The stable marriage problem and modern dating
arvarik.com
arvarik.com
People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you. Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the boxes, they settle down.
This article https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/ is not about a guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person that matched that criteria.
Would this be an appropriate place to share that story? Because I'm intrigued
Based on OP's description, it sounded like a company taken over by gangs, but it's really a for-profit social enterprise.
What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of mine have dated only very few people before getting married.
Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which both partners did not have a dating history with a lot of partners "to find out what they don't want". That said, I'm aware of the negative selection bias there.
This is not against what OP says, you could have some people who date less people and some who prefer to date a lot. At the end, both of them will probably settle down when they find one they like a lot
It is also about selection, but much more about ability to weed out abusive people and selfish people and so on. Of course also compatibility, clean freak will never be happy with messy person.
And those abilities form a lot in childhood, in family and with friends. They are also about your deep seeted values.
A lot of short relationships suggest either lack of interest in long term relationship or inability to form it.
The way hn talks about these issue always strikes me like a bunch of people who think people are machines and kind of don't undestand how people form relationships. Like qualifying a partner that don't fit some checkbox on original list someone was forced to make as "settling down". There is chemistry alias emotional and hormonal side to the whole thing, people.
Also, if you dated a lot of people who were genuinly unsuitable for long term relationship, issue really is either your selection or what you signal to good prospective partners. Like, abusers pick up certain types and stable guys/gals avoid certain types.
This is not to discount that there are treatments that really do work. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is an excellent example.
This is also not to deny that people who seek therapy on average do better than people who do not. That is clearly true, but it is unclear whether it is explained by "therapy worked" or the selection bias that "people who are demonstrate putting effort into their problems are likely to do better."
But it is a lot easier to make the claim that therapy helps than it is to demonstrate it. And given the combination of the replication crisis and widespread poor use of statistics, it is hard to trust most of the research into mental health treatments.
That said, most people who have been through therapy believe that it helped them. This is not actually evidence of effectiveness. Because that was true even for therapies such a Freudian psychology that are demonstrably ineffective. And even widespread belief in the effectiveness of treatments is not evidence either - as https://psmag.com/social-justice/75-years-alcoholics-anonymo... points out there is remarkably little evidence for 12 step programs for addiction. Despite testimonials and general belief to the contrary.
Edit: Collage education and getting first married at an older age significantly lower the odds of divorce. Which suggests having multiple prior relationships increase the odds of marriage success. However, we don’t have good statistics for this stuff.
People often avoid divorce and keep dead marriage because of inertia or fear of change. The massive life trasitions bring on stresses that test all of of that. And things are changing anyway at that point.
Divorce spikes around various life transitions occur because predictable events create predictable stresses that predictably are hard on marriages. Examples include the death of a child, children leaving the home, financial crisis, retirement and long-term illness.
Pairs who proved compatibility by settling down fast last longer because they are more likely to survive these stress points. However stress points are still stress points and "more likely to survive" still means that lots won't.
Personal disclaimer. I married at 20 to my second girlfriend. I was her first boyfriend. We did divorce..but only after 25 years. You can decide for yourself whether a 25 year marriage is evidence that we were more or less stable than an average couple.
I don’t think a relationship that ends is always worse than one that continues. Many stay together out of habit, fear, finances, having kids etc, continue long enough and someone is likely to die. Simply lasting a long time is thus a very poor measure of success. Arguably being happy, raising well adjusted kids, financial success, and or a host of other things could be considered a much better benchmark.
So I will turn it around, what’s the odds you would each have found a better partner or even become a better partner by looking longer?
I'm biased. But given her dating history since, I don't know that she would have done better than me.
You can not use statistic thay way. General stat for divorce does translate into individual one like this.
I'm guessing those marriages are likely correlated with strong shared religious beliefs[1] and closeness to extended families that help share the burden of raising children.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857783/#:~:tex....
Negative selection bias as in people who are less capable to maintain long term relationships are more likely to have a lot of dating history.
Conversely, people who are super easy going and great partners to be with may have very few people break up with them (and kind of succeed on the first try).
Or another way to put it: To have a long dating history with a lot of different partners, you need to have broken up (or been broken up with) quite a few times. This could be due to circumstances outside of your control, but that is probably not true for all people in that category.
