Online Dating and the Death of the 'Mixed-Attractiveness' Couple
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
From speaking to people who use Tinder (I settled down some years ago, so my experience of online dating was limited to OKCupid and PoF which were big back then), that the traditional route of finding a future spouse is still open, and Tinder is for hook-ups, one night stands, short relationships or maybe finding "friends with benefits" type relationships.
None of them are thinking they're going to find their future spouse on Tinder, that would be a nice bonus. Tinder is an app for getting laid.
When I was single and I went to a bar because I wanted to get laid (and I'm prepared to admit I was shallow enough to want to do this on occasion), my search parameters were very, very different than when I decided I wanted to settle down and find somebody to share my life with.
I don't think I'm unusual in this.
This article takes a slim premise and develops a hypothesis as fact that is too large a burden for it: that because on Tinder people are making flash judgements based on attractiveness, long-term relationships will change in their fundamental structural nature as relates to attractiveness.
This is nonsense. Tinder is an asynchronous singles bar.
It's the same behaviour that has been going on for hundreds - perhaps thousands - of years, but you can raise the bar of what you're looking for in terms of attractiveness if you yourself are attractive because you are not time-bound to last orders at the bar, and you are less likely to drop inhibitions because you are hopefully not constantly drunk whilst using it.
Sure, people might get married after meeting on Tinder, just as they do after a hook-up from meeting drunk in a bar. But falling in love at work or based on a long social relationship is not suddenly going to stop happening because of Tinder.
As someone engaged to someone I met on Tinder, and I met a lot of attractive, relationship-minded women, Tinder is just far and away the most efficient way to meet attractive women. Even if you're looking for a relationship, the idea of placing any weight in elaborately written profile statements (which often tell you far less than 10 seconds in front of a person) and sending messages to random women on OK Cupid seems like a waste of time. Tinder takes all of the most awkward "breaking the ice" parts of looking for a hook-up OR a partner and turns them into a fun little swipe game.
I'll also add that most women I met on Tinder weren't above a hook-up but not-so-subtly had a relationship on the agenda, and that this affects guys behavior. If you sleep with an attractive, compatible woman a few times, it's not unheard of to start to form a friendship, at which point most (not all) guys in our society start to blanche at the idea of her doing the same with other partners. There's also the fact that for many of us, hook-up sex isn't even the best sex. So there's a natural draw to exclusivity.
Men might try to use Tinder for hook-ups, but the higher quality female users sort out male users who project this image. I would 100% rather swipe right on a bald guy with a picture of him dancing with his niece at a wedding than with a muscular 25-year old taking a shirtless selfie in a dirty bathroom mirror.
I think that's what the original article gets wrong. Men who can signal their potential as a good mate on Tinder get matched with higher quality women, even those who are more attractive than them.
I am very relationship-minded, but after having a couple of very long-term relationships that began online, I am seeking some damn serendipity for the next relationship. The thought of women swiping (either direction) in response to some fleeting half-glimpse mostly based on how well I could choose photos that overstate my attractiveness is seriously a distressing idea.
The shift in the way people perceive online dating stresses me out. In general it makes me feel that I would not be considered or evaluated in serendipitous real-life encounters, because everyone has filed away "dating" to be "that thing I screen for on Tinder." People you meet in random circumstances, and who might strike up a conversation about going on a date, are now universally panned, perhaps because there is a risk factor with meeting a stranger that way that feels mitigated on a platform like Tinder. But whatever it is, it means that non-empty, substantive, 3-D interactions out in the real world are heavily discounted compared to what I really feel are hollow, checkout-line-candy-bar low-substance representations of our selves (e.g. Tinder profile, OKCupid profile) ...
I'm very secure with being alone, so I think my only realistic hope is that later on, maybe when I am 35 or maybe when I am 40, some single women in the age range I am seeking will stop viewing it this way, and someone they happen to meet when they are out doing something will again be evaluated as a possible partner. I've more or less resigned myself to being alone and missing out on sexual opportunities between now and then. I don't consent to being evaluated the Tinder way ... and I'm just gonna go ahead and keep on not consenting to that.
I can only speak about the male perspective on this ... but I imagine the same would be true for females, except that it seems likely that a higher proportion of male Tinder users are seeking casual sex. As a result, something like Tinder is well-suited to women who either do want casual sex, or who want to screen against people seeking only that. It doesn't seem to offer reciprocal utility for a male in my situation.
I think I'd feel less stressed if everyone was just using Tinder for casual sex.
It's probably just torschlusspanik anyway O_o ...
What an awesome word! TIL that it's German for 'gate-shut-panic', [1] or 'fear that time is running out' apparently. Literally the feeling that medieval peasants had when the castle gates were closing for an upcoming onslaught by enemies.
Also, consider how scripted and industrialized the quest for "serendipity" actually was - for most people, it amounted to an otherwise boring trawl through bars often devoid of anyone attractive to you.
it's just too much work, for not enough payoff, and i'm also too picky about my mates. i found that the women i attracted really didn't add much into my life, nor did the actual companionship. i found it to be much like a 2nd job to maintain a relationship and the expectations that go along with it. i already have a job, i don't need a second one. maybe that's my problem, but it is what it is.
i plan on retiring somewhere cheap and warm in my 40s or early 50s and not really bothering with mortgage or family or anything.
personally i think a lot of guys are like this, they just don't talk about it because the social expectation of career/family/mortgage is too strong.
