The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
PSA:
For the love of all that is unholy, avoid Tinder if you find yourself at a point in your life that dating apps are appealing.
Hinge and Bumble are much better, at least from the perspective of a guy.
Why so?
Well, the women on Tinder are, in my experience, spoiled brats who expect male attention to be handed to them on a silver platter, as breakfast in bed. The design of the app, while more egalitarian than Bumble (which requires women to be the ones to approach you first, unless you pay), incentivizes much more mindless swiping. You are one cut of meat among many others, and the 1% of guys who are prime Wagyu are pulling most of the women (a mild exaggeration, it's probably more like the standard Pareto deal of 20% getting 80%). Even if you're lucky enough to match with a bored girl looking at all the options, they're congenitally lazy. Why wouldn't they be? They've got a million horny men to choose from and can afford to be picky.
In contrast, Bumble, by forcing the woman to make contact, is actually doing guys a favor. A hi or hello means a lot more when you know for a fact that she's into you, and trust me that low bar counts for a lot.
Even Hinge, with its focus on limiting matches daily (cynically, a ploy to make you pay for more), means that your profile is likely to get more consideration than a surface judgement. You can expect people to actually read the damn bio.
Your time and attention are far better rewarded on the latter two, though of course anyone blessed enough to be handsome will likely get what they desire on any platform. I'm hardly ugly, just average in terms of facial attractiveness (optimistically a 7 out of ten when I've grown out my beard and lost weight, as I have now), but I find that charm, wit and general markers of intelligence (like the ability to write a bio more entertaining than a dictionary), are more viable ways to stand out.
I'd rather not brag, but I'm frankly stunned at the sheer disparity. I tentatively wager that this isn't an India-only phenomenon, and if anyone is soured on online dating, branch out from Tinder. If you're a handsome Chad, by all means carry on, but if you need to sell yourself with something other than just looks or a Ferrari, give it a whirl. This presumes you don't have the option of dating in the workplace or hitting up bars, but you wouldn't be reading this if those were the case.
(I have a longer draft from when I was very drunk, and it's surprisingly well written, slightly more sober yet hungover me is impressed, but it says much the same)
PS: It's a damn shame that the OG OkCupid is dead and a conglomerate is wearing its corpse. But I wouldn't have been legal to use it when it was actually good, so what do I know.
OkCupid was really good back in the day. It was the golden age of online dating where it was mainstream enough to draw a crowd but hadn't yet been completely optimized for revenue. I got at least a couple of in person dates a week from it and eventually met my wife there. I see those graphs where people have thousands of swipes, dozens of messages and a handful of dates and it's just depressing.
Born too late to try the only good dating site. Born just in time to read their research blog uncensored, before they got acquired and sanitized the findings.
I'm pretty sure the original versions are still out there, and while they might cause you to lose a little faith in human nature, still an excellent read.
At least you got yourself the lady you love out of it, may my quandary remain purely academic for you haha.
Gwern has archived a bunch, e.g. this one.
Thanks for tracking them down, I could have gone to one of the archival sites where I last saw them, but I really was drunk and dreading work the next day.
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I don't mean to defend dating apps but I suspect that there's a little bit of selection bias. I expect the type of men who enjoy making data visualizations not to have great prospects on the dating market. Also if you really enjoy data visualization but you find the perfect match on the first try, you'll probably make data visualizations about something else.
I would almost suspect some of these guys to subconsciously shoot themselves in the foot because they're too busy thinking about collecting data and organizing it instead of putting their best effort into optimizing their profile, making conversation and enjoying the date.
There have been quite a few experiments by data visualizer-types who allegedly set up a fake profile with male model pictures and raked in matches by the dozen. I don't recall any that were published somewhere more respectable than 4chan, though.
Also, it's always "top 1% male model" fake profiles, I'd be more interested in seeing how well someone closer to top 10% does.
You can't publish those types of experiments anywhere else because you'd be drowned in an endless sea of insults and strawmen.
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I remember a particularly hilarious example where they used a picture of a model and a bio that straight up confessed to being a convicted pedophile who can't get close to schools.
And they were still getting matches. And the women were thirsty even though the fake user kept reiterating the point. As someone with a far more handsome brother, I should have seen this coming, but still, bruh.
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It’s this and only swiping on women more attractive than they are. You could be an average guy perfectly capable of finding a date on Tinder or whatever, but if you only swipe on beautiful women it’s plausible you could go a very large number of matches before getting reciprocated.
The male strategy used to be to match every single woman and then go through the dozen of matches and decide which ones are worth your time.
In the past few years it seems that they tweaked the algorithm to stratify users.
