I can sympathize with the author's experiences, though I find things like
One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there.
> One afternoon, Nasruddin and his friend were sitting in a cafe, drinking tea, and talking about life and love.
> “How come you never got married, Nasruddin?” asked his friend.
> “Well,” said Nasruddin, “to tell you the truth, I spent my youth looking for the perfect woman. In Cairo, I met a beautiful, intelligent woman, with eyes like dark olives, but she was unkind. Then in Baghdad, I met a woman who was a wonderful and generous, but we had no interests in common. One woman after another would seem just right, but there was always something missing. Then one day, I met her. She was beautiful, intelligent, generous and kind. We had everything in common. In fact she was perfect.”
I think that is the problem with modern dating. There is too much information and too many choices available so that it is easy to reject someone for something that is obviously trivial. In the olden days you would sometimes fall for someone as you got to know them better, even if they had a few flaws that made them seem imperfect. There is a great Russian movie "Moscow does not believe in tears" where the heroine says she will never date a man with dirty shoes. She meets a man with messy shoes.. (spoiler) eventually they fall in love.
> I think that is the problem with modern dating. There is too much information and too many choices available so that it is easy to reject someone for something that is obviously trivial.
You can go looking for the perfect person and never find them - or you can choose to be with someone and say “I’m flawed and you are flawed but we are going to try our hardest to make it work in spite of our flaws”.
I watched a video on YouTube recently that was actually on decision making, but it talked about arranged marriages.
With arranged marriages, the decision is made, so they have to make it work, for the rest of us, we think it’s the decision that matters more than anything else, so we place too much value on making the decision, as if a perfect one exists and place less value on making that decision work.
In her defense in that particular instance, she acknowledges that she had shallow reasons and that it had nothing to do with the man.
I can empathize with the author on this one, that sometimes your emotional interest in someone dissipates for superficial reasons, but no matter how much you rationally know it’s dumb, you also know it’s unlikely you’ll think yourself out of the hole.
Sounds like a Seinfeld plot for one of Jerry's relationships. Bet this lady also goes "Sorry, I just don't see it working out. Not with your green bubbles."
The attitude of this writer is precisely why so many people struggle to find meaningful relationships.
The internet tricks them into living in some fantasy world in which perfection is not only possible, but accessible. To connect with someone is not to open oneself to the surprising richness of life and experience and to stumble into a fulfilling partnership in which you, crucially, grow but rather a little game with "goals", and "checklists", "non-negotiables". It's scrolling through dossiers and presentations and a constant comparison of the "real deal", which is never up to snuff, with these digital portraits.
If people took a second to just reflect on how rigid, robotic, and insufferable they've let themselves become, and instead opted for the natural, childlike openness that we all have inside, before we let ourselves start treating life like some kind of quarterly deliverable, they'd fare much better.
A relationship will never form if you refuse to budge. It's as much about being willing to change yourself, grow, and bob down the winding rivers of life without certainty as it is about finding someone that makes the current you happy.
At the end, she describes what computer scientists call the Fussy Suitor problem, without naming it. Ah, but the Fussy is the problem, mostly. She has a lot of very weird bits. She keeps talking about dating "people" but she only mentions men -- are there women in there or not? She's got some kidding on the square about men's heights in the end. Going to Israel, becoming Jewish, and getting IVF smacks of geographic panic. The Starbucks bit, I just don't know how to respond to that except that she's self-aware enough to know that this is a counterproductive behavior but she just won't try to work herself out of it -- radical self-acceptance means that your flaws get to drive sometimes, too. And then there's the occupation: developing television and film projects about abortion. That's ... really hyperfocused. I'm not sure how many stories about abortion I'd want to tell and shepherd through the process of becoming visual media for a larger audience.
No doubt, dating is hard. But here we have someone who is literally making it harder than it must be, squandering her chances, full "Hazy Shade of Winter" style ("See what's become of me / While I looked around for my possibilities"). It's self-indulgent self-torment, and it makes Sartre look like he threw in two people too many into the famous play. It's certainly the end of love for her. Whew.
