
The stable marriage problem and modern dating - arvarik
https://www.arvarik.com/the-stable-marriage-problem-and-modern-dating
======
poorman
Having worked on a dating app startup with a 2m seed (it's since pivoted to a
brewery run by active gang members), I can say the problem of dating is looked
at horribly wrong.

People assume dating is about finding the person "most compatible" with you.
Compatibility is an illusion. Most people tend to date until they have an idea
of "what they don't want". Once they know and they find someone who checks the
boxes, they settle down.

This article [https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-
okcupid/](https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/) is not about a
guy who created some algorithm for finding love. The algorithm was simple. He
went on enough dates to know what he didn't want, and then found the person
that matched that criteria.

~~~
YetAnotherMatt
Do you have any data to back that up that you can share? I don't mean to call
you out, it could very well be the case, people date in rather not-
understandable ways to me.

What you're saying does not match my experience though. Quite a few friends of
mine have dated only very few people before getting married.

Anecdotally, the marriages that seem to do the best are the marriages in which
both partners did not have a dating history with a lot of partners "to find
out what they don't want". That said, I'm aware of the negative selection bias
there.

~~~
watwut
Because long term marriage is a lot about your tendency to create long term
emotional ties to people. It is also about your willingness to think about
relationship itself and put work on it.

It is also about selection, but much more about ability to weed out abusive
people and selfish people and so on. Of course also compatibility, clean freak
will never be happy with messy person.

And those abilities form a lot in childhood, in family and with friends. They
are also about your deep seeted values.

A lot of short relationships suggest either lack of interest in long term
relationship or inability to form it.

The way hn talks about these issue always strikes me like a bunch of people
who think people are machines and kind of don't undestand how people form
relationships. Like qualifying a partner that don't fit some checkbox on
original list someone was forced to make as "settling down". There is
chemistry alias emotional and hormonal side to the whole thing, people.

~~~
Retric
Looking at divorce statistics you find that pattern doesn’t really hold up.
There are spikes around various life transitions like retirement which still
occur even with long term emotional bonds. Long term relationships are a
continuous negotiation as people’s want’s and needs change.

Edit: Collage education and getting first married at an older age
significantly lower the odds of divorce. Which suggests having multiple prior
relationships increase the odds of marriage success. However, we don’t have
good statistics for this stuff.

~~~
btilly
You are not offering evidence against the hypothesis.

Divorce spikes around various life transitions occur because predictable
events create predictable stresses that predictably are hard on marriages.
Examples include the death of a child, children leaving the home, financial
crisis, retirement and long-term illness.

Pairs who proved compatibility by settling down fast last longer _because_
they are more likely to survive these stress points. However stress points are
still stress points and "more likely to survive" still means that lots won't.

Personal disclaimer. I married at 20 to my second girlfriend. I was her first
boyfriend. We did divorce..but only after 25 years. You can decide for
yourself whether a 25 year marriage is evidence that we were more or less
stable than an average couple.

~~~
Retric
Divorce after 25 years is statistically below average for a first marriage in
the US. Waiting would have significantly reduced your odds of divorce.
Overall, most relationships don’t involve marriage and many people never get
married, so it’s really a question of what you consider below average.

I don’t think a relationship that ends is always worse than one that
continues. Many stay together out of habit, fear, finances, having kids etc,
continue long enough and someone is likely to die. Simply lasting a long time
is thus a very poor measure of success. Arguably being happy, raising well
adjusted kids, financial success, and or a host of other things could be
considered a much better benchmark.

So I will turn it around, what’s the odds you would each have found a better
partner or even become a better partner by looking longer?

~~~
watwut
> Waiting would have significantly reduced your odds of divorce.

You can not use statistic thay way. General stat for divorce does translate
into individual one like this.

------
anikan_vader
>> The first graph demonstrates the O(n²) complexity of the algorithm. We can
see that as the community grows larger, even by a small amount, the amount of
iterations it takes to solve the matching problem grows exponentially.

This statement is contradictory. Probably the author is using "exponentially"
to mean quick growth. I suppose this is alright in common parlance, but I find
it disturbing when people describe a function as exponential just because it
is a superlinear polynomial.

~~~
pengaru
Whenever I visit family in the midwest this phenomenon makes me twitch.

It seems people out there have taken to using "exponentially" as a pseudo-
scientific word meaning "a lot". i.e. "you're making my job exponentially more
difficult"

Edit: fixed typo :)

~~~
ARandomerDude
It seems like people out there are using "this phenomena" to mean "this
phenomenon."

