So, the "flirting escalation ladder". A few months ago I was skeptical that it even existed, as I had basically never seen it actually play out. Then half the internet showed up to yell "John that is definitely a thing!", and since then I've been more actively looking for it.
And so far my experience when actively looking for it has been "women do not respond to mild escalation with mild escalation, even when in hindsight they were clearly interested". Where the signals of "clear interest" here include things like e.g. talked for two hours at a party (and clearly enjoyed it). Girl will just spend two hours sitting there in one-on-one conversation looking like she's enjoying the teasing and occasional dirty joke or comment on her appearance or insinuation, generally laughing and having fun, and... not the slightest sign of matching escalation level, let alone escalating further.
My current working hypothesis is that the vast majority of people (regardless of gender) only climb the flirtation escalation ladder when at least somewhat tipsy, and I have never observed it because I do not drink or spend much time at drinking-heavy events (I usually get bored in the early stages and leave). But I've yet to investigate that hypothesis much, and am very curious to hear other hypotheses.
I often do physical escalation on online dates with minimal or no alcohol (as a straight man). In my experience, the way it happens is not her "matching" or "climbing" the ladder with me, but rather "approving" or "disapproving" of my moves. If I sense she's disapproving, I stop, and if she seems to passively approve, I slowly escalate further. In many cases, this leads all the way to the top of the ladder without a single active move on her part.
So, your read of "women do not respond to mild escalation with mild escalation" is often correct, but they do notice and climb it as a receptive participant. The active climber just needs to give something to be receptive to.
That was my previous best guess at the norm! It's what would make sense on priors, and what matches my observations. And it was what I would have expected if there hadn't been such unanimous agreement in this thread that, no, mutual escalation is totally a normal thing.
If that is what people mean when they talk about "the dance of flirtatious mutual escalation", I wish they would describe it accurately - it's a dance of "one person escalates and the other passively approves". That is decidedly not a dance of mutual escalation, it is not a back-and-forth, and it requires both different models and different strategies.
I only go further when I detect mutual escalation because I got tired of attracting the kind of person who won't reciprocate in the escalation process. this makes me attempt to date many fewer people and I think my matching SNR is much better for it. Previously I tried to date people who didn't escalate in return and it wasn't great, lots of waiting for "...so do you want to hang out or..." type moments.
more speculatively people may be having difficulty describing the surface and moving parts of a subspace of human behavior which is both fairly complex and is submerged in noise just enough to not be clearly visible, so in general I'd expect any concrete claim to be a small update that doesn't completely remove noise
Sounds like you might be able to provide a data point on the main question I'm curious about: roughly what fraction of people (or people of your preferred gender) mutually escalate at all?
As far as I know, men tend to choose female friends who are attractive.
you should focus on making platonic friends with people you find attractive, without trying to date them at all, and then see what happens?
If the situation is symmetric (i.e. women also tend to choose male friends who are attractive), then if you are not attractive, what happens is that your attempts to make platonic friends will probably not be reciprocated.
[testing mind-reading] also has a clear negative selection effect for ‘men who go around hitting on everyone a lot’
Not sure about this. A man who stretches his attention thin between many women may be worse at reading any particular woman's mind, but better at noticing the statistical patterns. (He says the right things on the third date not because he understands her perfectly, but because he knows from experience that saying the same thing on the second date is usually too early and saying it on the fourth date is usually too late.)
I think that if you select for smooth players, then smooth players is exactly what you will get. Although you will select against clumsy players; the type of guy who barely has any skill beyond "approach a lot".
Also, this selects for men who are familiar with your (sub)culture, which seems like a good thing. Unless you grew up in a culture that you hate, of course, then it seems like a bad thing.
One detailed complaint from a client who paid $4,500 articulated the perceived unfairness of being matched with men who had only paid the $99 database fee, a critical detail she claims was never disclosed during the sales process.
This is hilarious.
