Those numbers are so horrendous that you'd be better off going to a bar and hitting on every single woman. You could get shot down 50 times in a row, yet as long as you want to 3 bars in a week w/at least 20 approachable women each, you'd still have a date within a week, which is already 1/3 of the success the guy in your example had in a tiny fraction of the time.
And of course, bars are pretty much the bottom of the barrel, as unpleasant as it gets. This is hard mode. Try any other setting - a meetup, a birding club, whatever - and things will be easier.
The only good thing about online dating apps is the anonymous liking feature, you get match when you mutually like each other - so on paper there is less rejection. However as this thread states - it has other downfalls.
This issue really got to me few years ago and I set out to build an app that would allow you to have this anonymously liking but at events, bars etc So it's hyper localised, you check-in to an event/bar and you see other singles that are there. If you match, you can then 'warm' approach them.
I always just saw this app as an ice breaker app - it was received well by my peers. Unfortunately due to flaky business partners and covid, i'm only now at a point where i'm ready to release. Pending Apple app store approval which has been an absolute pain.
It will be a slow roll out, initially in Bali, Indonesia. Pending response and funding.
if anyone is interested, its called SeeMe http://www.seemeapp.net/
You're treating it here like this is no issue, but do you actually know anyone that can take that many rejections in a row and not have it impact their mental state? Even if you know it's not a judgement on you etc. etc., it is hard for any human to continue in the face of so many rejections. It's not just about dating -- successful entrepreneurs are often those people that can take rejection after rejection and continue going. But it's very hard and very rare.
In general I am on the same side -- you can get much better success approaching in real life vs. on the apps. But what the apps abstract away is that rejection which you feel very intimately when in person.
Treating relationships as an equation to be optimized might be the real hindrance.
But you can choose the system that gets you what you want, faster.
So, in choosing the lesser of two evils, choose the bar. Choose anything other than Tinder. Because pretty much any dating alternative to Tinder is better than Tinder.
You certainly could say that, but you have no idea how the variables will react. That sets people up for disappointment when they think they’ve “optimized” human relationships.
I'm in the top 5% of attractiveness IRL and tinder was bizarre to try and use. It was this weird self referential world where you needed a completely new set of skills to be noticed. I was reminded of trying to learn how to write an effective resume after university.
When I had a woman make my tinder profile attractive to other women I just deleted it: the type of woman who would find that appealing is not the type of woman I would find appealing.
Which means several things. As you say, for heterosexual individuals, it's much more difficult for a typical male to be matched with a typical female. It also means if you're a male looking for a long-term mate, then you'll do better with the old-fashioned approach of getting out and being social.
> All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term.
As an outsider whose exposure to Tinder is largely hearsay, my understanding is that long-term relationships are not really the goal of most users on this particular app.
Of course it's still brutal. Good candidates get out of the pool quickly and so the remaining ones tend to have issues :/
They're rigged for women. Even on the sites that claim to cater to women by forcing them to make first contact, they overwhelmingly use superficial low effort messages to unlock the other side and then proceed to reject 80% of the men they selected just like with regular sites.
I'm that guy (6.5/10). I've never done numbers close to that bad. I could understand if someone was trying to date out of their socio-economic and age ranges (although you can always date up in age, for men).
In southern california, more like 200 swipes, 2 conversations, 1 date. Out of 5 dates, at least 1 overnight.
Tinder, however, was a total wasteland. Zero responses to anything. I think it just wasn't my scene.
I have a friend who ABSOLUTELY do not fit the stereotype of attractive men (1.70m / software engineer and he does climbing but with a small belly) and he f** like 60 girls in 8 months when he discovered the tinder magic.
I've done my time too, but at a lower scale, but since I'm slightly attractive that would not make my point. In general the biggest fuckboys Ive met were really not considered nice looking at best.
When there is a disproportionate number of males competing for chance at mating, females become very selective. I guess the apps are just going with the data.
My wife works as a dating coach, with both men and women. Men are very reluctant to listen or even try the advice, so I'm not going to try to convince you guys that you can make it work. It's not that hard actually, but most men already made up their mind on the whole dating thing. I'm sure there's plenty of "experts" here that can tell you all about how it can never work.
