College as a Marriage Market | Hacker News Reader

College as a Marriage Market

nber.org

81 pointsnabla9126 comments

Simplest explanation seems to be when there's a bunch of mating-age humans in one place, some of them mate.

You see this with educational institutions, work, sports clubs, and so on.

What I don't see is that people join the institution with that market as an intention. At least I have a lot of friends and none of them have ever said they did anything other than perhaps a dance class in order to meet someone. Longer term commitments like university often end up being where people meet a partner, but don't seem like that was part of the purpose.

I knew a girl at university who was there to find a husband, and she did!

In South Africa there is even a colloquial Afrikaans term for it: BA Man Soek, i.e. Bachelor of Arts in Finding a Husband.

It is of course possible that this is/was a sexist idea, but I’m sure it’s a bit of both. Especially as a conservative woman seeking a housewife lifestyle, it makes sense to make yourself available in an environment where there is a high concentration of available men who will likely be quite successful.

In the US I've heard it called the MRS Degree.

Also the cliché "ring by spring" goal of senior year, especially common in sororities.

the time honored M.R.S. degree! (Often said tongue In cheek and in somewhat bad form regarding certain top MBA programs.

>I knew a girl at university who was there to find a husband, and she did! In South Africa there is even a colloquial Afrikaans term for it: BA Man Soek, i.e. Bachelor of Arts in Finding a Husband.

That motivation is not uncommon for some demographics such as students at Brigham Young University where it's openly acknowledged:

“The point of Mormon women going to college is to find a spouse, period,” says Kate Kelly, an alumna of the college who graduated in the early 2000s. [...] “BYU is just like a dating factory,” she remembers, “but [for women] that was the entire point.” -- excerpt from : https://qz.com/1778333/the-brigham-young-university-wage-gap...

on the contrary, a lot of girls in Russian universities seem to be a lot more interested in mating(in serious way, finding the best husband they can) than in the field they supposedly are going to work in(specifically engineering, when most of guys who study some kid of engineering are really into it, girls just study to get grades)

P.S. not everyone but significant amount to notice some kind of a pattern

It's just human relationships in general -- repeated serendipitous contact leads to relationships, platonic or otherwise.

I believe that adults' stated difficulty stems from a lack of such an environment with few exceptions like church or sports clubs.

That’s also the secret to finding someone who matches your cultural tastes or background.

You can’t pick who you fall in love with, but it’s easy to restrict the set of candidates.

> What I don't see is that people join the institution with that market as an intention.

Perhaps that happens because society would judge people to be creepy if they did that. Imagine you were a man and you announced to the world that you joined a yoga class not for yoga but for finding a girlfriend. The vibe that you broadcast would probably backfire on you.

I'm experimenting on adding dating/marriage market to the institutions like educational institutions, work, sports clubs, and so on.

I'm working on SwanLove (https://swan.love). Right now, it's just an ordinary centralized dating website. But I plan to build a decentralized dating app (without crypto). It's akin to GitLab or WordPress. Say, you own a gym. You can host my dating app yourself (https://yourgym/dating) or on my site (https://swanlove/yourgym). Then anyone who wants to join your dating app must have your gym membership.

This way, a man in your gym who is attracted to a woman can send his like in your dating app. A woman can ignore or receive the romance invitation. Without this dating app, a man has to approach a woman in your gym. That, to some extent, can make a woman uncomfortable. You read some complaints from women about unwanted advances from men in gym.

You would say that hitting on women is not appropriate in gym. So which places are okay to hit on women? My female friend told me that it's okay to hit on her in yoga classes. But what about tennis club, salsa club, workplaces?

This is why I'm experimenting with this decentralized dating app. I know, I know, to some extent, this dating app can kill spontaneity.

Why would women who to the gym to exercise opt in to have their gym account made into a profile for an internal dating app?

Maybe they are single and want to find romantic partners. Some women like to find partners who share common interests. Imagine you like to cycle and you like to find a romantic partner who also like to cycle. Wouldn't that be great?

This kind of makes sense, however I would wonder if that will make an incentive for creeps to get a membership just to approach women through the internal dating app.

That already happened, no?

Some men pretend to care about yoga and veganism just to approach women. You can see some memes about this phenomenon.

In this context, I assume the definition of a creep is someone who joins a group or an activity just to approach people romantically/sexually.

