The logic is similar to the old idiom: If you have to say you are a lady, you are not a lady. With dating, you have be sought after, and not chase after others. Trying to tell people that are lonely about this is, unfortunately, useless; the heart wants what it wants and we can do little to change it. For anyone out there that is male, I would suggest these posts (linked in article) to help alter the equation so that you are sought after and are not the seeker: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/03/31/the-3-ps-of-manhood... . Remember that being a real man is not the opposite of being a woman, but rather in not being a child.
I don't believe in soulmates or perfect matches. Relationships are about working together, generosity, and graciousness. My wife and I could have made it work with other people, but we chose to make our relationship work, which is what makes it special. And we never forget that we have to keep working on it every day.
> I don't believe in soulmates or perfect matches. Relationships are about working together, generosity, and graciousness.
It just sounds like a bad cost/benefit ratio to me. But then again, I don't like people in general and I don't seem to be as dependent on social contact as the average person. I might value the benefits much lower than others.
That's why some people have a lot of relationships, because they get great value (emotional benefit) from them. Others don't, so it's not worth their time.
It's not a matter of settling. Perfection in relationships is a wrong concept. (If someone projects one on Facebook, it's to cover their insecurities) They take work. Even when you find the right person.
Agreed. It's like finding the perfect job that's perfect for 40 years. Never gonna happen. It's great to find a good job, that keeps your interest, respects you, treats you well, grows with you, is loyal, and gives back; but you're never gonna find a perfect job.
Some people find what seems like a perfect job, then after a few years, they get bought out and aren't so perfect anymore.
I played the field until I was in my mid 30s, then settled down. Never been happier. I hope it lasts, and I think it will.
Also, beauty fades pretty quickly. Not only in the object, but in the eye of the beholder. The person is much more important. Also, it sucks when everyone hits on your girlfriend / wife all the time.
Ah, this sounds so right taking into account 'perfect' means a finished process, compared to the ongoing progress that a relation is (and live in general).
Edit: Further, careless and secura are antonym homonyms modulo literal translation.
Let me rephrase it. When you were looking for a relationship, did you have a set of expectations that you ultimately gave up on fulfilling? Or did you try to set out with no expectations at all?
Not the author of the comment, but once your ego gets humbled enough, you "settle" without feeling like you are settling. Perfection is the enemy of human.
> Let's make the rather conservative assumption, then, that a girl would go out with someone if and only if they were at least one standard deviation above her idea of average
At least he's not that picky about how picky his girl friends should be.
And of course, he forgot to take into account selection effects. You don't meet and go on dates with random people, you meet and go on dates with people similar enough to you to be in your social circle.
Or whoever swipes right (left? I don't know) on Tinder, or whoever emails you on dating websites. Going on dates with random people that exist outside of your social circles feels like it's more normal than perhaps it once was. At least in areas that are populous and transient enough that you don't have that two to four degrees of separation factor that you get in small towns and college campuses.
Yeah, well, now try it if you're gay. Divide the world population in half, and then multiply that by (latest estimate) 4%. Also, remember that every other gay guy is a potential rival as well as a potential match. Every day I think about how lucky I am to have met the guy I am with, now 15 years ago.
I'm not into guys but I got hit on by a guy with a pretty good pick-up line which I would probably use if I were gay. I was standing at the finish line of a race and a guy standing next to me said, "There's a lot of cute guys here, huh?" At first I started to respond, "I... guess..." and then I realized he was hitting on me. Pretty smooth way to ferret out whether a guy is open to other guys.
I'm not sure that would work too often. I'm also not gay but I notice when I've caught the eye of someone who is; it's subtle but very obvious.
I imagine if I were gay it would be very likely I'd be more attuned to this than I am now. So, I doubt there's a need to be so brazen?
Forget men vs women, you know what people like? They like it if you're actually interested in them and listen to them and don't have a hidden agenda and aren't silently judging them.
You can apply this to a lot, not just romance. I mean, there are other approaches to making yourself desirable (like be really rich, ridiculously good looking, famous &c) but it's notable that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both seem to be actually interested in what their wives think.
Also available in this book series:
"Why I will never be Happy/Lucky/Content"
"Why I will never be a <Important Sounding Title>"
"Why I will never have a <Expensive Luxury Item>"
You might also like from this author:
"Mastering navel gazing, and justifying your paralyzing inaction"
Personally I just have way too high standards while no person that can fulfil these would ever like me. I can't lower them. I can't settle for someone I don't really find attractive like I can settle for a cheaper car. Because a car has a practical purpose. Even if I wish I could have a cooler car the cheap car still gets me to places. But with a partner is different. I don't have to have one. I can be alone. Sometimes I think nothing is better than something. Solitude is better than an unsatisfying relationship.