The author is their own worst enemy, and their article makes it abundantly clear. Hopefully, someday, they will reread what they wrote and see it as the postmortem that it is.
On a broader note, maybe dating was never sustainable in the first place. The concept of dating is, for the most part, a 20th century invention. In any earlier time, it would have been considered low-key prostitution. As a man, the expectation that I pay for anything regardless of how well I know the other person or how the date goes always felt kinda dirty. Which is why I stopped doing that a long time ago, even before I quit dating all together. Dating can't be untangled from the inertia of technology, and it was inevitable that dating just wouldn't scale well.
We're never going back to some hypothetical time where dating actually worked, but I do think there are pathways that can at least lead to better tradeoffs:
1. Far more people should be open to making acquaintances offline and be willing to introduce friends they think would be compatible.
2. We need to drop the pretense that the only places left for men and women to meet each other after college is at bars, and any context outside of that would be harassment.
3. Everyone is unique, but people need to consider whether their idiosyncrasies are ultimately working against them. As far as the United States is concerned, we've gone way too far in the direction of everybody thinking they can get everything their way, yet few actually do. For instance, if you're perpetually single but you're turning down people for liking Starbucks, maybe you should rethink whether you're the fool for not just accepting the coffee others like.
4. Call a spade a spade and just start calling all dating apps "hookup" apps, because that's what they're best suited for. We should reject the idea that there isn't something inherently salacious about apps like Tinder, and that attitude needs to be a part of the culture.
5. In the modern world, technology (dating apps, ML/AI-assisted image enhancement shifting expectations of average attractiveness, and the destruction of socialization by TikTok/Insta/Snap) has rendered a significant portion of the male population undateable/unmatchable. This has tipped the scales largely in favor of the men in the desirable pool, as more women compete over that narrowing set. Purists may call this some sort of extreme Darwinism. The end result will be at least a generation or two of outsized suffering for males in the middle of the bell curve.
4. people are allegedly having less sex than at other times in recent history, so as much as these apps might be implicitly about hookups, they apparently aren't very good at making them happen. See https://www.salon.com/2022/11/06/why-are-so-many-young-peopl... and many similar articles.
This feels kind of like the paradox of choice. Too many options and FOMO that you won't secure the absolute best perfect match.
I wasn't sure on my wedding day that I truly loved and wanted to be with the person I was marrying, but 15 years and 3 kids later I couldn't imagine being with anyone else or loving anyone more. Maybe not having to stick it out and make it work is causing some sort of paralysis?
> when I talk about how I’ve been on dates with so many people in Los Angeles that I see them everywhere now—I even saw one guy I’d dated at a funeral.
+1.
I was called for jury duty, and the judge was a lady I'd met at a singles event.
I approached the bench and said, "I've met you socially, Your Honor." She said, "I thought you looked familiar."
That's not grounds for being dismissed from the case, if you're wondering.
Articles like this make me incredibly depressed. It seems common place now to see blog posts written by women saying “woe is me, I’ve dated a crapton of men and get so much attention, but I can’t find the one”. If women become this entitled and vain from online dating, the dating pool is only going to stagnate more. If the author could practice some tolerance, empathy, gratitude, and non-judgement, I’m sure many of those 100+ men could have been great partners. As it is, I have no sympathy for her. Her stories make me nauseous.
What’s even worse is she’s been twice divorced and already has kids, but expects a perfect man in return. It’s hard to have empathy when she’s rejecting people based on Marvel movies and Starbucks.
The whole time I was reading the article I was thinking of the hundreds of thousands of men on these apps who are not 6ft and above, who don't have PhDs, who do not drink 3rd wave coffee and are lucky to maybe get a couple of matches on the apps in a month.
This woman is suffocating in choice, while the armies of men who are not good enough for her would be happy to get 1/100th of the activity she's seeing. We really do live on different planets.
