Starting with being one of Match's first profiles in my area in the mid 90s through a couple of years ago, I've given online dating a try several through various stages of life. The one constant I've found is that paid services, even if it's just a small amount, gets rid of the tire kickers and validation seekers. When everyone has something invested into the process, everything is primed for moving forward. Paid services unfortunately have their own incentives to keep you around even after finding mutually attraction and compatibility but the free (and freemium) sites are designed to suck up your time and attention, which are monetized, instead of you paying directly.
Two other random observations about the differences between using matching sites versus people I've met more organically: Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. That difference is quite stark but otherwise personality and lifestyle differences are minimal. The other is that tall women are vastly overrepresented on dating sites. My guess is that if you're a 6' tall woman who wants to not be taller than her significant other but still wants to be able to wear heels, the numbers don't work very well with more traditional dating. You have to be able to cast a wide net when 96% of men are already shorter than you are in two inch heels.
For myself, my best relationships have been those I've met in person rather than through online dating. In most of those cases, we wouldn't have been a match if we had been using an app and running in similar social circles itself was a good filter. The best relationship from someone I met online was a woman I met on LiveJournal in an alumni area, which was somewhat of a pseudo social circle filter itself.
$7000? Sounds like dating apps are wildly underpriced, or they are not fit for purpose. Likely a bit of both. A girlfriend of mine once used a matchmaking service for profesionals that was priced in the $10k range and the stories she told me about them all seemed to have the similar theme, where if you want a person to represent something in your life (wife, partner, husband, etc.), it's a recipe for disappointment.
Durable relationships with friends are ones that just work because you don't freight it with external meaning. That we use a noun for a "relationship" between people at all is probably the root of a lot of its difficulty. Relationships as things are intractable, whereas relating and choosing how you relate is the simplest thing in the world. It's as though we codified relating into a noun so we could trade it, which makes sense when you look at "being in a relationship" as a proxy for being property, and matchmaking services that want to sell you one.
Intimacy does require a shared perimeter of safety, trust, and exclusivity relative to that specific personal intimacy, and you need to maintain it, but reducing it to role-playing expectations just turns it into a power struggle in the guise of a game.
For a lot of people, marriage is basically a dead institution, but we still go looking for someone to "make" a marriage with, as though it's a thing you make that is abstracted from the people involved. The same can be said for family, where we relate to "the family" as our reflection against an ideal of family, instead of each person directly.
Maybe I've been into the stoics too much, but the simple mental rephrasing of "my partner," to "the partner I have" changes how you relate to them, from being an extension or reflection of yourself to being an experience in your life, and it takes a lot of pressure off how you relate to them.
That last statement is a destroyer of codependent relationships, which is probably good because someone spending thousands of dollars to find someone to represent their idea of a "relationship," in which they like their reflection in it is just going to suffer. That is, until they don't need to check a reflection to know they're good.
A relationship is a noun and not a verb because it is formed into something stable the people in it can commit to, and because our limits into knowing another person's heart and mind are so profound, and feelings change with, for example, external events, committing to shared goals and life is more realistic than one irrational human to another. Free love isn't free for all.
The value of internet dating for people looking for a serious connection is access to scale and therein the bypass of the happenstance of initial conditions. This approach gives up on scale. At first I was challenged with how to effectively gain the value of that access to scale. But then I selected a dating app (okcupid) that allowed for depth and designed my profile to ward off others and select for the subpopulation that I had hypothesized was most likely to hold the partner I was interested in. It's only been 10 years but I'm happy with my results.
Ha! I second for okcupid. The only normal dating site (that allows indepth profiles) that I was able to find back in 2015-16. Never needed it since then, because I married a girl I met there)
Unfortunately okcupid has trended away from what it was 5+ years ago. My last SO was through okcupid right before they changed the incentives in the system. Now it has been driven towards the same swipe culture as all the other apps. Though you can still answer questions and write detailed profile... The system doesn't seem to promote that as much. My key gripe right now with how it is setup is that the only discovery is through one of 5-6 swipe categories and your filter criteria no longer impacts any of those swipe decks.
So in practice they have taken away the discover and pushed towards swiping removing any positives of their platform in the process. I have heard that many of the dating apps are now owned by 1 company. So if that is true, it makes sense from a shitty business perspective
I really want to call out the technical founders here, Chris Coyne and Max Krohn, because they've done nothing but leave a legacy of abandoned products in the hands of untrustworthy companies: in the case of OkCupid they sold to Match.com which devastated the site committing it to the same wastebasket as Match.com's portfolio of other predatory dating products.
Then they created Keybase, which was fantastic, before selling out to Zoom. Development has all but stopped.
This style of hit and run get what's mine is endemic to SV. Nobody takes responsibility for the lasting legacy of the things they build.
OkCupid was a safe haven for people who really wanted something genuine. It had a culture-wide effect the same way that Tinder cemented hook-ups as the New Normal of dating. We need to start taking responsibility for the things we make that touch millions of people.
Chris' Twitter [1] professes his love for making things. Yes but you don't love being a good steward of the things you build.
You could call okcupid feature complete. Keybase however still had plenty of exciting greenfield work to do (IMO) - my friend and I emailed them asking to pay for KBFS but the founders declined!
