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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

I've been away from the bay for a while, but it's amazing how bad the dating scene is, for exactly the reasons you described. I'm currently engaged to an amazing woman who has only ever lived in working-class suburbs and smaller cities. Her exes and her friends' husbands are shockingly anti-intellectual, didn't attend college, have some substance abuse issues, and/or make well under 6 figures. She keeps telling me how amazing I am as a partner, even though in my mind, I'm just being a decent human being. Engineers in places like SFBA severely underestimate how attractive they would be anywhere else in the country/world.

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> Engineers in places like SFBA severely underestimate how attractive they would be anywhere else in the country/world.

I agree completely.

> Her exes and her friends' husbands are shockingly anti-intellectual, didn't attend college, have some substance abuse issues, and/or make well under 6 figures.

Here's what happened:

Guys who are intellectual, attended college, have good discipline, and stayed away from substance abuse and similar problems - they moved to the Bay to get that "six figure job".

The Bay has thus become chock-full of these men.

The few women who moved to the Bay can have their pick. What would be a rare find elsewhere, is commonplace and boring in the Bay.

One of many anecdotes I could cite:

A friend of mine is a 25yo female working in recruiting in the Bay. If you pitched a date as an "intellectual, college-educated man with a good life and a six-figure job" she'd literally laugh in your face. She had 2 different guys courting her at the time, a startup CEO and a VC. She once showed me her Tinder account. Just by swiping 30-40 times, she'd find at least one guy who is an exec or VC making 7 figures per year, and it would usually be a match.

"120k/year"? You'd make her laugh.

Most startup CEOs don't make much. Are there really very many VCs out there?

> Most startup CEOs don't make much.

Depends on the startup and what stage it is. If it's a successful startup, then the CEO is sitting on a pile of stock that will likely be worth millions. If it's also a later stage startup, then likely he is making at least as much as his senior developers on top of that.

Either way, he's a much better bet if you want to be a millionaire's wife some day. Also, executives typically have expense accounts that afford them a very nice lifestyle _right now_, even if their salary isn't that high. You can be making a modest salary, but leading a jetset life on business expenses.

> Are there really very many VCs out there?

Yes there are. Here's just one random list of them:

http://www.calstartuplawfirm.com/venture-groups.html

Of all the women I know, not one of them aspires to be "a millionaire's wife".

"How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him"

Funny coincidence, I never met such a woman either!

I did meet plenty who just happened to only date men who make high six to seven figures. It was a serial coincidence!

Sounds like a self-selection situation

Me too! Unfortunately none of them ever married those men and most of them remain pretty unhappy with their dating lives. Another serial coincidence!

That's a pretty expected outcome when you pay that game.

If you take the sum of all the comments, it goes something like this:

1. Women are disproportionally flocking to a few guys at the very top of the income / success curve. 2. Those guys have amazing dating life, and no pressure to commit. 3. They will go through dozens of women and eventually settle with one. So if they date X women in their bachelorhood, only one 1/X will end up marrying them, and X-1/X will be left disappointed and unhappy. 4. X can be 200+, so that's a lot of unhappy women. 5. Meanwhile tons of guys below the top would love get a date, and can't. They're also unhappy. 6. Evolution isn't optimizing for happiness.

To contrast this, I think at least a quarter of the ones I know have this as an ambition. Knowing people that do want something or that do not has nothing to do with averages, unless you happen to know everyone :)

I guess I know better / more ambitious women than you. :)

I try not to put value judgements on people just for what they think they want in life, so I don't know that I agree.

I've had shares worth millions on paper that later turned out to be worthless many times... It really need to be a later stage startup with real traction for that to really mean anything.

You and me both, man.

However, it's a different path for top executives versus the rest of us.

If you follow folks at that level, you'll notice that even when their startup fizzles, they tend to come out on top.

There are ways to get paid well at an exit even when your stock are nominally worthless. If you're an executive. Not to mention that if their startup was worth $100m+ at one point, they would likely get a chance to start another.

None of this is criticism, by the way: many of these guys worked harder and longer than most engineers.

They did get disproportionately compensated for it, though.

What are the ways they get paid at exit with worthless stock?

One example: if you're the one who approves the sale, you can arrange for a cushy job with a golden parachute at the acquiring entity. Say, $1m/yr comp with $30m mandatory severance whenever you leave for any reason.

Congrats, you just got paid $30m+ as an exec for an exit that paid nothing to all other shareholders.

