It was my experience that young women in general were asking for too much when I was in my early 20s. They wanted someone who had it "all together," and that's just not where most people are in their early 20s. There doesn't seem to be any appreciation anymore for the fact that young couples grow up together. Instead, people seem to think that you grow up first and establish who you are independently, then find someone else to bring into your life. But realistically, you don't finish growing before dating, and in life who you become is based on the interactions not just with your significant other, but your friends and family, too.

Lastly, all of my dating experiences online lead me to women who wanted to be "entertained." And not in the sort of "wined and dined" sense which seems obvious to me, but rather most women I came across didn't want to get to know men, they just wanted entertainment value out of the experience of dating. This was a sharp contrast from interactions with young women in real life. The dating world for both young men and women online seems to create some strange scenarios that don't play out well for anyone involved. I see this manifest the most in online dating where most men are naturally led to play pickup artist lines. I personally find it extremely off-putting. I'm not a jester.

I'm not saying that is what you're saying. It just made me recall my experiences.

Now I will say it's not really anyone's fault. Women looking for men probably don't see what the other women on the site's profiles look like. Likewise my profile might be a trope as well. But men do have to go out of their way to stand out to get a decent chance at a connection.

You're right. Everyone is interesting once they open up a little.

The goal though isn't to show how you're different from the herd, it's to show that you're better than the herd, for whichever sub-herd you're signaling membership. That strategy preserves maximum choice.

Something interesting I've noticed, is that trying to break that mold is considered negative. If you look at subreddits that tend to give out advice (typically to men) on dating profiles, they advise people to do things that make their profiles more generic.

I personally avoid dating apps, because I'm not attractive enough (or at least, not photogenic enough, somehow cameras almost always manage to clown me) and I'm not outwardly interesting enough to attract people by reducing myself down to a few pictures and text snippets.

Because you then have established so much of who you are independent of the interactions between yourself and a who-would-be spouse, there's a greater chance that you'll have even more to disagree over.

You're only creating more difficulties for yourself. Beyond the intricacies of a crystallized person, there's a smaller dating pool, it's more difficult to get pregnant, you have a greater difficulty acquiring assets not having another person you're working together through life with.

Yes, those women in their 20s will want to date you, but if you're in your 30s, you're effectively dating a kid. They absolutely do not have the same experiences you will have at that point in time unless you did no personal growth for a decade.

Temporarily. Then you divorce and lose all of those assets. It’s not a gamble I would recommend based on expected financial gains for sure.

And also as I mentioned below but just to make sure it's clear: if you aren't comfortable dating, then you should date as often as you can because it can be genuinely fun and fulfilling and lead to very positive outcomes. If you _are_ comfortable dating and do well with the opposite sex of your preference, but just aren't satisfied with what's out there or it feels forced and unenjoyable, then you _might_ benefit from focusing more on developing yourself rather than focusing on the partner search. It's a cliche but once you're truly in a good place with yourself, you tend to attract to the right people into your life.

This needs to be hugely caveated. If you skip dating for five to ten years, you're gonna jump back in fresh and probably fuck things up terribly the first few times. Too eager, too indifferent, too clingy, too distant, etc... you're gonna be terribly out of practice at it all.

It's a skill, like anything else it takes practice. There's altogether too much BS out there about people being "meant to be" versus people putting in the work on both sides to create something real.

That’s why you should never stop dating, even after you’ve met someone. You never know when you’ll break up and have to find someone else. Best to stay sharp.

These are generally personality traits of someone who is not well adjusted. If you are the type of person who can become professionally and personally (think friendships and any other non-sexual relationship) successful, then you'll probably be fine jumping back into the dating pool even if you've only dabbled casually for a pretty long period of time.

You might also quite reasonably be confident in your professional and personal-friend lives, but be lacking some of that confidence in dating, since you haven't done it for years. These aren't transferable domains for a lot of people.

I was on dating sites and apps for several years before I started having any luck finding much, much less something serious, and every moment of it was valuable practice in an area that didn't come naturally to me at all. My career situation also improved throughout those years, sometimes faster than my dating skills, and I quickly learned that having a nicer car did me 0 favors while I was still uncomfortable on a date in the first place. None of that professional practice applied - was I going to talk about load balancers and HA strategies on the date?

