>You’re Single Because You’re Not Okay Making Less Money Than She Does, You Fool
This point is mostly countered by the data that shows women tend to choose men who earn more than them and that marriages where the woman earns more are less happy, have less sex and are more likely to end in divorce. *Maybe* we can say that men just need to learn to be more accepting, but if most men cannot do so, or even if the majority of your readers cannot do so, it's pointless to suggest it.
I would be concerned about selection effects on marriages where the woman earns more. Anecdotally my mom was the definitive breadwinner in my family and I think the quality of my parents marriage is clearly orthogonal to their respective incomes.
It's possible there are selection effects. It's also possible that the data is "polluted" by unemployed husbands vs husbands who are employed but earn less. Regardless, there's more evidence on that side than the one or two quotes that Zvi supplied.
I'm really not sure this is true at least for the typical Zvi reader. I think earnings are far more likely to be serving as a proxy for status, education, intelligence, atypical psychology etcetera.
Oh yeah, let's find all those jobs with high status, high educational requirements and success that also don't have a high (relative to the median) salary/earnings.
As an example there are huge disparities in pay within different fields of medicine. I'm just incredibly skeptical that these subspecialty earnings differences are going to be important in a doctor life partnership relative to the selection effects that lead different people into different subspecialties of medicine let alone the broader selection effects associated with a doctor marrying someone without a graduate degree or adjacent.
Fair enough, but Zvi's point doesn't take any of that status etc... into consideration. I think you're broadly right - a woman doctor marrying a male doctor who earns less is considerably different than a woman doctor marrying a gas station attendant. I have strong doubts about the second situation and unfortunately it's only in the comments section that this is brought up.
I can imagine giving a poop about my partner earning money at 2.5x the rate I do. I can imagine it consuming someone. I simply don't care and (afaik) neither does she. If she could choose someone who earns more than her, but works much more and doesn't want to do the things that we do, she wouldn't. People chasing money and status just isn't what she was looking for all those years ago. Though I think if I had to guess, she's in the minority.
I feel obligated to post this. I'm male. Was a virgin until my early 30s (I'm now in my mid-60s; happily married thank you). Thinking back on my 20s, I can recall AT LEAST a dozen occasions on which women - attractive women my age - basically asked to have sex with me, to the degree women are allowed to in US culture ("want to come up to my hotel room for a drink?").
I was desperate for sex. And I must have been hot enough for them to propose it. But I simply didn't beleive I was attractive at all. When this happened I'd be sure I was misreading them (they couldn't possibly be interested in me, sex is a big taboo and I can get in trouble for being too forward [accepting]) or I was being set up for humiliation.
Eventually I got over it. I'd been a very unpopular nerd in school. An awful lot of wasted opportunities (and probably rejected-feeling women).
[FWIW, I'm 5'8" and looked like the guy on the left in Zvi's photo in the post.]
> Special K: No he does look better in the before. Women are correct on this one I fear. Guys obsess over these supremely tight toned muscles and they shouldn’t.
As always, people focus too much on gender vs "what's the vote ratio of the kind of people I would be interested dating". Ie if every woman 45+ voted that the guy on the left is hotter but every woman 18-45 voted guy on the right is hotter, clearly thr conclusion one makes would be radically different.
What I would do instead of X polls is ask Nano Banana to create photos of yourself with various levels of muscles and upload each for evaluation with 40 votes on Photofeeler, selecting your target age demographic. It's still imperfect because you don't know if the raters are attractive or not, but it's going to be vastly more accurate.
And, you know, it's implicitly better health wise. Better happiness, quality of life, longer life - these all come with being fit/in shape. Being more attractive to women (which this blog post attempts to disprove, so it may or may not even be true) seems like a side benefit to the other provable health effects.
