Yes. The other common meme among this kind of guy is the one that says 80% of women are all chasing after the top 20% of men and ignore the rest.
I don’t think it’s controversial that monogamy in marriage benefits less powerful/attractive men, because they would end up single if polygamy was common and legal. Most women prefer monogamy too. If we truly had ‘free love’ there’s no reason for most women to choose less attractive men, so they would be out of luck. Therefore it does make some sense for these guys to support slut-shaming.
IMO the mismatch in desire for casual sex or short term vs long term relationships is a major cause of this dating market failure. Women are often inundated with ‘likes’ and messages, with no way to tell which guys are serious about wanting a relationship, and which if any like her in particular Vs spamming every women in the hopes of getting a reply. Perhaps the cost (in courage and risk of embarrassment) of asking a woman out in person is a useful filter for finding men who are at least somewhat serious. I wonder if any dating site has tried limiting how many women the men can like or message, or imposing some other cost to do so?
I was too, and I don’t agree either, but this is what Nice Guy Discourse says.
With the ‘price’ being marriage, which has indeed fallen as sex has become more easily available.
I have to agree, “dating apps” have always struck me as a terrible way to look for an actually good relationship, short or long term. They are basically the high tech equivalent of standing on a corner waving a “I WANT A BOYFRIEND” sign. (Or girlfriend, depending on taste)
Mobile dating apps are a popular way to meet people. They promise a fun partner and a happy love life. However, a new study by Radboud University researchers shows that people who use dating apps actually tend to be overall less satisfied with their relationship status than those who don’t.
If that works, great. Personally, I’ve taken classes in woodworking, guitar, and ballroom dance; and I’ve been curling for about 15 years. All things that I was interested in trying. I learned a lot and had a good time. But no strong friendships or dating came from them.
It’s hard to tell from that link whether people are less satisfied because they use the apps, or whether people who are less satisfied with their relationship status are just more likely to use dating apps, which would have been my initial assumption.
I’ve never used one, because i married the man who is still my husband before they existed. But i have lots of friends who did. And while everyone bitches about the apps, i know an awful lot of people who found a partner (and seem happy about that) using dating apps. Like, i went to a friend’s wedding, and asked, “how did you meet?”, and they laughed and said, “how do you find anything these days?”
Fwiw, i think my celibate friend who used to be so frustrated would have done better if there had been dating apps in his youth. If he had the patience to stick it out. I suppose he might have just gotten angry at women in general when few responded to him.
All three of my kids with current relationships, including one long term cohabiting plan on marrying at some point they say … began on dating apps. They are all happy. And to your selection bias arrow of causality point: they are now not on the apps of course.
So do I - and it’s people of all ages, from my 35 year old niece to my 70 (at the time) year old uncle. I have no idea how many people they met or how long they spent on apps before finding a partner - but I’m sure they were less satisfied during that time.
I don’t think dating apps are like standing on a street corner with a sign - I think they are like going to the places that existed when I was young. Bars and clubs that attracted single people who were looking to meet other single people.
They compared single people using them with single people not using them. But it seems very likely that people who were more unhappy about being single would be more likely to be using apps.
I have one friend who found his wife on a dating site, but it took him a very long time and a lot of dates compared to those of us who met more organically. (I actually met my husband online, but on an irc server rather than a dating site; apps didn’t exist back then.)
Maybe it’s not that the apps are so terrible exactly; it’s that other ways to meet people like going to bars and clubs, hanging out in pubic with friends, and going to church or other places of worship have been fading away, so if the apps don’t work well for you there isn’t much of an alternative.
Nevermind. I was lying down trying to get to sleep last night when I finally realized what you meant. The odd thing is that my profile page shows the most popular links I have posted and how many people have clicked on them. The link that I said only goes to page telling you that you need to sign in to see this content keeps getting clicks.
It’s not that apps are “terrible” but they reduce people to a series of filterable metrics. Dating apps are also part of the proliferation of super hi-dev streaming and online entertainment and services that reduces the need for people to “go outside” where they can meet and interact with other people.
