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Why do a lot of women not like acknowledging the practical aspects of dating? By this I mean that women appear to be put off by me simply discussing:
Of course I'm not discussing these topic with women I'm trying to actually date, I'm not that autistic. But if you're trying to actually find a partner to settle down and have kids with, how do you not take all of these into account? Not only does it reek of impracticality, but on an even deeper level, it appears that any attempt to practically model the dating world at all produces a negative female reaction.
(Maybe it's because some of these women don't ever intend on having kids and therefore don't ever have to be realistic about dating.)
I’d argue you’ve just answered your own question. But it’s not only that. Not prioritizing mating/coupling, not being willing to make personal/lifestyle compromises for that purpose, or assuming – based on the experience of their mothers and grandmothers – that marriage and children is something that just happens anyway, will have the same consequence.
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I disagree with your assumption. The basic rule (for mainstream discussion) is that you aren't supposed to say anything that puts women as a group in a negative light. So for example:
OK:
Not OK:
+++
OK:
Not OK:
+++
OK:
Not OK:
++++
To be clear, I am talking about mainstream discussion, not about what can or can't be said in dark corners of the internet. On discussion forums such as this one, typical man-bashing is likely to get called out and also posters are less afraid of being labeled "misogynist."
It is indeed the general rule in the normie sphere. Women being petty is par for the course. Men being petty is unbecoming. And to openly state about petty women as a man that they are petty is in itself extremely petty.
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I wonder if a book written in this style, a kind of "social rules for social autists" (maybe under a different name?) would sell well. Certainly, it would be an interesting archeological artifact a few hundred years from now.
It would need either a lot of commentary and explanation, or it would just be an anthology of know the workplace rules memes.
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In my experience women are quite willing to discuss such topics, especially reproduction-related.
(I don't live in the USA though, might be cultural difference.)
More specifically: (3) is just an absolutely normal topic for discussing, just be more tactful -- age doesn't have mercy on anyone; (2) SMV and "marked" are too subjective. Even on the most primitive level, some people like blonds, some like black hair. People are repelled by claiming that attraction is universal, it's not.; (1) women LOVE discussing looks, like giving advice and disparaging people with suboptimal looks. They even like receiving advice on looks, but with a caveat, it's better too avoid saying bluntly "do like that beauty does", women become jealous (and rightfully), so be more tactful.
Overall, really, try to pay less attention to females' look, looks gonna wane, but personal qualities won't.
'Giving bad advice on purpose and disparaging men with suboptimal looks' is a more accurate overall description.
again, not in my experience, at all. possibly because of cultural difference? generally where I live women care very little about men's looks. a big Maitreya style belly is considered rather cute.
but of course women are ready to give bad advice to other women
That's generally the case everywhere, so it's not surprising. (It's also true however that men's looks rise in priority if their provider ability loses priority due to rising female economic independence.) My point is that disparaging men's looks is largely considered socially acceptable but doing the same to women is not, except for extreme cases (like when an otherwise ugly woman is revealed to be a thought criminal or heretic, racist etc).
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I would disagree specifically with the characterization of #2. You can still speak of a "used car market" even if used cars come in all sorts of varieties. No two used cars are the same, and the same scratch on a car will be okay for one person and not okay for another. Doesn't mean used car buyers or sellers are any less immune from the inherent implications of scarcity.
Oh, yeah, of course. there are many traits that are universally disliked, like having debts.
but the market is very diverse, far from being a "commodity market"
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A lot of women would discuss some of these if put using different terms.
Also, it doesn't just produce a negative female reaction. It produces a negative reaction in a lot of humans because you are signalling a lot of things by discussing these:
You are probably also opening wounds and triggering insecurity about where they would stand in "SMV" or whatever. A lot of people find the Darwinian nature of early dating bad.
I think as humans a lot of us have an ideal of (unrealistic) somewhat unconditional care and of being loved for things we influence, for our deeds and words. Entire religions are founded on this. A big part of later-stage dating and relationships is about trust, kindness, reciprocity and related things.
