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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen

I don't think you need these things to find a partner and have children.

Just go to a maternity ward. It sounds like you think everyone there is highly motivated, physically fit, and dedicated to working on relationships. They aren't. They're just normal people with a range of human flaws and a regular cross-section of society. Fat, thin, lazy, hard-working, professional, unemployed, etc.

Having kids isn't as hard as you make it sound!

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IDK starting the baby making process isn't terribly difficult once one has a partner. It's the carrying to term and everything after that is a lot of time, money, and energy.

Some folks will struggle more with the partnering aspect than others. Or mustering the will and resources to begin parenting.

Spend some time reading about infertility at the start of the baby making process and I think you’ll find that it can terribly difficult. Especially as you progress into your mid/late 30s (women). And it is that starting process that can also cost lots of money, time, and energy.

Great call out. I forgot about some struggles in this regard myself, though IME dwarfed by the aftermath.

As two-kid dad, I definitely agree that the time, energy, and cost of delivering and raising kids is HUGE. It's not something that you should undervalue at all.

But I think we have this unfortunate habit of severely underweighting the start process and things that aren't obvious.

You probably experience lots of stress over the span of raising a kid (or more). Other people see that in the classic screaming-kid seemingly-helpless-parent visual. You may also experience that same stress, perhaps cumulatively more, just from the start because it's (1) VERY stressful when it doesn't work, and (2) a situation that can drag on for what feels like forever.

So, everyone commiserates over work it is to raise a kid but few people talk openly or at all about how hard it is to start the process of having a kid.

The toolbox for doing it sucks too. The public school and childcare infrastructure is absolute shit and private is an expensive crapshoot

That really depends on the country, the smart move may require relocating to raise kids elsewhere.

Some jobs are unfortunately linked to areas where it’s really expensive to raise kids.

I've just looked at this recently, boarding school in Spain is around 12k per year

In the USA 12k buys you a half day of care or possibly a religious school if you are already a member

That's why I mentioned boarding schools, you don't have to live there to send your kids to it and also it might be good for them, nurture independence and a lot of experience with a foreign culture while also giving you flexibility and easing the burden of child raising.

That sounds like the toolbox when your kid is born. You are probably right as it pertains to the US. I’m talking about pre-birth part.

Spend some time reading about infertility and you'll find that the number one cause for both men and women is obesity.

Every single one of my friends or acquaintances who is obese has had trouble conceiving. Every. Single. One.

Sure, I didn’t have that in mind but I would say it augments my point rather than refutes it.

The selection process is on Tinder, not the maternity ward, and the bar is brutally high there for men.

> the bar is brutally high

The men I've seen in maternity wards are just totally normal men.

I used to think that. I genuinely did. I thought that the bar was all the way up in space and that it’s impossible to reach it. I was pretty lonely.

Of course, I used to also think that my value was in my net worth and you could have seen all the way from space the “I’m an asshole and I don’t know why nobody will date me” vibes radiating off of me.

Then I grew up, I chilled out, and I put conscious effort into things other than my career and being Good At Tech Stuff. Stuff like listening, and exercising my capacity for empathy, and trying to be pleasant to be around. You can project being likeable or interesting for a bit, but I found that it’s easier to be likeable and interesting instead. And suddenly I stopped finding it so difficult at all to find matches and find dates.

I met my previous SO of three years on OKCupid and my current SO on Tinder, and it wasn’t until we’d been dating for quite a while that what I did for a living, all that Is This Man A Provider nonsense, even came up.

The difficulty is between the ears of one party in this selection process. It’s a mix of getting over oneself and understanding that it’s all a numbers game besides, but one of those things doesn’t work without the other.

> listening, and exercising my capacity for empathy, and trying to be pleasant to be around

None of that matters if you aren’t attractive. You have to be attractive for girls to swipe right on you and start a conversation in the first place.

> You have to be attractive

Again, looking in any maternity ward at the fathers you'll see many conventionally unattractive men.

Those are the men who "stuck around". You're not going to see all the deadbeats who are having babies with multiple women in a maternity ward.

Odd thing to but-for him about. About one in five American mothers have children from more than one father, and that includes Very Upstanding(tm) folks who divorce and remarry and not the women falling for those absolute chads of your projection.

A bit of a sidetrack, but that seems like a pretty high number to me. At least in my part of the world, the numbers are at least an order of magnitude lower.

Probably is high. Americans seem to divorce a lot.

It’s actually not that bad if you get out from behind the keyboard and practice. But it’s work and it could take a few years off practice 2-3 times a week.

This is the line peddled by MRAs and similar dirtbags, yes, when they need you to be righteously angry about your situation. And yet, somehow one can muddle along and do alright for oneself--and I am not ugly but I'm not particularly attractive.

As 'rdtwo notes, though, it does take practice and commitment and it does take time.

Continuing to believe that may be what's holding you back. There are less- and un-attractive females that are looking for a partner as well. The "bar being too high" works in both directions.

Also, in regards to longer-term relationships, if this is true:

> You have to be attractive for girls to swipe right on you and start a conversation in the first place.

Then they're probably not the right ones to be starting a conversation with.

> Then they're probably not the right ones to be starting a conversation with.

Why? Aren't women entitled to be attracted by phisique and by passing good genes?

what a wild single standard

You can work on being attractive with good diet and exercise.

I have zero experience with online dating, but I've watched a friend give it a crack after divorce. A brutal appraisal would be: struggling freelancer, doesn't own a house, overweight, mental health issues, greybeard. On the other hand: smart, good sense of humour, etc. Yet he's had a solid number of dates and he puts it down mostly to not putting a picture of him catching a fish in his profile, and holding a decent conversation.

