Fun fact on height: I'm almost exactly 5'11.5", and my wife is the one who pushes me to claim I'm 6'0" instead of 5'11" (not for dating, we're monogamous, just in life). She's 5'10", so that extra half inch is very clearly visible to her when standing next to me.
I'm curious if we know, is there a 180cm effect? Does the rest of the world get away with being a whole inch shorter without feeling the need to lie?
I'm curious if we know, is there a 180cm effect? Does the rest of the world get away with being a whole inch shorter without feeling the need to lie?
In my experience, this is correct. There's a saying in my country, roughly: 'a real man begins at 180cm' expressed with varying levels of tongue-in-cheeckness. See also this comment from a hungarian.
So, I'd say it's one of the many advantages of the metric system.
Previously: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
Dating Roundup #4 covered dating apps. Roundup #5 covered opening without them.
Dating Roundup #6 covers everything else.
Table of Contents
You’re Single Because You Can’t Handle Basic Logistics
You can take the pressure off yourself to plan the perfect date.
Instead, plan any date at all.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Ask Questions
A lot of the alpha is on the simple things, and not messing them up.
There are often reports from women that men will go on a first date with them, and fail to ask the woman any questions or show curiosity about the person across from them, actual zero anything.
This is a huge unforced error. Asking only has upside, even when you have to steer things back that way intentionally. Such questions are almost always appreciated, failure to ask them taken as a bad sign. Also the information is highly useful in deciding how and whether to proceed, and is usually actually interesting. If you find the answers boring, then partly that is likely a you problem, learn how to find people interesting (see Dan Carnegie etc) but also a sign this match is not for you, so little has been lost.
Or maybe they’re not making it easy on you.
Keep in mind that Amanda Askell works at Anthropic, so ‘he’s a spy’ is on the table.
The woman saying she is curious about you is partly that she probably is curious, but it also is a trap, potentially an intentional one. How do you steer things from there?
Good question. Presumably the goal is balance, and you may need to fight for that.
Then there are the parts that are about calibration, especially of being the right level of assertive and aggressive, and of course knowing which situations call for which, which is one of the hardest challenges. There is a lot of advice to men that is indeed essentially ‘don’t be pushy’ and lots of other advice from other sources that say ‘do be pushy’ so of course reverse all advice you hear.
You’re Single Because of Your Terrible Dating Tactics
Whichever you hear most is more likely the one you don’t need.
This is frequently a skill issue. You need to be assertive at the right times, ideally in the right ways – if the times are sufficiently right you have a lot of slack here, if they’re only somewhat right you have less – and not at the wrong times in the wrong ways.
Other times it very much is a calibration issue. And the default response to not yet being skilled is to become miscalibrated, and to seek out miscalibrated advice.
Either you take, and are advised to take, lots of shots on goal so you at least have a chance and also a chance to learn and grow comfortable. In which case you will indeed often come off rather badly. Or you take barely any shots, which avoids many downsides but ends up wasting everyone’s time, with little chance of success and not much learning.
The good news is that if you are paying any attention there really is quite a lot of space between ‘assertive but non-threatening’ and ‘earning a restraining order.’
A common sense heuristic for the timid is that if you go home sad that things did not progress at all, and you never got any form of negative feedback (this can be subtle, ideally it mostly will be, but it has to be there), you probably weren’t assertive enough.
Also, flat out, you need to flirt on dates (no matter who you are), first or otherwise, and want as a man to be attempting kissing at least often. Anyone who says ‘don’t flirt’ or tells a man ‘never kiss on the first date’ (or never initiate one) is giving you terrible advice and you should essentially ignore everything else they say not to do – they might be right on other points, but them giving you that advice is not useful information.
You’re Single Because You Refuse to Play Your Role
Some basics for those who need them, or who would find it helpful to affirm them, or have them made more explicit.
It doesn’t always work this way, it doesn’t have to work this way. When dealing with a particular person you can and should pay attention and stand ready to throw this all out the window if they want to play differently. But one should be aware that it usually does directionally work this way. Going with it tends to lead to better outcomes, and going against it usually means swimming uphill.
Jacob expands this into a full blog post, framing modern dating as improv, in which there are no fixed hard rules but (for heterosexual pairings) the man’s role is generally to read the signals and the room, and make moves to advance the plot, including being willing to risk being explicitly rejected, while the woman’s is to provide a room and signals to be read and approving or rejecting proposals, and helping everything stay graceful.
But of course, none of that is in the form of rules. There used to be actual rules with actual people enforcing them, and now those rules are far more minimal – some things are actually off limits but you presumably knew about those rules already. If the situation isn’t typical, or typical isn’t working, you are free to switch the roles, take completely different rules (except for the big actually enforced ones, although even that can get weird these days), or do anything else you want.