No, this isn't true at all for females (I have no idea about males, I don't look at men's profiles). Women who are 30+ on Tinder are NOT looking for casual sex. source: looking through probably thousands of women's profiles in the 30-45 age range.
I'm really getting sick of these meme about Tinder being for hook-ups. It's only the 18-25 crowd that's like that. Stop generalizing the entire adult population based on what college kids are doing.
If you like having lots of women around, this same concept works outside of apps, in the physical world.
Yes, it is distressing if you aren't interested in doing that. People eventually want the luxury of not being judged this way while having the emotional attachment to someone.
I don't have the experience of being a man on Tinder, but I can tell you from my experience that most men don't market themselves well. My approach is for guys to show what makes them unique, via text and pictures.
As for the arguments above, 1) about how girls say they don't like muscle selfies, and then do like them, or 2) about how girls don't like guys with dogs--honestly, its each to their own. I think its better to display things that are reflective of your personality than to show pictures designed to impress girls. So if you and your dog are inseparable, show that--they girls who like cats will find someone else, and you'll find your dog-lover.
> I don't have the experience of being a man on Tinder
I think this is the fatal flaw. I'd value the advice of a man who looks like me who has managed to be successful on Tinder 100x over any woman's. He has faced the same challenges as I, you have not. It's the same as talking to a white person about racism, or trying to discuss gender privilege with a man. The privileged can speculate on the difficulties of the less privileged, but has never felt them. The gulf in life experience has an enormous effect on quality of advice.
that's traditionally what it's been for. The "long term relationship" crowd has literally every other dating app out there, but so many of them flooded onto Tinder to "just give it a try" that it changed things.
"but the higher quality female users sort out male users who project this image"
That comes across as kind of... snobby?
"maybe a dog or picture of you doing something you are good at (i.e. surfing, dancing)."
you'd be surprised how many other women complain about guys doing just that in photos.
No, that's what it was for, and still is for, for the 18-25 crowd. When the older crowd started using it, their interest was different.
>The "long term relationship" crowd has literally every other dating app out there, but so many of them flooded onto Tinder to "just give it a try" that it changed things.
No, it was the 25+ and especially 30+ crowd flooding onto it that changed things.
The reason they like it is because Tinder works better for both men and women. Men hate traditional dating sites because they spend all kinds of time looking through profiles, then writing messages, only to get no response. Women get overwhelmed on those sites by all the messages from men they have zero interest in. Tinder solves this problem by forcing both parties to respond affirmatively in order for communication to proceed.
>you'd be surprised how many other women complain about guys doing just that in photos.
I have no idea what you're complaining about here. I mainly look at 30-45 women, and they love pictures of men with dogs, and frequently say they'll swipe right just for a picture of a man with a dog. Sucks for me because I like cats and not dogs, but oh well. And women typically love dancing, so that's not going to repel them either. What they do complain about is shiftless selfies, selfies in the car, selfies in the bathroom, headless torsos, and pictures of the guy with a bunch of women.
I'll take the criticism on labeling females who are looking for long term relationships as "high quality." I'm not judging anyone's motives. But I will stand by the sentiment that people are sorting for matches that meet their goals, and many women have #relationshipgoals.
The women who complain about guys doing things in their photos don't have to match with those guys. They can match with non-dancers, non-surfers.
This sounds too much like the stereotypical stuff women want and less like actual things a individual would consider worth while.
Also, regarding the shirtless selfie. It's highly effective for men who have muscles: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of-profile.... This is in line with the old male chestnut "what women say they want is not what they want," women strongly side toward only vocalizing preferences that reflect well upon them.
Like you, I've had much better luck with OkCupid, which makes it distressing that the online dating population in general seems to be shifting from OkCupid type sites to Tinder type ones.
Having a six-pack reflects a certain kind of lifestyle and certain values. Being witty in a profile or conversation or showing pictures of you engaging in things that are meaningful to you convey a different set of values. I don't know your experience, but I do believe that showing your personality via any dating app delivers better results.
However, I don't get many responses or matches, but I think that's mostly because of my distance. I only look for women who live over an hour from me, because that's where all the desirable women live, but they don't seem to be interested in dating a man that far away. So I guess I'm stuck being single until I can relocate myself closer.
My issue with dating apps is that they're too efficient. Our attractiveness fluctuates dramatically based on context. If we're doing something we love, doing something interesting, or exhibiting a particular behavior or trait, we can be far more attractive than any five curated photos will show. And vice versa.
Dating apps remove all contextual variety and flatten us out. And in that case, "efficiency" is actually inefficient.
I think this is both true and not true. A suspicion I have (and I'm sure there's got to be research on this) is that a lot of people interested in casual dating/hooking up on Tinder and/or in bars are unconsciously looking for a long term mate. In some ways this is a very effective strategy, since you're cycling through a large number of potential mates to find one who meets some kind of acceptability threshold. I read somewhere (sorry can't find the reference), that extroverted, high frequency daters ended up in happier long term relationships simply because they had more selection, which on the face of it seems to make sense.
You definitely can find someone in your late 20s if you have little relationship experience. But you won't be able to make an informed choice and will miss a lot of red flags.
Some of the similarities are insane, like the laser like focus on demographic membership, first impressions, ageism, all the way down to stereotypical trivialities like wailing "there's no good ones left out there" despite obviously living in a sea full of fish.
I'm not sure if its baked into the cake because of something as simple and obvious as the rather extreme gender ratios in HR and Programming bleeding thru into the business processes, or both rituals come from the same larger culture so naturally human selection processes would be similar, or of there's a third more elaborate, probably more interesting, explanation.
