[HN Gopher] How Online Dating in the United States displaces oth...
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How Online Dating in the United States displaces other ways of
meeting[pdf]
Author : arkj
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-06-22 20:24 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.stanford.edu)
| mellosouls wrote:
| (2019) particularly relevant considering the online nature of
| much our social lives since then.
| symlinkk wrote:
| And online dating is massively biased towards women, so more and
| more men are being left out.
| martinky24 wrote:
| incel culture shit right here
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Yea somewhat of course, since they are swamped with requests,
| but i would say that probably it is more biased towards people
| of both genders who look good on photos and who can sell
| themselves. "The top 10% get all the matches" so to speak.
|
| Anyway its an interesting time we are in. One company (Match)
| owns like 90% of the dating apps and gets to "dictate" the
| future procreation of our species, if we put it in extreme
| terms.
| baron816 wrote:
| Whenever online dating comes up here, it inevitably leads to
| discussions of imbalances in favor of women and elite men.
|
| This predicament isn't really unique to online dating though.
| Lots of society throughout history have had polygamy (elite men
| get many wives, others are shit out of luck).
|
| I've been wondering if war mongers in times past have been driven
| by this--decimate men to rebalance the scales towards the general
| male population (and also the elites who don't fight).
|
| There were baby booms after the two world wars. How much of that
| was due to a perceived scarcity of men among women? Did that
| cause them to settle quickly?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| The people waging wars already had enough women for themselves
| in all likelihood.
| arkj wrote:
| There is a very interesting chart at the last page of the pdf
| showing how heterosexual couples have met over the past years.
|
| Here is a direct link to the chart as an image,
| https://thebrowser.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/06/ima...
| mabub24 wrote:
| The apps are exceptionally good for meeting people.
|
| I think the animosity many people have for the apps comes from
| the idea that using the apps _is_ dating. For a certain
| generation, the first generation that grew up with the various
| dating apps now, using the apps is often considered dating.
| This is, however, a creation of the dating app companies. More
| people using the apps = more user numbers /engagement/data for
| $$$$.
|
| Couple that idea of dating as using the apps with the general
| decline in the use of social institutions like
| clubs/societies/team sports/ etc. (the decline in social
| partnerships and friends in general for many), and you get a
| generation that views dating apps as the _sole_ way of meeting
| people for dating and that often recoils from the idea of
| asking someone out in person.
| joshz404 wrote:
| It took me a bit to see the hiding in plain sight trajectory of
| "Met in a bar or restaurant". Everything but it and of course
| the dominate Met Online, are decreasing. Curious.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The drop of "met in college" is the weirdest one to me. Isn't
| that where most people meet? Am I living in a weird bubble?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I went to a commuter campus. Most of my classmates had
| jobs, some had kids, others lived at home with parents. The
| stereotypical American university experience of young,
| single people learning, living and socializing on a college
| campus can be inaccurate.
| mehrdada wrote:
| I suppose large fractions of people in college meet their
| schoolmates _through_ the dating apps.
| elseweather wrote:
| Most people don't go to college, but if you did, you're
| likely to have a mostly college-educated bubble
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Most Americans have some college education.[1] But not
| all of them start at 18, move away from home, or finish.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_
| in_the_...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Most people do go to college, and the proportion has been
| increasing for years, in the united states.
| majormajor wrote:
| Probably an aspect of people using apps while in college,
| and ending up in that bucket instead.
|
| A graph of "age when met" for current couples would be
| interesting, if today's "final" couples meet at a later age
| than in the past because people don't want to settle down
| as early, you'll have less school couples.
|
| We also need a graph of "number of relationships still
| around started by year" - if fewer relationships started in
| 2018 are still extant compared to ones in 2014, that's
| gonna skew numbers too.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| It peaked around 10%. And people marry later now.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Maybe the population of people they surveyed are old enough
| not to have survived their college relationships?
