Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Two other random observations about the differences between using matching sites versus people I've met more organically: Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. That difference is quite stark but otherwise personality and lifestyle differences are minimal. The other is that tall women are vastly overrepresented on dating sites. My guess is that if you're a 6' tall woman who wants to not be taller than her significant other but still wants to be able to wear heels, the numbers don't work very well with more traditional dating. You have to be able to cast a wide net when 96% of men are already shorter than you are in two inch heels.
For myself, my best relationships have been those I've met in person rather than through online dating. In most of those cases, we wouldn't have been a match if we had been using an app and running in similar social circles itself was a good filter. The best relationship from someone I met online was a woman I met on LiveJournal in an alumni area, which was somewhat of a pseudo social circle filter itself.
This is interesting. Can you provide a little information on the context:
- what is the number of people you've encountered to form this opinion?
- Is this all in one region/sub-population or do you suspect socio-economic differences to play into this?
Durable relationships with friends are ones that just work because you don't freight it with external meaning. That we use a noun for a "relationship" between people at all is probably the root of a lot of its difficulty. Relationships as things are intractable, whereas relating and choosing how you relate is the simplest thing in the world. It's as though we codified relating into a noun so we could trade it, which makes sense when you look at "being in a relationship" as a proxy for being property, and matchmaking services that want to sell you one.
Intimacy does require a shared perimeter of safety, trust, and exclusivity relative to that specific personal intimacy, and you need to maintain it, but reducing it to role-playing expectations just turns it into a power struggle in the guise of a game.
For a lot of people, marriage is basically a dead institution, but we still go looking for someone to "make" a marriage with, as though it's a thing you make that is abstracted from the people involved. The same can be said for family, where we relate to "the family" as our reflection against an ideal of family, instead of each person directly.
Maybe I've been into the stoics too much, but the simple mental rephrasing of "my partner," to "the partner I have" changes how you relate to them, from being an extension or reflection of yourself to being an experience in your life, and it takes a lot of pressure off how you relate to them.
That last statement is a destroyer of codependent relationships, which is probably good because someone spending thousands of dollars to find someone to represent their idea of a "relationship," in which they like their reflection in it is just going to suffer. That is, until they don't need to check a reflection to know they're good.
So in practice they have taken away the discover and pushed towards swiping removing any positives of their platform in the process. I have heard that many of the dating apps are now owned by 1 company. So if that is true, it makes sense from a shitty business perspective
Then they created Keybase, which was fantastic, before selling out to Zoom. Development has all but stopped.
This style of hit and run get what's mine is endemic to SV. Nobody takes responsibility for the lasting legacy of the things they build.
OkCupid was a safe haven for people who really wanted something genuine. It had a culture-wide effect the same way that Tinder cemented hook-ups as the New Normal of dating. We need to start taking responsibility for the things we make that touch millions of people.
Chris' Twitter [1] professes his love for making things. Yes but you don't love being a good steward of the things you build.
Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives.
Ironically, OKCupid wrote about this exact issue, explaining why membership incentives were bad, etc.
Then they were bought by Match.com, went to a membership based subscription model, and deleted that post.
And that, right there, is probably the key principle for a solid matchmaking app...
Of course there must be logistics against anuse/fraud. But that would align incentives.
- less social pressure to get married than for my grandparents
- less financial incentive through tax benefits already applying if you live together here (to not prefer any religous belief system)
edit: formatting
On the other hand my internal entrepreneur says that it could be a great opportunity to launch okcupid2.0 given that there's an actual demand for this kind of site.
Dating sites were better in the 2000's. Yahoo personals? Craigslist? Even the old match.com were better than what we have now.
On noise, it's not uncommon to see less than 1% of male right swipes to turn into a match. As many here may know, this can be pretty emotionally taxing.
Then add on the choice problem. It's a well known psychological effect that too many choices can cause us feel bad about our choices. The classic example of this is with cereal in the grocery store. If you only have a few choices you pick one and think "I did the best I could" but if you have a hundred to choose from you'll think "maybe I could have done better" and doubt yourself even if you like the cereal. In relation to dating I think we end up judging a bit more than normal on first dates. I know I do. But first dates are often awkward and not a great indication of if you're a good match or not, unless there are major red flags.
