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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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 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.
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