And if they don’t understand how the game works or what their role is supposed to be, that’s fine, you figure out how they think the game works or how they want it to work, and you play by those rules instead. That especially applies when the man is kind of clueless, and you don’t want that to be a dealbreaker.
Billy Is Young has another thread of remarkably similar dating-as-a-male-101, and how you need to project yourself, and in particular not to attempt to present yourself as other than you are. Fully ‘be yourself’ is not always wise, but don’t be actively not yourself either. Don’t hold back your masculine energy or pretend not to be attracted.
You’re Single Because People Are Crazy About Age Gaps
Apparently there was a ‘predator sting’ in which a 22-year-old was invited to meet up with an 18-year-old, then the students berated him as a ‘sex offender,’ 25 students chased him and one student punched him in the back of the head. If you believe we live in a world where 18-to-22 is an unacceptable age gap and might get you chased by a mob of 25 people and punched in the back of the head, you’re going to have a much harder time dating.
You’re Single and You Need Professional Help
Aella hints she may be available to tutor you to be irresistible to women. I don’t know if this would work, and yes you’d have to pay, but it might work and this does seem like it would at least be fun. It sure beats buying them Tinder credits.
In her case, she offers us some free instructions.
See? It’s easy.
Including this first level move, although you’ll usually need a different framing.
I’ve never heard the 15% claim but I’ve been sitting with it for a few minutes. It seems plausible in some settings, I can see it being a cool percentage chance to win a run for example, but in my sports betting experience going +500 seems like a bit much, although it also rarely is a natural thing to come up without a parlay.
For dating, it makes sense. 15% chance of serious interest is still a hot date.
You’re Single Because You Never Close
Always be closing.
A classic puzzle, inspired by a TikTok clip. A woman is invited back to a man’s place after a date, agrees but says ‘I’m not going to sleep with you.’ What does that mean?
It means you need to pay close attention.
In the clip, the woman complains that she is the problem, because she did not want to sleep with him, but she wanted him to try a little, and he didn’t, so now she feels ugly.
Richard notes that a lot of younger men expressed great fear that they would be punished severely (as in life ruined) for judging wrong and going too far.
Any of these things could be happening. There is a substantial chance she does end up sleeping with you if you are down for that, and also a substantial chance she does not no matter how well you play. Your job is to navigate this ambiguity. Develop and use the relevant social skills, use ambiguous actions to see how she reacts, do the best you can. Understand that there is no perfect solution, you need to be willing to get it wrong in both directions and gracefully navigate both failure modes.
That is vastly harder if you have gotten it into your head that one move too far could ruin your life. Which in theory it could, but the chances of that happening (especially if no one involved is in college) if you act at all reasonably are very low.
Essentially, those men think their own sexuality is borderline illegal In Their Culture.
My model is the same as Andrew’s here. There are particular places and times in which being terrified is a reasonable response. The obvious response, if you find yourself in such a place, is to tread very carefully while there, not get stuck there permanently, and do your best to get your dating and relationships elsewhere.
Once you are not in such a place, you need to realize that you are not now in such place, and undo the paranoid adjustments you felt forced to make.
You’re Single Because You’re Bad at Sex And Everyone Knows
If she (27yo) screams someone else’s name during sex, what to do? If that someone else appears to be a 16-year-old boy cartoon character called Ben 10 (but also could be another Ben she is cheating with and then tried to ‘save it’ with the cartoon character?) then does that change your answer? Some advise leaning into it. Mostly I think people let this kind of thing get to them more than it should, and you should essentially bank the credits for when you need them. But that’s an outside view.
What about endurance, and how much of it is being fit?
What’s most interesting here is how much of the issue here is presented as worry about endurance, rather than in the actual endurance. That’s yet another way confidence matters. I’m also rather surprised by her observation that cardio and general muscle fatigue are the most common limiting factors here? I suppose it depends on how much endurance you need.
Aella’s studies report that watching porn is mostly positively correlated with predicting female sexual preferences, including the finding that more women like rough sex than men (of course check first, you can’t assume!). But she notes that anal is the big important exception.
How to make casual sex great again?
That must be quite the network, given her other statements about this meaning only guys inherently into things guys are rarely inherently into. The sex might be casual, the logistical operation and interview process is anything but, although presumably worth it.
I presume most people need to do much less aggressive filtering than this, and would be happy to do a bunch of compromising within a reasonably wide range, but should absolutely speak up far more about what they want.
You’re Single Because You Are Only a Fan
This sadly does seem to be a reliable format for Peak Engagement on Twitter, but also seems like relevant information in this case.
