[fwlr]

The last paragraph: “How many [men] over six feet tall with graduate degrees who don’t smoke and drink only socially or not at all and either already have kids or don’t want kids and live within fifty miles of you who aren’t polyamorous and designate themselves as active, with liberal politics and no bathroom selfies or rote clichéd philosophizing? I thought I might stop at ninety-nine, or one hundred.” gives you a good feeling of a constant theme throughout the entire article. Every few paragraphs the author discusses another disqualifying feature she uses to winnow the field of potential mates - no car selfies, no bathroom selfies, no mentioning sarcasm, no “partners in crime”, etc.

The simple analysis is she’s being too picky, but the simple analysis is too easy; this is a intelligent woman who tries very hard to introspect and self-reflect and pours an enormous amount of effort into trying to find love, and in my opinion that effort earns her a right to a correspondingly more effortful analysis.

She feels distrust towards dating apps, seeing them as “casinos“; she feels a sense that this breakdown of the dating market is being blamed on women somehow; she feels this is unfair. All valid feelings, and when we put them together we get the start of a much more interesting analysis.

She says she has been on a hundred dates. (I would absolutely love for her to give a ballpark figure of how many profiles she has viewed - I suspect high five figures with a fat, fat tail out to high six, but for the purposes of this analysis I will use a conservative estimate of 10,000.)

She specifies in about two thirds of her dates, her filters were telling her no but she went anyway out of a fear that her filters were somehow wrong, and then her filters were confirmed later on. The Starbucks example quoted by other commenters is illustrative: she rejects on the basis that she can’t like a man who likes Starbucks, but then rejects her own rejection and tries anyway, but then discovers he also likes Marvel movies and her initial rejection is re-confirmed: “But then he mentioned he got his daily coffee from Starbucks… but then he mentioned mostly watching Marvel movies…”.

“But then he mentioned”. 10,000 profiles viewed, 100 dates, ~0 long term relationships. No car selfies. Dating apps are casinos. Let’s put it all together:

Dating apps present a stunning over-abundance of choice, which forces women to construct a veritable armory of cheap and hard filters just to even begin to start considering individuals. But dating is an incomplete information game where there’s an initial dump of information on a profile, and then more is revealed over time in conversation and on dates. Any set of filters that can practically reduce the initial superabundance to a manageable amount based on the initial info dump will likewise reduce the manageable amount to ~0 when more information is revealed. And so after the first date, she must return to the dating app.

Is this what’s going on? We might think to examine womens’ psyches for evidence to support our conclusion, but that would be very rude and also we suck at doing that. Instead, we might examine dating apps to see if they use superabundance and low initial information. Well, Tinder exemplifies this pattern - it absolutely inundates you with superficial profiles and demands an immediate, often split-second “no / maybe” decision (your filters have to be incredibly cheap to compute under those constraints). Is Tinder more successful than other dating apps? Yes - in fact it’s more successful than all other dating apps put together. We might be on to something here.

tl;dr Dating apps are designed to hack womens’ psychology and make them super-picky, because pickiness sets them up to fail the rest of the relationship and this makes them a returning customer.

[ravenstine]

As a man, it's hard to imagine the kind of bubble that some women must exist in for those combined preferences to seem completely reasonable. Men have their own idiotic preferences, but they're usually self-contained whilst many women have an all-encompassing "he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that, he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that, he's gotta have this, he's gotta have that..." attitude. People should feel ashamed for being so openly misanthropic, but to some extent it's considered acceptable.

Though I mentioned some things that I think will help society move past this phase of "modern dating", I forgot to mention specifically that if anything's going to change, it may only happen if women collectively start rejecting hookup apps. All of the women I know seem to realize they hate something about apps like Tinder, yet continue relying on them, but maybe enough of them will eventually put two and two together. It's not just the men whom are failing them, but the technology itself.

[fwlr]

On some level, the author recognizes that whole set of preferences is completely unreasonable - that’s the point of listing them all out like that. But you can also see that whole set of preferences is necessary and functional to survive a dating app - she states it produced 100 potential suitors. 99% of women across 99% of history wouldn’t have had 100 potential suitors across their entire life. Hence why I quoted that final paragraph, it neatly encapsulates the problem: “I applied unreasonably picky standards and still found 100 men”.

[Johanx64]

She didn't find 100 suitors, what she got instead is 100 guys that passed her unrealistic standards and matched, out of which most probably found her single mom "closing in on fourty" looks still good enough to cream her, but not much beside that.

Of those 100 very few would be willing to be seen with her in public, and clearly not interested in commiting. It's subtle, but you can clearly pick it up reading her lamentations

How many men that are 6ft+, are educated and have their shit together put in 40yo single moms with 3kids and colorful past as their commitment filter?