I don't think demographic membership and age are invalid criteria when trying to find someone to marry and raise children with. Different demographics have different cultures, and different cultures have different ideals of what is good and bad, how to raise children &c. Age is rather pertinent if one wishes to have children. Even if one wishes to marry and not have children, culture fit is pretty important (and age determines a heck of a lot about culture!).
> wailing "there's no good ones left out there" despite obviously living in a sea full of fish.
In both dating & hiring, the issue is not so much that there are no good options, but that sieving the wheat from the chaff is incredibly difficult. In both cases, so far as I can tell, it's an unsolved problem (or possibly it's solved but we don't like the solutions: I've not quite made up my mind).
Mainly the result of societal pressure or expectations. Being a 33 year-old man, never married. That's "normal". If I were a woman, people would be asking me when I was going to get married and have kids (very much depends on area, but this is not at all uncommon). As a 33 year-old man, it's also not thought of as strange for me to date women in their early-to-mid 20s. The same is not true for women my age.
Then there's also just how people tend to rate attractiveness, which is something that really matters in a lot of these online dating systems. Men are generally viewed as (physically) attractive at higher ages than women are. A few wrinkles on a guy, some gray. That makes him "distinguished". You don't here people saying that about women as often.
The age range and feature-sets for what makes women attractive (again, this is emphasizing first impression attraction) are much narrower than for men.
Yes, there are people who use Tinder for hookups. People use OKCupid for hookups. Match for hookups. That has not even remotely been the desire of the women I've met on Tinder.
I see this all of the time, but how often do you think the author sees it too and consciously or unconsciously brushes it off as, "they must not actually be together." This article is like intellectual white-nighting, though not directly offering to save any girls - it's implying that the author knows better than the women whom are caving in to the wrong stimuli via "online dating."
This is also a denial of sex statistics. If this new environment is keeping you ugly men from getting laid more today than you could yesterday, then who are all the ugly women banging? Otherwise, the author needs to claim that attractive men are actually getting laid more, while unattractive men are getting laid less or not at all. I don't see any evidence that less attractive men together have worse access to women in general than they had before. If anything, physical attractiveness of masculinity has decreased in some female's selection criteria over a long period of time due to the fact that a man's ability to physically defend himself and his family has become less necessary. Furthermore, studies have shown that the use of birth control causes women to be attracted to different (more feminine) men than they would otherwise - a side effect not often discussed or listed on the contraceptive package inserts.
Personally I have no experiences with it, but in my circle I see tinder being used as a dating app.
I mean if you think about it, it's an online dating platform that provides nothing more than a few pictures and a sentence as a basis for decision making. It's designed to allow for fast selection of people based solely on appearance. This is backed up by the fact that there's no profile text displayed when you're swiping...all you see is a picture of the person. If you want to view their actual profile, you need to click their picture, which hardly anyone does.
This is unlike other dating sites where you have to take a personality test, provide a detailed description of your interestest, etc...
However, like someone else said, many people go there for hookups, but they are actually seeking a longer term relationship whether they like to admit it or not. Some are probably looking for hookups maybe with the possibility of a longer term relationship. Additionally, this is going to come off as sexist, but I feel that there's a large percentage of girls on there who aren't looking for anything at all other than attention. This is particularly true for attractive girls. Hell, who wouldn't love to have people constantly telling them they're beautiful? I've even talked to a few attractive girls who use Tinder "because it's funny". For guys, I will go out on a limb and say that 90% of guys on Tinder are looking for some action.
EDIT: Just to add, keep in mind that age plays a huge role here. I am 25 years old, and many of my friends are in the 20-23 year old range. I have a feeling that the average age of the commenters here is slightly higher, which could explain why so many people don't agree with Tinder being used for hookups. There's a big difference between a 35 year old and a 21 year old when it comes to maturity in dating.
On Tinder getting a match is really just a first minor step.
There is one flaw. Usally it just happens that you find the one. A person doesn't go "Oh I am getting married now let me find that person I want to marry."
My Mom: "Careful who you date since you could end up falling in love with them. AKA Don't date people you wouldn't want to marry"
In the gay community (male at least), tinder is more relationship-oriented than your description (because there are already many other apps for hooking up).
I like the idea of being able to filter people too, and I find I can tell a lot about people from their OKC profile. The problem, however, is that OKC is basically a big waste of time because everyone desirable has moved to Tinder, and the few decent women on OKC don't respond because they get too many messages, and I end up spending way too much time writing messages with zero return. With Tinder, I don't have to waste my precious time 1) reading through a profile to see if this is someone I should spend time writing, and 2) writing a long, thoughtful message, only to get no response. If a woman matches me on Tinder, there's a decent chance she's actually going to respond. It's probably something like 33% chance I'll get a response on Tinder to a match. On OKC, it's probably less than 1%. If that means I have to spend a little more time text-chatting to learn about them because the Tinder profiles are so sparse, that's still a giant time savings for me.
And further to the point, his observation does not change if you find and replace 'tinder' with whatever app you DO use for hooking up.
Not only the idea that Tinder is majority used for hook-ups, but the idea that people have been having casual hook ups for hundreds or thousands of years, and mostly falling in love through work or long term social relationships. You don't have to look very far in time or geography to see societies that don't work anything like that. Arranged marriages, gender segregated schooling, lack of women in the workplace until relatively recently.
And FWIW, within my social circles, Tinder is frequently used to find serious (as opposed to casual) dates. I have just moved in with my girlfriend who I met on Tinder.