The demand for cheating has been there since forever, so it’s weird to say societal norms ‘haven’t caught up with’ it yet. And I’d say it’s more that there’s demand for attention, I’d presume that single men use OnlyFans more if you hold other conditions constant, rather than less.
I think this all seems less sad rather than more sad, given the alternatives, if we hold the amount of money and time spent constant? At least you do get some sort of parasocial relationship, some amount of interaction. Although it also does seem more damaging to relationships.
If that appeals to you, Aella discusses how to succeed at OnlyFans, with a lot of distinct connections, versus as a cam girl, where you are aiming for 1-2 whales that like to win a dominance contest in front of other men. OnlyFans is about the illusion that you’re the only guy. The money in OF is in upselling via DMs, which (of course) are typically are handled by agency-hired minimal wage workers in warehouses, and agencies often charge 50% or more (on top of the OF 20%) for this and other services.
I presume AIs will replace those jobs rather soon, which greatly reduces marginal cost and also turnaround times, and presumably thus alters the business model.
The new dominant play is apparently ‘drips’ where you have a sequence of clips with escalating price tags, which you pretend to do in real time but you don’t have to pretend that hard, the men don’t notice or care. They want a minimal deeply uncredible version of the second level symbolic version of the thing – the conceptual indicator of a personal connection that would imitate an actual personal connection.
She also notes that by not doing internal discovery, OnlyFans forces creators to advertise elsewhere, which got so aggressive that various places (even Fetlife) got pretty hostile towards all the posting. This is a levels of friction situation of the type we’re going to see a lot of with AI – OF reduced frictions to doing the OF thing, so suddenly the previous levels of friction outside OF didn’t deter people enough, and if you didn’t ban it the level of tits-in-your-face was out of control.
It’s like there was this great business model lying around the whole time, that any (sufficiently hot woman) could use – spam the internet with hot pics, recruit men, charge a subscription for some sexy content, charge for individual interactions and marginal content. And the secret to unlocking this was to remove the friction, and also earning 20%, was just to take care of various basics on the backend?
Aly Dee asks, isn’t OnlyFans a bad deal, versus finding one ‘kind’ rich fan and putting a ring on it, given the prospects of a young woman who can succeed at OF if they’re willing to date older, and how easy it would be to be intentional about this? The obvious answer is that no, that isn’t obviously better depending on what you want, especially given the commitments involved, and also isn’t so easy to get given the adverse selection problems.
In other OnlyFans news, this is a real way people are reacting to real news?
I have nothing against OnlyFans, but if this can ‘boost the UK economy significantly’ then that raises further questions. So many questions.
You’re Single Because of Preference Falsification
Are your preferences bad? If so, should you feel bad?
As in: Paper asks, is it bad to prefer attractive partners? No. Next question. Paper disagrees and claims there are strong philosophical arguments for both sides. The argument against seems to be the fully general anti-discrimination argument, that says humans are not allowed to express preferences, or to prefer better things to worse things, unless they have some special moral justification. And, yeah, no.
Mate preferences differ a ton across individuals, and the gender-based differences look relatively small, but taken together if you know someone’s preferences you can guess their gender with 92.2% accuracy.
Aella looks at preferences by examining the relative prices of female escorts with various physical attributes. Nothing is too surprising, but you learn about which things have bigger magnitudes of impact. Even the things that mattered don’t seem to have that big an impact on price, to a level that I’m a little suspicious.
Aella also notes that as she charged higher prices, client quality improved, in particular there were far fewer assholes:
I bet that charging more also makes the same men act less like assholes. Consultants know that if you don’t charge enough, no one will respect or listen to you, so not only won’t you make much money, you won’t be able to do the job. When you charge a lot, people who do pay doubly respect you – you assert you’re worth that much, and also they agreed to pay it. There’s also the section effect, of course, where assholes are shopping cheap as they can.
A similar principle holds for regular dating. It doesn’t have to be money that acts as your asshole filter.
Strategies that are very hard to do, especially before having done them, but that work.
How one finds a highly effective wife (or husband), without first yourself being highly effective, is the mystery. But yes, absolutely, being around effectiveness, hard work and high standards will rub off on you a lot. The need to be worthy can’t hurt either.
This also applies to everything else. Seek out those who have qualities you want to have yourself, and avoid those with qualities you want to avoid.
Here’s a preference.
If that is her motivation, that is a good thing to want to avoid (especially in her position, since I imagine a lot of men who dare try and date a pop star are rather full of themselves) and this is potentially a good question to ask, but you have to pay attention to exactly how he answers. If the answer is ‘sure, if given the opportunity, of course I’d go’ and you turn them down for that because they’re too ‘full of themselves,’ then you fool. If the answer is ‘yes, I’m actively trying to go to space’ then sure, maybe that’s not what she wants.