This is what I think happens now: on the first day they show all the women, including the most attractive ones, but if the swiping has a low match ratio, they stop showing them. The user gets ranked among low match ratio users and it's basically over for them. I think they may be able to buy premium options after that.
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I swipe on women more aesthetically appealing than I am. And that works fine, if you have other qualities that make up for it, which I do. It's worked for me in the past, and works fine now.
Most men are frankly terrible at making profiles and selling themselves. As @4bpp claims, I can corroborate that the original OKC researchers found that men rate women on a normal curve, whereas women rate most men as "below average" in terms of looks. They're just far more picky.*
And dating apps break the cycle of assortative mating too, with a small number of very hot guys having anywhere from supermodels to average women clamoring for them.
*Too drunk to chase down links. But we've seen the same blogs.
This is a misunderstanding of female sexuality. It is true that many average women could find a hot guy to hook up with on Tinder. But it’s also interesting that comparatively few women do this, certainly with any regularity. Many women I know have never had a one-night stand. If they find themselves in ambiguous ‘situationships’, it’s typically with men they’ve met in real life. The fact that they could fuck a guy with a six pack in an hour via Tinder holds no appeal to the average woman, whatever her hotness.
It is a projection of male sexuality onto women. Men, if they could have NSA sex with hot women out of their league via the apps would be doing it every single day, at lunch, after dropping grandma off at the grocery store, whatever. And indeed this is how a lot of gay men’s sexuality works, it’s why Grindr is proximity-based, because it really is about finding the nearest guy you want to fuck right now as soon as possible.
This also ties into the general phenomenon of men driving themselves crazy trying to attract the small minority of highly promiscuous women (who, sure, are going to be pretty superficial) and then extrapolating their behaviour to everyone else.
There are no large dating apps/sites for non-superficial people. So probably non-promiscuous women are about as superficial as promiscuous.
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Dating apps, in general, attempt to service two separate yet overlapping sets of users:
People looking to hook up. These are far more likely to be men, no doubt about it.
People looking for a steady relationship. I would imagine that this is nearly equal.
This is not a paradox when you understand that both userbases overlap.
Men do want more flings than women, as you've stated. However, only the hottest of them will find steady success, and it's a winner take all field. Or most, at least. The women who want flings will obviously desire them with the most attractive men around. Said men are usually happy to oblige, and service the entire market while the rest standby dicks wagging in the cold breeze.
When it comes to steady relationships, there are certainly women who don't opt for flings. They're also still going to try and get the best possible guy they can, and will eventually, through repeated rejection if nothing else, find someone of equivalent Sexual Market Value (an ill defined but still useful term).
I hardly blame them. Everyone is acting according to their incentives.
Unfortunately, said incentive systems are simply not built for the scenario they find themselves in, which is an endless gamut of people to flick through on a whim.
Well, while I sincerely doubt I know the women you know, none of this is a surprise to me.
I'm not speaking about all women. I'm talking about the women (and men) who are using dating apps. Which now hold the preponderance of the market, in terms of where people try and find people to fuck, marry
kill.I'm not a red-pilled PUA, I'm not dismissing all women as inconsiderate, or delusional. You'll just find more of them on Tinder. After all, both the women and men on dating apps are being selected from the set that isn't doing shit outside (mostly).
After all, people do meet IRL, or through friends of friends, which has the benefit of a great deal of vetting and sanity checking, and an implicit belief that the two of them are fit for each other. This is how things were done before (and even Indian arranged marriages are closer to family-vetted serious dating), but it's being devoured by the monster that is online dating.
A few men swallow up the entire market for female sexual promiscuity (again, not all women, not even most of them, for most of the time, but when they crave it).
Men are unhappy because they feel ignored and undervalued. Women are unhappy because the guys they're able to sleep with won't commit to them. This isn't a particularly original observation, but it's still true.
I'm just lucky in some ways, fuck, if I wasn't tall, or a doctor, or (list of attractive traits), there but for the grace of God go I. I certainly empathize more with the men, but having seen some of the pathetic shit guys try, I feel for the women too. Few people are happy about how it works.
I would much prefer to date in real life, but I'm lazy and rather busy. And that's easier said than done for a working professional. Especially one who intends to emigrate sooner or later. Hence the apps it is.
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What's the attractivity metric here? If we define it in terms of absolute attractivity to the other sex, in the below-40 bracket most women are more attractive than the median guy (see also those OkCupid blog men-rating-women/women-rating-men charts). I'm not so sure that the "swiping on women more attractive than they are" thing is true if the rating is on the curve for their respective sex.
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