It's baseless and directly contradicts the data in the article, with no evidence outside of a personal experience with Tinder.
This is the most aggravating thing, even beyond the content of his comment and the way that it implicitly insults people who are trying to use Tinder for more than hookups: people see an app/phenomenon like Tinder and make a quick simplistic judgement based on what they want to see and their moral biases, and then make sweeping pronouncements like that.
Consider this: at least in the bar you have your chance to make a good impression. In online dating you're one click away from being ignored forever.
Hm. So, how come average and below-average looking people with good personalities have stable and happy long-term relationships after thirty, when gorgeous and sexy party animals and drama queens (of any gender and sexual orientation) keep marrying, divorcing, and end up being mostly single after 40?
There's some observational bias at play. You notice the cases where the guy (usually) has "outkicked his coverage" and you may notice the very attractive singles and wonder about it. You don't notice the plain singles or the perfectly matched couples, but you notice the woman in the red dress from the Matrix.
Second, some people make a conscious decision to have a stable relationship. I'm not saying it's 100% choice, but it's well over half IMO. I sought [and found] a partner who came from a stable family, who was educated and valued education, who wanted kids, and who wanted a stable relationship. Did that contribute to me being one of "those people"? Probably.
Since there are two sides to the transaction, the number of people marrying more attractive people is exactly equal to the number marrying less attractive people.
A physics analogy would be that no matter how strong the theoretical argument, its widely observed that over many human accessible orders of magnitude in mass of the object, gravity makes things fall at the same rate. Leading to the (actually inaccurate) theory that the force of gravity has no correlation with the masses of the objects.
Given that there's observationally no correlation between two variables and not much theory either, then observed variation in one variable is by the above, unsurprisingly not correlated to the other variable.
That's exactly my point, so I'm surprised that you phrase your comment as if you're arguing with me.
The article is not about how hot people find eternal stable relationships, but how they have more chances to get into relationships.
That you noticed them often break an older relationship and get into a new one corroborates the article, doesn't negate it.
And if we take away the stigma of divorce, which is supposed to mean some kind of personal failure, that's good for them.
It could also entail "ugly" people also wanting to divorce/play around more, but as they fear not having the same chances, they play it safe (and miserably).
So, yeah, it might not be that a less attractive person will "know no one ever" (absolute), but it will probably be that they'll have limited chances to get to know other people, and when they do, they'll tend to stick with them.
Source: I'm helping a startup in the Tinder ecosystem. Learned a lot about people's habits.
People are using it for numerous purposes. And there are also other apps. All in all, online dating is also for serious matters.
Well, I'm looking at the chart included in the article that shows all of those means of meeting someone in free-fall, while meeting people online rises exponentially. That data comes from the linked study:
http://asr.sagepub.com/content/77/4/523
So, where is your data that this drastic shift isn't actually happening?
only about 85% of the time?
My experience is that this is a giant load of crap, sorry. Every woman I see on there explicitly says "no hookups", all the ones I've met are not looking for hookups, they're looking for serious dates.
I'm guessing you're under 25 years old. In that age range, Tinder is indeed for hookups. For people in their mid-30s and up, Tinder is absolutely not, except for the very occasional swinger couple I see there.
What better method for meeting people do you propose? Go look at the article: online dating is now the #3 (IIRC) most popular method, just behind bars and through friends. Meeting through friends is falling fast, and all the other methods have gone down the tubes: church, school, through family, etc. In a society where people are more mobile (i.e. they move around the country with job changes, they don't live in the same place they grew up or went to college), are less religious, online dating makes the most sense for anyone who isn't a big drinker.
I can only think of two better ways to meet people online: a referral-approval system for friends-of-friends, and actual interaction in a group setting, but online - like Facebook groups or more old-school chat rooms. Both have their problems, but they also rely on good old human interaction to determine compatibility. Whether a friend thinks you're both a good match, or whether you just like someone's snarky commentary on a forum, you're using your human heuristics to find a match instead of computerized heuristics. It makes more sense to me since you're trying to date a human and not a computer.
Dating requires physical attraction, and a way to meet people you're attracted to. Tinder satisfies that, just as going to a bar does.
>To do more than hook up, one must determine compatibility, and Tinder provides nothing but the most shallow and difficult tools to accomplish this.
Tinder provides better tools for this than walking up to a stranger in a bar. A person in a bar doesn't carry a sign around saying a few things about them, such as that they like dogs or cats, follow a particular religion, aren't interested in casual sex, or whatever they choose to advertise about themselves. You can only find that out by starting a conversation with them and asking them these things. On Tinder, there's at least an opportunity to put these things out there, and then someone looking at your profile is able to screen you out.
>You'd have better luck walking around with a list of your favorite interests and biggest deal-breakers taped to your back.
No, you wouldn't, unless you happen to know a place that's packed full of hundreds and hundreds of singles of the sex and age range that you're looking for, and isn't limited to a self-selected group of people that may not be the group you're interested in (for instance, people who drink a lot).
>I can only think of two better ways to meet people online: a referral-approval system for friends-of-friends
That's pretty lousy because it limits you to people within your social circle. If you don't have a lot of friends, or you've moved, that isn't going to help you. A lot of people simply do not make a significant number of new friends after they're 30+ years old.
