Why I will never have a girlfriend (1999)
logological.org
logological.org
"Unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man."
In my experience, an overlooked part of finding a good mate is making yourself into a good candidate for your side of that partnership.
[edited for grammar]
"Even if you found the perfect women, she'd certainly have no interest in you."
---
Speaking of perfect soulmates:
"If I didn't have you, I'd have someone else" by Tim Minchin https://youtu.be/Gaid72fqzNE
So did you feel like you "settled" so to speak? If so, did you ever stop thinking that?
Edit: Further, careless and secura are antonym homonyms modulo literal translation.
Some people find what seems like a perfect job, then after a few years, they get bought out and aren't so perfect anymore.
I played the field until I was in my mid 30s, then settled down. Never been happier. I hope it lasts, and I think it will.
Also, beauty fades pretty quickly. Not only in the object, but in the eye of the beholder. The person is much more important. Also, it sucks when everyone hits on your girlfriend / wife all the time.
Truth! After you have two kids, the character of your spouse matters much more than anything else. :-)
Let me rephrase it. When you were looking for a relationship, did you have a set of expectations that you ultimately gave up on fulfilling? Or did you try to set out with no expectations at all?
It just sounds like a bad cost/benefit ratio to me. But then again, I don't like people in general and I don't seem to be as dependent on social contact as the average person. I might value the benefits much lower than others.
> ... [in intelligence] I will settle for someone a mere one standard deviation above the normal
Yeah, that would do it. Nothing to learn here.
At least he's not that picky about how picky his girl friends should be.
I'd never thought of it that way before - thanks for the insight!
Also, not all gay people are monogamous! That makes things complicated if you are. Your dating pool dwindles smaller and smaller.
> Every day I think about how lucky I am to have met the guy I am with, now 15 years ago.
Good on ya. :)
Haha wow I never realized that aspect. Complicated! Ahwell it still all boils down to trust I guess :-)
Forget men vs women, you know what people like? They like it if you're actually interested in them and listen to them and don't have a hidden agenda and aren't silently judging them.
You can apply this to a lot, not just romance. I mean, there are other approaches to making yourself desirable (like be really rich, ridiculously good looking, famous &c) but it's notable that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both seem to be actually interested in what their wives think.
You might also like from this author: "Mastering navel gazing, and justifying your paralyzing inaction"
You admit these impressive women would never like you. Perhaps, but then improve yourself.
Choosing to go without if you can't have the very best is an excuse. Do you live in the street because you don't have a mansion? Do you die because you can't afford to dine like the upper crust? Why is it that for a partner you suddenly need the very best?
Most people work to improve themselves, yet we do not expect anyone to be perfect, except here. Most people have faults. Some faults make them less dateable than other faults. Some they may not care that much about or don't know how to fix. After all, the average person falls short of many standards up until they die, despite all the attempts at improvement. It should surprise no one that a subset will always be that falls short, or they choose a different set to focus on. Yet we demand that such a subset does not exist when the subject of dating comes up?
> Why is it that for a partner you suddenly need the very best?
I don't know, maybe because a partner is one of the most influential people in your life and they can absolutely make or break it? They don't have to be the very best, but I don't understand why, in effectively every other area, people are often commended for being picky, but here, you are perceived better if you have anyone, anyone at all, even if it crashes and burns and results in some ruined lives one is responsible for (children).
Dating is not special. It doesn't get a pass. Some people just don't like the risk. Some don't assess well or don't know how. In any other area, we consider that the person's prerogative.
This all smells of giving the dating scenario incredibly heavy weight for no other reason but that nature programmed us to feel that way. I would like to think we can think beyond that, and also get rid of all the surrounding vitriol, judgment, and gossip.
You'll certainly do better in the self-improvement department if you avoid falling into the trap of: "I don't fit a certain arbitrary and hard to assess requirement, therefore I suck". I don't agree with the author's, err, parameters, but this is the one part I agree with, and I wouldn't be surprised he's happier for it. Nothing good ever comes out of thinking like that.
