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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23979 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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There has been some new study recently showing that female promiscuity, just like male promiscuity, is limited to a small subset of the total population. Before I deleted X, I saw several posts asking why non-promiscuous men are still chasing the "hoes" (and are complaining about them) instead of concentrating on the majority of women that aren't. I want to propose a hypothesis.

But first, a digression. Imagine a happily married gay couple, Fred and Steve. It's Saturday afternoon, their adopted kids won't be back home for a couple more hours, all the chores are done, and Fred's looking bored and restless. Steve suggests a quickie to pass the time. Is Fred down for it? I would bet my money on yes.

Now replace Fred with Frida. Suddenly, the odds are completely different. I am not saying that all women are not into random acts of intercourse, but the proportion of them that are dtf is low enough that reversing the bet makes total financial sense.

What does this have to do with promiscuity? My hypothesis is that it's significantly correlated with overall sex drive in women. (Feel free to nominate me for the Ig Nobel prize.) There are some non-promiscuous, but libidinous women, except they don't stay on the dating market long, just like reasonably prices houses in good locations are almost never seen on Zillow. The visible parts of the dating market are promiscuous women and women with low sex drive. In the past the concepts of "putting out", "marital duty" obscured this dynamic, but modern women have been brought up knowing they don't owe anyone sex and don't have to hide their (dis)interest. And given that single lives are now easier than ever, why bother with trying to date such women at all? Better to concentrate on the visibly promiscuous women or on the age cohorts that are just entering the dating market, both of them have a higher share of women with a high enough sex drive.

non-promiscuous men are still chasing the "hoes" (and are complaining about them) instead of concentrating on the majority of women that aren't

I've checked out this extensive discussion and maybe I've missed a couple of arguments but I don't see anyone questioning this premise, even though I think it's highly suspect. It seems to be a usual case of female delusion drive by a combination of projection and the apex fallacy.

The most obvious parallel to Chastity is Violence, both in the sense that these are the two highest stakes human activities that can be done for fun or profit, and in the sense that engaging in them or not is both a huge sign of your character and totally ambiguous absent context.

A man who tells you he never gets in fights is telling you something about himself, but it's not clear what he's telling you. A man who tells you he does get into fights is telling you something about himself, but it's not clear what he's telling you.

A man who never gets into fights might be telling you that he's a peaceful man who values non-violence, that he stoically accepts and avoids situations where he would have to engage in violence, because he considers it a sin. Or he might be telling you that he is a weakling, a coward, a frightened pipsqueak who flees rather that confront an insult, that he has no sense of honor or right and wrong. Or he might be so manifestly large and intimidating that no one starts a fight with him because, seriously, look at the guy, he has no need to get into fights because his mere commanding presence intimidates wrongdoers.

A man who gets into fights might have heroic characteristics, he might have a highly developed sense of honor and right and wrong, he might be strong and brave enough to fight for those values. He might seek out "good trouble" rather than flee. Or he might be a violent psychopath who starts fights for no reason, constantly, who goes off the rails at the slightest imagined provocation. He might appear so small and weak that he is constantly being picked on and forced into fights. He might be a bitch who is constantly starting shit and saying insulting things to people to the point that they punch him.

Similarly, a chaste woman and a promiscuous woman are telling you things about their character, but it's not clear what.

A chaste woman might be a normal sexual woman with a highly developed sense of religious values and a strong will. Or she might have something medically wrong with her, have no sex drive. In the context of a religious community, she might very well be gay.

Similarly, a promiscuous woman might have a high sex drive. Or she might be of average or below average libido, but intensely submissive to her partners' desires.

Throw in that, lacking community and reputation to work off of, in an atomized urban community people only have the one decision to work off of: does he/she want to sleep with me? And that adds the possibility: if she doesn't sleep with me, it's because she isn't that attracted to me. If she does sleep with me, it might mean she's the town bicycle, or it might mean that she's super attracted to me. These are probably the worst/best outcomes possible, the worst thing that can happen to you is marrying a horny woman who doesn't like you, and the best thing that can happen to you is marrying a normal woman who thinks you're so hot she turns into a porn star with you. So it makes sense that men overweight them in the sample.

Context is key. We can draw a lot of this from social reputation in a community, we know the circumstances around what happened a little better, whether it's a fight or a fuck. But we don't really have that anymore.

Before I deleted X, I saw several posts asking why non-promiscuous men are still chasing the "hoes" (and are complaining about them) instead of concentrating on the majority of women that aren't.

At the risk of sharing the Ig Nobel with you, it seems to me that men might be generally more interested in sex outside established relationships, or earlier in a relationship.

From an evo-psych perspective, this is certainly what we should expect. A female mammal invests quite some resources in her offspring, so genes which promote being picky about partners and mating only with the ones which seem to thrive most in their environment is an optimal strategy. For male mammals, the situation is different, because their investment in the process is comparatively tiny. (Obviously this varies widely between species, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, etc). One complication with humans is that it is non-obvious if a woman is currently fertile or not. In response, genes thrived in humanity which make men horny all the time, circumstances permitting.

For the genes in a woman, mate selection is akin to the secretary problem. Better to wait a few months than spending years raising a child with subpar genes. (Where subpar could mean 'bad at a silly Kensian beauty contest, like a peacock without any tail feathers'). From the perspective of the same genome in a man, it is still akin to the secretary problem, but on a very different time scale, here the genes would optimize for 'what is the best investment for a day's worth of testes production?'

Obviously this gets complicated by gene-culture interactions, a gene which will cause its carrier getting stoned for adultery or ingroup rape will not thrive too much, for example.

As a man who is by inclination (if not by opportunity) a slut, I imagine that male promiscuity is one or two standard deviations higher than female promiscuity. For example, I imagine that it would be very easy for me to arrange a hookup with someone with a similar hotness score as myself -- if I was willing to hook up with a guy, which is sadly not one of my kinks.

There are probably a few men around who are non-promiscuous to the point where "join a church, court a single woman from the congregation, marry her, have missionary PIV sex, figure out if it is good sex or you have any (non-sinful) kinks in common, have a few kids" is compatible with their sex drive, but most will probably be off better competing for women more interested in sex, at least in the short-to-medium term.

I think in your scenario you're conflating promiscuity (willingness to engage in sex with multiple partners, even multiple partners who are strangers or are relative strangers) and being DTF one's significant other. In my experience (sudden screech of mic feedback) once in a committed relationship, women are DTF almost as much as men, if not moreso (in marriage I'd say moreso, though YMMV, and it's true I married well past my excruciatingly lustful late teens and twenties.)

Now times may have a' changed, it's true, I guess, at least one reads that no one's having sex anymore. They say that about Japan as well but I am convinced that's just bad data.

Re. Japan, I think it's an herbivore male problem**. Japanese women don't have nearly the negative attitude western women do, outside of a few female Westaboos who are on Twitter too much. The majority of the current crop of guys are too passive about their work, life plan, physical fitness, friend group, dating life. Women want a guy with a plan, or at least some charisma. I work with a bunch of Japanese guys in their mid 30s and they are either married and mildly depressed or unmarried and obsessed with video games. There are a few exceptions; a couple guys dress sharp, play casual sports, and (I'm guessing) probably have an active love life. But most seem either to be "lying flat" or to be trapped in a marriage with a woman who has fully metamorphosed into a ママ instead of a wife.

** Runner up: Extremely strong pressure from and modeling of the "sexless mother" archetype by peers and older women. "We have kids, we can't do that anymore. Grow up."

Japan's incentives for men kinda encourage a certain level of passivity, no? There's a plethora of affordable prostitution options so if you're especially horny you can satisfy a lot of those urges without having to really do much beyond earn a reasonable salary. Career progression is pretty rigid and the social contract is rather all-encompassing

Yes, but it used to be that passivity and deference was rewarded with social status, a good enough wage, and company perks. You could do this things and not feel like a loser, you were just playing the game. These days, nobody really believes that they'll get any of those benefits, but superiors still demand respect and passivity (after all, it their turn now, they earned the right!) and so the game feels very rigged. But what are you going to do, found a company? Good luck finding the capital, if you have your own money good luck trying to get licensed, follow regulations, and muscle your way in amongst the established business who have probably helped write the national or local regulations your new business will be subjected to. Better just to take the entry level salaryman job and live for the weekend.

The widespread availability of various forms of prostitution is quite interesting. A 2024 study says that 47% of Japanese men have used prostitutes (compared to 20% in the Netherlands) and of that number 64% were married. But I'm not sure whether that's a cause or a symptom of the passivity.

I mean I feel like Japan's interesting in that sense since like 150-200 years ago in the West and prostitution would be similarly a fact of life, but like most other developed societies have discarded the niche whilst they've retained it.

I guess, at least one reads that no one's having sex anymore.

My understanding is that this is driven by fewer people being coupled up, not by couples having less sex.

I'm not conflating them, I'm saying they are likely strongly correlated.

