This is not true, not even remotely
The 5% thing is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.
You can just look outside your window and see the thousands of couples that exist, most of whom do not include a "top 5% man". The theory of hypergamy, and the idea that is so much worse in the digital age, is unsupported by facts.
For exampple Tinder has a hidden rating for each person, so lets say you are an average girl and Tinder has rated you as a 5/10. You can probably only see men that Tinder has rated 4-6. Even if you wanted to go for a "top 5%" man, algorithmically he would not even show in your feed.
Humans are biologically programmed to find suitable partners, we value many things beyond looks or social status and the basis of relationships is varied, complicated and researched to death.
There is no gaggle of desperate women running after a succesful hot man in a suit who keeps denying their advances. This is simply not happening
We still have a strong norm for monogamy, so of course you're going to see plenty of couples when you look out the window. The "stable marriages problem" resolving itself is always going to lead to a lot of marriages... What you don't see is how those people feel. Do they feel lucky to have their partner? Or do they feel that it's mostly the partner who's lucky in having them?
This is not a magical question, its been researched multiple times. People are less picky than they think, and we grow attached to people. Even if someone had feel like they settled in a relationship (btw this isn't happening, young people are taking twice as long in the dating part before marriage) the feelings grow quickly and we are progressive in the sense of progressing the relationship over breaking it.
If anything the problem is the opposite, people grow attached too quickly and many existing relationships shouldn't.
I'd really like some actual sources on this. This has not been my experience nor the experience of many people I know, at all. Both sides are pickier than ever before with instant gratification running rampant, both sides are advised not to settle too quickly. Even if I want to agree with the growing together part, I'm not getting nearly the same vibe from society pushing people to settle together as was prevalent prior to the sexual revolution.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-18263-009
> Both sides are pickier than ever before with instant gratification running rampant, both sides are advised not to settle too quickly.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761455282...
> I'm not getting nearly the same vibe from society pushing people to settle together as was prevalent prior to the sexual revolution.
Young people ARE taking longer to settle, and divorces are also down, the longer courtship before the commitment can be related to a million things, including lessons learnt from the mistakes of our parents, overcoming religious pressures etc
I can only access the abstract, but it seems fairly obvious there's a massive selection bias here which doesn't hold for the total populace. These people are selected to speed date in person by a commercial firm. That already surpasses the initial hurdle of trying to get a date. Furthermore, this doesn't tell me anything about pickiness, rather than "what people say isn't as they do".
>https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761455282...
Same story, only abstract. Without knowing the details, I can only assume they got people over the initial hurdle of establishing contact. Yes, I agree once you get over the hurdle, it isn't as bad as people say. It's the initial hurdle which is the problem.
The study also doesn't refute what I'm saying. Even if people are less picky than is indicated, it doesn't make a single mention that people are less picky or just as picky as they were a few decades ago. Given, that wasn't your point, but it is the point I am most interested in.
>https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10888683211025...
I fully agree with this one anecdotally, but again, it doesn't really deal with the initial hurdle. All it confirms is "once you get over it, it's not that bad". It speaks far more favorably of people willing to work through their problems and working together, but that won't help you if your potential partners never give you a chance. It's the approach phase I am most curious about and whether this has changed among younger generations.
thats true, I replied to what they implied rather than what they said. And then they replied and proved what I had read between the lines is what they meant.
> The claim was that women supposedly "fought" for those "5%", in the context of dating apps. OP didn't claim women exclusively dated them or ended up with them in the real world.
If you fight for something, then your attention, time and effort is spent on that. The resulting relationships would therefore just be women spent from trying to get with those men and settling for everyone else, again something demonstrably false by the countless happy couples out there. It would be impossible if the basis of 95% of them was a tired, desperate women who ended up with Craig cause that top 5% man said no to her repeatedly.
Go to a place where there are a lot of women. The simplest example is dancing class(es). Become the top 5% guy there (not 5% in dancing, top 5% male in general) and see. The same thing by being top 5% in your high school or university.
Literally anywhere, they are 50% of the world population
> The simplest example is dancing class(es
In what sitcom universe is dancing classes the simplest example of a place to find women? Also not a dating place, they are there to learn to dance.
> Become the top 5% guy there (not 5% in dancing, top 5% male in general) and see.
