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Notes -
Somewhat Contra Scott Alexander on Dating
Astral Codex Ten: "In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences"
I say "somewhat contra" because there is a bit of a disguised Motte and Bailey here. The Motte is that describable preferences like age, race, culture, politics, relationship style, and desire for children have strong predictive and filtering power. This is obviously true. The implied Bailey is that modern dating apps suck, long-form dating profiles like old OKCupid and "Date-me" docs are much better, and the nerdy rationalist coke-bottle glasses waifu you've always dreamed about is just around the corner. This is false.
In the old days, dating sites were based around writing a profile and answering questions about yourself. In current year, online dating programs have converged around the "swipe" model. Why? One common theory I see is that users (customers) finding high-quality long-term relationships is bad for the app, because it causes users to leave and decreases the userbase. This sounds plausible, but if it were true we would expect to see a "two models" system. One mass-commercialized model where people looking for casual fun can swipe to find hookups, and a second non-profit or premium model where people can write long-form profiles to find high-quality partners. What we observe instead is convergence around the "swipe" model. Some would blame Match Group for buying OKCupid and monopolizing the market:
But Match Group isn't a monopoly anymore. In fact, their main competitor, Bumble, is also a swipe app. Sounds more like revealed preferences than evil capitalism to me.
Suppose OKCupid, being an early iteration of online dating, was an inefficient market. Whom would we expect this market inefficiency to benefit? People who are good at writing long-form engaging content for their profile of course. Who are the people currently telling you OKCupid was the greatest thing since sliced bread? Really makes you go "hmmm".
You already know.
Yes, age, race, culture, politics, relationship style, and desire for children are all vital filtering tools. The dirty little secret is that you can tell all of this quite reliably from only a few photographs. A picture is worth a thousand words. Photos are also harder to fake, thus making them a more credible signal of social information. If any doubt remains, it takes literally two seconds to scroll down and see her info.
Far from being the cause of our modern romanceless society, Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge are simply lenses into the inherent nature of the sexual market at the margins. Those who are both in demand and willing to partner up are long since unavailable. There is no law of nature, nor any other reason to believe that every person has a "soulmate". Some people just suck.
What has changed in the modern world is the quality of single life. In the past, before internet porn, before women could reliably hold down careers, people had to pair up. It was socially demanded, it was the only way to obtain sexual gratification if you were a man, and it was the only way to provide for yourself economically if you were a woman. The positive externality of these "sad" marriages was that they generally produced children.
I agree with your opening that Scott has a bit of a Motte & Bailey, but it seems to me like you might be doing a bit of the same. Mind defining your terms a bit?
I read Scott's post as creating a dichotomy between
a) Looks "Only" dating apps. E.g. Tinder
b) Personality/Attribute based dating apps. Among these are two basic groups: the long form (words words words. aka Date-Me Docs) and the filterers (the type where you match based on stuff like 100 dimensions of compatibility).
I personally think group b is should be split into these two for any sort of analysis.
From my perspective you are arguing against b being effective/popular by categorizing parts of "b" into group "a".
In my opinion this is EXACTLY what we do have. Tinder brands itself (and is widely agreed upon) as the hookup app. Hinge brands itself as "The App designed be Deleted." At a glance they look similar because they share some UI elements (swiping), but I think it's a mistake to lump them together. The fact that the UI is similar tells us something about mobile ergonomics, but not as much about the users' goals or the backend. At the risk of sounding like a Hinge shill (which maybe I am?), the matching algo and UX is pretty different and lead to different outcomes. I know several close friends who have great success on Hinge, at one point I may write an effort post about optimal dating strategies.
Even if they were the exact same app, the userbase and their motivations matter. While some (read: many men) use it for hookups that doesn't define it for the same reason that although many people use LinkedIn as a less (differently) competitive dating app, it should not be viewed as such.
tl;dr: "Describable dating" apps exist. They are popular.
As an aside, Dating Docs are a very eccentric approach that will turn off the vast majority of potential partners. I would strongly discourage anyone from having one. To the extent they are at all effective I think it's solely for the ability to signal you are open to advances. This can be done with a less costly signal.
edited to add line breaks.