I'll admit that I've had more success by being set up by friends. They know your personality, they know the other person's personality and if you will match. I think there's also a bit of pressure to go on a few dates and help get out of that awkward stage and really find out who the other person is.
But everyone has different takes. With scale one method might work well for some people and might not work for others. A wide array of tools is honestly the best because there never will be a singular solution for everyone. I think the major problem here is that were trying to turn all forms of dating into Tinder like and pretending like that's the only successful model.
If you're looking for a relationship I would suggest avoiding the swiping apps. That fits my bias. I think that choosing a partner or partners in life is one of the most important and most salient things we do and should get commensurate attention. Further, none of the most important aspects of a person are present in their appearance, not to mention a mere image. I believe this is so even if there are echoes of them available and accepting that our presentations to the world are generated by the pattern that we manifest. It still seems to me that it is the pattern you are attempting to discover, evaluate compatibility with, and create relationship to. The point there being to create new configurations and patterns according to the value systems of participants and structures of reality. It would take a huge stretch of imagination to devise a swiping app to help with that.
I'm not sure what dating apps optimize for. It's easy to say "for hookups!", but it seems like a very low% of matches on those apps lead to any kind of in-person connection, date or hookup: anecdotally I think I had a few hundred matches on Tinder, but only went on ~10 dates / hookups as a consequence. For most matches, the conversation would fizzle after a few messages. Maybe it's different for straight people?
My hypothesis is there's a "Market for Lemons"[1] problem here: take a pool of potential matches on Tinder. The pools narrow like so:
100% of people are on the app (given)
x<100% of people will match with an average person (picky)
y<x% of people will message or reply to a message[2]
z<y% of people will go on a date / hookup with someone[2]
People in each pool will be selected out of the swiping pool, leaving the people left for you to swipe on being, on average, less committed to ultimately going on a date. For example: people in the `z` group will get into short/long-term relationships and stop using Tinder. People in the `y` group will be busy texting with someone they met on Tinder (using pickup lines, etc.) and swipe less. Etc, etc.
I'm not sure how a dating app would solve this issue. Traditional ways of finding partners, like meeting people at a bar or hobby group or at college, doesn't either: it's just there's a benefit to making friends or talking to people beyond trying to hook up or start dating them. Most people, if they make 5 friends at a college club but don't start dating any of them, are still happy, I would think.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
[2]: Why would people match or reply to a message, but not want to go on a date? I've anecdotally known several people who do this: some just wanted validation from random strangers, some are just shy and would theoretically want to go on a date but didn't work up the courage to actually do it, etc. etc. Lots of reasons.
A friend of mine, John, first met his future wife while accompanying a third friend to an evening of speed dating.
The thing is, neither John nor his now wife, actually participated. They were both there, begrudgingly providing moral support to their respective friends, and smugly watching the whole spectacle from the sidelines, when they struck up conversation.
Of course I’m dealing with an older than primary demographic (30-50), which might have something to do with it, but I think you’ve hit on a scarcity issue caused by the temporal nature of interactions on the apps themselves. The longer you spend online, the higher the chance that someone else will come along and be more efficient in setting something up with the one you’re talking to.
I’ve only been on the swipey apps for a month now, but I’ve found myself regularly unmatching anyone where I feel like it will be too much work because of this phenomena. It’s like an incurred opportunity cost of dealing with people who are too hesitant.
That's probably because they've had enough experience to become aware of "the great lie" with all of these approaches to dating, and are tired of wasting time with it. That is, the fantasy that the online conversation actually has any real meaning whatsoever.
No matter how much time you spend chatting or exchanging messages virtually, it is completely and utterly meaningless when held up against the first 5 minutes of that first in-person meet-up. So getting to that stage as quickly as possible tends to be the best for everyone.