What would be better is something more like OKCupid, where you're basically forced to create a pretty extensive bio for yourself, which people can use better to look for a good match. The problem with this is that people have been abandoning OKC and other traditional sites for Tinder (IME), and for good reason: the traditional sites let anyone message anyone, and as a result, women get bombarded with message from men they're not interested in, and men waste all their time writing thoughtful messages to women who never respond. Tinder fixes that by only allowing people to message each other if they both "like" each other. Men still waste time writing messages that never get responses, but now it's more like a response rate of 25-50% rather than a response rate of 0.5%. And women seem to like it a lot more too, because they don't get overwhelmed with messages (this happened to my ex-wife after we split: she had to disable her OKC profile because she was just getting too many responses).
If you're able to meet eligible people through your social circle, great. But that doesn't work for a large and growing segment of the population.
Honestly, you sound like a college student to me. We older people don't have time for the stuff you talk about.
Are you 'shallow' when you eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, sleep when tired?
> In this case, the data is clear that men’s preferences are much more homogenous than women’s. “There are women who 95% of men say yes to, and there’s nothing like that for men,” says McLeod. “A man is really attractive if 40% of women say yes.”
So women have more complicated taste than men. But there are probably certain clusters of women (based on demographics, location, etc.) who'd find a specific look attractive at a rate higher than 40%.
There'd be a "George Clooney cluster" and a "Leonardo DiCaprio cluster". I just need to find the sndean cluster.
(And the opposite: people with wealth and status that only attract cheap gold-digger types, and women in general could not care less for).
Wealth, I believe, is only interesting in this equation to the extend it confers status, or at least coincides with it. Beta-males/low-status guys who win the lottery typically gets taken advantage of, rather than swooned over.
Not always. It can be just the local barman or barista that women swoon for. Or just a guy in the office, with the same rank as 30 others. It can even be an unemployed bum. Heck, women went wild over some felon last year:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/hot-convict-jeremy-mee...
What it gets down to is: there is such a thing as male good looks, it's not all status and wealth. And Clooney and Pitt etc certainly have those too.
I recommend The Evolution of Desire or The Red Queen. Both fascinating.
The men that 95% of women would say yes to aren't available on dating apps, because they don't need to be - almost by definition.
Those women 95% of men are saying yes to are obviously not compatible with all of those men. But some men don't care about compatibility, they care about sex.
I also believe parent of parent, and OKTrends, is arguing there isn't a single man out there that "95% of women would say yes to" to begin with.
Self confidence plays a big role too, which goes with funny. Not "jerk self confidence", but "talk to you comfortably self confidence".
Also, I don't rely on online dating. I'm not a "player" by any stretch of the imagination, but life is too short to wonder what a woman would have said, so if I see a woman I like, I talk to her and ask her out if its appropriate. Politely and unintrusively. You risk nothing except rejection and stand to gain a whole lot more. Life gives to people who ask.
I am a funny guy. I have been told multiple times by different people that I am the funniest person they have ever met. I have been told several times by different people in different contexts that I should be a stand-up comedian. All these were spontaneous and not said by anyone who wanted or needed anything from me.
I also used to be morbidly obese. Now I am in good shape.
The idea that funny is attractive in isolation (in the same way that a pretty face is on a woman) is, based on my experience, entirely, hilariously untrue.
Just one man's life :)
When you're just funny, there is a general lowering of respect for such people. People wanna hang out with you, but they don't respect you as much.
What you need to be is to add 'cockiness' to your personality. Again being just cocky is bad because then you just come out as a dick.
The killer combination is to get the right amount of cockiness + humor.
I suspect this to be true. Not in the sense that, from my experience, people see a comedian (pro or not) as somehow "lesser", but that some people only seem to joke. It becomes tiresome. I have a colleague like this. Interaction with him is a series of music references or jokes and poor accent imitations. Carrying on a serious conversation, as has happened sometimes, is great until he starts cutting up again.
One of the problems with being told "you're so ____" is that people often start trying to emphasize ____. You've already got that, now work on the rest of yourself. Autoflanderization should be avoided.
People laugh together to show group bonding. Naturally you are more likely to laugh at the jokes of somebody you want to be close to.
My gym has plenty of men with amazing physiques who are absolutely awful with women. It also has a pudgy guy who's amazing.
What does this mean?
Its kind of TRP dog whistle-ish, which is neither good nor bad.
Can you perform your joke or pickup line or whatever in an appealing manner with confidence and consistently without giggling or overreacting to your audience facial expression or generally looking anxious.
If you abstract out all the sex and the psychological rationalization behind it, its something like the audience would not find you flaky if you were presenting at a professional meeting. The presenter might be wrong or the audience might be completely uninterested, but they would describe it as presented well, by most common standards of presenting well. There's generally a side dish of smooth recovery from minor bumps in the road, which some people would consider a self evident part of the definition of "presenting well".
Originally, way back, the concept comes from the mix of the mental side of disciplined holding your frame of mind and the physical side of maintaining a strong frame when ballroom dancing or lifting.
I've witnessed women ignore a funny guy with a good personality or body for a boring "beta acting" guy with a highly attractive face.
The articles point is that the longer you know someone, the less their attractiveness matters. I suspect that slope starts rather quickly.
it's amazing how good looking your face becomes when you're in shape and have a decent amount of muscle mass with definition.
BULLSHIT. I was very self conscious of my big nose but Asian women love it! The first time I heard 'I like your nose! it's so nice' I couldn't believe it.
I had to turn off notifications for Tinder because it's so active after 11:00PM.
Many male models have huge or badly broken noses (see Stone Island campaigns for the latter). They're still considered handsome. I guy who lived on my street has an extraordinary long face, and he's a now D&G model.
