I used to be woke about gender until I delved into dating site statistics. Talk about a red pill. I think the biggest wakeup call was seeing that something like 99% of conversations were initiated by men. Taken together with everything else, it's pretty obvious that men and women are different. And the most successful couples, in my experience, are the ones who acknowledge and celebrate those differences rather than pretend they aren't there.
Always difficult to figure out how to respond to just the quantity and variety of material covered in these posts. Kudos for comprehensiveness anyway.
But I just hope people know - almost all of the relationship information discussed here is insanity. The self-interest, the excessive focus on dating market structures and elements, the strategic approaches, even the discussion of “improve your partner by 25%” is completely bonkers. If you are reading this and think any of it is something you should employ or emulate, you are lost.
As an old, you figure out over time that there are no relationship experts, not much subject matter real wisdom to be provided, and so much idiosyncrasy in the relationship dynamic that you are pretty much on your own.
Yes, dating has game elements that cannot be ignored, especially in the App environment. But if you are actually seeking to meet a decent person, the quicker you get to being honest about yourself and what you are looking for, and then being honest with a potential partner, etc, the more likely something may work out.
Of course it’s a mess and a crap shoot. I don’t really know why some things works out and some don’t. But if you think any of what’s posted here is really relevant to a meaningful relationship outcome, you are generally doomed.
On the other hand, it's not like conscious tactical and strategic effort resulted in much romantic success for me, and the romantic success that resulted didn't make my life noticeably better.
Returning to the first hand, wu wei resulted in a job I generally enjoy, pretty good physical fitness, some nice toys, a decent amount of savings (maybe not by the standards of this blog's readership, but I reckon I'm doong okay), a few good adventures, and not only no prospects but no prospects of prospects, at the age of 31. A guy could do worse, but I can't recommend it as a way to solve romantic problems.
But then do I even have romantic problems to solve? I don't really mind being alone, not the way some people seem to. It bothers me to be seen as a loser or weirdo by people around me, it bothers me to disappoint my parents (they're nice liberals who would never admit such a thing, perhaps not even to themselves, but I reckon it's there), but actually coming home to an empty apartment, I dunno, not that bad really. I read stuff like this series, or Feral Pawg Hunter's thread (https://twitter.com/FeralPHunter/status/1784582833110970856) and mostly think, not "wow, inspiring!" but "Damn, that sounds like a lot of work, and the end state doesn't seem all that great". Maybe that's cope, but maybe sometimes coping is a reasonable thing to do.
On the other ^n hand, I do still read this stuff and occasionally comment instead of having a sensible chuckle and going on to the next thing, so perhaps that's telling me something.
These Dating roundups are fun to read. I've not been single in a decade. Other married people I know also find dating fascinating. My wife routinely watches a bunch of reality TV dating shows (think love is blind). I often cringe too hard at the males making mistakes in the show to enjoy them.
I think it’s a lot more normal than Zvi thinks to spend more time « engaged » with a pet than with humans. If you telework, live alone, aren’t particularly extroverted…
Normal isn't the right word. It's the path of least resistance and can fill a shallow need for non-solipsistic interaction but not a deep need. If you would really like to be in a meaningful relationship and your biggest interaction is with your pet ... NGMI
I think it's normal in that it's common, but that doesn't make it healthy.
One can of course find ways to do both at once - eg. taking your dog to a dog park and interacting with the humans there while your dog plays with other dogs is great for all involved
Maybe physical attractiveness is fairly standardised, but emotional/intellectual attractiveness varies *wildly*. I chatted up my wife by talking about land taxation in Hong Kong, she then made the first romantic moves. I am not tall, and was unemployed at the time. Lads and lasses, if you're a decent human being, there's someone out there for you.
Behold! A young human male (a citizen of the USA) met a human female (a citizen of Tanzania) in in a USA college. Even though he was socially awkward, and she was four years his senior, she was attracted to him, and they are now married.
So the idea of human males from semi-matriarchal societies having success dating human females from patriarchal societies might be worth a shot.
I couldn't believe it. My max estimate was maybe 15%. I'm honestly still very skeptical of these studies/surveys, but now think that it's higher than I previously thought.