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I was too busy studying to meet girls in college. Of
| course, it helps that I'm non-white and unattractive too.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _Am I living in a weird bubble?_
|
| Yes.
|
| Though I would suspect that if you broke each of these
| meeting methods out and analyzed the failure rates for
| each, "met in college" would be one of the best 3 methods
| in terms of success rate. I would suspect "met in church",
| "met in college", and "met online" to be the methods
| leading to the most long term success. Further, if you
| asked about whether there was marital _satisfaction_ as
| opposed to simply a marriage that didn 't end in divorce, I
| would suspect "met in college" to be the best overall
| method.
|
| The only better methods of meeting, I would suspect, are
| not mentioned here. For instance, a lot of successful
| marriages likely come from people who were in the peace
| corps together. Shared hardship and passion kind of thing.
|
| Just my intuition though. No data to back any of that up.
| simoneau wrote:
| This surprised me as well. In fact, this line is misleading.
| From the article.
|
| "Figure 1's apparent post-2010 rise in meeting through bars
| and restaurants for heterosexual couples is due entirely to
| couples who met online and subsequently had a first in-person
| meeting at a bar or restaurant or other establishment where
| people gather and socialize. If we exclude the couples who
| first met online from the bar/restaurant category, the
| bar/restaurant category was significantly declining after
| 1995 as a venue for heterosexual couples to meet."
| dougmwne wrote:
| There seems to be a second wave of online dating starting
| with the popularity of mobile apps. That just so happened to
| coincidence with the huge uptick in "met in a
| bar/restaurant". My guess is that chatting up random people
| in bars has been flat to decreasing and that all the people
| reporting that really met on apps but met "for real" at the
| bar/restaurant.
| cheq wrote:
| Met in church?, that one is good haha.
| colmvp wrote:
| I found a good match via online dating recently, but only after
| about half a decade of usage. I honestly cannot stand online
| dating. In all my years real-life dating, online dating had
| substantially worse experiences.
|
| Last winter on a 'Zoom date' one match multi-tasked while I was
| trying to talk with her. She was literally shopping.
|
| Another 'left the chat' after I said I wasn't a property
| developer, I was a software developer. I hesitate to even mention
| this because it practically reveals my identity to friends who
| know that story.
|
| I've met women who chatted for a while, and setup a date, only to
| finally reveal at the 11th hour that they are seeing someone.
| Sorry! I've also met women who used very, very misleading
| photographs in their profiles.
|
| I've had 'matches' who return curt answers to very simple
| conversational questions, as if how dare you attempt to grace
| their presence with your messages. I'd take a non-reply over that
| sort of signal. I would not be texting them in the first place if
| they hadn't also swiped right on me.
|
| My real life experiences dating someone from Meetup/College/Work
| had substantially more honesty and humanity. In online dating, I
| truly feel there's a loss of treating others like human beings
| instead of a disposable item. And to be fair, I am guilty of that
| sin as well.
|
| But for all the talk I've heard from my female friends about how
| guys are awful on online dating (and I believe it), I can assure
| you that it's not any easier on this side.
| to11mtm wrote:
| I place most of the blame of the terrible state of online
| dating squarely on Match Group.
|
| OKCupid was a serviceable platform until they took step after
| step to monetize it, on top of making everything a series of
| 'swipes'. It reinforces the idea that people are able to be
| just discarded, which is a real shame.
|
| Frankly, I would love if somebody could get a hold of the old
| OKCupid codebase, back when matches were based on hashtag type
| matching, Didn't allow photos in chat (eliminates certain types
| of harassment,) and perhaps added a 'one-time-verify' fee. i.e.
| Pay 10$ to get yourself verified with a photo-ID, and perhaps
| have some sort of 'review fee' for reporting; if you report
| someone and it was found fradulent, -you- have to pay 10$. If
| the report was valid, the other person gets banhammered.
|
| So simple, but it doesn't make money.