I’ve read a similar argument before about getting ripped/jacked as a man: it might make you less attractive to the average woman, but it might make you more attractive to the sort of woman who works out a lot herself, which might be what you want
Being super ripped is much better for dating because even if only a minority of women prefer that body type, a much smaller minority of men possess that body type. The same is true for other good traits pushed outside of many people's comfort zones, like very rich or very tall women. Supply and demand!
My college buddy was 6' 9" and knew that he had a narrow appeal. So his strategy was to just be seen by lots of women and let the ones who liked tall guys come to him. Worked quite well.
Re: hiring matchmakers, I know it's a pretty bold claim, but I'm pretty confident I could do better than the "$50k/client" lady by simply giving some grooming advice, taking new photos of a guy and rewriting their dating profile. All for only $1000 and it'll be done in under 4 weeks (all except the final 3 days is buffer for grooming changes). See this post for a free DYI version: https://nsokolsky.substack.com/p/how-to-take-a-perfect-dating-photo - email me at sokolx@gmail.com if you want the paid one.
I've been extremely skeptical of matchmakers ever since the one asking for "$100k if you guys get married" failed to get me a single date in NYC of all places (I've signed up as an experiment and had no issues finding dates otherwise). Note that I do still think they can be highly helpful for women and wealthy men, it's just that 99% of this blogs male readers would be wasting their time paying one.
It doesn’t entirely relate, but your comment reminded me of an idea I once read in a book about psychotherapy from the mid-1960s. The idea was that assuming there is no relationship between socioeconomic status and incidence of mental illness, then those patients who can pay the highest fees tend to have the mildest cases.
I’m not sure if the assumption still holds today, but it is interesting to think about how that relates to paid matchmaking too.
I think the relationship might break down for dating because if you're a guy making a cool $1M/year but you're still single, then either...
1. You are VERY unattractive (either looks or social awkwardness)
2. You are VERY picky
I guess #2 is a bit easier as the matchmaker can try to get you to lower your expectations, but #1 cannot be solved without many hours of personalized effort, which I feel like doesn't mesh well with their business model.
Location is important for the majority. For those reading Substack, it won’t be enough. You’re probably ugly.
Blaine is a hack. She’s been very upfront that her goal is to ripoff very lonely and desperate men. These men mostly have the issue that they’re well off and ugly.
Almost no women out there are okay with dating a man who is guaranteed to make substantially less money than her. Very few men are genuinely threatened by a woman who makes more money than them. The only reason a guy would avoid this “archetype” (woman who makes more than him) is because he’s worried she’s gonna be bossy and try to control him due to her financial capital. For most men, they feel the only leverage they have in a relationship is financial. This isn’t because men want to be higher earners - it’s because without this leverage women just leave all the time. The amount of women who leave a broke man is infinitely larger than the pool of men who leave a broke woman.
On the upside, at least when you're dying of illness and the man leaves you won't have to suffer for much longer!
If I had to choose: I'd probably take the wife leaving me when I am terminally ill over she leaves me because I don't make as much money anymore. In one scenario, I have 50 years of good marriage and in the other it might never happen!
I think you’re reading way too much into the “one night stand” question - I read it with an implicit “…and you were single/available” and I assume most others did too (or didn’t answer if they weren’t). Clearly that’s not the spirit of what they’re asking for.
I thought the same thing, and was about to post it.
However, I also thought that my own answer is <50% (heck, not 100%) almost entirely because most of my female friends are married - and I'd not want to participate in the dishonesty or drama of their infidelity.
Not immediately assuming the same "if unattached" qualifier for everyone potentially involved means the poll question could certainly be read various ways, so could stand to have more qualification to be useful.
In any case, I don't think most people read it in the way where it can be taken to indicate most monogamous men will cheat.
I lived in Brooklyn for a few months and then Harlem for a year. This isn't mainly a judgment about the place per se, more about other heterogeneous factors dominating city-level location. The number or ratio of women one can see "partying" just isn't relevant; access to social contexts where one can get to know people well is more relevant. It wasn't very hard to meet people who identified as women, but it seemed prohibitively difficult to form new friendships of the sort that could lead to relevant introductions. Then I ended up with someone I'd met on Twitter.