It’s certainly a component for sure, esp as the marketplace is so hard for guys meaning they’re willing to go to greater lengths to stand out… but I feel this is more an issue of the process being so transactional and transitory.
These days I can think of many many friends who've had relationships start via online dating, and the stigma/weirdness has completely gone away.
Well, not completely - anecdata but plenty of places on this planet (in the West too) where online dating = you are too desperate and you have no other options = stigma (especially for straight men).
One thing she often says is I was within a hairs breath of being deleted, because we chatted on Tinder and then WhatsApp for a couple of weeks before our first date. For me it was natural, as I've always been comfortable chatting to people online (via IRC etc)
There is this inherent problem that if the dating app does its job well, it will inevitably lose the customer. The ideal customer does a lot of matching is more into hookups than actual dating, so the dating app in incentivized to optimize for this behavior rather than focusing on matching people based on character to increase the possibility of a long term relationship.
She pinged me and we talked briefly, but at the time I had just gotten a new job a couple of hours away and was considering moving closer to the job (and away from her), and she didn't want to do anything long distance.
About a year later I had switched jobs back into the area, was still on the same dating platform, and she pinged me again. We've been together for over six years now.
I think just meeting in-person will replace dating apps. There was a downward trend in chatting up strangers and in-person events, but I think that’s going back upward now. Because most people got lonely during the pandemic, and now that the vaccines are out hanging out is getting back to normal.
The fundamental issue is that dating apps don’t actually give you much information or preferences vs in-person, and most people who are attractive and looking for partners get in-person matches anyways.
(...I don't want to spend my life thinking like this.)
For instance, we used to make a little money when I married my wife, now we make a lot more. We didn't change our lifestyle or spending, nor what we spent on the child. Just savings increased, none of which we planned to give to the child. But now the child support calculator says I owe a lot more after a divorce, which is supposed to be money for the child. If the cost of the child didn't go up, it makes no sense the child support would go up when you earn more money, but it does. It's just a penalty on whoever earns more or doesn't take the child, as societies way of getting even for violating Christian norms.
What the court imposes is more of a penalty and incentive for divorce, than a representation on what a wife costs.
Only if you believe in the relatively modern human concept of two monogamous people being the only parents of a child.
Biologically speaking, a woman wants the sperm which will provide her the most survivable and resilient child, plus any number of other adults around who will help care for and protect that child.
This idea of a woman being choosy is a very new concept. You don't have to go back far in time at all to see where women had no choice at all (or look in some current cultures).
But if you go back further, or you go to places less touched by modern conventions, you find men and women of groups being generally sexual with each other, and being responsible for all the children in their group. This appears to be how humans survived and flourished for most of human history; or at least, it fits the existing evidence much better than the idea of a monogomous (and very 1:1 protective) couple.
Sure, if a woman knows she is only ever allowed to have one partner (and she's not allowed to be an equal participant in the world where income or resources are earned), she will choose the man more likely to guarantee that the basic survival needs are met or exceeded as much as possible. But she will still biologically seek the strongest, fittest, most genetically compatible and complementary man she can have sex with. From a modern human survival standpoint, this is the path of success.
> if a woman knows she is only ever allowed to have one partner
If each woman and each man can only choose one partner, i would expect the choosiness of men and women to become much more equal, because the reproductive investment of the man and the woman start to look a lot more equal (a lifetime investment for each). In reality we know that humans historically have not really been monogamous creatures, even in societies that are nominally so.
> Females have a biological incentive to be more choosy than men as their reproductive investment is much higher
until I saw you had also written
> If each woman and each man can only choose one partner, i would expect the choosiness of men and women to become much more equal
which is the missing piece I was going to add.
> In reality we know that humans historically have not really been monogamous creatures, even in societies that are nominally so.
But, to shift emphasis a little, in those societies, many many people really were monogamous, there absolutely were, and are, functioning lifelong pair-bonds, there were men who devoted a lot of themselves to being good husbands and fathers, and, I'd like to think, there still can be. But yes, such men will need to be choosy, because they're making the biggest investment of their lives.