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| > I'd take a non-reply over that sort of signal.
|
| My understanding is that women get so many messages that
| they're overloaded and invest most of their time replying to
| top candidates while folks lower on the totem pole get
| dismissed curtly or ghosted.
|
| And it makes sense, we all treat non-scarce resources pretty
| wastefully.
|
| The question is are dating apps still worth it even though it
| makes you feel like a commodity?
| lsd_throwaway wrote:
| Online dating is a skewed game (for M/F), if you're in the top
| 2% of attractiveness for men it's great - otherwise it's not
| worth it. This is compounded a bit by region, if your dating
| market is pretty even or skewed where there are more women than
| men (NYC/DC) it gets a lot better (I suspect actually for both
| men and women, but don't know) - in the bay area it's not worth
| it.
|
| Women get a lot of matches which while a lot better than no
| matches (can go on dates, get practice, etc.) leads to a filter
| problem. Many (based on OKC data [0]) tend to pre-select based
| on attractiveness*, so the top 2% of men get most of the
| matches, which pre-filters out high quality candidates that
| would have a chance in real life. It also leads to lower
| quality interactions (since those men have more options
| anyway).
|
| If you're a woman with hundreds of matches it's not really a
| surprise they'd be multi-tasking on a zoom date, the dates are
| abundant - each one has low value. This shifts as people get
| older though - if I had to guess that's probably part of why
| your recent matches improved after 5 yrs, suddenly there are
| fewer men available and the competition heats up (both because
| there are fewer available men and because there are more
| younger women getting more attention).
|
| If you're a man that gets one match at best every other month,
| they're so scarce the value is high. I think honestly women and
| men have a poor sense for how extreme the difference in online
| dating experience is.
|
| We're not that different from other apes in a lot ways, if
| you're not really good looking and you're in a skewed market
| online dating is a bad approach for you (imo).
|
| [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-
| Offlin...
|
| * Men do too obviously, but not to the same winner-takes-all
| extreme (based on the OKC data).
| munk-a wrote:
| I found my partner through a common interest and I'd suggest it
| as a preferable route for most folks looking. Do the things you
| enjoy and be open to friendships and other relationships with
| the people you enjoy doing it with.
|
| I would admit that I'm rather introverted and never really felt
| the need to seek a relationship specifically - I was pretty
| happy existing on my own until I found a good partner.
| twic wrote:
| You should get into C#, that lets you declare as many
| properties as you like.
| mdorazio wrote:
| I'd love to see this correlated with data on prevalence of
| "casual" dating, satisfaction with dating, and something like #
| of dating partners before marriage. I have a strong suspicion
| that the rise of online dating has had many not-so-great impacts
| on expectations, satisfaction, and finding a partner in general,
| but I have very little data to back that suspicion up.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Norah Vincent in _Self-made Man_ describes her experiences
| dating women (while pretending to be a man). She observes that,
| in person, they tend to reject her for not being masculine
| enough.
|
| But she has far more success than most men in translating
| online contact into dates in person. The women demand extensive
| correspondence before being willing to meet, and the feminine
| style of her _writing_ appeals to them in a way that the
| feminine style of her body and personality doesn 't.
|
| You can interpret this as evidence that one thing contributing
| to problems in the online dating landscape is that women don't
| know what they want. They have one set of requirements for
| agreeing to a date, and a different -- to some degree
| _conflicting_ -- set of requirements for thinking that a date
| went well.
|
| (Vincent contrasts contemporaneous experience dating men -- she
| specifically comments on the coherence between what they want
| online and what they want in person. To agree to a date, men
| want to see your picture. And in person, they're happy if you
| look like your picture.)
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Pretending to be a man to see how its like to court women
| online? Sounds reasonable.
|
| Pretending to be a man, irl, wearing a disguise? I'm not sure
| that translates to anything. Saying women rejected her for
| not being masculine enough could easily be a nice way of
| saying "while I wouldn't dare question whether you are, in
| fact, a man, here in front of me, something about this feels
| off putting for me".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| One girl she dated revealed afterwards that she had
| referred to Ned as "my gay boyfriend".
|
| I'm not sure what difference you see between "rejecting
| someone for not being masculine enough" and "questioning
| whether they are, in fact, a man".
| majormajor wrote:
| > I'm not sure what difference you see between "rejecting
| someone for not being masculine enough" and "questioning
| whether they are, in fact, a man".
|
| I wonder what percentage of these women would've guessed
| right had she straight-up asked "do you think I'm a man
| or do you think I'm a woman pretending to be a man"?
|
| That's the difference - the idea that someone you're
| dating is deceiving you on such a huge level isn't
| something that's going to be at the front of your mind by
| default.