And thus why most software is utter crap too.
When people first talked about holding software development to the same standards as professional engineering I thought it was crazy, but the longer I've been in this the more I think it is absolutely required - for this reason if nothing else.
It's called work for a reason and the un-fun stuff is often as or more important than the fun stuff.
Leaving aside the fun, maintaining them is also often not economically rewarding compared to building the next new thing. I dare say the founders of these sites will be happy enough with their decision even if they are called out once or twice in comment threads by critics with no skin in the game.
The incentives of dating apps are all wrong for the daters. They want to maximize users, which means they want you to keep dating through the app forever. Finding you a great long term match is, from their perspective, losing a repeat customer.
Ironically the old fashioned matchmaker who only took a fee after the wedding had much better aligned incentives.
> The incentives of dating apps are all wrong for the daters. They want to maximize users, which means they want you to keep dating through the app forever. Finding you a great long term match is, from their perspective, losing a repeat customer.
Ironically, OKCupid wrote about this exact issue, explaining why membership incentives were bad, etc.
Then they were bought by Match.com, went to a membership based subscription model, and deleted that post.
I wrote it in another older thread: Make a service that asks you for say $1000 USD upfront and then pays you back partially every month until you find a match.
Of course there must be logistics against anuse/fraud. But that would align incentives.
If you found a match, how would the site know that you matched successfully if you didn't want the site to know (so you could recover the full amount)?
Then wouldn't the app have an incentive to send you on dates with the most obnoxious and/or dangerous people possible, so that you refused to attend any more?
That's very sad news... I think it'd already started to mutate back then in 2015-2016, but it was still possible to make and to discover a detailed user profiles, that actually allowed to get interested in a person.
On the other hand my internal entrepreneur says that it could be a great opportunity to launch okcupid2.0 given that there's an actual demand for this kind of site.
Giving up on scale might be a good thing tbh. With scale comes a lot of noise. Also with it comes choice paralysis.
On noise, it's not uncommon to see less than 1% of male right swipes to turn into a match. As many here may know, this can be pretty emotionally taxing.
Then add on the choice problem. It's a well known psychological effect that too many choices can cause us feel bad about our choices. The classic example of this is with cereal in the grocery store. If you only have a few choices you pick one and think "I did the best I could" but if you have a hundred to choose from you'll think "maybe I could have done better" and doubt yourself even if you like the cereal. In relation to dating I think we end up judging a bit more than normal on first dates. I know I do. But first dates are often awkward and not a great indication of if you're a good match or not, unless there are major red flags.
I'll admit that I've had more success by being set up by friends. They know your personality, they know the other person's personality and if you will match. I think there's also a bit of pressure to go on a few dates and help get out of that awkward stage and really find out who the other person is.
But everyone has different takes. With scale one method might work well for some people and might not work for others. A wide array of tools is honestly the best because there never will be a singular solution for everyone. I think the major problem here is that were trying to turn all forms of dating into Tinder like and pretending like that's the only successful model.
I mentioned okcupid as an option that helps focus better into your expected compatible population. Others are noting it is changed from when I used it. The reason I liked it is that all my choices were far higher quality and my experiences helped me better understand my deeper nuances.
If you're looking for a relationship I would suggest avoiding the swiping apps. That fits my bias. I think that choosing a partner or partners in life is one of the most important and most salient things we do and should get commensurate attention. Further, none of the most important aspects of a person are present in their appearance, not to mention a mere image. I believe this is so even if there are echoes of them available and accepting that our presentations to the world are generated by the pattern that we manifest. It still seems to me that it is the pattern you are attempting to discover, evaluate compatibility with, and create relationship to. The point there being to create new configurations and patterns according to the value systems of participants and structures of reality. It would take a huge stretch of imagination to devise a swiping app to help with that.
Has he given up on scale? He's already got a news article and (many) thousands of eyeballs on him. Maybe the scale is in the publicity. Still, by no means easily reproducible by anyone else trying to do the same.
I completely agree. I was factoring in that his attempt is novel and noteworthy but doesn't generalize. I wouldn't expect copycats to achieve similar results.
I think this scales in quality vs. quantity and it might actually work better that it does for this guy when folks copy this approach. Dating apps clearly have more eyeballs, but the suggestions he receives through this are likely to have some context and social status.
Met my partner through okcupid (about 8 years ago I gather it's gotten a little worse since) - at the time it was leagues ahead of the other offerings though.
I wonder what, if anything, will replace dating apps. As someone who tried dating apps for a while, I never had much luck with them. I ended up meeting my wife in person at the LGBTQ center at my college, we were friends for awhile, started dating, then got married a couple years later.
I'm not sure what dating apps optimize for. It's easy to say "for hookups!", but it seems like a very low% of matches on those apps lead to any kind of in-person connection, date or hookup: anecdotally I think I had a few hundred matches on Tinder, but only went on ~10 dates / hookups as a consequence. For most matches, the conversation would fizzle after a few messages. Maybe it's different for straight people?
