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Comment by phlipski | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect here - "20 years of successful online dating" sounds like an oxymoron! Unless you're choosing to date and to not enter into a long term relationship?

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With all due respect, this seems like a Rorschach test? He didn't say "20 years continuously dating online"? People can date online a bit, get into a relationship for a quite a while, relationship ends, go back to online dating, etc.

This is semantics, but I think the parent's point is: if the relationship ended, was it "successful"? You obviously have different answers (and that's fine!)

If you can consistently eat out at restaurants every night, why settle for Mom’s home cooked meals every night?

Some will see a reason to. Others won’t.

You won’t see many home cooked meal enthusiasts at the restaurant, either way.

Actually this brings up an interesting point: the article implicitly assumes that the winning condition, the optimal outcome, is a long term relationship. But is it? Certainly many rich guys don’t act like that (stay w one person for 50+ years). This is important, because if we don’t have a consensus on what the best outcome is, that would explain why we’re not getting one. There may not be a single optimal outcome for that userbase.

We don't need consensus since consensus is impossible with a large population. You just need a vast majority and the vast majority agree on the winning condition.

The average marriage in the US lasts 8 years.

Isn't this (heavily?) influenced by a small amount of people who marry again and again?

Kind of. The median is apparently 19. Still, if a lifelong marriage is winning at life, we're a society of losers.

That's a big "if" imho. Especially, since there are more than enough instances of unhappy marriages in previous generations. Often people stayed in abusive relationships because divorce was heavily frowned upon.

Yes? You can be successful (or a failure) at being single, dating, or married. There's not one universally valid approach to relationships.

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