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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

It is difficult to reconcile your theory with the stat that 90% of women have married at least once by the time they are 40 years old. Assume 4% of women are lesbian or queer, and that 5% have either congenital disabilities or long term illnesses, and 1% have served long prison terms, and you end up with the fact that very nearly 100% of healthy non-criminal heterosexual women get married to a man. So in what sense are women being picky? They marry all kinds of men.

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90% of women marry by age 56 according to this chart[0]. At 40 it's 81%. Data from 2015 5-year American Community Survey

[0]https://flowingdata.com/2017/11/01/who-is-married-by-now/

Still the same question. Does 81% strike you as picky? It seems that women marry all kinds of men. They marry men who drink alcohol, men who've been to prison, men who use drugs, men who are poor, men who are ugly, men who are known to engage in domestic violence. They marry all kinds of men. 81% doesn't really justify the above comment, to which I was responding, does it?

I would think the population being affected by these changes hasn’t yet reached age 40 yet.

Can you suggest a test for the hypothesis that dating apps are driving changes? What percentage of marriage do you expect at age 30, and how do you account for the negative economic circumstances following the crisis of 2008, which must have pushed the marriage rate down somewhat for those who are currently 30?

I think we all understand that social systems are multi-variate and so it is difficult to assert absolutes. But you must have in mind some statistics that you expect to see in the evidence, and if you don't see them you'll agree that the theory is probably disproven?

I've previously emphasized economics over dating apps. Following the theory that males wages, relative to rent/mortgage, have a big impact on the formation of heterosexual couples, please see what I wrote in "Do men become warlike if they do not have women?"

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike...

  how do you account for
  the negative economic
  circumstances following
  the crisis of 2008

The economics might have changed, but the biological clock for women who want children hasn’t.

How do you reconcile "the biological clock for women who want children hasn’t" with "All women are going after the same top x% of men"?

It seems that women marry all kinds of men. They marry men who drink alcohol, men who've been to prison, men who use drugs, men who are poor, men who are ugly, men who are known to engage in domestic violence. They marry all kinds of men.

There is nothing in the data that justifies ""All women are going after the same top x% of men".

In the USA, the average age when women have their first child is 27, and the average age of marriage is 28.

At what age? I don't think this is necessarily a refutation of the parent comment even when accounting for the fact that many women in the internet dating demographic aren't old enough to marry yet. If you limit age level to, say, under 30 (probably even older at this point), then up to that age the parent comment could be true while after that age women find their options more limited and choose to settle for the less than X% men and get married.

Again, can you specify what test would nullify this hypothesis? What data would you need to see to change your mind on this? I asked in a different comment for a test regarding the kind of data needed to know if this hypothesis is wrong. I'm assuming you'd reject anecdotal data. You can certainly, rather easily, amass a large collection of essays from women who reject this hypothesis. If that data isn't valid, then what kind of data are you looking for? What would you need to see to agree this hypothesis is false?

Seems pretty simple. My own experience with my circle of friends, coworkers, and family has mirrored the parent post quite closely. This view is further backed by instances where people have actually attempted to measure activity on platforms like Tinder [1][2].

I would want to see actual statistics on median number of dating partners by gender prior to marriage from age 18-35 broken out by age year. Ideally that data would also be broken out by location as well since I have a very strong feeling the parent post posited situation is most common in large cities and less common in smaller ones.

[1] http://worst-online-dater.tumblr.com/post/99441021279/tinder...

[2] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

What's the source for that claim? I'd like to read more. I'm also interested if the statistic is true for men as well (i.e. basically all men get married).

Marriage is a completely different matter. Most people date an order (or several) of magnitude more people than they marry and they frequently don't do it with that aim.

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