The problem is.... where should a man find a romantic partner without being a creep? By that definition, if he wants to join salsa class to find a girlfriend, he is already a creep.

The only appropriate place to find a girlfriend without being a creep is on Tinder or Bumblebee which have a slew of problems.

You heard someone giving advice that online dating is disaster and a man should find a girlfriend in social settings, like.... yoga class, salsa class.

So I try to mitigate this problem by building this dating app.

Pre filter for physical fitness?

As someone currently heavily using dating apps, your idea sounds interesting. I don't really get the "movies / TV series preferences" thing though, I wouldn't really want to chose someone based on that but maybe that's just me.

Whatever you do, if you succeed, I beg you please never sell out to Match Group (who own Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, Ship, and OurTime.)

> I don't really get the "movies / TV series preferences"

Basically, I'm experimenting with my dating app. I built the dating app with the premise on some people want to find dates in Linkedin. So I give them space in SwanLove.

Then I'm thinking of adding other social medias to it. So you can find dates in GitHub, Twitter, Strava, Chess.com, etc.

In a nutshell, SwanLove adds dating to any social medias.

Then some people tweeted about creating a dating app based on movies preferences. So I added that to my dating app as well.

I'm throwing many darts and see which ones are stuck.

> I beg you please never sell out to Match Group

So a couple of days ago, some people in HN criticized me on creating this centralized dating app. It would become a honeypot for hackers. So that gave me an idea to build a decentralized dating app (like GitLab or WordPress).

Yes, I'll do my utmost not to sell out to them.

Swanlove is a cool website.

Has there been much response from linkedin users?

I'd have thought that men and women might want to steer clear of mixing business and dating.

Thank you. Less than 1000 registered users are on SwanLove. Basically, I'm dealing with marketplace problem (chicked and egg problem).

Yeah, a lot of people told me that dating for Linkedin is stupid. :)

But it's just beginning. I want to add dating to other online places like Strava, GitHub, Twitter, Chess.com, and so on.

The idea is you may find someone you like on Chess.com and you want to convey your interest to them but you're afraid being "punished" because Chess.com is not for dating. You can replace Chess.com with Strava, GitHub, or other social medias.

You can see how many women complaint about getting unwanted advances in Twitter. So I just want to separate people who want to date into a group with SwanLove.

I like the core concept of a "missing connections" type of thing where people can reveal interest LATER and then it's either reciprocated or ignored.

Even more interesting would be to only reveal interest if both people are interested..

Yes, I already support that. You can "like" people publicly or secretly. The thing you talk about is "liking secretly". If both people like each other secretly, the interest would be revealed to them.

>You would say that hitting on women is not appropriate in gym. So which places are okay to hit on women? My female friend told me that it's okay to hit on her in yoga classes.

Well, she said that, some other woman might say otherwise.

In general, this is mostly a charade. Being accepted is mostly about being the right person and having the right timing, not about whether space X or Y is appropriate or not. People have hooked up succesfully in every kind of place, including work (heck, especially there), hospitals, and funerals.

I get you. But the climate has shifted. "Unwelcome advances" can be different things to women. How do you know for woman A the "unwelcome advances" means this thing but for woman B it means other things.

Lemme ask you. Asking a phone number from a woman is acceptable or not in a gym? It depends on whom you ask. Some women think that gym is strictly for working out. Other women are more open to this kind of approach.

Not every man has high EQ, can read the room and women's body language. Not every man is social savvy.

When building this dating app, I'm thinking of a group of men which are not so good approaching women. Getting courage to approach women is already exhausting. But it's not enough. You have to know which women are open to dating.

This idea that unwelcome advances is harassment is ridiculous (not saying that's what you're saying in your comment, just what I've heard countless times in discussions).

Asking for a phone number is ok at almost any time.

If you ask me mid workout I'll be annoyed though and likely react negatively.

If you ask me and I'm engaged / not looking, it will be annoying. Some women train in women only gym for this reason. I still think it's ok to ask in a polite way.

Just don't ask in a situation where the receiver may feel threatened (eg. Alone in a dark alley) and react out of fear.

There were apps like this among Facebook friends, I don't think something like this would pickup because you need to know about the app.

Women are showered with people approaching them so they don't feel the need to register - or they register to something more on-point (see tinder, bumble).

That said, women may be in the situation where they like someone and that someone is blind/shy to make the first move (men rarely imagine being the recipient of female attention). I would focus with something where women-only can send a flirt and men can register with the hope of getting one from someone they know.