My hypothesis is there's a "Market for Lemons"[1] problem here: take a pool of potential matches on Tinder. The pools narrow like so:
100% of people are on the app (given)
x<100% of people will match with an average person (picky)
y<x% of people will message or reply to a message[2]
z<y% of people will go on a date / hookup with someone[2]
People in each pool will be selected out of the swiping pool, leaving the people left for you to swipe on being, on average, less committed to ultimately going on a date. For example: people in the `z` group will get into short/long-term relationships and stop using Tinder. People in the `y` group will be busy texting with someone they met on Tinder (using pickup lines, etc.) and swipe less. Etc, etc.
I'm not sure how a dating app would solve this issue. Traditional ways of finding partners, like meeting people at a bar or hobby group or at college, doesn't either: it's just there's a benefit to making friends or talking to people beyond trying to hook up or start dating them. Most people, if they make 5 friends at a college club but don't start dating any of them, are still happy, I would think.
[2]: Why would people match or reply to a message, but not want to go on a date? I've anecdotally known several people who do this: some just wanted validation from random strangers, some are just shy and would theoretically want to go on a date but didn't work up the courage to actually do it, etc. etc. Lots of reasons.
> I wonder what, if anything, will replace dating apps.
A friend of mine, John, first met his future wife while accompanying a third friend to an evening of speed dating.
The thing is, neither John nor his now wife, actually participated. They were both there, begrudgingly providing moral support to their respective friends, and smugly watching the whole spectacle from the sidelines, when they struck up conversation.
As a 45yo straight male, I’ve found women are eager to set up a meeting within the first five or so messages, sometimes even hinting at it by the 2nd message… all I have to say is something like “it says we’re 15 miles apart, what part of town are you in?” and they’ll suggest meeting somewhere in the middle.
Of course I’m dealing with an older than primary demographic (30-50), which might have something to do with it, but I think you’ve hit on a scarcity issue caused by the temporal nature of interactions on the apps themselves. The longer you spend online, the higher the chance that someone else will come along and be more efficient in setting something up with the one you’re talking to.
I’ve only been on the swipey apps for a month now, but I’ve found myself regularly unmatching anyone where I feel like it will be too much work because of this phenomena. It’s like an incurred opportunity cost of dealing with people who are too hesitant.
> I’ve found women are eager to set up a meeting within the first five or so messages, sometimes even hinting at it by the 2nd message
That's probably because they've had enough experience to become aware of "the great lie" with all of these approaches to dating, and are tired of wasting time with it. That is, the fantasy that the online conversation actually has any real meaning whatsoever.
No matter how much time you spend chatting or exchanging messages virtually, it is completely and utterly meaningless when held up against the first 5 minutes of that first in-person meet-up. So getting to that stage as quickly as possible tends to be the best for everyone.
While I agree with this in spirit, it isn’t the experience I had back in the early days of OLD before it became mainstream - I regularly got pushback for suggesting meeting up too early… there seemed to be a trust issue or maybe being too expedient meant looking for a hookup.
It’s certainly a component for sure, esp as the marketplace is so hard for guys meaning they’re willing to go to greater lengths to stand out… but I feel this is more an issue of the process being so transactional and transitory.
>and the stigma/weirdness has completely gone away.
Well, not completely - anecdata but plenty of places on this planet (in the West too) where online dating = you are too desperate and you have no other options = stigma (especially for straight men).
I met my partner (of 3 years) on Tinder, and I agree this is a thing.
One thing she often says is I was within a hairs breath of being deleted, because we chatted on Tinder and then WhatsApp for a couple of weeks before our first date. For me it was natural, as I've always been comfortable chatting to people online (via IRC etc)
I think a largely unsolved problem is it's more satisfying to match than to re-kindle a conversation with a past match. The window after a match where a conversation can spark and lead to an offline interaction is fleeting and, once gone, it feels weird to re-message a past match.
I feel like this is partly something the dating app companies do on purpose.
There is this inherent problem that if the dating app does its job well, it will inevitably lose the customer. The ideal customer does a lot of matching is more into hookups than actual dating, so the dating app in incentivized to optimize for this behavior rather than focusing on matching people based on character to increase the possibility of a long term relationship.
She pinged me and we talked briefly, but at the time I had just gotten a new job a couple of hours away and was considering moving closer to the job (and away from her), and she didn't want to do anything long distance.
About a year later I had switched jobs back into the area, was still on the same dating platform, and she pinged me again. We've been together for over six years now.
I think most dating apps right now target desperate people, since they pay huge amounts of money they could actually make up the majority of sales. There are other apps but I don’t think they’re successful or profitable enough to really stand out.
I think just meeting in-person will replace dating apps. There was a downward trend in chatting up strangers and in-person events, but I think that’s going back upward now. Because most people got lonely during the pandemic, and now that the vaccines are out hanging out is getting back to normal.
The fundamental issue is that dating apps don’t actually give you much information or preferences vs in-person, and most people who are attractive and looking for partners get in-person matches anyways.
Interesting experiment. Traditionally when people reach the point of wanting to pay money to get a wife, they travel to some less well off country and buy a wife from there.
You say that like spending money on marriage is a bad thing. But effectively, if you marry someone who earns less than you, you're paying money to maintain that marriage for the rest of your life anyway.