I didn't realize when responding how long the discussion was. Apparently no one else had my impression, in any case.

Most promiscuous men are promiscuous because they associate with promiscuous women, rather than because they are extremely handsome.

This is an obvious but little stated point. While straight male attractiveness is surely correlated with partner/‘body’ count, because very unattractive men are unlikely to have had many or any partners, the most promiscuous straight men are rarely the most handsome; they are often just the horniest and most desperate. Often they are the most regular purchasers of sex. So the fat, aging long haul trucker might have a body count that puts many an NBA star or Hollywood leading man to shame. Ask him if all women are whores and, well, ninety percent of those he encounters might well be. The promiscuous male is not often particularly or necessarily reliable when it comes to ‘knowing’ women.

Much of the incel ecosystem involves activities that specifically overexpose incels to the small minority of the most promiscuous women. “Chadfishing” for example, where they post pictures of beautiful male models and then send vulgar or rude messages to the women who match with them (or just include them in their profile and see who they match with). Or the consumption of media by hustle bros and ‘looksmaxxers’ like Clav, who hang around OnlyFans prostitutes and Miami club rats. Even the original pick up artists did this: techniques like ‘street game’ hitting on a hundred women in public and then trying to hook up with the single one who seems receptive and gives them their number are tailor made to filter for 99th percentile promiscuity women.

The obvious reason why you might not want to take a pimp’s opinion “about women” is that he is exposed primarily to the behavior of only one very specific kind of woman.

techniques like ‘street game’ hitting on a hundred women in public and then trying to hook up with the single one who seems receptive and gives them their number are tailor made to filter for 99th percentile promiscuity women.

It does not even has to be that, you can filter for women who are currently in manic phase of their BPD or who want to get revenge on their boyfriend who literally dumped them an hour ago etc. This is also strategy of various sneaky fuckers who embed themselves in women's organizations - they are there exactly to use any opportunity they can get. It is just game of numbers.

Add on that these guys get the most practice at identifying the women who are vulnerable to this approach and thus the most skill at correctly timing and exploiting the opening.

They become adept at hunting a particularized type of prey, and as long as that prey is around in sufficient numbers, will find regular success, even if they'd strike out with 90% of other women 99% of the time.

True and the marketification of this kinda stuff has second-order effects where somebody who really really optimizes their approach to lovebombing or whatever can potentially really wreck the marketplace for everybody else. Girl A comes to expect unsustainable levels of game from somebody who's really really perfected their 3 date cycle and has zero intention beyond that, then gets released back into the market and stuff gets fucky.

Yep.

I optimized for a world where you generally had pre-selection of the people you dated because you knew them via your own social circles already.

Then I adjusted for the world where, okay, you don't know them, but you can at least consciously target your efforts towards people you expect you'd get along with and ignore the rest.

But the current world there's no way to optimize when all the information/feedback you'd need to actually adjust your approach is locked in the black box of the app, and you absolutely CANNOT trust women to accurately explain what appeals to them.

In my experience, the majority of guys that really ran up a bodycount weren't picky about the girls they slept with. It wouldn't surprise me if some had a sex addiction or self esteem issue.

I remember one guy who kept telling stories about how a girl he'd bag had big breasts and then a mutual friend would send a photo and you would see that the 'girl' was 40 years old and had 'big everything'. I never understood the appeal of going for unattractive women just to get sex. Mind-boggling.

'Fishing' stories of mass exaggeration were rife in the PUA community. You pretty much learnt only to believe people if you'd personally seen them walk out of a club with an 8+ on their arm.

Edit: Here's a professional athlete that went for some low hanging fruit. When the girl realised he was going for a 'slump-buster' and she'd never be able to wrangle him into a relationship, she went public in a pearl-clutching fake affront. The athlete (while not the best looking) could probably do much better, but is happy to settle for something average. He wouldn't be approaching girls like that on Tinder unless he had success doing so and was comfortable with the quality.

I feel like low-hanging fruit is a bit strong there. Is she Helen of Troy, no, but unless America's been totally upended by Ozempic to a degree that hasn't hit the rest of the world just being not fat or actively ugly gets you to a 4 in a lot of markets as a woman.

just being not fat or actively ugly gets you to a 4 in a lot of markets as a woman.

Roughly two thirds of women 18-35 are overweight. Just being not fat gets you to at least a five, probably a six. A non-fat, non-ugly girl in that age range is in the top 25% of available women.

Overweight and fat are different. IMO plenty of girls can be over a 25 BMI and not look fat. Obviously there's a cliff from there but yeah if you're non-fat, not actively facially ugly and in the beholder's preferred spot on the cleanskin -> body modification spectrum you're doing perfectly fine in mid twenties Australia and America.

I left plenty of space in that napkin math to account. I stand by my wild-ass-guess.

I feel like we're spiritually aligned. Just being not-fat, not-deformed and somewhat feminine presenting gets you to middle these days.

I'm reminded of a semi-viral twitter thread a week or two ago with a photo of a womens' MBA class or something about 'good luck finding husbands' and a pitched battle in the comments between 'they look kinda plain so they're 3's' and 'they have jobs, reasonable-range BMIs and they're not actively ugly they're 6+' in the comments

How the mighty have fallen.

I was actually regretting equivocating men (even high value men) getting fast food with sex addicts who think that any hole is a goal, but there should be some standards for the women we choose in our lives. Shouldn't there?

It's a marketplace. You can do a one-person strike from the sexual marketplace to protest the rise of tattoos and the expansion of waistlines but unless you have an Ozempic dartgun what can you do about it?

I mean sure but also anybody who's been on a dating app knows what the lowend looks like these days and it's a big girl or trans or really really alternate looks. That girl is okay

I guess this was quite awhile ago when a circle of friends were geneticists and a physicians assistant cohort. The with out a doubt best looking guy - only seen him with 6' D1 volley ball players - body count was 4. The - slightly pudgy normal looking guy - was at 28; also the guy who'd slept with a drunk much younger subordinate and would make low key passes at people's wives.

Are women actually less horny than men on average? I think I have about an average sex drive for a man, and while it's hard to remember clearly, I feel that at least half of the women I've fucked had a higher sex drive than me. They might have been more selective than the average man when it comes to deciding whom to fuck, but once they selected me (or any other man who passed the selection, I'm sure), they wanted to fuck a lot.

Of course, it's possible that my behavior and/or looks has been selecting for unusually horny women. Hard to say.

As for the gay couple example: I'm not actually sure that works as differently from straight couples as you might think. Sure, men like (or think they like) random acts of intercourse. But men also like sexual variety, indeed it's possible that most men are hard-wired to desire sexual variety whether they want to fuck women or they want to fuck men. What if Stevie suggests the quickie and, despite their marriage being happy in all other aspects, Fred thinks "Not again... I'm tired of fucking this guy"? Besides the issue of sexual variety, it's also likely that one of either Fred or Steve just naturally has a higher sex drive than the other, even though they are both men.

My experience is that most girls have a very horny section of the dating cycle, that often exceeds the male at that particular time. This in no way means women are hornier than men on average and over time.

Most people call it the "honeymoon period" or whatever. For me, it generally started about a month into the relationship and lasted six to nine months. If you stay together, this usually dies down pretty quickly and pretty drastically. Or you can break up and start over, trying again and again to experience that new-relationship feeling.

If you've had multiple 2+ year relationships in which the women were still hornier than you at the end, I'd guess you have a lower-than-average male sex drive, or you have the special Sex Panther pheromones.

Commonly the most dangerous kind of sex that women perform is prostitution. The most dangerous kind of sex that men perform is cruising for gay sex in societies that are hostile to homosexuality. I'd say they're broadly comparable in risk of arrest, assault and health consequences. The major difference is the gay men do it for free.

What confuses me when this question comes up and people start umming and aaahing about whether women can be as horny as men, and qualifying it with contingencies ("but if she's a free range, fresh air and sunshine teenager, in a steady stable relationship with a man she wants children with, and he's a bereaved old man who has been eating polystyrene and wearing frozen Speedos 24/7..."), what confuses me is the underlying assumption that being horny is something enviable that women are disadvantaged by not being the equal of men. Being horny isn't a positive experience. At best it's distracting, at the worst it's disturbing, and often leads to behaviour which can have unwanted consequences.

The most dangerous kind of sex that men perform is cruising for gay sex in societies that are hostile to homosexuality

I feel like gay prostitution in those societies is a little bit higher risk but also broadly agree. Ye olde trans murder rate being massively skewed towards streetwalkers and whatnot.

underlying assumption that being horny is something enviable that women are disadvantaged by not being the equal of men.

I don't think that's the underlying assumption, except maybe in a subconscious way that's close to unfalsifiable. The underlying assumption is that men and women's minds are precisely identical in every way that matters. Therefore, any observation that women are less/more X than men is necessarily the consequence of patriarchy, whether due to bias of observers or unfalsifiable "internalized misogyny" of women or anything else. And but for that patriarchy, if freed from their shackles, women and men would have precisely the same level of X.

prostitution [without qualifier]

vs.

gay sex in societies that are hostile to homosexuality

You probably should also clarify "prostitution in societies that are hostile to prostitution".