Best of luck

> women-only can send a flirt

So something similar to Bumblebee. Thanks for the feedback.

> What I don't see is that people join the institution with that market as an intention.

Perhaps people go to, say, a Catholic college because of the people they might meet, there is a preference for Catholic?

What I don't see is that people join the institution with that market as an intention.

There is an old fashioned term that "She's just there to get her MRS." that used to be said about women attending college so they could marry a better class of man.

I don't know how intentional that was on the part of women and how much it was simply expected that wives deferred to their husband's career. I've read/heard a fair number of true stories where a woman had trouble pursuing her career because she married a man with similar career interests and this made her largely unemployable. His employer wouldn't hire her and competitors of his employer also wouldn't hire her.

Edits:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=MRS%20Degree

https://thoughtcatalog.com/isla-sofia/2014/03/7-definitive-w...

I believe it was Madeleine Albright who said in an interview she wanted to be a journalist but couldn't get a job as a reporter because her husband was a reporter. The paper he worked for wouldn't hire her and neither would other papers.

Wikipedia doesn't mention that but does say:

In January 1960, the couple moved to her husband's hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Joseph worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a journalist, and Albright worked as a picture editor for Encyclopædia Britannica.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Albright

There's often a difference between why people do things, and why they say they do things. Often they themselves aren't aware of why they really do things.

There is a certain risk that women could find your statement offensive.

it applies to men too. when I was in college it was not uncommon for men to take lower level women's studies courses with a certain agenda.

Why women in particular? It seems to me that statement can apply to men, too, including "finding that offensive."

Plus, whether someone finds something offensive doesn't tell us whether the thing is true or false.

Which is of course unrelated to whether it's true.

In the US, this is the first generation where economical equals are marrying each other

Basically the idea of a man with stability marrying a woman who is seeking stability is now false, replaced by two upper middle class college educated people that are prospering in their careers

Therefore, the new progressive and self aware observation is how this increases inequality much greater than the previous iteration of inequality (where women weren’t in university or the professional workforce). Ironic, but worth paying attention to. I find it interesting to think about. Marrying into wealth/stability is now a less reliable option despite our cultural predilections and assumptions not really catching up.

There is a whole slew of problems.

1) There is still an expectation women will marry up, and men will marry down, in terms of income potential. If the woman is a little bit ahead, it's okay, but e.g. a doctor marrying a nurse is perceived as acceptable in one direction, but taboo in the other. This means there is a growing shortage of mates for men at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap, and increasingly, women at the top (unless college-age and pretty).

2) Overlapping and poorly-defined roles make for a lot more conflict in marriages.

3) Divorce laws vary by states, but in the most liberal states, tend to be punitive towards men; the de facto standard is women get the kids, and men pay (massive, debilitating) child support. At the same time, the legal industry works hard to increase divorce rates. With half of marriages ending in divorce, this leads to all sorts of misaligned incentives and imbalances which are taboo to talk about, but interplay in complex ways. Marrying down is now a huge liability.

4) And, as you pointed out, social classes are much more likely to calcify.

We kind of got to where we are randomly, without thought or planning. We had a bad system (women were oppressed), and we pushed hard against it. It snapped. We landed somewhere pretty random and still pretty dysfunctional; just dysfunctional in other ways.

Yeah, misaligned incentives galore

It will take collaboration between genders to reconcile

Right now it is convenient for misandrists to just laugh at the concept of men complaining, and never even noticing that misandry is a character flaw - let alone a word

this all exacerbates the reality

As a man, I simply refused to to marry. It's just a legal contract which is potentially life destroying for me.

Still, I have a pretty traditional family without the titles: only one of us is working and it makes sense for both of us. This is likely going to change when kids are bigger and we have more time, but at the same time, we're close to not be in full time employment for someone else. We will likely work in our own business because we enjoy doing it, more than for the money we make.

I think what's important, in today's society, is to not be career driven. Corporations chew you, you end up wasting your life and your family is unstable because there's no one home for the kids.

Equal working opportunity for both genders are great, but feminism preached being career driven too much. Society adapted to having two working parents per family, wages stagnated while prices increased thanks to double the workers available and thanks to double purchasing power. Divorces and single parenting, unstable families are what created this problematic generation.

Now we pay the price.