Your love is one in a million (One in a million) You couldn't buy it at any price (Can't buy love) But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves Statistically, some of them would be equally nice (Equally nice) Or maybe not as nice but, say, smarter than you Or dumber but better at sport or tracing I'm just saying (I really think that I would) Probably (Have somebody else)
I don't think I agree with it - but it seems like far more useful dating advice than what this guy is trying to achieve. Select from the pool of people who are also attracted to you - not all people.
How long will it take until that happens? (I'm not asking for opinion, this is a math problem;-)
You don't meet random people within the general population, you meet random people within your environment. If you are above the normal for intelligence its almost certain that your environment is going to be filled above normal intelligence women, and to a lesser extent its likely the same in terms of attractiveness.
Also his standards are too high (especially on physical attraction - yeesh!)...
But yeah, two standard deviations for physical attraction is too high.
Yeah, two standard deviations is too high, even if attractiveness could be modelled as a normal distribution. That's the top 2.5%. Even one standard deviation is the top 15.5%, which is very picky. I don't think the average person is all that terrible.
One standard deviation for intelligence is probably ok. IQ scores are actually based on the normal distribution, where the mean is 100 and one standard deviation is 15 points. So while I don't think 115 is a very high bar, you probably shouldn't ask your date to do an IQ test.
There's a whole area of maths devoted to finding the ideal partner and related topics, called optimal stopping theory. The Secretary Problem is particularly relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
"I don't want the world, I just want your half."
So I switched jobs and for a couple of years I didn't run into him regularly like when we worked together but we still lived in the same part of St. Pete and one night I'm out walking my dogs and wind up in his neighborhood and there's his house for sale...it was a Thursday night and I get home and call (cell phones existed but had yet to become ubiquitous) him and am like "What the hell is going on?"
And John had met a woman who had two kids and lived in Birmingham and was getting married on Saturday and moving and taking a grunt position at a firm in Alabama and that was almost twenty years ago and their third child is going to college.
Once you grasp that and accept that women do no operate, think and behave like male; your success with them will sky rocket.
I think grouping people by gender is not very helpful. There are always exceptions and usually quite a few. But maybe that is just so in my social circles.
Isn't it pretty well-known that mating behavior is different between genders in humans (well-know == observed scientifically in this case)?
Once you realize this and figure out how much you are worth (sexually), dating will really become easier.
[0] https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dat...
"As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable."
If you meet someone at a party, maybe he's a friend of a friend, you talk to him for a while, you might think "He seems like a reasonably handsome guy!" You see the same guy as a profile picture, out of a sea of 20 others messaging you at the same time, and you're just mentally primed for reasons to reject people, rather than accept them. You're more likely to think "Ugh, stupid haircut. 1/5 stars. Would not date"
So I don't think that women have unrealistic expectations of beauty, in general everyday life, it's just that the motivations and mindset is so much different on dating sites.
This is a pretty bold assertion. On what do you base it?
Seems to me that the average woman is average looking.
I agree. Add to that list different cultures, societies, levels of wealth, occupations, upbringing, personality quirks, fetishes, randomness...
The expectation of finding someone who "operates" like you is tough to meet.
For years I was looking for another engineer (I have a bachelor's in general engineering, masters in SE), or at least someone mathematically/scientifically inclined. Ambitious, constantly working on personal projects, likes to travel, go to conferences, pick up new hobbies, etc.
Now I'm married to a social worker who's had the same job for 12 years, dropped out of music school, didn't have a passport (never even considered getting one), doesn't know math beyond basic algebra, often sleeps until noon, and generally doesn't have any hobbies besides "hanging out with friends."
But you know what? I love my husband, I think we work really well together :) He was really the first guy I ever dated after I decided to get out of my bubble and stop looking for "male versions of me" and I wouldn't change anything for the world!