I say this not to be rude, but to note that if we needlessly scrutinize each
other's grammar, no one will be happy.

~~~
wwarner
I'm smiling tho.

------
euix
Some interesting stuff there. I think you could also frame it as a explore vs
exploit problem. If we assume there is a successive series of partners you
could meet but only in sequence and you choose whether to "attempt to exploit,
i.e. form a relationship" or pass and continue to explore. At which point
should you commit such that it maximizes the expected gain (marginalizing over
your lifespan)? It's like RL game except you only get to play once. In
addition, the time gap between successive prospects is unknown and may even be
infinite.

Last year I purchased a condominium in the downtown core of where I live and I
thought the process was very similar. At the time the market was very
competitive. It's a sequence of potential "offers" for which you make a binary
decision and you cannot go back and must consider them in chronological order
and there is no guarantee if you pass on a okay condo now that you will find a
spectacular one down the line and prices will not be even less palpable.

~~~
albntomat0
What you describe is called the "secretary problem", among other names

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

~~~
hinkley
I was trying to explain this to a friend playing Animal Crossing. I did not
get very far.

Optimality breaks down when humans get involved. Because what most humans need
is to _believe_ they did a good job picking, which is quite a bit different.
If the best solution falls into your lap you may continue spending energy on
that decision forever, and that longing for what might have been is a big
opportunity cost (which is magnified if your partner ever finds out about it).
We have this sort of intuition that we have to put a bit of sweat equity into
a decision before it feels good. Which may relate to the somewhat debunked
theory of 'ego exhaustion'.

You may know what fridge you want but you have to keep showing options to your
spouse because they aren't okay with the decision yet, and if you rush it then
you'll regret it. You can spend that energy now, or you can make emotional
interest payments for the life of the fridge. At work you sometimes have to do
the wrong thing so that people get why the more expensive option makes sense.

What my friend was doing and what I see other people do, including myself, is
make a list of targets of opportunity. 5% of the options are acceptable and I
will stop when I get access to the first one in that category, be it a fridge,
an islander, or a partner. This person is smart, funny, likes cats, and your
family adores them, and you have chemistry so why not. You feel good with your
decision, or at least you do at the time. You might still leave them six years
later because it turns out those other things you didn't like overshadowed
everything else, once you had to live in the same house. How many other
potential matches went away during that time?

------
zwkrt
This is especially interesting as same-sex dating is even more skewed toward
online interaction, probably just due to the fact that we make up only ~5% of
the population; any person we meet in public is straight 19 out of 20 times
[1].

[1] [https://cdn.static-
economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...](https://cdn.static-
economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20180818_FBC543.png)

~~~
automatoney
What I'm wondering about is what the attractiveness distribution looks like
for gay men and lesbians (and also bi/pan people, although there's probably
less data to pull from there). I would guess that for gay dudes it matches the
bell curve shape - anecdotally my experience of online dating more closely
matches what my straight female friends see in terms of getting matches being
easy. And also my conceptualiztion of same-sex attraction is "I'm attracted to
men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to women" NOT "I'm
attracted to men in the same way straight women tend to be attracted to men."
But I'm super interested in seeing how that plays out, especially given other
confounding variables of being gay. And I have no idea what the lesbian curve
would look like - I suppose I would predict it looks like the pareto
distribution, but I have no idea.

Also the prevalence of "boyfriend twins" matches with what the site says -
they end up with a partner of almost identical attractiveness because the
curves for both of them match, and there's no bias in who makes the first
move.

~~~
abnercoimbre
Gay male with a fiancé here, and I love the boyfriend twins analogy. My
partner and I are (gratefully) described as similarly good-looking -- curious
store clerks like to ask us if we're siblings but then quickly realize we're
probably a couple.

> I'm attracted to men in the same way straight men tend to be attracted to
> women

See, we wouldn't know how to answer this! Certain ways our straight friends
describe their love interests sound foreign to us..

~~~
automatoney
Y'know the boyfriend twin thing makes me wonder... how successful might a
dating app be that just takes a front and profile photo, and then matches
people by facial similarity?