People that have dated few people might be more likely to share a similar approach to relationships.
Finding out what you don't want is definitely important too. Some people figure that out quickly, some go through a lot of drama before they finally figure it out. And I can certainly see how people who have trouble figuring out what they don't want, may enter a marriage that doesn't work out. But I also think that people who marry with relatively little dating, are more committed to making it work.
My take on your comment.
Accepting the premise of: "you have both credibly committed"(a nice phrase) -> removes reason to be suspicious.
Removing suspicion -> removes fear. Removing fear -> removes anxiety/anger. Less suspicion, fear, anxiety and anger -> Less effort
Hence: "Committing to make it work makes it easier to make it work." (another nice phrase)
On the one hand you are committing to work. Who wants to sign up for more of that!? On the other hand, it really does reduce the overall workload. Long term relationships may be less scary than people realise.
When my wife does something that irritates me, my first question is "What error in communication led to our team play resulting in this?", because I have already accepted she is not doing it from spite.
Here is a movie that satirizes the 'whitelist' approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lobster
As it is often the case, it boils down to personality, character traits, and culture; if you are someone who is intrinsically and culturally driven to long-term, if not forever, relationships, fine. But if you are not, live your life and respectfully forget about what novelist and imaginative people have written about. I traveled the world on my own, dated everywhere, and fulfilled my childhood dreams of desire and be desired. I had a few multi-year relationships, but don't make me think about them or you'd ruin my day.
Had I listened to the spirit of the times or of the place, I would have ended up miserable, sad, and probably out of shape. Instead, when I am in bed and close to fall asleep, I often think about the exciting life I had, the amazing people I intimately knew, and the dreams I have for tomorrow. To each their own, always. And life has different phases and new desires will knock on my door, maybe a kid, maybe a long-term relationship, but always (I hope...) my choice.
What if it's yet another illusion that the conscious mind is in control and, in fact, it's not really related?
The attractiveness to women of differences in major histocompatibility complex genes is a documented thing, for example [1], More loosely we've all known people who were most attracted/committed to people who, intellectually by lists of criteria, etc., even they'd agree made no sense for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_odour_and_sexual_attracti...
I don't see how this suggests compatibility is an illusion. You just described another way of finding someone who is compatible. Personally I already had a mental checklist of everything I wanted out of a relationship, no dating around was necessary to know those things. Just basic introspection. I ended up marrying my second girlfriend and I would say the relationship is 100% perfect.
Say what?? Sounds like there's an interesting story here...
At times I was lonely and miserable and wanted somebody in my life badly and in those times nobody ever was even remotely interested in me. The moment I did well and / or was also in a relationship it seemed like potential partners were all over me (it seemed almost unfair). Point I'm trying to make is people usually "date" for the wrong reasons. The moment they're in to find somebody to "complete themselves" they create a an unconscious demand on their partner which is the pre-programmed disaster that it will turn out to be. The moment I notice my date is "actively looking" I run.
To me the whole concepts of "dating" is very sterile. It's not in my culture maybe to have a formal process where you sniff each other with prepared questions and then after 3 years you check "where this is going". What has worked well for me is not ever to look for partners actively and the trick was always "the less I look the more opportunities I find" (strange that).
I think why most relationships don't last is because we literally suffocate everything that is good out of it. Usually it happens slowly so we don't notice (or tell ourselves things will get better - they usually don't). For most people it's just a way to build many small co-dependencies into a neurotic prison which they can be unhappy in but tell themselves "at least I feel secure". Some even think it's their mission to fix their partner (and all they do is set themselves up for pain).
A timeless classic on the psychology of relationships: Scott Peck "The Road less Traveled" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr... (one of my top 10 fav books I ever read (and I read a lot).
edit: my experience working for a dating startup called Friendscout24 (a total horror show) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18713837
This statement is contradictory. Probably the author is using "exponentially" to mean quick growth. I suppose this is alright in common parlance, but I find it disturbing when people describe a function as exponential just because it is a superlinear polynomial.
It seems people out there have taken to using "exponentially" as a pseudo-scientific word meaning "a lot". i.e. "you're making my job exponentially more difficult"
Edit: fixed typo :)
I say this not to be rude, but to note that if we needlessly scrutinize each other's grammar, no one will be happy.
so it depends on whether "log enough scale" applies to both axes...
