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Comment by nebukadnet | Hacker News Reader

I find this very surprising. The first sentence of the article states that about 60% of men are single, and only about 30% of women. There's about equal men and women, so that would mean that 30% of women are dating each other, or are in relationships with multiple men? That's discounting men dating men. I find that surprising.

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Another possibility is that women are more likely to choose to self report their status as "in a relationship" vs. men. (Which would be an interesting finding on its own!) I'm not sure which source they pulled those figures in the first line from, but elsewhere it talks about PEW studies and the Survey Center on American Life which are presumably working from self reported survey data? "Married" is easier to track objectively than "single" vs. "in a relationship" which is more subjective. Is having been on three dates a "relationship?" Is it a relationship if you never talked about it with each other in those terms? If you're dating multiple people non-exclusively are you "in a relationship" or "single"? (I'm not asking; just speculating that two people might answer those questions differently.)

The 60% / 30% figure doesn't pass the sniff test to me.

Edit: Noticed the comment about this data focusing on "young" women and men and the possibility that more women are dating men outside that range than men are doing the same. That's also a good explanation. This was mentioned in the article too; I was just initially underestimating its significance.

That’s a good point that the article doesn’t touch on! (and along with the other ones from the article, makes a lot more sense than the “10% of the men date all the women” meme I see repeated in this HN discussion).

The article states 60/30% of young people, so the correct interpretation is that older men are "taking" a large share of the young, single women / young women prefer dating older men.

And men die young than women. That leaves a surplus of lonely old women who form a harem for the male survivors in the old folks homes.

I think this article is somewhat of a relief to myself. It always felt like the majority of women I talked to casually mentioned they are in a relationship before my interest further peaked. At least it's not just thinking it's a coincidence that the majority that I talk to are taken, it's statistical lol.

Women are not objects to be owned. Even if she's in a relationship she might be unhappy with it and open to other options. Just don't be creepy or aggressive about it.

To use an analogy, hiring managers are allowed to offer you a job even if you already have a job. They're not obligated to wait until you're unemployed.

Entirely possible that older men are going into second long-term relationships with younger women after already having had a child or two.

"There's a sucker born every minute." - attributed to P.T. Barnum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

Who is the sucker?

So that would be a reversion to historical norms then.

The article explains this. They are either dating each other or dating older men.

They didn't mention the fact that successful younger males are dating multiple women at once. That's another factor.

Is it? Are open relationships that statistically significant?

I think we're talking about ambiguous relationships, not open ones.

So situations where women think they're in a relationship, but the man does not (or not with them). Again, is this statistically significant? Are women's standards for what qualifies as a relationship low enough that they think they're in one with 1/2, 1/3, or even less, of a man's time?

I'm willing to bet that it contributes to the total in a way which isn't negligible.

I guess, but there's a vast gulf between "isn't negligible" and "30% vs. 60%"

> so that would mean that 30% of women are dating each other, or are in relationships with multiple men

If you read the article to the end, it specifically mentions the former and also strongly implies the latter.

Those figures are for "young adults". (20s I think? The article isn't totally clear.) The article mentions further down that some of the extra women are dating older men.

There is a phrase in there: "in their 20s", so I suppose it means under 30.

Could be that younger women are in relationships with older men and that older women are more likely to be single.

Nothing surprising, yes this is mostly about top 10% of men dating several women each. Inequality in action.

That's ridiculous. Poly relationships are a tiny minority and even there most stick it to two partners - everything above that just takes way too much time to juggle next to a full-time job.

Conscious poly relationships are a tiny minority and will probably always remain so. But i mean situations when women don't know that they are not alone. Tinder does it to them. It makes easy to find and "get" the best men. But there's a catch...

Plus, very frequently women get ahead of themselves imagining that they are in relationship while their men sees it as merely a sequence of gradually more and more effortless hookups.

Casual dating is single. Those women are still single, except in the rare cases of bigamy.

Literally a /r9k/ incel talking point. Never backed up by anything at all.

I don't mean to say it in a negative sense. I'm a right-wing liberal. Inequality is the only thing that saves us for complete dominance of mediocrity. Also, it's sort of stupid to complain about because it's no one's policy or anything, just an objective fact. You can't un-invent Tinder.

You think the disparity is more accounted for by the numeric difference between multiple-dating men and multiple-dating women, rather than by women dating men who are older than themselves?

Not just "think", it's a fact that same study shows: if that was the way you are putting it, in the upper age cohort, fraction of single men would be smaller than single women: men would be with young girls and dump women of same age as themselves. But it's not the case, because percentage of single men is higher in any age cohort under 65 (then, there are more single women simply because men die at earlier age).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK4y6C1Uuhw

it's simply inequality. all those women are hooking up with the small number of high quality men (of any age), leaving the rest alone.

only fix to this i can see is normalisation of single parenthood so those women can have kids at the same rate as married women.

Isn't single parenthood already "normalized"? In the US at least, it's extremely common. Of course, it's also extremely difficult for the mother; I can't imagine why anyone would willingly choose it unless she was independently wealthy and could hire caretakers.

I see this talking point all the time yet never backed up by studies. That would mean that these attractive men put a premium on quantity over quality (because they’d have to date women less attractive then them for the numbers to work out) and have lots of time and mental energy at their disposal to manage these concurrent relationships. Whereas in general people tend to date people that are more or less as attractive as themselves, and the most prevalent form of relationships is still a two person couple. For casual flings it might be different.

Isn't this what is reported by Tinder? That women get selected all the time but only the most attractive men get selected by women

Tinder wouldn’t report that, since it’s not very encouraging for their customers. The source most linked seems to be someone on Medium who interviewed people: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

Dating apps don’t make their data available to scientists, that would be nice though!

For sure life is more easy for hot people, off or on dating apps. It’s true in bars and clubs too. In settings where people have more of a time to get to know each other it probably matters less, even if it always plays a role. It’s just that, as long as society’s concept of a relationship is still two people together, and not one person with a harem, these attractive people at the top of the pyramid will end up being picky too.

Another interesting thing to observe is whether the premium for being attractive has increased in general because of the "shrinking of the world" effect via internet (i.e. attractive people have more opportunities now to be models, to work in branding, start an onlyfans and make money). Basically - whether it's easier now to "monetize" your good looks.

If that is the case, attractiveness has actually become a better proxy for social status/success than it used to be. I don't have data to back this up - intuitively it makes sense to me, but I hope someone out there is studying the effect.

> Dating apps don’t make their data available to scientists, that would be nice though!

Actually OKCupid did do that at some point, well, it was their own employees but they did extensive and very honest data analysis. After the company was sold those blog posts were erased, of course.

they're still in the internet in a few places if you know where to look, i.e. archive.com

60% of young men. Young men are more likely to be single because they are competing with older men.

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