The attraction comparison is mostly from me being pretty visual and noticing
that many straight men are also quite visual.

~~~
k__
When I use FaceApp to make a picture of me look female, it looks like my
sister, which I don't find very attractive and many people say my sister is
hot.

------
k__
_" the top 20% of men hold 80% of cumulative attractiveness in the eyes of
women"_ \- OKCupid stats

As a guy who lives polyamorous, this is an interesting observation.

Many guys told me that they try the poly life, because if they don't have to
be "the one" for a women, their potential partners would give them a chance
even if they aren't a 100% fit.

Somehow, only a few guys end up with multiple women.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> "the top 20% of men hold 80% of cumulative attractiveness in the eyes of
> women" \- OKCupid stats

Also seems to hold up on Tinder:

[https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-
ii-g...](https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-
unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-
your-2ddf370a6e9a)

~~~
PeterW2
This is to be expected because, due to biological differences, male and female
mammals have different mating strategies:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_pluralism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_pluralism)

~~~
ducttapecrown
However, humans are markedly different from other mammals, so maybe it isn't
to be expected!

~~~
everdrive
Mating strategies are not exactly uniform within the group known as mammals,
either. A number of things come into play, such as the resource differential
between sperm and egg, and then general sexual dimorphism.

------
gerbilly
Schopenhauer believed that we can't control who we are attracted to, nature
does, and further that the mates nature predisposes us to aren't the one most
likely to make us happy, it's the ones most likely to produce genetically
compatible offspring.

"Love... casts itself on persons who, apart from the sexual relation, would be
hateful, contemptible and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the
species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover
shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him... Only from this is it
possible to explain why we often see very rational, and even eminent, men tied
to termagants and matrimonial fiends..."

~~~
danans
> Only from this is it possible to explain why we often see very rational, and
> even eminent, men tied to termagants and matrimonial fiends...

That's Schopenhauer demonstrating his well attested misogyny.

~~~
asguy
So what? Plenty of women write from their perspective, which could be taken as
misandry.

There's something to learn by putting yourself in someone's shoes, and seeing
from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives Matter).

~~~
danans
> Plenty of women write from their perspective, which could be taken as
> misandry.

Women writing from their perspective != misandry any more than men writing
from their perspective is misogyny. Those words have specific definitions that
you are abusing to make a false equivalency.

And what's wrong with calling out historical misogyny when it is presented as
wisdom? That's not to say Schopenhauer has nothing useful to offer, but his
misogyny isn't one of those things. It's no different from calling out racism
in a similar historical context - like acknowledging that Winston Churchill
was a great statesman and also simultaneously a very racist person.

Schopenhauer's misogynistic perspective has long been the default of much of
society, so it doesn't need to be treated with kid gloves.

> seeing from their perspective (e.g. the current protests, and Black Lives
> Matter).

18th century misogyny doesn't deserve the same hearing out as BLM protests
against contemporary police brutality. That logic would also excuse the
presentation of 18th century racism as a valid perspective today.

------
dilippkumar
I am interested in how dating apps are changing humanity. Starting with three
assumptions:

1\. Over several generations of successful partnering, Human cognition has
become really good at estimating someone's "rank" as a potential mate (in the
stable marriage problem sense).

2\. Language, modern UX design schemes and dating apps do not have sufficient
bandwidth to communicate all the signals needed to "rank" a potential mate.

3\. Dating apps present the lowest bandwidth signals first (photograph, age,
height etc) and expand out to higher bandwidth signals after an initial
screening (Language, communication, cultural similarity etc in messages).

Putting these ideas together, it's possible that dating apps will reward an
entire generation for optimizing for those narrow range of signals that work
well on dating apps (and not reward investing into developing a well rounded
personality). I would think that being good at Instagram, TikTok and Photoshop
might almost become evolutionary advantages for today's 14 year olds as they
grow older and start seeking partners.

How will this change our society after 5-6 generations of descendants who all
found partners on dating apps? Should schools begin to teach 8 year olds how
to photoshop away their bad hair days because one day it will become an
essential skill to being successful at one of the most important human
experiences?

~~~
kennywinker
A contest is only an evolutionary advantage if the winners reproduce more, or
more successfully, than the losers.

So assuming you're not having babies with everyone you match with on tinder,
having a large number of matches isn't actually an increase in fitness. I
haven't seen any evidence that people who don't do well on dating apps don't
actually end up reproducing... in fact it's possible less success in that
realm could be correlated with stronger relationships when you do find someone
- since you don't feel you have a million other options waiting in the wings.