Yes me too. I’d guess that the average man on OLD sees more rejection in a month than the average woman will in her lifetime. It’s a tough dating world for the average straight man. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Maybe a potential remedy is for straight men to move back to predominantly hitting on people in real life in the hopes of finding a woman not on OLD. OLD is only making the straight women on their platforms more repugnant, and really doesn’t provide high quality or quantity for the average man.
It is just the reckoning happening man. Socially we taught at least gen x forward untruths about the life cycle of relationships. Turns out the religious monogamy for life guys got it more right for more people than the consumerist sex without consequence for all time crew over the whole life cycle, even though the consumerist is better for young women and better for successful men of most ages.
I really hate this quote: “Why buy the cow when the milk is free?”. Having said that, sex is a huge bonding element for those who won’t have sex outside of marriage. Everyone else misses out on that element, and are paying for it.
Yah, that quote is problematic because it's primarily reflecting the successful man's position when the problem is more broad. Unless you really screw up your choice and marry someone you fundamentally can't get along with once the smoldering sex burns down to embers and you are stuck coasting on talking to each other, the occasional bang, and potentially shared commitments to raising children, marriage almost certainly far outperforms consumerist sex without consequences across any individual's life cycle for the majority of individuals (at least from what I can see from my personal experience and the experience of the people in my peer group). I know so many young women that had a blast through their early 30's and now sound exactly like the writer of this article and I know a lot of men who are still struggling because they were average or slightly less than average levels of successful professionally as well as a minority of men who had it rough in their 20's but are having a blast in the 30's and 40's because they stayed single and did well professionally and now basically have their pick of the dating apps. I am an atheist but I can see the superiority of the outcome for most people of the religious monogamy with social consequences setup for most people from my dataset.
> I don’t want to meet someone so we can share a life of leisure. I do like going to the movies, I do love experiencing art and music with someone, I do enjoy hiking, I would love to have someone to cook with. But I would rather meet someone because we are running an abortion medication supply chain, or because we are joining an ecocommune in South America, or because we are building something worthwhile, growing something, teaching something, helping some people, or otherwise doing something hard together. Please let’s not play board games, let’s not get comfortable, let’s not talk about opening the relationship so our bourgeois lives can become even more prosaic. Please God don’t let’s try new restaurants.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get the sense this person doesn't know who she's looking for, but she already knows that most normal humans with a normal existence will never fit her needs, of which she's not fully sure either.
> When the other participants turned on their cameras one by one, they were all middle-aged white ladies too.
Is this a taste of what's to come from the latest wave of hyper-successful and hyper-educated women outpacing men in everything outside of suicides and incarceration? Their standards can understandably no longer be met by the mating marketplace, they refuse to settle because they know their theoretical worth, and the markets keep not clearing. What an interesting historic time.
There are millions of lonely guys in decent physical, mental and financial shape who would make devoted husbands and fathers and are actively and obviously looking for a mate. I am sure there are millions of women are like that too, but back when I was looking online around two decades ago, I have never met a normal woman who would give a normal guy some patience to see if initial meeting would grow into a friendship and then a relationship. It always has to be immediate butterflies in the stomach and swept off the feet, meaning that a minority of hunks get all the dates, overwhelmingly without any hope of long term future. I finally met my future wife by accident when I was not looking for a match at all.
> Those seemed like significant numbers. I thought I might stop at one hundred and one, since that seemed definitive. So when I say the house won it’s because I’m still at the table, and my question has changed from, When will I meet someone? to When will I stop?
The Secretary Problem [0], or "optimal stopping" problem indicates that given the perception of an infinite field of options, the author will not be able to determine an optimal stopping point. It's not very good news.
When our perception of our options outpaces our actual ones, that's going to create a cycle of addicted behaviour. Dating apps are literally slot machines for people, and that is a terrible evolutionary strategy.
This reminds me of the Mad Men quote, along the lines of “Love is invented by advertisers to sell stockings to women.” Sounds like she is given so many options she will never be happy with anyone, so she rejects everyone for minutiae.