Or maybe dating apps are a response to the lack of “other places” for people to go.
My daughter met her SO on a Discord, but they were friends for years before meeting in person and dating. Neither is a young man, though. Our son met his SO in a very traditional way, as college classmates.
It’s hard to say how online dating would have worked for me. A photo of me wouldn’t have scared many women away, and I probably could have typed a good game. I still might have had the deer in the headlights look when meeting in person, though.
Implying people bother to read before clicking anything.
Yeah. And they give the illusion of infinite choice. It’s not that people have to be prepared to ‘settle’ exactly, but it’s not great to think that however good your partner, there could always be someone better out there.
Probably both. I don’t think online socialising fully substitutes for the IRL version, but getting people back out in the real world is a collective action problem.
Right. Single people who are happy to be single, and partnered people who are satisfied with their partner don’t generally use dating apps. They are used primarily by people who want a new partner. Almost by definition the users of dating apps are unsatisfied with their current situation.
I’ve posted this site / cite before. It’s an interesting way to expose how filtration on the “catalog features” of your desired mate changes their availability. In essence you fiddle with common dating app filters and immediately see how many & what percentage of people in the USA meet those filters.
The site is old enough it does not support https. But it also doesn’t ask you for any personal info. So IMO that’s not an obstacle to using the site, despite many browsers choosing to warn you about that.
It is real eye opening how quickly you can restrict yourself to 1 in 10,000 (= 0.01%) people. if you applied those same filters in a real dating app, that suggests that 9,999 of the subscribers of your desired gender are people you’ll never be shown. Becasue you filtered them out a priori. Probably an oops on you.
Caveat:
I doubt their data has any cross correlations included. i.e. If you filter on education level they treat that as one independent dimension. If separately you filter on income level they treat that as one independent dimension. But if you filter on both, the result is excess filtration and a more pessimistic number of hits because IRL education and income have a pretty high correlation. Which their data doesn’t know about.
It also doesn’t account for how certain traits are clustered in particular geographic areas. If you restrict your criteria to “Jewish woman” or “gay man,” the “% of population” figure drops to a fraction of 1% - but then, if that’s the only type of partner you’re interested in, you’re probably living in an area where the percentage of gay people or Jews is substantially higher than in the U.S. as a whole.
It’s surprising how little those demographic filters correspond to what I’d actually be looking for if single (is that also true for other people?), but since it’s taken from the census I suppose they used what’s available. I’m sure I’d get a very tiny percentage of the population in reality, but I can only approximate that by choosing things I don’t technically care about.
OKCupid was much better because you could answer questions on a whole range of issues, and rate them for how important they were, and then you’d get a match score with other users, rather than filtering them out for being ‘wrong’ on just one thing.
And if you’re not living in such an area, you’ll be out of luck. I grew up in Hicksville and trying to date was hopeless, but when I went to university it was very different because it selects for several important traits.
Maybe a better dating service would be to have people sign up, answer a bunch of questions on themselves and what they are looking for, pick out clusters of similar people and then arrange social events for them? High probability of finding someone you’d be interested in, but no one is straight up eliminated over one criterion, and you get to meet them in real life rather than by swiping.
Agreed. It’s definitely tinkertoy-level statistics. But still a bit eye opening.
I live in a metro area of ~6M people. Demographically I’m pretty mainstream for the professional class SES. Even with pretty loose parameters on a desired match it quickly reduced the ~3M local-ish females to a few hundred. With no allowance for what percentage of those few are already married or committed. Yikes!
Yeah, I don’t think it’s accurate. You can fill in your own demograhics to see how many people are similar to you, and it’s giving unrealistically low numbers. Also, one of the options is ‘in a relationship’ or not.
And yet, some of the early growth of dating apps was driven by people looking for Jewish women or gay men, because that really was their requirement, and it can be hard to find those people by just going to a bar. Dating apps are let efficient of you have a hard requirement for an unusual choice like those examples.