Nobody's even going to mention the effect of welfare here, either, which subsidizes single motherhood and each additional child out of wedlock? Or the effect that this has had especially on the families of minorities?

Thomas Sowell does.

Unfortunately, it doesn't fit with the narrative of more welfare, more taxes which allows both parties to increase government spending and gain even more power.

Welfare polices do not subsidize single motherhood as much as punish intact families where the man cannot find work. In that way it does create perverse incentives that are harmful to families it is meant to support.

Can you elaborate, I'm not familiar with this part

I know of the scenario where a man has to check in to jail when they cannot successfully pay the alimony or child support, which doesn't help their ability to do that. basically debtor's prisons.

are you referring to that?

What viable alternatives are there?

As a man, I simply refused to to marry. It's just a legal contract which is potentially life destroying for me.

In Australia you’d be defacto and thus more or less married.

In the U.S. too, people just don't seem to realize it.

No, only a handful of state have common law marriage. California is not one of them.

Canada however has common law marriage. No nuptials needed, assets are split and alimony is possible just from living together long enough.

Despite not having common law marriage, there are a number of factors that can cause asset splitting in California, since the '70s.

https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/family-law/family-law-ke...

Note there was an oral agreement, and that is a factor.

how would marriage be life destrying as opposed to living together without being married?

interestingly, i believe germany has something like a concept of a "living arrangement similar to a marriage" which is completely informal, it's not something you chose but it is defined by a court simply based on the reality of how you live together. the result of that is, to my understanding, that if you separate, one party can still sue the other for eg. splitting your assets, etc. as for child support, the relationship status should not even matter, regardless if you are married, or even live together. you are the father after all, so you are partly responsible for your children. if you earn, you pay.

in other words, you get the downsides of a relationship without the upsides of being married.

In the US, marriage is bound by laws created by an active divorce lobby. Divorce is a huge industry.

In my state, divorce, for a men, generally means paying roughly 1/3 of your income in child support, and splitting child-rearing expenses after that. To most people, that's financially devastating.

Before:

Mom earns $100k, $66k after taxes

Dad earns $100k, $66k after taxes

After, Mom gets $88k after taxes, dad gets $44k after taxes.

Uneven income, and Mom gets alimony too.

Mom signs kids up for a $24k/kid child care with 2 kids. Dad pays $24k and is left with $20k for his own living expenses. Mom is left with $62k. Many Moms do things like this punitively, because they hate Dad. Dad is living in poverty, and it's life-ending. Mom is using child support to buy fancy clothes for herself.

> It's just a legal contract

In business, finance, housing, consumption we are expected to bide by a contract. Yet, somehow partnerships are exempt from this rule.

Could you imagine if startups were run this way? "Hey a legal contract is potentially life destroying for me. So just take me at my word and do this secret handshake. That should be good enough." We'd laugh them out of the room.

That's probably because partnerships are not an upfront contract and termination terms are negotiated post-hoc, which is completely unlike "business, finance, housing, consumption" contracts.

For some reason prenuptial agreements aren't that big of a thing, and I'm not even sure they would hold any water in Europe.

So when I enter a contract with a business, before signing, I know who owes what and what happens if someone fails to provide that. Also, we know what it means to fail to provide. Usually, "Meh, I'm just not happy anymore" isn't a part of that.

So I totally understand people (usually men) not wanting to enter a contract where they face a significant probability of being taken to the cleaners.

If my company fails to deliver a service to a client, or the product delivered is subpar, it's clear what the penalties are.

And those penalties are established upfront. If in the meantime my company goes from a thousand dollar startup to a multi-billion dollar enterprise, I don't suddenly owe an angry client half of what I own. I still owe them what we agreed beforehand, which may be an insignificant sum. Even if it's somehow thanks to them that we became a huge company.

It's my understanding that marriage doesn't work like that.

> We'd laugh them out of the room.

sells all my SPAC positions

Relationships often happen under circumstances where no sane person would sign a contract. My girlfriend and I currently both share an emotional risk. If one of us is unhappy in the relationship and leaves, the other suffers emotionally. That risk is roughly equal, though. The likelihood of harm and the magnitude of harm are equal, as is the likelihood of happiness and the magnitude thereof.

I am much better off than my girlfriend financially, though. Marriage introduces a financial element wherein I bear a substantial financial liability, in exchange for effectively no likelihood of financial gain. On the other hand, she bears no financial liability, and in fact gains a likelihood of financial gain. No sane person would sign a contract like that with a business. It would be like Amazon buying out a startup with a contract that says if the merger isn't successful, the startup gets to keep half of Amazon.