I think it is not the author's fault that the world is, in some ways - to some people - at some times, a meatgrinder. I have tremendous sympathy for her. It is often the case in the modern world that we are promised one thing by society and receive something quite different.
I disagree. She seems entitled and vain. I’m sure many of those 100+ men would have been great matches if she would have only put the effort in, been more tolerant and less judgemental.
too many sappy "romantic" movies they believe reflect real life. Is it really different than hearing fake news or conspiracy theories and believing them? Some people lack good filters to discern good information from bad. The idea of rejecting someone over going to Starbucks is unbelievable to me. If you are that passionate about "good" coffee and they clearly like coffee also, why not try introducing them to something new? Maybe on a date? You may expand their horizon. Does she believe people "grow up" and stop growing after that? Relationships should be about growing together.
Can’t decide what I think about this account. It definitely describes a common trope. But I also can’t shake the feeling that she wants a relationship, but not enough to make sacrifices/change for. Which is fine, but it is a high, high barrier to starting a new relationship.
> One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there. I judged this a stupid reason to stop messaging him, given his other, surely more important qualities, so I continued messaging him. But then he said he mostly watched Marvel movies, and the combination of Starbucks and Marvel was too much, so I stopped messaging him, even though I judged my own judgment in this case to be ridiculously shallow and flimsy. If he hadn’t been American, I might have excused it or interpreted it differently. Or if I had met him in another context, his consumer tastes might have barely figured in my estimation of him. But he was just an overeducated, emotionally available American, with many winsome attributes and poor taste in coffee and movies; I myself didn’t even understand why I lost interest in him, and recognized it was a bug in my programming, rather than anything to do with him. Or perhaps, the obvious ominous thought goes, it wasn’t a bug but an actual feature of the programming—not mine, but the app’s.
Clearly she puts in effort by going to dates. But she’s not developing her own psychology enough. She had to fight this tooth and nail and gone on a few more dates with him. Her issue is that she thinks she can predict what a relationship will be like with him and that Marvel and Starbucks would be too bad as an experience. (Edit: not entirely accurate but typing on phone)
More gratitude needed, more optimism needed
Dating apps aren’t the problem it’s her mindset.
Note: I go on dates 1.5 times per week myself, on average. I’m having a blast. I’m no casanova, in most cases it ends in the friendzone. I recently met one person though that might be something more and she lives on another continent. It helps that I am a digital nomad.
But yea, lots of effort but not in the right place. IMO dating needs to be strategic for certain people (like the author) and she has no strategy on being grateful and accepting flaws, or so it seems.
There was a TED talk once on a woman who hacked online dating for herself. She should do more of that.
Dating takes a lot of effort for some (me as well). Roll with it and create something beautiful. In my case I need to have a thick skin in being okay with rejection. In her case, her filters are set too tight (emotionally).
Agreed. Put another way, she’s acting entitled and vain. If she could practice some tolerance, gratitude, empathy, and non-judgement, she might be able to find love. As it is, I read this as an entitled woman expecting the world to come to her.
I see where you’re coming from. Not sure if it’s pure entitlement. I just think she is in her own way without realizing it. She jas certain schemas that she runs on autopilot without realizing it.
Then again, I am not good with English emotional words, I know what they mean but I don’t feel much when they’re said, second language
Ah, this was pretty tiring. Couldn't read the whole thing, but the book she was quoting from was probably the worst part. E.g. this quote is especially upsetting and dumb:
> Men have not been compelled to use sexuality as a leverage to receive social and economic resources and thus have no reason to implicate their whole self in sexuality
What if these people would care to read a bit of biology (like etology, evolution) and also evolutionary psychology? The claim in the quote is kind of 100% upside down. The reality is something like: "Men have been compelled to use their economic and social resources as a leverage to receive sex and thus have a very strong reason to implicate their whole self in work (or any other way available to acquire these)"
Because this is how it works. But even if we disregard the evolutionary dynamic the base claim is false: women aren't compelled to use sexuality to receive social or economic resources in modern Western societies. They can, you know work. And actually most of them do. This was (is) one of the most fundamental goals of feminism. While you could argue that the author simply depicts women as helpless prostitutes.