Women report significant and markedly lower sex drives and also far more variance in sex drive than men over their lifetimes. This is pretty robust. Also women's sex drives are more reactive than men's.

I think it's more accurate to simply say that the female sex drive is reactive and the male sex drive is not.

Yes, look at the market for sex, both illicit and legal. Where are all the women paying for sex with men? Where are all the women paying for porn, escorts, or spending six figures on only fans? Where are the men demanding that women stop using porn? Consider that sex drive is linked primarily to testosterone in both genders. Consider the AIDs epidemic in SF - gay men had sex with each other in “bath houses” (in the dark) with men whose names they didn’t know whom they just met … That is not the failure mode of lesbians. Consider the treatment of men and women during wartime pillaging. There is no possibility that women have an equivalent sex drive to men because the market for sex has been supply limited for millennia.

I think I have about an average sex drive for a man

Why do you think that? What evidence do you base it on? As a prior, "I'm average" is pretty decent... But if given counterevidence you might want to adjust that prior. Based on the posted study. The difference men and women is about half a standard deviation... All you have to be at above the 40th percentile to be about on-par with the average women, and that's nowhere near alibidinous or otherwise defective.

They might have been more selective than the average man when it comes to deciding whom to fuck, but once they selected me (or any other man who passed the selection, I'm sure), they wanted to fuck a lot.

I think this is exactly what people mean when they say "the average man has a higher sex drive than the average woman": that, owing to their higher sex drive, men tend to be far less discriminating in their choice of sexual partners.

Consider which demographic makes up the lion's share of prostitution customers vs. which makes up the lion's share of prostitutes (likewise strip clubs, porn consumption etc.) More darkly, consider which demographic commits most rape and sexual assault vs. which demographic is disproportionately likely to be a victim of rape or sexual assault.

Consider how many sexual partners the average gay man reports having in his lifetime vs. the average lesbian or heterosexual woman. While gay men are unrepresentative of the modal male experience on many axes, I think it's fair to say that gay male sexuality is what unconstrained male sexuality looks like (that is, male sexuality operating without the constraint of female selectiveness and libido).

I also think survey data (e.g. "how many times have you masturbated in the last month?" "how often do you look at pornography/erotica?" "have you ever visited a prostitute?" and so on) would probably make the disparity readily apparent.

Almost nothing about human culture is compatible with the claim that women are exactly as horny as men.

I agree with you, although I do think the male sex drive is qualitatively different along with being stronger. In addition to the spontaneous vs responsive desire aspect, men’s sex preferences tend to be more rigid, novelty-seeking visual, goal oriented (no need to state what goal is), and isolated to specific body parts or acts with no need of a broader context (fetishes being the extreme end of this, and almost entirely found in men as far as I know). The high sex drive isn’t the only thing leading to being less choosy, otherwise gay men would just pick using a dildo instead of Grindr, and they wouldn’t be into open relationships to the same extent.

A man with low libido would still have all those traits, but the desire would be triggered less often and with less overwhelming intensity, from what I understand.

I agree with all of the above.

Maybe you are one of the unusually promiscuous men?

I am, but I think that most women I've been with have been less promiscuous than me, or about equally promiscuous, so I'm not sure that my impression of female horniness has necessarily been formed by experiences with unusually promiscuous women.

That said, I guess that "less promiscuous than me" might possibly still be more promiscuous than the average woman. I've certainly spent a large fraction of my sexual energy among the kind of people who did not settle down in a long-term relationship at a young age.

Now that I think of it, it's also kind of hard to compare male and female promiscuity anyway. A man and a woman might have the same level of raw desire to fuck, yet fuck different quantities of other people due to other factors... it's easier for the average woman to find a willing sex partner quickly than it is for a man, but on the other hand, casual sexual adventuring is also physically more dangerous for her than it is for a man. Etc.

Are women actually less horny than men on average? I think I have about an average sex drive for a man, and while it's hard to remember clearly, I feel that at least half of the women I've fucked had a higher sex drive than me. They might have been more selective than the average man when it comes to deciding whom to fuck, but once they selected me (or any other man who passed the selection, I'm sure), they wanted to fuck a lot.

I think a certain amount of it is decline over time in a longterm relationship, especially once kids are introduced. And like it's not unreasonable on a woman's part to want to scale down on the sex drive after the physical toll of pregnancy and the ongoing energy usage that having kids represents.

Cluster B, and really colloquially "crazy" women in general, IME and from what I've read anecdotally, seem to have a significantly higher sex drive than normal woman (statistically). Many men are drawn in to stay, despite the issues, partially because the sex is plentiful and often of higher quality/excitement. "Crazy" women tend to also be more promiscuous. I suspect the "crazy" angle is another reason a lot of men go for the "hoes".

Part of it also that having sex with a guy early is a high variance play; you may get a guy who disregards you as a 'slut', but you may also get a guy who appreciates it and stays focused on you. Having sex with a woman early certainly gives an ego boost both that the man is attractive both to her and in general.

before I deleted X

Finally, I can feel like I had a positive impact on the world.

I won't deny that your comment was one of the things that made me do it. Browsing X was like eating raw cookie dough straight out of the tube.

I thought you were supposed to be talking me in to getting off of X...

Browsing X was like eating raw cookie dough straight out of the tube.

If they had raw cookie dough, tell me where I can sign up immediately.

The visible parts of the dating market are promiscuous women and women with low sex drive. In the past the concepts of "putting out", "marital duty" obscured this dynamic, but modern women have been brought up knowing they don't owe anyone sex and don't have to hide their (dis)interest.

Generalize that further.

The people who are visible on the dating market are often 'broken' in some way that makes their ability to maintain long-term relationships much more stunted (especially under modern conditions).

The ones who are capable of stable pair-bonding and are generally normal in terms of attractiveness, life-put-togetherness, from happy families, are by sheer definition, the ones most likely to get locked in to a stable relationship early and not leave. The pool, at any given time, is mostly inhabited by the broken and you have to get lucky to chance onto a viable partner in their brief period of availability.

It creates a double-sided Market for Lemons as people learn to expect the worst from each given encounter and thus are ever less willing to extend commitment or effort to the next person.

So don't limit it just to promiscuity and libido, include emotional stability and familial instincts and generally being 'sane' enough to envision a committed relationship with that person. If the person is aware that they're broken, they even have an incentive to hide that from potential matches, so there's already a layer of suspicion going in.

In terms of promiscuous women, I think that they get the focus because sexual availability is one of the few things that's relatively easy to sus out in short order, and if you've decided you're unlikely to find a life partner anytime soon, getting sex in the meantime is a consolation prize of sorts. Or a self-esteem booster.

This is an issue that the dating apps not only haven't solved, they've exacerbated.

They give you less up front information than you'd need to make a solid judgment, they disallow searching out specific characteristics and they show you people at seemingly random that you know almost nothing about other than they, too, have been unable to secure commitment.

It enrages me. I know with precision the qualities I'm looking for. I know what qualities I want to avoid. I'm acutely aware how rare these positive qualities are, DOUBLY so among those who are still single. So I want to be given tools to zero in on these people more directly, and not absorb the waste of time and additional risk of figuring out if this person who deigned to match with me is sane or not, whilst operating on the assumption they are not. When the person I'm searching for is so unique, the search tools need to be powerful. And search is, on the technology side, a solved problem, I should be able to pluck my potential partners out of the ether with ease.

But this is simply not a thing you are allowed to do in the current era.

Are you willing to expend resources? Matchmaker services still exist but are somewhat expensive. They seem to cater to careerists who missed their early window to find a mate, which may be what you're looking for.

I simply do not believe that most matchmakers are actually good at their jobs (especially given the larger culture they're working in) to give them money I could spend on either improving my status or actually taking out a woman I was interested in.

I stop short of calling them scams (they surely DO provide matches) but they're not solving the issue of women believing they have infinite optionality, which is simply a symptom of having access to dating apps at all.

I simply do not believe that most matchmakers are actually good at their jobs (especially given the larger culture they're working in) to give them money I could spend on either improving my status or actually taking out a woman I was interested in.

Yeah unless there's a significant cultural pressure around using matchmakers since you're from a subculture that mainlines them, I feel like the market for lemons thing will be doubly exacerbated by using a matchmaker. If a woman is serious and intentional enough to want a longterm partner and be sorting on the sort of factors that matchmakers push, they could also open up their hinge app apply like 5 filters and probably find a perfectly-good providertype within a week of concerted dating. I've seen enough of my wife's friends and siblings discarding perfectly-good candidates for random tiny blemishes or being somewhat-awkward to know that there is an infinite menu there if you just focus on being somewhat agreeable.