I would bet that men (from couples) who have clear and open communication can be otherwise very loving partners and devoted parents without also having to be monogamous. If you zoom out just a bit and look at what is physically occurring, why should it be that physically touching someone else would prevent you from continuing to be a good parent and partner?
At a population level, it's hardly even up for debate that humans are not monogamous. This has been researched ad nauseum, although I am too lazy at the moment to dig up the research at the moment.
They really weren't. If anything, they were probably a bit above average.
Although, there is one thing that might have contributed back in the day. Female users of online dating might have been concentrated in tech areas. Being a rare female in a male dominated ratio area causes a highly skewed estimate of how attractive you really are.
With the dynamics of the game laid out the way you said, do you see any reason to right swipe on someone of a relatively similar attractiveness to you? Or given it’s current parameters, does it always make more sense for women to try to match “up” and aim for men objectively more attractive than them?
1. There are very, very few life-long partnerships. And of the ones that are, some of them are for reciprocal benefits (not love); some are because the people are too scared or complacent to leave; some are because the two are completely lacking in ambition and hope for a better future. Most people change over time, and most people change differently (especially different sexes). To imagine them remaining on a parallel trajectory through long life by nature (instead of sheer willpower or complacency) is naive.
2. Swiping left/right by looks is not for long term partnership. It is for short term physical excitement. And in that regard, it's a good start.
3. No amount of online communication or friend referrals will compare to frequently being around someone, getting to know them, and falling in love with them. This is a very low percentage game he's betting on (unless he's just betting on publicity, in which case he wins 15 minutes of fame).
4. Wait until the (unnamed nationality) recruiters get wind of this. For a chance of $7000, they will inundate him with dates. The smartest of them will promise to share half of it with the women, in which case he'll have more dates than he has time for. And if he has some money, the more desperate women will fake their way to marriage, winning the $3500 and potentially a comfortable life (only having to have sex with him a couple of times per week).
This may sound pessimistic, but it's really just an observation on traditional modern marriage. People don't work like the story books suggest, and the story books are based on fiction that doesn't represent the vast majority of human history.
The good news for him and anyone else who wants to expand their awareness is that one can have many good meaningful relationships and some really great physical relationships in one lifetime. And be happy through most of it.
Not to mention points 2, 3 and 4 are completely unsubstantiated lol. How is this the top reply?
Because I replied early? I dunno, only 3 points. [edit - -1 points :P. So sad :( ]
His idea is doomed because he says, "I'm looking for somebody who has a kind heart, someone who's curious and maybe has a sense of humour, it doesn't have to be my sense of humour."... and he's depending on other people, with their own sensibilities and emotions, to identify people he might fit with?
This is not new. People forever (perhaps more often women) have been motivated to play matchmaker for their friends. If that method were most successful, dating apps wouldn't exist.
Another reason his idea is doomed is because he put money on it. That provides a perverse incentive which favors the person who can provide him the most dates (who can superficially entertain him until he weds one).
What you call unsubstantiated I call obvious.
2. Who out there believes that Tinder is where you find your life mate? Maybe it is now, I dunno... but it was certainly a hookup app for the first many years of its existence.
3. A friend is going to be more accurate than you would if you got to know someone naturally and fell in love with them?
4. Absolutely not unsubstantiated. Put any money value on something, and hordes of hungry gamers (not gamers, but gamers) will find a way to take the shotgun approach. After all, if one of his friends is able to keep his calendar booked with prospects, then that friend is more likely to win the prize.
There's hope, and it's a tough dating world out there, but if you have your attitude is over before you start.
No, my attitude is that one can have many meaningful chapters (perhaps more than one with the same partner). The problem is this shared assumption that relationships should never end. If one person can grow a lot in life, and you have two people together, the idea that they will both grow in the same ways which keep them sharing the same connection is _very_ ideallistic.
Add children, which certainly changes the parents, and you have even more variables. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do what is right for you at the time, have children, have a happy family, and enjoy it. It just means you should not think it's the end of the world if (when) people's directions begin to diverge.