Now it's true that most women/women on average will chose men who are financially and (or?) socially are at least on par with them, preferably having a higher status/salary/earning potential. (And this is has been observed in a wide range of societies according e.g. to David Buss [1].) And that preference is what makes men 'compelled' to compete hard for the economic and social resources. (BTW, this is, I think, at least one of the reasons behind men having higher salaries and roles.)
So again, the reality seems to be the exact opposite of what the quote from book says. (And no, I'm not blaming women at all.)
>> It wasn’t my goal to go on dates with a lot of people, or to carry out some anthropological or sociological study.
Perhaps, not a conscious goal, but surely, her behaviour was more than just a little driven by professional motivations, resulting as it did in this essay.
She had also written a book on a related topic.
I feel sorry for those 107 people who didn't realise the game was rigged.
It really sounds like she puts too much into dating profiles, instead of actually getting to know someone. She also sounds extremely picky and can't make up her mind about what she actually wants. Perhaps she needs to sit down and think about what she really wants out of dating, and also realize that just two dates is really not enough time to get to know someone.
Go to South America, or Africa. America and Europe are great about building things and organizing society, but when it comes to enjoying life there's a lot to learn from the South, actually. Good luck :)
Accepting a partner is not a single-point decision, but a process. You have to know each other, build trust, build joy, etc. I don't think that's the main driver for most women. Smart people will care about who you are, not what you have. Good luck
She should use Optimal Choice. Estimate the number of partners you can date, then date log(N) of them, then marry the next one that's better than any of the previous.
More seriously, that's the optimal solution if your goal is to maximize the probability that you end up with the single best person in the pool. I don't think that's a good match for most people's objectives when dating.
(If instead each prospective partner has a score chosen uniformly randomly between 0 and 1, and you want to maximize your average partner-score, then you should use a similar strategy but with about sqrt(N) dates before taking the next that's better, instead of N/e. That's still not super-realistic but it's probably more realistic.)
I read a bunch of the article but gave up so maybe there's a novel twist at the end that I missed out ln. But...
This author is overcomplicating what is a very straight forward thing.
I am 41, my wife is 36 - we are at the age where all our friends had either figured it out (got married, had kids) or it's very clearly not going to happen.
In every case where "it's not going to happen" despite the person saying they want a relationship - it is very clearly related to the person themself, usually a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health issue that lead to unproductive/self sabotaging behavior.
This article claims problems dating stem from capitalism, oddly shaped expectations, etc - but I don't know if that's it (unless those are the things that have made people act crazy and self sabotage)
In one of the early paragraphs, she describes a series of insane date experiences. Among my friends, some have this kind of experience always and some have it never, and it's something about them that seeks out and allows this experiences, just one aspect of self sabotage.
It's not that everyone has this experience. My wife has never had a truly horrible date despite being single in NYC for many years, neither have I not many of our now married friends. I think usually there are red flags very early on and it takes a certain person to ignore them and get into that situation.
I don't have an answer, except that I am pretty sure I wouldn't have the family I have if I hadn't spent a few years in therapy and I recommend that to everyone. If your relationship life isn't what you want, it's not "capitalism" it's you.
If you are not compatible with hookup “free love” culture neither am I and I totally understand where women like this are coming from. I found my perfect match on a dating site, who just happened to be brought up in/from a province in the Philippines. She is beautiful like a sunset and has the values that are so fleeting and forgotten in our hookup culture. She is exactly what I am compatible with - the embodiment of the values I claim to be important to me - which I must say are very similar if not the same as the author of that blog.
And you know whats crazy.. There are men here too! Crazy thought right? And I mean great men who have the values so many western women claim to be looking for. I’m curious If the idea of dating a good man from a 3rd world country ever crosses the minds of these “struggling” women who have the same means I do?