I think the core issue with the first paper is that it has fairly low N and is slightly fishy in other ways (it apparently used the word "celibate" instead of "single" in the github code, they mistranslated because they are French, before they changed it, but unclear if for sure they used the word "single" in the original survey). But "65.3 percent of the 1,387 survey participants reported that they were married or otherwise in a relationship", what???
The other reason I'm skeptical of both papers is that I think they both failed to normalize to the actual distribution of users on Tinder. From what I remember, about half of Tinder users are between the ages of 18 to 24, so I think both studies actually provided a somewhat uniform distribution of ages, when they should have normalized closer to the Tinder age statistics (which they didn't have access to). They also probably didn't normalize for gender (I don't have access to the actual studies).
All of this to say, it's probably not as high as those papers claimed, but maybe there's a higher percentage of dating app users than we thought who are either perusing "for their friends", "out of curiosity / fun", "as a game", or, more likely, dissatisfied with their current relationship.
Somebody asked me whether my dating doc (https://jacquesthibodeau.com/date/) has been useful for me, so I wrote up my experience with it (Claude summarized my messages to their questions). The response has been positive:
* I've had about 15-20 women reach out to me after finding my dating doc. While I didn't pursue any of them, it was a good indicator of interest.
* I went on several dates with women who saw my doc afterwards and found it useful to know my intentions upfront.
* In the past few weeks, I've had 20+ women on dating apps specifically mention that they were impressed by the effort I put into creating my doc.
The general feedback was that my website was really well-done and people were impressed by the level of effort I put into it. One even initially thought it might be a joke, but ultimately found it genuine and appealing. I dates planned with several of them, but ultimately decided not to go because I'm currently focusing on one woman in particular.
However, I discovered that while the doc served as excellent supplementary information for women I had already connected with, it wasn't as effective for generating new leads on its own. The woman I'm currently focusing on didn't actually see my dating doc before we started talking.
Overall, I believe the combination of a well-crafted "date-me" doc and a strong dating app profile can be a powerful tool in finding compatible partners who appreciate your transparency and share your values. It's not a magic bullet, but it can certainly help you stand out and attract the kind of person you're looking for.
I think the biggest reason I'm single is that ~every girl I've ever been romantically interested in has turned out to be lesbian or asexual, on just large enough of a sample size that it's definitely not a coincidence.
Possible explanations that have been suggested to me:
- non-heterosexual women being statistically more likely to have personality/physical traits that I find attractive;
- non-heterosexual women being more relaxed around men;
- non-heterosexuality being disproportionately common among women in the circles I frequent.
To which the only actionable advice I can think of is: get to know more women, in more diverse contexts. Except I feel like I've already done a pretty good job of trying this, with no success. Any other advice I should be aware of?
Take up a new hobby, one with a reasonable gender balance. Historical reenactment (worked for me), crafting, local theater, community service. Find something you'll enjoy, let other people see you're good at it, and after some time, things will happen.
fwiw my sense is that being into lesbians and asexual women is often a problem guys run into when they're attracted to autistic/adhd women. idk if it's the high rates of neurodivergence among queer people or whether the traits just overlap or what. not sure to what extent it helps to know this if it's true, but
That's probably a lot of it. A lot of them are probably neurodivergent guys looking for a compatible partner.
I thought it was the extreme male brain theory of autism; those are women with relatively masculinized brains (relative to the general population of women).
A fair number of my exes were bi (roughly 1/3), which may be the moderate form of the problem.
I don’t suppose there’s a way to learn to be attracted to less masculinized brains? Seems necessary (or at least extremely helpful) for dating heterosexual women.
I hate to ignore a plainly phrased request for help, but I gave up on the romance thing a while ago. But I did have a large number of prior partners. I think they were probably after the money (or at least it was a confounding factor), though, so I can't give any advice. There's a lot of heterosexual male nerds here, though, so some of them may have some useful advice. The one thing I can think of is that from what I've seen getting into shape boosts your masculinity points and has health benefits to boot, so it seems like a no-brainer. Good luck!
depends on why you're not attracted to less masculine brains to start with but personally i find feminine brains kind of alien and scary and i have an innate fear that every part of my being will be rejected by any feminine woman on sight, even though i present as a woman. i expect this is a really standard experience for a lot of nerdy/autistic guys. ime (platonic!!) exposure to more women helps with this a lot.