It varies, because people vary, and you have to both work at it and want similar things.
Fairytales aren't real, but that's also not a reason to just say all marriages won't last. That's obviously false. It's also not the end of the world, as you say, if in the end you've both grown so far apart neither can remember what you're doing together in the first place. You fight for a relationship up to a point, but there are limits.
My point, which seems to be missed everywhere, is not that you shouldn't try - it's that you should not make the duration a key metric. Live for today, and for the next year, and maybe collectively fantasize and plan about the nextd 5 years. This day zero focus on "forever" just sets people up for mysery if (when) things start to change for the worse.
Isn't now good enough? After all, we only live Now. If we spent more of now enjoying what we have now, then we might waste a lot less of the "good years" worrying about the next years.
Unfortunately, I think most of the points here are spot on.
#2 (swiping is for physical excitement) and #4 (an offer of money creates incentives for un-genuine behavior) seem indisputable and deserve to be addressed
#1 (few life-long partnerships)
According to some random web site [1], about 45% of US marriages end in divorce. This seems to support assertion #1.
#3 (online communication does not compare to the quality of in-person communication): Seems like a no-brainer assertion to me, HN posts excepted... (j/k). Of course the online communication is supposed to lead to other opportunities to get to know someone better, so it should really be compared to hanging out in a bar or something. Which I would expect is also (relatively) ineffective at helping find a partner.
I mean, really I think the claim that there are few life-long partnerships is not relevant. A relationship needs a place to start and grow. Later failure of a relationship that "could have" worked out isn't an indication that the filters applied at the start are not functioning correctly.
But this assumption that two people who find each other a perfect match now will still feel that way in 5, 10, 20, 40 years is just unrealistic. It would be much better if people understood that we are all unique, and we all grow and expand in different ways. Sometimes a couple grows in the same way (and usually they do, quite a lot); but sometimes one of the couple grows in a different direction - discovers something important to them which pulls them away. It doesn't mean there was a problem with the other person or the relationship. A very simple example is when one person finds their career developing and fulfilling, but the other partner has a happy life in a certain town, near their family, friends, etc. To stay together, one of them probably must give up something very important. But to realize that a parting doesn't mean losing connection, it just means going separate ways, is natural.
I actually think that there can be great joy, mutual success, and net-postive happiness amongst people if they are willing to reconsider the rules and boundaries set by 1-20 generations before them.
Just as with studies and news articles, it's important to consider who benefits from the message being presented. Quite often, it's the "establishment".
After all, the establishment has tried to convince us that smoking was good for you, that mastubation would make you blind (and a host of other maladies), that burning fossil fuels wouldn't harm the environment, that eating low-fat packaged goods wouldn't make us fat, that drinking diet sodas wouldn't make us fat, that vaping wouldn't do some really wack stuff to us, that politicians represented us, etc. etc.
There are places in the world today where a woman breastfeeding in public is considered offensive. Who made that determination? (I use this example because it's about the most natural human activity, perhaps beside sex.) And yet, much of the US establishment wants us to believe that it's inappropriate. All of these crazy rules and artificial limitations could be much of what's wrong with our relationships and our behavior. I'm trying to point out the absurdity of things.
Personally, it's not for me but then I have been single for a while so I'm not really qualified to criticise.
That's the gist of the article.
I don't like online dating either. But this "social experiment" is just, I dunno, grimy?
India even has matchmaking websites for those wanting to find a suitable partner for marriage (half of the posts in it will be from parents / relatives of the prospective bride / groom). It's actually quite a competitive and lucrative business. Apart from charging for membership, these sites also abuse lax privacy laws and sell the individual profiles to data brokers and marketing divisions of various industries.
Am curious - do you think the Match group is any different? Their market cap suggests that they also do the same...
It's all very... Transactional.
I think its a bit worse to pay for dates/access which is the entire premise of dating apps, matchmakers, clubs etc. because those dont have a vested interest in helping you find anything long and successful. In fact, its the opposite.
