included, they were usually scandalous and offered as implied evidence for a person or fictional character later getting his or her comeuppance.
It's very easy, especially if you're raised in a religious or just plain awkward household, to latch onto that attitude with apparent reinforcement from historical sources. That doesn't mean that's how people actually lived. It does mean that's how most people wanted others to believe they lived. And there are plenty of private letters and other less public texts from history that show our ancestors to have been every bit as kinky, homosexual, and promiscuous as we collectively are today. There were prudes then, too, and plenty of them, and there were people who were happy in a genuinely monogamous marriage, just as there are today.
But what's changed is not what people are doing, nor with whom, but whether they're willing to have others know about it. And even that's still nowhere near as free as many would imagine it: this article used pseudonyms throughout.
Temporal exceptionalism is just way too lazy.
The reason this is significant, whether it is actual monogamy or perceived monogamy that is dying, is because a lot of men will begin losing their incentive to be invested in society (the latter, the hope of monogamy and reproduction, still provides incentive). I'd also wager that a lot more women in older ages (40+) are less happy; actually there's evidence for this too, [1]. I'd also wager that the unhappiest are those who are unmarried or are married to partners they find significantly less desirable than previous hook ups in their younger years.
[1] - http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/astounding-increase-in-an...
Many (not all, but many) animal mammal societies work like this, and there are strong indications humans were wired to work like this too. Some human cultures still use that form of reproductive organization.
And then MALES (non-alpha ones) invented monogamy to get a piece of the action.
It's extemely ironic that women would complain about the disappearance of something that was designed to their direct detriment.
So-called 'alpha males' tend to define and shape the culture they're a part of, a lot more than the 'non-alpha' males you just spent ten sentences shitting on. It's interesting you think low-status males just 'invented' monogamy, and in doing so turned the reproductive tables on 20% of men and 100% of women.
I think it's more like, historically speaking, cultures that allowed for more males to have reproductive success, and that therefore gave more males a stake in the society and culture they're a part of, saw more success and out-competed the ones that did not. Which is to say, a society where near-100% of the population have a direct reproductive stake in the future, will be more productive than societies where about 60% of the population does.
Whether this remains true now is an interesting question.
The beta males did not invent monogamy; it evolved as a system whereby more productive abled bodies were invested in the success of a society. These societies proliferated.
> Whether this remains true now is an interesting question.
I believe that when the benefits do not outweigh the cons, a lot of males start checking out of society altogether. See Japan [1] as an example. E.g. I'm going to have to work my ass off throughout life jumping through hoops and then work 80 hour weeks at BigCompanyJapan and then maybe find a woman who I won't have time to spend with? Fuck it, video games, porn, and basement sound better.
For a more US-centric view, check out [2].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
[2] - http://www.amazon.ca/The-War-Against-Boys-Misguided/dp/06848...
There is an antithetic trend in Japan though, since Japanese women are emancipated and the high economic demands prevent them from investing time into dating. So, the numbers could possibly differ even more. (I’m not sure how emancipation affects the statistics for the males, though.)
Citation needed. In what culture "all females mate and carry the children of the one leader, all other males don't mate _at all, ever", or anything even close to this?
By contrast, there are a lot of cultures (eg. India, the Arab/Muslim world) where marriage is societally more or less obligatory.
This is still very new research, but not implausible. See for example section 3.6 in this paper [1].
> By contrast, there are a lot of cultures (eg. India, the Arab/Muslim world) where marriage is societally more or less obligatory.
An interpretation of that could be that it’s a result of memetics [2], i.e. several successful cultures have invented marriage because it makes them successful. Marriage might significantly increase social stability at all scales. For an interesting discussion about these kind of arguments from cultural evolution, see this blog article [3].
[1] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.6231.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
[3] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/07/the-argument-from-cultu...
1. If all women mated with the same small group of genetically-gifted men, there would be much less gene-mixing and variation in their offspring. Not good for evolution.
2. Monogamy was invented because it takes a lot of time/effort to bring up human offspring (typically 18-21 years :-)). Mothers need a guarantee that fathers will be around to provide for the children.
2. As far as I know this is not fully known yet. It is conceivable that the offspring did just fine in polygamous relationships or just inside the secure environment that the pack provides. There is, for example, some evidence that intensive mothering is ineffective [1]. Among Great Apes the upbringing of the young is commonly shared between the members of the pack and the identity of the father is unknown. Moreover, consider that the importance of education only became really significant within the past 100-50 years, or so, but the concept of marriage in Western culture is much older than that [2].
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12170/abstra...