Then there's functions like n -> 2^2^...^2 with an exponential tower of height n. That's doesn't become linear with any finite number of logs...
https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
This is the kind of statement people should put in their dating profiles if they want fewer but better matches. No, I’m not teasing you (ok just a little). Show quirky elements of yourself, just keep the mood sunny rather than salty.
Last year I purchased a condominium in the downtown core of where I live and I thought the process was very similar. At the time the market was very competitive. It's a sequence of potential "offers" for which you make a binary decision and you cannot go back and must consider them in chronological order and there is no guarantee if you pass on a okay condo now that you will find a spectacular one down the line and prices will not be even less palpable.
Optimality breaks down when humans get involved. Because what most humans need is to believe they did a good job picking, which is quite a bit different. If the best solution falls into your lap you may continue spending energy on that decision forever, and that longing for what might have been is a big opportunity cost (which is magnified if your partner ever finds out about it). We have this sort of intuition that we have to put a bit of sweat equity into a decision before it feels good. Which may relate to the somewhat debunked theory of 'ego exhaustion'.
You may know what fridge you want but you have to keep showing options to your spouse because they aren't okay with the decision yet, and if you rush it then you'll regret it. You can spend that energy now, or you can make emotional interest payments for the life of the fridge. At work you sometimes have to do the wrong thing so that people get why the more expensive option makes sense.
What my friend was doing and what I see other people do, including myself, is make a list of targets of opportunity. 5% of the options are acceptable and I will stop when I get access to the first one in that category, be it a fridge, an islander, or a partner. This person is smart, funny, likes cats, and your family adores them, and you have chemistry so why not. You feel good with your decision, or at least you do at the time. You might still leave them six years later because it turns out those other things you didn't like overshadowed everything else, once you had to live in the same house. How many other potential matches went away during that time?
[1] https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...
1. The person they are phantoming
2-N+1. All other phantom partners
N+1-2N+1. All other people.
If the person prefers not being married over all other available partners, then that will necessarily be a stable marriage. If they don't then the phantom partner will be able to find a match among the other unmatched phantom partners.
In any case, are homosexuals distributed equally over the area? My intuitive assumption is that they gravitate to larger cities for a variety of reasons (but less discrimination is probably a big one, since cities tend to be much more liberal and anonymous than the nation they are in), which would change the chances significantly.
Also the prevalence of "boyfriend twins" matches with what the site says - they end up with a partner of almost identical attractiveness because the curves for both of them match, and there's no bias in who makes the first move.
> I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women
See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends describe their love interests sound foreign to us..
That sounds intriguing. Care to elaborate at all with any examples?
- Treating every person you date like a potential spouse instead of a potential friend
- Getting upset when your partner finds someone else attractive
- Caring about how many sexual partners someone has had in the past
- Remaining sexually monogamous in a relationship that has lost its sexual energy (i.e., 'dead bedroom')
Again, generalizations. I think straight people have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the values of western religions and government institutions that demand couples settle down indefinitely and singularly in high-stakes marriages. Soo much rests on finding the right partner, which can be very stressful, especially for women. They think that their desires have to be suppressed or changed to be happy, and have internalized ridiculous messages about sexual purity and how love is 'supposed to be'. However, us degenerates have always been shunned by those institutions and therefore can see the silliness in it, not that we don't have a huge heaping of silliness to deal with ourselves.
- Bog down with mortgages and children instead of hopping around the world, partying.
I opted for a kid and a mortgage because at least this way maybe one day me "and my son" will build an electromagnetic rail accelerator[1] and remote-controlled gliders and fly them around together.
The serious answer to that question is probably because straight couples mostly have biological children, with the associated biogenic time pressure driving FOMO. Adoption or surrogacy can in theory be put off indefinitely and I imagine a lot of male-male couples wind up doing just that.
[1] Terminology intentionally changed from "rail-gun" to emphasize peaceful applications to my gun-hating wife.
At a high level, one big difference is that straight couples can reproduce together. So its not merely looking for a partner in life, or a partner to help raise a child with. But for the prospect of merging your genes.