Meanwhile if you're Indian or whatever I feel like a combination of cultural pressures against casual dating and towards arranged marriage culture means you're far more likely to get somebody normal who is using a matchmaking service.

The fact is that almost every matchmaker I can find with a public-facing profile isn't trumpeting their success rate from the rooftops. And that is a strong signal. Or anti-signal.

If you were able to get even 50% of your clients married within a year of working with you, that would be FANTASTIC. I'd write a check for $10k on the spot.

There's no possible excuse for:

A) not tracking that stat

B) Not disclosing it (it certainly isn't hurting your clients' interests)

Strangely, they never respond when I point out this lack of transparency.

I'm sure there are successful matchmakers around, but there's also going to be a degree that the people who are easiest to match also have the least need of a matchmaker.

Yes, but take that argument to its logical conclusion, I'd say that the people who seek out matchmaker assistance are likely the most desperate and thus more susceptible to being manipulated.

Which is to say, they're a ripe target for scamming. So I suspect matchmakers are dependent on such folks for maintaining business.

The original way of doing this was to draw from your own peer group. At least that’s what we did back when I was growing up. Tech has likely permanently shifted the boundary away from the tried and true traditional paths, which is still probably the best route.

The original way of doing this was to draw from your own peer group.

This is now considered a form of shitting where you eat.

Several of my good friends have recently landed LTRs via friend-of-friends or, in one case, a former co-worker.

But it is indeed a risk that can blow up the larger friend group.

There's still the salient issue of actually catching one of these people when they're actually single, the window is still rather small.

And that guy who hangs around the friend group, pining after one of the other members, lying in wait for her current relationship to fail is kind of a wretched state of being.

I read a book about attachment styles which made the more specific argument that securely attached people tend to pair off with other securely attached people early on, resulting in a dating pool made up primarily of insecurely attached people. This results in the "anxious-avoidant trap", a relationship made up of one anxiously attached person and one avoidant person, which is mutually unfulfilling.

I think this is true to a degree, but also the nature of online dating (which is getting to be a bigger and bigger percentage of relationship formation) means that it's very hard to be securely attached when people have a lot more scope to just vanish completely at any moment for any reason and for you to not even have any real social recourse. I managed to get off the apps and now have wife/kids, but I still occasionally get Vietnam flashbacks of the search period and how the whole thing had an eternal vibe of herding cats in which even something that's ostensibly going well can just die instantaneously for factors largely beyond your control.

Like even if you've got incredible game the sheer numbers involved and a lot of people dating many people in parallel means there's just a bunch of scope for getting blindsided by plot developments completely out of your control. I'm reminded of a first date I had once that I thought went incredibly, then the girl essentially broke it off saying that this was their last rodeo before they finally went monogamous with a guy they'd been seeing for 2-3 months and that situation is unnavigable without somebody getting blindsided.

the girl essentially broke it off saying that this was their last rodeo before they finally went monogamous with a guy they'd been seeing for 2-3 months and that situation is unnavigable without somebody getting blindsided.

Relatively recently I hit it off with a girl I met in person. Got her number, exchanged texts, had a good rapport going which included her sending 'good morning' messages. Which I personally thought was a little forward, but I could roll with it.

Just shy of three weeks into the conversation, on Valentines Day, she just drops, out of nowhere, that she has a boyfriend who was taking her out and had got her flowers, the whole shebang. Not a word of this breathed beforehand.

This is the sort of thing that would have spun me for a massive loop a few years ago. Now, as you say, its sort of unsurprising to find out that you were being held in the back pocket while some other player was being auditioned. Even so, this one felt very '0 to 100 in 5 seconds' in terms of reveals. I can't compete effectively if I don't have any idea what the competition even is.

People using others as instruments for their own emotional fulfillment whilst knowing there's no intent to proceed further is hands-down the worst behavior one encounters regularly out there these days.

As of about two weeks ago they broke up and she's giving off signs of spiraling.

Not too sure what to make of that.

Such is life.

Lots of chicks be out there constantly interviewing applicants on a rolling basis for a position that’s already filled, under the guise of plausible deniability, for the attention and in case they eventually feel like monkeybranching.

Thank you, @faceh, for the time and effort you have put into the candidacy process. While your skills and qualifications are impressive, her feelings have changed and she will no longer be moving forward with your candidacy at this time. Please feel free to keep in touch and reapply in the future. Best wishes in your search and thank you again for your interest in her.

I would not be captain save a ho in that situation, but yeah the whole invisible parallel dating structure where somebody can have 10 dates a week without any of it really getting back to their own social circle sets up a ton of weird incentives. A lot of behavior from both men and women only really makes sense if you assume there's no particularly effective way of developing a reputation and that there's an infinite flow of future prospects.

The lack of ANY kind of reputation system built into the apps... and the ad hoc attempts to create one anyway (remember the Tea app?) gives away problem, yeah.

The app companies don't want to spend money to build up the whole system that would be required to litigate whether someone who didn't show up for a date had a valid excuse or whether this guy was stringing multiple women along with no intent to commit.

And they probably correctly presume that such a system would, itself, get gamed by certain parties to gain advantages in the app. But they do not admit that people are already gaming the hell out of the existing structure of the apps to everyone's detriment.

The app companies don't want to spend money to build up the whole system that would be required to litigate whether someone who didn't show up for a date had a valid excuse or whether this guy was stringing multiple women along with no intent to commit.

Also both can be true in a given interaction/I've been third-person spectator to enough cases of 'person behaves outlandishly but thinks they're the aggrieved party' from both genders that I can see how it's an absolutely untenable thing to police at scale.

And therein lies the rub.

We used to have semi-distributed reputation/surveillance networks that could monitor behavior and punish egregious instances of it. It was clearly less than perfect, yet whisper networks and informal ostracizing miscreants was able to police both genders' behavior without needing a central arbiter to make these determinations.

Phones took a lot of these things out of the public eye and then dating apps made it much simpler to pick up people outside your social network thus not subject to the reprisals for bad behavior.

then the girl essentially broke it off saying that this was their last rodeo before they finally went monogamous with a guy they'd been seeing for 2-3 months

Did she really call herself a 'they'? Sounds like you dodged a bullet.

Oh no that wasn't the case I just use gender-neutral singular a lot

Yep.

I've become ACUTELY prescient at noticing when someone is anxious-avoidant or worse, just straight up dismissive. Me, I'm mildly anxious (have gotten a lot better) and very secure once basic trust is established. It takes a lot of effort to maintain that, since one scary thing is that secure-attachment people can be shifted over to avoidant and anxious if they have enough bad experiences with the other types.

So the secure types become a rarer and rarer type to find because they're either pairing off or getting ruined by having a handful of bad relationships that failed on them.

I'm semi-comfortable with the anxious types, I don't mind giving reassurances to them that the relationship is strong... but there's always going to be some incident that 'confirms' their fears and causes them to cut it off when they think that things are about to go south.

The ones where the avoidant person is trying to withdraw and the other party is trying to chase and secure their commitment is maybe the worst dynamic on a meta level, because it can remain stable for quite a while but its burning out both parties as it continues. I remember straight up telling one girl "look, its one thing to want men to chase you... but you have to be willing to be caught and its clear you are not."

And the pernicious one is the avoidant who is mostly aware they're avoidant, and keeps trying to establish relationships with people then withdrawing suddenly, closing off all contact as if the connection never existed, and move on relatively quickly. That one hurts.

This is apparently a pattern with some women. Fire up a dating app, stick around long enough to find a nice enough dude, delete the app, date for a bit, freak out and break it off, stay single and get lonely after a bit, then repeat.

And the pernicious one is the avoidant who is mostly aware they're avoidant, and keeps trying to establish relationships with people then withdrawing suddenly, closing off all contact as if the connection never existed, and move on relatively quickly.

You rang?

Thank Christ I broke out of that cycle.

How?

I've done the 'anxious with an avoidant' bit from the avoidant side. Wasn't fun at all. Any advice much appreciated.

The best I can say is "persistence". Sticking with a relationship I know makes me happy even when my gut is telling me to cut and run. Per High Fidelity, it's about learning to recognise when your guts have shit for brains.

I don’t know. Never went wrong trusting my gut but I’ve went wrong several times ignoring it. Maybe my intuition was always calibrated just right. I’ve known people who were equally persistent and all miserable just the same.

It sucks because you rarely ever learn any useful lessons out of it either, because there's no reason for things ending other than "brain said to run so I ran."

You don't learn to be a better partner, you just get left wondering if you were inadequate.

What helped me a lot was keeping tabs on these women for long enough that I could see that it wasn't me, they did this to every guy. I actually had an interesting realization that of all the women I dated seriously... only one of them has managed to get into a stable relationship, so realistically I probably couldn't have made any of those situations work on my own efforts.

But also means I've been pretty bad at selecting good partners.

