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Comment by plonk | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't that sound a bit tautological? One not wanting to date people one isn't interested in?

Maybe, but there are many, many studies showing that on dating apps, it's 80% of the women choosing 20% of the men. Many women are also fairly ignorant about how unrealistic some standards (over 6' tall, makes over $100K/yr.) are.

Assuming those are your only two criteria, that narrows the population to 2.5%. If you throw age and relative health then all bets are off.

Tangent: where'd you get that number? Not questioning it, I'd just love to know if there's a tool that makes it easy to get intersections with that kind of data.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37574915

Here's some data I found with a quick web search...

Income Percentile Calculator for the US: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

Height Percentile Calculator for Men and Women in the US: https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men-and-w...

The biggest filter outside of marital status is race and age. Yet minorities still manage to find people within their own ethnicity to date.

Even 1% of the US male population is still 1 million men to date.

I'm not sure if things are all as dire as people are talking about.

that's 1 million men spread across the US. For comparison's sake, Greater NYC has ~22 million people. LA has a bit more.

1 million in a country of 330 million is nothing.

Plus there is competition, both in terms of other mates, as well as other priorities. Your ideal man may be in the military and disappearing in 6 months, or working 70 hours a week in a law firm.

I honestly have zero problem with people having "unrealistic" standards. You can restrict your own pool as much as you like, as long as you don't complain about not finding any partners.

I (and people in general) have no right to be upset at not meeting what we see as "unrealistic" or "unimportant" standards held by people we are interested in. We are not entitled to a relationship.

(I do think it's kind of sad when e.g. I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius. She said she could go months out and about in a major city and not see a single man she found physically attractive. It's very much not the experience I've had, I see reasonably attractive people everywhere, so I wonder what people are looking for who say there is nobody even worth considering anywhere around them?)

Edit: to be clear, I don't mean she couldn't get dates with people she found attractive, she didn't see anyone attractive at all. Her "type" was incredibly strict: between 6' and 6'2", wavy blond hair, medium length, athletic without being too "muscular", and no brown eyes. She showed us pictures of her past boyfriends and they could have all been identical twins of each other, it was absurd. But hey, again, more power to her, nobody has the right to demand she relax her standards for them.

Not finding anyone physical attractive for months at a time is something that can happen to both sexes. Around the age of forty I, a man, began to feel like I was completely surrounded by unattractive women wherever I go. Not because the women changed or there is anything at all wrong with them, but because with experience, I have a good idea now of how relationships work, and my interest has waned.

I myself have what one might term “unrealistic standards”. At some point, what I was looking for was someone to share experiences with: someone to travel with, watch great cinema or view art with, etc. Yet every woman I have personally been with sought a relationship because they wanted a man to make them feel comfortable, secure, and desired, and that left me bored and feeling used. I don’t complain about this any more or feel entitled to a relationship, I just get on with living alone. But I still understand younger men’s feelings of frustration, and hope that those feelings can get channeled in some non-destructive direction.

>I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius

I found this tool to be very illuminating: https://igotstandardsbro.com/

(Please ignore the misogynistic verbiage)

I don't think it's that they're ignorant. They probably don't really care if it's unrealistic or not. They're given a platform where they can describe exactly what it is they want, and given the imbalance in men/women on the platform, they've got a decent chance of getting it.

I’m not that old but I also never did online dating. Is there a possibility that online dating has a bias for women that are “choosy” (for lack of a better term)?

>Is there a possibility that online dating has a bias for women that are “choosy”

Worse: online dating apps create choosy daters. It is less like "dating" and more like online shopping. People who use such apps are incentivized to drill down using increasingly-specific filters hoping to find the perfect mate, but in reality find themselves with no suitable matches at all. Worse yet, if they do find someone, the false sense of being able to continue refining toward a more perfect mate often drives them away from actually-existing relationships and back to the apps where they fruitlessly search for an "upgrade"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice

https://www.salecycle.com/blog/strategies/is-choice-paralysi...

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