I think nowadays a lot of the behavior could be explained by values lingering. But I can also rationalize how in a more natural order, without contraception existing, the decision for two straight people to get together comes with a much higher risk/reward ratio. From this, entails that picking the best partner is much more important, and making sure they'll remain throughout the whole pragnency and afterwards to help and support, etc. All that seems to weigh on the decisions for two people to partner up in a straight relationship that doesn't seem as likely in a gay one.
Maybe those instincts remains in straight people, even though nowadays we have good contraception. Or maybe it's that values of such time still linger. Also, even with contraception, it be pretty weird for a straight couple to decide to find a suitable surrogate, so there's still that ultimate, would this be the genetic other of my child?
Also, we're both Seattle-area engineers, leading very career-oriented lives. One reason for marrying would be to mitigate financial risk when one of us tries to do something crazy.
Funny enough, our simple desire to leave a professional legacy has helped our immediate family greatly (e.g. I'm the one my parents or straight siblings go to for big cash emergencies, etc.)
The attraction comparison is mostly from me being pretty visual and noticing that many straight men are also quite visual.
Most people meet the kind of people they are attracted to in places where they are likely to congregate.
In other words hardly any population has uniform distribution.
Same sex dating is, sadly, still not entirely safe. A little anonymity and being out of arm's reach probably makes people feel a lot more comfortable (have you ever gone on a date when you were uncomfortable for some other reason? Did it end well?)
I don't recall if it was Dan Savage or something I read earlier than that, about how screwed gay men are in a mixed orientation environment, because a heterosexual male can use prolonged eye contact across a bar as an intro to approaching a woman, while some men see eye contact as aggression. If that person turns out to be a homophobe, the author theorizes that the odds of a violent end to this encounter has just gone up considerably. A gay bar or an online dating site sets a context, a social filter. If you crash and burn it's over quickly and you can move on.
If smart phones were available sooner I wonder how much faster that line would have gone up.
As a guy who lives polyamorous, this is an interesting observation.
Many guys told me that they try the poly life, because if they don't have to be "the one" for a women, their potential partners would give them a chance even if they aren't a 100% fit.
Somehow, only a few guys end up with multiple women.
Also seems to hold up on Tinder:
https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
Even after reading through the profiles and discarding many of the men with a big enough pile there is only so much time in the day to talk with the guys so why not start with the more attractive ones?
When you value intimate encounters with people you care about, there is an upper limit, even if you have multiple women waiting to date you.
The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.
>The only ways to get those numbers up without going casual is to remove other things from your life or get bisexual partners so you can consolidate, and well, even that has its limit.
I didn't say they are good or bad.
I just said if you don't want casual sexual encounters, for whatever reason, you don't have much optimization options.
But even being far below that limit (e.g. one new partner a month for a few years) will statistically place in the extreme tail.
I don't work much, and besides friends and alone time I can handle 4 partners.
I'd say that's untrue if you're participating in a fairly healthy poly community.
I'm not sure what this is called, but your statement is basically just redundantly agreeing with me.
Edited for clarification.
We were talking past each other because my comments were basically saying "It isn't like this in general" but you never intended to communicate that claim. You were only talking about specific situations.
"Love... casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him... Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends..."
That's Schopenhauer demonstrating his well attested misogyny.
There's something to learn by putting yourself in someone's shoes, and seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).
Women writing from their perspective != misandry any more than men writing from their perspective is misogyny. Those words have specific definitions that you are abusing to make a false equivalency.
And what's wrong with calling out historical misogyny when it is presented as wisdom? That's not to say Schopenhauer has nothing useful to offer, but his misogyny isn't one of those things. It's no different from calling out racism in a similar historical context - like acknowledging that Winston Churchill was a great statesman and also simultaneously a very racist person.
Schopenhauer's misogynistic perspective has long been the default of much of society, so it doesn't need to be treated with kid gloves.
> seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).
18th century misogyny doesn't deserve the same hearing out as BLM protests against contemporary police brutality. That logic would also excuse the presentation of 18th century racism as a valid perspective today.
1. Over several generations of successful partnering, Human cognition has become really good at estimating someone's "rank" as a potential mate (in the stable marriage problem sense).