And finally, the thing I really hate is when I meet a girl whose personality is a really close match to my ideal and is physically attractive, but I immediately clock her as anxious or avoidant and I ultimately learn that she had a bad experience with a controlling, abusive, or promiscuous/sociopathic dude who has basically ruined her pair-bonding capability. And I agonize over the "what ifs" I had met her earlier before the damage was done.

This is a problem writ large with how many of them think, that I’ve noticed. They find it easy to attach with men who are “low stakes” to them, because it doesn’t matter if they end up leaving or not. They’ve got no sustained investment in them; they’re a utility or a prop. Guys they have a serious interest in they’re more cold or distant with because they risk a “misstep” of screwing things up; or some other idiotic reason.

Guys see this behavior and say to themselves, “Shit, I wish I was treated like I didn’t matter.” Because women are treating men they don’t like or care for better than the men they do. This is why they’ve got everything backwards. If you like a man and want to lock him down, do literally the exact opposite of everything you have been doing. Roll out the red carpet for him, make his life easy and eschew the attention you receive from other men; keep them a mile away at all times. It’s really as simple as that. I love nothing more than an otherwise boring woman who makes my life easy. That’s the best woman of all time. But they make it harder than it has to be for themselves. And this is the origin story of how good men go bad over time. Men see the narrative unfold with their eyes and see men with bad behavior getting what they want, while upstanding men are punished for it. And so as time goes on, the pool of good men shrinks even further and as women age they wonder where all the decent ones go. That’s what happened to them. They didn’t “go” anywhere. They no longer exist.

Something whenever I hear it that immediately scratches one off for serious consideration thorough is when someone says “I’m not happy…” That is a phrase that is so wildly overused in relationships today that it’s all but lost any serious meaning it may once have had. Concepts like “duty” and “responsibility” are foreign to these people. Nobody in any circumstance of life is guaranteed to be happy 100% of the time. Yes, happiness is enormously important and should be intrinsic to the relationship, but someone who adopts the unhealthy viewpoint of it like they’re always chasing the next high is an emotional junkie who’s more akin to a drug addict that should be in rehab, rather than in a serious relationship. I can’t stand those people.

do literally the exact opposite of everything you have been doing. Roll out the red carpet for him, make his life easy and eschew the attention you receive from other men;

That's the big one.

Most guys are aware that a woman will have a dozen other prospects in their phone at any given time. You CAN'T get attached to that person, b/c her cost of swapping you out for another is minimal. You become aloof because that's what the game theory says you have to do. She can defect at any time, and she can't be punished for doing so, don't be the chump who cooperates too early.

Costly shows of effort and interest that demonstrate she's not entertaining other men is how you'd actually know she's serious and not as likely to leave on a whim (alas, it takes 5 minutes for her to set up a dating profile, so you're never truly safe).

And no, that doesn't count just sleeping with him, since there's no direct cost to THAT anymore. Be pleasant, show appreciation, make him feel like he is important to you, and he's already yours.

What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.

What's interesting is I think women know (or ought to know) that this is a male desire/fantasy, you can find certain genres of softcore porn that emphasize the woman being pleasant and affectionate and doting and caring for a guy with sexual desire as an undertone. The blackpill is that you can easily get a woman to act this way if you pay for it directly in hour-long increments. Which tells you both that many women don't want to act this way for a man, naturally, and perhaps worse many are able to convincingly fake it anyway.

You’ve just described a long-term relationship. The relevant porn term is “girlfriend experience,” because this is what a loving girlfriend is like.

Women certainly don’t want to act this way for any man, just for a man they’re in love with. It’s true that women who are ‘playing the field’ and aren’t ready to settle into an LTR are noncommittal and ready to swap out — but so are men who are trying to play the field.

The saving grace for men is that most women aren’t actually looking to play the field. It looks like it, especially when you look at the population of women on dating apps, and particularly hookup-oriented dating apps. Those women, of course, are looking for hot men who are good at sex and make the on-ramp to a sexual encounter thrilling and socially permissible.

But the same statistics that show that also show that their absolute number is low, especially compared to the men looking for the same thing. Most women don’t want to be on dating apps, and most would consider joining one to be an admission of failure, an unacceptable stranger danger risk, or at the very least massively overwhelming with low-quality attention in a way that’s uncomfortable and hopelessness-inducing, not validating. These are the actual feelings the average woman feels about dating apps, not something they’ve made up to mess with guys.

I guess sometimes I read discussions from guys on what women are like in dating and I wonder if anyone’s actually been in a reasonably-healthy LTR. Most women want to be what you’re describing, but only with a man who she feels gives the same to her.

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The older you get as well and as your drive begins to dwindle, the long-term appeal of any of it diminishes significantly; and you lose considerable interest in it over time. Certainly the best time to take advantage of me would’ve been the ripe age bracket of my very early 20’s. I discussed this with a friend some years back and he remarked, “Once I hit the age of 40, I’m not taking any new calls… No, I don’t want to know you, I don’t want to meet you, no; I don’t care about you; leave me alone…” That was about the age he just wanted to officially stop everything, consolidate his gains and what he’s made for himself in life, call it quits and live out the rest of his days in peace.

Misery loves company. He and I had a hard enough life growing up as it was. I’m just about with him. Even though I wanted a family, I have no problems being happy on my own.

“Once I hit the age of 40, I’m not taking any new calls… No, I don’t want to know you, I don’t want to meet you, no; I don’t care about you; leave me alone…” That was about the age he just wanted to officially stop everything, consolidate his gains and what he’s made for himself in life, call it quits and live out the rest of his days in peace.

Can't lie, I'm contemplating that deadline myself, in my late 30's.

Every failed connection or relationship that goes nowhere unfortunately makes me bayesian update towards the likelihood that I'll just never find someone that I can make it work with.

Thing is my drive isn't dwinding yet. I'm not feeling 'old' by any means yet. I still feel vital and effective and the misery is coming from trying to encounter someone whose interests and values align when most of those interests and values are selected against by the default overculture.

There's an odd disconnect these days. I'm able to attract women... but I'm less interested in playing the games and I'm better able to perceive the immediate disqualifying factors. The women I have available are not bad people but I don't expect that anything I initiate between us would last... so why toy around with each other?

I can sustain my current life routine indefinitely (until AI disruption finally hits) and every foray I make into the dating market gives me yet more reasons to stay out of it.

His argument was persuasive and he didn’t have to do much convincing to get me on board. People like me were just placed in the wrong century. Like you I’m also not feeling old, but I’m definitely not 18 either. A lot of people are going to come due for a very rude awakening in the years to come and I’m not normally one to be the guy to gloat “I told you so,” but I’m definitely going to be the guy with a smirk that says “I told you so.” I know a couple of those people already.

I was never a guy who played games when it came to interpersonal relationships. If it isn’t a board game, a card game, a video game or a bedroom game, I don’t play it. You don’t play with people’s lives unless you want to invite some serious trouble into your life. I’d have thought that point was made a long time ago. Enjoy each other’s time, shared interests and company, and be a family. Why complicate and risk destroying it all out of mental instability? I know a lot of women on the same level as you. I don’t oblige them because I don’t think they’d be a good mother. I know too much about their history; and that’s not where their mind has been.

I have enough in the interest department to keep me occupied, and enough interests and things I like to do in my private life to keep me occupied and entertained until the end of time and there’s enough people in my family and in my close friend’s family that I’ve had an enormous impact on that leaves me with a feeling of achievement I’ll be proud of on my death bed. The most important document I own is a 3-page essay my best friend’s younger brother (who always viewed me as an older sibling, like a lot of people close to me) wrote me at a time when I was feeling down many years ago. In it he dropped a line saying, “Why do you want a son so much when you already have one?” I always think of that line.

Being an older sibling to others can be rewarding, it can simulate some aspects of parenthood. But full parenthood is a class of its own, and raising a child of your own from conception is the full undiluted parenthood experience. It's full of stress and backaches but also full of intense amazing moments. It is an experience worth trying for at least once if a good partner can be found.

If a man can be made presentable to college age women, then that is the group he should try to find a good woman from, as they have less relationship baggage. It might just be a matter of luck or fate though with how few eligible bachelorettes there are these days.

That’s what I’ve always been after but it’s eluded me my whole life.

I had an interesting position between my sibling and the rest of our extended family. A lot of my 1st generation cousins are much older than me, the youngest is like 12 years older or something like that, and they would always be hanging around themselves or our parents. They’d encourage me to spend time with them and a lot of times I did, but I was clearly out of their age bracket from being able to meaningfully associate with them. The younger half was much younger than me. The oldest was within 2 years of me and the rest between 5-20 years younger. So I always stood on an island that was the middle ground, where nobody else my age was. My sibling always associated with my 1st cousins, I was always the “big brother” and mentor to my 2nd cousins and I stuck with them.

My friends interestingly enough were born the same year as me or the year prior. But they also had big families and whenever we’d spend time, their parents would encourage them to tag along with us and we’d also be in charge of them. So they participated in many of the same activities we did and we never treated them as a separate class most of the time (but not always). They always looked up to us as well.