Another reason contracts aren't analogous is because marriage is an intensely emotional affair. There is no sane way, that I can think of, to make emotional restitution. What's the point of having a contract that's unenforceable because there is no reasonable restitution?

So you end up in a spot where for some people, the benefits of marriage are unenforceable (not that I'm saying they should be enforceable) but the liabilities are very much enforceable. I'm not aware of any common contracts in business, finance or housing that follow that kind of a paradigm.

And yet in the real world small businesses still frequently operate on handshake deals between people who have known each other for years. Most of the time it works out.

> is to not be career driven

I'm building ParttimeCareers (https://parttime.careers) to tackle this problem. I think part-time remote jobs can be reasonable accommodation for people who want to work and take care kids. Basically, you'll just need to work 4 or 5 hours per day or less if you spread it into weekends.

Does you partner have health insurance? Will she be able to make decisions for you, visit you in the hospital, or inherit your assets, if something were to happen to you? There are many legal benefits to marriage.

Are feminists forcing women into focusing on their careers or just giving them the option? AFAIK there are still plenty of women who are want to lean out and do the housewife thing. I mean “Real Housewives of X” is one of the most long running and popular tv franchises in the US.

> Are feminists forcing women into focusing on their careers or just giving them the option?

So the answer to this question is very complicated.

A husband complained that his wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/sudden-sahm-concern...

As you can guess, there were many reactions to this article. A woman argued that a working mom is a better option: https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/1369685618863841280

Of course, there is other side of the coin. Some argued women should be given an option to be a staying-at-home mom: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1369865452642471938

What do women want? Some want to be a stay-at-home mom: https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/09/12/is-op...

A husband complained that his wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/sudden-sahm-concern...

Raising a child and building a home and life for a family is expensive. I know a lot of dudes who are stressed because they partner decided to become stay at home moms but also, “please buy a house”.

Anecdotally, I’ve also heard a few women balk at the idea of the husband being the stay at home parent. And I know a few dads who would love to be home more but can’t because they became the default breadwinner.

That’s not a partnership.

I don’t know who to attribute this to but you know what they say: “The only correction is an over correction“.

> Raising a child and building a home and life for a family is expensive.

This is an important point. I don't think feminism is trying to limit options but in practical terms if you have a mix of two income and one income households competition between them will drive up basic costs such housing so that running a one income household is significantly more expensive than back when most households were one income.

You can try address this via tax, as many European countries do. But then two income households feel unfairly penalised.

Most of the work under the label of feminism has been about creating options, there are many people that try to leverage the movement to be more exclusionary and say some options are wrong in favor of a mental corporate career. From my experience this has been women that go as far as to invalidate the decision making ability of other women that are not choosing a corporate career like that.

Well how do you make the family more stable? Maybe by marrying and creating a legal contract that will encourage you not to do something stupid that will destroy your life and destabilize your family.

Sack up and make her an honest woman.

> Equal working opportunity for both genders are great, but feminism preached being career driven too much

I encounter more and more women that literally apologize to me as a disclaimer before they say they want children and to raise them in person most of the day, as their form of empowerment involves only corporate career aspirations and they also call this feminism. This is just in casual conversation.

Hilariously they are also apologizing excessively, which is not progressive at all but just so safe that it's a tougher habit to break.

> With half of marriages ending in divorce,

That's half of ALL marriages in the US, not half of first marriages. Only 41% of first marriages end in divorce in the US, and rates are much lower in the EU, and the UK.

4 in 10 is not good. Especially if there is a high chance of an extreme financial penalty over it.

41% is really high considering the potential consequences.

It would still be a shitty contract even at 10%, or 5%, or 2%

maybe at 2% there could be a viable divorce insurance product and the terms of the contract wouldn't have to be updated by legislatures

but at higher percentages an insurance product is not possible, and we need a better contract, laws, and court behavior

ha, that is the first time I have read someone suggest divorce insurance. I would love to see the stipulations insurers come up with.

I've looked into it several years ago and a product was trialed, but basically you can't insure events that are bound to happen, you need to bolster the insurance pool.

I and a few others don't have any issue abstracting all topics into their economic realities, including the marriage concept that the state offers in its entity catalogue. I think many more people could do that as well, it is just convenient to deflect and pretend marriage isn't about that, convenient for typically one party in any case.

