
The Problem with Modern Romance Is Too Much Choice - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/the-problem-with-modern-romance-is-too-much-choice
======
colmvp
I'm just going to preface this by saying I'm a fairly physically unattractive
man (short, Asian, assymetrical face with no strong jawline).

The quality of the women (based on intellect, personality, accomplishments,
and appearance) who I've met in real life first before dating have been vastly
superior to the women who I managed to find a date with through online dating.

Besides the restrictiveness of the online dating medium, specifically its
inability to capture personality or warmth, I think another reason is because
the women I meet in real life are able to evaluate me individually for who I
am whereas in online dating you're practically always being compared to dozens
of people.

I also think that people are overly picky in online dating and treat their
specifications as sacrosanct instead of something to constantly self evaluate.
For example, it's fairly common for people to specify a preference for a
single race, usually their own. When I used to go on match.com I saw plenty of
white women who explicitly noted they only wanted to date white men. Fair
enough. And you know, a lot of white women I know in real life might have the
same preference given the nature of growing up in small towns dominated by a
single ethnicity and having consumed culture that largely glamorizes white
men. But they also ended up marry Asian men, not through online dating but
perhaps because they got to know them in college or at work or through
friends. Likewise I'm certain that some of the women I dated in real life
wouldn't have given me a chance in online dating. Perhaps it's because we
could share laughter and gain trust in one another before even considering the
concept of love. I'm sure there's also studies that show repeated exposure of
a person has a positive effect on their perception.

And if you read the story in Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance, he mentions a
similar anecdote where he met two Indian dudes, one who was struggling to meet
anyone through online dating, and the other who exclusively just met women in
real life and had no problems in that realm.

I guess my unscientific observation is that while online dating is certainly
gaining in popularity and can be successful for some people, that it can sort
of be misrepresentative of reality.

~~~
danharaj
Here's another thing society does that heavily penalizes "unattractive" men:
Men are strongly stigmatized for wearing make-up for personal (as opposed to
professional) use. It really isn't fair. A good foundation and some concealer
goes a long way.

I don't think attractiveness matters past initiating the first date in a cold
relationship. Who knows, is it because I've gotten older? Getting to know
someone makes their face so dynamic and expressive. Every human face is pretty
once you get to know it that way. Perhaps that is why it's easier to date
people we're already friends with: we already know how pretty and interesting
they are, what more could one want?

~~~
sotojuan
I'm guessing this isn't so much the case in other cultures as I had a few male
Korean friends who wore light make up.

~~~
danharaj
Oh, of course. It even changes with time within the same culture. In the
United States at least, away from major cities with a strong culture of
liberal individuality, there are extreme social pressures culminating in even
violence that police the conduct of both men and women when it comes to self-
expression through makeup and fashion.

------
curiousdater
So my experience and how it feels for an average to less then average guy in
looks(I'm causcasin ..5'10..170.. fit)to be on all these damn apps.

Basically we all want something hot and or attractive to us. I feel for women
who are less to average in looks have it better then guys. Probably sign into
these apps and get bombarded by guys.

I definitely date using match and plenty of fish(15 different dates a year)
Tinder to me is crickets. I'm well aware of why and oh well that's how it goes
but it does suck.

Though I've then tried Grindr and other bi apps. I've found both attractive
yet if I had found some chick who I liked in my 20s(in my 30s I was in a long
term relationship with a chick) and settled down I would most likely have
never explored my interest in guys. Would have just kept it to the normal
curious fun a lot of us guys have with each other in our teens.

Well using Grindr and others I now know what it feels like to be a chick...
sign on and get tons of messages and choose which one catches your eye. This
happens each time you open the app. Hey if your into both it's a great way to
beat loniless, meet new friends and have fun here/there.

Overall I just wanted to point out one mans use of these dating apps. I'm sure
I'm not alone in my struggle with finding the women I want and they want me
too. If Tinder keeps you busy your one lucky dude! Probably alone in using
those other apps or maybe not and that could be another thing these apps are
changing how/who we date and meet?

~~~
stuxnet79
I find this is one of the more useful comments I've ever read on this topic
(dating struggles and difference in male / female viewpoints).