2. Language, modern UX design schemes and dating apps do not have sufficient bandwidth to communicate all the signals needed to "rank" a potential mate.
3. Dating apps present the lowest bandwidth signals first (photograph, age, height etc) and expand out to higher bandwidth signals after an initial screening (Language, communication, cultural similarity etc in messages).
Putting these ideas together, it's possible that dating apps will reward an entire generation for optimizing for those narrow range of signals that work well on dating apps (and not reward investing into developing a well rounded personality). I would think that being good at Instagram, TikTok and Photoshop might almost become evolutionary advantages for today's 14 year olds as they grow older and start seeking partners.
How will this change our society after 5-6 generations of descendants who all found partners on dating apps? Should schools begin to teach 8 year olds how to photoshop away their bad hair days because one day it will become an essential skill to being successful at one of the most important human experiences?
So assuming you're not having babies with everyone you match with on tinder, having a large number of matches isn't actually an increase in fitness. I haven't seen any evidence that people who don't do well on dating apps don't actually end up reproducing... in fact it's possible less success in that realm could be correlated with stronger relationships when you do find someone - since you don't feel you have a million other options waiting in the wings.
Now having large number of matches means you have more to choose from, so perhaps you're likely to get a "better" partner - but this seems like it would be a fairly weak and therefore slow-acting selection bias.
A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in stable relationship, as can (to a lesser exteny) a woman who is so unstable that her children are adopted.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/europe/jan-karbaat-fertility-...
My answers would be:
1. it's debatable
2. there are multiple viable strategies
3. any theory about what increases fitness needs testing and ones like this are very hard to prove or disprove since the signals are noisy.
> A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in stable relationship
Theoretically can have, sure. But that doesn't instantly translate to that being a higher fitness strategy. For example - does that strategy work in practice, or only in theory? And if it does, what is the success of those offspring? An individual's reproductive success is only as good as their offspring's reproductive success. It's quite possible kids from stable homes are more likely to have more kids than those from unstable homes for a million subtle reasons.
The rest can be usually be surmised with a quick chat about where you grew up/live, the universities you attended, the firm you work at, and what you do for a living. After that, any nuances would probably require spending time with the other person, when the other person finally lets their guard down and you can see who they might be in the long term.
It could also be trivial for one of these dating apps to pull credit reports and incorporate them when offering matches, as well as asking the candidates to submit their last 3 to 5 years of tax returns.
The higher bandwidth signals (shared values, etc.) are what is used to determine a suitable match for reproduction, especially in more developed societies. You can see those values occasionally supersede actual romantic compatibility when it is common in some professionally competitive places (less time for dating - Bay Area, New York...) for two people in their 30s to agree to have a child together outside of marriage and with shared custody only because they
a) want a child b) have not yet found a suitable romantic partner c) the reproductive "partner" has shared values
That, in my opinion, is more likely to change humanity, especially as the above article demonstrates how much harder dating has become for everyone.
Edit: I think it may be relevant to the discussion. Im in my early 40s and she's in her late 30s so marrying was bound to happen at some point around this age.
The way I've heard this phrased is that you don't want to marry someone with the same strengths as you, you want to marry someone who has the strengths you are lacking. You want someone who will complement you.
I can see how someone could easily get stuck in the idea of "dating" as a thing.
I got married at 23, so I guess that's a stage of my life I didn't spend much time in.
See for example:
https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences/m...
As such, male advantage is probably a lot lower in the real world, if (hyperbolic) every woman has a different man on nr 1 of their preference list, and every man has the same woman as nr 1 of their preference list, all women could theoretically have their best possible partner, while only one man can.
Considering how much I hear about beauty standards and how they harm women, I almost never hear anything about male beauty standards.
If society is to be improved by having more realistic female beauty standards, then there's apparently a lot more headroom for society to be improved by having more realistic male beauty standards.
very strongly disagree, maybe this is true in some subset of the dating world, or non western countries, but that's it.
For example in Asian cultures there is the idea of 666 standard for males, 6 feet tall, 6 figure salary, 6 pack, which make up less than 0.01% of the eligible population. It may be due to the gender ratio being off, but the standard leaves a lot of women unhappy in their later years
But the other think is that the body shapes for males that showed up in entertainment were more various for males then for females. There was less perfection and more variety, but that is changing. Now it seems guys are moving toward similar restrictive requirements, so we may get there with guys too.