I agree that the "date me" docs give me the willies, and Hana is someone I'd run a mile from in real life. But the thing is, with modern dating apps, I don't know if it's so much "revealed preferences" as "race to the bottom".
Sure, OKCupid etc. were the first ones. But Tinder was copied as a Grindr clone for straights, and Grindr was all about being a hookup app. The new, younger generation of customers were then looking for something like Tinder, and the long-form old dating app models had to adapt or die. And so now there is the swipe culture and the complaints about that.
That's because of competition. Young men in their 20s are competing with men in all ranges for young women in their 20s, because men from 20-80 have a preference for women in their 20s. So a guy who's 24, maybe still in school, not doing much of anything yet with his life is competing with the 30 and 40 year olds who are established and have money to wine and dine the 22 year old women. Go to the 30-50 year old women and see what rates match up there. And even historically, this was so; May-December marriages because the man was richer and the bride's family thought this was an excellent match, or was a widower looking for a second (or third) wife happened. That put younger men out of the running too.
Are we going to ask men who are 30+ to kindly stick to dating women of their own age? I wonder how well that would go down, with the same people proposing that the answer is to deny women higher education and economically force them into marrying at a young age! I don't think we can blame 22 year old Cindy for preferring 35 year old George over 24 year old Josh, even if down the line George will still be chasing women in their 20s when he (and Cindy) are in their 40s - Josh will be doing the same thing, after all!
In conclusion, I totally agree that there is no such thing as a soulmate and it's a concept I'd love to kill with fire. It makes the pressure on romantic love and achievement that much greater, it makes people dissatisified and always with one eye out for the better, perfect partner instead of the one they're with, or could be with. There's both too much expectation around marriage (your spouse will be all-in-all to you instead of you having a range of friends and other relationships - not poly, let me hasten to add - outside the marriage) and it's too easy to get out of your current marriage and set out on chasing the soulmate this time round for a second marriage.
I think the part about the lack of friendships for men is very important, too, and part of that problem is the American set up that you make friends in school, then you move off to college, make friends there, then leave home and go somewhere completely different to get a job. And if you don't keep in touch with your college friends or make new work friends, then you're going to end up without friends (unless you marry and your wife does the traditional role of maintaining friendships by keeping the network of contacts going with the Christmas cards, emailing or phoning, invites to life events like marriages and so on). There's not the same "stayed in the local community" expectation anymore, so you leave all your early roots behind and then (seemingly) men find it harder to find and make lasting friends. That's what I was saying about making marriage the be-all and end-all to serve all these social functions, when there used to be things like friendships and membership of societies outside the home.
It's not really because of this, the data doesn't suggest any substantial number of 22 year old women are dating or fucking 40 year old men. Of course it happens (and moreso than the gender-inverse situation), but it's not the cause of the discrepancy.
The cause of the discrepancy is almost certainly just the long-observed difference between what men and women consider a 'relationship'. It's the same thing as when your buddy tells you his relationship of three years with a girl "isn't that serious", while she's telling her friends she thinks he's going to propose. In the end, he's posturing to his friends and she's posturing to hers. A woman has an ongoing monogamous relationship with a man, she puts down that she's 'in a relationship'. A man has a monogamous relationship with a woman, but thinks he's a lothario who surely could be fucking another chick if he put his mind to it which he doesn't, and puts down 'single' because he 'technically' doesn't call her his 'girlfriend' and hasn't yet introduced her to his parents.
I have observed this exact situation (a monogamous relationship on both sides that woman considers 'relationship' and man considers 'fwb' or 'a casual thing') countless times. Usually they end up together and get over their own coping strategies about settling down.
Technically, they are both single but in a case like that (if it's going on for more than a year), I think the term for such a guy is "dickwad". If it's monogamous, exclusive, engaging in sexual activity, and long-term it's a relationship, Algernon. If you just meet up for coffee, lunch, and going to the movies, it's simply dating (by older definitions) but not serious and indeed need not be exclusive (women and men could have had several 'dates' like that with different people going on because they were seeing several people casually but nobody exclusively or seriously).