I was lucky in that when I met the woman who became my wife, neither of us was looking for anything other than to get laid. Sounds crass, but I think it helped me avoid the "look for a female version of me" thing, because we are nothing like each other.
After spending the first few months pretending that we weren't, in fact, falling for each other, we gave into it and 15+ years later, still working on staying together :-)
...
I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at least two standard deviations above the norm.
A) Loosen up
B) Do a very thorough search all over the planet and be prepared to move to Duesseldorf OR
C) Join a monastery."
http://web.archive.org/web/20100214192633/http://www2.warwic... (seems like the original has been removed)
Anyway, I think the author should talk to women more frequently, about things not related to work.
On the other hand, if you're already publishing cringey articles about your love life, perhaps the calculus shifts.
Note the article's from 1999.
Tinder only works if you are in the top 10% of males. If you are short (anything under 6 ft nowadays), a minority, fat, etc using tinder is an invitation to get your self esteem crushed.
There's no place for the average or below average men in the dating scene anymore. It's all about height,Wealth,penis size and overall looks.
Is Tristan Miller well known? Is he a leader in his field? Is he wealthy or otherwise successful?
http://www.girlsaskguys.com/sexual-behavior/a22977-girls-on-...
It's also the same with "beauty". Even industries that hire primarily based on beauty (modeling, acting etc) have widely differing criteria based on their own niche in the marketplace. American models are quite different to British models, for e.g. The French magazines require a different look to, say, German magazines. Catalogue models vs editorial models. Throughout Europe, various markets require different heights, different looks and different personas. That doesn't even take into account racial differences across the world.
No, he's not. From the article: "beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population."
He's assuming a normal distribution but he's not assuming a universal agreed standard of beauty.
As they say, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Some like women curvy, some like them slim. Some people prefer Roman noses, others prefer snub noses. My wife is beautiful; some might disagree but their opinion doesn't matter.
Above average intelligence is even easier to find. That's partly because many men are intimidated by smart women, and partly because "above average intelligence" often just means "common interests". You want to find a woman who can hold an interesting conversation with you on topics you care about.
It's true that people's aesthetic tastes may differ in some ways, but they do converge in most ways. There's a reason why supermodels are almost universally considered attractive. So not only is this guy ruling out 99% of the girls out there, he's competing with almost everyone for the remaining 1%.
But that's not even the main point of my comment. Even if he was only willing to date girls in the "top 1 percent", that might still be achievable if he used a filtering process that can semi-reliably identify girls in that group who are single and potentially interested in him. But that's not what he's doing. He's going on a blind date with a completely random girl, once per week. If you're extremely selective in what you're looking for, but are relying on a low-frequency completely-random-sampling strategy, of course that's never going to work.
That said, me analyzing the heck out of what is obviously a humorous post, is probably not helping me achieve any of my life goals either.
It is a silly place, I implore you not to visit it.
Also: the world is big and "there is plenty of fish in the sea": usually, if you don't get to have a SO, chances are that there is something wrong with yourself too.
But whatever...
As a single guy, sure there's plenty of things wrong with me. But another factor is that not everyone values having a relationship in the same way.
To use a car analogy: my brother is really into cars, he likes to have a really nice car and is willing to spend a lot of money on one. Would I like a nice car, sure, but I don't really care enough to spend the money on one, and that is fine.
Same goes for an SO: would I like one, sure. Am I willing to spend a lot of time and effort finding one, not really. And that is fine too.
"there's something wrong with you" is such a generic statement to make that doesn't really say anything about reality and just causes neurosis all over the place. Plenty of absolutely abhorrent people have SO's, and I've met plenty nice people who can't get SO's or just don't really want them. There are some factors that affect likelihood of having an SO and they're not really aligned with the "something wrong" scale.
The issue with the OP isn't his refusal to hate himself, because that's pointless. It's his odd standards for the other gender, but, hey, maybe he just refuses to settle for less, it is his prerogative.