(apparently it's pretty common for bi/lesbian women to worry that other women will view them as predatory for being attracted to them; to me this feels v related)
Re "personally i find feminine brains kind of alien and scary": I would read a blog post where you expand on this, since I think you understand the differences between male and female minds much better than I do. Like, I can list which personality traits are statistically more or less prevalent in which sex, but this level of understanding feels incomplete, kind of like how memorizing a book of French vocabulary isn't enough to actually communicate on the streets of Paris. I think you're right that more exposure would help; also posts like https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/sublimated-femininity.
To the extent that I can consciously identify why I might be attracted to more masculine brains: some statistically-masculine-skewed traits that I value are assertiveness, thick skin, very low neuroticism, openness to weird ideas, and lack of piercings/makeup/etc. (I have an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley reaction to such things).
At least temporarily, I would get out of the circles where that's the norm. In a previous era, a gal could just have have semi-masculine traits or interests, and that's just fine. Now, especially in some subcultures, the same type is encouraged to come out or something. Kind of a new one-drop rule.
This is where the apps, terrible as they are, can be very useful. Some interests and hobbies and professions just skew very male, to the extent that the women in them are both rare and disproportionately not straight.
You just need to meet lots of people and dating apps provide that service; Personally I found OKCupid, at least in my locale, had a userbase that I was more likely to resonate with, but there are a lot of apps out there and tastes differ. I note that while almost all the apps these days have basically the same UI the differences in user bases make for drastically different experiences.
Yeah, the problem seems to be that even when I spend time in more gender-balanced spaces (including Hinge), I almost never meet girls I'm romantically interested in there; it seems that the traits I find attractive are strongly correlated with having male-skewed interests and hobbies. Hence my followup comment above asking if there's a way to learn to be attracted to more feminine personalities (which seems like a long shot, but if anyone can help then it's probably the commenters on a Zvi post).
I checked Claude's answer here and it was awful and unhelpful, as I mostly expected, other than to correctly note that changing who you are attracted to is hard and tends to go badly.
The most basic suggestion would be that perhaps you need to get more experience with and appreciating the advantages of such folks and activities, and you can do that without trying to get a long term romance going. I know that's weak, but it is what I have that I can put in this location.
(There are some more... aggressive... strategies one might pursue here, in theory, but they are not things I can just tell someone to go do.)
I do understand the issue, I think - my own partner has approx 0 overlap in hobbies with me, and it does cause come issues, but it's not a deal-breaker. Zvi's suggestion is solid - exposure does a lot for enabling appreciation of different traits.
The other tack is to build the biggest funnel you can and filter aggressively. Straight tomboys do exist, and even if demand outstrips supply it is possible to be one of the men who ends up with one.
Something that’s been randomly nagging at me since Dating Roundup #2 was the line about “I have it on good authority that if you are male and want to date females, it is a bad idea to own cats.”
I asked my girlfriend and several other women about this but got nothing worse than “It’s neutral, I wouldn’t think about it” as a response. I’m curious for a more detailed explanation.
Can anyone clarify my thinking on dating apps? I've come to think of them as basically useless for me. I'd say I'm choosy with my relationships, I want to aggressively filter people out, so I would prefer 99.99% of people swipe left on me. But of course, this makes dating app algorithms hate me and my profile dies. The obvious solution is to mediate and/or fake things in the early stage, but this would be a pretty high cost for me to pay.
I guess my question is: is this cope? Has anyone succeeded with dating apps in a way that I would like to succeed? Maybe my profile and texting skills are just rubbish. To be clear, I'm neurotypical and not massively nerdy, maybe I should suck it up and just get more charismatic (somehow)
For starters: what's the Photofeeler score of the photos you're using? It costs a bit of money to evaluate but it's 100% worth it. If your primary photo is below 8.0, you haven't optimized your profile enough.
Do you want lots of people swiping left on you, or do you want to be swiping left on *them*? Sure you don't want to invest heaps of effort faking things in actual conversations but the app algorithm mostly only cares if people are swiping right on you, you're allowed to be selective.
Thanks for the link to my dating photography blog post. A bit of self promo (if I may): I do dating photography in Seattle with a moneyback guarantee if I can't get you at least one photo that ranks at least 8.5/10 in attractiveness on Photofeeler. It's $500/photoshoot or entirely free if I fail the Photofeeler test.