"standards are too high" is the most common excuse people give when really they themselves are akward, solitary, etc.
You admit these impressive women would never like you. Perhaps, but then improve yourself.
Choosing to go without if you can't have the very best is an excuse. Do you live in the street because you don't have a mansion? Do you die because you can't afford to dine like the upper crust? Why is it that for a partner you suddenly need the very best?
This is the one discussion where insulting the party you're replying to is considered perfectly acceptable. You can always say someone you disagree with is <insert undesirable qualities here>, and nobody wants to admit that they're <insert undesirable qualities>.
Most people work to improve themselves, yet we do not expect anyone to be perfect, except here. Most people have faults. Some faults make them less dateable than other faults. Some they may not care that much about or don't know how to fix. After all, the average person falls short of many standards up until they die, despite all the attempts at improvement. It should surprise no one that a subset will always be that falls short, or they choose a different set to focus on. Yet we demand that such a subset does not exist when the subject of dating comes up?
> Why is it that for a partner you suddenly need the very best?
I don't know, maybe because a partner is one of the most influential people in your life and they can absolutely make or break it? They don't have to be the very best, but I don't understand why, in effectively every other area, people are often commended for being picky, but here, you are perceived better if you have anyone, anyone at all, even if it crashes and burns and results in some ruined lives one is responsible for (children).
Dating is not special. It doesn't get a pass. Some people just don't like the risk. Some don't assess well or don't know how. In any other area, we consider that the person's prerogative.
This all smells of giving the dating scenario incredibly heavy weight for no other reason but that nature programmed us to feel that way. I would like to think we can think beyond that, and also get rid of all the surrounding vitriol, judgment, and gossip.
You'll certainly do better in the self-improvement department if you avoid falling into the trap of: "I don't fit a certain arbitrary and hard to assess requirement, therefore I suck". I don't agree with the author's, err, parameters, but this is the one part I agree with, and I wouldn't be surprised he's happier for it. Nothing good ever comes out of thinking like that.
Your love is one in a million
(One in a million)
You couldn't buy it at any price
(Can't buy love)
But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves
Statistically, some of them would be equally nice
(Equally nice)
Or maybe not as nice but, say, smarter than you
Or dumber but better at sport or tracing
I'm just saying
(I really think that I would)
Probably
(Have somebody else)
Brian Christian did a Long Now Foundation talk about algorithms that you can apply to life. One point he made was (roughly) to find a good life partner follow this advice: until the age of 26 date as many people as you can (as in, have a relationship - not just Tinder dates). After the age of 26, marry the next person you date that is better than the best person you dated before 26.
I don't think I agree with it - but it seems like far more useful dating advice than what this guy is trying to achieve. Select from the pool of people who are also attracted to you - not all people.
Funny, but he does not need to go through 3493 dates to meet one of his 18,726 viable bachelorettes. Its probably in the double digits.
You don't meet random people within the general population, you meet random people within your environment. If you are above the normal for intelligence its almost certain that your environment is going to be filled above normal intelligence women, and to a lesser extent its likely the same in terms of attractiveness.
Also his standards are too high (especially on physical attraction - yeesh!)...
I think it's rare to find a software company where all of the employees are software engineers. They are usually outnumbered by designers, marketers, salespeople, support staff, finance, accounting, etc. There is generally a similar number of men and women working in these fields.
Yeah, two standard deviations is too high, even if attractiveness could be modelled as a normal distribution. That's the top 2.5%. Even one standard deviation is the top 15.5%, which is very picky. I don't think the average person is all that terrible.
One standard deviation for intelligence is probably ok. IQ scores are actually based on the normal distribution, where the mean is 100 and one standard deviation is 15 points. So while I don't think 115 is a very high bar, you probably shouldn't ask your date to do an IQ test.
Exactly! You can rationalise any assertion akin to that by broadening your sample space. Your sample space isn't the world's population, it's your environment.
There's a whole area of maths devoted to finding the ideal partner and related topics, called optimal stopping theory. The Secretary Problem is particularly relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
When I worked for my friend John (he was a VP and a stockholder at the firm). John'd been married once and divorced in some matter of weeks and among his complaints was that he'd had three VCR's (it was a while ago) but somehow his ex wound up with all of them. Anyway, I was engaged and then newly married at the time but John was always looking for a hot twenty-something (I was in my early thirties at the time and John is a couple of years older than me).
So I switched jobs and for a couple of years I didn't run into him regularly like when we worked together but we still lived in the same part of St. Pete and one night I'm out walking my dogs and wind up in his neighborhood and there's his house for sale...it was a Thursday night and I get home and call (cell phones existed but had yet to become ubiquitous) him and am like "What the hell is going on?"