Here are some other claims about preferences that sure sound like a trap.
Being a catch is not the same as being more likely to be caught.
I do think that these characteristics are valuable and worth pursuing for other reasons, and are underrated as male dating strategies, but for it to work you need to get into opportunities to demonstrate this style of value.
This won’t get you in the door. Merely being stable and fine on your own in the abstract is great down the line, but you still need a way in. This can’t take the role of ‘the thing that is attractive about you.’
You’re Single Because You Have Insufficient Visual Aids
Also fitting the above the pattern: Women like kind men. This is a well-known robust result in evolutionary psychology. However, men have the strong perception that if you want to end up with a woman, being kind too early is a poor strategy.
To put this all in someone else’s terminology, and hopefully make it clearer, we’re going to have to pull out the visual aids, as I realized while editing the post we’ve been effectively talking about the two different axes on the latest men and women ranking scales chart. It’s a fun one, with lots of detail. As usual, take the right amount of seriously and literally, which is neither super high nor non-zero.
I have many quibbles with this even as a ‘baseline scenario.’ But I like that this is the quirky perspective of a particular person, who is clearly describing what they observe. And it emphasizes that, mostly, Good Things are Good, and that everything counts.
The discussion at the link, mostly unrelated to the graphic, is the latest iteration of the ‘the dating market broke because the men who can get multiple offers solved for the equilibrium’ argument, where without enforcement of various traditional social norms things collapse into dynamics that aren’t good for most people involved, where men have little felt incentive to commit and women have little leverage.
Even if you do want to spend your 20s seeking marriage and kids, that becomes very difficult, especially if you are unwilling to break with the mainstream social scripts around dating.
Also it seems there’s a part two? Which resonated a lot less, and feels like it says a lot more about the author than anything else, but seems fun so sharing anyway.
You’re Single Because You Told Your Partner You Didn’t Want Them
There was much talk about this Reddit thread, reminding some of this other thread.
(As usual, the story might be fake but the hypothetical and the reactions are real.)
It makes sense that these kinds of comments can be unfixable dealbreakers. The information can’t be taken back, and potentially colors everything.
‘Not being hot is a skill issue’ is a bold take. It’s not entirely wrong, especially if you go beyond exercise into various other areas, there is usually a lot of room for improvement. But a lot of it is not a fixable skill issue, especially for being hot to a particular individual person, and once impressions have solidified. Also, that’s a lot of additional investment, if you don’t otherwise want it.
My quick model is that I see there as being three distinct problems caused by this.
If she means what Ocean thinks she means, and you’re ‘too good’ to only hook up with for risk of getting attached or what not, then she’s communicating quite poorly but has opportunity to clarify and save it. The whole meaning can be turned around. And indeed, even if that isn’t what she meant but she is willing to lie to save the relationship , this is the best lie available.
I think most of the time that’s not what she’s saying.
Obviously successful pairings happen all the time with attitudes like this. Most successful pairings don’t involve maximum baseline physical attractiveness before growing into that, and if they did then that means everyone is paying way, way too much attention to looks. You still have to be very careful how you say that.
Indeed, one of our big problems is exactly that we don’t give not-maximally-physically-attracted pairings situations where they are set up to find each other and then succeed in spite of that. Instead, we do the opposite, we tell people and especially men that if they aren’t sufficiently attractive, they will never get the opportunity for the rest, and also will be in constant danger of losing everything.
You’re Single Because of Your Terrible Dating Strategy
Game theory of Jane Austen regarding dating strategy. Fun for those who were forced to endure her in school, but nothing most readers would regard as new.
I don’t know if there is actually a pattern of those claiming to be ‘29 year old boss girls from TikTok’ having public meltdowns about failing to find a man despite their otherwise amazing lives.
I do know that the one here is complaining that people are telling her she is wrong, and she is tired of waiting for her soulmate to suddenly appear that ‘matches her energy,’ and yet she says she is not asking for a lot. I know that she says that ‘all her friends’ have their finances and husbands ‘that they’ve prioritized,’ which is evidence against this being so impossible, and perhaps that she made different choices on what to prioritize. She is clearly feeling entitled to a soulmate.
Here is a woman who more credibly reports trying, for years, yet finding no one.
It is noteworthy that in the first clip, Katherine is wrong and the woman mentions all her friends rather than complaining about lack of community.