I've had a long string of failures after starting dating (Post covid vaccine) and just felt so incapable of being next to another person.

It's like all this time quarantined as put my dating skills back to zero (not that they were ever good). I feel so broken, like shards of glass that cuts anyone who tries to touch me.

But you have inspired to to once again glue all my broken shards together and try and try again.

Thank you.

I don't know... I'm not sure most women would be comfortable dating a man in his early 30's who'd never had a relationship of any kind...

P.s. I've learn just enough bass to meet my wife !

I go out socialising/partying less now, and am on the PC more (games, projects, etc - most of my interests are on PC). Your advice creates the people in the article!

"Today" is an interesting word choice. This seems like a lingering problem originating in the past, when women were entirely expected to depend on a man to provide, and were NOT expected to have stuff going on in their own life beyond being fertile and useful around the house and of good family background...?

What's the line? "Feminism is for men too"?

Men who just want hookups can keep such women's calendar filled for a while but aren't going to be really doing that providing in the long run.

But in general, the obsession with not being a loser is dangerous for everyone: not everyone will be in the top 10%, and not everyone will attract someone in the top 10%, by simple math, and yet people of both gender's are convinced that it's the other group that has the unreasonable standards...

One school of thought says there are men on dating websites who copy-paste a message saying "hey how you doing?" to every woman they see; and that women are beset by hundreds of copy-pasted messages from men who haven't even read their profile.

This school of thought says, in order to stand out, men should carefully compose a different clever, charming message for each woman they contact, based on things the recipient mentions in their profile and suchlike.

Of course, a man sending 100 copy-pasted messages and a man sending 5 high-quality messages might be expending the same amount of effort in total but the latter is demonstrating greater effort per woman

In this context, kogepathic means more men should adopt the strategy of carefully composing messages.

The takeaway for me is profile pictures, physical appearance and class/status signifiers (vacations, hobbies, nice things in/around the picture) were all that mattered and if someone was sold on that all you really had to do was not get in your own way by saying something stupid.

To use a property analogy: if I am not the highest offer on a house, I probably won't get it. Doesn't matter if I have a trust fund or work for minimum wage (effort put into the offer) my offer wasn't accepted.

Similarly if I'm the seller, I can decide "No, actually I don't want to sell my house to BlackRock, I'd rather sell it to this young family" and that's entirely my choice. This choice might leave money on the table, but at least I get the warm fuzzy feels inside for doing what I think is best.

What you describe sounds like you want some kind of "thank you for putting in some effort" but you decide the amount of effort to invest, the other party owes you nothing.

It's hard to say which is worse: the messages that say that they haven't put any thought into you at all, or the messages that say they have exactly one thought about you -- and everybody else.

Everybody gets poor payoff percentages. You play if you think the game is worth the candle.

While if a guy wants a proper conversation... get lucky punk?

I'm told it's different in other places but I suspect that has more to do with the men than the women.

You're saying the "it's not hard" situation is similarly demoralizing to what women face? Sure I guess.

But BitwiseFool was describing a situation where it's extremely hard to get a reply, and that is much more demoralizing because there's no easy fix.

My suspicion is that I worked to make myself interesting, and worth conversing with. And I see a lot of comments here that betray a deep distrust of women, with a ton of stereotyping and lack of empathy. I hear tons of complaints from women about men's profiles, and it never has to do with looks or money.

I've sometimes thought of opening a dating profile consultancy. I may be completely off base, but I believe that in a lot of cases, men can do better without changing jobs or their appearance. And my first piece of free advice is that if you're blaming women, women aren't going to like you.

In what sort of ways are you “ interesting”? Genuinely curious. FWIW most advice I’ve seen regarding advice for dating profiles (particularly for guys) involves removing anything that might signify personality and to make it as formulaic as possible. Your pictures all have to be the right things, the profile description can’t be too short or too long, and can only say certain things, etc. I think on these sort of apps it’s almost seen as positive to be as basic as possible. Even I find myself suspicious of profiles that say to much or try to stand out now.