A marriage in today's society is more of a business partnership than anything else; infidelity is as common as not. Often in wealthy circles joint business ownership precludes divorce as well, so enter the side partners. Typical aristocratic nonsense, which is what you get with Empires.
But there is no requirement to view or focus on everything through a single lens.
Sounds like he’s using the wrong apps for his goal. It’s intuitively determined that the gradient of intentions for dating apps goes from being hookup-oriented to long term compatibility in direct proportion to the amount of info given before matching.
the inability to communicate digitally with those around us at a bar or at a park is pretty silly. it'd be so neat to start more ad-hoc, non-applicationized communications channels! and a chief use would definitely be, "hi, single and interested!"
was talking with someone yesterday about dating & they actually brought up dating & knowing people's availability, & tech for facilitating info exchange at a bar ornwhat not. which is a twist, because usually it's me semi-subtly wading into a discussion about p2p tech. latter in the conversation they brought up stoplight parties- using very visible clothing (red/yellow/green) to signal interest (no/maybe/yes). trying to think of more over real world ways to connect seems ultra interesting to me.
When I got my first smartphone, I wondered if there might be a trend of single people setting their Bluetooth device name to the URL of their dating profile. Ideally the profile would have a machine-readable set of fields in (alongside a human-readable equivalent) and an app could calculate if you are compatible with anyone in the vicinity.
The system could still work without an app, though, since the user (when they notice someone they are attracted to nearby) could manually scan for Bluetooth device names using their phone, and browse to each page to check if the profile picture matches the person they noticed.
I know there have been some geo-location based dating services, but I think they have an incentive to make the matching radius as wide as possible, so that you keep looking at their app. On an open system, though, the economics of hosting these profiles should be similar to that of hosting Fediverse accounts, so there shouldn't be the same conflicts of interest.
I'm surprised to hear you describe those odds as undesirable. 50% chance of a positive interaction is an order of magnitude higher than I would have estimated. Even if there's only a 5% chance of a positive interaction, parent poster's advice is still worth it. If you are respectful other other people, those negative interactions will be short and not too bad for either party. The upshot of find love and a lifelong partner more than offsets those short negative interactions that you have to wade through.
It's one thing if it's someone in a social circle, however big. Total stranger? Seems to only result in frustration for most folks.
Besides meeting my wife this way, there was one girl who rather coldly rejected me that I later ran into via another social circle. I apologized if I had made her uncomfortable and she told me that even though she wasn’t interested she was also somewhat flattered and that the incident made her day.
I think with sexual harassment in the world and all these apps everyone overthinks things and think just walking up to a stranger is for boomers or pick up artists. Really it’s just the normal human interaction that worked for a couple million years and still works today. And at least for typical heterosexual dynamics, the ability to make eye contact and say “Hi, my name is” will always be more impactful than a Bluetooth signal.
In my experience, you are 110% correct.
I first saw my wife giving a speech and remembered her name. Two weeks later, I went up and introduced myself, with "Hello, <name>, my name is <ghoward>. Thank you for your [speech] about <thing>."
There are a few interesting things about what she noticed. First, she didn't really notice that I got "<thing>" wrong. (I mixed her speech up with another person's.) Second, the reason she didn't notice is because all she noticed was that I remembered her name!
And finally, as we were preparing to get married, many guys in our community got up in arms about how the community "superstar" was marrying me, someone known to be less attractive. My wife says all of the time that she chose me simply because I actually introduced myself and (later) asked her on a date.
Though all of that doesn't explain how she still finds me attractive, especially since she now knows I'm not that confident after all...
I'm really, genuinely glad this worked out for you.
When feminists talk about the objectification of women, though, I think this is a prime example. (Admittedly there are no details.) The assumption that bothers me is that it is ok to approach a "pretty girl" about entering into a relationship.
Isn't this problem as old as the hills?
> Why can't I walk down a street free of suggestion?
> Is my body my only trait in the eyes of men?
> -- Suggestion, Fugazi, 1988
companionship is a road not a destination. every single second of building up to it, achieving it and maintaining it takes work.