The polls highlight some interesting discrepancies between how respondents considered the hypothetical and how they might engage in the event. I see two important mechanisms that explain at least part of that discrepancy:
1. Everything Happens on the Margin
Infidelity in Alice’s second poll is a simple single-round game: the real-world analogue is a multi-round one with sequential decisions. However, as anyone who has dated knows, you don’t magically end up in bed with someone, and so those many small incremental interactions entail many small conscious choices. The shift from “I am the kind of person who would not cheat” to “I am the kind of person who would” is marginal rather than instant, unless your undergarments are experiencing a “fast take-off”.
2. Update Yourself
In a Bayesian sense, each incremental defection shifts your self-model towards “I am the kind of person who would”. Assuming you intrinsically value fidelity, those choices and subsequent updates become costly to you in ways the poll responses elide. Even assuming other actors never knew, as in Alice’s first poll, as Zvi notes, you always will. Given the simplified framing, I suspect that if people are accurately reporting their willingness to cheat in a stylised, single-interaction way, they are not adequately accounting for both the impacts on their self-model and “levels of friction” in reality.
For me, as someone who values my own fidelity (married 5 years; practising Christian), the instrumental goal remains to act consistently as someone capable of and willing to keep that and other promises. Unless your self-model already involves you being the kind of person who would choose to defect, that oughtn’t mean paranoia about attraction to others or closeness with them. Ideally, real-world defection is costly enough that one could acknowledge “I would probably defect in the hypothetical” but still affirm a desire to avoid doing so in practise.
People keep saying NYC is a great city for meeting women but man my experience has not borne this out. Admittedly part of this is what I complained about before (well, over on Wordpress :P ), that my friends just don't seem to introduce me to their friends often enough. :-/ (Or organize events, or invite their friends along to events...) But then also every group I do seem to end up in -- even the one I joined largely with the hope of meeting girls -- seems to be male-tilted.
And then idk man when I do meet women here they rarely seem to be the sort I'm interested in. So much of New York seems so *mercenary* -- I hardly seem to encounter the more academic or nerdy sort I'm more interested in (I mean there's OBNYC but obviously that's too male-tilted to be generally useful here, much more so than like actual math departments). I guess I'm just not in the right circles here because those circles must exist but I don't seem to know how to find them...
But the reason I brought this up is because, although people say SF is way worse as a man... it seems that like whenever I encounter an interesting woman on the internet, large fraction of the time, she lives in SF! I almost wonder if I'd have better luck there. Not that I'm going to that, I have way too many reasons not to move to SF. But sometimes I wonder if I should move to Boston or something, that's where MIT is and all, maybe things there would be more interesting and less mercenary...?
The 'after' body is better - in the before pic he's by no means in terrible shape, but in the second he's got rid of the breast fat which is a plus and now looks athletic as opposed to 'yeah I go to the gym sometimes'
It's not 'too far', but it may suggest it because he's a) posing, b) mostly-nude and c) in good light emphasising contours. Without that lighting, that muscle tension, with some clothes on, he will just look like an somewhat muscular athletic guy, which is good!
And this is where I think one of the tweet responses nails it - the second *picture* is different in nature. It's not just that he has a better body, it's suggesting (correctly or not) "I am hardcore into training, look at all my muscles, I am a narcissist". Many/most women don't want this vibe, regardless of their attraction to the body itself.
In my experience most women like muscularity and leanness itself, so it's positive dating value to train to the point of it being obvious with clothes on, just don't fill your dating profile with shirtless pics - because that will filter out many women, and filter for women you probably don't want to date (at least, as a DWATV reader)
"Literal ‘any woman you wanted’ with zero risk of discovery is a stupidly tempting offer. If you treat this in the spirit it was presumably intended, instead, and everyone was being fully honest including with themselves and fully understood what was on offer (as in literally whoever you’d most want), presumably the ratio would be a lot higher."
