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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"I have friends that I find intellectually stimulating, average-looking, that have not been touched by a woman in years."

I have a friends like this. One solution a couple of them have found is dating internationally. Not via "mail-order" services though. It was sort of a situation where they had a domestic friend who had friends or relatives abroad who were looking for a US marriage. So there was some trust there, and it was set up sort of like an arranged marriage. A lot of people hate on arraigned marriages, but the older I get, the more they make sense.

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The international dating absolutely ruins dating for local guys. Look into Eastern Europe or even better, Thailand.

Also, is it really long term solution to loneliness? If only motivation for marriage was to get the attractive citezenship, what will hold the marriage after it's done? Anecdotally, internet is full of stories of "mail-brides", who divorce the men and take a sweet part of his assets with it.

There are prenups, which I believe would be wise for any couple to create (together), and especially important in this type of arrangement.

As I said, this isn't through a mail order service. This is via friends of friends. The marriage would not just be for citizenship. Just like the arranged marriages I mentioned, there would be an element of matchmaking via the intermediary (the mutual friend in this case, or the two families in a traditional arrangement) that has a true belief that the two people would get along well together and share similar values. Then you would have visits and such to see how you liked the other person.

But yes, I see how that can create problems in specific locales. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how the problem can be solved universally.

> There are prenups, which I believe would be wise for any couple to create (together), and especially important in this type of arrangement.

Judges can override prenups. I just did a little Google research, and just under 50% of prenups are invalidated during divorce.

They can't override prenups. They can invalidate prenups, or portions of the prenup for specific reasons. I couldn't find the stats that you mentioned. I would guess that number included specific provisions that were invalidates, such as custody arrangements, which are outside the scope of a prenup.

Look up "Second Look Doctrine"

Yeah, again, they can invalidate portions of the prenup for specific reasons. In the case of second look, that reason would be if the terms are considered unreasonable at the time of divorce. So it is fairly open ended due to "reasonable" being subjective based on the judge (or master) that you get. But the use of this doctrine is supposed to be pretty limited and should only be applied if the terms were egregiously lopsided or a significant life event occurred (disabled spouse).

I would strongly discourage fishing in international waters. The basic problem is that there is a huge incentive for such women to pretend interest when what they really want is the green card. The balance of what each brings to the table shifts considerably once the permanent green card is issued.

Note that this is *not* to say that international relationships can't work--I've seen some that do (including my own) but I do not know of one that didn't involve one person being in the other's country already (although I would not rule out both people being in a third country, I just don't know any such.)

Go for other first world countries then.

yeah internationally traveling to date I encourage it.

even if it's just for short term flings.

a lot of average guys tend to get overlooked with online dating, and don't have the cojones to approach their local women.

whereas if it's international - you become interesting - just by being someone a woman doesn't interact with on a daily basis i.e you not the local loser. so chances of her fucking you for the "wow" factor are higher than if you were a local.

of course don't go there trying to find love

At minimum I think most people (the bottom ~90% dating-success-wise, both men and women) in our society would be better off with arranged marriages compared to our current cultural hellscape.

The problem is no one thinks they're in the bottom 90% of anything.

Yeah, mindset is a huge component to this. I think the media has exasperated the problem through idealized fantasy which does not match reality. I think people tend to have high expectations of a match, but don't hold themselves to the same standards.

As an example, I've had fat/obese friends say they wouldn't date a fat girl... Or friends that expect the man to pay for everything like it's 1950 and make grand gestures like in the movies.. what do they expect then?

Just like porn ruins actual sex for so many young men, romantic movies of all types ruin relationships for so many young women. Smut novels sell millions of copies a year to women of all ages so even if women intellectually know its 'not real' it becomes their default internal vocabulary.

Re: paying for everything. A lot of women want to step outside of their own traditional gender role but have a man firmly inside his.

There's a somewhat well-known series on HBO in USA, called Game of Thrones. A character there, Tyrion Lannister, who's a kind of a nerd, describes how he lost virginity in staged encounter with a paid woman.

It could be hard to figure out what would be better - this kind of initiation with associated large risk of getting emotionally attached to the paid person, or staying virgin for years and years, having no comparative to peers experience and somewhat falling more behind, so having to dig out from deeper and deeper pit. So I wouldn't with certainty recommend looking for paid services to get initial experience, even though that could - not always - simplify subsequent interactions. Even though such an approach could be sufficiently different for men vs. women.

Agree. Arranged marriages worked for generations. And to me it looks like a perfect mechanism to tame hormone-induced young people, who, en masse, hurt not only themselves but whole society.

> Arranged marriages worked for generations.

Existed, sure. Whether they “work” or not is... well, for most of history no one was gathering data, but arranged marriage still exists now, and there is evidence linking it to higher rates of suicide, for women particularly.

Do you have some links? The stuff I found was just correlated, but also had other major issues listed too, like domestic violence.

There's a big statistical problem here--these days the things shown to relate to a relationship "working" are basically reasons not to dissolve failed relationships. Lots of couples stay together but are basically financially-linked roommates.

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