Perhaps not the central point, but: The actual story was about her going out to a comedy show. She seems to not have known what it means to sit in the front row. It often means you are going to get absolutely roasted. Instead, she got a free gift bag and praised for being brave and singled out. Then she went home rather than have a drink, because she had this gift bag.
You fool! This was actually a great situation. An entire room full of people heard comics call you brave and drew their attention. This is exactly when you go to the bar. So what if you have a gift bag. Good chance you get approaches, you have something to talk about, that is exactly what you came out for.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Enjoy the Process
Another problem is, what if dating no longer gives you even a little excitement, even if you’re not going on that many? The obvious answer is ‘find better people to date, that actually excite you’ but that is not easy. Neither is ‘find people who are unpredictable and liable to say interesting things,’ or even ‘find activities that are inherently exciting even if your date isn’t.’
Presumably a lot of this is a lack of the dance of ambiguous escalation?
If your strategy involves moving away from the dance, if it resolves the ambiguity too easily, then there is great risk that what remains is not exciting or fun.
I never went on enough dates, or rather never had enough unexciting date opportunities, to have this problem. My presumption is the right strategy is to think, I now have an excuse to go out and meet someone new, if I’m not enjoying it or seeing much value by default I get to mix it up, and you get to have gambler’s mindset that if it works it’s pretty great so you can afford a lot of uneventful along the way. Or maybe… just don’t be all that excited, and that’s kind of fine?
You’re Single Because You Don’t Escalate Quickly
‘Act like you’re on Bachelor in Paradise except without the cameras’ is remarkably close to good advice. Easy to say, hard to act on it. Move fast and break things, in particular fail fast, and treat every relationship as either headed for an engagement or not worth pursuing further.
There is no case where I wish I’d followed this advice less, and several where I would have benefited from following it more.
The counterargument is that doing this is difficult and painful. Fair enough.
The other counterargument is that being in a long term relationship teaches you things you can’t learn other ways. But from what I’ve seen, often you then need to unlearn exactly those lessons.
Mostly it seems super wise, the moment you can tell it’s not going to work out, to act accordingly. That doesn’t automatically mean ending it right away, fun is valid, but if you’re out of the super fun period, it kind of does mean that.
More precisely, I would say there are a lot of cases where you can’t tell and it might work out, but yes there are many that are pretty doomed and it’s obvious early on, so don’t pretend not to notice.
You’re Single Because Your Standards Are Too High
(Definitely one for Remember to Reverse Any Advice You Hear and even more than usual I’m not endorsing the quoted text.)
Of course you have no available LTR options you like, if you did you’d have an LTR.
It’s a matching problem. Anyone medium term unmatched is not going to have easy access to matches they want. That might or might not mean they have unreasonably high standards.
Everyone has at least some non-standard preferences, so you can reasonably hold out for a much better than random match given your general market value, even if you only do an average amount of search.
But that only goes so far, especially if you mostly want generically desired attributes and don’t have excellent search methods, and there are preference mismatches at the population level. The remaining market is going to at best suck, and potentially break down entirely.
You’re Single Because You Read the Wrong Books
This book review of How Not to Die Alone distills a very clear explanation of why dating advice for women is so typically unhelpful. They keep repeating the same three pieces of advice.
They’re all good advice, but neither complete nor usually all that actionable.
Jacob then goes on to absolutely savage the ‘science’ that the book in question (How Not to Die Alone) is based on, while noticing that the advice is perfectly respectable and mostly seems right, but generic and in line with general expectations.
I actually think the central theme of much of the advice here seems to fall outside the three categories above, while also being good advice, which is:
The book knows better than to say anything is your fault. But have you considered making better more deliberate decisions, and journaling to record what you learned?
Whether or not it is useful to think of things as ‘your fault’ depends on how you react to that. If it helps you improve and learn and have hope because you can fix your fate, great. If it makes you insecure and afraid and hating yourself and you stop leaving the house, then that’s not great.
It’s weird that the book is doing that while also explicitly holding the reader blameless.
You’re Single Because You’re Short, Sorry, That’s All There Is To It
The funny part is this isn’t for a dating app. This is for a CDC survey. So the dating-related rate is presumably a lot higher.
Except: Height does not correlate with the chance men are married or have a child.
Tall is overrated and overvalued, I believe largely because it is easy to notice and measure, and the most legible to others. If you seek the tall man, you are ‘overpaying’ for it. So to the extent the dating market is ‘efficient,’ unless you have a relatively very strong height preference you should be sacrificing height to get more of other things you want.
You’re Single Because of Bad Government Incentives
Lyman’s full proposal is instantly-reverse-the-fertility-crisis bazooka-level big. I don’t know I’d go that far, but on any realistic margin movement towards it is great. At minimum, we need to eliminate marriage penalties and have at least some marriage bonus. We want to encourage marriages.
