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Comment by morgtheborg | Hacker News Reader

> Small parties with friends who are verifiably not loud and obnoxious are good, and so are dinner parties.

Seems reasonable. I'm all about being as committed to my personal life as my work and I make those dating apps WORK for me. I am talking 1-2 dates a week when I'm in search mode.

But I met my current SO after I went climbing with my friend and he invited his housemate along. Within a day I knew I was at least somewhat interested, but there was another man partially in my friend group I was interested in. Within three weeks the other man had done something that killed my interest and the climbing man had consistently impressed me.

So I made a move. Tada, two years later we're living together and happy as clams.

There's something to be said for the pre-filter of friends that I find can't be matched yet with online algorithms.

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I agree that friend networks can be a good pre-filter. Unfortunately for me, I live pretty far away from my closest friends, and I may be moving even farther away, so it has been hard. Once I am settled, I will have to invest in finding more friends in order to have the network. It's easy to let the salience of online dating seduce you in this kind of situation though ... but really it's like going for a candy bar when you need a meal.

I find your wording very cute: "the climbing man had consistently impressed me" -- I'm imagining some kind of Tarzan character who happened to be out with you when all sorts of freak occurrences happened that were perfectly suited for climbing: getting a cat out of a tree, getting a ball back for some children, getting back into an apartment when you've locked yourself out.

It's funny, when I read "the climbing man had consistently impressed me" I had a completely different image in my head. Rather than a show-off, I imagined a polite and friendly man, that showed genuine interest in the poster, struck up conversations about interesting topics, etc.

It's quite weird to me that the unusual adjective 'climbing' had no impact on the way you pictured it. Of course your description is more likely the real outcome, but it's a very unlikely immediate picture to have when the person describing it is making use of a bespoke aspect of the person (that he climbs) as the primary means of identifying him.

I just realised that a bunch of people I like are into rock climbing, which might be the reason for the different association I had. Climbers are nice people, in my experience.

I agree, and a number of my grad school friends were into climbing. I would never have identified them as "the climbing man" or "the climbing woman" though, since it was just one aspect of their personality. If someone had introduced one of them to me as "the climbing man" then the climbing stereotype would have obviously had some effect on my perception.

>Within three weeks the other man had done something that killed my interest and the climbing man had consistently impressed me.

If you don't mind me asking, what exactly did the other guy to do kill your interest?

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