Thanks for sharing.

~~~
curiousdater
Yeah it's so tough out there if your looks don't fit the mold. I think based
on the upvotes of my thread other guys are doing the same. Probably a small
majority are, as if you you are curious and disenchanted by str8 dating apps
too then why not?. Us guys are completely wound differenly then women and are
equally driven by one thing. I can imagine if I was smoking hot guy women
would be sending me hot pics like received on Grindr. That would be awesome
but nothing I will experienced in this lifetime.

There's no doubt I could be with a chick now but it wouldn't be with any I
want, who excite me and or who fit my check list. Thus until I find her I'm
biding my time between all these apps and always playing it safe and
infrequently on the bi apps.

------
jasode
_> So is there an ideally sized choice set when it comes to dating—one large
enough to include variety and depth, yet small enough that you can fairly
weigh each prospect’s potential without tripping your brain’s overload switch?
[...] Fisher puts people somewhere in the middle of that range. “Once you’ve
met nine people who are vaguely in the ballpark, choose one and get to know
that person better. If nothing works in that nine, go for another nine,” she
says._

The article talks about _simultaneous_ choices (choice overload). A related
concept is _serial_ choices and the _" when to stop looking for The One"_
dilemma. That's been modeled as The Secretary Problem[1] which calculates a
37% stopping point. It also has been discussed by several authors: [2] [3] [4]
[5]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem)

[2][https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-
Deci...](https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-
Decisions/dp/1627790365)

[3][https://youtu.be/OwKj-wgXteo?t=10m12s](https://youtu.be/OwKj-
wgXteo?t=10m12s)

[4][https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Love-Patterns-Ultimate-
Eq...](https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Love-Patterns-Ultimate-
Equation/dp/1476784884)

[5][https://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_fry_the_mathematics_of_love...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hannah_fry_the_mathematics_of_love?language=en)

~~~
wyager
It is worth noting that the 1/e secretary problem solution is optimal only if
your goal is to maximize the probability of choosing the single best
secretary.

If your goal is to do expectimax optimization, as decision theory would
dictate, you should make a decision after reviewing sqrt(n) applicants. That's
assuming a uniform distribution of utility among secretary choices. If the
distribution is non-uniform, another heuristic might be better.

~~~
avn2109
I assure you that in dating, utility is not even close to uniformly
distributed over secretaries. It is almost the least uniform naturally-
occurring distribution I can think of.

------
Spooky23
This is the key passage of the article that pretty much says it.

In short, if you're faced with 30 jars of jam to choose from, you'll narrow by
brand or GMO-status or whatever. Facing a choice for a mate in a list of 1,000
people, you filter by height, race, tits, or some other attribute.

Your outcome will be the same (ie. you'll have jam in your toast or a person
in your life), but the criteria different.

> When Benjamin Scheibehenne, a professor of cognition and consumer behavior
> at the University of Geneva, set out to replicate the jam study, he found no
> evidence that people were less satisfied with their choices when they had a
> larger array to select from. “It seems to be fairly difficult to overload or
> confuse or frustrate people just based on the number of options,”
> Scheibehenne says. “In most situations, people are quite good at coping.” He
> points out that if abundant choice were really as paralyzing as Schwartz and
> others have proposed, people would constantly get stymied in everyday
> situations like deciding which shirt to wear or what to have for lunch.

> Instead, Scheibehenne argues that people generally avoid being overwhelmed
> by practicing a kind of quick-and-dirty mental judo, using some kind of
> shortcut to limit their choices—whether that means giving certain factors
> more weight or simply skipping some of the presented choices.

~~~
tomp
This makes compete sense. As they say in the world of freelancing, "if you
have too much demand, raise prices". Same in dating, if you have too much
choice, raise standards ". Conversely, beggars can't be choosers.

------
winterismute
The feeling I am developing is that the success of dating apps correlates with
the fact that people spend more and more time working/looking for a job. I am
pretty not attractive but while in high-school/university I had multiple
partners whom I would meet just in my daily life and I felt it was the same
for most of my friends, but when we all started working full time (even doing
very different things) everything changed suddenly for most of us. I felt it
myself, I had little time to socialize with people because I would spend most
of my time in a place where socializing is not only not among the top
priorities but is in fact often discouraged (can cause conflict of interests
etc). The same thing literally drove some of my friends crazy. After I moved
(last year) to a different country for a new job (with a girl that had become
my wife by that time) I (we) noticed how difficult it was to simply make new
friends. Before, it was really easy to come across so many different kind of
people, while now I meet mostly males who did an engineering degree to whom I
can't anyway speak much. A very close friend I have of my same age recently
told me, during a rather depressing conversation, that I did the best thing by
marrying just after having started a professional career with the girl I met
in Uni, because trying afterwards is just so much harder. Guys from work who
are single just turn to dating apps, or go to courses on seduction etc. I do
think a healthy society should try to address this issue, somehow.

~~~
ido
That it's much harder to date/make new friends once you're done with school is
hardly a new phenomenon - it was true when I started working 15 years ago, and
it was probably true 30 years ago too.