Alternatively, what about matching people by browser history? If there is a way to avoid data security and privacy concerns (ha!) then there are actually a lot of advantages.
I have recently learned that Fully Homomorphic Encryption (doing calculations on encrypted data) 1. exists and 2. is usable in a small scale.
https://bozmen.io/fhe
https://bozmen.io/fhe-current-apps (FHE Real-world Applications)
Current FHE has 1,000x to 10,000x computational overhead compared to plaintext operations. On the storage side, ciphertexts can be 40 to 1,000 times larger than the original. It's like the internet in 1990—technically awesome, but limited in practice.
I initially read this as a joke implying that your browsing history of encryption stuff might be too niche to be useful for matching against. I guess that's me projecting
There’s quite a lot in the queue since last time, so this is the first large chunk of it, which focuses on apps and otherwise finding an initial connection, and some things that directly impact that.
Table of Contents
You’re Single Because You Have No Friends To Date
Two thirds of romantic partners were friends first, especially at university.
Two thirds really is an awful lot. It’s enough of an awful lot to suggest that if your current goal is a long term relationship rather than short term dating, and you have enough practice, it might outright be a mistake to be primarily (rather than opportunistically or additionally, the goods are often non-rivalrous) trying to date people who aren’t your friends or at least friends of friends? That instead you should focus on making platonic friends with people you find attractive, without trying to date them at all, and then see what happens?
Highly speculative, but potentially this has a lot of advantages, including a network that can lead to dates with non-friends. It’s pretty great to have friends even if there are never any non-platonic benefits.
It does have its own difficulties. The most obvious one is that if you’re not trying to date them, you need a different excuse and set of activities in order to become friends.
As the paper notes, this raises the question of why we so often have the opposite impression, or that the youth think that hitting on your friends is just awful – although perhaps they do think that in cases where it doesn’t work, there’s no contradiction there, if you can’t do subtle escalations instead then one could say that’s a skill issue.
There’s also ‘an app for that’ at least inside the rationalist community, called Reciprocity, where you can signal interest and then it only reveals if there is a two-sided match. If this is your strategy it is important social tech to minimize the amount to which you make it weird.
Friendmaxxing makes it a lot easier to try to take that leap. If you have one friend and you make it weird, then you might have zero friends. If you have a thousand friends, you have not one friend to spare, but also if you botch things and go down to 999 friends you will be fine.
One note in the paper is that if you move to friends with benefits, that typically doesn’t lead to long term romantic success. If you want something more, then statistically you need to go straight for it once things get complicated.
You’re Single Because You Aren’t Willing To Be Dungeon Master
Two strong pieces of advice here.
The first half is a gimme. If there is an activity that is popular with the gender you’re looking for, where the people who want to do it are people you would want to date, then running or helping run such an activity is a great idea, even better than simply participating, and actually making it a killer version is even better. I do not think this in any way counts as being ‘fake.’
This goes double when combined with the statistics about friends. D&D is the ultimate ‘make friends first’ strategy.
The second half is even better. Traditional dating paths require or at least tend to cause a set of strange, awkward conversations about personality and dating. That means the people who are good at navigating that will be in high demand, whereas those who are not as good will struggle. Any way to change the topic into other things shakes that up and puts you in a better spot. It might be a bit slower, but you absolutely get to know people when not explicitly discussing getting to know them.
Also, do this with your friends. Knowing your friends this way is Amazingly Great, on its own merits.
You’re Single Because You Didn’t Listen To My Friend’s Podcast
My old friend Ted Knutson has a new podcast called Man Down, which includes at least three episodes on dating. This one is about strategy using dating apps and improving your profile, the first one was more about dating in general, they then followed up with another on fixing your profile.
I wouldn’t have listened if I hadn’t had the extra value of watching Ted squirm. The information density from podcasts isn’t great even at faster speeds, although the info that is here seems pretty solid if you don’t mind that.
