If I believed everything I read on a dating profile, I'd be convinced that every woman is "fluent in sarcasm", "obssessed with travel" and is "looking for the Jim Halpert to her Pam Beasly".

In reality, most people don't truly know what they're looking for and definitely cannot afford to travel more than 1x a year, if that. Hell, I "travel" that much and it'll never be a bullet point on my profile because it's not something I really value.

People put in the most formulaic BS on their profiles in the hope of appearing "normal" to a potential match. The UX of most dating sites encourages this kind of self-pigeonholing as well.

In rare cases, people will actually write "I really don't know what to write here, it's hard to summarize myself this way". But I find that to be a truer reflection of a person rather than the boilerplate text people tend to post.

When a woman puts in her profile that she has a dog, and her favorite activities all revolve around the dog, and she has pictures of herself in bed with the dog, that isn't "formulaic BS", that's her life.

Sure, you can say things like "love to travel", "fluent in sarcasm", etc., without those being huge parts of your daily life. But you can't own a dog and not have it be a big part of your life.

I do see some women who don't own dogs, and will say stuff in there about how much she loves them, wants to get one, will totally swipe right for your dog, etc. But usually they actually do own one.

> I do see some women who don't own dogs, and will say stuff in there about how much she loves them

That's the scenario I was referring to. For potential matches that already have pets of some kind, I usually see that they ask that the other person be OK with dogs/cats, which is very reasonable compared to "you must also have pets".

That's not at all what you wrote above. You said they were adding things like that just to sound good, not because they truly value it. You gave travel as an example, because you (correctly) assume many women put in their profiles that they like to travel, when in reality many probably only do it every year or two at best. This isn't the case with a dog: she must value it quite a bit to put up with living with it.

>animals that are totally impractical in the city.

Having a dog signals that you will take on caring for another being even if it is not in your financial best interest and that you can at least keep the thing alive. Think with your lizard brain and it makes perfect sense why women are attracted to that.

Having a cat also signals that you will take on caring for another being even though it is not in your financial best interest. But when you live in a condo with no backyard, or some other city dwelling like that, a cat makes far more sense, and doesn't require the ridiculous amount of maintenance that a dog does.

Why childless American women who explicitly don't want children aren't attracted to men who like cats, I have no idea. It's not like this in other countries; this is mostly an American phenomenon.

>But when you live in a condo with no backyard, or some other city dwelling like that, a cat makes far more sense, and doesn't require the ridiculous amount of maintenance that a dog does.

That's exactly what I'm saying. The dog is conspicuous consumption. It's signaling that you are willing to burn resources (time in particular) in a similar manner you would on a child. The lizard brain eats that shit up and the human brain is none the wiser. As a byproduct of being far more practical in terms of time/money resources the cat does not broadcast that signal. Nobody is saying the cat is not more practical. That's a given.

You seem to be implying that it's biological. It's not, it's entirely cultural. Non-American women (unless they're highly Americanized) aren't like this at all. Chinese women aren't really big on pets, because people there don't have indoor pets very much. Also, black American women don't have dogs (or cats) very much at all. This is a cultural thing, and so I don't see how you can claim it's some kind of innate biological thing, unless you're going to claim that white American women are biologically different from everyone else in the world.

The lizard brain likes seeing conspicuous consumption (indication of wealth/status) and signs that you are possibly ok pissing away resources on a kid. Having a pet dog is the way we Americans prefer to signal that. The interface is biological. The implementation is cultural.