A big, extended, and physically close family is a nice thing to be a part of. I'm from large extended families on both sides myself. I did happen to notice that my desire for children increased as I moved much farther away from the family area, as I missed the family atmosphere that similar aged "child-free" friends could not provide.

For me the desire was always there. I had my head on straight from a pretty young age as far as that was concerned. Nobody ever had to coax me into it.

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Has nobody created a dating app that allows you to autistically file a 100 fields of highly-specific information and search against them?

Or have they just failed to get women to sign up? Or because the ones that signed up would only seek 7 feet tall high-earners with good hair? Perhaps the app would need to integrate the percentage of prospective matches generated by each successive restriction in the search box to counter that problem.

As stated by @orthoxerox, OkCupid was very close.

You answered a bunch of interesting questions, and you'd search for people who answered those questions in ways that indicated they would be compatible, then winnow from there.

There was a lengthy profile sections so people could put quite a bit of info about themselves if they wished.

And, the killer function, you could actually search and filter from the pool in a given area to zero in on ones that seemed most promising. It was more like spearfishing rather than sticking your bait out there and seeing who nibbled.

It was FAR from perfect in terms of actually generating dates, but I know multiple people who met spouses there.

I myself met the Ex that I almost married on there. Granted, it was because we both happened to be online at 2 a.m., me because I had gotten stood up by a different date. Timing/luck was a huge factor.

When I came back to it years later after my breakup, it had already been converted to a Tinder-style swipe app... as has EVERY OTHER APP.

I have a friend who is something of a player -- had casual sex in high school, was resented by a lot of women as a ladykiller, accused of infidelity repeatedly in ways that may or may not have been true. Even as an adult, when I really got to know him, he had a new girlfriend every 2-6 months. He had an engagement that broke off not too long after I got to know him.

He apparently had created an OkCupid or Match or one of the other traditional online dating websites after the engagement broke off, didn't use it much, didn't find much going on there, and his story is that when he went to log in after months of not using the site, he had one match, who was like a 95% match or whatever that platform used to gauge compatibility and had messaged him, he messaged her back. Apparently she was an English evangelical (there are such a thing, apparently) in the United States as part of a religious choir.

About a year ago they got married in a Church of England parish. I heard the wedding party's trip to the UK was great, although we're really more distant from each other in the past few years as our lives have drifted so I wasn't part of that.

My joke is that the best people you can meet on online dating are people who have just arrived (and are freshly looking and hopeful) or people who are just leaving (because they've realized the specific platform or OLD as a whole aren't getting them what they want). Online dating just seems to suck for people who use it to try to find partnership, and anyone who 'goes native' on them is probably not a dateable person.

My joke is that the best people you can meet on online dating are people who have just arrived (and are freshly looking and hopeful) or people who are just leaving (because they've realized the specific platform or OLD as a whole aren't getting them what they want). Online dating just seems to suck for people who use it to try to find partnership, and anyone who 'goes native' on them is probably not a dateable person.

My meeting with my wife was essentially this from both sides. I'd had a year or so where I'd gone on high double-digits amounts of first dates, had had something that seemed superduper promising blow up like 2 weeks beforehand and literally had like 2 chats left with any promising prospects. One of which was my now-wife. If I'd struck out with both of them I was planning to head overseas for a couple weeks and meander around aimlessly. She'd just made a dating app profile about 6 months after the end of a multi-year relationship and I was her first match and date. I do find it kind of sobering since I feel like in a slightly Alternate Universe that wouldn't have aligned and my life would be much different now, but oh well.

I used OKCupid during what was apparently it's heyday and I found it pretty good, certainly compared to stats I see thrown around now, which I am deeply immersed in as I am in the process if getting divorced (from someone I met on OKC). I got a reply from like 25% of the girls I messaged and once I had a reply my conversion rate of turning it into a date was like 75%. From what I can see people saying of the swiping apps that is several orders of magnitude better than present day (though the effort involved in finding good matches and generating good initial messages might have been higher, dunno). Once the divorce is final and I spend some time on the new apps I will report back and give my impression of the differences.

Be braced for misery my guy.

No point in sugar coating it. Just realize its not really a 'you' thing.

OkCupid used to be like that, they even found what questions were the most useful for determining compatibility. Engagement farming killed that model. The most successful dating app is the one that keeps you swiping and paying for features.

Has nobody created a dating app that allows you to autistically file a 100 fields of highly-specific information and search against them?

Duolicious (list of 2000 questions)

Way too many questions, and psychometrically incompetent. Couples mainly pair on intelligence and political ideology. Surprisingly, big 5 spousal correlations are quite small. They also pair on BMI and drug using status. Not 2000 dAnK mEmEs questions.

To clarify, Duolicious does not use your answers to these questions for pairing directly. Rather, it distills from these questions your positions on 47 personality traits, and uses those variables for pairing—but it also lets you filter by individual answers in the search interface. Full explanation

Are you the dev or something? 47 traits mostly pulled out of thin air does not change my psychometrically incompetent assessment.

Yeah I also feel like even if you've got a pretty good read for those personality traits, hypothetically, then further-distilling 'how will somebody who is this particular assemblage of those traits react when meeting another assemblage of traits' is super-hard.

We have scientific papers about this for a number of traits. We do not have those papers for most of the traits of duolicious, which appear to be pulled out of LLM latent space. As in, the dev literally asked chat GPT to generate a bunch of questions. Lol. Actual slop. And the dev doesn't seem to be aware of any assortative mating research. Completely incompetent. All of the dating app issue is a competency crisis I think. You either have a competent leader who knows what he's doing or the app takes all the wrong turns and doesn't work. The software side is completely trivial even before LLMs. Most 21 year old CS students in 2018 could spin up a React Native chatting and matchmaking app. It's all about actually understanding human mating, which these people don't. How many apps allow you to efficiently filter by intelligence and politics for example? None. Duolicious measures these variables like shit and pollutes the system with a bunch of noise. None of the other apps allow it at all. How hard is it to make a composite based on standardized test scores, academic rank, maybe an in-house 30 minute exam if they don't have these, and have a decent politics questionaire? Nobody understands the importance of doing this.

So this is what @faceh needs apparently ? @faceh please sign up and give us a report on the issues you immediately encounter on that app.

I think it'd be better to just find the correct environment, select whichever female specimen is the most liked / compatible, and deal with it until completion.

Personally, if I had to do it again, I would wager that a BLM protest would not be the right environment for me to find a match, perhaps I'd end up with some white-aspiring South-American or Asian.

Took me five minute to sign up and there are absolutely zero people meeting my criteria in a 30 miles radius.

in a 30-mile radius

That's unreasonably picky. Try increasing the radius. Also, don't forget to answer a bunch of the 2000 questions.

Remember that this website is rather small. As I understand it, the creator got a reasonable number of users by advertising on 4chan (there's still a dedicated thread on /soc/, though he no longer participates there) and Twitter something like a year ago, but you still can't expect to see a zillion people on it.

The 'nearest' prospect that showed up with the maximum range was across the state.

30 miles, for me, encompasses my town and the 3 nearest towns, any further than that and its a real commitment to drive out to meet someone.

Because Dating Apps have perverse incentives. If a dating app is really good, it loses customers and since the goal of the app is to make money, losing customers leads to a bad revenue stream. Their goal is to show you matches that are close to what you want but that are incompatible, so that you feel like there is progress and then are willing to pay for upgrades to do better/be seen more/swipe more, etc. Realistically the only way to fix this would for a non-profit or for a government entity to create the "dating app" as they aren't required to be profitable and likely are more interested in the 2nd order effects of matchmaking/relationships.

The way to fix it would be with matchmakers who might charge a deposit but get their payout upon a successful-relationship-milestone. But society can't agree on what that milestone should be.

The largest problem with matchmakers is that it is a niche system, and it doesn't scale well. Part of the allure of Dating Apps is that it is a mass-market computational algorithm. Whether that's the OG OKC style of app, with a search function and compatibility scores or the modern digital swipe style app. The assumption is that these algorithms are unbiased and "fair" by virtue of having to generalize across the population. Using a matchmaker feels scammier whether or not its true. It probably has to do with some psychology, algorithms/apps are "science" whereas matchmakers are guts and intuition. Certain ethnic groups don't feel that way but those groups have their own in-community matchmakers, so using the general populous ones is not on the table.

I agree with a comment below that a sort of life-insurance style payment might be better at aligning incentives. But even that has a large amount of friction with a general populous, which is the market apps target.

They do have perverse incentives. However, in certain contexts it might be possible for them to be profitable even if they do not act on the perverse incentives. For example, medical professionals make money despite, generally speaking, not acting on the perverse incentives that would make them more profitable if they did a somewhat worse job of treating patients. Or am I wrong about this, and medical professionals actually do pursue these perverse incentives more often than I think they do? In any case, of course in medicine there is strong government regulation trying to prevent people from acting on the perverse incentives, whereas in dating apps there is not.