There’s a bunch of fun stats to start. The first recommendation is for men to fight on different terrain where they aren’t unnumbered (men outnumber women ~4:1 on Tinder and spend ~96% of the money) or in a bad spot, try in person. But you might fully not have that option so they mostly focus on sharing data and then improving Ted’s dating profile. Women on Tinder swipe right 8% of the time, men swipe right 46% of the time, the average man gets 1-2 matches a week. Hinge’s numbers are less unbalanced (2:1 ratio). They discuss various different apps you can consider.
Then the Ted squirming part begins and we start on his profile. It’s remarkable how bad it starts out, starting with pictures. Some advice given: Think elegant and sober, charismatic pictures, focus on face, definitely not shirtless unless maybe you’re playing sports, ideally pay to get better photos taken. Save the humor for the prompts and chats and focus answers on the person not the relationship type. Actively study profiles before you message people, customize everything.
You’re Single Because You Flunk The Eye Contact Test
This seems right.
The question is, is this a ‘sincerity is great, once you can fake that you’ve got it made’ situation? Or is it easier and more effective to actually be okay with all of this?
The good news is that it is optimal life strategy to genuinely be okay with whatever happens next so long as no machetes are involved. It is actively good for other people you are attracted to to sense you are attracted to them – so long as they sense that you’re okay with whatever happens next, and that you aren’t afraid of them knowing.
The other good news is that you can also pass through practice, even if you’re not fully genuinely okay with whatever happens next short of machetes.
You’re Single Because The Women Don’t Hit On The Men
Bryan Caplan’s polls are mostly answered by men, so:
There was essentially no interaction between the variables. About 85% of those in both groups wanted to be hit on more rather than less. Even when it’s an automatic no, you know what, it’s nice to be asked.
So, you seem to be saying ‘shit test’ like that’s a bad thing…
There’s nothing inherently bad or inefficient about a shit test. This is very clearly a (very standard) shit test. Anything that could be described by the phrase ‘not f***ing telling you’ is either a ghosting or a shit test. It’s selection and information gathering via forcing you to correctly respond to an uncertain situation, which here involves both ‘figure out she’s interested’ and also ‘actually act on it’ and doing that in a skilled fashion.
Which has some very clear positive selection effects. But it also has a clear negative selection effect for ‘men who go around hitting on everyone a lot’ and against men who are (very understandably and often for good reasons) risk averse about making such a move.
It is my understanding is that as things have shifted, with more men being afraid to open either in general or to anyone they already know, this is making a lot less sense as a filter.
The problem with not doing so is you are filtering a lot less for ability to detect attraction and mind reading, and far more for those who have norms that involve hitting on a lot of women. Which is a far more mixed blessing. You’re going to fail on a lot more otherwise desirable connections than you would have in the past.
A man being unwilling to make a first move simply isn’t a strong negative sign at this point. Indeed, if they are capable of navigating subsequent moves it could even be a positive sign, because this is how they didn’t get removed from the market.
Also I am pretty sure the other downsides of being too forward are way down from where they used to be. That is especially true if they are unwilling to (essentially ever) make the first move, which means they’re likely to very much appreciate it when you do so instead (and if they don’t, then the combination is a big red flag). Thus, I think being forward (as a woman seeking men) is a far better strategy than it was in the past.
You’re Single Because When A Woman Did Hit On You, You Choked
If someone runs a TikTok experiment where a woman hits on men out of the blue, do you get points for being smooth and trying to capitalize on it, or points for correctly suspecting it’s not real?
If you know you’re being filmed that’s all the more reason to go for it? Same principle as before, if they post it and it gets views you identify yourself and say DMs are open.
All the men in the video did successfully exchange contact information of some form. Rob Henderson and Richard Hanania then did a 20 minute analysis of the 5 minute video, critiquing the various responses to see who got game and who didn’t.
They pointed out correctly that the percentage play, if you have the option and you are actually interested and think this could be real, is to attempt escalation to a low investment date on the spot, and go from there, while she’s feeling it.