Do you need a card? Or is this one of those "if you are 6ft tall and rich women swoon over you like a disney movie" spiel?
I have danced a lot and trust me, people who go in front of others and can dance, even if they are average, get way more attention than pretty boys who sit standing still in the back acting like they are too cool. Courage, getting out there, skill, practice, being fun to be around, are skills people value much more than looks.
Btw see how I said people all the time and not women, because those skills work beyond dating, even if they certainly work for dating.
What is a dating place then? Do girls actually go anywhere specifically to date? In my experience any event/meetup/whatever that explicitly mentions dating/singles/mingling becomes a sausage fest right away.
You could say exactly the same thing about bars and clubs. They are there to have fun with their friends, not to date.
Well the topic of this post is dating apps where everyone there is explicitly down to date.
> In my experience any event/meetup/whatever that explicitly mentions dating/singles/mingling becomes a sausage fest right away.
>You could say exactly the same thing about bars and clubs. They are there to have fun with their friends, not to date.
I agree, some men act like dating is a hunting ground probably part of the reason why dating apps have so few women.
Well my point is that if you ask a woman out at a dance class, she can certainly turn you down because she is not interested in you. But it can also be because thats not what she came for. Like I might love Pizza, but if I go to my accountant and he offers me some, I probably will turn it down.
Common interests like dance, can be a starting point for a relationship, and classes with people can be a jumping point to talking and seeing if there is any chemistry. But your intention to going to dance classes shouldn't be dating women, it will never work out that way.
And yet, I can hardly believe that the dance where the main point is "how to make a girl grind on your crotch in a way that is acceptable in public?" can be seen as just a dance and nothing else. Before you ask, yes, I danced bachata for many years.
As for online dating per se, if we accept that there are a lot more men on dating apps than women, it means only a minority of single women use them at all. If you rely only on apps you will miss out on a huge part of your dating pool. Who wants that?
Well I can speak of Salsa more than bachata, but you can like the dance without liking the partner. Like I would love to dance a Waltz in my wedding, and would have to practice first, doesn't mean I wanna marry the lady in the class. Some women might want to have their boyfriends crotch but in the class they just have to put up with whoever is there.
And again, if you go to a dancing class cause you are interested in dancing. And in a break talk to the people in the class. And one guy likes movies and one girl likes rock climbing and youre like "oh I love rock climbing too" and you talk about that and the next class you talk some more and then you ask her out for a coffee. Thats normal. But if you go to a bachata class, rub yourself like a monkey on people and before knowing their name ask a girl out, then you wont get turned down because you are not a top 5% man.
> If you rely only on apps you will miss out on a huge part of your dating pool. Who wants that?
I wanted that when I used them. Mostly because it had the advantage that I knew they were looking for dates, and could unmatch if they werent feeling it. I never felt I was imposing on any girl by talking to them on a dating app, so even if it has drawbacks, their ability to leave anytime made it much easier to be forward and honest than if you talk to someone in a cafe.
In a bar that plays soccer games, 3% are women. In a dancing class of bachata, ~75% are women. In a kickboxing class that have active fighters, 7% women. At least it is where I live in Europe.
> Do you need a card? Or is this one of those "if you are 6ft tall and rich women swoon over you like a disney movie" spiel?
Something like this is my opinion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750692
> Courage, getting out there, skill, practice, being fun to be around, are skills people value much more than looks.
Agree.
You are there to watch a game not flirt, who cares about percentage of women? Also in most of europe the percentage is much larger (for big games), same as superbowl parties in america have more than 3% women.
> In a dancing class of bachata, ~75% are women.
Yes every bachata class in the planet has 75% women. Also there to dance, not to flirt.
> Something like this is my opinion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750692
Those are insanely varied, and vague things though. Signifiers of social status can get vain people interested but that does not realte to long term relationships or success in dating. Attracting gold diggers is not a superpower, and honestly a pretty undesireble thing to want anyway. It'd be like writting a guide into how to attract Pick Up artists as a woman, why would anyone want that.
If anything the list being so long proves the 5% thing cannot possibly be true, you can do the math, but if people happen in a regular bellcurve, being top x% of something, across multiple variables exponentially decreases the chance of finding anyone. Therefore someone close even to top 5% in even half of those categories would be 0.001% of the human population.