Exercising and having good skin puts you in front of 90% of men. I'd agree algorithm might say smaller noses are, on the whole, more handsome, but you can still be considered handsome having a huge nose.
After being married for the period when most people were finding partners, I divorced and started dating again. I realized that I wasn't very good at small-talk, and I was having trouble meeting women.
The HN comments here are full of suggestions, but they are isolated and not systematic. By now I'm sure that everyone is aware of the "pick-up artist" community on the internet. I'm not a fan of the idea of learning how to impress as many women as one can in order to have sex with someone you really don't care about, but while that almost underground community was still nascent I read about it and decided that it was something interesting enough to investigate. I traveled to southern California and met Mystery, the person described in Neil Strauss's (at the time) new book, The Game.
I hung out with them for two days and was invited to go out one evening with them. There were around a dozen guys in the group and it was a very fascinating evening. No, I didn't pick up a girl in a club and get laid, but talking to the guys was very interesting it did change things for me. Most of the guys I met were like me. They were lonely and wanted a serious girlfriend and had always had trouble approaching and striking up conversations with stangers.
I was always able to talk to people from my field or other academically inclined people, but I learned to be more interesting to others and to understand attraction from both sides. It helped my confidence tremendously and consequently I found more women attracted to me.
That's a long introduction to my recommendations:
- don't get caught up in the manipulative techniques being promulgated by the recent pick-up experts
- learn more about attraction by reading some of the early stuff talked about by, say, Mystery
- approach more strangers and stike up conversations (you don't need to be online to meet people)
- develop a wider circle of friends
- get out and make your life itself more interesting by finding new interests, this make you interesting to others
- take your company public! Success helps.
Generally, I've found online dating to be a slow, frustrating process. It's much better to simple strike up conversations with people that you find attractive. The time to line up dates online and exchange information and then discover that the person is nothing like their old high school photos is disheartening.
While it's subjective, there are stats from MANY dating sites that show having certain traits (e.g. tall black guy or short Asian woman) will give you an advantage in dating over others (short Asian guy or tall black woman).
Oktrends showed tall guys unequivocally have more sexual partners than short men.
There were countless little things that I learned from hanging out with Mystery and his friends just the one night. For example, they all wore the same style boots to the clubs. Mystery was already tall, but not all of his buddies were. However they all wore boots that had a very thick sole and heels that added a couple of inches to their height. He pointed it out to me.
This was one of the things that I had to overcome while dating.
However, attraction is more complex. Multidimensional factors dominate any single attribute. I've been married for over five years now to a beautiful, vivacious, intelligent, talented, successful and kind wife who towers over me in heels.
And yet in your previous post you wrote, 'I've found online dating to be a slow, frustrating process.' Shouldn't that be 'I found online dating to be a slow, frustrating process'?
Or do women rated a 2 not select men rated a 5?
I came up with this theory because a bafflingly large number of people have shared their opinions on this very matter as it relates to my relationships. In each relationship, a large number of my heterosexual female friends thought I was punching above my weight. Almost all my other friends thought I was at least as attractive, or more attractive, than my SO at the time. At the time, I thought one of two things:
1.) Men, including homosexual men, weight traits differently when it comes to attractiveness.
2.) My behavior towards women was unattractive in some way, e.g. sexist, overly macho, etc.
Both of those things might still be true, but I reconsidered the main cause, because as time went on more and more women that were middle-aged or older would tell me that I was more attractive than my girlfriend.
In any case, I'm personally of the opinion that outsiders' personal tastes shouldn't matter in a relationship. I've found each of my girlfriends very attractive, and they've found me attractive in turn. I don't believe there is a single positive reason that could motivate someone to tell someone else they are either more attractive or less attractive than their partner. Best-case scenario, they completely ignore your input. It strikes me as a way of enforcing normative behavior.
But then when I go into the city on the weekend and start swiping, I get a boatload of matches from much more attractive women, the kind I really do want to date.
It's just like they say in real estate: location, location, location. If you're not a good match or cultural fit for the single women in your area (I'm not), and you're a bit too far for a lot of people to want to bother dating you, the "market" is going to look really bad.
As far as maximizing one's own rating, there are a number of subtle signifiers that can be deployed (though it's unethical to outright lie about yourself) and it helps to not be cliche. And of course, the basic matter of having good photos of oneself. Good lighting, well dressed, taken with a longer focal length than a smartphone camera, etc. (I don't fully understand the effect myself, but longer focal length tends to result in a more flattering photo)
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/6e/77/52/6e7752ec3...
Technically the focal length doesn't do anything- what's really happening is a short focal length results in placing the camera very close to the subject (which gives distorted perspectives) while a long focal length results in the camera far from the subject (which minimizes perspective distortion)
(If only because I want to avoid the "tinwhat?" discussion.)
I'm assuming this was a spell check issue. Stigma is the appropriate word here. Stigmata are these:
A will grant that it's sometimes used in the medical literature to mean "a clear, diagnostic sign of some illness", but the allusion there is to the stigmata of Christianity.
I've never, ever seen it used to mean the plural of stigma as the word is commonly used in English.
In my generation, it comes off as awkward to approach a person in the bar or other social gather and try to start a conversation, but it's completely normal to send a random person a message on Facebook telling them that they're beautiful.
Dancing clubs aren't very common here, but that seems like a great place to socialize.
Maybe it's an age thing or maybe it's a location thing, but I don't know a single person who participates in a dancing club. Most of my peers either play video games in their basement or go to the bar. That's pretty much it.