I went on over 100 dates using online dating apps. Eventually, I found a partner in the "real world." The problem was that going on yet another date was too easy for me. With my current partner, it took a long time to build up trust and attraction. At first, it wasn't even romantic. Maybe for her too, online dating is too fast to build a real connection. The first time you see the other person, you feel pressured to know if you are attracted to them or not. Don't even get me started on evaluating an online dating profile.
She talked about how drinking Starbucks was a deal breaker for her. My current partner has multiple qualities that would have been deal breakers if I had evaluated them in the online dating context, and yet I am very happy in this relationship.
She does say that she has an avoidant attachment style. When someone gets close they pull away. I did notice they didn't really follow up on that thread, working to become a more secure person. Maybe one day.
I mean, it could also be that she is just fantastically bad at prescreening. It's easy to find a hundred garbage single people - that's why they're single, remember?
Her case is really clear cut, dry and simple. Aging single mother of 3, yet with very high expectations that don't match her fading looks, nor personality.
The vast amount of choices and nearly unlimited supply that hookup apps have on offer messes with her head
This is a common recurring theme with single aging middle aged woman with kids types.
The last paragraph: “How many [men] over six feet tall with graduate degrees who don’t smoke and drink only socially or not at all and either already have kids or don’t want kids and live within fifty miles of you who aren’t polyamorous and designate themselves as active, with liberal politics and no bathroom selfies or rote clichéd philosophizing? I thought I might stop at ninety-nine, or one hundred.” gives you a good feeling of a constant theme throughout the entire article. Every few paragraphs the author discusses another disqualifying feature she uses to winnow the field of potential mates - no car selfies, no bathroom selfies, no mentioning sarcasm, no “partners in crime”, etc.
The simple analysis is she’s being too picky, but the simple analysis is too easy; this is a intelligent woman who tries very hard to introspect and self-reflect and pours an enormous amount of effort into trying to find love, and in my opinion that effort earns her a right to a correspondingly more effortful analysis.
She feels distrust towards dating apps, seeing them as “casinos“; she feels a sense that this breakdown of the dating market is being blamed on women somehow; she feels this is unfair. All valid feelings, and when we put them together we get the start of a much more interesting analysis.
She says she has been on a hundred dates. (I would absolutely love for her to give a ballpark figure of how many profiles she has viewed - I suspect high five figures with a fat, fat tail out to high six, but for the purposes of this analysis I will use a conservative estimate of 10,000.)
She specifies in about two thirds of her dates, her filters were telling her no but she went anyway out of a fear that her filters were somehow wrong, and then her filters were confirmed later on. The Starbucks example quoted by other commenters is illustrative: she rejects on the basis that she can’t like a man who likes Starbucks, but then rejects her own rejection and tries anyway, but then discovers he also likes Marvel movies and her initial rejection is re-confirmed: “But then he mentioned he got his daily coffee from Starbucks… but then he mentioned mostly watching Marvel movies…”.
“But then he mentioned”. 10,000 profiles viewed, 100 dates, ~0 long term relationships. No car selfies. Dating apps are casinos. Let’s put it all together:
Dating apps present a stunning over-abundance of choice, which forces women to construct a veritable armory of cheap and hard filters just to even begin to start considering individuals. But dating is an incomplete information game where there’s an initial dump of information on a profile, and then more is revealed over time in conversation and on dates. Any set of filters that can practically reduce the initial superabundance to a manageable amount based on the initial info dump will likewise reduce the manageable amount to ~0 when more information is revealed. And so after the first date, she must return to the dating app.
Is this what’s going on? We might think to examine womens’ psyches for evidence to support our conclusion, but that would be very rude and also we suck at doing that. Instead, we might examine dating apps to see if they use superabundance and low initial information. Well, Tinder exemplifies this pattern - it absolutely inundates you with superficial profiles and demands an immediate, often split-second “no / maybe” decision (your filters have to be incredibly cheap to compute under those constraints). Is Tinder more successful than other dating apps? Yes - in fact it’s more successful than all other dating apps put together. We might be on to something here.
tl;dr Dating apps are designed to hack womens’ psychology and make them super-picky, because pickiness sets them up to fail the rest of the relationship and this makes them a returning customer.