Even if they never find out, I'd still know I cheated.
> Only 14% of men attracted to women answering this didn’t have at least one female friend they would have a one night stand with? Presumably many of the others don’t have the right female friend. Which means substantially more than 86% of them are not, for the most important practical purpose, in a monogamous relationship?
Wait... Is *that* the way we're supposed to interpret such a question? As "if they offered *right tonight*, *all other things being equal*"? I hadn't seen that one particular poll, but in general, when I see questions like that, I tend to assume that answering "no" because I'm in married would be missing the spirit of the question, and that I'm supposed to interpret it as "if they offered when you're single (or in an open relationship)", or if I can't imagine ever being single again at any time soon I'm supposed to just not answer the question as not part of its intended audience. Perhaps some of the 23.8% + 48.8% interpreted the question this way too, rather than "if they offered while you're still in your current relationship"?
(Even in terms of marginalized conditional probabilities with no further assumptions, if an oracle told me that at some unspecified point in the future a female friend of mine offered a one-night stand, the bulk of my posterior probability mass would be that by then I'll be widowed or something, at least for values of "friend" that don't include anyone who doesn't know I'm taken and monogamous and values of "offer" that require breaking plausible deniability.)
True story, I'm single because I read too much substack articles on why I'm single.
>You’re Single Because You’re Not Okay Making Less Money Than She Does, You Fool
This point is mostly countered by the data that shows women tend to choose men who earn more than them and that marriages where the woman earns more are less happy, have less sex and are more likely to end in divorce. *Maybe* we can say that men just need to learn to be more accepting, but if most men cannot do so, or even if the majority of your readers cannot do so, it's pointless to suggest it.
Hardly pointless. Lots of hot rich women want guys like you is a useful thing to know!
It would be useful if it were true - which Zvi's Roundup fails to prove, or even support properly outside of one or two points of anecdata.
I would be concerned about selection effects on marriages where the woman earns more. Anecdotally my mom was the definitive breadwinner in my family and I think the quality of my parents marriage is clearly orthogonal to their respective incomes.
It's possible there are selection effects. It's also possible that the data is "polluted" by unemployed husbands vs husbands who are employed but earn less. Regardless, there's more evidence on that side than the one or two quotes that Zvi supplied.
I'm really not sure this is true at least for the typical Zvi reader. I think earnings are far more likely to be serving as a proxy for status, education, intelligence, atypical psychology etcetera.
Oh yeah, let's find all those jobs with high status, high educational requirements and success that also don't have a high (relative to the median) salary/earnings.
As an example there are huge disparities in pay within different fields of medicine. I'm just incredibly skeptical that these subspecialty earnings differences are going to be important in a doctor life partnership relative to the selection effects that lead different people into different subspecialties of medicine let alone the broader selection effects associated with a doctor marrying someone without a graduate degree or adjacent.
Fair enough, but Zvi's point doesn't take any of that status etc... into consideration. I think you're broadly right - a woman doctor marrying a male doctor who earns less is considerably different than a woman doctor marrying a gas station attendant. I have strong doubts about the second situation and unfortunately it's only in the comments section that this is brought up.
I can imagine giving a poop about my partner earning money at 2.5x the rate I do. I can imagine it consuming someone. I simply don't care and (afaik) neither does she. If she could choose someone who earns more than her, but works much more and doesn't want to do the things that we do, she wouldn't. People chasing money and status just isn't what she was looking for all those years ago. Though I think if I had to guess, she's in the minority.
I feel obligated to post this. I'm male. Was a virgin until my early 30s (I'm now in my mid-60s; happily married thank you). Thinking back on my 20s, I can recall AT LEAST a dozen occasions on which women - attractive women my age - basically asked to have sex with me, to the degree women are allowed to in US culture ("want to come up to my hotel room for a drink?").