No wonder surveys are all biased towards the reported experiences of women:
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The article itself attempts to explain the discrepancy as follows:
(1) Women are more gay now (which I take leave to doubt) (2) Older men, younger women (which is my position) (3) Women are choosier (again, that well may be; if there are more men than women, then women have a greater choice. But if there are more men than women, then of course there will be some men who aren't getting dates).
The thing is, there are seemingly as many women saying they can't get a man who wants to commit as there are men complaining they can't get a date. It does seem to be that older women aren't finding men in their age range (and by "older", I mean 30+) and while that may be 'unrealistic expectations' and standards set way too high, I think it's also that those men are chasing - and winning - the younger women.
This study is a bit all over the place, as it is covering decades so it jumps around from 2000s to 2010s, but the key changes seem to be:
(1) Dating has declined, though this may be due to changes in terminology and what people regard as "dating" (2) Cohabitation has increased (3) Marriage rates have decreased (4) While divorce rates are down, so are remarriage rates
So I think cohabitation has largely replaced marriage, and my own view has long been that if you aren't married within a couple of years of 'getting serious' then it's never going to happen, a view that seems to be borne out as below, and women should stop being surprised that "my partner of seven/ten/fifteen years just left me for a younger woman!" because yeah, he was getting free milk all those years and now has traded in the old cow for a younger heifer:
Age of first marriage has also gone up, and I think that's in part down to the acceptability of cohabitation and the view that "you shouldn't just rush into marriage, live together first to find out if you're compatible". In the 70s women got married at 21 because 'living in sin' was frowned upon, nowadays that would be considered too soon and too young and you should live together first. Of course, if you do live together, you're less likely to get married. Another reason would be that women are no longer as economically dependent upon men; historically it was marriage or poverty, but now women can be self-supporting by work.
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In cases such as this, I'd say the crucial difference is that the woman expects the relationship to end in marriage, while the man has no such plans/expectations. Hence the two different sorts of posturing.
Often the man does end up marrying the girl, at least in my experience.
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It's the three years. As I said, if he isn't proposing by then, it's never going to happen, which is why women think "yeah, this is serious and heading that way". If you're only together a year and one or the other of you gives the "it's not you, it's me" speech then sure, it wasn't that serious. But longer than that is - or should be - leading to definite committment.
That's why I think the Sexual Revolution was a bad deal for women, no matter how the feminists of the day thought they could take on male sexual values and enjoy the same kind of benefits. The saying about free milk and the cow has value because it's true: why will a man take on the responsibility of marriage if he's getting all the benefits, including romantic, without entering into the institution? The same goes for women, of course, but I do think women still are being socialised with the view that a relationship should lead to marriage.
IMO it's a birth control issue as much as anything. Back in the days of spontaneous unwanted pregnancies, these things were a bit more self-resolving.
Shotgun weddings didn't get their name from the nature of the problem being self-resolving.
The possibility made you put a bit more thought into where you were putting your genitals, especially with the threat of the half-decade go nowhere relationship.
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I think so. One of the things that’s most important for women to realize is “if he wanted to, he would”. This is true for women, too, but men usually encounter it in dating or friendships (ie the archetypal friendzone ‘should I confess my love to my best friend, who is a girl?’ post) while women usually encounter it in either hookup situations where the man doesn’t want to commit at all, or in long term relationships where he doesn’t want to marry.
I think everyone has seen the same man go from entirely relaxed and putting in minimal effort in one relationship to being the consummate gentleman in another (in everything from chores to holding open doors to presents) and the sole difference is that he meets a girl he likes more and doesn’t want to lose. Almost every quality man I’ve met who got married has said that they knew very quickly after they met the girl.
At the same time, I think men naturally waver more about marriage than women and it’s not an awful thing for a man to be concerned about making the wrong decision, as long as he does come to one. But it’s very sad to have friends where you struggle to tell them that it’s not going to be them, especially if they’re really in love.
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