In other words, women like a varied number of things, men do too, and in that complicated mix of wants, needs and preferences dating is a varied exercise that leads to finding suitable partners, which happens for most people.
> Also there to dance, not to flirt.
Because you are not hot enough.
> Yes every bachata class in the planet has 75% women. Also there to dance, not to flirt.
I'm pretty certain of my opinions on only things that I have 5+ years experience in (bachata/salsa, kickboxing, programming, few other personal things).
> that does not realte to long term relationships or success in dating
I was never speaking of long term relationship success. I was saying what woman "want".
Yes women are unable to say no if you are hot enough. Its a defect they have from birth. You said you are pretty certain in things you have 5+ years of exp in, so how come you are sharing your opinion on what women want? Shoouldn't you at least get an internship on that before sharing your "knowledge" ?
> I'm pretty certain of my opinions on only things that I have 5+ years experience in
Google sampling bias, confirmation bias, empirical data != research and "how to not confuse my personal experience with reality". I knew most people didn't know that correlation != causation but I wasn't expecting people to not know their bachata class might not represent 8 billion peoples experience...
> I was saying what woman "want".
And you would be wrong about that, because your research is you confirmation bias and not any actual study.
> how come you are sharing your opinion on what women want? Shoouldn't you at least get an internship on that before sharing your "knowledge" ?
And what position or school is that? gender studies? Even in psychology, you'll need a phd and some years of experience to really know stuff.
> And you would be wrong about that, because your research is you confirmation bias and not any actual study.
I never researched and never wrote that I researched. Just observed. This is your/our problem. We spend too much time here arguing.
The way you reply and what you write, you remind me of 2 memes: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ackchyually-actually-guy and https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit.
I could have guessed that
> And what position or school is that?
Talking to a woman who isn't your mum is usually a good first step.
> I never researched and never wrote that I researched.
Yet you claimed as universal truth that women fight tooth and nail for the top 5% of men.
Why not just say "In my limited, biased and provably wrong opinion I think dating looks like this".
You said you have a background in CS right? Cool, you are using a training set of 2005 songs and now you are trying to analyse all the music in the world. Your training set is insufficent, personal anecdotes are not data, and there is enough noise on the internet for you to add more pollution on men/women dynamics.
I don't think this is universally true, I bet it works in a lot of cases, but the opposite is often true as well. Try too hard and you look desperate. And looks will always win past a certain level, if you are johnny depp level attractive, you will always get the girls over some average looking guy who is working his ass off.
I bet the same goes for money as well past a certain level.
You can easily google it. Women rate looks as the 4th most important attribute in dating. as always, its an average, there are some vain people who only care about looks. They are by no means common or enough to make 95% of men undateable.
> And looks will always win past a certain level
pretty people who are single say the same thing about people with money. People with money say this about younger people. Turns out its never their fault, and its just something unattainble someone else has.
I guess blaming women is easier than working on yourself but that doesn't make it true.
I think "looks win" accurately describes the way many women select men online for many of their dating years, but it can't continue forever. The "20% of the men get 80% of the women" works in short term dating, but it won't work out for more permanent relationships. From 100 men and 100 women, 20 men would pair with 20 women, and you have 80 men and 80 women left over. So they start to change preferences as they get older. And women know that a man can have a trait that's useless in the bedroom but very useful when raising a child.
It's also hard to say what "4th most important" means. Maybe looks are the 4th most important thing, given that the man is, at a minimum, in the top X%. But what's the formula? There are nonlinearities also, i.e. you can't always compensate. Having a million dollars and being 5.5 feet tall is better than having a billion dollars and being 4.5 feet tall, I'd predict. Something can be low-importance, but just about anything can be a dealbreaker.
I think you're correct in saying the gender inequity isn't so terrible at the end of the day. I predict if you surveyed both genders about whether they get what they really want out of online dating, they'd largely say no. Yes, the average woman has lots of options on Tinder, but that doesn't mean the average woman enjoys using Tinder much. Men think women have it great online because the women have what men want - lots of choice. But I have many female friends who are depressed about dating despite their long list of suitors. They struggle to build satisfying connections. We could ask who is to blame, but I'll just note at the end of the day, one side might be slightly happier than the other ... but only slightly! So frustrated people should keep that in mind.