Now having large number of matches means you have more to choose from, so
perhaps you're likely to get a "better" partner - but this seems like it would
be a fairly weak and therefore slow-acting selection bias.

~~~
gowld
Evolutionary success isn't about stronger relationships, it's about having
more sex with less birth control and a basically safe environment for
childhood survival.

A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in
stable relationship, as can (to a lesser exteny) a woman who is so unstable
that her children are adopted.

~~~
kennywinker
I was meaning stronger relationships, as in ones that are more likely to get
to "let's have kids". But I'll meet you at your point, is stability in a
relationship a bad strategy?

My answers would be:

1\. it's debatable

2\. there are multiple viable strategies

3\. any theory about what increases fitness needs testing and ones like this
are very hard to prove or disprove since the signals are noisy.

> A male in unstable relationships can have far more offspring than a man in
> stable relationship

Theoretically can have, sure. But that doesn't instantly translate to that
being a higher fitness strategy. For example - does that strategy work in
practice, or only in theory? And if it does, what is the success of those
offspring? An individual's reproductive success is only as good as their
offspring's reproductive success. It's quite possible kids from stable homes
are more likely to have more kids than those from unstable homes for a million
subtle reasons.

------
grugagag
I'll chime in with my experience. I married a partner who gave me a strong
sense of trust and we now have a child together and are a happy family. We are
not very compatible in the sense that we have different mindsets and
personalities but share values. We both agreed that rather than trying to
change each other we should strive to complete each other instead. It is hard
work, but I have the sense that marriage is never easy. Previous to meeting
each other I dated a bit more than she did. I did the online dating and it did
not work at for my personality. We ended up being introduced by a common
friend.

Edit: I think it may be relevant to the discussion. Im in my early 40s and
she's in her late 30s so marrying was bound to happen at some point around
this age.

~~~
war1025
> We are not very compatible in the sense that we have different mindsets and
> personalities but share values.

The way I've heard this phrased is that you don't want to marry someone with
the same strengths as you, you want to marry someone who has the strengths you
are lacking. You want someone who will complement you.

~~~
grugagag
This is not something I was specifically looking for when I was dating. I
wasn't very sure what I was looking for to be honest, I think I was trying
find someone to get along with as well as be attracted physically. When I was
dating I wasn't even looking for a wife and this is a bit of a problem with
the dating culture, only few want to take this step. This is important because
it take your life to a different level or completely wreck it if the marriage
fails and end up with kids and bills

~~~
war1025
> When I was dating I wasn't even looking for a wife and this is a bit of a
> problem with the dating culture

I can see how someone could easily get stuck in the idea of "dating" as a
thing.

I got married at 23, so I guess that's a stage of my life I didn't spend much
time in.

------
YetAnotherMatt
One factor that I didn't see addressed in the post which does make a
significant impact is that men in general rate women more similarly than women
rate men.

See for example:

[https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-
audiences/m...](https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-
audiences/men-demographics-and-
audiences-9818#:~:text=recent%20research%20from%20Wake%20Forest,what%20makes%20an%20attractive%20man.&text=While%20most%20men%20agreed%20that,to%20agree%20about%20men's%20attractiveness)

As such, male advantage is probably a lot lower in the real world, if
(hyperbolic) every woman has a different man on nr 1 of their preference list,
and every man has the same woman as nr 1 of their preference list, all women
could theoretically have their best possible partner, while only one man can.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
I'm always surprised that while men apparently rate women's attractiveness on
a bell curve, women seem to rate men on a Pareto distribution.

Considering how much I hear about beauty standards and how they harm women, I
almost never hear anything about male beauty standards.

If society is to be improved by having more realistic female beauty standards,
then there's apparently a lot more headroom for society to be improved by
having more realistic male beauty standards.

~~~
minikites
Unrealistic beauty standards are absolutely a problem for both men and women,
the difference is that in society, men can be valued for other things
(occupation, knowledge, athletics) and that is much less true for women.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
That's fair but it's not a zero sum game. Making men happier on average
doesn't necessarily make women unhappier.

------
Causality1
I think this overlooks a good many points. For example, the "being the
initiator is always better" claim would be more accurately framed "having been
the initiator is always better". The data completely ignores the downsides
because it only looks at the potential results, not the path to get those
results.

Yes, _if_ you're willing to face repeated rejection, _if_ you're willing to
bother people who aren't interested in you and ignore the guilt of having done
so, then it's better to be the initiator.

