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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sounds intriguing. Care to elaborate at all with any examples?

GP of the thread here. Things that straight people stereotypically do that gay men stereotypically do not understand:

- Treating every person you date like a potential spouse instead of a potential friend

- Getting upset when your partner finds someone else attractive

- Caring about how many sexual partners someone has had in the past

- Remaining sexually monogamous in a relationship that has lost its sexual energy (i.e., 'dead bedroom')

Again, generalizations. I think straight people have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the values of western religions and government institutions that demand couples settle down indefinitely and singularly in high-stakes marriages. Soo much rests on finding the right partner, which can be very stressful, especially for women. They think that their desires have to be suppressed or changed to be happy, and have internalized ridiculous messages about sexual purity and how love is 'supposed to be'. However, us degenerates have always been shunned by those institutions and therefore can see the silliness in it, not that we don't have a huge heaping of silliness to deal with ourselves.

I can see those stereotype applying in a lot of situations. It makes me wonder, looking at them, how does the prospect for reproduction play into it.

At a high level, one big difference is that straight couples can reproduce together. So its not merely looking for a partner in life, or a partner to help raise a child with. But for the prospect of merging your genes.

I think nowadays a lot of the behavior could be explained by values lingering. But I can also rationalize how in a more natural order, without contraception existing, the decision for two straight people to get together comes with a much higher risk/reward ratio. From this, entails that picking the best partner is much more important, and making sure they'll remain throughout the whole pragnency and afterwards to help and support, etc. All that seems to weigh on the decisions for two people to partner up in a straight relationship that doesn't seem as likely in a gay one.

Maybe those instincts remains in straight people, even though nowadays we have good contraception. Or maybe it's that values of such time still linger. Also, even with contraception, it be pretty weird for a straight couple to decide to find a suitable surrogate, so there's still that ultimate, would this be the genetic other of my child?

> Things that straight people stereotypically do that gay men stereotypically do not understand:

- Bog down with mortgages and children instead of hopping around the world, partying.

Why are those the only two choices? This is definitely how every woman I have dated (including my wife) has seen it - if we ain't raisin' kids in a house we damn well better be burning a fuckton of jet fuel. Not willing to entertain "just work a lot less" as even a joking third path.

I opted for a kid and a mortgage because at least this way maybe one day me "and my son" will build an electromagnetic rail accelerator[1] and remote-controlled gliders and fly them around together.

The serious answer to that question is probably because straight couples mostly have biological children, with the associated biogenic time pressure driving FOMO. Adoption or surrogacy can in theory be put off indefinitely and I imagine a lot of male-male couples wind up doing just that.

[1] Terminology intentionally changed from "rail-gun" to emphasize peaceful applications to my gun-hating wife.

This is within the same ballpark of stuff I was thinking about!

Also, we're both Seattle-area engineers, leading very career-oriented lives. One reason for marrying would be to mitigate financial risk when one of us tries to do something crazy.

Funny enough, our simple desire to leave a professional legacy has helped our immediate family greatly (e.g. I'm the one my parents or straight siblings go to for big cash emergencies, etc.)

I've seen numbers between 1% and 10%, but there's a lot of noise about it, is there a good source?

In any case, are homosexuals distributed equally over the area? My intuitive assumption is that they gravitate to larger cities for a variety of reasons (but less discrimination is probably a big one, since cities tend to be much more liberal and anonymous than the nation they are in), which would change the chances significantly.

Re: percentages. I just picked 5% for a talking point. It is definitely more than 1%, but it really depends on how you define 'homosexual'. Some surveys might count someone who has had a same-sex partner in the past but now does not, or people who are open to the idea but have not acted on it. Then there's trans people, who generally are attracted to the opposite gender but might get counted because they are 'not really straight' :(.

I am dying to hear some stories from that 5% who were meeting at church. And I wonder if the declining college number has to do with people waiting longer, or the fact that more people are coming out and so the age range of the survey is broader.

Same sex dating is, sadly, still not entirely safe. A little anonymity and being out of arm's reach probably makes people feel a lot more comfortable (have you ever gone on a date when you were uncomfortable for some other reason? Did it end well?)

I don't recall if it was Dan Savage or something I read earlier than that, about how screwed gay men are in a mixed orientation environment, because a heterosexual male can use prolonged eye contact across a bar as an intro to approaching a woman, while some men see eye contact as aggression. If that person turns out to be a homophobe, the author theorizes that the odds of a violent end to this encounter has just gone up considerably. A gay bar or an online dating site sets a context, a social filter. If you crash and burn it's over quickly and you can move on.

If smart phones were available sooner I wonder how much faster that line would have gone up.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true just as it would be for divorced seniors. People don’t typically randomly try to meet someone on the street (usually it’s against norms and may be categorized as “creepy”).

Most people meet the kind of people they are attracted to in places where they are likely to congregate.

In other words hardly any population has uniform distribution.

People might not randomly meet in the street, but they certainly meet through hobbies, work and random social events. If you have some dating requirement that instantly cuts your dating pool significantly, the chance of finding someone at a generic event also drops. This holds true for both divorced seniors and gay people, but with being gay there's the additional difficulty of narrowing down people at an event - at least the divorced seniors can identify the seniors in a room.

I understand that and I will acknowledge it reduces the pool compared to larger populations but it’s not 1/20 because the hobbies and friends and places one might frequent are often but not always obviously the places with like-people.

Also Jewish dating and so on.

If the participants are free to say "I refuse to date anyone of (or not of) race X under any circumstances" then there's no solution in the general case.

No solution to what

I think they're referring to the "stable marriage problem" where every person is gonna get married come hell or high water, no takebacks. That problem cannot be solved in general if individuals can give a hard no.

Are you sure? What if you inventing a "phantom partner" for each person, who represents "not getting married". The preferences for that phantom partner would be

1. The person they are phantoming

2-N+1. All other phantom partners

N+1-2N+1. All other people.

If the person prefers not being married over all other available partners, then that will necessarily be a stable marriage. If they don't then the phantom partner will be able to find a match among the other unmatched phantom partners.

Hard no's are fine in the classic stable marriage problem. "Remain single" gets added as an option to each person's preference list, then you can run Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance more-or-less as normal with each person on the accepting side starting with "remain single".

The original formulation of the problem is looking for a bijection / perfect matching. That isn't always possible if "remain single" is an option. I agree with you and your sibling that modifying the problem is possible, but it won't always produce a perfect matching which is what I meant by unsolvable.

Given this appears in Gale and Shapley 1962, I'd say it is part of the original formulation (though they do it by saying people are simply not allowed to apply to colleges where they'd be a hard no rather than apply and be rejected). They're looking at stable matchings for college admissions, not perfect matchings.

Fair enough :)