The Difficulty in Dating Good Men (Aella) | Hacker News Reader

The Difficulty in Dating Good Men (Aella)

aella.substack.com

6 pointsinglor_cz12 comments

IDK if it belongs here, but Aella is well-known in rationalist circles, and in this article, she is trying to "hack" dating for herself - not very successfully, though. I can almost see my former colleagues from the Mathematics and Physics Faculty in throes of similar desperation.

One of the guys in the comments estimates her requirements down to 5.7 acceptable men in a million people, which aren't great odds.

If you are interested, I would love for this discussion to develop in the "dating online" direction as well. I am almost 47 and most of my dating life happened before smartphones. It is my impression that in the smartphone era, everything became quite a bit more frustrating, not less.

> which aren't great odds

For others, here's the comment:

  This YouGov poll, sourced at the end, notes that 9% of the male population is interested in complete nonmonogamy. US Government Statistics note that males that make >$200k/year comprise approximately 5% of the population. A Pew Research poll states that 51% of young men desire children. Approximately 10% of the population is males ages 22-40, which is a wider age range than I think she would be interested in, but I'm trying to make the numbers as generous as possible. Using a normal distribution curve, approximately 25% of the population will have an attractiveness of >5.9. I selected a generous 10% of the remaining population as being interesting enough for her to engage with on an intellectual level.

  0.09 * 0.05 * 0.51 * 0.25 * 0.10 * 0.10

  0.00057%

  5.7 per million people

  There are 4.6 million people in the San Francisco metro area

I did a similar calculation for a friend who had a few "reasonable" expectations but the odds were less than 1 in 10 billion.

More comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43777456

But flagged

This thing about the questions. She's probably hot and they probably don't get much female interest, so she's already won them over and they aren't evaluating her further. Having standards as a man who is already in very low demand feels like a good way to shoot yourself in the foot with statistics (yet ironically it works in your favor as you can see in this example). Most people in general though don't actually know what they're looking for. They haven't thought about it, read about it and probably aren't exerienced enough to even figure it out, so there's nothing really for these men to investigate about her even if she hadn't already won them over by her looks and their desperation.

Then there's also the fact that men just don't need to be that picky. Pregancy is expensive and dangerous for women. It costs nothing for a man to walk away from a shitty woman at any point (unless they get married without a prenup I guess).

She talks about running empathy models (jeez cringe, typical rationalist BS) but seems to have no insight into men and what their situation and concerns are. Not that I'm condoning these guys' stupidity. Clearly they need to figure this shit out and get some game, but it shouldn't be surprising that they haven't yet.

For her though, I think things would go better with some of them if she spent more time with them. They need to warm up and realize the situation is safe. Some are literally scared of her and don't know what they're doing. She doesn't seem to understand why or what to do about it.

But yeah for them, the main problem is they're just trying to impress her, which is boring. Flip the script, see if she will impress you. To do that though, you'll have to know what you want.

Tip though: women want to feel safe around you. Trying to impress them (i.e. trick them into liking you by selectively only showing your good side (i.e. deception)), not caring about who and how they are, etc. does not engender those feelings. Take her word for it.

I think that with the general movement of communication into online spaces, our ability to actually understand other people went down, sometimes catastrophically so.

We don't only communicate with words. We also communicate with gestures, voice tones, dynamism of our voices, facial expressions etc. Once this all goes out of the window, it becomes much harder to actually understand other people.

I wonder if the Internet just gave our civilization a massive emotional tinnitus.

Late to this, but I wanted to wait till I was home and could type on a keyboard:

Overall, it feels like Aella, justifiably, wants to feel like she has passed a bunch of filters for a guy to consider her a high-qualified mate. This is both because she wants the ego boost of knowing she passed all those hurdles, and also because she's more likely to have relationship success with a guy who knows what he wants, has an established filter system, and decides she passes all of them.

The problem is, as you say, Aella is hot, intelligent, and driven as a partner. This means that basically a guy is going to find all of the boxes he's looking at for a first date checked. This is especially true if he's not an idiot and knows who Aella is and did even a casual Google about her first. This all kind of means that honestly, a first date is more about a guy auditioning for her to see if he's her type. Once he finds out that she's interested, that will be when he starts to get into the nitty gritty of "is this a woman who will work for me as a partner?"

Further bonus question, how do you even date someone with a strong online presence? Are you supposed to read their blog posts? Will they consider that creepy, or disrespectful of their time if you don't?

Let's do a technical interviewing analogy. It kinda feels like Aella is an experienced engineer who has written a well-known library. Basically the "interview" is an employer who already knows her qualifications trying to convince her to work for them. She feels offended that they aren't trying to see if she's a good fit for the position...but its immediately obvious she was at least a 90% fit and nobody needs to poke around for dealbreakers, any problems are the kind that are going to be teased out over time.

Yeah, exactly. Women want to feel chosen and special too. She may be misinterpreting them being so easy as them being willing to take anyone.

I do think she's right about some of them not being interested in getting to know her more deeply though. They don't need to be screening her to be able to learn how she fekt abkut some thing or more details that aren't already public.

(Honestly, I have no idea who she is myself or if she's even hot but I'll take your wiord for it.)

> The difficulty in dating good men

> Aella is (...) blogger, sex worker, and camgirl

I don't think many good men want sex workers and orgy organizers as their SO.

Her internal life sounds exhausting and her external one sounds insufferable.

True, but she lives in SF, and if someone goes on an actual date with her, they probably already know who she is.

The complaints in the article are mostly concentrated around the actual dates, not around rejections in the pre-date phase.

Sounds like some easy rejects then. Moving forwards, if you know any possibles:

  I have a $100,000 bounty on my marriage. If you introduce me to someone who I end up marrying, I’ll pay you $100k upon marriage*.

  There’s some details here:

I think that this, at the very least, indicates that she means things seriously. Anyone can write an article complaining about the other sex, few will pony up a major sum in cash.

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