One specific example I can give you: Women find it important that you have clean, well-groomed hands. This is not intuitive or obvious to men at all, unless you know.
But I think the main problem is not necessarily the lack of information, but a more a mentality change. A lot of the men think "She has to accept me for who I am". That might be true, but it's not really relevant. You have to show what you can offer in a relationship. A woman doesn't start a relationship with you just because she all of a sudden loves you. No, she starts a relationship because somehow she gets some benefit out of that relationship. So you have to show what you have to offer. You like traveling? Maybe she wants to travel. You like a certain kind of music? Maybe she likes that music and likes to go to concerts. Or whatever.
Answering the question "Why would a woman start a relationship with you? What's in it for her?" seems a question that some men don't want to answer. I don't mean that they don't know the answer, I mean they have a problem with the question itself.
The TL;DR is to improve yourself, work on your insecurities, be emotionally open, and become genuinely not-needy. He provides a lot of specific helpful tactics.
If women would rather remain single than setting for a partner who doesn't match all their expectations and they set their expectations unreasonably high and online dating only benefits the top 5% of men and all real life venues of approach close for various reasons.... what are the bottom 90% of men going to do in the future? Is sex going to become a privilege reserved for only the most elite men? If the majority of men cannot enjoy intimacy, expect incel terrorism to increase exponentially.
Sex is unconditionally a privilege as long as we believe in consent. It is the prerogative of anyone who owns their own body to decide whether or not to give themselves to anyone. That includes the prerogative of holding out only for metaphorical Brad Pitt.
I'm not sure "but the incels engage in terrorism" is going to persuade women to give their bodies to the men they don't want.
This is why Lori Gottlieb wrote Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. <https://smile.amazon.com/Marry-Him-Case-Settling-Enough-eboo...>
One can also see the relation to the message of Susan "the Princeton mom" Patton's Marry Smart. <https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/13/living/princeton-mom-book-mar...>.
I’m surprised people seem to think homo sapiens sapiens has somehow moved beyond instinctual behaviors programmed by thousands upon thousands of years of evolution.
We haven’t.
> We haven’t.
I have seen my own children develop their understanding of the world through such stereotypical behaviors that it further solidifies my appreciation of just how much human behavior is derived from innate instinct.
With women, it's different. Each individual woman has a different taste. Some like men with beards, others hate them. Some like tattoos, others hate them. Some like them more chubby, some skinny. Some like a funny guy, some a serious one that doesn't act childish.
If you don't believe me, play a game with a women where you try to guess which guys she finds attractive. Very hard. With guys, that game is easy.
Beyond this there are about 55 features that need to come together to get the 95th percentile phenotype. Rather than enumerating them all here, there is a four part analysis on YouTube:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhEuWSXxu5k
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwbGW9jeDeo
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz7tI7qT5t8
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2otjA_98StYEvidence from 2014 craigslist personals: https://incels.wiki/images/6/61/Juggernaut_test_2014.jpg
Looks unmatched couples are unstable and the better looking partner is at elevated risk of monkey branching.
- before, religion and morals were preventing sleeping around, which was effectively doing "sexual socialism" for the "poor" of the sexual market. this led to everyone having 1 partner as a pareto optimum. (even if in many cases paople were sleeping out of marriage)
- with sexual liberation (both of men and women), top performers get all the spoils, as it is with monopoly and businesses, and the lower perfomer gets... what's left.
Conclusion : be a top performer. Equality is always only a social construct
As an example, a slightly above average man who generates 16561 swipes on Tinder will generate 7666 likes and 8675 dislikes. Out of these there will be 290 matches and 7596 no-match. A rate of 2.5 matches per day and an overall 3.7% match rate. Out of 290 matches he will send 87 messages and receive 12. 191 matches will never result in a message. Of the 99 messages 31 will be left on read or never even opened the initial message, resulting in 68 conversations. 40 of these women ghosted him, and our subject gave up on 17 of them. Ultimately this resulted in getting 11 phone numbers. These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates and 8 gave up on texting, declined the dating offer, or our subject simply gave up on them. All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term. It was a complete waste of time. Considering that online dating is the most common method used to find a date these days, the options are grim for men who are not in the top 5% of attractiveness if they use these online platforms.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31823294