------
atlasunshrugged
I didn't see it mentioned but I thought I'd call out that one of the best
articles I've read on the topic of dating was from the Wait But Why Blog

[https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-
partner.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html)
[https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-
part-2.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html)

------
dvt
This is a complicated and very interesting problem; we had some fantastic
related discussion here[1][2] earlier this year. I like your angle of
population size being the "input" of some n^2 "matching algorithm" \-- it's
probably a bit _too_ game theoretic in practice, but I think it makes sense.

I'm of the opinion that online dating has been creating some real market
problems; as you mention, communities were small and people met within their
own circles back in the 60s. But nowadays there are _millions of people_ just
a swipe away, and FOMO can be really strong, and as such, supply/demand curves
are extremely skewed.

Fun article!

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406583)

[2] [https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-
apps/](https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/)

------
tathougies
Easy dating app: instead of making profiles and 'matching', just organize a
bunch of dances, hikes, etc in a community and charge a nominal fee for
membership. This will likely lead to much better matches than some silly
algorithm.

~~~
parliament32
This exists:
[https://www.eventsandadventures.com/](https://www.eventsandadventures.com/)

The downside is there's a lot of overlap between "people who are online
dating" and "people who aren't good in group social settings".

~~~
dmitrygr
eventsandadventures are scum. please do not even give them clicks.

Source (among many): [https://www.complaintsboard.com/events-and-adventures-
possib...](https://www.complaintsboard.com/events-and-adventures-possible-
scam-c383899)

some examples: if you end up "not single" you cannot cancel your membership
and are obligated to keep paying through the agreed term, BUT are not allowed
to participate in any events as they are "for singles only".

~~~
Rebelgecko
If they were upfront about that, I actually think it's a good thing. One of
the big conflicts of interests for dating apps is that if they're _too_
effective it's bad for business. They have a vested interest in keeping you on
the platform as long as possible, but with this sort of payment process the
company isn't punished for you finding a relationship.

The apps are particularly bad at this. Bumble in particular heavily promotes
the profiles of people who are traveling. So when I go on vacation I get the
dopamine hit of 10x more matches than usual, but with a decreased chance of
actually forming a lasting connection. On the flip side when I'm not traveling
probably 15% of the profiles I see are people at the nearest airport or flight
attendants who live in other cities.

------
willdearden
There are a ton of papers on the properties of stable matching under random
preferences. The classic paper (Pittel 1989
[https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0402048?journalCode=s...](https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/0402048?journalCode=sjdmec))
calculates the average rank of men and women for their partners under male-
proposing Gale Shapley. They find the men's average rank is O(log(n)) and the
women's average rank is O(n / log(n)). Depending on how you calculate percent
advantage, that roughly matches your simulations.

~~~
likelybear
The difference based on which side proposes turns out to be a knife-edge
result for balanced markets! For imbalanced markets, the short side gets
average rank `O(log(n))` in every stable matching and the long side gets `O(n
/ log(n))`

Edit: reference is Ashlagi et al (2015). "Unbalanced Random Matching Markets:
The Stark Effect of Competition"
[http://web.mit.edu/iashlagi/www/papers/UnbalancedMatchingAKL...](http://web.mit.edu/iashlagi/www/papers/UnbalancedMatchingAKL.pdf)

------
BadassFractal
COVID is throwing an interesting wrench into dating. No more bars, clubs,
large social gatherings, everybody working or studying remotely, most people
wearing masks in public, meeting in person carries the risk of contracting the
virus.

Meeting a new romantic interest in person first is bound to take a big hit.
Most first encounters will have to be through online dating apps. If the
OKCupid study is to be believed, 80% of men on these apps will be frustrated
from the inability of dating "within their league". What is this going to lead
to?

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
> What is this going to lead to?

Statistically speaking, higher bandwidth costs for pornhub.com and if things
were open some more crazy mass shooters?

------
mips_avatar
One time I was arguing with my female friend that women were overly-selective
on dating apps. She disagreed and to prove her point handed me her phone with
Tinder open. I began swiping on guys on the app, and I was amazed at how bad
their profiles were. A lot of the guys might have actually been attractive in
real life, but their pictures made them look like smelly weirdos. I can't say
this experience changed my strategy much, but it was definitely eye-opening.

------
tzs
The article links to another article [1] at the same site for a description of
the stable marriage problem. I don't think the description is right.