I think your last part about regulation overriding the perverse incentives by making the punishment worse than the incentives to be basically correct. Combined with I'd say is an internal cultural cultivation of the medical field to attract those who wish to do less harm. But we actually do hear about medical professionals acting on profit incentives to the detriment of their patients. There was that whole Perdue scandal about Oxycodone and Doctors recommending it to patients who didn't need it for kickbacks, my memory is saying its not the only scandal where Doctors have recommended drugs that aren't always needed, or surgeries, procedures, etc.

Dating Apps being relatively new to the market, along with the government being a gerontocracy means that it will probably be awhile before regulation targeting markets, that exploit human desire for connection, that are destroying the fabric of our society is implemented.

Not true, a Marriage App generates its own new customers by working well. That's the point of marriage. There's certainly value in becoming The Marriage App That Works, which can be passed down through the generations, if only people want what it can offer. The limit is that silicon valley people don't want to offer it and a lot of Westerners don't want to buy what it would sell.

If it was so easy to create a company based on long term matching at scale, then where is it? Tinders been out for what 15 years, okcupid, match.com 30? 90% of datong apps/websites are owned by match.com

At some point you need to consider the systemic problems that incentivize dating app profitability. If matching people for long term profit made more money for shareholders then selling short term boost/matches then it’s likely we would see that sort of emergent behavior. It’s clearly not. The system is just not setup that way. Being known as “the app” only works if you have such network effects that you can get a large base of people so short term losses are offset by long term gains.

I believe the secret would be that payment is due at time of marriage. But that creates incentives which push the target market out of the mainstream.

Was there ever a business willing to wait ~18 years for its returns?

Barrel-aged spirits are a classic example: scotches are not infrequently in that age range.

On the other hand, I've heard a lot of people in the business remark that it makes starting costs pretty overwhelming. At best you can start selling gin and vodka, or reselling out-of-house product while you wait for yours to age. Depending on jurisdiction you get to pay inventory/property tax on it too while you wait.

I once spoke to a guy who worked in a recently founded distillery. While waiting for their first batch of whiskey to age, they started selling gin and vodka just to get a bit of revenue in their coffers. To their surprise, their gin and vodka ended up being so popular (winning assorted international awards) that many of their customers are entirely unaware they distill whiskey.

Yes and also children exist right now and approximately 0% of them are betrothed, so they will be looking for marriage sooner than in 18 years.

How am i, the app company getting paid? I’m not making an app out of the goodness of my heart. I need to achieve network effects, i need to market, i need people to not be afraid to say they met on my app so i can get credibility.

How does the shidduch system work, economically? Is the yenta doing it for free, or do both sexes pay up front, or is payment due at time of betrothal?

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Make men pay to be on it and focus on attracting women and matching well. The men provide the revenue, the good reputation provides the men.

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Tree farms

Fair. I'll specify: a business willing to wait 18 years for its returns in an area where returns aren't guaranteed and governed pretty much only by soil quality, rains and time; and also that area being social media???

Software-wise, there are plenty of apps that are barely manned, generating zero revenue and somehow still exist. I think the main cost of dating apps is marketing, advertising on non-software platforms where you might find young women. It's the holy grail of advertising and it takes top-dollar to get it.

There's something counter-productive about women going on dating apps, as needing to jump through hoops, filing forms and boxes and so on is a signal that a woman is not attractive enough to just have a knight in shiny armor show up for her. So perhaps this is something that should be left to her parents. Perhaps already a thing in China. Otherwise with technology-minded millennials' children reaching adult age it should be. I know I'm concerned about my daughter's marriage prospects, so if I have to sign her up to an app to have access to a pool of relevant bachelors the world over, it might be worth it.

Otherwise another solution would be some kind of wife-hunting service, for this guy:

It enrages me. I know with precision the qualities I'm looking for. I know what qualities I want to avoid. I'm acutely aware how rare these qualities are, DOUBLY so among those who are still single. So I want to be given tools to zero in on these people more directly, and not absorb the waste of time and additional risk of figuring out if this person who deigned to match with me is sane or not, whilst operating on the assumption they are not.

No need to have the women sign up for that, just identify them and let the customer actually do the effort of dating them. What's Palantir for?

There was a famous noughties fake website offering exactly that service. Large parts of the MSM were taken in and wrote outraged articles about how awful it was.

There's something counter-productive about women going on dating apps, as needing to jump through hoops, filing forms and boxes and so on is a signal that a woman is not attractive enough to just have a knight in shiny armor show up for her.

Really, it's the same for a man. Attractive men (some combination of looks, personality, and social presence/status) don't need to put more than a cursory effort into getting women. They just show up to places and women make themselves available to them - maybe not every single time they go somewhere, but often enough that "meeting decent women who are willing to fuck" is a solved problem. Of course, meeting a woman that the attractive man would be willing to settle down with is a completely different issue.

So I think that if an attractive man is using a dating app, it's just for convenience.

So I think that if an attractive man is using a dating app, it's just for convenience.

Convenience plus definitely helps to get a heuristic for who's available/interested and mitigate the issues of shitting where you eat. Especially since attractive doesn't always mean 'you are a 11/10 and girls constantly throw underwear at you'. There's plenty of guys who have good online dating success who don't have great 'daygame' and vice-versa.

Would you pay 1k a year to give your daughter a better shot at marriage? Whats the upper limit you’d be willing to spend per year with a lump sum at the wedding? One really needs to think of the funding model of these companies they are VC invested short term companies where the goal is to hit a suitable critical mass of users and then ratchet the crank to turn a profit. And the barrier to entry is in the dirt. Their mercenary network of users is pretty much only the moat.

You've rediscovered Greek life. The entire point of sending your daughter to join a sorority is to make sure your son in law is wealthy and culturally compatible. They dress it up with dance routines and mansions to make it more appealing to eighteen year old girls, of course. But the SEC parents are the ones paying for it, not the girls.

I thought sorority girls were known as alcoholic sluts who get banged by mediocre dudes who pay for friends? What kind of parent would want their daughter to be that?

I was in Greek life, you don't need to explain the concept or the practicalities to me. And that's not quite how it goes for probably 80% of the Panhellenic community.

1k is nothing. If she gets married in her early twenties that's less than 10k.

Many people spend a lot more than that just on the wedding day.

Many parents spend a lot more than that every year keeping their kids in private schools where they can ensure their kids are around other 'good-enough' kids. Many parents spend a whole lot more than that sending their young adult women to college for the reward of them ending up childless girlbosses or worse.

Ideally the service should be able to vet out people with criminal pasts or tendencies, certain early-adulthood onset mental illnesses, scammers, etc.

Whats the upper limit you’d be willing to spend per year with a lump sum at the wedding?

If you want to get into a delivery-based system, it should go beyond the wedding. A husband who disappears, becomes a deadbeat, starts a second family, becomes a reddit moderator, etc, should not be considered 'success'. Perhaps some kind of life insurance model with a mafia/bounty-hunting component for retribution would work.

In theory that's what keeper.ai is working towards.

Interesting site, but I’m not sure what the AI adds other than marketing gimmicks. Matchmaking algorithms are apparently good enough, okcupid was successful before match.com bought it and heavily monetized it into oblivion.

Yes, there legitimately should be no need for the 'matchmaker' role at all, if they let you search with the precision that I'd like.

Imagine if Google, instead of returning an array of results that are mostly responsive to your query, it showed you a snapshot of some webpage that sort of matches your general interests, and then makes you swipe through each one individually. A large enough database with a powerful enough search function shouldn't need a middleman I have to pay to find and access the result I want.

I think the appeal of Keeper is the promise of basically "one and done" being a real possibility rather than a whole process, so if you're really to in the mood for going through the process for months on end, they give you a shortcut.

I get the vision, but i think the average user is going to use it to search for the hottest member of the opposite sex they can find in their radius (lets be real it will almost always be men -> women) that meets some of their criteria. This just devolves into the pareto problem again. If you are a hot woman you are going to get spammed with messages. Theoretically a good matchmaking app acts as a filter by preventing you from needing to see all the spam and only connecting you to mates that it thinks are comparable.

appeal of Keeper is the promise of basically "one and done"

That might be the sales pitch but is there any evidence of it? Thats essentially both OKC, Hinge, and hundreds of other matchmaking services pitch too.

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The AI adds apparently nothing because the app doesn't work due to the creators pairing people by hand. Why even be a website at that point?

Marketing probably, and giving me amusement. Gotta get on the AI grindset for VC funding.

I have had two exes who managed to out-horny me, to the point where I was the one who had to stay in the dog-house when I turned them down. The spirit was willing, but the flesh couldn't take it anymore. No comments on the bruising. And I'm a red-blooded young man (or at least I could pass as young when this happened). It's one thing to know the theory, it's another to engage in praxis.