As a man, it's hard to imagine the kind of bubble that some women must exist in for those combined preferences to seem completely reasonable. Men have their own idiotic preferences, but they're usually self-contained whilst many women have an all-encompassing "he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that, he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that, he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that..." attitude. People should feel ashamed for being so openly misanthropic, but to some extent it's considered acceptable.
Though I mentioned some things that I think will help society move past this phase of "modern dating", I forgot to mention specifically that if anything's going to change, it may only happen if women collectively start rejecting hookup apps. All of the women I know seem to realize they hate something about apps like Tinder, yet continue relying on them, but maybe enough of them will eventually put two and two together. It's not just the men whom are failing them, but the technology itself.
On some level, the author recognizes that whole set of preferences is completely unreasonable - that’s the point of listing them all out like that. But you can also see that whole set of preferences is necessary and functional to survive a dating app - she states it produced 100 potential suitors. 99% of women across 99% of history wouldn’t have had 100 potential suitors across their entire life. Hence why I quoted that final paragraph, it neatly encapsulates the problem: “I applied unreasonably picky standards and still found 100 men”.
She didn't find 100 suitors, what she got instead is 100 guys that passed her unrealistic standards and matched, out of which most probably found her single mom "closing in on fourty" looks still good enough to cream her, but not much beside that.
Of those 100 very few would be willing to be seen with her in public, and clearly not interested in commiting. It's subtle, but you can clearly pick it up reading her lamentations
How many men that are 6ft+, are educated and have their shit together put in 40yo single moms with 3kids and colorful past as their commitment filter?
I don't think dating apps are designed to make women picky per se but they definitely end up distorting their perception and turn them into overly picky for sure.
This has always been the case with all dating apps from the start (except for maybe a few that tried to actively designed around it). This phenomenon emerges automatically from how dating platforms and people work:
1. men are expected to do the approach/first move (this is socially and evolutionary encoded in both sexes)
2. men initially put the bar somewhat lower and mostly care about looks at first (I'd say it makes a lot of sense, especially in online dating, but only if you disregard that the photos end up manipulated)
3. women (and also men) will start manipulating their photos. Even just selecting your best photos is manipulation. (I'm not saying it's wrong or unreasonable.)
4. men will do more approaches than IRL because it's cheap and safe and also can be done in parallel
5. women will receive a lot more approaches than IRL because men do more apporoaches
and this turns on the cycle:
6. women will feel that they have a lot higher desirability than what they were used to IRL/before starting to date online. They'll become picky, will feel higher status and start to be mean with some of the men who approach. Actually they don't have to be actively and explicitly mean, not being nice with the rejection is bad enough for men (see 7.). And being nice to all the unwanted approachers is hard. I mean it can be hard work so it's frustrating.
7. men will start to see that their efforts don't pay off. I mean it will pay off for the top say 5-20% but not for the others. So they get frustrated and try to further minimize the investment in each approach
8. this makes women feel even worse about all the unwanted approaches and they'll be even less considerate about those who they don't want (while porbably increasing the bar). They'll start complaining and putting stupid requirements (messages, really) on their profile, like the usual "those who do X and are Y need not bother to swipe right", etc.
9. this further frustrates men
etc. The cycle is on. Online dating, at least the naive approches, don't work because it makes the wrong thing easy and efficient. (And yes, due to the business models of these platforms they are not motivated to solve the issue. After all, the more users they have the better it is for them. They are getting paid for keeping people on the platform and not getting them off i.e. hook them up.)