Not in any obvious definite way if you're both above sustaining yourselves. I.e. if there is discretionary money (sourced from both parties) then what you say is only true if the decisions/compromises not in your favour outweigh your portion of the discretionary funds.
(...I don't want to spend my life thinking like this.)
Well you can ignore it as long as the marriage goes well :-) but in a divorce the court will make it very clear just how much money the marriage cost the higher earner, both in terms of dividing up past earnings, and in terms of dividing up future earnings via alimony and child support.
What the court imposes is more of a penalty on divorce, than a representation on what a wife costs.
For instance, we used to make a little money when I married my wife, now we make a lot more. We didn't change our lifestyle or spending, nor what we spent on the child. Just savings increased, none of which we planned to give to the child. But now the child support calculator says I owe a lot more after a divorce, which is supposed to be money for the child. If the cost of the child didn't go up, it makes no sense the child support would go up when you earn more money, but it does. It's just a penalty on whoever earns more or doesn't take the child, as societies way of getting even for violating Christian norms.
But a penalty for one side can be viewed as an incentive for the other side. Which given either side can initiate divorce, could increase the divorce rate.
This is not necessarily true, beyond the fact that you must pay to live no matter what. If you have one person making, say, $300k/year and another making $60k/year, together you share a bedroom, share a fridge, share a stove, share a living room, etc. Your total costs could lower than they would be otherwise.
Being on the other side of that though is: join app, wade through many low quality matches because the ratio is like 10:1, become extremely choosy because every right swipe is a match. It produces really bad psychological effects for both cohorts.
Women are, in general, hypergamous, meaning they are looking for men who are "above" them along some dimension: wealth, status, looks, education, etc. I can not find the link, but I read somewhere once that something like the "top" 80% of women are competing over the "top" 20% of men. In other words, the "bottom" 80% of men are un-dateable for those women. That is how you end up with the situation described.
They were censored? How is this even controversial? Females have a biological incentive to be more choosy than men as their reproductive investment is much higher -- it seems obvious that the result is rational from a biological perspective.
> it seems obvious that the result is rational from a biological perspective
Only if you believe in the relatively modern human concept of two monogamous people being the only parents of a child.
Biologically speaking, a woman wants the sperm which will provide her the most survivable and resilient child, plus any number of other adults around who will help care for and protect that child.
This idea of a woman being choosy is a very new concept. You don't have to go back far in time at all to see where women had no choice at all (or look in some current cultures).
But if you go back further, or you go to places less touched by modern conventions, you find men and women of groups being generally sexual with each other, and being responsible for all the children in their group. This appears to be how humans survived and flourished for most of human history; or at least, it fits the existing evidence much better than the idea of a monogomous (and very 1:1 protective) couple.
Sure, if a woman knows she is only ever allowed to have one partner (and she's not allowed to be an equal participant in the world where income or resources are earned), she will choose the man more likely to guarantee that the basic survival needs are met or exceeded as much as possible. But she will still biologically seek the strongest, fittest, most genetically compatible and complementary man she can have sex with. From a modern human survival standpoint, this is the path of success.
A woman takes 9 months to birth a child, and up until very recently had some serious risk during childbirth. The dude just has to shoot his load. This imbalance in reproductive investment predates modern human concept of monogamy.
> if a woman knows she is only ever allowed to have one partner
If each woman and each man can only choose one partner, i would expect the choosiness of men and women to become much more equal, because the reproductive investment of the man and the woman start to look a lot more equal (a lifetime investment for each). In reality we know that humans historically have not really been monogamous creatures, even in societies that are nominally so.
> Females have a biological incentive to be more choosy than men as their reproductive investment is much higher
until I saw you had also written
> If each woman and each man can only choose one partner, i would expect the choosiness of men and women to become much more equal
which is the missing piece I was going to add.
> In reality we know that humans historically have not really been monogamous creatures, even in societies that are nominally so.
But, to shift emphasis a little, in those societies, many many people really were monogamous, there absolutely were, and are, functioning lifelong pair-bonds, there were men who devoted a lot of themselves to being good husbands and fathers, and, I'd like to think, there still can be. But yes, such men will need to be choosy, because they're making the biggest investment of their lives.
It seems that your definition of "good husbands and fathers" implicitly disallows non-monogamous interactions.
I would bet that men (from couples) who have clear and open communication can be otherwise very loving partners and devoted parents without also having to be monogamous. If you zoom out just a bit and look at what is physically occurring, why should it be that physically touching someone else would prevent you from continuing to be a good parent and partner?
At an individual level, one could be a good husband and father and be non-monogamous. At an individual level, one could also be a good monogamous husband and father. I agree with you there, although I think the expectations for most (but not all) people in western nations is that their wife/husband will be "faithful" in the traditional sense. If most wives expect most husbands to be monogomous, it starts to look like the _average_ person who is "unfaithful" is a "bad" husband by definition of the wife (even if they care deeply for their wife and any children). This also suffers from the network effect that even if the wife is ok with non-monogamy, family and friends could still shame her into being negatively effected by any non-monogamous actions in the marriage.
At a population level, it's hardly even up for debate that humans are not monogamous. This has been researched ad nauseum, although I am too lazy at the moment to dig up the research at the moment.
