Interesting experiment. Traditionally when people reach the point of wanting to pay money to get a wife, they travel to some less well off country and buy a wife from there.
You say that like spending money on marriage is a bad thing. But effectively, if you marry someone who earns less than you, you're paying money to maintain that marriage for the rest of your life anyway.
Not in any obvious definite way if you're both above sustaining yourselves. I.e. if there is discretionary money (sourced from both parties) then what you say is only true if the decisions/compromises not in your favour outweigh your portion of the discretionary funds.
(...I don't want to spend my life thinking like this.)
Well you can ignore it as long as the marriage goes well :-) but in a divorce the court will make it very clear just how much money the marriage cost the higher earner, both in terms of dividing up past earnings, and in terms of dividing up future earnings via alimony and child support.
What the court imposes is more of a penalty on divorce, than a representation on what a wife costs.
For instance, we used to make a little money when I married my wife, now we make a lot more. We didn't change our lifestyle or spending, nor what we spent on the child. Just savings increased, none of which we planned to give to the child. But now the child support calculator says I owe a lot more after a divorce, which is supposed to be money for the child. If the cost of the child didn't go up, it makes no sense the child support would go up when you earn more money, but it does. It's just a penalty on whoever earns more or doesn't take the child, as societies way of getting even for violating Christian norms.
But a penalty for one side can be viewed as an incentive for the other side. Which given either side can initiate divorce, could increase the divorce rate.
This is not necessarily true, beyond the fact that you must pay to live no matter what. If you have one person making, say, $300k/year and another making $60k/year, together you share a bedroom, share a fridge, share a stove, share a living room, etc. Your total costs could lower than they would be otherwise.
Being on the other side of that though is: join app, wade through many low quality matches because the ratio is like 10:1, become extremely choosy because every right swipe is a match. It produces really bad psychological effects for both cohorts.
Women are, in general, hypergamous, meaning they are looking for men who are "above" them along some dimension: wealth, status, looks, education, etc. I can not find the link, but I read somewhere once that something like the "top" 80% of women are competing over the "top" 20% of men. In other words, the "bottom" 80% of men are un-dateable for those women. That is how you end up with the situation described.
They were censored? How is this even controversial? Females have a biological incentive to be more choosy than men as their reproductive investment is much higher -- it seems obvious that the result is rational from a biological perspective.
That's funny at first glance but it might be more accurate than we would like to admit. Maybe there were a lot of below average men (compared to the general population) on OKC when that study was conducted
Actually, the OkCupid founders used their own pictures and got nailed as significantly below average. <chuckle>
They really weren't. If anything, they were probably a bit above average.
Although, there is one thing that might have contributed back in the day. Female users of online dating might have been concentrated in tech areas. Being a rare female in a male dominated ratio area causes a highly skewed estimate of how attractive you really are.
Discovering that men 'over average' don't have problems to find women or are married yet, so don't need the services of the platform wouldn't be much of a surprise...
This is very true. Anecdote and all that but I've known some very fortunate dudes who literally just had to show up and the ladies would fall over themselves. It was entertaining and sobering at the same time.
For starters, the pool of people on say, Tinder, for example, is already disproportionately imbalanced in terms of represented populations (as I said, 10:1). Assuming an even distribution of “attractiveness” (which obviously isn’t straightforward to quantify and varies by locale), there’s already a huge discrepancy: even a woman of average attractiveness (of ten women 1-10, she ranks a 5) has fifty (given ten women, there are a hundred men in total) that rank below, in terms of attractiveness. When you have a limited number of right swipes a day, well below the number of available options that _do_ qualify, and nearly every right swipe is a match, it leads to a conditioned behavior of selecting well above one’s “rank”. Of course, online dating apps have no interest in removing the barriers that result in this condition — it makes men pay more for more swipes, higher priority in the stacks shown to women, and the option to see who swiped on them. In other words, it’s a rigged game.
Thanks for the detailed reply. This matches my experience fairly well.
With the dynamics of the game laid out the way you said, do you see any reason to right swipe on someone of a relatively similar attractiveness to you? Or given it’s current parameters, does it always make more sense for women to try to match “up” and aim for men objectively more attractive than them?
Admittedly, I’ve had a very unusual experience on Tinder. Attraction is important, but it’s not the be all end all for me, as there are way more important things. That being said, I also know I rank pretty high on their scoring mechanics, based on the characteristics of who they show to me, and how I am shown to others (for example, Tinder primes people to swipe right by showing a high scoring user when you first open the app, many close friends have informed me “Tinder keeps showing me you when I open the app”, but there are other considerations you can use to assess your internal score). So I match with interesting choices on other attributes. And of the crowd I match with I have built a workflow to manage the volume (literally, I have over three thousand matches as of writing this, historically a total of over 7,000 in the year and a half I’ve used the app) — I reverse engineered their API so I could pull the matches and messages and create JIRA tickets automatically so I could bucket conversations based on initial intentions. It sounds pretty horrible once I write that out, but on the other hand I feel it’s pretty horrible that people don’t get a fair shake because of the way this game is rigged, and this ensures better “fairness”, at least in some way. Also not to mention, about half don’t message first, and of those that do, about a fifth of the time they’re pretty unsavory openers.