The other great point is, no it isn’t real by design, but who is to say you cannot make it real? She’s opening. She’s giving you an opportunity. Sure, she might intend it to purely be a bit, but if you play your cards right, who knows? Worst case scenario is you get an extra rep. It’s even a power move to indicate you know she thinks it’s fake, and to run right through that.
I would add that the men here all now have her contact information, and there is nothing stopping them from extending the experiment. As in, you say ‘I know that your approaching me was a bit for a video, but I do like you, so…’ and again worst case is she tells the world you tried to have some game. Even now, there’s still time, guys.
Also, of course, yes women can basically do this at will, and there are strong arguments that they should be approaching quite a lot, as they have full social permission to do so, and even when you get a no you probably brighten the guy’s day – almost all guys consistently say, as noted above, they want to be approached more. And as I noted above, ‘guy is willing to open’ is not a great selection plan in 2025.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Know The Flirtation Escalation Ladder
Even basic flirting principles are in short supply so it’s worth going over this again, starting from the top.
Standard Deviant offers us The Escalation Ladder. The flirting examples are sometimes weird and strangely ordered, but the principles are what is important and seem entirely correct. Indeed, the very fact that the details seem off yet this is still the person writing the post illustrates that the principles are what matters.
The basic principles are:
Some notes on the specific actions:
Flirting is pretty awesome. Alas, flirting seems to be getting rare and men are afraid to do it. The perception here has little basis in reality, but fear of tail risk (or in some cases, thinking it’s not even a tail risk) works whether or not the thing you are afraid of is real.
Obviously she is correct, unless you are doing something very wrong in a way that should be rather obvious, you use a reasonable escalation ladder and you take no for an answer, the chance of a woman you approach trying to ‘run your life’ let alone ‘send you to jail’ is epsilon.
The problem is, the extreme was loud, and looked to many young men like the norm.
Alternatively, the message that went out was ‘do the wrong thing and we will rain hell down upon you’ and even though this was rare even when the man deserved it or worse, and far rarer when they didn’t, there were a few prominent examples of this happening in ambiguous cases, so the combination created a culture of fear. To which some said good and they amplified it.
Then this synthesized into a culture obsessed with smartphones and dating apps, to the point where interactions in physical space seem alien and bizarre, and any kind of flirting or similar behaviors in person seemed verboten.
As always there is an alternate hypothesis, which it seems is both that there is no problem, and that the problem is the fault of the apps or porn:
You’re Single Because You Will Actually Never Open
The most obvious place to start is, if she’s talking to you for a remarkably long time, you don’t want to make any assumptions but you (assuming you are interested yourself) do want to at least try flirting a bit and seeing if she’s interested?
The concern of NeedMeAJinshi is real, which is why you gracefully check. Talking for two hours at a party goes well beyond basic respect and you should definitely check.
At least be less oblivious than this guy.
You’re Single Because We Let Tinder Win
A new paper covers what happened when Tinder first arrived, note that this was largely a replacement of other dating apps.
The full paper is gated, and one must note the unavoidable limitations here. Greek organizations are importantly different from others, and the real difference is that the early dynamics are not going to hold stable over time, and with this kind of study you are not going to see longer term effects.
In terms of ‘mental health,’ the short term effects are reported (presumably self-reported) to be neutral-to-good in aggregate, and the net relationship impacts tiny. Given the other impacts I would presume that the longer term mental health impacts are negative, and for college students to be a group where the net effects are relatively positive.
You’re Single Because The Apps Are Bad On Purpose To Make You Click
Periodically we see a version of this claim:
I mean, yes, in theory at some point this becomes true. At any reasonable margin this simply isn’t true, certainly not for anyone outside of Match group. The reputational effects swamp everything else, especially since even if you are 100% to get a successful match most relationships don’t last. You’ll be back, and if you aren’t you’ll be telling all your friends how you met.