That's funny at first glance but it might be more accurate than we would like to admit. Maybe there were a lot of below average men (compared to the general population) on OKC when that study was conducted
Actually, the OkCupid founders used their own pictures and got nailed as significantly below average. <chuckle>
They really weren't. If anything, they were probably a bit above average.
Although, there is one thing that might have contributed back in the day. Female users of online dating might have been concentrated in tech areas. Being a rare female in a male dominated ratio area causes a highly skewed estimate of how attractive you really are.
Discovering that men 'over average' don't have problems to find women or are married yet, so don't need the services of the platform wouldn't be much of a surprise...
This is very true. Anecdote and all that but I've known some very fortunate dudes who literally just had to show up and the ladies would fall over themselves. It was entertaining and sobering at the same time.
For starters, the pool of people on say, Tinder, for example, is already disproportionately imbalanced in terms of represented populations (as I said, 10:1). Assuming an even distribution of “attractiveness” (which obviously isn’t straightforward to quantify and varies by locale), there’s already a huge discrepancy: even a woman of average attractiveness (of ten women 1-10, she ranks a 5) has fifty (given ten women, there are a hundred men in total) that rank below, in terms of attractiveness. When you have a limited number of right swipes a day, well below the number of available options that _do_ qualify, and nearly every right swipe is a match, it leads to a conditioned behavior of selecting well above one’s “rank”. Of course, online dating apps have no interest in removing the barriers that result in this condition — it makes men pay more for more swipes, higher priority in the stacks shown to women, and the option to see who swiped on them. In other words, it’s a rigged game.
Thanks for the detailed reply. This matches my experience fairly well.
With the dynamics of the game laid out the way you said, do you see any reason to right swipe on someone of a relatively similar attractiveness to you? Or given it’s current parameters, does it always make more sense for women to try to match “up” and aim for men objectively more attractive than them?
Admittedly, I’ve had a very unusual experience on Tinder. Attraction is important, but it’s not the be all end all for me, as there are way more important things. That being said, I also know I rank pretty high on their scoring mechanics, based on the characteristics of who they show to me, and how I am shown to others (for example, Tinder primes people to swipe right by showing a high scoring user when you first open the app, many close friends have informed me “Tinder keeps showing me you when I open the app”, but there are other considerations you can use to assess your internal score). So I match with interesting choices on other attributes. And of the crowd I match with I have built a workflow to manage the volume (literally, I have over three thousand matches as of writing this, historically a total of over 7,000 in the year and a half I’ve used the app) — I reverse engineered their API so I could pull the matches and messages and create JIRA tickets automatically so I could bucket conversations based on initial intentions. It sounds pretty horrible once I write that out, but on the other hand I feel it’s pretty horrible that people don’t get a fair shake because of the way this game is rigged, and this ensures better “fairness”, at least in some way. Also not to mention, about half don’t message first, and of those that do, about a fifth of the time they’re pretty unsavory openers.
This makes a nice news story, but based on the criteria mentioned, it is doomed to failure.
1. There are very, very few life-long partnerships. And of the ones that are, some of them are for reciprocal benefits (not love); some are because the people are too scared or complacent to leave; some are because the two are completely lacking in ambition and hope for a better future. Most people change over time, and most people change differently (especially different sexes). To imagine them remaining on a parallel trajectory through long life by nature (instead of sheer willpower or complacency) is naive.
2. Swiping left/right by looks is not for long term partnership. It is for short term physical excitement. And in that regard, it's a good start.
3. No amount of online communication or friend referrals will compare to frequently being around someone, getting to know them, and falling in love with them. This is a very low percentage game he's betting on (unless he's just betting on publicity, in which case he wins 15 minutes of fame).
4. Wait until the (unnamed nationality) recruiters get wind of this. For a chance of $7000, they will inundate him with dates. The smartest of them will promise to share half of it with the women, in which case he'll have more dates than he has time for. And if he has some money, the more desperate women will fake their way to marriage, winning the $3500 and potentially a comfortable life (only having to have sex with him a couple of times per week).
This may sound pessimistic, but it's really just an observation on traditional modern marriage. People don't work like the story books suggest, and the story books are based on fiction that doesn't represent the vast majority of human history.
The good news for him and anyone else who wants to expand their awareness is that one can have many good meaningful relationships and some really great physical relationships in one lifetime. And be happy through most of it.
None of what you say here imply or explain why his idea would be doomed (not to mention most of your assumptions are not always true or false and like most things depends on the person).
Not to mention points 2, 3 and 4 are completely unsubstantiated lol. How is this the top reply?
Because I replied early? I dunno, only 3 points. [edit - -1 points :P. So sad :( ]
His idea is doomed because he says, "I'm looking for somebody who has a kind heart, someone who's curious and maybe has a sense of humour, it doesn't have to be my sense of humour."... and he's depending on other people, with their own sensibilities and emotions, to identify people he might fit with?
This is not new. People forever (perhaps more often women) have been motivated to play matchmaker for their friends. If that method were most successful, dating apps wouldn't exist.