I was desperate for sex. And I must have been hot enough for them to propose it. But I simply didn't beleive I was attractive at all. When this happened I'd be sure I was misreading them (they couldn't possibly be interested in me, sex is a big taboo and I can get in trouble for being too forward [accepting]) or I was being set up for humiliation.
Eventually I got over it. I'd been a very unpopular nerd in school. An awful lot of wasted opportunities (and probably rejected-feeling women).
[FWIW, I'm 5'8" and looked like the guy on the left in Zvi's photo in the post.]
yeah i eventually figured this out. but its too late now. sucks.
> Special K: No he does look better in the before. Women are correct on this one I fear. Guys obsess over these supremely tight toned muscles and they shouldn’t.
As always, people focus too much on gender vs "what's the vote ratio of the kind of people I would be interested dating". Ie if every woman 45+ voted that the guy on the left is hotter but every woman 18-45 voted guy on the right is hotter, clearly thr conclusion one makes would be radically different.
What I would do instead of X polls is ask Nano Banana to create photos of yourself with various levels of muscles and upload each for evaluation with 40 votes on Photofeeler, selecting your target age demographic. It's still imperfect because you don't know if the raters are attractive or not, but it's going to be vastly more accurate.
And, you know, it's implicitly better health wise. Better happiness, quality of life, longer life - these all come with being fit/in shape. Being more attractive to women (which this blog post attempts to disprove, so it may or may not even be true) seems like a side benefit to the other provable health effects.
All true but honestly "it'll help me be more attractive" is realistically the most powerful motivator in existence.
That's why steroids are so popular, even with their side effects. Ask RFK Jr.
I’ve read a similar argument before about getting ripped/jacked as a man: it might make you less attractive to the average woman, but it might make you more attractive to the sort of woman who works out a lot herself, which might be what you want
Being super ripped is much better for dating because even if only a minority of women prefer that body type, a much smaller minority of men possess that body type. The same is true for other good traits pushed outside of many people's comfort zones, like very rich or very tall women. Supply and demand!
My college buddy was 6' 9" and knew that he had a narrow appeal. So his strategy was to just be seen by lots of women and let the ones who liked tall guys come to him. Worked quite well.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/dating-roundup-11-going-too-meta
Re: hiring matchmakers, I know it's a pretty bold claim, but I'm pretty confident I could do better than the "$50k/client" lady by simply giving some grooming advice, taking new photos of a guy and rewriting their dating profile. All for only $1000 and it'll be done in under 4 weeks (all except the final 3 days is buffer for grooming changes). See this post for a free DYI version: https://nsokolsky.substack.com/p/how-to-take-a-perfect-dating-photo - email me at sokolx@gmail.com if you want the paid one.
I've been extremely skeptical of matchmakers ever since the one asking for "$100k if you guys get married" failed to get me a single date in NYC of all places (I've signed up as an experiment and had no issues finding dates otherwise). Note that I do still think they can be highly helpful for women and wealthy men, it's just that 99% of this blogs male readers would be wasting their time paying one.
It doesn’t entirely relate, but your comment reminded me of an idea I once read in a book about psychotherapy from the mid-1960s. The idea was that assuming there is no relationship between socioeconomic status and incidence of mental illness, then those patients who can pay the highest fees tend to have the mildest cases.
I’m not sure if the assumption still holds today, but it is interesting to think about how that relates to paid matchmaking too.
I think the relationship might break down for dating because if you're a guy making a cool $1M/year but you're still single, then either...
1. You are VERY unattractive (either looks or social awkwardness)
2. You are VERY picky
I guess #2 is a bit easier as the matchmaker can try to get you to lower your expectations, but #1 cannot be solved without many hours of personalized effort, which I feel like doesn't mesh well with their business model.
Location is important for the majority. For those reading Substack, it won’t be enough. You’re probably ugly.
Blaine is a hack. She’s been very upfront that her goal is to ripoff very lonely and desperate men. These men mostly have the issue that they’re well off and ugly.