You do want to somewhat sabotage the lives of free users to force them to pay,and thus you gate useful things behind paywalls, but that’s true of essentially all free apps everywhere to some degree.
You’re Single Because You Present Super Weird
Having nerdy interests is only a minor handicap, if you (1) own it with no stress and (2) don’t require or impose them on your partners or let them get in the way. Chances are high your actual problem to fix lies elsewhere.
If someone actually vetoes you because of your hobby even if you own it with no stress and no imposition of it on others, it wasn’t a good match anyway. That’s positive selection right there. The same goes for political vetoes.
This conversation started off with the (decent looking) Guy Who Swiped Right Two Million Times and got one date. Ten out of ten points for persistence and minus several million for repeating the same action expecting different results and also minus another million for having actual zero swiping standards.
He’s plausibly got requirement one nailed but number two might be a problem.
The problem clearly ran deep. It’s one thing to do 2.05 million swipes and get only 2,053 matches. That’s 1 in 1,000, which to be fair is very bad, and it’s not hard to generate theories as to how that happened. But then he had 1,269 chats and that led to 1 date, and at that point dude it’s something else entirely.
The contradictions are there right off the bat. He does have standards, in his way.
I don’t think that’s weirdo lefty, you can totally have 33 snakes and be a weirdo rightie. Claude suspects ‘trying too hard to be quirky,’ which definitely fits.
At most, you get one move at this level. You definitely don’t get two.
You’re Single Because You Have The Wrong Hobbies
The broader point is mostly right, the narrow point seems obviously wrong?
In general, yes, better to be into as many non-harmful things as you can, so long as you are capable of shutting up about them and not letting them interfere with your dating activities. The reason so many of the things here are unattractive is that they do actively interfere, either because people can’t stop talking about them, they are money sinks, they have very bad correlations, or they do active harm to you, or a combination thereof.
You definitely can’t say that if X% of women find [Y] attractive, then at least X% of men should have attribute [Y], or vice versa, or that this indicates undersupply if not true, or anything like it. That’s not how it works for various obvious reasons.
But yes, if you are not into some things, you need to pick at least one something and get into it, ideally something that people you are interested in will find interesting.
You’re Single Because You Do The Wrong Kind Of Magic
Why is (illusionary) magic considered lame and low status? I am with Chana Messinger here that if executed and presented well, magic gives you charm and charisma, and seems great at ice breaking and demonstrating skill and value, and is actually great.
I also think Jack is correct that most people who use magic in this way are bad at it, and that bad magic is indeed lame and low status. Most magicians are not successful, and most people presenting magic are showing that they’ve overinvested in magic relative to other things. So is being ‘too in’ in magic as a strategy relative to your level of magic success.
There is especially a problem if you are obviously doing the magic as a strategy to get girls, doubly so if you are shoehorning your magic into an interaction where it shouldn’t be, or if you present as if you think you’re super hot stuff when you clearly aren’t. Having magic available as a tool is awesome, if you have some skill, but part of making the magic happen is knowing when not to make the magic happen.
The other problem is that illusionary magic (unlike magick or Magic: The Gathering) is at its core illusion and deception. Do you want to make that your brand? What other kinds of scams are you trying to pull?
You’re Single And All That Rejection Really Sucks
It’s easy to get caught up in ‘how to play correctly’ and the fact that you can indeed succeed on the apps with effort, and forget that even in the best case all that rejection is going to feel really terrible if you let it.
The obvious mental trick, far easier said than done, is to not see this as rejection.
As in, you’re not being rejected so much as not being considered. You’re not making a request so much as you’re confirming you would be open to something happening.
The algorithm is gating your success behind a bunch of grinding, until someone takes the time to consider you enough to have meaningfully rejected you rather than a photo, to have chosen to reject rather than not have had time to choose at all. And it is only once someone engages you in conversation for real that you’ve actually been rejected as a person.
Until then, yes you should be aware of your metrics versus others so you can work on improving, but in a real way this ‘doesn’t count.’