Unfortunately I've yet to see other photographers with a similar guarantee. There's lots of extremely talented photographers doing amazing artistic shots but that's not quite what gets the most attention on a dating site.
Have you heard of https://keeper.ai/ my friend is the founder. Incentive-aligned matchmaking (you pay a bounty for match or marriage), and they're trying to automate the process with AI. By making sure that you and the other person pairwise match all of your preferences they report a pretty high rate (though I'm not sure what the denominator is).
> For the meals, if this is ‘alone in your house’ then I could potentially see it, but if it applies to a restaurant it’s straight up nuts.
Another potentially relevant different is "choose to go out to dinner with someone else over staying home with your spouse" vs "going out to dinner with someone else while you're on a business trip or something so you wouldn't be able to stay with your spouse either way". I don't think anyone objecting to the latter is reasonable, but in the former case I'd rather ask the other person "is it okay if I bring my spouse too?"
Re: frugality:
Being frugal in situations such as first dates where https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/scwoBEju75C45W5n3/how-i-lost-100-pounds-using-tdt doesn't apply (I mean, unless you're going to hundreds of first dates a year) is different from being frugal in everyday situations. I can coinceive finding the former a red flag while finding the latter okay or even commendable.
One of Helen Gurley Brown’s pieces of advice for single women is: The way you feed him, or them, should have nothing to do with the way you feed yourself. I think same applies with willingness to spend on dates.
I used to be woke about gender until I delved into dating site statistics. Talk about a red pill. I think the biggest wakeup call was seeing that something like 99% of conversations were initiated by men. Taken together with everything else, it's pretty obvious that men and women are different. And the most successful couples, in my experience, are the ones who acknowledge and celebrate those differences rather than pretend they aren't there.
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
Over 100 years old, and still relevant!
Always difficult to figure out how to respond to just the quantity and variety of material covered in these posts. Kudos for comprehensiveness anyway.
But I just hope people know - almost all of the relationship information discussed here is insanity. The self-interest, the excessive focus on dating market structures and elements, the strategic approaches, even the discussion of “improve your partner by 25%” is completely bonkers. If you are reading this and think any of it is something you should employ or emulate, you are lost.
As an old, you figure out over time that there are no relationship experts, not much subject matter real wisdom to be provided, and so much idiosyncrasy in the relationship dynamic that you are pretty much on your own.
Yes, dating has game elements that cannot be ignored, especially in the App environment. But if you are actually seeking to meet a decent person, the quicker you get to being honest about yourself and what you are looking for, and then being honest with a potential partner, etc, the more likely something may work out.
Of course it’s a mess and a crap shoot. I don’t really know why some things works out and some don’t. But if you think any of what’s posted here is really relevant to a meaningful relationship outcome, you are generally doomed.
These dating roundups are best read as if if they were the appendix to some dystopian novel.
I agree that there's no real advice here; though I can't stop reading them anyway.
On one hand, just 🐝 yourself lol
On the other hand, it's not like conscious tactical and strategic effort resulted in much romantic success for me, and the romantic success that resulted didn't make my life noticeably better.
Returning to the first hand, wu wei resulted in a job I generally enjoy, pretty good physical fitness, some nice toys, a decent amount of savings (maybe not by the standards of this blog's readership, but I reckon I'm doong okay), a few good adventures, and not only no prospects but no prospects of prospects, at the age of 31. A guy could do worse, but I can't recommend it as a way to solve romantic problems.
But then do I even have romantic problems to solve? I don't really mind being alone, not the way some people seem to. It bothers me to be seen as a loser or weirdo by people around me, it bothers me to disappoint my parents (they're nice liberals who would never admit such a thing, perhaps not even to themselves, but I reckon it's there), but actually coming home to an empty apartment, I dunno, not that bad really. I read stuff like this series, or Feral Pawg Hunter's thread (https://twitter.com/FeralPHunter/status/1784582833110970856) and mostly think, not "wow, inspiring!" but "Damn, that sounds like a lot of work, and the end state doesn't seem all that great". Maybe that's cope, but maybe sometimes coping is a reasonable thing to do.
On the other ^n hand, I do still read this stuff and occasionally comment instead of having a sensible chuckle and going on to the next thing, so perhaps that's telling me something.