Almost no women out there are okay with dating a man who is guaranteed to make substantially less money than her. Very few men are genuinely threatened by a woman who makes more money than them. The only reason a guy would avoid this “archetype” (woman who makes more than him) is because he’s worried she’s gonna be bossy and try to control him due to her financial capital. For most men, they feel the only leverage they have in a relationship is financial. This isn’t because men want to be higher earners - it’s because without this leverage women just leave all the time. The amount of women who leave a broke man is infinitely larger than the pool of men who leave a broke woman.
The rules of thumb, from what I've seen:
1) women leave when their husbands lose their job
2) men leave when their wives get sick
It doesn't paint a pretty picture of humanity but there is some evidence these stereotypes are true.
On the upside, at least when you're dying of illness and the man leaves you won't have to suffer for much longer!
If I had to choose: I'd probably take the wife leaving me when I am terminally ill over she leaves me because I don't make as much money anymore. In one scenario, I have 50 years of good marriage and in the other it might never happen!
"The amount of women who leave a broke man is infinitely larger than the pool of men who leave a broke woman." -- an aphorism for the ages.
I think you’re reading way too much into the “one night stand” question - I read it with an implicit “…and you were single/available” and I assume most others did too (or didn’t answer if they weren’t). Clearly that’s not the spirit of what they’re asking for.
Same
I thought the same thing, and was about to post it.
However, I also thought that my own answer is <50% (heck, not 100%) almost entirely because most of my female friends are married - and I'd not want to participate in the dishonesty or drama of their infidelity.
Not immediately assuming the same "if unattached" qualifier for everyone potentially involved means the poll question could certainly be read various ways, so could stand to have more qualification to be useful.
In any case, I don't think most people read it in the way where it can be taken to indicate most monogamous men will cheat.
Also, presumably many people with a female partner automatically have a female friend (her) they'd be willing to sleep with.
Huh. Of the major metro areas I've lived in (DC, NYC, Pittsburgh, SF), NYC seemed like a uniquely bad place to date women.
What made you feel that way? How far from Midtown did you live/try to date?
I lived in Brooklyn for a few months and then Harlem for a year. This isn't mainly a judgment about the place per se, more about other heterogeneous factors dominating city-level location. The number or ratio of women one can see "partying" just isn't relevant; access to social contexts where one can get to know people well is more relevant. It wasn't very hard to meet people who identified as women, but it seemed prohibitively difficult to form new friendships of the sort that could lead to relevant introductions. Then I ended up with someone I'd met on Twitter.
The polls highlight some interesting discrepancies between how respondents considered the hypothetical and how they might engage in the event. I see two important mechanisms that explain at least part of that discrepancy:
1. Everything Happens on the Margin
Infidelity in Alice’s second poll is a simple single-round game: the real-world analogue is a multi-round one with sequential decisions. However, as anyone who has dated knows, you don’t magically end up in bed with someone, and so those many small incremental interactions entail many small conscious choices. The shift from “I am the kind of person who would not cheat” to “I am the kind of person who would” is marginal rather than instant, unless your undergarments are experiencing a “fast take-off”.
2. Update Yourself
In a Bayesian sense, each incremental defection shifts your self-model towards “I am the kind of person who would”. Assuming you intrinsically value fidelity, those choices and subsequent updates become costly to you in ways the poll responses elide. Even assuming other actors never knew, as in Alice’s first poll, as Zvi notes, you always will. Given the simplified framing, I suspect that if people are accurately reporting their willingness to cheat in a stylised, single-interaction way, they are not adequately accounting for both the impacts on their self-model and “levels of friction” in reality.
For me, as someone who values my own fidelity (married 5 years; practising Christian), the instrumental goal remains to act consistently as someone capable of and willing to keep that and other promises. Unless your self-model already involves you being the kind of person who would choose to defect, that oughtn’t mean paranoia about attraction to others or closeness with them. Ideally, real-world defection is costly enough that one could acknowledge “I would probably defect in the hypothetical” but still affirm a desire to avoid doing so in practise.