>she'd find at least one guy who is an exec or VC making 7 figures per year,

Does she have them audited? Because my "Tinder Salary" is an order of magnitude greater my actual salary.

I assure you, she is quite astute. The Tinder demonstration was just a fun way to show me how many options she has.

For example, with LinkedIn and its profile pics, it's very easy to figure out whether the guy you're chatting with really is the CEO of a hot startup.

I'm not sure if this doesn't fall under the definition of something like "delusory rape" these days

if what she cares about is income, that's pretty damned sad.

In her defense, I don't think she only cared about income. But she could easily screen out everyone making less than seven figures, so she started from that reduced pool, then further screened it for personality, etc.

Being a woman dating in the Bay Area is like that gif with the hot dogs thrown at your face. You’ve gotta start cutting somewhere and why not there?

> If you pitched a date as an "intellectual, college-educated man with a good life and a six-figure job" she'd literally laugh in your face.

That literally says nothing about what makes that person interesting or fun to be around.

Thinking that people boil down to salary and education level will make you only able to display those things.

Find a hobby that you like, enrich yourself in ways that aren't measured by the IRS.

> she'd find at least one guy who is an exec or VC making 7 figures per year, and it would usually be a match.

> "120k/year"? You'd make her laugh.

I don't understand this fixation on earnings, I wasn't making half that when I found my partner. Making 7 figures won't get you a girlfriend, but thinking it will makes it likely any partner you do find won't stick around long.

One of two things are happening, either a, all the women you're meeting truly are fixated on nothing but a man's wallet (highly unlikely but possible) or b, you have some seriously unhealthy views towards women and relationships that you should work on before attempting to enter a meaningful relationship.

Women find men with more money to be more attractive. It isn't the only factor, but it is a significant factor like for example height.

> "A man can move himself two points higher on the attractiveness scale we used if his salary increases by a factor of 10," study author John Speakman told The Times.

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2018/01/women-are-more-...

I found my wife when I was unemployed. I wouldn't have it any other way. As a result, I remind myself to never forget it, and be extra good as a husband. Relationships are hard enough, if you're using your income (I had none, was on unemployment), or inheritance (I have none) as a carrot, you're in for a rude awakening someday. Apologies to Red Green, but while I'm not wealthy, I'm just a run of the mill software developer in Chicago.. she does find me handy and handsome!

Finding a spouse when you aren't well off or rich is the wave. From what I see/hear from my friends, dating is grueling. I've been with my mine for almost a decade.

attempts at explaining macro-scale socio-economics with the kind of game-theoretic arguments in this thread assume you can nudge one factor while keeping "all other things equal". It's hard to do this with perdonal anecdotes, yet that's what all of us have direct experience of.

It's not always the money you're currently making that matters. The potential to make money is also subconsciously considered in dating.

I'm mostly impressed that anyone on this hellsite is paraphrasing Red Green.

The book "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley goes into depth about how men and women choose their mates, based largely on evolutionary biology.

People treat it like a character flaw for a woman to choose a man based on wealth and status, but why? A woman committing to a relationship likely means pregnancy and that requires resources and protection for years and years.

That's how it's been for hundreds of thousands of years. Expecting widespread birth control and changing societal norms to overcome all those years of evolution in only a few generations seems foolish.

You're right, but the flip side is that men are actively shamed for pursuing their own evolutionary incentives. There are two layers of competition going on, the sexual-economic one and the fluffy interpersonal one, but some people gain leverage by maintaining the fiction that one of them is obsolete. This fiction is enforced by calling everyone who notices it a misogynist or an incel.

Indeed. I don't fault women for preferring wealthy and successful men. I don't fault men for preferring young, beautiful women.

> That's how it's been for hundreds of thousands of years.

Try "millions" :)

ding ding ding: "Making 7 figures won't get you a girlfriend, but thinking it will makes it likely any partner you do find won't stick around long."

> The few women who moved to the Bay can have their pick.

I don't think so. It's only when males are desperate to settle; living alone and spending their money on their hobbies/travel might be a much more attractive option to them than to bind to an unattractive female that went to SFBA specifically to capture a high-value male.

I think you underestimate the situation haha. Your perception of attractiveness is based on who’s around you. If the average around you is by New York standards a 5, then a 6 is above-average attractive. And a 7 is a solid catch.

Women in the Bay Area can easily score a few points higher than in more competitive cities and the opposite is true for men.

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