Comment by BugBrother | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BugBrother | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have to put in another viewpoint here.

How a woman looks decide who I [try to] talk to, but a good sense of humor, intelligence and cool personality will change my "target" quickly.

From what I've seen, this is not unusual for men. (And probably the same goes for women too, I wish I had anecdotal evidence that my "good" sense of humor worked wonders. :-) )

Edit: Other people below said similar things.

Edit 2: How large percentage of relationships (in small/big cities) starts with people you meet online, these days? Is the article relevant?

Edit 3: As a clarification [and answer to removed(/reinserted?) comment]. I reacted to "Contrast that with male perception, if you think a girl is attractive, everything she says suddenly sounds meaningful and important.". It is too much of a simplification. Attraction to women can come from other things than eyes.

A couple of examples:

- I was crazy over a woman that was far from pretty while ignoring a cool woman. (She dumped me after a year, sigh.) Her (irritated) old time friends said she always had a tail of guys.

- I ended up weirdly on a date with a fat woman a while ago, which I realized that we had both misunderstood -- she was way out of my league in "mate value" (I realized that early in the dinner, so I spent the time asking about her really cool work and previous jobs).

This is not common (large "mate value" for women not based on looks but personality, intelligence and so on), but do exist. (And can also be quite obvious, not after knowing someone for months/years.)

> From what I've seen, this is not unusual for men.

Yes, I agree with everything you said. Of course the implication here is that it's different for women. Which may well be the case.

Anecdotal evidence on my part seems to suggest that men are prone to add exceptions to their filter in order to let people in, whereas women overwhelmingly tend to only restrict their results further. In the end, this all might be explainable by supply and demand concepts, the underlying theory being that women always have a higher mate value than men. This sounds mathematically absurd at first, but it seems to fit the behavior patterns observable in the wild.

Why is it mathematically absurd? Women have a smaller reproductive window than men. This includes periods which take a full 25% of the reproductive time. Men are available all the time.

Women also bear a higher cost and greater investment in sex. So once again they are more selective. This creates greater competition among males for females than the other way around. Sure, the top guys have women competing for them but a much greater percentage of women have men competing for THEIR sex.

I think the topic is more about relationships, not sex in itself.

Well even in relationships these same considerations apply. A woman's investment in a relationship is higher since her biological clock is ticking, so to speak. She is most desirable in her teens and twenties and it falls off from there. Just ask who's chasing who after 35.

So, she will try to optimize her time in long term relationship with the best marriage / long term love partner prospect. That's why she cares about more than looks.

And what are men's considerations in long term relationships? It doesn't seem like they are just going along with the first woman who deems them worthy.

I guess there's a whole spectrum. Many men aren't interested in committing anymore. In general though men 21-40 are the chasers in the beginning and women are the chasers in the relationship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com