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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29757 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Came across the following post from the other site. The OP deleted it shortly after posting, so I'm pasting it below (strange that the mobile app preserves the text longer than the web app).

Title: I (29M) got 200 Hinge matches in 1 week, likely because of my job title. Am I wrong to feel some resentment?

I (29M) want to start out by saying I'm not a particularly handsome or good looking guy. I have a high hairline and a very weak chin. I'm a bit overweight, and not muscular. I'm 5'9.

After not dating for 3 years (I got brutally cheated on), in 2020, I finally made my first Hinge profile. I got maybe 20 matches over a month, then Trump went on TV and said he was cancelling all flights to Europe because of COVID and I ended up deleting the app.

During COVID, my career really became a rocketship. I had always been a hard worker (I don't drink and I'm kind of introverted, so I mostly focused on work), but things really came together for me during the pandemic in a really surreal way. Working remotely at my parents house, I spent a year rising up in my firm, and then because of my niche knowledge set, I was recruited to become a Partner at a very large venture capital firm. I'm currently making $350k a year, and depending on how the fund performs, up to $1.5M a year. None of it really seems real because I essentially didn't talk to anyone but my parents for two years and have basically been sitting all day on a computer in my highschool bedroom.

At the beginning of the year, I moved to a big city and started a relationship with a former friend. It was really tumultuous (she had much more experience than me and seemed to relish throwing it in my face) and it ended after half a year. It was my second relationship of my life, and she really hurt me in ways I'm still unpacking. She told me I'm lacking in confidence and inexperienced and immature and hard to love.

A few months after the break up, I decided to create another profile on Hinge just to see what was out there. I put on my profile that I was "Partner at VC firm" and HOLY SH*T. I got over 200 matches in a single week. Not to be shallow but these aren't mediocre people either. Many are beautiful women with serious jobs as doctors, private equity analysts, lawyers, etc and more. Several of them have messaged me first.

I feel absolutely and totally overwhelmed, and I've since stopped swiping on the app. I can't bring myself to message a single person, and over a hundred have already fallen into the "hidden" section because I never sent a message.

On one hand, I am feeling so overwhelmed by this female attention that I don't know what to do. All of these women seem to have their lives together, and meanwhile I'm this introvert with a weird internet job with no dating experience (seriously, I've never asked a woman on a date formally) and I don't know how to catch up. I seriously feel like if I meet in real life, they'll smell my inexperience on me. I also, for some reason, just don't want to be rejected if that makes sense.

On the other hand (and I'm doing my best to unpack this here), I can't help but feel disappointed at how much more female attention I'm receiving as a result of having a more prestigious job and title. I think the person I was 3 years ago was much happier, kinder, less jaded, more fun, more ambitious, more authentic and all around better as a whole - but I could barely get any matches. I literally miss the person I was. I look at these beautiful women in my matches now and I kind of feel a sense of resentment towards them for only showing interest in me now that I've climbed the mountain or become (at least outwardly) a "finished product" so to speak. I can't help but feel like I'm basically just being objectified for my money, and any relationship I start with these women will be tainted.

If anyone could offer some words of advice on how to get my footing or at least help me unpack why the way I'm feeling is incorrect, I'd be very appreciative. Thank you.

https://old.reddit.com/r/amiwrong/comments/161q6df/i_29m_got_200_hinge_matches_in_1_week_likely/

Once you've adequately formed your opinion on this, I would like to ask:

How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?

I'm posting this because I'm worried that I am more gullible than I thought. Hundreds of comments on the thread point out fairly convincing reasons why this is a creative writing exercise: some claim to have equally prestigious job titles and/or make more money, but did not experience anywhere close to the reported success here; others say they've temporarily changed their job titles to something made up and far fancier and it didn't move the needle; then some point out that 200 matches in a week would require he swipe 400 times at a 50% match rate, and that seems excessive for one who claims to not have bothered messaging any of them; finally, there are some vaguely incel tropes that make this seem more likely to have a hidden agenda in influencing popular opinions.

In my defense, the majority of comments seems to buy into the OP's story and responds sincerely; they also have more upvotes, suggesting the majority of lurkers tend to agree. But I think most people here hold themselves to a higher intellectual/rational standard than the average Redditor, so I do blame myself for not thinking critically enough. Are there any simple heuristics that I could have employed here to better avoid falling for creative writing exercises? I did think the post had challenged my priors about what drove dating app success rates, so perhaps one strategy is simply to be more faithful to your priors.

P.S. lol @ the new 500,000 character limit on posts. Seems excessive...

Seems real to me. If he was at a VC that did crypto they could have been ejaculating money over the pandemic.

Also his story seems not implausible given my own experience.

I filled out an OKC profile once and was my honest funny cute self. I also included my income, $250-500k and mentioned quant finance. I was getting about 3-4 dates a month. The women weren't amazing but not bad either. I kept this up for a year or so.

Then I came across some OKC blog post about how income is the biggest predictor of dating success for men. I felt crushed, in a lot of the ways the quoted guy did. Surely this didn't really apply to me?

