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:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 -
Had a second date today. She's great. I mean, great. Just objectively an obscene number of things in common, but different enough to be interesting, and the chemistry was there. Never felt this way really, although one other time was in the ballpark (...and then I moved out of state).
Unfortunately, she learned today that she's "definitely" leaving the state for work related reasons, permanently, in a month. If I had any sense, I'd've walked away when she gave me this news, early on in the date, along with the suggestion that I do so. Instead, I'm going to just ignore this fact, I guess, despite my dating goal being "a very serious relationship at a minimum" - next date Saturday. Why ignore this fact? Well:
there's some reasons (omitted for anonymity) to believe it's more "probably" than "definitely"
genuinely enjoying the dates
market research
And it's not even a "well, let's at least get laid" kind of thing (or I'd just text my ex instead of being back on the apps...). I wouldn't be shocked if we do sleep together, but I might actually try not to, in the interest of not getting hurt more than necessary. Might, anyway.
At a minimum, I think I've just found the bar by which future secretarial interviews will be judged. At a maximum, hell, I work remotely and make rash decisions sometimes - maybe I leave the state, too. I "definitely" won't do that. Even if she stays, I think long term she leaves, but by that point it'd be not crazy to imagine following.
I do in fact realize the above is rashly strong, I really do. The saner takeaway here is that I should approach dating more seriously, more optimistically, and with higher standards - women like that do exist. But damn, if not for the atomization of society, the tendency of high achievers to move around so much; if we'd met in some small town before the internet, the outcome would, with reasonable probability, be the obvious and happy one.
I did some napkin math. With 3.5M people in my greater metro area (~1 hour driving radius), I estimate 22 potential matches (though she clears a bar more than a bit higher):
I can't decide if 22 is good news or not. I lean "good news" but finding 'em is a bit elusive.
22 is fucking terrible. Way too many filters.
Also I doubt this woman meets all these filters. I mean what are the odds right? You have rose tinted glasses on.
I really don't think so. It's easy living in a bubble of smart people to forget what p80 intelligence looks like. The least smart person I've ever dated was a first grade teacher, and presumably she was at least above average, leaving not a ton of room, if any, from her to p80. I really wanted to believe it wouldn't matter, but it just did. My real preference is probably steeper than p99, and Ms. Definitely clearly is past there. I'm fairly sure she's smarter than me, and I know I'm comfortably past p99. It doesn't hurt that often, and in this case, IQ correlated with gainful employment.
I'm really not trying to be, with my factor of 3 on that. Note that I didn't put "top 1/3" attractiveness - the intention is to filter out some at the top, filter out more at the bottom, and aim for some objective notion of at least modestly above average. She easily is, and fits a number of my specific preferences that are neutral to most people. She could be a fair amount less attractive and it wouldn't have changed my reaction.
Note also that by "attracted" (factor of 3), I meant "attracted to me" not "I'm attracted to her". I'm alright looking, but appearance certainly isn't my top selling point.
All that said, I think there may be some redundancy between these two factors, and between them and everything else. I.e. women who are smart, age appropriate, personality match etc are more likely than random women to be attractive/attracted to me.
I put a light factor here (2) intentionally. I don't need her to be a Mottizan, just not to hate me for having weird opinions on things from time to time. This also filters out e.g. strongly religious people.
Rose tinted glasses in general, entirely possible. As to the specific factors, I think they're all there, but it's possible she misses on "attracted to me" (I don't think so, but hard to say, and these things take time especially for women sometimes), "politics" (we've gotten into it some, but not that much - the lack of it coming up is in itself actually almost enough to check this box) and "personality" (I don't think so at all, but don't know her that well just yet). There's zero doubt that she's within an hour drive, human, female, age appropriate, highly intelligent, attractive, and single.
Based only on this, aren't the average elementary education majors IQ's 108 based on the old SAT data? The gap between 108 and 120 is still pretty healthy.
Am I messing up the IQ quantile conversion, or was there an error up-thread? Using a normal with mean 100, and SD 15 I get:
So a relaxation to a requirement of 120 would only be a 10x wider filter rather than 20x.
Yeah I dun goofed, I came up with those off the top of my head.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I do wonder about these filters.