You’re Single Because Dating Apps Are Designed Like TikTok
Would this feature work?
The obvious problem with this is that users don’t want to do this. The point of swiping is that it is almost instant, it requires no thought, no words, like a slot machine. That wins in the marketplace because that’s what women choose.
So most users, most importantly most women, will quickly start to use the cut and paste, or something damn close to it. I mean, if you’re swiping on a profile, is there really that much to say there, and if they aren’t even going to read it before deciding why should you spend the effort? ‘Not hot’? In general, you can’t have mechanisms at odds with the user like this.
The variant of this that has non-zero chance of working is that the man would swipe and write a message first, and only then does the woman get to swipe, and perhaps you would have an AI that would give it a uniqueness score relative to other messages the same person sent, or you would otherwise engage in an auto-filter on the message along with everything else that is available for an LLM to filter profiles.
The first major dating site to get AI and usefully costly signaling properly into the early matching process, in a way that actually fixed the incentives without wrecking the experience, is going to see some big returns. It’s odd how little they seem to be focusing on this problem.
Alternatively, what about matching people by browser history? If there is a way to avoid data security and privacy concerns (ha!) then there are actually a lot of advantages. This should match people by various forms of common interests and content consumption patterns.
It also serves as a way to effectively say things you couldn’t otherwise say. As in, suppose you have a very niche interest, perhaps a kink and perhaps something else. You wouldn’t want to put that information in a profile, but this can potentially work around that.
That suggests a different design, which is AI-only honest-request blind matching.
As in, you write down what you really, truly want and care about. All the really good stuff. A document you would absolutely not want anyone else to read, including both freeform statements and answers to a range of questions.
Then, an AI looks at this, and compares your requests and statements to those of others, and gives compatibility scores, in a way that is protected against hacking the system in various ways (e.g. you don’t want someone to be able to add and remove ‘I’m extremely into [X]’ from their profile and compare all the scores, thus revealing who is exactly how into or not into [X].)
You could also offer this evaluation as a one-time service, where a fully anonymized server can take any given two write-ups [X], [Y] from different sources, and then evaluate.
Also note this does not have to be romantic. You can also do this, at scale or one-on-one, for finding ordinary friends or anything else.
You’re Single And Here’s Aella With a Tea Update
You’re Single Because You Don’t Have a Date Me Doc
I continue to think having a Date Me Doc, which is literally a document that lays out at length who you are, what you bring to the table and what you’re looking for at length, is an excellent move.
Here’s a resource that seems worth getting in on, if you’re in the area and the right Type of Guy sufficiently to qualify. This seems like The Way, it only works if you don’t know what she’s writing down:
You’re Single Because You Didn’t Hire a Matchmaker
It seems likely matchmaking is underrated, at least relative to dating apps and for those who can afford the fees? Or it would be, if the services deliver the goods.
I’ve now seen several ads on the subway recently for matchmaking services. The latest was for a service called Tawkify, which claims to be rather large, and I figured I’d do some brief investigation.
Clients pay for a package of curated dates managed by a dedicated matchmaker, based on your criteria, or you can pay a much smaller amount ($100/year) to be the candidate pool. They will also recruit outside the platform.
Yes, the price of ~$4500 for three matches is not cheap (bigger packages seem cheaper per date), but compare it to the number of hours you would otherwise spend to get to that point, and the quality of the matches you get from the apps, and ask if you were enjoying those hours of app work.
The problem with the matchmaking option is what you would expect it to be. The service is reportedly using predatory sales tactics and does not actually make much of an attempt to Do The Thing.
Yes, you would expect a lot of unhappy complaining customers no matter how good the service was but even by that standard this look is terrible and there are a lot of signs of reputation manipulation.
So the trick is to find the good version of the service.
Also, it seems there is now at least one person running a non-monogamous matchmaking service focusing on Austin, Oakland and Boulder.