I live right outside of Philadelphia, BTW.
No, it's not. Please don't do this.
For example, I agree that it's weird to send a random girl a message on Facebook telling her she's beautiful, but it’s far more common amongst 20-25 year olds than approaching someone in person at a social gathering is.
Maybe “completely normal” wasn’t the best way to put it. The point was to show a contrast in how different forms of interaction are perceived amongst the youth these days.
My source for this information is not official but is based off of the stories that girls have told me. It’s not unusual for an attractive girl in the 20-25 y/o range to receive messages from 2-3+ random guys every day.
I feel like there’s a big difference between how people in their late 20’s interact compared with how people in their early 20’s interact. Social media really “took off” around 2007 under most circumstances, which means that people in their late 20’s now would have already been in their late teens and would have already established their methods of interaction.
Now compare this with someone who has grown up with Facebook and MySpace from the time they were 12 years old. It’s a much bigger influence on them.
There have been massive changes in how people interact and it’s all fairly recent. My 33 year old brother was already well into the dating scene by the time _real_ social media even became a thing. Me on the other hand, I caught the trailing edge of it.
Here’s another example:
If you’re in your 30’s and don’t have a Facebook account, it’s not the end of the world (although still unusual). However, if you are 19 years old and don’t have a Facebook account, you will basically fall off of the map.
Anyone that does that in my circle would be considered a weirdo. It's ok on a dating site. Not facebook.
Relevent: https://xkcd.com/642/
Dating crossed with Deal of the Day.
We had long conversations and I had no idea what she looked like for the first month or so, she commented that I hadn't asked for a picture which men normally do straight away, my response was "I enjoy talking to you".
She eventually sent a picture when we arrange to go on a date last week, turns out she is absolutely stunning (not I find her attractive, I mean objectively stunning) and the reason she took her picture off was all the "Hey baby, want sum fuk?" messages she was getting.
Date went well and we are going out again soon, I'm not handsome, I'm pretty average looking except for been in decent physical shape (swimming, cycling and dropping 60lbs will do that), frankly if I'd known what she looks like first I probably wouldn't have sent her a message in the first place figuring I didn't have a chance.
The world is a strange place sometimes.
I'm pretty sure it was this episode https://gimletmedia.com/episode/profiled-season-2-6/
Or, in the least, Tinder could just create a basic setting for only showing "def not looking for a hook-up" profiles.
I've used it for the last four months and have gotten a grand total of... drumroll please one date.
And trust me, I've been really kind to like many women of various interests and ethnicities. I've also been thoughtful in my messaging to women.
Of course this assumes that attractiveness is objective, and purely physical. Which is false in both counts, but it's a simplification as we all know.
I found the referenced article to OkCupid rather interesting. It seems that if you can block people from visually seeing each other, until the actual blind date, then even very attractive women report having a great time with very plain men. So it seems that while people will almost invariably filter and match each other on looks if that option is open (which it usually is these days), but at the end of the day, looks are not important if you can meet in person first.
The output is clear: even random matching has a higher score than all girls (or boys) liking the same boys (or girls).
This is, indeed, a serious problem if you take that people nowadays have access to: 1. An enormous pool of potential partners 2. A lot more information
The .2 is particularly worrisome. It is clear that too much information early in the interaction can actually bring to suboptimal equilibrium. The thing is, when you know everything about somebody you tend to act on your most superficial preferences, getting to know gives you access to a much deeper connection (and a much better choice).
I want a smell-based Tinder. Seriously, most of the girls I met online seemed to have incompatible pheromones.
Unfortunately, specifying smell is not possible, I suppose because of the huge gap in science w.r.t. the olfactory system. This is curious because from an evolutionary perspective smell is the sense that developed before the other senses.
I would legitimately be interested in hearing more about this. It's not something I've consciously experienced. How does this incompatibility manifest?
This is an extraordinary statement that requires extraordinary evidence.
Ran into a guy joining Tinder the other day, he said they were saying the valuation for the company was a billion... :-)
Look at that chart: the main way straight people meet their partners is through friends. In-person meeting pairings vastly outweigh online meeting pairings. Back in the 1940s, people meet through friends, through family, in elementary or high school, or by being neighbors. I shudder to see the rise of "at a bar", but online dating is a huge, huge improvement.
If I remember correctly wealth inequality in couples is becoming rarer and rarer as well. I think that's the article I read about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/upshot/marriages-of-power-...
If they are US only, well, that's why the Safe Harbour law was struck down.
I have specific tastes and somehow I'm bad in writing people on dating sites the "first message".
The only people I met from dating sites wrote me first.
Also, many people look different on photos than in RL.
And some people are only attractive after I talked to them in person for a while.
I still like online dating websites. I find about one person a year online, that I like. Most of those won't become serious relationships, but it's nice to meet new people from outside my filter bubble once in a while.
I find it extremely funny how Indian and Chinese programmers are writing the code (Tinder,OkCupid) thats cucks themselves with Indian and Chinese women sleeping with white guys on Tinder whereas you almost never see the opposite scenario of white girls with Asian men.
Just kidding. I have the same experience as a man. I'm no George Clooney, but I have all of my teeth and consider myself to be "average" looking. That said, I get messages from women who are very unattractive to me (morbidly obese is common).
But I can't knock them for it. Maybe the girls that I message are saying the exact same thing about me. Who knows.
The problem is that there's basically nothing to lose by sending someone a message.
So there is a penalty for swiping right always. All the people claiming that folks should swipe right always and then select from matches were wrong.