It's not like someone is forcing you to get married. Also 41% as a top line number doesn't tell the whole story. Among college educated Americans the rate is ~29% and falling year over year.

Also prenuptial agreements are a thing for a reason.

I think some of this is correct, but would like to push back on a few points.

2. I think that some amount of redundancy in skills and roles is helpful. Being able to exchange roles and responsibilities fosters adaptation of the family unit to changing circumstances and new opportunities.

3. Is this because divorce laws favor women or because men are usually the primary breadwinners while women are the caretakers? High earning women also have to pay alimony and split the community property they paid for.

Is it really lawyers that are driving divorce rates? It’s not like they are showing up unsolicited and sowing discontent in otherwise happy relationships.

> High earning women also have to pay alimony and split the community property they paid for.

They ended #3 by saying marrying down is the liability, which would be true for all spouses of all genders. But in a world where men are still overwhelmingly making the unilateral choice to marry, this is mostly about the incentives that men are prudent to weigh.

It speaks to the winner-takes-all outcome of our economy: No social mobility.

#1 is a particularly bad problem. I’ve seen a handful of exceptions but it’s truly an exception.

We don’t seem to have the collective will to legislate the underlying causes away either, and it bothers me tremendously.

It’s become worse every decade without exception, as 90 to 95% of the population keeps fighting over for less and less.

Your point is far more interesting than the content of the article itself. If nature and nurture underlies intelligence, it would be easy to reason that we will have a lot more intelligence inequality in the future than in other points in history.

Mating and marriage are not the same thing. We're social creatures and my view is a set of shared experiences and friends creates stronger bonds between people, which in turn can lead to marriage.

>What I don't see is that people join the institution with that market as an intention.

It was a quite common idea in the upper middle class back in the day (let's say '20s to late 50s in the US with adjustments for countries in different stages of development up to very recently), somewhat after the initial women's liberation, but not so much so that women careers where not rare, that parents sent their girls to college not to study for a profession, but to snatch a husband.

Why do you assume people would state their full purpose, or are even aware of it?

I’ve seen quite a bit of research that our reasons and justifications for an action FOLLOW the action, not the other way around.

I was about to say this. Why in the hell are they trying to over intellectualize, "horny young adults that see each other often are more likely to hook up with each other". Add in similarities of interest since they congregated to the same place, this leads to easier topic points to hold conversations. Even the most socially awkward can date in these situations since small talk points are made easier.

I smell someone needed to use up grant money and ran out of ideas.

I'd wager that one of the big variables is proximity. At college, you eat, go out, party, study and do all of the mundane stuff together with a close group of people. At work, after hours you may go get some drinks, but you are not going to go buy TP together.

For some reason I've had this long standing belief that love is just a function of proximity.

I think I've subconsciously made it one of my goals in life to disprove this, by finding someone on the other side of the world. I'm not getting my hopes up though.

> finding someone on the other side of the world

First hand experience is that it can be very rewarding if the wave lengths match. It opens a whole new world of experiences and thinking patterns.

It takes a lot more commitment than, say, a relationship with someone from same college/town, so it takes more awareness about the fact.

I've heard a similar argument and I don't think it's entirely wrong, but I think the function is a little more complicated.

Because when you spend enough time around anyone, you realize they suck (because everyone does). So some degree of grace is required as well to maintain love once the proximity factor has peaked.

I think, it's about perceived proximity (car, train, and plane, help to lower that) and the kind of relationship you want.

I have two girlfriends who live two train hours away from me. As the two implies, I'm not living a regular relationship, so I'm inclined to go to greater lengths when finding someone that fits.

Already disproved it (and many many many others), First 4 years of my relationship spent living in different countries. After college we moved in together. I think proximity is only a small part of it at least in a Facetime enabled world.

> function of proximity.

If you define proximity as spending time together IRL or virtually, then I agree.

See also the mere exposure effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect#:~:text=T....

The best advice I can give is to date/marry/bond with someone as similar as possible to yourself. I know this is both sociopolitical anathema, and breaks the rules of attraction/neediness. The other option is a lifetime of frustration trying to understand why this person thinks/says/does every little thing. This is only fun when it’s inconsequential, and you both walk away, each thinking the other is so impressed that they want to be just like you.