The other piece of advice I see almost always has to do with quality of pictures, which is understandable, but let’s be real, if I had the kind of life where I was happy all the time, doing cool things and taking pictures with friends, I probably wouldn’t need to be on this app ;)

So many women I've met complain that they start the date with "so tell me about yourself" and get, "uh I dunno. I like to play video games." (Not that there's anything wrong with video games but at least have some stories to tell. Maybe she'll also play. Jackpot. Unless you start telling her she's not a real games.)

I do lots of things. I act, i juggle, i run marathons. The tricky part is phrasing it in a way that doesn't come off as "I'm too cool an expect you to shut up and listen."

That is of course just what works for me, and for the kind of women I like. (Talking about dating sites is a really easy topic of conversation on a first date, so I hear a lot.)

If they're telling you to be dull, maybe that works for other men with other women. But to me it sounds like a recipe for a boring date.

I try to go in with the attitude that if we do nothing more than spend a few minutes chatting nicely over coffee, it will have been fun and worth my time. That kind of attitude seems best for making myself seem worthwhile and fun, so that she wants more.

If someone told you they were having a hard time buying a house and all their offers were silently rejected replying "The sellers owe you nothing" might be true, but it is beside the point.

No, that's an aberration perpetrated by software. The same problem has manifested in interviewing. Maybe you're thinking of "nobody owes you sex" instead?

If you greet a person in real life or over a call and they intentionally ignore you, they are being rude. Obviously, if you're being rude first, that's different. They can say "hey" back, or "sorry, I'm not interested" or "kind of busy right now, can we pick this up later?" There are plenty of options.

I understand that the way these apps are set up, responding like this isn't a winning strategy. Despite what the Internet would have you believe, there is a minimum social bar when there's a human on the other end of a comm channel.

(Looking for hookups on apps is, I imagine, an entirely different ballgame, and I have no idea what works or doesn't work there.)

Now? I just gave up. I have better things to do then spend hundreds of hours without a single conversation going anywhere. Online dating is a useless black hole.

Towards the end of my time on OkCupid (where I met my wife!), I wanted to only compose five messages per day. I did this to reduce my time on the platform. (Online dating services are masters of dark patterns and addicting behaviors.) However, even though those messages were short, since they were bespoke to the profiles I was looking at, those messages took time to write.

I found myself in this predicament where I burned too much time looking at profiles of attractive women with bland (to me) profiles. So, I thought "what if I hid the photos and focused on profiles I thought were interesting?"

Three things happened when I did that:

1. Writing short, but targeted, messages became a LOT easier because I was focusing on connecting with people I probably wanted to spend more time with,

2. Since I never "saw" who I was messaging when I wrote those messages, me never getting a response from them hurt way less (since I never met them to begin with!), and

3. When I un-hid the photos of the women who responded to me, _they were still attractive!_ As it happens, I learned that I'm attracted to smart, pretty women with personalities.

I suppose this won't work for people who want to do the nasty with as many hot people as they can find. There were, like men, smart, attractive women who didn't know how to craft an online dating profile and got filtered out from this approach.

What I do know is that my response and date rate went WAY up after hiding photos and responding to interesting profiles, and my mental health towards online dating improved significantly.

The "I want the total package" unrealistic-expectations person is prominent in both genders, even if "no fat chicks" t-shirts aren't as popular as they once were. The slob-with-hot-wife TV trope probably hasn't helped men's expectations here.

The "I'm gonna send a thousand dick pics and see who is down for a hookup" behavior, on the other hand, seems predominantly male-dominated. Even the women looking for hookups don't operate like that (you could debate chicken-and-egg here, around how they don't ever have to with all the dudes throwing themselves at them, but I'm not too interested in that). Those men result in a worse experience for BOTH women and men, but in a more acute fashion for the women on the receiving end of the creepiness than for the men who just have to try harder to manage to stand out above the background bullshit level.

Someone at Match Group must have worked out that having these users boosts the bottom line more than it reduces engagement and retention. Maybe these are the guys paying for Premium Platinum with extra InMails each day. (Oops wrong platform.)

So the two extremes are basically having sex with rando internet people and getting ultra-picky.