I can see the feedback loop going very wrong if how you rate others has a significant impact impact on your own attractiveness score. I don't think it serves Tinder's interests to reward people for swiping left more often -- they benefit when people use their platform, which requires getting matches.
I'm sure Tinder has experimented with penalizing users who always swipe right, but probably not by adjusting the attractiveness nob. Always swiping right doesn't make you any less attractive, but it might suggest you're less likely to engage when someone likes you back. If Tinder is optimizing for maximizing user engagement, this would naturally enter into their pairing algorithm in a different way.
That said, the last thing Tinder wants to do is discourage the hypothetical "super user" who is very attractive, always swipes right and goes on tons of dates.
Because even when "swiping right always" people will filter the obvious non-matches
Especially given Tinder limits amount of right swipes for free plans.
For example, is there any reason to think that typical 25 year olds are looking for the same thing that typical 35 year olds are even on the same site? Or gay people vs. straight people? Or ...
Nobody has an interesting courtship story. It's just a boring "Oh i thought she was hot and I messaged her" kind of thing. I only know 1 couple in their late 20s/early 30s where both partners are truly happy. Everybody else is just stuck in a perpetual mindfuck or is cheating their way to happiness.
I you haven't read "Brave New World" I would highly recommend this book because it shows the society we're becoming.
> It's just a boring "Oh i thought she was hot and I
> messaged her" kind of thing.
You're not Hugh Grant in a romantic comedy, so all that matters is that you're getting the results you want and enjoying the ride.
Online dating doesn't stop you from attending singles night at the roller rink, but it might give you more opportunities to find what you're looking for. That it's your Brave New World seems more indicative of personal self-limiting hangups about what courtship should be vs. what it actually is.
Maybe you just need to expand your social circle. Sounds like you just have a sad sack group of friends.
And there has always been people seeking out long term relationships.
These are often the same people, at different times.
Modern technology hasn't changed human nature, its only enabled efficiencies for those living in large cities.
I know many couples who found each other through online dating and are in it for the long run.
More and more, people seem to mistrust and misunderstand face-to-face communication. Sometimes, they even lack the words to describe a meme or emoji.
For the majority of us, If you talk to a random stranger in a coffee shop/museum/gym, the conversation will be often awkward or reckless.
Facial attractiveness trumps everything else. Women prefer beta guys with a better face to alpha guys with an unattractive face.
There is no game, there is only face.
That and not having aspergers syndrome.
(Link goes to a thread titled "You need a teardrop-shaped inner canthus to be facially aesthetic. No excuses!" and apparently written in all seriousness).
So, real meat market, or virtual meat market, those are the primary gainers.
We live in a very superficial society these days, so it isn't surprising...
Citation needed. Pretty sure physical attractiveness is something both genders can judge pretty well and clearly it plays a role in relationships also because it is something you can influence to a degree which also implies a certain type of behavior.
Checking goolge for hints:
https://www.google.com/search?q=women%20first%20thing%20noti...
It appears that most of the things listed on the first 10 pages of google hits are related to physical look (height, tooth, hands, etc.) and some is related to financial background and taste (clothing for example). I am not sure what does holistic mean in this context though. In my experience women attracted to physical look and self confidence the most, yet I know that sample is not representative. It would be nice if you could back up your comment with data.
High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic equals, while middle- and lower-tier women often marry up. In other words, female CEOs tend to marry other CEOs; male CEOs are OK marrying their secretaries.
Pay attention to the looks on your female friends' faces next time they notice a muscular guy with a six pack jogging down the street and you'll quickly let go of this belief.
Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard (Dax is jacked, but that's not part of his movie persona)
Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis
Katy Perry and Russell Brand
but not Britney Spears and Kevin Federline (from a visual pov) but he was in a different social class.
I don't understand who thought this was a demonstrably true premise. The concept of beauty has been expanded. There's no validation of the attractiveness ladder theory which this article is leveraging up front. Attractiveness does not lend well to that stratification.
I used to get paid to take portraits. I can guarantee some people just don't photograph well. They might be a 10 in person, but a 6 on film. I still haven't figured it out completely. I think current society puts too much importance in what a person looks like in a picture.
In two psychology classes in college, I was told people end up with someone who is attractive as they are, but where I live--well let's just say if a fugley man makes a lot of money, or does someting society affirms him for, he can marry/mate way out of his league. Sit in Mill Valley, or Tiburon, CA on a weekend afternoon and try to figure out what that female saw in that guy. (I'm just speaking for myself. I'm probally wrong. If I offended you, I'm sorry. I will probally still get hammered though.)
It seems to work in a contrarian way for women? I have seen women work so hard to have a powerful career, and money, and the guy is looking at the maid. I don't think it's fair, but I've seen it happen too often. (Don't beat me up over this last sentance--I'm probally wrong, and it's not the least bit politically correct.) I do see it changing a bit. Dependent attractive women are not as desirable as they once were, especially if they use their looks to get ahead, and the guy knows what she's doing.
I gave found the whole mating process screwed up, and steps we get to marriage even worse.
Using a one dimensional picture to weed out potential mates, seems almost as bad as bar hopping. At least with bar hopping, you could weed out the wrong ones pretty quick?
> When was the last time you met a couple where one person was attractive and the other was not?
Hence quoting that at the top of their post. Also some of the confusion here comes from 'attractive' meaning different things: being funny, powerful or well known also make someone attractive. I think the parent poster is right though: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=dax+shepard is not a handsome man.