Another reason his idea is doomed is because he put money on it. That provides a perverse incentive which favors the person who can provide him the most dates (who can superficially entertain him until he weds one).
What you call unsubstantiated I call obvious.
2. Who out there believes that Tinder is where you find your life mate? Maybe it is now, I dunno... but it was certainly a hookup app for the first many years of its existence.
3. A friend is going to be more accurate than you would if you got to know someone naturally and fell in love with them?
4. Absolutely not unsubstantiated. Put any money value on something, and hordes of hungry gamers (not gamers, but gamers) will find a way to take the shotgun approach. After all, if one of his friends is able to keep his calendar booked with prospects, then that friend is more likely to win the prize.
That's way too cynical a view. It's often accurate, but it certainly does not describe all relationships. I've been married 8 years now and it's not at all like that. It's not a fairytale either, but it's a real love. While we've both grown and changed a lot, we haven't grown apart.
There's hope, and it's a tough dating world out there, but if you have your attitude is over before you start.
8 years? Not being flippant, but 8 years is one chapter. More than 8 years of my marriage were so great I couldn't imagine anything better (and I have not topped it with anyone since). I'm saying that you can and should enjoy relationships, but if you expect the impossible, it will end badly. It doesn't have to end badly! It could end naturally, with great respect and friendship.
No, my attitude is that one can have many meaningful chapters (perhaps more than one with the same partner). The problem is this shared assumption that relationships should never end. If one person can grow a lot in life, and you have two people together, the idea that they will both grow in the same ways which keep them sharing the same connection is _very_ ideallistic.
Add children, which certainly changes the parents, and you have even more variables. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do what is right for you at the time, have children, have a happy family, and enjoy it. It just means you should not think it's the end of the world if (when) people's directions begin to diverge.
You're correct that not all relationships last for a lifetime. Not all should last that long. But neither should none.
It varies, because people vary, and you have to both work at it and want similar things.
Fairytales aren't real, but that's also not a reason to just say all marriages won't last. That's obviously false. It's also not the end of the world, as you say, if in the end you've both grown so far apart neither can remember what you're doing together in the first place. You fight for a relationship up to a point, but there are limits.
Statistically most relationships don't last for the remaining lifetimes of the partners. I don't even have to back this up with footnotes. (30+ years ago it might have been true.) I will point out that if you go looking for stats, they can be very misleading as they often compare current new marriages against current divorces. They are not comparing original marriages to their eventual divorces.
My point, which seems to be missed everywhere, is not that you shouldn't try - it's that you should not make the duration a key metric. Live for today, and for the next year, and maybe collectively fantasize and plan about the nextd 5 years. This day zero focus on "forever" just sets people up for mysery if (when) things start to change for the worse.
Isn't now good enough? After all, we only live Now. If we spent more of now enjoying what we have now, then we might waste a lot less of the "good years" worrying about the next years.
While I disagree with this comment, I think that others who disagree should post substantive comments instead of snark. Shallow dismissals are missing an opportunity to refute claims you disagree with.
Unfortunately, I think most of the points here are spot on.
#2 (swiping is for physical excitement) and #4 (an offer of money creates incentives for un-genuine behavior) seem indisputable and deserve to be addressed
#1 (few life-long partnerships)
According to some random web site [1], about 45% of US marriages end in divorce. This seems to support assertion #1.
#3 (online communication does not compare to the quality of in-person communication): Seems like a no-brainer assertion to me, HN posts excepted... (j/k). Of course the online communication is supposed to lead to other opportunities to get to know someone better, so it should really be compared to hanging out in a bar or something. Which I would expect is also (relatively) ineffective at helping find a partner.
I mean, really I think the claim that there are few life-long partnerships is not relevant. A relationship needs a place to start and grow. Later failure of a relationship that "could have" worked out isn't an indication that the filters applied at the start are not functioning correctly.
It's not rocket science. It is, however, really hard. It's very hard to know whether to stay or go but i generally feel happy with marriage and kids. While it takes a lot of time and soul, it removes the need to be looking for someone, which can leave a lot of time for working on what i want to be working on. That's optimistic, but, hey.
Marriage and kids can be a very happy and enriching experience, for all involved. I'm not disputing that. (I had 15 years of magnificent marriage and have two amazing young adult children. I wouldn't trade that for anything.)
But this assumption that two people who find each other a perfect match now will still feel that way in 5, 10, 20, 40 years is just unrealistic. It would be much better if people understood that we are all unique, and we all grow and expand in different ways. Sometimes a couple grows in the same way (and usually they do, quite a lot); but sometimes one of the couple grows in a different direction - discovers something important to them which pulls them away. It doesn't mean there was a problem with the other person or the relationship. A very simple example is when one person finds their career developing and fulfilling, but the other partner has a happy life in a certain town, near their family, friends, etc. To stay together, one of them probably must give up something very important. But to realize that a parting doesn't mean losing connection, it just means going separate ways, is natural.
There are quite a few contrived scenarios in there, but I don't disagree with the last paragraph. For some people that sort of thing (not without effort, patience, understanding, caring, etc) can bring both spontaneous adventure deep discovery. Others are fortunate enough to find it primarily with one person.