So as a computer programmer with a LinkedIn profile, I can at least empathize a bit: I get an average of 3 job offers a week, even though I haven't really expressed any interest in changing jobs. A lot of these offers would be a major step down for me, and that's pretty clear from my profile. I still feel obligated to take the time to politely decline because I do have some sympathy for the recruiters who are just doing their best, but it's also clear they're just blasting out offers to anybody who meets a basic set of requirements.

That said - I'm much happier being in the position I'm in of too much interest than at the other end of the spectrum.

1) Do you offer permanent remote work?

2) What's the salary range for this position?

Twice now I have been very pleasantly surprised by the answer, and one of those resulted in me making an unplanned job move for a 50% increase in TC.

I've also had some success just throwing out a huge number as my expectation for comp. There is pretty much no downside to doing this.

I don't think dating apps/sites favor either sex more so than dating in general does. Women, in general, don't really have to try to get solicitations. Their issue is in trying to weed through all of the solicitations to find those worth responding to. It's basically the hiring problem. But there's no Hackerrank for compatibility.

And then there's the issue that even those that feel the system is tilted against them in general don't understand that it's just them. They're not successful because they aren't as kind, nice, or desirable as they think they are. Or they keep making the same bad choices in romantic pursuits and wonder why they keep getting the same outcome.

The problem with all of these apps and gimmicks and what not and certain segments of tech in general is that it assumes that deep down, people are making rational choices. We aren't.

(Some of it, I think, is Tinder et al showing me profiles that it knew perfectly well were defunct. They're hoping to attract the person back, but it's a very dark pattern.)

I did find that the vast majority of women on Bumble wrote tolerable first messages. Some were better than "hi" but nonetheless didn't say much, which I interpreted as "OK, you can go ahead and write the first message." That rarely turned out well, but at least I knew the account wasn't dead and not a bot (at least, probably not).

I met a lot of great women on both Bumble and Tinder, leading to relationships everywhere from one-night stands to decade-long romances. I don't think it's easy for either men or women, albeit in different ways. It's very easy to make the mistake that thinking that if X is hard for me then X must be the only important thing, and that leads to a lot of ill will.

Women put in high effort up front and lower effort per solicitation. Men put in lower effort up front and more effort per solicitation. Women's approach scales better, though they also bear the safety risks.

> those that feel the system is tilted against them in general don't understand that it's just them

Absolutely. Imagine if dating apps showed users their rating!

> At Tinder headquarters, I ask them if the data they’re about to show me will scar my ego. The beauty of Tinder, after all, is that rejection has been removed entirely from the process. Now, in an instant, I’d learn exactly how I ranked on Tinder. Then Solli-Nowlan revealed my score. “It’s 946,” he said. What does that mean? “It’s on the upper end of average.” It’s a vague number to process, but I knew I didn’t like hearing it. Something about “upper end of average” didn’t exactly do wonders for my ego. https://www.fastcompany.com/3054871/whats-your-tinder-score-...

On the other hand, showing your rating could be good IF coupled with actionable ways to improve it. Credit Karma but for Tinder anyone?

It's a force multiplier and the dynamics that are already present in dating in general get reinforced. So you end up with 99% of the women competing for the top 1% males and the remaining 99% males competing for nothing at all because all their advances get ignored.

It's just the result of our reproductive strategies exerting an incredible influence on our behavior, more so than we personally realize.

Dating apps are especially good at making people not have to face their shortcomings, i.e. I don't have to fix my shortcomings, because with a large enough pool there's going to be someone broken in the right way to accommodate me. Maybe that's rational, or maybe it's not, it really depends on expectations.

Counter intuitively, accepting that we're just stupid hairless apes makes me believe we're rational. We're not failing to find anything meaningful; we're not interested or looking.

Often because that inferior product manages to exploit our irrational selves either intentionally or unintentionally.

I agree for a different reason. The circus show about hiring is mostly bullshit. You could probably randomly select qualified candidates and turn out just fine.

Likewise with dating, ordering up another human like a sandwich creates a weird dynamic designed to keep you shopping — you stop paying when you meet someone.

If you paired 10 pairs of average people at random and had them doing some task that took them a couple of weeks, half would be “together” at some level by the end.