To be fair, this is the 40+ age range. It's possible that 18-25 year olds of both genders haven't yet honed in on what makes for a good partner.

It's exactly like marketing, but the product is you: understand the customer you want, understand the market dynamics, understand the product. Carefully position the product to ensure you are reaching the right customers, and be willing to iterate. I literally A/B tested profile descriptions and pics yo improve my response rates on apps.

And now i have a wonderful SO and don't have to deal with those awful apps for the time being.

> The selection process is on Tinder, not the maternity ward, and the bar is brutally high there for men.

I’ve been seeing this exact trope repeated more and more on HN lately: Some vague assertion that Tinder is the only place for matchmaking and that only a tiny number of men are getting all of the matches.

It’s an objectively ridiculous claim for anyone who has experience in the real world where, yes, even “normal” men can find partners. It doesn’t even stand up to the most basic tests of logic.

Are only attractive people getting married and having kids? Of course not.

So what is actually going on here? Is this some talking point being repeated on some corner of the internet that resonates with a subset of people who view the world through their cell phones instead of getting out and interacting with real other people? It’s an objectively absurd assertion, yet it gets repeated with great confidence in a lot of online discussions.

Genuinely asking, roughly how old are you? I'm in my early-mid twenties and of the ~100 people I keep in touch with my age range from high school, there has been one child born (by accident if the rumors are true) and zero marriages. Of the dozen or so people I keep in regular contact with I've gathered that this is not for lack of trying, either. Obviously there is bias here as this is all anecdotal, but I'm very curious as to how unique this situation is.

That was the same for me in my mid-20s. By my mid 30s, vast majority are married with children. People are waiting a little longer than the last generation, but it's still happening as normal.

Mid-20s is nothing, especially if your peer group is college educated. My wife and I married at 25 a bit over 20 years ago. Even at that time, we were the first of our friends group to marry. We had our first child right about the time I turned 30. We were only the 2nd of our peer group to have a child. Today, all of our friends from back then are married (a few divorced) with kids.

The trend has been only towards waiting longer in the 20+ years since we were ahead of the curve.

If you're from an affluent background - being married in your 20s is weird. If you're single in your 30s - you should be worried but it's too late. By then - most of your friends will likely marry.

I'm close to your age than some of the other commenters, but I also find that marriage/child statistic unsurprising, not least given the events of the last two years, and the assumption of a vaguely affluent, coastal peer group.

>So what is actually going on here?

It actually matches the real data and studies which have been done on the topic. When men ranked photos of women on a scale of 1-10, the majority of woman were ranked in the 5 category which would indicate the average person is seen as average. While when woman ranked photos of men, the majority of men were ranked bellow 5. The data that has come out of online dating is pretty damning and says a lot more than some anecdotes about some normal men finding partners.

I wish I remembered the exact study from a few years ago because there are more details which were even more depressing but I'm less certain on.

Link to the graphic I believe you're referencing: https://i.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo.png

The original study was published on the OkCupid blog, but it was taken down after it caught on likely due to the obvious PR implications.

The real world isn't carefully structured studies with arbitrary rating scales, though. People match with each other and settle down.

If you want a scientific explanation, look up "Assortative mating": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating

The idea that only the most attractive people are entering relationships with each other while everyone else, regardless of gender, is staying single is ridiculous.

Did you date during Covid? I did. Every possible avenue to meet partners was closed except...apps. i am extremely active and extroverted, but yoga classes went online, the gym shut down, the bars closed, concerts were cancelled. Dance studios shut their doors. How exactly were your expecting dating to work for the last few years?

I would not underestimate how much the process of dating and meeting romantic partners has shifted because of that, even as we re-open. the stigma is mostly gone and there is little reason not to at least be present there.

> It’s an objectively ridiculous claim for anyone who has experience in the real world where, yes, even “normal” men can find partners. It doesn’t even stand up to the most basic tests of logic.

> Are only attractive people getting married and having kids? Of course not.

Have you considered that men are just having less partners than women? Many more men go childless (25%) than women (14%). As far as we can tell - men are having less sex overall. It's obvious that the majority of men eventually get a partner and settle down with someone but that's generally less than the number of partners a woman has before she settles down.

Here's a fun source - and this is BEFORE COVID. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame... I cannot imagine how much more grim it is post-COVID.

I find it weird that you didn't think about that. Men and women generally have very different journeys to their destination. One is usually more consistent in sexual experience whereas the other is wildly varying. The amount of men who have 50+ sexual partners completely dominates the amount of women who do. This doesn't mean that men are having more sex than women though. This means that a few men are having more sex than most women.

This is what feeds into the whole online discussion. It's obvious to anyone who has done online dating or talked to the women. They'll be like, "Oh yeah, I matched with that guy too." It's clear that many women are sleeping with the same select group of men. I don't know how this is a surprise to anyone...

Tinder isn't for relationships, it's a disgusting people market for hook ups. Every profile is basically an ad for a person.

Online dating is toxic, most people I know that used it years ago are still there safe for few unicorns. How could it possibly be? Weren't they lookimg for someone?

Maybe because it distorts relationships and people as commodities thus making meaningful relationships harder to initiate, maintain and commit.

> Online dating is toxic

Most serious relationships and marriages that I known of (including mine) that started within the last 7 years or so originate in online dating. I'm in my 40s. You might want to be a little less sure of your opinions.

Damn near every profile I see says "not here for hookups, no FWB/casual" and people are almost so allergic to any form of flirtatiousness you practically need to keep it "business casual" or you get silence/unmatched. If you're over your mid 20's, you're not using it for hookups, at least in my (US) city.

What is disgusting about consenting adults wanting to hookup?

Throwaway's point about how the system is extremely self-selecting is still a very good one though.

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