Online dating may make women more vain and entitled. It’s still her responsibility to recognize that bias and work against it. If she truly wants a partner, at least. Otherwise it’s hard to have sympathy for someone inundated with choice who has rejected people for liking Starbucks and Marvel movies. Especially when she herself has been divorced twice and already has kids. She isn’t exactly a prime fruit, but she seems to expect a perfect man in return. If she had some empathy, gratitude, tolerance, and non-judgement, I’m sure many of those 100+ men would have been great partners.
Applying the same reasoning to casinos: “Casinos may make gamblers more impulsive. It’s still their responsibility to recognize that bias and work against it. If they truly want to financially secure, at least.” It seems a little heartless to me. Casinos are big powerful institutions with lots of resources to spend on crafting psychological exploits to make gamblers more impulsive, and we don’t fully blame gamblers for this - we regulate casinos pretty intensely, provide services to help gambling addicts, etc. The problem is more acute in this domain too, since dating apps have more of a monopoly on dating than casinos have on money.
I do agree with you that if she did have less judgment, some of those 100+ men would have been great partners. She mentions a French economist she dated who said “if he was going to be sent to a deserted island and had to choose between me and “someone gorgeous,” of course he would choose me, because I would be more interesting to talk to forever and he could still have sex with me too. But in the real world, surrounded by other people who’d be looking at him-with-me, he knew he would feel ashamed of me because he could have been with a more beautiful woman.” This mixture of acceptance and rejection may have just been his way of softening the blow of his rejection of her, but it may have also been his awkward unromantic way of saying “I will settle for you”. Willingness to settle like that might be the model we have to adapt to survive a dating market warped by high-powered dating apps.
I think comparing OLD to big Casinos is incredibly reductive.
I also think you’re bending my words into a straw man. If I had to play this game, the better answer would be “it’s an addictive gambler’s responsibility to keep out of casinos, or set a limit and stay within it”.
An addict has problems with alcohol. It’s their responsibility to deal with it. The fallout in their life is their responsibility to handle, nobody else’s.
A bipolar person can’t control their moods. It’s still their responsibility to deal with the fallout of manic episodes and try to stabilize their mood. Eventually most bipolar have the ability to recognize that they are at the centre of the broken relationships in their life and act upon that knowledge for the positive.
She’s either already vain and entitled or became repugnantly vain and entitled through OLD. It’s her responsibility to deal with that. The article reads like someone trying to bury the fact that they are at the centre of their suffering.
I agree tolerance and willingness to settle are key attributes to a happy and long lasting relationship. She seems to have neither in spades.
I don’t mean to be reductive or try to absolve the individuals of responsibility; ultimately, responsibility must bottom out with the individual, there’s nowhere else for it to go.
Regarding the casino comparison: casinos are an established institution that we might categorize as “mildly exploitative”, and we have a mature moral/ethical framework around permitting them to exist, judging people who they exploit, etc. (Like, we DO permit casinos to exist, we say things like “enjoy them responsibly and expect to lose because the house always wins”, we would respect someone who refuses to attend casinos because they know they have a gambling problem, and so on.) I think the casino comparison is valuable mostly because we currently DON’T see dating apps as mildly exploitative pickiness-inducers, and we probably should.
No. A person with schizoid personality disorder doesn’t go on 100+ first dates. People with schizoid personality disorder avoid social interaction, so they are much more likely to go on 0 first dates than 100+
Just because a person makes what others may see as bad life choices, doesn't necessarily follow that they meet the criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis, or ought to be diagnosed with one.
Vain and narcissistic. Expects perfection from her partners despite being twice divorced and having kids already. Can’t take ownership for her problems and blames the “system”, as you say. No gratitude, tolerance, empathy, or non-judgement.
Well, you could have started a legitimate conversation here about commitment or gender roles or whatever it is "blackpilled" means. With a genuinely diplomatic attitude and some nuance in your presentation you can broach most topics on here without getting too many downvotes.
I heard it suggested that we honklers should take a more conciliatory approach. They fear the chuds, but in fact we have good things to offer. We can help make things better. Just listen
One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there.
to be a bit much :D