I wrote an article about the talk I gave at LessOnline on the subject of The Escalation Ladder. It's here: https://casualsex.substack.com/p/the-escalation-ladder
People keep saying NYC is a great city for meeting women but man my experience has not borne this out. Admittedly part of this is what I complained about before (well, over on Wordpress :P ), that my friends just don't seem to introduce me to their friends often enough. :-/ (Or organize events, or invite their friends along to events...) But then also every group I do seem to end up in -- even the one I joined largely with the hope of meeting girls -- seems to be male-tilted.
And then idk man when I do meet women here they rarely seem to be the sort I'm interested in. So much of New York seems so *mercenary* -- I hardly seem to encounter the more academic or nerdy sort I'm more interested in (I mean there's OBNYC but obviously that's too male-tilted to be generally useful here, much more so than like actual math departments). I guess I'm just not in the right circles here because those circles must exist but I don't seem to know how to find them...
But the reason I brought this up is because, although people say SF is way worse as a man... it seems that like whenever I encounter an interesting woman on the internet, large fraction of the time, she lives in SF! I almost wonder if I'd have better luck there. Not that I'm going to that, I have way too many reasons not to move to SF. But sometimes I wonder if I should move to Boston or something, that's where MIT is and all, maybe things there would be more interesting and less mercenary...?
My take on the Olly Murs pics;
The 'after' body is better - in the before pic he's by no means in terrible shape, but in the second he's got rid of the breast fat which is a plus and now looks athletic as opposed to 'yeah I go to the gym sometimes'
It's not 'too far', but it may suggest it because he's a) posing, b) mostly-nude and c) in good light emphasising contours. Without that lighting, that muscle tension, with some clothes on, he will just look like an somewhat muscular athletic guy, which is good!
And this is where I think one of the tweet responses nails it - the second *picture* is different in nature. It's not just that he has a better body, it's suggesting (correctly or not) "I am hardcore into training, look at all my muscles, I am a narcissist". Many/most women don't want this vibe, regardless of their attraction to the body itself.
In my experience most women like muscularity and leanness itself, so it's positive dating value to train to the point of it being obvious with clothes on, just don't fill your dating profile with shirtless pics - because that will filter out many women, and filter for women you probably don't want to date (at least, as a DWATV reader)
"Literal ‘any woman you wanted’ with zero risk of discovery is a stupidly tempting offer. If you treat this in the spirit it was presumably intended, instead, and everyone was being fully honest including with themselves and fully understood what was on offer (as in literally whoever you’d most want), presumably the ratio would be a lot higher."
Even if they never find out, I'd still know I cheated.
> Only 14% of men attracted to women answering this didn’t have at least one female friend they would have a one night stand with? Presumably many of the others don’t have the right female friend. Which means substantially more than 86% of them are not, for the most important practical purpose, in a monogamous relationship?
Wait... Is *that* the way we're supposed to interpret such a question? As "if they offered *right tonight*, *all other things being equal*"? I hadn't seen that one particular poll, but in general, when I see questions like that, I tend to assume that answering "no" because I'm in married would be missing the spirit of the question, and that I'm supposed to interpret it as "if they offered when you're single (or in an open relationship)", or if I can't imagine ever being single again at any time soon I'm supposed to just not answer the question as not part of its intended audience. Perhaps some of the 23.8% + 48.8% interpreted the question this way too, rather than "if they offered while you're still in your current relationship"?
(Even in terms of marginalized conditional probabilities with no further assumptions, if an oracle told me that at some unspecified point in the future a female friend of mine offered a one-night stand, the bulk of my posterior probability mass would be that by then I'll be widowed or something, at least for values of "friend" that don't include anyone who doesn't know I'm taken and monogamous and values of "offer" that require breaking plausible deniability.)