It seems pessimistic, but it's only pessimism if you accept the current systems that are in place (economic, human relational, etc.).
I actually think that there can be great joy, mutual success, and net-postive happiness amongst people if they are willing to reconsider the rules and boundaries set by 1-20 generations before them.
Just as with studies and news articles, it's important to consider who benefits from the message being presented. Quite often, it's the "establishment".
After all, the establishment has tried to convince us that smoking was good for you, that mastubation would make you blind (and a host of other maladies), that burning fossil fuels wouldn't harm the environment, that eating low-fat packaged goods wouldn't make us fat, that drinking diet sodas wouldn't make us fat, that vaping wouldn't do some really wack stuff to us, that politicians represented us, etc. etc.
There are places in the world today where a woman breastfeeding in public is considered offensive. Who made that determination? (I use this example because it's about the most natural human activity, perhaps beside sex.) And yet, much of the US establishment wants us to believe that it's inappropriate. All of these crazy rules and artificial limitations could be much of what's wrong with our relationships and our behavior. I'm trying to point out the absurdity of things.
I've never used a dating app, probably never will. I don't see the allure. It's like the fast food of human relationships - completely synthetic and made to fill a desire (in some cases). Not to mention the level of vanity in these apps.
Why do you think that? Nothing really matters until you meet up in person and once you do, how you planned it doesn't really matter. It isn't some backpage transaction, there isn't any commitment or investment before you meet up. If you want to leave you leave.
Honestly it just sounds like he's outsourcing a match maker. There are professional match markers and they aren't uncommon. It's also pretty common for friends and family to play match maker. I'm not sure I'd use a professional match maker but this isn't too weird.
Being an indian, I find this funny - in our culture (and I guess most asian cultures), it is quite common for the elders in our social network do so much unsolicited match-making that it can sometimes be irksome. :)
India even has matchmaking websites for those wanting to find a suitable partner for marriage (half of the posts in it will be from parents / relatives of the prospective bride / groom). It's actually quite a competitive and lucrative business. Apart from charging for membership, these sites also abuse lax privacy laws and sell the individual profiles to data brokers and marketing divisions of various industries.
> Apart from charging for membership, these sites also abuse lax privacy laws and sell the individual profiles to data brokers and marketing divisions of various industries.
Am curious - do you think the Match group is any different? Their market cap suggests that they also do the same...
I've joked to friends (but would follow through) that if they introduce me to my future wife I would give them 5k. That is such a small amount of money to help you find the most important person in your life.
I think its a bit worse to pay for dates/access which is the entire premise of dating apps, matchmakers, clubs etc. because those dont have a vested interest in helping you find anything long and successful. In fact, its the opposite.
In my experience of human society, marriage is extremely transactional. It's modern legal form was invented largely to legally codify how wealth transfers related to marriages would be handled, essentially.
A marriage in today's society is more of a business partnership than anything else; infidelity is as common as not. Often in wealthy circles joint business ownership precludes divorce as well, so enter the side partners. Typical aristocratic nonsense, which is what you get with Empires.
The transactional nature of it doesn't bother me. Plenty of cultures and people do arranged marriages and stuff like that. It's just, how he has a lottery for freelance head hunters, a bounty, it's gross.
On the dating app subject. It is interesting that the most successful customers will never come back. Must be hard to keep up the number of active users if the service is too good…
> He says the swipe-right or swipe-left nature of many of the apps means people are judging a person based on very little, a photo and a short bio.
Sounds like he’s using the wrong apps for his goal. It’s intuitively determined that the gradient of intentions for dating apps goes from being hookup-oriented to long term compatibility in direct proportion to the amount of info given before matching.
i was starting to cobble together a project Eddystone (bluetooth le url beacon) dating profile, before google killed the android notifications for eddystone.
the inability to communicate digitally with those around us at a bar or at a park is pretty silly. it'd be so neat to start more ad-hoc, non-applicationized communications channels! and a chief use would definitely be, "hi, single and interested!"
was talking with someone yesterday about dating & they actually brought up dating & knowing people's availability, & tech for facilitating info exchange at a bar ornwhat not. which is a twist, because usually it's me semi-subtly wading into a discussion about p2p tech. latter in the conversation they brought up stoplight parties- using very visible clothing (red/yellow/green) to signal interest (no/maybe/yes). trying to think of more over real world ways to connect seems ultra interesting to me.
> i was starting to cobble together a project Eddystone (bluetooth le url beacon) dating profile
When I got my first smartphone, I wondered if there might be a trend of single people setting their Bluetooth device name to the URL of their dating profile. Ideally the profile would have a machine-readable set of fields in (alongside a human-readable equivalent) and an app could calculate if you are compatible with anyone in the vicinity.
The system could still work without an app, though, since the user (when they notice someone they are attracted to nearby) could manually scan for Bluetooth device names using their phone, and browse to each page to check if the profile picture matches the person they noticed.
I know there have been some geo-location based dating services, but I think they have an incentive to make the matching radius as wide as possible, so that you keep looking at their app. On an open system, though, the economics of hosting these profiles should be similar to that of hosting Fediverse accounts, so there shouldn't be the same conflicts of interest.
