[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

A small gender imbalance can become greatly magnified. For example, in a hypothetical town of 100 hetero adults comprised of 55 men and 45 women, perhaps 40 women will decide to settle down with the best 40 men into happy committed relationships. The 15 remaining single men will be left to compete for the 5 remaining women. Here, a population-wide gender ratio of 55:45 turns into a dating-pool gender ratio of 3:1.

Blink 182 snuck a lyric into one of their songs that I think describes what's been happening in the American dating scene: "Nobody likes you when you're 23." People in college generally like dating other people in college, but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.

This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.

[csa]

> These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists),

I was going to say this if you didn’t.

The dynamics can be weird at times, but it works. I think more men in their early 20s should give this a go.

[temp93]

Have you tried this? Obviously, law of small numbers and whatnot, but as an early-20s male who's gone on multiple dates with older women, I repeatedly felt disrespected or ignored in conversation. It's as if I bored them. Some outright told me they prefer to date men older than them.

And maybe I'm boring! But when I date younger women this doesn't happen. So, in my experience, this does not work and I won't be trying again soon.

[csa]

> Have you tried this?

Yes, when I was in my early 20s.

I dated several women between 28 and 35.

As I mentioned before, the dynamics can get weird. Things that someone in their early 20s occupy their thoughts with are often very different than someone in their 30s.

That said, we all figured out how to make the most of our time together, and the sex was really good. I’m not going to pretend like these were deep relationships — that was not what I was looking for, and I don’t think that was their focus either. The focus was mostly companionship and intimacy, and I think that we accomplished our goals on that front.

[willsoon]

Here's another lyrics:

>They only want you when you are seventeen >When you are twenty-one >You are not fun

[moonlighter]

Ladytron, Seventeen ;-)

[vidarh]

> but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.

This is one those things that's important to keep in mind. If we compared like for like a 20-something and a 40-something man, the 20-something many would probably do very well.

But a 40-something man have had 20 extra years to learn how to interact with women, gain experiences, gain education, advance a career, so it's rarely a like for like comparison.

I mean, I personally can't blame the women who rejected me when I was younger. I know exactly what I was like.

Of course some will have physically decayed, but the spread of womens physical preferences for men is pretty wide, and many men still look more attractive to a large proportion of women in their 40's than their 20's.

> This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.

This is also massively exacerbated by dating apps that have no interest in redressing the issue, by allowing womens match queues to build up to the point that most of the women you swipe on will never see your profile, and allowing people to keep swiping on huge number of people in one go.

E.g. my ex wife told me at one point that she'd once signed up for Tinder's premium service out of curiosity and found she had several thousand matches outstanding. It's in Tinders interest to keep showing women who keep getting swiped even as their queues grow large enough that they'll never work their way through those queues.

At the same time this number is massively artificially inflated also because those most struggling to get a match are incentivised to keep trying to match with a huge number of people.

If these apps cared about their users and only showed profiles to other users that didn't have a huge queue of outstanding matches, and also put caps on the number of outstanding/unseen swipes, it wouldn't improve the number of matches much, but it would likely increase the proportion of swipes that leads to matches by drastically reducing the number of swipes.It would also show users who are actually realistically available. Maybe it'd make more people widen their search criteria.

Of course the problem with this is that it runs completely counter to the interests of dating apps, which are best served by encouraging desperation to get people to pay for premium services.

[mleonhard]

I am building a dating app that prioritizes UX over short-term profitability. The roadmap includes this feature, matching users with people who are likely to respond and preventing users from getting too many or too few connections.

[vidarh]

Good luck to you with that. I hope you succeed, but I also fear that it's a really tough one because the lifetime value of a dating app user is pretty low to start with (most people are only active for a few months, and many never come back - you can see this in the pricing structures for these apps where the per-month fees for premium services drop off drastically with longer periods, and where some offer lifetime memberships that cost only a few months worth of individual upgrades). On the upside, if you manage the PR well, pushing the angle that it's quality and connections that matters and that your competition are all borderline scams in how they pretend you have a chance with far more people than will ever see your profile might well get you enough attention to keep user acquisition costs low.

Just don't sell out to Match like everyone else seems to be doing...

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, but that clears up for that cohort of guys, doesn't it? They get older (and hopefully get their act somewhat more together), and then the younger women are interested in them.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Yes, exactly - it's just an explanation for why it seems like there is a big pool of not-yet-married men chasing a small pool of not-yet-married women on dating apps. It's literally what's happening: as long as older men prefer to date women younger than themselves, and younger women prefer to date men a bit older than themselves, and there is a hard divide between the college and post-college dating worlds, single men will outnumber single women, and the dating app experience will be vastly different between genders.