Having one spouse support the other is fine and good, we shouldn’t punish that.
The ‘sugar daddy’ scenario is icky to many (not all!), but as Lyman says, a marriage if anything reduces the ick level and the power imbalances involved. Given sugar daddy is happening either way, sugar husband is an upgrade. You might prefer to have neither, but is that the primary effect you’re getting by punishing the marriage?
You’re Single Because You Don’t Realize Cheating is Wrong
This is an interesting divergence, but it’s also a highly mislabeled diagram:
The question was whether “extramarital sex is always wrong,” not whether an “extramarital affair is always wrong.”
Part of the cultural divide is arguing over where there is a difference.
I very much think there is a difference.
You’re Single Because You’re Doing Polyamory Wrong
Aella offers a thread of polyamory lessons learned, with clear themes.
This is asking a lot. Which is good, if that is what it takes to make polyamory work. You have to ask for what would actually work, not what sounds nice (see also: AI alignment and everyone not dying, etc, sigh).
It is highly plausible to me that there is a small minority for whom this all comes relatively naturally. And that for them, if they practice it with discipline amongst themselves, this particular equilibrium can work better than the alternatives.
However this is very different from what is suggested by most polyamorous people I have met. Most such folks are making the case that polyamory should be a default, and are suggesting various things Aella warns do not work.
Here’s what happens when you don’t heed point three:
Aella then tells this composite story, where your partner meets someone else that’s monogamous but willing to try poly, and there’s no plan but they end up falling for the other person, and then leaving you to be monogamous with them. Which does seem rather common, based on the experiences I know about, and it all makes sense.
That sets a high bar, with poly wanting to consist only of people who are fully committed to it, which Aella says she was the moment she heard about it, but presumably most people can’t possibly be confident until they try it out? That was constantly the actual argument for trying it out, that I used to hear all the time in San Francisco, and this is exactly the opposite.
The obvious problem is: Under this framework, everyone involved in your polyamory must be ‘all-in’ on it, and not even be open to monogamy.
But how can you be all-in without experiencing it first? I would assume most people, even if being all-in on polyamory would ultimately be right for them, won’t be able to know this in advance.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Beware Cheaters
Is it not this simple, but I believe this is directionally correct.
From what I’ve seen, by far the biggest risk factor for cheating – for every meaning of the word cheating, not only sexually or within a relationship, both within a particular cheating format and for cheating in general – is prior cheating or otherwise being the type of person that cheats. It is an indication of who they are, and can make it part of their identity. The reverse is true as well.
Not all such actions are created equal. The circumstances still matter quite a lot, including evaluating past circumstances to predict implied future cheating risk. Details are important.
Attractiveness does matter too, especially in relative terms and not only in terms of physical attraction. If you’re dating out of your league you are taking on risk. But I think that is a bigger risk factor for them leaving than for cheating.
You’re Single Because Your Ex Spilled the Tea
A key problem in our civilization is that it is legally dangerous to say anything negative about anyone in a documented way outside of certain specific bounds (e.g. leaving online reviews of products). Then again, one must consider the alternative.
In theory of course Tea (4.8+ on the App stores but the reviews I read make me rather suspicious in various ways) should be great and net positive for our romantic prospects via reducing uncertainty and Conservation of Expected Evidence.
Tea says it lets you run a background check, reverse phone lookup, reverse image search, criminal record lookup and sex offender search, including trying to figure out if the guy is already in a relationship. Not only does filtering out bad apples get rid of the bad apples and let you accept more marginal other dates, it also improves the dates you do go on because you can trust things more.
What about ‘reviews’ from exes? The same things should be true, if we take reviews as given. If you’re properly calibrated, you should on net come out more excited, and also have more information to help things go well.
The first obvious danger is that an ex could have it out for you, and there will be false positives here, but the alerts should be much better than random. A lot of the negative reviews are from not-crazy exes, and it’s not entirely random, shall we say, who ends up with crazy enraged exes. The accuracy rate doesn’t have to be that high to still be net positive, if everyone is reacting reasonably.
The second obvious danger is poor calibration. You don’t want Tea users to only or mostly update negatively on such reviews. There will doubtless be some of this, it’s unclear how much.
I’d also note that this likely constitutes positive selection for the men – the women who are now more positively inclined will tend to be the ones you want to date. Good.
Then there are the incentives, and how this changes dynamics while dating. How much do interactions change when the woman may be your future ex writing a tea-spilling future review? Some amount of this is good, since it rewards staying on good terms and treating her well. This can also be a threat, or held over your head, and have some decidedly nasty second-order effects.