The manosphere gets some regrettable aspects of dating and early relationship formation right but there is actual evidence that being a decent person is pretty important for actually having quality long-term relationships. If you are signalling early that you instrumentalise and commoditise people that is a pretty negative signal and will rightfully put people off. Not everyone would be of course, package this stuff in the right language and I'm sure you could discuss it with some women.
I honestly get put off when people enthusiastically talk about having a zero-sum mindset about these things even if I think they have a point. It's just a signal that this person is probably not very kind. And why would you want to talk about this enthusiastically and with a partner? It's honestly inherently quite an awkward topic.
Good points. How exactly is one to discuss the dating market in the abstract without "commoditising", "instrumentalising", or "dehumanising" anyone?
Well with my most recent partner, once we got to know each other pretty well, we naturally talked about our personal history with the local dating scene and how that informed our perspectives on dating. We discussed the various causal factors that might've led each of us to have such very different experiences despite nominally participating in the exact same arena. I mean, it's really fascinating stuff, is it not? Wouldn't you want to know about your partner's past lived experiences and what sort of future lived experiences they are expecting themselves to have? And yes, she was somewhere on the spectrum too.
But maybe I should've made this clearer -- I'm talking about talking about this with platonic friends, not women I'm trying to actively hit on. Platonic male friends, at least the bunch I have, have no problem whatsoever talking about what they've needed to do to get to where they are as an attractive mate, or about female fertility and how that informs their family planning and mate selection strategies. Not in those specific terms, but definitely about those specific topics.
I found a lot of my really meta dating-app conversations tended to be of the sort where I'd get halfway through a first date, realize I had no real interest in ever seeing the woman ever again and then just start asking questions. Also a few cases where the woman was a massive oversharer of their dating-app escapades which killed anything I had for them, but I was happy to talk about the game as a player at the time.
On that note, I'd say look maximizing generally pretty overrated for women so long as they're not obese. Even fours could get pretty solid dates so long as they could see their feet, and most of the chatter I got was more of the 'Girl dithering/trying to reach for the absolute hottest guy instead of dating just a notch or two up and probably finding a solid consistent boyfriend'. Hell, in my year or so of concerted dating app effort I went from a 35 BMI to like a 22, dressed/presented better and got better at dating as a whole which meant I feel like I saw life as a male 2/10 all the way to a 7/10 which was pretty illuminating.
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I think you have to either be talking to a pretty high decoupler or approach this stuff in a sensitive and safe way. One reliable, evidence-backed thing is that women score about 0.5 SD or similar higher on neuroticism (OCEAN trait) than men - meaning the average woman has a bit of a more sensitive trigger for threats. Someone talking about this stuff can both trigger insecurities (bad for higher neuroticism) and also, as mentioned, make you look like someone who generally has a bit of zero-sum mindset.
Also female dating is and has never been grounded in cultivation of resources and positive traits. I find a lot of women get this wrong and are surprised in a kind of female nice-guy-ism, like I read about a female doctor that expected to be a hot commodity but was then surprised most men cared about looks, agreeableness, etc. over her career and that all her hard work didn't make her good prospect. So it might be hard for women to empathise with what this means to be a man (a common trope for men is that non-parental love is always conditional). As a man this stuff sounds like acknowledgment of a tough (shared) reality, as a woman you might sound like someone who sees things as being an eternal competition and who can't care/love unconditionally which looks bad even for a platonic friend.
She’s not entirely wrong.
If she has a good career, savings and possessions while not being exceedingly ugly, unpleasant or old, all this makes her a good marriage prospect within her upper-middle-class social circle (we can assume), because her male peers do prioritize such attributes within the context of modern assortative mating.
But I stress: these attributes make her an attractive wife – not a great girlfriend, situationship partner, fling or sex partner, but wife.