As a point of evidence, I mostly used Tinder before meeting my current girlfriend on it, because Hinge and Bumble are unusable for me because they both require listing height, which results in me getting no matches from women on them. But, interestingly, my current girlfriend (and the girlfriend before her!) said that she wouldn't have matched with me if I had listed my height: in real life, however, it's not a concern, and she bemoans the fact that we spent so much time within a half mile of each other without meeting and she wasted so much time with people who weren't as compatible.
Women are inundated with options, so they have to filter them somehow: most women have similar preferences in men, and so once they filter their particular matches to those men who meet those easily filterable preferences, they end up with men that have already been heavily picked over and haven't left the market, either because they don't want a relationship or because they have other characteristics that result in them exiting relationships relatively soon after they start. So it ends up being a market for lemons (if a relationship is what the woman is looking for), leading to lots of mediocre or bad experiences.
I do suspect you could mitigate the market-for-lemons/selection effect by allowing filters on number of likes/matches and duration of time spent on the app: if someone has been on an OLD app for years consistently getting dozens of likes per day, they probably aren't a likely candidate for a long term relationship. But that'd be much less popular, because few people are willing to focus on potential partners not many other people want.
Screw around part, before the predisposed expected monogamy bit usually called boyfriend/girlfriend. Holds for both.
> I think "looks win" accurately describes the way many women select men online for many of their dating years
This cannot be true. Just algorithmically, they have a rating for you, so women cannot pick men outside their rating regardless of their preferences. (I don't agree it would hold if they could pick any man, but its a moot question because they simply can't)
> The "20% of the men get 80% of the women" works in short term dating,
It doesn't. That fact comes from a horrible game of telephone, from a survey ran in a blog over a decade ago. The attempts to make an intellectual sounding argument for redpilling started early with comments about the Paretto principle. But thats not what the data showed at all.
> From 100 men and 100 women, 20 men would pair with 20 women, and you have 80 men and 80 women left over.
In the uk less than 50% of people are single in their 20s which is the heaviest user base of online dating sites.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/714172/uk-current-relati...
> And women know that a man can have a trait that's useless in the bedroom but very useful when raising a child.
The idea that women go on sexual rampages after tall chiselled bodied men in their 20 and find a chubby bald rich 40 year old to settle after they are done is unsupported by data, research and anything outside of 4chan greentext stories. Which is where the idea started and should have died.
> It's also hard to say what "4th most important" means.
Women are asked to name what is important in a relationship, what is a dealbreaker, etc And looks hardly come first. Funnily enough in men appearance is quite an important metric early but goes down with time. Women usually say "stable income" as one of the most important things, many times above wealth (specially inherited many women prefer a smaller stable income over a one time larger paycheck).
> but just about anything can be a dealbreaker.
Sure, but thats on the extremes. Most humans fall in a bell curve, and 80% of them are not being tossed away over some perceived lack of top percentagedness.
> I think you're correct in saying the gender inequity isn't so terrible at the end of the day.
And at the start of the day.
> I predict if you surveyed both genders about whether they get what they really want out of online dating, they'd largely say no.
at the end of the day, its a company, they are there to make money not make you happy. Their product is access to women, their business model exploiting men loneliness.
> that doesn't mean the average woman enjoys using Tinder much.
They don't, which is why there are few women and why most feautures are designed either to make money or to retain women and nothing else. Those are the two metrics tinder checks.
You can't ask women this, see instead who the men are that get the most girls, there's your answer. Actions speak louder than words, and women are infamous for their cognitive dissonance in the field of mating.
> pretty people who are single say the same thing about people with money. People with money say this about younger people. Turns out its never their fault, and its just something unattainble someone else has.
And the young, pretty and rich people don't say anything, because they do in fact get first choice.
And how does that work out for online dating?
you can obviously lie about a number of them, but that probably would lead to a number of unsucessful first dates. On the other hand a weaker profile might lead to less dates, but if you have those skills in real life it might lead to a number of succesful dates.
There are some really nasty "market for lemons" effects in online dating, and it seems clear to me it really makes things harder for young people. I am not young myself, and have no need for online dating, so this is how it looks to me from the outside.
Your repeated dismissal of these experiences in this thread comes off to me as a bit callous.
There are gaggles of desperate women running after celebrities. It is happening.