No. Prepare for anagnorisis.

The opportunity for highly-similar pairing peaks in grad school. I believe this has more to do with graduate program success than the grad schooling itself.

But you won’t take this advice. You will choose someone that makes you feel better about yourself, either because they need heroic superior you to fill some deficit in themselves, or because the relationship proves that in fact you are perfect with no such deficits. If you don’t recognize the full irony and impending disaster of that situation, I strongly advise reading any book on codependency.

A corollary of this is that third-party observers are often quite easily able to notice this, though advice is often ignored.

True wisdom here. Heed it, younger people!

My wife is quite different than I am, in many ways. She was an arts major who lived in a punk rock house that had shows with out of town bands in the basement. I was an Electrical Engineering major who listened to a lot of prog rock. None of our mutual friends expected us to hook up. We have been together over 20 years, and the fact that we are different means we are more often able to complement each others' skill sets (not least in the raising of our daughter). Just one data point, of course, but there you are.

You sound almost exactly alike. Music. School. Friends. These are all quite superficial, but it points to very similar patterns of thought and interest. You’ll see what I mean if you ever find yourself dating full strangers again.

Prog rock and punk rock are, yes, both music. She was formerly an art major, I was in electrical engineering, although she was forced to drop out before I met her due to financial issues. So, obviously not complete opposites, but not "almost exactly alike".

Do people like oneself exist?

I have never met anyone with whom I agreed fully or shared everything. I can't imagine that one could, or that someone that smioar even exists. Maybe if you come from a small town and had all nonconformism beaten out of you? Even that sounds hard to imagine to me.

The paradox of living with someone as I have experienced it is that the larger the apparent difference initially, the more the existence of differences and the necessity of being prepared to expect the unexpected is. Ultimately any romantic relationship ends over incompatibilities that cant or wont be overcome, and in my experience the more similar we were, the more certain people were about gaps being too wide to bridge.

I'm married now with a foreign person, whom I met while in a third country, we've been together for over 7 years and while what you describe is always present and is sometimes tiring, the truth is that we also regularly discover how we have changed and 'infected' each other with habits and opinions. And that happens in any relationship: you grow towards each other, if you can and want to let it happen.

I therefore think it may in fact be easier when you are different: there is nowhere to hide and you need and are obviously prepared to deal with difference. When you are similarish, you might delude yourself into forgetting you are in fact not.

You’re describing a fear of intimacy. It’s actually fear of rejection, or of self-rejection, like so many things. If you choose someone to avoid a faithful reflection of yourself, you won’t be upset at any dissonance. It does work though.

You say things without showing or proving them. They merely seem hollows words invented to fit a narrative constructed to achieve precisely what you accuse others of: making yourself feel comfortable with your imperfect choices.

Sure. Regardless, it wasn’t a criticism. Your words seemed true and the situation common by my observation. There are some west Asian ‘third world’ cultures I have observed where marriage is not tied to any bond of intimacy or cohabitation, and now I see that as the direction of modern society as well. I’m not ready to make a value judgement on that. Maybe after a few lifetimes trying different pairing strategies.

At no point did I write about the absence of intimacy, cohabitation, or Asian 'third world' cultures.

You're not making much sense.

Wouldn't you naturally learn how to model how your mate thinks over time? Does it really doom you to a lifetime lacking understanding of how they think?

You would think so, but no, you are only observing and predicting behavior. But life is infinitely nuanced. And even if you could, what help is that when those thoughts have power over you, and you have none over them? It will never feel okay.

This is so close to being the right advice imo.

Personally I don't think it matters a ton if you have similar interests or careers or think about things in a similar way.

What matters most is that you want the same things out of life and out of a relationship. All of those similarities don't matter one bit if one person wants kids and the other doesn't. Or one person wants to own a lot of property and the other would like to spend every spare cent travelling.

Your partner does not have to be someone you share every hobby with or do everything together with, or agree on everything with.

They do have to be someone you can build a life with.

Those are examples of fundamental differences in thought patterns, interests, and preferences. And you are right, but a lot of that gets baked into more superficial similarities like education. But, for instance, the statement, “I want kids” can be a massively different statement from rational versus emotional reasoning.

I notice I’m sounding like Myers-Briggs, and I hadn’t thought about the validity of that.

I went to an engineering college, 80-90% male at the time, good education, co-op program for good work experience.

I think I missed out on a lot of the college experience,so I wound up here instead.