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In my experience the most professionally qualified females either had overbearing bossbitch energy which is kinda self-explanatory, or the other side of the spectrum where I ran into a bunch of women who'd just never really dated until mid-late twenties at all due to focusing on their professional/academic pathway. And you've never seen a slower-moving, awkwarder scrum than dating apps with a woman who treats it as a HR exercise and is disposed to bolt back into the KDrama bunker at the slightest vibe anything is even slightly off. Also generally incapable of giving the right signals to guys due to their lack of experience so their 'flirty withdrawal' attempts just read as 'fuck off and die'.
I'm not even saying this purely out of experience of dating these woman. My now-wife's friends and siblings trend alarmingly in that direction, and I've seen this common social thread from multiple angles now consequentially.
It looks to me like both men and women would benefit from more opportunities to spend time together when they are still in their teens. Maybe the Japanese have the right idea with their all-but-mandatory leniently supervised after-school clubs.
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After a certain age you also get adverse selection (on both sexes). Can concur with the bossbitch thing. Some women try hard to cultivate disagreeability which while maybe adaptive in their careers make her a pretty bad partner (especially if paired with being neurotic, which women are on average more than men). For men this kind of works (though only to a point, I'm not fully aligned with the manosphere people here) but for women it's generally quite off-putting.
Also as a higher earner myself I always felt like having a high earning partner raises expectations rather than providing any security. Some people would call me insecure for thinking this but I've not yet met a woman who contradicts this idea (I'm sure they are out there but most women want to be provided for).
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Women don't like autists (arguably for good reason), but it's good to have an intelligent mate (higher income, higher chances of all sorts of success), but intelligence and autism often go together. What do? Set up a selection process where the rules are somewhat complex, and opaque. Anyone who can figure them out is probably intelligent. Anyone who wants to talk about them is probably an autist. BOOM!
Intelligence and autism are probably anticorrelated.
There is a reason why I use "spergery" and "sperg" rather than "autism" to talk about the social dysfunction which is common (but not universal) in high-functioning autism and the people who display it. "Autism" or "ASD" with the modern diagnostic criteria covers a very broad spectrum from "not actually disabling at all" to "about as functional as a pet rock", and moderate-to-severe autism can be disabling in different ways. "Having an ASD diagnosis" is definitely anticorrelated with IQ, because the most severe cases are more likely to be diagnosed.
My personal view is that there are two different aetiologies of autism, which I call "familial autism" and "fucked-head autism" - the second of which is caused by some kind of brain damage and typically comes along with multiple other disabilities and a very low IQ. This would make autism anticorrelated with intelligence because fucked-head autism exists. I don't know what sign the correlation between familial autism and IQ is, although anecdotally it is positive.
There is definitely a positive correlation between visible spergery and visible intelligence. My darkly cynical view on this is that neurotypical people recognise that the socially correct thing for smart people in normal social environments (and especially mainstream schools) is to act dumber than they are so they fit in with the top quarter of the local IQ distribution. So only spergs show a visible high IQ. There is also a selection effect, where 90 IQ moderately autistic people can't manage their own condition and end up removed from the public realm due to e.g. frequent meltdowns.
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Because these are only topics a high-decoupler woman would bother discussing (in a way that isn't just naked self-interest), and those are rare.
There's not much more going on than that.
But what is there to couple together in the first place?
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Well, the stock manosphere answer is that women want you to be naturally attractive and are a bit put off by an unattractive man who's just managed to sneakily become attractive. A man who has worked tirelessly to perfect his sport, his craft, his dating game, is less attractive from the one who was just as good without having to try.
Beyond that it simply is socially gauche, so apart from the above it's also signaling that you're uncouth.
The signaling game aspect makes a lot of sense, but it's not like women don't signal heavily too. Is it not also in their best interests to understand dating market dynamics and thereby snag a high-quality man, instead of constantly complaining about how shitty dating is nowadays?
And is this topic really too gauche to even broach with platonic female friends?
Depends. It's more fun to let their limbic system take control and just enjoy the ride.
A lot of women are dating for entertainment and aren't necessarily trying to figure out how to land a good husband.
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