You need some more factors for that.
For most people any one of these point can be a deal breaker, even if he's a 10/10.
That is addressed halfway through the post. Methinks you didn't actually read the article.
The article is good enough to be read to the very end.
Yes, if you're willing to face repeated rejection, if you're willing to bother people who aren't interested in you and ignore the guilt of having done so, then it's better to be the initiator.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html
I'm of the opinion that online dating has been creating some real market problems; as you mention, communities were small and people met within their own circles back in the 60s. But nowadays there are millions of people just a swipe away, and FOMO can be really strong, and as such, supply/demand curves are extremely skewed.
Fun article!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583
[2] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/
The downside is there's a lot of overlap between "people who are online dating" and "people who aren't good in group social settings".
Source (among many): https://www.complaintsboard.com/events-and-adventures-possib...
some examples: if you end up "not single" you cannot cancel your membership and are obligated to keep paying through the agreed term, BUT are not allowed to participate in any events as they are "for singles only".
The apps are particularly bad at this. Bumble in particular heavily promotes the profiles of people who are traveling. So when I go on vacation I get the dopamine hit of 10x more matches than usual, but with a decreased chance of actually forming a lasting connection. On the flip side when I'm not traveling probably 15% of the profiles I see are people at the nearest airport or flight attendants who live in other cities.
Edit: reference is Ashlagi et al (2015). "Unbalanced Random Matching Markets: The Stark Effect of Competition" http://web.mit.edu/iashlagi/www/papers/UnbalancedMatchingAKL...
Meeting a new romantic interest in person first is bound to take a big hit. Most first encounters will have to be through online dating apps. If the OKCupid study is to be believed, 80% of men on these apps will be frustrated from the inability of dating "within their league". What is this going to lead to?
Statistically speaking, higher bandwidth costs for pornhub.com and if things were open some more crazy mass shooters?
Here is the description:
> Find a stable matching between two equally sized sets of elements where each element has a preference ranking of all the elements in the opposite set.
> A matching is stable if there are no unstable pairings.
> An unstable pairing happens in the following example:
> A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 and A prefers 2.
Let's arbitrarily call the lettered set the males and the numbered set the females.
That definition of an unstable pairing cannot possibly be correct, because it is defined entirely in terms of male preferences.
For a pairing to be unstable you need a male who prefers a different female, and you need that female to prefer him over her current male. Only then are they both willing to ditch the current partner to form the new pair.
A correct definition of unstable pairing must involved conditions on both male preferences and female preferences.
It should be something like this:
> A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other set. However, B prefers 1 over 2 and 1 prefers B over A.
[1] https://www.arvarik.com/visiting-the-stable-marriage-problem
Suppose you had people in two groups A and B where each individual in group A wants to pair up with an individual in group B and visa versa. If you can assign a "compatibility score" to each possible pair, then the goal is to find the set of pairs, where a pair consists of an individual from A and an individual from B, that maximizes the sum of the compatibility scores. In other words, the assignment problem is about finding the best 1:1 mapping between groups A and B when given a compatibility score for every possible pair between the groups of individuals.
Someone with a mind to settle down can find someone to settle down with pretty quickly it seems. I'm sure there is more to it than that, but I'm not sure what.
> Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think people started to meet online before 2010.
Certainly, but back then meeting online was highly unusual and there was a period where online dating had a bit of a stigma. It's probably only been in the last decade or so that it's been fully normalized.
I think I will start to charge Tinder for my time...
i tried to apply the results and thinking about matching and stability to a many to many matching problem between students and courses offered. i basically just wrote a bunch of bullshit in latex but it was fun. i cant remember now but i think there is often a set of stable matches, although maybe it can be empty- and finding them requires pretty savage computation. i remember some of the newest papers were just big nasty algorithms for finding the set of stable matches.
What would be the percentage of people not being in a unstable pairing in order for men to not have any advantage over women ?
Without removing that, and assuming everyone pairs up, the "advantage" remains.
It is due to the fact that they are the one choosing first
A more apt comparison is how Hinge works. People don't need to actively go out and 'like' people, they can just sit and wait for likes to come in and they can choose if they want to match or not.