|
| (Though I have a higher-level question here: why are we
| simply believing stated reasons for rejection? People lie
| about that all the time. It's not you, it's me. People
| try to avoid confrontations. Someone who's blatantly
| lying to everyone else has to consider the possibility
| that they're being lied to as well.)
|
| I have no problem accepting two things from this account:
| high-effort communication helps, and not being in
| disguise helps. I think anything beyond that is largely
| speculative and especially don't see any contradictions.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I wonder what percentage of these women would've
| guessed right had she straight-up asked "do you think I'm
| a man or do you think I'm a woman pretending to be a
| man"?
|
| This is a question that can't be usefully asked -- it
| would never come up in any normal circumstance, so just
| the fact that you asked tends to give the answer away.
|
| > not being in disguise helps.
|
| Women don't seem to agree with you. I've seen some pretty
| dramatic "makeup / no makeup" picture spreads.
| majormajor wrote:
| Yes, precisely. Hardly anyone is going to guess that
| organically, so all the little tells that an imperfect
| pretender would give are just going to read as hard-to-
| nail-down oddities that will leave many people looking
| for a polite way of saying "thanks but no thanks." Those
| sorts of discrepancies are going to be of an entirely
| different nature than "makeup," it's much more like
| watching a movie with a performance that you just don't
| find convincing.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > I'm not sure what difference you see between "rejecting
| someone for not being masculine enough" and "questioning
| whether they are, in fact, a man".
|
| One of those is a personal taste, the other is an alarm
| bell that you are being deceived, possibly failing to hit
| a number of subconscious sensors.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| > You can interpret this as evidence that one thing
| contributing to problems in the online dating landscape is
| that women don't know what they want.
|
| I suppose you can! It's intensely bizarre that you _would_ ,
| though.
|
| Another way to interpret it would be to say that there's a
| certain minimum level of communication skills that some of us
| aren't quite meeting.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Norah Vincent is also a professional writer.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Thanks - I've just added this to my reading list.
| majormajor wrote:
| I'm having trouble following why this would be a
| contradictory set of requirements from women vs simply a
| _pickier_ set of requirements compared to men. "Lots of men
| are shallow" is an olddddd cliche, no surprise there, but a
| female perspective being reported as "I want someone I can
| connect to in words that is also physically attractive to me
| in person" doesn't read as contradictory to me.
|
| (I'm also unclear on what "feminine style of writing" means,
| but would think for such an experiment to be really useful
| you'd need to pretend to be a man in your writing as well!)
|
| I had far more success in online dating when I started moving
| towards "let's meet in person as quickly as possible" because
| (even for me as a man) I found that the physical connection
| was harder to predict yet also more important than just a
| text-based one. The only area where my experience doesn't
| match hers is that I didn't encounter much resistance to
| something along the lines of "hey, let's meet up in person
| and see if we can keep this going" after just a few messages.
| meowkit wrote:
| That interpretation doesn't read as a contradiction because
| its not.
|
| My interpretation is that communicating in a feminine style
| (more subtext, longer messages, longer + consistent
| correspondence is how I would interpret it) is what will
| get you a date, but initial attraction and in presence
| masculinity (communicated via a different conversational
| style, appearance, and behavior) is what is preferred.
|
| So the contraction is that there is a difference in
| communication styles online and in person.
| majormajor wrote:
| I think there is a difference in online and in-person
| communication styles for most people - at least for those
| of any literary bent at all, who get beyond stream of
| consciousness, unfiltered blathering of words into their
| keyboard - so that's why I don't see any contradiction in
| preferences of women who might want a literary written
| communication style but also want in-person chemistry
| that a woman pretending to be a man wasn't able to
| create.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _and the feminine style of her writing appeals to them in a
| way that the feminine style of her body and personality doesn
| 't._
|
| I have trouble imagining how that was determined. Everything
| I have seen indicates women expect you to emotionally bond
| and establish a relationship before they can get all hot and
| bothered and men don't typically need that.
|
| That may have nothing to do with writing style and everything
| to do with simply being willing to put in the time.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I feel like by "writing style" they meant "communication
| style".