~~~
winterismute
Well, it is true, of course. But I sometimes think about 2 things: \- Somehow,
we are working more [1] while not earning significantly more, and we do while
progress promised us shorter hours in the past. Hence I guess the phenomenon
is just getting worse? \- My father (I'm originally from Italy) dropped out
from school when he was 16, and many of the parents of my friends had a
similar experience. We never have the impression they strongly shared our
views on the issue. Like, maybe they also experienced it, but they still
reject the idea it is a general problem and simply attribute it to weak,
singular case and so on. Not sure.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/18/news/economy/bernie-
sanders-...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/18/news/economy/bernie-sanders-
americans-work-more/)

------
Lazare
Anecdotal agreement:

I spent some time using online dating several years ago, but I wasn't really
sure what I was looking for. I messaged a lot of women, got ignored by a lot
of women, went on a couple of very unfulfilling dates. The issue was that (for
me and my targets) when you log in there's just so _many_ people. So you use
very brutal winnowing to filter down to a manageable set, but (obviously) you
can only filter based on the info the site gives you: Height, weight,
religion, ethnicity, facial appearance. In so doing you throw away tons of
potential matches that you'd have got along great with, but the people you're
left with aren't really "matches" at all. They had no particular reason to
talk to me, and I had no particular reason to talk to them. "Hello fellow
human; do you wish to discuss current events?"

A couple years later (after a fairly unhappy but _very_ educational
relationship with someone I did NOT meet on a dating site) I tried online
dating again. This time I had a very specific idea what I was looking for, and
used keyword searches to find potential matches. I quickly filtered it down to
3 possible matches in my city, one of whom was far and away the best match. I
messaged her, she replied, and 4.5 years later we're still happily dating.

I think online dating is great if you have very specific criteria and you're
trying to find someone who matches at all, and need the ability to perform a
hard filter on a large pool of people you know don't match. Online dating is
terrible if you _don 't_ really know what you're looking for, and you're just
trying to find people to talk to.

(And of course, that goes both ways. Online dating is a horrible way to meet
someone who doesn't know what they're looking for, because they're likely to
use very arbitrary was to filter the pool down to a manageable subset. But
it's great if your target _does_ know what they're looking for, because if you
match, your message will really stand out.)

------
Overtonwindow
I think the issue of "too much choice" in online dating has seeped out into
the real world, making people believe the world is full of infinite choice, so
why get married? Why settle? Why TRY? When the world beckons.

~~~
Cthulhu_
That's another thing, everyone has the freedom to move and live wherever they
want, to work where they want under their conditions (hours, pay, etc.
Interestingly enough, working conditions aren't up for debate as much), etc.
The other part is that there's very, very few relationships that end up in
"for life"; my parents' generation is still the ones that believe in marriage
for life, they manage their problems like adults. But there's no social reason
to stay together anymore, at least if both parties are financially independent
- on that note, I know a few people that stay together not because they want
to, but for practical and financial reasons. as in, the woman / mother can't
move because she couldn't afford it. Kinda sad really.

------
bruceb
Considering HN is a relatively affluent crowd would anyone who is having
trouble online dating pay to have their dating profile edited/rewritten and
also their msgs to potential dates (I say to women as would seem to be most
likely) . Thus saving time and lessening frustration?

There seem to be a lot of decently intelligent men that are not skilled at
writing good profiles and msgs.

Thoughts on what one would pay, with and without a guarantee of X success.

~~~
curiousdater
Is it really about what's written???

90% is visual is it not?

How is it for you ... if you don't find her attractive as im sure you look at
her pics first.. are you going to bother reading what her profile says?

~~~
bruceb
Do people judge on looks, of course but women less so. How a profile is
written can absolutely make a difference. It is your personality translated in
to words.

~~~
curiousdater
Nah as bisexual guy and in my experience women are more judgemental then guys.

They after all might procreate with you.

~~~
Consultant32452
Just to put some data on this phenomenon. Women rate 80% of men as less
attractive than average. Oddly enough, they message them anyways.

[https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-
dat...](https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/)

~~~
szemet
Average? That's ok. If it were median there would be some problem here
though... ;)

(e.g. If every men is the same, except one who is beautiful, than everybody is
below the average but one.)

~~~
Consultant32452
Uhh, you can't have 80% below the median. That's impossible by definition.

~~~
szemet
Yes that's my point. But 80% below the average can be a valid/true valuation,
no logical glitch here: If the "wisdom of the (female) crowd" says that's the
case, then it may be true - so I don't see the issue here...