/deer diary
These Dating roundups are fun to read. I've not been single in a decade. Other married people I know also find dating fascinating. My wife routinely watches a bunch of reality TV dating shows (think love is blind). I often cringe too hard at the males making mistakes in the show to enjoy them.
I think it’s a lot more normal than Zvi thinks to spend more time « engaged » with a pet than with humans. If you telework, live alone, aren’t particularly extroverted…
Normal isn't the right word. It's the path of least resistance and can fill a shallow need for non-solipsistic interaction but not a deep need. If you would really like to be in a meaningful relationship and your biggest interaction is with your pet ... NGMI
I think it's normal in that it's common, but that doesn't make it healthy.
One can of course find ways to do both at once - eg. taking your dog to a dog park and interacting with the humans there while your dog plays with other dogs is great for all involved
Maybe physical attractiveness is fairly standardised, but emotional/intellectual attractiveness varies *wildly*. I chatted up my wife by talking about land taxation in Hong Kong, she then made the first romantic moves. I am not tall, and was unemployed at the time. Lads and lasses, if you're a decent human being, there's someone out there for you.
Behold! A young human male (a citizen of the USA) met a human female (a citizen of Tanzania) in in a USA college. Even though he was socially awkward, and she was four years his senior, she was attracted to him, and they are now married.
So the idea of human males from semi-matriarchal societies having success dating human females from patriarchal societies might be worth a shot.
Love those Tanzanian safaris and Zanzibari beach holidays!
I have the same experience. The compromise position is an absurd level of win-win.
Liked for the obscure AD&D reference.
Sounds like it works for quite a few people. This is what 'passport bros' do after all.
EDIT: Just realized you talked about this briefly in the first post!
A girl I've started dating sent me these studies recently:
1. (2023) "Two-thirds of Tinder users are in a relationship": https://mashable.com/article/are-many-tinder-users-in-relationships
2. (2015) "42 Percent of Tinder Users Aren't Even Single": https://www.wired.com/2015/05/tinder-users-not-single/
I couldn't believe it. My max estimate was maybe 15%. I'm honestly still very skeptical of these studies/surveys, but now think that it's higher than I previously thought.
I think the core issue with the first paper is that it has fairly low N and is slightly fishy in other ways (it apparently used the word "celibate" instead of "single" in the github code, they mistranslated because they are French, before they changed it, but unclear if for sure they used the word "single" in the original survey). But "65.3 percent of the 1,387 survey participants reported that they were married or otherwise in a relationship", what???
The other reason I'm skeptical of both papers is that I think they both failed to normalize to the actual distribution of users on Tinder. From what I remember, about half of Tinder users are between the ages of 18 to 24, so I think both studies actually provided a somewhat uniform distribution of ages, when they should have normalized closer to the Tinder age statistics (which they didn't have access to). They also probably didn't normalize for gender (I don't have access to the actual studies).
All of this to say, it's probably not as high as those papers claimed, but maybe there's a higher percentage of dating app users than we thought who are either perusing "for their friends", "out of curiosity / fun", "as a game", or, more likely, dissatisfied with their current relationship.
Somebody asked me whether my dating doc (https://jacquesthibodeau.com/date/) has been useful for me, so I wrote up my experience with it (Claude summarized my messages to their questions). The response has been positive:
* I've had about 15-20 women reach out to me after finding my dating doc. While I didn't pursue any of them, it was a good indicator of interest.
* I went on several dates with women who saw my doc afterwards and found it useful to know my intentions upfront.
* In the past few weeks, I've had 20+ women on dating apps specifically mention that they were impressed by the effort I put into creating my doc.
The general feedback was that my website was really well-done and people were impressed by the level of effort I put into it. One even initially thought it might be a joke, but ultimately found it genuine and appealing. I dates planned with several of them, but ultimately decided not to go because I'm currently focusing on one woman in particular.
However, I discovered that while the doc served as excellent supplementary information for women I had already connected with, it wasn't as effective for generating new leads on its own. The woman I'm currently focusing on didn't actually see my dating doc before we started talking.
Overall, I believe the combination of a well-crafted "date-me" doc and a strong dating app profile can be a powerful tool in finding compatible partners who appreciate your transparency and share your values. It's not a magic bullet, but it can certainly help you stand out and attract the kind of person you're looking for.
Great website!