Here is the description:

> Find a stable matching between two equally sized sets of elements where each
> element has a preference ranking of all the elements in the opposite set.

> A matching is stable if there are no unstable pairings.

> An unstable pairing happens in the following example:

> A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other
> set. However, B prefers 1 and A prefers 2.

Let's arbitrarily call the lettered set the males and the numbered set the
females.

That definition of an unstable pairing cannot possibly be correct, because it
is defined entirely in terms of male preferences.

For a pairing to be unstable you need a male who prefers a different female,
and you need that female to prefer him over her current male. Only then are
they both willing to ditch the current partner to form the new pair.

A correct definition of unstable pairing must involved conditions on both male
preferences and female preferences.

It should be something like this:

> A and B from one set gets paired with 1 and 2 respectively from the other
> set. However, B prefers 1 over 2 and 1 prefers B over A.

[1] [https://www.arvarik.com/visiting-the-stable-marriage-
problem](https://www.arvarik.com/visiting-the-stable-marriage-problem)

------
konaraddi
At work, we had a problem that's similar to the stable marriage problem. We
ended up finding another combinatorial optimization problem called the
"assignment problem" [0] that fit more closely with our problem. Here's a
brief summary of the assignment problem:

Suppose you had people in two groups A and B where each individual in group A
wants to pair up with an individual in group B and visa versa. If you can
assign a "compatibility score" to each possible pair, then the goal is to find
the set of pairs, where a pair consists of an individual from A and an
individual from B, that maximizes the sum of the compatibility scores. In
other words, the assignment problem is about finding the best 1:1 mapping
between groups A and B when given a compatibility score for every possible
pair between the groups of individuals.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignment_problem)

~~~
viklove
This isn't how it works in the real world at all, though. People want to
optimize for their own pair, with no regard for "maximizing the sum of all
compatibility scores." In other words, I don't care about anyone else's
marriage, I only want me and my partner to be as happy as possible.

~~~
konaraddi
Absolutely! I agree. To be clear, I brought up the linear sum assignment
problem because it’s relevant, I liked reading about it, and perhaps someone
else here would like to read about it too. At work, we applied the linear sum
assignment problem when comparing results from a tracking algorithm to the
truth data.

------
tianlong
The reality is that men profiles on online dating apps are terrible! I have
tried to check for fun both male and female profiles and there are so many
women with attractive pictures while men have really poorly curated
profiles.... Are women naturally more attractive than men or culturally, women
are "forced" to take care of themselves and show how attractive they are while
this pressure does not exist for men (men have other type of pressures, like a
good salary)? I do believe is the second one. As woman, I'd love to see
handsome men, online and not only.

~~~
tianlong
More handsome attractive men!

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at_a_remove
I used to work at a dating service pre-IntarWebz. Still had a matching algo. I
started privately running some analyses looking to confirm or disprove my
hunches. I will say this: it's still brutal out there.

~~~
war1025
A thing I think is interesting is that comparing my single friends to my
married friends, there isn't really an obvious advantage the married friends
have in terms of skills / attractiveness / etc. other than they decided they
wanted to be married.

Someone with a mind to settle down can find someone to settle down with pretty
quickly it seems. I'm sure there is more to it than that, but I'm not sure
what.

~~~
at_a_remove
I dunno. The place where I worked had some folks pretty desperate to get
married who couldn't seem to make it happen. But almost every trend pointed
out in this blog entry was something I saw from constantly entering data. It
was very, uh, eye-opening at the same time it was quite a bummer.

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dddddaviddddd
Original source for the assumptions used in the model (OkCupid blog post from
2009, via the Wayback Machine):
[https://web.archive.org/web/20100324074028/http://blog.okcup...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100324074028/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-
looks-and-online-dating/)

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davidcollantes
Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think
people started to meet online before 2010.

~~~
ardy42
>> The 2010’s showed a monumental rise in online dating, and the number of
people who have met their significant other online is only going to continue
to grow.

> Interestingly enough, wife and I met online, in 1994 (EFNET, IRC). I think
> people started to meet online before 2010.