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Personality and writing style or communication style tend
| to be related.
|
| Meeting in person exposes you to many factors more than
| just looks. Smell is a big thing that people are often
| not consciously aware of but if you are a heterosexual
| female and you meet a woman dressed as a man, you may
| subconsciously react to "This doesn't smell like a man.
| Something ain't right."
|
| Voice tone is another. It has nothing to do with
| communication style, but her voice just may not be deep
| enough for a heterosexual woman to go "Yeah, I would hit
| that."
|
| People seem to think it boils down to "looks" or
| something and that doesn't really fit with what I
| understand about life, the universe and everything.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Year-
| Disguised/d...
|
| Based on this cover, I would have thought it was a very
| gender neutral looking person, and probably a lot less
| masculine if she wasn't frowning like that. But yeah,
| there's a huge difference between not being masculine
| enough vs. not being obviously a man.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The first photo reads to me as "clearly a woman" and
| based on that photo I have trouble imagining she actually
| passed for male. The second photo reads to me as "clearly
| a loser with no self esteem who is going to cry on my
| shoulder."
|
| I can imagine the second photo passing as male but not in
| a good way.
|
| There are subtle body language differences between men
| and women and that may be a factor.
|
| I'm tall for a woman. I've had very short hair for like
| fifteen years. It didn't initially get me mistaken for
| male.
|
| After being homeless for a year, people began calling me
| "sir" if they initially saw me from the back. (I would
| turn around and they would apologize for their error.)
| That was partly due to clothing but probably also my body
| language changed in ways I was not conscious of.
|
| There are myriad subtle details that help us distinguish
| male from female. It isn't any one thing.
|
| Edit: I will add her hair is hair that is _short for a
| woman_ but on the long side for a man. Men with long hair
| are often bearded. They have hair all over.
|
| The photos are almost an uncanny valley in terms of
| trying to look like a man. Like she didn't quite get it
| but thought she did.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Smell is a big thing that people are often not
| consciously aware of but if you are a heterosexual female
| and you meet a woman dressed as a man, you may
| subconsciously react to "This doesn't smell like a man.
| Something ain't right."
|
| No comments on smell were noted, but she did get comments
| about not being hairy.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Commenting on smell tends to not be socially acceptable
| and people are often not consciously aware of it.
| Hairiness is definitely a gender difference and helps
| people sort the boys from the girls, so to speak.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > These women wanted to be wooed by language. They weren't
| going to meet a strange man without measuring him first,
| and they weren't going to waste a meal or even a cup of
| coffee on a suitor who couldn't be bothered to craft a few
| lines beforehand. I was happy to oblige. The seductive
| effect of a well-written letter or, better yet, a well-
| chosen poem, on a strange woman's mind was often strong and
| sometimes hilariously so, even to the women involved, who
| were quite aware and ready to laugh about the effect
| distracting missives could have on them. One date told me,
| long after she'd dated Ned [the author's male alter ego]
| and learned his secret, that a coworker, reading one of
| Ned's e-mails over her shoulder, had said "Shit. He's
| sending you poems? You'd better fuck this man."
|
| > Ned made an impression not just because he gave these
| women at least a pale version of the reading material they
| seemed to crave, but because he did it so willingly. It was
| rare, most of them told me, for a man to write at such
| length, much less to write with consideration and
| investment.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| My father and ex husband both wrote poems. There's
| nothing inherently gendered about writing rhymes.
|
| _It was rare, most of them told me, for a man to write
| at such length, much less to write with consideration and
| investment._
|
| To me, that boils down to what I tried to say above:
| women expect commitment and evidence that you will stick
| around. "Writing at length" is, in part, simply a matter
| of putting in the time.
| xwdv wrote:
| Your suspicion is best hypothesized as "Social media has people
| thinking they have so many options, but in reality most of them
| aren't even worth it."
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The market is not clearing due to participants not properly
| pricing each other.
|
| Or the participants are not desirable enough for the other
| party.
|
| The former can be helped by letting your network decide your
| price as they may be able to do it more objectively, so
| anyone introduced to you by your network is likelier to be in
| your price range. This, of course, depends on you having
| access to a good network, but I suspect that is also on the
| decline.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| Well, if marriage is the "purchase", you should also
| include the case that people are finding the terms of the
| purchase itself to be not worth it.
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