For IQ it depends on how much you value producing high IQ children. I assume it's pretty hard to estimate the distribution for outcomes, but if you were to go down to 110 like @2D3D suggests, it might be unreasonably hard to relate to both your wife and your children... I suppose if you're willing to go down the embryo selection road, but then you would also have to find a partner who would also be into that.
Attractive—where does 1 in 3 here conditional on 25-34 and high IQ place them on absolute attractiveness? I would assume given youth, iq, and contentiousness the person would be well above average in attractiveness to start with. Even if only from the correlated likely socioeconomic advantages they enjoyed growing up. I mean, how many ugly people do you see walking around the campus of say Stanford?
For politics a 1 in 2 filter would be compatible, but not necessarily exactly aligned? Given how niche the politics of someone who posts regularly on the Mott probably are, I suppose it would be hard to filter any more generously without admitting intolerable incompatibility.
That's valid. It's plausible I could weaken this filter. Some of the point of it was to remove women who are too attractive to be into me. I tend to find them paradoxically unattractive anyway: give me a t-shirt over gratuitously well put together outfits and makeup any day. The personality filter also does some of the work on that front.
I don't think I could remove it, though. Especially by my age bracket, a fair number of people are getting out of shape, and that's not ideal.
As to the specific question re: absolute attractiveness, I guess the target is 6-8, although I've always found the numbers weird. Like, is this linear? Are we measuring against only the same age, or if not, how broad a range? Do we include my specific preferences? At any rate, Ms. Definitely is great on this front, very much my cup of tea.
More options
Context Copy link
110 is too low? Goddamn this forum really is full of bigbrains.
I kind of assumed, based on a vague recollection of OP's claimed achievements, username (as implied major), and desire for a 135+ IQ partner that their (maybe self assessed?) IQ was at least 140. In that if it were "only" 135 it would be unreasonable to set a lower bound at 135.
At 140, the gap to 110 is 30 points, which is the same gap as 100 to 70. Or average to borderline intellectually disabled. I do think it's possible for 140 paired with 110 to work, which is why I put it as conditional on the relationship you expect with your children. Like there is a whole set of life experiences you likely will never be able to share with your children. That's sort of based off of a crude model of averaging parents IQ and assessing a 10 point regression to the mean, (140 + 110) / 2 - 10 = 115. I'd be pretty interested if someone has a less ad-hoc way of calculating this.
It can at least work in fiction though, season 6 episode 9 of House "Ignorance Is Bliss" has an IQ 178 married to an IQ 87.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I honestly would say 110 is a tolerable minimum. Super smart partners are nice to have, but what relationships are maintained on are graciousness and patience, on top of the other normal social capabilities like geniality. I specify IQ in relation to graciousness and patience because low IQ people really have little concept of delayed gratification and so will want to address any perceived slight immediately instead of stopping to let the incident stew a bit and decide whether confrontation, much less escalation, is necessary.
I am surprised that geographic distance is not a listed function here. Its easy to daydream about your ideal Croatian waifu waiting for you to sweep her off her feet, but that has little connection to reality when you're still slaving at a bulge bracket in Midtown or whatever.
See the thing is, I get real tired of hearing stupid people talk, and there's an awful (or delightful) lot of that in dating. It's great being able to talk about things in my life and know she has context on them. I hear this point about overvaluing a woman's intelligence/career frequently (e.g. here), but strenuously disagree. At some point I'd try proving myself wrong on that again, but I am not there.
More options
Context Copy link
Not that I know much about IQ but it’s hard to believe that character is circumscribed to this degree by intelligence. ‘Patience is a virtue that can be cultivated’ seems to hold true below the 110IQ cutoff point, even if there are retarded people who can genuinely never grasp it the best predictor of whether someone is patient (above or below that threshold) is simply whether they value patience (whether through religion, personality, experience, and so as not to disagree too much with you - reasoning).
More options
Context Copy link
He said 1 hour drive in his metro.
My bad, I saw 3.5m and mentally added 3 0s to reach 3.5b and went 'hmm every woman in the world. ok I respect that but damn'
If this guy filtered down to 22 from 3B, I would personally find him and slap him
Yeah, I think that'd be evidence I pulled a Peter from the lab leak debate. OTOH, 22 from my metro area makes me think my filters are somewhere between reasonable and slightly picky, especially in context of being myself somewhat of an atypical individual (but a fairly "modal Mottizan" - I can't seem to find that post...)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link