Every woman can put herself in a man's position of no matches - just delete Tinder. Every rich person can become poor - just give away all their money.

Yet they don't. It's called revealed preferences. Because having options, no matter how bad, is better than not having options.

I'm happy to be out of the game, but online dating is bleak for 98% of men.

Okcupid used to have great data on this before they sold out, a lot of it ended up in this book:https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...

The data in that book corroborates a lot of this. We're not that different from gorillas - sexual selection is tough and most of the discussion around it ranges from wrong to dishonest.

After that the cool data blog was killed.

Most women don’t want to sleep around and have a large number of partners. But tinder leads them to believe that they can find an unrealistic partner. And they get hurt by the small percentage of men that play the online dating game well.

Women need a lot more data and time to evaluate a potential partner before initiating contact.

Anyway, the disbalance between amount of men and women there is quite large.

The situation isn't great on either side, but plenty of statistics show it's mostly women having sex off these apps, so clearly there is an actual imbalance.

And you can't write off the sheer hopelessness and isolation that the thought "there's not a single woman out there who would date me" induces in young men. I'm sure it's not fun for women but it is absolutely __brutal__ for many men.

Uh, trust me, white men can easily accumulate zero matches too.

He didn't say it was, he said it was preferable to having no matches.

I recall seeing the OkCupid stats once (okstats?). The numbers pretty much said that although women were getting most of the messages, they were all only responding to the same 10% of males, while most men were sending messages to almost all the women.

You've pretty much got 80% of the women competing for the top 10% of the males.

Why invest more time and energy than absolutely necessary?

Under that model.. it's common for the first message to be "hi" or ".". Not much has changed.

Isn't that the exact lack of effort you complain about? The real problem is that wtf are you supposed to say to someone you don't know? Whatever that comes out is meaningless because you have 0 to go on. That's the point. It's a starting point.

So my idea is to put all the incentives the other way. The tool is designed to operate on a budget of ~$0. I would accept donations, but otherwise have no monetization and therefore no desire to increase "engagement" of any kind. My incentive is such that I actually don't want you to interact with the tool, because that will cost me bandwidth and processing time. I will allow you to have a profile of text and one single image of restricted size, because I don't want to have to host anything else. You will fill out a multiple choice questionnaire with as few questions as I feel I can get away with to ensure at least some level of basic compatibility, and then you do nothing.

Periodically, a cron job will run and see if anyone matches, then it will send you both each others profiles (through good old-fashion email) and ask if you'd like to go on a date. If you've both agreed, there will be a sequence of messages from the system proposing date ideas, locations, and times until consensus is reached. Then it's all up to you. This is designed to ensure that you make a real human connection to the person in a real life interaction before any contact information is ever exchanged.

It probably sounds as though this sort of thing would have a hard time attracting users. I consider that a feature, because it means it'll cost less to run and it will avoid attracting ego-inflation seekers, low effort numbers gamers, and other ungenuine people.

As envisioned, I would expect this sort of thing could cover a moderately sized state on a raspberry pi.

Rationale is that a lot of women, and to a lesser degree men, do not feel comfortable going out 1x1 with a stranger (and potential predator/rapist/catfish). Not to mention the pressure of finding common interests and cultivating a date experience. The group dynamic offers safety, and the hobby-focused nature of the activity offers entertainment without pressure.

Then I just agree to every date that gets sent to my email. Ideally this could be automated so that I could run it on a raspberry pi.

But please, go on.

You've just made a bad/even more exploitable OkCupid/Tinder/PlentyOfFish clone.

You're treating people being dishonest as some sort of revelation.

How do you spam/exploit that?

Sure you could be more picky and spend the same effort to go on less dates and maybe end up in the same boat at the end, you'll just get laid less often. And honestly, I learned so much about myself, about women, and about people in general by going on a bunch of average or below average dates.

Men spray low-effort messages at lots of women hoping for a bite. Women don't message because they have options.

Quality men trying to find any sort of extra have to work extra hard on selling themselves. Women looking for quality men have to work extra hard on creating a profile that deters the poor options they get (hard) _and_ deal with more subpar dates.