I would be very interested to see Hinge data for how often men give out likes versus women.
As soon as women decide to also approach, this advantage disappears.
I think the author is confusing the probability of a “stable marriage” with the probability of a relationship.
What this says is you’d expect cheating to go up. As Chris Rock says, “you’re only as faithful as your options.”
Although this is all assuming people date to get married.
Tongue firmly in cheek, I bet a not insignificant number of people get married to stop dating.
TLDR: do the women have a similar advantage if they are the reachers?
Do you mean what would happen if the distributions were switched but men still make the first move? I could change up the script and run it again if that's what you mean!
Basically, dating in our modern world of few meaningful social connections is a vicious cycle for women. Men rate attractiveness on a normal distribution, women rate attractiveness on a pareto distribution. (ie. 80% of men are "meh" or worse to women.)
I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a complex rules engine for screening an endless pool of available men. (Male criteria for engaging a woman online is very low.) When you are a 29 year old female only considering seriously dating attractive jewish/catholic/athiest, asian/black/hispanic/irish/white/etc men 6'1" or taller in professional jobs (generally speaking or a specific gig) who have attribute X, Y, or Z, you're screwed.
Men will usually stop filtering earlier. They still get into awful relationships, but they don't filter out 80% of the population.
Here's a comment where I opine on this from a previous thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407388
"Bowling Alone" captured part of the phenomena 20 years ago. That hasn't changed. Even things like little leagues and soccer clubs for kids are declining in many ways and much more commercial activities than they were in the past. Even worship has changed -- high growth religious services are scaled-up entertainment and child care focused vs. community.
Personally, I don't buy into the notion that people have changed. People are people. I think the environment has changed and people are playing interacting with it based on the funnel they get sucked into.
The online dating services are listing real estate agents -- their interest is in a higher number of conversions per customer. They will optimize for that metric over time.
Is this based on the OkCupid blog? My speculation is what men on average look for (appearance) is easily communicated via online dating, but this is less so than women. I'd be interested to see what the same chart would look for people known in person, rather than just online.
> I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart, attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a complex rules engine for screening an endless pool of available men. (Male criteria for engaging a woman online is very low.) When you are a 29 year old female only considering seriously dating attractive jewish/catholic/athiest, asian/black/hispanic/irish/white/etc men 6'1" or taller in professional jobs (generally speaking or a specific gig) who have attribute X, Y, or Z, you're screwed.
There's data showing that women care more about "dating up" in education/social class, which has negatively impacts college educated women and men without a college education. This is due to the widening gap in college degree attainment in the US between men and women[0]. The book "It's Not You, It's Biology" does a good job of going into this.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-...
They just use looks as a massive first filter.
And people from certain backgrounds also use that background as a major filter.
Anyway, what happens is that women are invested less in the beginning, but as the relationship progresses it switches. The woman gets more attracted than the man, and starts putting up with more than him to keep her investment.
Baumeister and Tice did some daring studies:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2013...
FWIW, I have found online dating way harder than dating someone I met through friends/work/school. YMMV but my theory is having access to that many more people leads one (including myself) to sometimes think there's someone more attractive/interesting out there instead of giving what's available to them a strong chance.
I have two good friends who have been serial daters for years and they have Seinfeldian reasons as to why they didn't fit with someone. It made me think my God, "if everyone had your standards, literally no one would have a long term relationship." Interestingly, when I saw them date mutual friends back in Uni, the relationships were the longest they've had their entire lives.
I'm convinced that a lot of stable marriages from people I know around me wouldn't have happened if they had tried first meeting online instead of happenstance in IRL situations, because person A wasn't the typical ethnicity that marries person B, or person A is much older than person B and wouldn't have fit in the filter, or person A isn't particularly photogenic, etc.
I'm not trying to paint online dating as a bad thing as there are quite a number of success stories.
I come from a strong family culture (dozens of cousins, off-spring, good communication, >95% stable long-lasting marriages, etc.), and we were taught that there is no perfect match. Love isn’t a feeling, it is an act of the will for the good of the other.
Ergo, it’s your job to make the relationship work.
Millennials without robust world-views haven’t yet figured out that the ‘fear of missing out’ is devastating to their pursuit of happiness.