So I removed my income from my OKC profile.

After that I landed two whole dates total over the course of an entire year.

Jokes on me, I'm cute and funny but not enough to cut through the noise the way possibly making $500k does.

Having sizeable income shows much more than just pure money numbers. It shows social skills, certain level of IQ (yes, there are exceptions, but there are always exceptions), likely a reasonably stable job, to some measure your social circles, your available budgets, etc. Having no information at all about any of that creates a risk, and the risk would not likely be justified given how many alternatives there are around.

I mean, it makes sense. If I have friends who don't earn high income I can often point to obvious character flaws, limits to intellect or mental illnesses. I can further imagine I'd probably not enjoy being in an intimate relationship with them.

Which isn't to say you are broken if you don't pull high income, but it's a not bad heuristic.

I find a rhetorical move that makes somebody saying "if you are a chess grandmaster, it's more likely than not that you are smart" into "so, you're saying if I'm not chess grandmaster, I am a moron, and if I don't play chess at all, I probably need to be institutionalized as hopeless drooling imbecile?!" to be very disingenuous and off-putting. I'd appreciate a little less of aggressive bad faith misunderstanding.

I wasn't being that extreme.

But also, chess is pretty superfluous to living a good life? Whereas money often directly affects the quality of your life?

Sure some people achieve enlightenment working as humble ferrymen deep in the woods but that's not the norm by far.

I think there's a question of what the data actually shows, though. For example, some percentage of women are mercenary gold diggers, in that they very much want the richest man they can find who isn't a complete piece of shit or horrifically unattractive to them (and even there there are people who will waive those requirements). I had no idea there were dating apps where you can literally filter for income, but given escorting / 'sugar babying' is a thing, that some women would seek a more permanent similar arrangement is obvious.

But the same relatively modest proportion of serious 'gold diggers' in a city who meticulously screen for wealthy men might then circulate among them, leading those men to perceive themselves as much more attractive to women in general once the latter knows their income even if that isn't the case. By the way, women dating for money is obviously completely a thing, but ime for many PMC type women it's less important because they know they'll have 'enough' either way and so being stuck in an unhappy marriage to a rich man for 40 years is less worth it than it would be to someone from grinding poverty or 150 years ago when her choice in husband usually determined a woman's economic class for life.

I know one attractive, accomplished, PMC woman from a decent family who married a much older (early fifties) uglyish (not hideous, still tall, not particularly overweight) rich guy in her very late twenties. But he's worth many hundreds of millions, is extremely nice and kind (and has a wide reputation as such), treats her like a queen, and she was never the kind of woman who went for looks in men anyway.

You can extend this logic to more famous cases. Larry Page has a beautiful blonde wife whose sister is a model and who has a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford, masters from Oxford, both parents have PhDs, essentially perfect hotness + intelligence pedigree. But at the same time, they met when she was 27 and he was 34, he's hardly ugly and is 5'11, and he married her within a year of dating. Even billionaires struggle to hit jackpot, many settle for pure looks on their second or third wives.

Larry Page has a beautiful blonde wife

A bit bad to say, but she's rough to look at, which accentuates your point.

She has a goofy smile, but I think she's pretty (and would be at least to most men).

It was an interesting experience in a few ways. None of the women I went on dates with struck me as gold diggers really. That was the biggest part of the head fuck I guess. Maybe they know to play it cool, but my pop culture impression of gold digging is that women drop hints constantly about wanting expensive gifts and going to exclusive places. Man always pays. Etc

I think they just generally found men less attractive if they didn't earn high income.

I feel like gold digger is the wrong angle to come into. I've been in a similar position dating, managed to date a bunch of professional high-flyers I met through various apps, and it's more of a 'I want a partner who's a financial equal' thing than a 'I expect my lifestyle to be subsidized' thing in a lot of cases

From my experience 'equal' is a lower bound. Just as a woman wants a man at least her height (but ideally taller) she wants a man earning at least her salary (but more is better).

Still I think the suggestion of gold-digger comes with an implication that the girl is contributing next-to-nothing financially

Yeah I don't use the term myself for the reason that basically every woman cares about how much a man earns. If we define that as gold digging, then every woman is a gold digger.

Similarly, if we define gold digging as women pretending to be attracted to a man because he's rich, then I would say there are very few women who meet that definition. My experience is that a man having wealth, fame, power etc makes him genuinely more attractive to women, in a way that is pretty alien to male sexuality.

Money is an imperfect representation of social status, but it is somewhat correlated. And honestly status is probably the main thing women go for, far above looks or money(tell me, how many successful scrap metal entrepreneurs pulling million dollar incomes and able to provide a vacation condo in the Caribbean, a mansion and a lake house in the US, etc, etc have wives who are beautiful and intelligent and good breeding etc? Probably few of them, they have bimbo model or eastern euro wives, or else marry smart women with serious family baggage).

Did you list how you got such a high income in your profile? I’m guessing that ‘surgeon, makes $350k’ is far more attractive to non-explicitly golddigging women than ‘owner of a plumbing business, nets $400k’.

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