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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29734 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...

I thought it was made up at the Title.

I would be shocked if anyone is reading anything in the profile at all. Other than swiping purely based on pictures. See: all those tinder experiments where the bio literally talks about being a child predator and a laundry list of other felonies with pictures of a male model and still gets 100s of thirsty chicks in the dm. I'm sure all those women are lovely folk who don't want to associate with a child predator.

The simple heuristics you should have known are just the mechanics of dating apps. Namely Rules 1 and 2. Applies to just about anything, The more you know about something, the more fine-tuned your BS detector, its not that complicated.

I would be shocked if anyone is reading anything in the profile at all. Other than swiping purely based on pictures. See: all those tinder experiments where the bio literally talks about being a child predator and a laundry list of other felonies with pictures of a male model and still gets 100s of thirsty chicks in the dm.

Even more black-pilling: Many of those chicks did read the profile and were still more than down to get railed.

To be fair, are you really going to swipe left on this? or this?

In a vacuum, both would likely be “woulds” for me.

However, I actively screen out women who’ve had a child or children, even for casual flings, so the former would had been out.* The upper limit of my OLD age settings is generally quite a few years younger than when the latter did her infamous needful, so she wouldn’t had appeared for me to swipe in the first place.

Especially knowing what they allegedly did, even if they were younger and childless, I’d definitely pass. I’m not Captain Save-a-Hoe and I can’t fix them.

I’m also not indestructible: chloroform, drowning, stabbings, and bullets hurt me too! (To borrow from the Bill Burr bit).

To be fair2, the point is that it’s fairly well-accepted that men, for the most part, are thirsty coomers who will take what they can get. A lot of men will readily admit that they’re weak for female youth and beauty, and it’s morally agnostic just like how apples fall from trees. They don’t pretend their preferences have some sort of moral underpinning.

In contrast is the mainstream view that women are Wonderful, and that women’s attraction for men are but moral litmus tests for men who have the “correct” attitudes and behaviors, a view that in mainstream and online discourse many men will whiteknight and women will fight tooth and nail to protect and insist. It’s evergreen Just World insistence.

* Interestingly enough, I could had sworn she used to have a long and extensive Wikipedia article that appears to have been deleted; only an article for her daughter remains.

In contrast is the mainstream view that women are Wonderful, and that women’s attraction for men are but moral litmus tests for men who have the “correct” attitudes and behaviors, a view that in mainstream and online discourse many men will whiteknight and women will fight tooth and nail to protect and insist. It’s evergreen Just World insistence.

Yeah, this is the thing thing that stuck in my craw as a young man and still does when I run into it; it kinda vanished into the "Boo Straight White Male" background noise ~2017.

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