I wonder if paying for Instagram/TikTok ads for your dating doc targeted to your city, interests and age range would work.
I think the biggest reason I'm single is that ~every girl I've ever been romantically interested in has turned out to be lesbian or asexual, on just large enough of a sample size that it's definitely not a coincidence.
Possible explanations that have been suggested to me:
- non-heterosexual women being statistically more likely to have personality/physical traits that I find attractive;
- non-heterosexual women being more relaxed around men;
- non-heterosexuality being disproportionately common among women in the circles I frequent.
To which the only actionable advice I can think of is: get to know more women, in more diverse contexts. Except I feel like I've already done a pretty good job of trying this, with no success. Any other advice I should be aware of?
Take up a new hobby, one with a reasonable gender balance. Historical reenactment (worked for me), crafting, local theater, community service. Find something you'll enjoy, let other people see you're good at it, and after some time, things will happen.
fwiw my sense is that being into lesbians and asexual women is often a problem guys run into when they're attracted to autistic/adhd women. idk if it's the high rates of neurodivergence among queer people or whether the traits just overlap or what. not sure to what extent it helps to know this if it's true, but
That's probably a lot of it. A lot of them are probably neurodivergent guys looking for a compatible partner.
I thought it was the extreme male brain theory of autism; those are women with relatively masculinized brains (relative to the general population of women).
A fair number of my exes were bi (roughly 1/3), which may be the moderate form of the problem.
I don’t suppose there’s a way to learn to be attracted to less masculinized brains? Seems necessary (or at least extremely helpful) for dating heterosexual women.
I hate to ignore a plainly phrased request for help, but I gave up on the romance thing a while ago. But I did have a large number of prior partners. I think they were probably after the money (or at least it was a confounding factor), though, so I can't give any advice. There's a lot of heterosexual male nerds here, though, so some of them may have some useful advice. The one thing I can think of is that from what I've seen getting into shape boosts your masculinity points and has health benefits to boot, so it seems like a no-brainer. Good luck!
depends on why you're not attracted to less masculine brains to start with but personally i find feminine brains kind of alien and scary and i have an innate fear that every part of my being will be rejected by any feminine woman on sight, even though i present as a woman. i expect this is a really standard experience for a lot of nerdy/autistic guys. ime (platonic!!) exposure to more women helps with this a lot.
(apparently it's pretty common for bi/lesbian women to worry that other women will view them as predatory for being attracted to them; to me this feels v related)
Re "personally i find feminine brains kind of alien and scary": I would read a blog post where you expand on this, since I think you understand the differences between male and female minds much better than I do. Like, I can list which personality traits are statistically more or less prevalent in which sex, but this level of understanding feels incomplete, kind of like how memorizing a book of French vocabulary isn't enough to actually communicate on the streets of Paris. I think you're right that more exposure would help; also posts like https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/sublimated-femininity.
To the extent that I can consciously identify why I might be attracted to more masculine brains: some statistically-masculine-skewed traits that I value are assertiveness, thick skin, very low neuroticism, openness to weird ideas, and lack of piercings/makeup/etc. (I have an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley reaction to such things).
At least temporarily, I would get out of the circles where that's the norm. In a previous era, a gal could just have have semi-masculine traits or interests, and that's just fine. Now, especially in some subcultures, the same type is encouraged to come out or something. Kind of a new one-drop rule.
This is where the apps, terrible as they are, can be very useful. Some interests and hobbies and professions just skew very male, to the extent that the women in them are both rare and disproportionately not straight.
You just need to meet lots of people and dating apps provide that service; Personally I found OKCupid, at least in my locale, had a userbase that I was more likely to resonate with, but there are a lot of apps out there and tastes differ. I note that while almost all the apps these days have basically the same UI the differences in user bases make for drastically different experiences.
Yeah, the problem seems to be that even when I spend time in more gender-balanced spaces (including Hinge), I almost never meet girls I'm romantically interested in there; it seems that the traits I find attractive are strongly correlated with having male-skewed interests and hobbies. Hence my followup comment above asking if there's a way to learn to be attracted to more feminine personalities (which seems like a long shot, but if anyone can help then it's probably the commenters on a Zvi post).
I checked Claude's answer here and it was awful and unhelpful, as I mostly expected, other than to correctly note that changing who you are attracted to is hard and tends to go badly.