Certainly, but back then meeting online was highly unusual and there was a
period where online dating had a bit of a stigma. It's probably only been in
the last decade or so that it's been fully normalized.

~~~
ascorbic
I met my now wife on OkCupid in 2005, and while not necessarily holding a
stigma it would certainly raise comment. By 2010 it was no longer weird, and
by 2015 not even worth mentioning.

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mzakharo1
Also, women dont rate 'male attractiveness' to the same degree of importance
as the other way around. So the distribution is skewed maybe for a different
reason: women are asked to match men they 'rate' to pictures they see on
public media, and only 20% make it.

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durnygbur
BTW What's up with Tinder granting for free global in discovery settings? I am
the only lucky one? Never have I had an opportunity to swipe on so many single
mothers 3000km away.

I think I will start to charge Tinder for my time...

~~~
GoToRO
It’s an aknowlegment from Tinder that not enough people are using it in your
locality. In order for you to not loose interest, they give you that.

------
the_cat_kittles
related: nrmp kidney match (al roth is kind of a guru on this subject)

i tried to apply the results and thinking about matching and stability to a
many to many matching problem between students and courses offered. i
basically just wrote a bunch of bullshit in latex but it was fun. i cant
remember now but i think there is often a set of stable matches, although
maybe it can be empty- and finding them requires pretty savage computation. i
remember some of the newest papers were just big nasty algorithms for finding
the set of stable matches.

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polote
Could we solve the advantage towards men by removing the condition that there
could be some unstable pairing ? (but not a lot), it is not like changing
partner is a liquid market.

What would be the percentage of people not being in a unstable pairing in
order for men to not have any advantage over women ?

~~~
albntomat0
My understanding is the "advantage" men have over women in this article is due
to the average man finding the average women more attractive than the average
woman finds the average man, at least in the data used.

Without removing that, and assuming everyone pairs up, the "advantage"
remains.

~~~
polote
The advantage is amplified by the distribution of preferences, but in the
classic simulation the advantage was already of 13%.

It is due to the fact that they are the one choosing first

~~~
viklove
Are they the ones choosing first? I think it's completely the other way
around. Consider the common Tinder/OkCupid situation where a man sends out
hundreds of messages to only receive a few replies, while a woman has hundreds
of messages waiting in her inbox, from which she gets to select her preferred
match.

~~~
arvarik
This is an interesting point. The way Tinder works is a little different than
how this problem is normally modeled since both people need to swipe (propose)
in order to get a match and therefore proposals are bidirectional. There is
still some subtleties because people don't know who swiped right on them
(unless they have gold).

A more apt comparison is how Hinge works. People don't need to actively go out
and 'like' people, they can just sit and wait for likes to come in and they
can choose if they want to match or not.

I would be very interested to see Hinge data for how often men give out likes
versus women.

------
EGreg
Why would having a larger pool make dating harder?

I think the author is confusing the probability of a “stable marriage” with
the probability of _a relationship_.

What this says is you’d expect cheating to go up. As Chris Rock says, “you’re
only as faithful as your options.”

~~~
Spooky23
It's in the article.

Basically, dating in our modern world of few meaningful social connections is
a vicious cycle for women. Men rate attractiveness on a normal distribution,
women rate attractiveness on a pareto distribution. (ie. 80% of men are "meh"
or worse to women.)

I've seen this in action in my personal and professional lives. Smart,
attractive women end up implementing (knowinginly or unknowningly) a complex
rules engine for screening an endless pool of available men. (Male criteria
for engaging a woman online is very low.) When you are a 29 year old female
only considering seriously dating attractive jewish/catholic/athiest,
asian/black/hispanic/irish/white/etc men 6'1" or taller in professional jobs
(generally speaking or a specific gig) who have attribute X, Y, or Z, you're
screwed.

Men will usually stop filtering earlier. They still get into awful
relationships, but they don't filter out 80% of the population.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I don't think it's solely a lack of meaningful social connections, although
that's a contributing factor. Women have more choices and are more picky
versus historically, and men are economically disadvantaged due to
globalization and wealth/income inequality.

Here's a comment where I opine on this from a previous thread on the topic:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407388)

~~~
Spooky23
I think the hockey stick growth of online dating is directly correlated to
reduced social activity.

"Bowling Alone" captured part of the phenomena 20 years ago. That hasn't
changed. Even things like little leagues and soccer clubs for kids are
declining in many ways and much more commercial activities than they were in
the past. Even worship has changed -- high growth religious services are
scaled-up entertainment and child care focused vs. community.

Personally, I don't buy into the notion that people have changed. People are
people. I think the environment has changed and people are playing interacting
with it based on the funnel they get sucked into.

The online dating services are listing real estate agents -- their interest is
in a higher number of conversions per customer. They will optimize for that
metric over time.