Whatever happened to just asking pretty girls you see on dates? That’s how I met my wife. Total stranger, gave her my number and asked her out for coffee. Been married ten years now.
There are dozens (probably hundreds) of articles demonizing men for interacting with women in public they do not know. Your comment sounds a lot like "Look the hiring manager in the eye and give him a firm handshake" advice that's half a century out of date. We no longer live in the type of high trust society where such casual interactions are welcomed or even socially acceptable. Perhaps that still exists in a small town that could be part of a Hallmark movie but in the typical contemporary urban center, you're just as likely to end up on someone's "I don't owe you my attention" tiktok video as you are to have a mutually positive interaction.
> in the typical contemporary urban center, you're just as likely to end up on someone's "I don't owe you my attention" tiktok video as you are to have a mutually positive interaction.
I'm surprised to hear you describe those odds as undesirable. 50% chance of a positive interaction is an order of magnitude higher than I would have estimated. Even if there's only a 5% chance of a positive interaction, parent poster's advice is still worth it. If you are respectful other other people, those negative interactions will be short and not too bad for either party. The upshot of find love and a lifelong partner more than offsets those short negative interactions that you have to wade through.
This would be true if the world were not as highly interconnected as it is. Nobody wants to risk this "failure" being broadcasted and possibly following them through virality. People today are not allowed to "fail safely" so to speak. Not without social penalties even outside their immediate social circle.
I know what you mean. The world was definitely different years ago when I met my wife. If I was single today, I don't know if I would take the same risks that I took 10 years ago. That said, I still think those are risks worth taking (even if I myself wouldn't have the balls to take them). If you go in with good intentions and treat people with respect, what's the worst that can happen? I don't think there's a lot of viral potential for a video where a socially awkward guy tries to talk to a woman and walks off after being rejected.
Skill is certainly involved, as are sometimes crushing demographics. I grew up in churches that taught one to only date non-Catholic Christians. In the area those were rare, especially single ones my age. Then everyone has deal breakers further reducing the pool of possible candidates. I learned to be less picky but still had to travel about 50 miles away and only made 2 successful matches (i.e. second date) over 5y.
Everyone overthinks things but this really is a good option. I’ve also been with my wife over ten years so maybe I’m not the authority any more. But even back then online dating was a thing but I had zero success with it. But it always seemed as a man, women basically gave you +2 in attractiveness just for having the confidence to go up and introduce yourself. Seemed crazy to throw those free points away so I just psyched myself into forcing myself to “just do it” if someone caught my eye.
Besides meeting my wife this way, there was one girl who rather coldly rejected me that I later ran into via another social circle. I apologized if I had made her uncomfortable and she told me that even though she wasn’t interested she was also somewhat flattered and that the incident made her day.
I think with sexual harassment in the world and all these apps everyone overthinks things and think just walking up to a stranger is for boomers or pick up artists. Really it’s just the normal human interaction that worked for a couple million years and still works today. And at least for typical heterosexual dynamics, the ability to make eye contact and say “Hi, my name is” will always be more impactful than a Bluetooth signal.
> But it always seemed as a man, women basically gave you +2 in attractiveness just for having the confidence to go up and introduce yourself.
In my experience, you are 110% correct.
I first saw my wife giving a speech and remembered her name. Two weeks later, I went up and introduced myself, with "Hello, <name>, my name is <ghoward>. Thank you for your [speech] about <thing>."
There are a few interesting things about what she noticed. First, she didn't really notice that I got "<thing>" wrong. (I mixed her speech up with another person's.) Second, the reason she didn't notice is because all she noticed was that I remembered her name!
And finally, as we were preparing to get married, many guys in our community got up in arms about how the community "superstar" was marrying me, someone known to be less attractive. My wife says all of the time that she chose me simply because I actually introduced myself and (later) asked her on a date.
Though all of that doesn't explain how she still finds me attractive, especially since she now knows I'm not that confident after all...
I'd argue many are throwing a different signal - wearing earbuds or headphones. Looking at your phone could be anything from talking to a friend to checking the weather. Listening to music sends a much stronger signal of "I'm busy, come back later or not at all".
> Total stranger, gave her my number and asked her out [...]
I'm really, genuinely glad this worked out for you.
When feminists talk about the objectification of women, though, I think this is a prime example. (Admittedly there are no details.) The assumption that bothers me is that it is ok to approach a "pretty girl" about entering into a relationship.
Isn't this problem as old as the hills?
> Why can't I walk down a street free of suggestion?
Two other random observations about the differences between using matching sites versus people I've met more organically: Those I've met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. That difference is quite stark but otherwise personality and lifestyle differences are minimal. The other is that tall women are vastly overrepresented on dating sites. My guess is that if you're a 6' tall woman who wants to not be taller than her significant other but still wants to be able to wear heels, the numbers don't work very well with more traditional dating. You have to be able to cast a wide net when 96% of men are already shorter than you are in two inch heels.
For myself, my best relationships have been those I've met in person rather than through online dating. In most of those cases, we wouldn't have been a match if we had been using an app and running in similar social circles itself was a good filter. The best relationship from someone I met online was a woman I met on LiveJournal in an alumni area, which was somewhat of a pseudo social circle filter itself.