(Yes, steak too lobstery, butter too juicy, yada yada).

I suppose I'd take that over dating women with a low libido, which is no fun either.

It's Saturday afternoon, their adopted kids won't be back home for a couple more hours, all the chores are done, and Fred's looking bored and restless. Steve suggests a quickie to pass the time. Is Fred down for it? I would bet my money on yes.

Now replace Fred with Frida. Suddenly, the odds are completely different.

Someone that’s been promiscuous in the past is not necessarily going to be more open to their spouse proposing sex unprompted in order to pass the time. People who have lots of casual sex could be motivated by thrill-seeking, self-esteem issues, high impulsivity, not just having a high sex drive - you can even be promiscuous by being horny once a month and rack up 100 partners by your mid-twenties. Your partner of X years saying “you look bored, wanna have sex?” is anything except exciting or passionate, and isn’t going to satisfy those impulses.

I do think men are more open to being casually asked for sex in that way while tend to women prefer there being a build up, physical touch leading up to it, their partner making their attraction known, creating desire and anticipation… show don’t tell kind of thing.

Personally my partner suggesting sex unprompted is not going to put me in the mood, but maybe for the average man there is no need to be in the mood, sex is a thing they’d have at any time for no reason? Reactive vs spontaneous desire essentially.

Reactive vs spontaneous desire essentially.

This right here really is the core of many 'man vs. woman' sex 'conflicts' in relationships. Many men often project their spontaneous sexuality onto women, and many women their reactive sexuality onto men, and treat their partner as defective for just working different. I do think more people understanding how those two types of sexuality work would lead to people finding a middle ground and working with each other in relationships more.

I think it should be noted that the non-promiscuous women may still be in a “talking stage” with the more promiscuous men, or they may be in a situationship with the more promiscuous men, and thus not necessarily on the market. The top 1% promiscuous men have many more unique partners than the top 1% promiscuous women, and my theory is that this has been exacerbated by social media. (These men, though, may be so busy that they have no time to fill out surveys, so tremendous skepticism should be placed on optional unpaid fill-out surveys).

Most of the most promiscuous men are, uh, not exactly taking women off the market.

I believe his point was that the most promiscuous men are gay men.

Good point. Not sure if the study I read controlled for that.

One thing to note is that people generally have less sex as they age, which makes them less promiscuous. Promiscuity being limited to a small subset of the population, could actually mean that promiscuity is limited to young people. Assuming this population pyramid from Wikipedia is correct, people aged 20 to 30 (where I would assume most promiscuity happens) contain just north of 10% of the entire population.

So theoretically two statements could be true at the same time:

  1. Young people are generally very promiscuous.
  2. Only a small subset of the population is promiscuous (because people tend to settle down as they age).

Only a small subset of the population is promiscuous (because people tend to settle down as they age).

Many would disagree that it is possible to become less promiscuous, as you can't un-have sex with people and remove the viral-DNA load they deposited into your body.

I think most people would define "promiscuous" as "number of sexual partners in a given timeframe" i.e. a person who provides a number greater than X to the question "how many sexual partners did you have in the last twelve months?" It seems weird to me to describe as "promiscuous" a man who slept around in his early twenties, then decided to join the priesthood, took a vow of celibacy and hasn't so much as kissed a woman in decades.

That is a matter of definition. Many would absolutely say something like "I spent my youth seducing women, but my wife convinced me to settle down". I see promiscuity as a lifestyle where you have sexual relations with multiple people within relatively short timeframes. This lifestyle can change over time. What you describe sounds more like a sin that cannot be undone.

Think of this in terms of encounter frequency. In both sexes there are those who are basically monogamous (perhaps sequentially) and those who are not. Call it r/k selection or whatever. Pareto says 80% of the variance comes from 20% of the population, so let's take that for some napkin math. 20% of the people, male and female, are accounting for let's say 80% of the dating sex that happens.

People in relationships aren't in this pool. They're having sex, or not, in the relationship. The dating pool though, is still 80% basically monogamous awkward chuds who are not good at dating because they only do it to get into a relationship. The difference is the female 80% can still bang one of those 20% of male sluts pretty easily, while the 80% of men in the dating pool are waiting to luck into a decent match. This is where both female and male resentments in dating originate.

Women because that 80% who are really just in it for a serious boyfriend/husband material get conned by the much more experienced 20% of guys who are good at dating, good at "game", and this in turn hurts their prospects for a number of reasons with their real target pool. Men because they just have a much harder time finding a sex partner if they're not willing/able to play the game and be a degenerate. Both men and women when dating are playing in a pool where a disproportionate number of the dates they'll go on are with the most predatory 20% of the opposite sex even though four out of five people in the pool don't want that. Most people don't spend all that long single and dating. The ones who do rack up crazy numbers, but it's in a pool of fish and sharks.

There is a real gap in sexual desire between men and women, though this shifts over time. It is worst below ~age 30, which is when most of this stuff is taking place. This, however, doesn't change, while the dating scene can be radically altered by social custom. What we need is some sort of badge for r-selectors......maybe a red "A"?

There is a real gap in sexual desire between men and women, though this shifts over time. It is worst below ~age 30, which is when most of this stuff is taking place.

I've seen a chart recently that suggest it's not the case and the couguar myth is a myth. I think Cremieux posted it, but I forgot to bookmark the study itself. Men are the horniest at 40, women are the horniest at the left edge of the chart, which was 18, and their sex drive monotonically decreases with each year.

If that's what it says, you should discount everything else in that chart, the study it is based on and whoever thought it was legitimate.

I was thinking it could be a cohort effect because the age effect is obviously not like that. But the paper doesn't do a proper APC analysis and I can't find another paper that does. Zoomers could be less horny due to more porn addiction, marijuana/SSRI usage, and evolutionary differences such as coming from less horny parents more of the time. Also the 40 year olds could be using a lot of TRT these days.

I'll grant you every single one of those, triple the results, double that just for fun and 40 year olds are still not as horny as teenagers. Anyone telling you that is lying and you need to be asking yourself why. You also need to be asking yourself why you would want to believe something so obviously and provably false? What sort of mental hill is that getting you over? What benefit could it possibly be to anyone to delude themselves about such basic natural phenomena?

If it were 30, I could almost believe they reversed the gender-coding. But at 40.. naa, that's just BS.

Men are the horniest at 40

Personally, I don't find this claim remotely credible.

Yeah that claim is insane. Men have an insanely high sex drive as teenagers and it goes down over time. It doesn't peak at 40, you finally start to get a reprieve at 40.

I don't believe that anyone is hornier than teenage boys. That's the age where "don't stick your dick in that" memes come from. Also fighting and the other risky and impulsive actions teen boys are notorious for.

I'm not so sure about women. Being horniest in the teenage years makes sense on the simple biological basis of being ready to reproduce correlating with strong impulses to do so, but there's a line of argument that the reduction of oestrogen after menopause increases the ratio of testosterone and can result in a subjectively higher libido.

there's a line of argument that the reduction of oestrogen after menopause increases the ratio of testosterone and can result in a subjectively higher libido

Anecdotes are not data, but yes. When I was going through menopause, at the start suddenly it was like a second mini-puberty about arousal. Very damn inconvenient when you don't want to be horny, have no reason to be horny (pete's sake, this is the official end of childbearing years) and nobody to be horny for/with. It did wear off (thankfully) but I can imagine some women getting the burst of desire then and their libido spiking.

I was going to say this as well. When he said, “… Men are the horniest at 40…” I shook my head and said “Uh. Yeah, no.” Not a chance in hell. You can’t even know how difficult clarity of mind was to achieve among my peers at a young age. Maybe in the modern age of microplastics and low T you can expect bizarre studies to emerge in the future. A young healthy and virile man though? Center stage of all the youthful energy.

Maybe in the modern age of microplastics

Which may not be as bad as we were told, due to contamination in the lab from latex gloves? Maybe?

Found the study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-23483-0

I was wrong about the monotonicity of female desire, but women are the horniest in their teens, according to it.

Routing around this was the entire point of reputation based traditional systems. But dating apps do not work on that basis, and people’s instincts are geared towards a different problem.

I think you’re underrating the effect of visibility. Humans really like knowing about other people’s sex lives and romantic drama(that’s what so so much of our entertainment fiction and the vast majority of our gossip is about). In the era of the algo, promiscuous women get signal boosted because that’s what gets clicks.

Back in the village days, ‘oh it’s so exciting, John’s going to propose to Jane soon!’ ‘Jane is such a whore’ brought about equal eyeballs, because everyone knew everyone else. But no one cares about the former when it’s strangers.

Surely the more parsimonius explanation is that the non-promiscuous men (and women) aren't going out and socialising much at all? Instead, they are doomscrolling and turning into incels and angry young women.

The angry gender discourse is downstream from a social life that involves very little moderating face to face interaction and lots of radicalising online consumption.

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