I returned to school for comp sci past year and as an older student, I still feel like I got the "college experience" because I actively sought it out. I was also in a state that didn't care about covid so that helped a ton too. But, my experiences weren't with people at school, they were predominantly with people and randoms at bars you just talk to. Also dating apps as well.

This is why people send their kids to Christian college. The boys get their degrees in whatever, and the girls can do the teacher/nurse/marriage. They get to choose from another Christian from a “good family”

Huh. Here I'd been thinking my classmates were there for the same reasons I was: The high-caliber education, top-tier faculty, abundant connections to other local schools (Boston area), and not just toleration of but encouragement toward my own spiritual and religious explorations at that stage in my life.

A handful of my best friends even became Catholic priests, so I guess if their parents sent them there to marry, it didn't work out very well.

> A handful of my best friends even became Catholic priests, so I guess if their parents sent them there to marry, it didn't work out very well.

Assuming the parents are authentic Catholics, they would send them there to find their vocation, whether that is marriage or holy orders. Seen through that lens, it worked out very well indeed.

Sure. My point was just counter- the dismissive parent post that treated Christian schools like a marriage market.

Well, they ended up married to Jesus.

Married to the Church, in Catholic theology, but yes ;)

In the Christian circles I grew up in, women used to say they were in college to get their MRS degree.

Same exact saying in the Jewish circles I grew up in :)

As a return college student, my college is just filled with women who are at college to rack up absurd amounts of debt for worthless fields making subpar art or papers. Also the typical trip to europe that costs 3x the amount it does if you did it yourself.

The old "MRS" degree

By this logic, could any social activity among 18-30 year olds be called a marriage market?

Video games as a marriage market. Instagram as a marriage market. Church as a marriage market.

I’ve never met someone who selected a particular college because they expected to find a better mating pool.

There are lots of people who don’t go to college who have marriage markets of their own.

Interesting, as I've been considering going to Harvard for the purposes of finding a suitable dating partner. I can't think of a better place to find someone with the qualities that I desire, other than possibly top tier prestigious companies.

I'm assuming you're being absolutely fascitious.

If you're not (and you're female), Wellesley is a better choice. You have more options (Harvard, MIT, Olin, &c.), and the parties are better :').

If anyone’s reading from the UK, St Andrew’s University is known for the number of marriages it creates. It’s not surprising, given you’re spending 4-5 years in a tiny, predominantly student, town. Also, the university has an ‘academic family’ system which produces exactly the expected results.

Smart!

I recommend you also try joining a Tennis Club. There's lots of humans there of various genders and with various qualities, likely including some of those you desire. Their bodies are above-average healthy and their backgrounds are often upper class. IQ is a little all over the place but that's an easy one to filter out. Prefer a Tennis Club that publishes an annual yearbook with all members' credentials so you can better filter their qualities by merging and processing data from public sources programmatically.

You almost had me there

This exchange reads like a Fry & Laurie sketch to me.

You don't join clubs with the intention of dating. If you are, you're going about dating 100% wrong...

Where i studied there were maybe 2 girls max in all of my engineering classes, And all of the guys i met were just interested in video games and had no social lives (like myself). The social networking aspect of uni was the biggest joke of all.

Where unattached adults meet, there will be ahem discovery and disclosure. But I think that its a serious mistake to get married without understanding the full financial responsibility and risk. Perhaps the educational system should make the teaching of this reality part of a mandatory curriculum of financial understanding.

"Marriage is unnecessarily complicated. You can just find someone whom you hate and give that person a house." -- Pat Paulsen

Just one more way in which college supports the class society. But really, is this a surprise to anyone?

Now what would be interesting would be to investigate if a one-year hiatus on in-person college causes marriage rates to drop in a few years.

The study uses data from Norway.

Maybe this is a good choice because the relevant variables can be controlled for.

On the other hand, the US has the most universities per capita, and students come from all over the world. Might this be one of the larger sources of heterogenous marriages as well?

Did the article mentions if there are difference when it comes to college preference. Would the chase of finding a mate at a finance program better than cold world studies for example?

>cold world studies

Sorry, I Googled this but had no luck; what exactly are cold world studies?

Edit: sorry my autocorrected cold War to cold world

It's a program part of Masters and bechelor degree in history.

You know like IT- distribute systems.

Example program https://worldhistory.columbia.edu/content/cold-war

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