And John had met a woman who had two kids and lived in Birmingham and was getting married on Saturday and moving and taking a grunt position at a firm in Alabama and that was almost twenty years ago and their third child is going to college.
The author has missed the key point: He is trying to find someone who operates like him, from a different gender. I'm all for gender-equality but the different genders operate differently.
Once you grasp that and accept that women do no operate, think and behave like male; your success with them will sky rocket.
Yeah, I also fell into the "someone who operates like me, but of the opposite sex" trap.
For years I was looking for another engineer (I have a bachelor's in general engineering, masters in SE), or at least someone mathematically/scientifically inclined. Ambitious, constantly working on personal projects, likes to travel, go to conferences, pick up new hobbies, etc.
Now I'm married to a social worker who's had the same job for 12 years, dropped out of music school, didn't have a passport (never even considered getting one), doesn't know math beyond basic algebra, often sleeps until noon, and generally doesn't have any hobbies besides "hanging out with friends."
But you know what? I love my husband, I think we work really well together :) He was really the first guy I ever dated after I decided to get out of my bubble and stop looking for "male versions of me" and I wouldn't change anything for the world!
I was lucky in that when I met the woman who became my wife, neither of us was looking for anything other than to get laid. Sounds crass, but I think it helped me avoid the "look for a female version of me" thing, because we are nothing like each other.
After spending the first few months pretending that we weren't, in fact, falling for each other, we gave into it and 15+ years later, still working on staying together :-)
IMHO this is the best way to go, never expect anything and you'll never be disappointed; it doesn't prevent you from getting some great surprises.. Also, any relation i had with someone i thought was the 'feminine versions of me' went to shit pretty quickly.. Although being (at least somehow a little bit) different pushes you way further forward.
In my experience, that's true for all humans, not just for humans of the opposite gender. Don't assume they are like you just because you share some similar biological appendices.
I think grouping people by gender is not very helpful. There are always exceptions and usually quite a few. But maybe that is just so in my social circles.
>I think grouping people by gender is not very helpful. There are always exceptions and usually quite a few. But maybe that is just so in my social circles.
Isn't it pretty well-known that mating behavior is different between genders in humans (well-know == observed scientifically in this case)?
If 60% of men exhibit mating behavior x and 60% of women behavior y, that's a clear statistical difference but there are so many exceptions that it's not useful in daily life.
No, they are normally distributed. Men are just attracted to the top 1% (or even 0.1%) of women. It just happens that most women are not that physically attractive which is an important trait for both genders.
Once you realize this and figure out how much you are worth (sexually), dating will really become easier.
It's no big secret that women are often bombarded by messages and other overtures on dating sites. Perhaps the "viewing males as more unattractive than they might otherwise" just stems from being primed for pickiness, especially on the Internet.
If you meet someone at a party, maybe he's a friend of a friend, you talk to him for a while, you might think "He seems like a reasonably handsome guy!" You see the same guy as a profile picture, out of a sea of 20 others messaging you at the same time, and you're just mentally primed for reasons to reject people, rather than accept them. You're more likely to think "Ugh, stupid haircut. 1/5 stars. Would not date"
So I don't think that women have unrealistic expectations of beauty, in general everyday life, it's just that the motivations and mindset is so much different on dating sites.
The data doesn't show that. It shows behavior on okcupid sites. Presumably. I don't understand why we blindly believe this data given many known issues about psych and sociology studies.
They are critical, but not unrealistic. From that blog:
"As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable."
He definitely needs to work on his strategy to find one of those 18726 girls. I would propose to go with strategy widely know in database system, namely using proper indexing. If you have a table in database and can create only one compound index for your important query you would create it in a way that most distinctive column end up on the first place of compound index. In this case that would be beauty of potential partner (only ~2% match this). Second most distinctive criteria would be to find girls who actually will like him.
So most optimal strategy would be to go to places with a lot of beautiful girls that might like him (similar interests etc.) ...from there continue with linear search.
An entertaining article but his intelligence and beauty requirements (1 and 2 standard deviations above the norm respectively) are rather silly. Unless he's actually rich and handsome to make it match. Especially so given I'm not convinced about the distribution, variance might be lower than he assumes.
Tinder only works if you are in the top 10% of males. If you are short (anything under 6 ft nowadays), a minority, fat, etc using tinder is an invitation to get your self esteem crushed.
There's no place for the average or below average men in the dating scene anymore. It's all about height,Wealth,penis size and overall looks.
Not only is Tinder's schtick super cringey, using it requires sharing extremely intimate details about yourself and life with Facebook. Some people might not regard it as being worth the moral hazard and information leak.
On the other hand, if you're already publishing cringey articles about your love life, perhaps the calculus shifts.
