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I'm dragging up the gender, dating, and fertility discourse for one last rodeo.
The below analysis is a possible infohazard for young single males. It contains analysis done by LLMs, but I solemnly swear I drafted this through my own brainpower, using AI only for the analysis I was too lazy to do myself.
I'm following upon a comment I made about a year ago that pulled out some raw numbers on the quality of women in the U.S., and how this might impact the desire of men to actually develop themselves and find one of those women and settle down.
At the time I didn't bother doing the work to produce an actual estimate of how many women would match the basic crtieria, given that these are NOT independent variables. The though occurred to me that AIs are the perfect solution for exactly this type of laziness, and now have the capability to do this task without completely making up numbers.
So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':
Single and looking (of course).
Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.
Not ‘obese.’
Not a mother already.
No ‘acute’ mental illness.
No STI.
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Under age 30.
And ask both ChatGPT and Grok to attempt to estimate the actual population of women in the U.S. that pass all these filters, accounting for how highly correlated each of the variables are.
Notable criteria I omitted:
Religious affiliation
Race
Political affiliation
Career
Drug use
Sex work/Onlyfans
I argue that a reasonable man would NOT want to ‘compromise’ on any of the original criteria, whereas the omitted ones are comparatively negotiable, or alternatively, are already captured in one of the original criteria.
Would you accept a woman who was carrying $50k in student loan debt into the relationship? I guess maybe if she was a doctor or lawyer or made enough money to justify it. Much higher than that and it starts to suggest financial recklessness.
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making. Ditto for being STI positive.
The age one is probably the most ‘unfair,’ but if having kids is a goal then this is pretty close to the ‘reasonable’ cutoff given the ticking fertility clock. Adjust upward if needed, I guess.
Here is the ChatGPT conversation. I used o3 in this case.
Here is Grok, specifically Grok 3.
In each case I used the “Deep Research” mode for the main query. I used identical prompts to start them off, they each seemingly did slightly different interpretations of the prompt. I was not using any fancy, complex prompt engineering to try and force it to think like a statistician or avoid hallucinations.
ChatGPT Gives this conclusion:
Grok comes to quite the similar conclusion:
Then I asked the truly cursed followup question: “how many men in the U.S. might be seeking these eligible women and thus how much competition is there for this population? How many are likely to ‘fail.’"
ChatGPT:
Emphasis Mine.
Grok:
Then the followup, when I tell it to extend the age range:
The error bars are pretty large on this one... the 9-out-of-10 number doesn't quite pass the smell test... but I think the point speaks for itself.
I don’t want to say that this is bleak, per se. I mean, 1 million or so women in the U.S. with some decent marriageable bonafides. That’s not a small pool! The problem stems from noticing that said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections, or more if they’re near the absolute peak of physical attractiveness.
Hence my increasing annoyance with the bog standard advice proffered to young males “become worthy and put in some effort and you will find a good woman” as it becomes increasingly divorced from the actual reality on the ground.
It’s not wrong. It is incomplete. Insufficient. If we increase the number of “worthy” men, that’s just intensifying the competition for the desirable women… while ALSO ensuring that more of those ‘worthy’ men will lose and go unfulfilled, DESPITE applying their efforts towards “worthiness.”
You CAN’T tell young men both “be better, improve, you have to DESERVE a good woman before you get one!” and then, when he improves:
“oh, you have to lower your standards, just because you thought you deserved a stable, chaste(ish), physically fit partner doesn’t mean you’re entitled to one, world ain’t fair.”
That dog won’t hunt.
Thems the numbers. I’m not making this up wholesale or whining about advice because I find it uncomfortable. No. The math is directly belying the platitudes. I’m too autistic NOT to notice.
So where am I going with this?
First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong. All of my personal experience, anecdotal observations, research, and my gut fucking instinct all points to this being an accurate model of reality. But I am fallible.
If I’m wrong I want to know!
I’m also not particularly worried about ME in general. I am in a good position to find a good woman, even though I’m sick of all the numerous frustrations and inanities one has to endure to do so. I get annoyed when someone, even in good faith, tries to suggest that my complaints are more mental than real. I can see the numbers, I've been in the trenches for years, this is a true phenomena, the competition is heavy, the prizes are... lacking.
And finally and most importantly, I genuinely feel the only way we keep the Ferris Wheel of organized civilization turning is if average women are willing to marry average men, and stay married, and help raise kids. I’m all for pushing the ‘average’ quality up, as long as actual relationships are forming.
Objectively, that is not happening. And so I’m worried because if society breaks down... well, I live here and I don't like what that implies for me, either.
(Yes, AGI is possibly/probably going to make this all a moot point before it all really collapses)
I understand your other criteria to various degrees, but I still don't understand why I'm supposed to care so much about the number of past sex partners. It is pretty much irrelevant to me when evaluating a potential long-term romantic partner unless maybe it is so ridiculously high that it indicates some kind of actual severe sex addiction. But that would be a number in the high 100s, probably. Actually, for me it would probably be more important that the woman had had at least one sex partner in the past, rather than that she had not had too many. I'm not sure that I would want to take on the risk of being a wife's first sex partner and thus having her views of me passed through a filter of inexperience.
Its associated with divorce risk after a certain point.
Of course YOU don't have to care about it.
But try to tell a single guy "yes you should settle for the girl that has like 6-12 guys she banged previously but don't worry I'm sure YOU'RE the one she sticks with and has NO remaining thoughts or feelings for the previous ones" with a straight face.
I would never tell a man to settle for a girl, though, unless maybe he is desperate to have kids and is reaching the age where even a man has to just take the best out of whatever mother options are available or else go without progeny.
What I would tell him is that if he actually likes the girl, he shouldn't let the number of guys she has banged stop him. And if he just simply has a visceral repulsion to that idea, I'd say fine, then go find some other girl. But I would recommend that he examines his own feelings and tries to figure out whether this is a true repulsion, like just not being into fat people, for example, or whether this is just a temporary insecurity that goes away with more experience.
Instead of recommending to a man that he settle, I'd recommend that he either goes and finds more girls or that he becomes more comfortable with having no girls, since being alone is better than being in a bad relationship.
I wouldn't worry too much, abstractly, about whether her promiscuity made her less likely to stick with me, if she was making me happy in other ways and I didn't see any evidence that she was actually pursuing other guys. Especially given that, since it is extremely easy for an attractive woman to get laid, for a woman to only have had sex with 12 guys strikes me as almost closer to celibacy than to promiscuity. Any attractive woman could easily have sex with 1000 men if she for some reason wanted to.
As for thoughts and feelings for previous lovers, I would find it a bit weird if she didn't have any at all. If by thoughts and feelings you mean that she was still carrying a torch for them, pining over them, etc. then sure, I think that would be weird and I would not be into that at all. But I would find it strange and almost inhuman if she completely put them out of her mind as if they had never existed. I guess you probably mean the carrying a torch version, though.
I mean, the average woman simply doesn’t desire the same variety of sexual partners that many men do. She desires a strong sexual relationship with a single man, which includes lots of non sexual affection, intimacy, caretaking, etc.
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