My guess is that while things like Tea are not used that often, this is all clearly good, but that if this reached a critical mass where there was too much negative selection risk out there for the woman to not to use such tools, then the fact that all the false positives and unfortunate situations correlate (e.g. everyone you want to date is seeing the same info, and that can ruin your chances in general, and this can be used as a threat) makes things a lot less clear.
You’re Single Because You’re Assigning People Numbers
Here’s Sgt Blackout thinking he’s solving for the equilibrium and failing, via a combination of objectification and then taking the 0-10 scale and completely butchering everything related to it on multiple levels at once, including by conflating a hotness-only-kind-of-offensive-objectification scale with an actual-human-including-personality scale, and trying to condense two dimensions down to one by pretending they correlate way more than they do.
If you do talk with numbers to rate anything, in any context, you always have to be clear what the numbers refer to, and what those numbers are leaving out.
It is obviously correct, however, to keep an eye on the personality distinction he’s pointing at underneath all that, about a personality type of ‘I am the hotness and get to act like it’ that definitely exists and is mostly to be avoided for most people reading this, even if they’re right.
Wisdom about the 0-10 scale:
You’re Single Because You Are The Wrong Amount of Kinky
BDSM and kink have gotten steadily more prevalent.
If you are looking for ways to give yourself more value on the dating market?
As I understand the situation, this very much is one of them.
Being down for more things, and knowing how to execute on them properly, is a kind of low level dating superpower. And it is one you can learn. It also often helps with confidence.
You would of course also want to figure out which aspects you can actively enjoy, and which you cannot, and act accordingly.
Aella breaks out some conceptual subtypes here. Note that the darker and more ‘hardcore’ stuff tends to be less popular. Most of the demand is for relatively light aspects that don’t require being all that actively kinky.
She also notes that different sexually successful guys can report overall very different female preferences in terms of liking it rough versus gentle. There are so many different decisions you make along the way, both big and subtle, that shape both who you end up dating, and also what they want from you.
Also gasp, I know: Sex dolls are not representative of typical average body types.
Here Aella talks about some of her interviews with people with obscure fetishes, as in ‘I like that one completely otherwise non-erotic scene in that one movie and literally nothing else.’
You’re Single Because You’re Not Good Enough at Sex
Of course the 99th percentile person – either for you in particular, or in general – is going to be very, very good in bed. As is the 99th percentile match. And yes, you can get a lot better with practice, both in general and as a match for a particular person. It would be absurd to think otherwise.
I find Rogue’s comment interesting, including the ‘how do you know enough 99th percentile people well enough to form a pattern, even by reputation?’ One can imagine this going either way – perhaps the way you get great at sex is you really want to be a great partner in every way, perhaps it’s so you can avoid doing that in other ways, or it trades off against developing other skills, or the way you get good involves not otherwise being that great a partner, shall we say.
They redid the ‘random stranger propositions people’ study again:
I assume the 0% vs. 4% is a random effect, the sample sizes are not that huge.
These are huge gaps in acceptance rates, but no correlation between gender and explicitness – the more explicit the offer, the less likely everyone was to accept it, but you could shoot your shot either way, contradicting Clark and Hatfield’s results.
I find the new result very hard to believe in relative terms, and am highly tempted to either defy the data or wonder about the people conducting these studies – if I can choose who is asking in both cases then I bet I could equalize the explicitness effect?
I can totally believe that receptivity has declined over time across the board, sad.
A practical guide to giving blowjobs to file under ‘it all sounds obvious but that doesn’t mean having it written down isn’t helpful.’
You’re Single But Not Because of Your Bodycount
This continues to seem spot on to me.
This seems like the default, and Alexander covers the obvious mechanisms. One could also notice that this leaves out that being more promiscuous likely correlates with more shots on goal and opportunities and also various desirable traits, given how often the person was indeed desired. So there is some amount of balancing out.
This poll provides three data points:
One result is that being libertarian is only slightly correlated with body count, once you control for voting in Aella polls. Another is that self-described libertarians are 52% of Aella’s voters, which seems about right.
The result that actually stood out to me was that only 56% of voters had a body count of six or higher, and again these are Aella poll voters.
It’s good to be reminded that most people really don’t have sex with that many people.
Here’s another self-reported bodycount chart, these are mean values, model this?
You’re Single Because They Divorced You
The woman is more likely to be the one that pulls the trigger. That does not tell you what or who was ultimately responsible for that being the final outcome.
What does ‘cause’ mean in context? If a marriage fails, one can say that the person who initiated divorce caused the divorce, in some sense. Or one can say that whoever did whatever provoked or led to that caused the divorce, which may or may not be the same person. Either party cheating can lead to a divorce, and then there can be claims about what caused them to cheat. The same goes for other failures.