So to clarify - your data says nothing about whether women are judgemental -
they may be just realistic ;) If beauty is in the eye of the beholder than how
can we argue them?

------
k__
I'm into polyamory, I'm also rather alternative looking (mowhawk, piercings).

These things filter >99% of the people out, but most of them aren't of my
interest in the first place.

Globally I have lesser choice, locally it works out pretty good for me, at
least at the moment.

~~~
danharaj
I'm nominally polyamorous as well. I haven't tried to maintain multiple
relationships at a time (one is already so hard!) but I prefer to date people
with polyamorous tendencies. It makes dating and commitment so much easier and
all of my romantic relationships have translated into intimate friendships
when they ended. I find that polyamory is a good proxy for flexibility and a
more deliberate attitude towards cultivating relationships.

~~~
k__
My longest relationships were poly. I have to go to specific places (offline
meetups and online communities) but in my experience it's a viable way to
structure ones love life :)

------
Mz
I don't think "too much choice" is really a problem. I think having no idea
how to find a good match plus too much choice is problematic. If you have no
idea what you are looking for, it is incredibly time consuming to sort through
your choices. But more options are good -- IF you know what you want/need.
Many people just don't.

~~~
unclenoriega
I think it's fair to say that an inability to effectively evaluate the choices
is implicit in "too much choice". It becomes too much when it becomes too
difficult to evaluate.

~~~
Mz
I have spent plenty of time on a forum where people routinely ask relationship
questions and many people seem to have plenty of trouble evaluating even just
the current relationship they are in right now and whether or not it is worth
staying.

These are perfectly intelligent people.

I don't think the world really has established good rubrics for how to sort
out who to marry. The high divorce rate also suggests we have trouble with
this.

So, I posit that not knowing what you want/need in a romantic partner is a
problem no matter how many people you are considering -- even if it is just
one.

------
thr328982
I think most men have opposite experience. Only a celebrity can choose from
hundreds of potential mates.

It is almost impossible to find a good partner for starting a family (healthy,
bellow 26, no debt, family values).

~~~
mancerayder
Below 26 is your killer. Statistically, people marry later than before, and
women are more educated (both 'than before' and 'than men'). Women have more
career opportunities than before, so why would they want to marry at 26 (or
sub-26, as you put it). That kills their opportunities for careers and post-
collegiate education. Family values? That's one specific to your region of the
country (I'm in a less pious part of the U.S., thankfully). No debt? That's a
hard one given how much more 'the critical things' (health care, education,
housing, not talking about computers) cost to millenials.

What you described are pre-1980 criteria in a post-2010 world.

~~~
nashashmi
Not really true. There are many women out there who marry below 26, even with
career opportunities. Debt tends to be low, though not zero. And family values
are high. However, they do tend to be from a set of ethnicities that are not
extreme Western or American.

The women you may be referring to are unbounded, liberal, and non-restrictive.
The set of men they tend to attract are less serious, less guided, are more
short-termed. Marriage for them before 30 is a situation of rarity.

> Statistically, people marry later than before.

True when you include certain cultural demographics.

~~~
sotojuan
FWIW the groups of people that marry before 26 may not be attractive to the
average HN reader as they tend to be moderately to very religious (at least
that's my experience) or "conservative" e.g. a good amount of my
suburban/semi-rural Texan high school acquaintances already got married (I'm
22) yet no one I know from my NYC college class is anywhere close to that.

------
susan_hall
At the moment, this post has 4 upvotes and yet it is in the #7 place on the
front page of Hacker News. How is that possible? 4 upvotes gets a post that
high on the front page?

~~~
tashoecraft
submitters karma is 25637, that probably has something to do with it.

~~~
0x0
Quite impressive karma count for only having 10 comments. A zillion story
submissions of which almost all are from nautil.us though. What's going on
here?

~~~
resonantjacket5
It's not as nefarious at it seems. The guy/girl just submits three or four
stories a day from nautil.us / new york times/ phys.org mostly.

And over time just built up some points. Probably just shot up because of 4
upvotes at the same time.

~~~
buro9
Probably written a bot to submit all stories from a few top sites.

As others submit the same stories, the first poster has their story upvoted.

Result is that this user is credited nearly all of the upvotes from a few core
sites that have content of interest to the HN audience.

------
cconcepts
Thanks for posting this, a very thought-provoking article.

This sentence: "He thinks too much choice overwhelms us and makes us unhappy—a
phenomenon he calls the paradox of choice" reminded me of this humorous clip:
[https://youtu.be/UtwKFZHY5o4?t=252](https://youtu.be/UtwKFZHY5o4?t=252)

Preparing for downvotes for posting something overtly Christian....