I can fulfill the rest of my social needs besides sex through family and friends and the part of my brain that likes sex doesn't care much about personality or intelligence or compatibility.
TLDR: He's looking for someone who's two standard deviations above the median in beauty, one standard deviation above the median in intelligence, and is trying to find this mythical unicorn by going on one blind date every week. That makes about as much sense as Google trying to find its next CEO by interviewing every single applicant it gets, without any filter, at a rate of 1-interview-per-week.
Finding above average beauty and intelligence isn't as hard as it sounds.
As they say, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Some like women curvy, some like them slim. Some people prefer Roman noses, others prefer snub noses. My wife is beautiful; some might disagree but their opinion doesn't matter.
Above average intelligence is even easier to find. That's partly because many men are intimidated by smart women, and partly because "above average intelligence" often just means "common interests". You want to find a woman who can hold an interesting conversation with you on topics you care about.
If the goal is simply to find "above average" beauty, I agree. After all, even 51st percentile is above average. The problem is that this guy is looking 2 standard deviations above the average, which eliminates something like 97% of the girls out there. And of the remaining 3%, he's eliminating another two-thirds based on his intelligence criteria.
It's true that people's aesthetic tastes may differ in some ways, but they do converge in most ways. There's a reason why supermodels are almost universally considered attractive. So not only is this guy ruling out 99% of the girls out there, he's competing with almost everyone for the remaining 1%.
But that's not even the main point of my comment. Even if he was only willing to date girls in the "top 1 percent", that might still be achievable if he used a filtering process that can semi-reliably identify girls in that group who are single and potentially interested in him. But that's not what he's doing. He's going on a blind date with a completely random girl, once per week. If you're extremely selective in what you're looking for, but are relying on a low-frequency completely-random-sampling strategy, of course that's never going to work.
That said, me analyzing the heck out of what is obviously a humorous post, is probably not helping me achieve any of my life goals either.
Using standard deviations sounds like he's using an objective standards, though. How do you define standard deviations for something that is a distribution only you can decide?
Thank you! Honestly, comparing this to a job screening is a great move because it reveals his analysis to be pretty silly. This guy is looking for "intelligence" and "beauty" as universally agreed traits whereas even businesses who are screening for "intelligence" are able to forced to search for specific and industry-relevant information. It would be like hiring a CEO with only an IQ test.
It's also the same with "beauty". Even industries that hire primarily based on beauty (modeling, acting etc) have widely differing criteria based on their own niche in the marketplace. American models are quite different to British models, for e.g. The French magazines require a different look to, say, German magazines. Catalogue models vs editorial models. Throughout Europe, various markets require different heights, different looks and different personas. That doesn't even take into account racial differences across the world.
> This guy is looking for "intelligence" and "beauty" as universally agreed traits
No, he's not. From the article: "beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population."
He's assuming a normal distribution but he's not assuming a universal agreed standard of beauty.
We also don't know socially valuable he is, only that his looks are average - he's heterosexual so looks likely aren't as important to his mate as they are to him.
Is Tristan Miller well known? Is he a leader in his field? Is he wealthy or otherwise successful?
I wonder in what partition would the author fall if the gender he's after applied similar reasoning.
Also: the world is big and "there is plenty of fish in the sea": usually, if you don't get to have a SO, chances are that there is something wrong with yourself too.
I never understood the view. People are not fish, and are not just looking for any fish. Getting an SO is not that difficult. Getting the right SO is a whole different story. Some people get the right SO. Most people get an SO and stick with them, and it works out or not. Some don't want to settle for any SO they came across, and stay single. The idea that everyone should always have an SO at all times strikes me as really, really strange, and it would seem to lead to all sorts of issues.
"there's something wrong with you" is such a generic statement to make that doesn't really say anything about reality and just causes neurosis all over the place. Plenty of absolutely abhorrent people have SO's, and I've met plenty nice people who can't get SO's or just don't really want them. There are some factors that affect likelihood of having an SO and they're not really aligned with the "something wrong" scale.
The issue with the OP isn't his refusal to hate himself, because that's pointless. It's his odd standards for the other gender, but, hey, maybe he just refuses to settle for less, it is his prerogative.
> usually, if you don't get to have a SO, chances are that there is something wrong with yourself too.
As a single guy, sure there's plenty of things wrong with me. But another factor is that not everyone values having a relationship in the same way.
To use a car analogy: my brother is really into cars, he likes to have a really nice car and is willing to spend a lot of money on one. Would I like a nice car, sure, but I don't really care enough to spend the money on one, and that is fine.
Same goes for an SO: would I like one, sure. Am I willing to spend a lot of time and effort finding one, not really. And that is fine too.
"Unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man."
In my experience, an overlooked part of finding a good mate is making yourself into a good candidate for your side of that partnership.
[edited for grammar]