I still think ‘who filed for the divorce’ tells us a lot. And it tells us what economics and incentives would predict, that the better your outside options the more likely you are to initiate a divorce. It seems plausible that the person with better options also is likely to impose more demands, treat the other person worse in various ways, and put in less effort.
You’re Single Because No One Tells You Anything
There isn’t a strict term for it, and I don’t know of a good pointer, but I’ve written about related phenomena before multiple times, with several
Why don’t we have better resources for this across this and many other systems? Because of the Implicit Coalition: The (implicit, of course!) alliance of enforcers who react quite badly if anyone is not part of the alliance of enforcers who punish anyone formally or explicitly knowing and doing things that everyone is supposed to keep secret or implicit.
Dating is a grey area where you definitely get smacked down hard for being ‘too strategic’ or doing actual thinking in the wrong ways, but also everyone understands the stakes are too high not to so all you have to do is not make what you are up to common knowledge.
Patrick McKenzie explains some aspects of this here:
You’re Single And You’re Not Alone
Well, you are, but you’re not alone in this particular way.
You’re Single Because Things Are Steadily Getting Worse
There’s all the talk that dating sucks and is in crisis but is it actually true? Or rather, is it true more than it used to be?
Over the longer term, yes, the declines seem like a big deal.
There does clearly seem to be a teen loneliness epidemic, but that could be a mostly distinct issue, born of our unwillingness to allow them physical contact and experiences, plus the way they handle mobile phones. And this is again over the longer time period.
Again, it seems clear there is a big issue at relatively young ages, but that could still be something that mostly fades over time.
Taken together, I see very strong evidence for the ongoing steadily worsening situation, but not strong evidence for a sudden crisis in the 2020s.
You’re Single Because You Didn’t Go to College
So good news then, all we have to do is send 100% of women to college.
In all seriousness though, as more women attend college over time, the yellow line is horizontal, and that is meaningful. The selection and signaling effects are doing less work and the results are holding steady.
Whereas the purple line could be increasingly dire selection effects, or the increasingly dire signal it sends to have not gone to college.
You’re Single But This Isn’t About You
From 2004: Survey of 10,000 Chinese couples in 1991 shows self-matched couples had fewer domestic conflicts and higher income versus parent-induced matches or friend introductions. It makes sense that parent introductions do worse. The paper considers agency costs versus market expansion.
I’d care more about population differences, with the paper attempting to fix this by using regional and generational differences but those are a lot of the population differences I’d worry about, including regional infrastructure for creating self-made matches. What is surprising to me is that friend introductions do not do well, as they do not come with the same pressure as parent matches.
I suppose the key is to still apply strong selection and mostly reject such matches, and people were accepting too many of them? That, or they didn’t actually control properly for selection effects, which seems likely.
Life without sex: Large-scale study links sexlessness to physical, cognitive, and personality traits, socioecological factors, and DNA. Sexless men tended to live in regions with fewer women and more income inequality, genetic variation explained ~15% of variance. Okie dokie.
Claim that assortative mating has greatly increased is 75% or so due to later marriage. If you are sorting later in life, uncertainty about income decreases, so you can more efficiently sort. A lot of the sorting is based on education and class markers rather than income, which complicates this explanation, but I buy that this is a major factor. I would also add that the later you are doing the matching, the more you likely prioritize income over other factors. Also it’s notable that we are sorting on income rather than wealth.
You’re Single so Let’s Go to the Videotape
Sentiment analysis and other statistics about text messages from a failed relationship.
You’re Single Because You Don’t Seek Out Good Advice
What are the sources I’ve found most interesting in this area?
Matchmaker Blaine Anderson (@datingbyblaine) has been interesting and is getting a bunch of mentions here. A lot of the notes are kind of obvious but it’s good to see it laid out, and often the details surprise. In particular, she’s good at calibrating how forcefully she says things. Alexander (@datepsych) also often makes it into these posts.
Jacob’s blog on dating is a solid read. He’s an old friend. We definitely don’t agree on everything but his model is worth understanding.
Also worth noting this, in both directions: Cartoons Hate Her explains if you want to know what gets a man to go for a woman, you should probably ask women rather than men, on the same principle of ‘ask the fisherman how to catch fish’ that should make you suspicious of women’s reports of how to attract women. And that the answer isn’t primarily ‘be nice and respectful’ or ‘shy and polite.’
You’re Single So Here’s Some Hope
The full story is less billboards and Twitter posts, and more Date-Me docs and meeting at Hackathons after seeing each others Date-Me docs and comparing Notion docs.