The most basic suggestion would be that perhaps you need to get more experience with and appreciating the advantages of such folks and activities, and you can do that without trying to get a long term romance going. I know that's weak, but it is what I have that I can put in this location.
(There are some more... aggressive... strategies one might pursue here, in theory, but they are not things I can just tell someone to go do.)
I do understand the issue, I think - my own partner has approx 0 overlap in hobbies with me, and it does cause come issues, but it's not a deal-breaker. Zvi's suggestion is solid - exposure does a lot for enabling appreciation of different traits.
The other tack is to build the biggest funnel you can and filter aggressively. Straight tomboys do exist, and even if demand outstrips supply it is possible to be one of the men who ends up with one.
I wrote up a response to the polyamory section: https://open.substack.com/pub/livingwithinreason/p/contra-zvi-on-polyamory
Something that’s been randomly nagging at me since Dating Roundup #2 was the line about “I have it on good authority that if you are male and want to date females, it is a bad idea to own cats.”
I asked my girlfriend and several other women about this but got nothing worse than “It’s neutral, I wouldn’t think about it” as a response. I’m curious for a more detailed explanation.
I've been wondering about the same thing! I've thought of a few explanations, none of them satisfying. Seconding the curiosity.
Man, this a bad time for me personally for you to be posting this Zvi...
I'll guess I'll try it at least...if it works you put me on the next roundup.
Can anyone clarify my thinking on dating apps? I've come to think of them as basically useless for me. I'd say I'm choosy with my relationships, I want to aggressively filter people out, so I would prefer 99.99% of people swipe left on me. But of course, this makes dating app algorithms hate me and my profile dies. The obvious solution is to mediate and/or fake things in the early stage, but this would be a pretty high cost for me to pay.
I guess my question is: is this cope? Has anyone succeeded with dating apps in a way that I would like to succeed? Maybe my profile and texting skills are just rubbish. To be clear, I'm neurotypical and not massively nerdy, maybe I should suck it up and just get more charismatic (somehow)
To clarify, when I say I'm choosy I mean about personality, connection, that kind of thing. I don't think I'm demanding regarding looks
For starters: what's the Photofeeler score of the photos you're using? It costs a bit of money to evaluate but it's 100% worth it. If your primary photo is below 8.0, you haven't optimized your profile enough.
Do you want lots of people swiping left on you, or do you want to be swiping left on *them*? Sure you don't want to invest heaps of effort faking things in actual conversations but the app algorithm mostly only cares if people are swiping right on you, you're allowed to be selective.
Thanks for the link to my dating photography blog post. A bit of self promo (if I may): I do dating photography in Seattle with a moneyback guarantee if I can't get you at least one photo that ranks at least 8.5/10 in attractiveness on Photofeeler. It's $500/photoshoot or entirely free if I fail the Photofeeler test.
Unfortunately I've yet to see other photographers with a similar guarantee. There's lots of extremely talented photographers doing amazing artistic shots but that's not quite what gets the most attention on a dating site.
Have you heard of https://keeper.ai/ my friend is the founder. Incentive-aligned matchmaking (you pay a bounty for match or marriage), and they're trying to automate the process with AI. By making sure that you and the other person pairwise match all of your preferences they report a pretty high rate (though I'm not sure what the denominator is).
Keeper is $$$$
I bet it’s the right solution for some men and women.
> For the meals, if this is ‘alone in your house’ then I could potentially see it, but if it applies to a restaurant it’s straight up nuts.
Another potentially relevant different is "choose to go out to dinner with someone else over staying home with your spouse" vs "going out to dinner with someone else while you're on a business trip or something so you wouldn't be able to stay with your spouse either way". I don't think anyone objecting to the latter is reasonable, but in the former case I'd rather ask the other person "is it okay if I bring my spouse too?"
Re: frugality:
Being frugal in situations such as first dates where https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/scwoBEju75C45W5n3/how-i-lost-100-pounds-using-tdt doesn't apply (I mean, unless you're going to hundreds of first dates a year) is different from being frugal in everyday situations. I can coinceive finding the former a red flag while finding the latter okay or even commendable.
One of Helen Gurley Brown’s pieces of advice for single women is: The way you feed him, or them, should have nothing to do with the way you feed yourself. I think same applies with willingness to spend on dates.