[atleta]

I don't think dating apps are designed to make women picky per se but they definitely end up distorting their perception and turn them into overly picky for sure.

This has always been the case with all dating apps from the start (except for maybe a few that tried to actively designed around it). This phenomenon emerges automatically from how dating platforms and people work: 1. men are expected to do the approach/first move (this is socially and evolutionary encoded in both sexes) 2. men initially put the bar somewhat lower and mostly care about looks at first (I'd say it makes a lot of sense, especially in online dating, but only if you disregard that the photos end up manipulated) 3. women (and also men) will start manipulating their photos. Even just selecting your best photos is manipulation. (I'm not saying it's wrong or unreasonable.) 4. men will do more approaches than IRL because it's cheap and safe and also can be done in parallel 5. women will receive a lot more approaches than IRL because men do more apporoaches

and this turns on the cycle: 6. women will feel that they have a lot higher desirability than what they were used to IRL/before starting to date online. They'll become picky, will feel higher status and start to be mean with some of the men who approach. Actually they don't have to be actively and explicitly mean, not being nice with the rejection is bad enough for men (see 7.). And being nice to all the unwanted approachers is hard. I mean it can be hard work so it's frustrating. 7. men will start to see that their efforts don't pay off. I mean it will pay off for the top say 5-20% but not for the others. So they get frustrated and try to further minimize the investment in each approach 8. this makes women feel even worse about all the unwanted approaches and they'll be even less considerate about those who they don't want (while porbably increasing the bar). They'll start complaining and putting stupid requirements (messages, really) on their profile, like the usual "those who do X and are Y need not bother to swipe right", etc. 9. this further frustrates men

etc. The cycle is on. Online dating, at least the naive approches, don't work because it makes the wrong thing easy and efficient. (And yes, due to the business models of these platforms they are not motivated to solve the issue. After all, the more users they have the better it is for them. They are getting paid for keeping people on the platform and not getting them off i.e. hook them up.)

[spadros]

Online dating may make women more vain and entitled. It’s still her responsibility to recognize that bias and work against it. If she truly wants a partner, at least. Otherwise it’s hard to have sympathy for someone inundated with choice who has rejected people for liking Starbucks and Marvel movies. Especially when she herself has been divorced twice and already has kids. She isn’t exactly a prime fruit, but she seems to expect a perfect man in return. If she had some empathy, gratitude, tolerance, and non-judgement, I’m sure many of those 100+ men would have been great partners.

[fwlr]

Applying the same reasoning to casinos: “Casinos may make gamblers more impulsive. It’s still their responsibility to recognize that bias and work against it. If they truly want to financially secure, at least.” It seems a little heartless to me. Casinos are big powerful institutions with lots of resources to spend on crafting psychological exploits to make gamblers more impulsive, and we don’t fully blame gamblers for this - we regulate casinos pretty intensely, provide services to help gambling addicts, etc. The problem is more acute in this domain too, since dating apps have more of a monopoly on dating than casinos have on money.

I do agree with you that if she did have less judgment, some of those 100+ men would have been great partners. She mentions a French economist she dated who said “if he was going to be sent to a deserted island and had to choose between me and “someone gorgeous,” of course he would choose me, because I would be more interesting to talk to forever and he could still have sex with me too. But in the real world, surrounded by other people who’d be looking at him-with-me, he knew he would feel ashamed of me because he could have been with a more beautiful woman.” This mixture of acceptance and rejection may have just been his way of softening the blow of his rejection of her, but it may have also been his awkward unromantic way of saying “I will settle for you”. Willingness to settle like that might be the model we have to adapt to survive a dating market warped by high-powered dating apps.

[spadros]

I think comparing OLD to big Casinos is incredibly reductive.

I also think you’re bending my words into a straw man. If I had to play this game, the better answer would be “it’s an addictive gambler’s responsibility to keep out of casinos, or set a limit and stay within it”.

An addict has problems with alcohol. It’s their responsibility to deal with it. The fallout in their life is their responsibility to handle, nobody else’s.

A bipolar person can’t control their moods. It’s still their responsibility to deal with the fallout of manic episodes and try to stabilize their mood. Eventually most bipolar have the ability to recognize that they are at the centre of the broken relationships in their life and act upon that knowledge for the positive.

She’s either already vain and entitled or became repugnantly vain and entitled through OLD. It’s her responsibility to deal with that. The article reads like someone trying to bury the fact that they are at the centre of their suffering.

I agree tolerance and willingness to settle are key attributes to a happy and long lasting relationship. She seems to have neither in spades.

[fwlr]

I don’t mean to be reductive or try to absolve the individuals of responsibility; ultimately, responsibility must bottom out with the individual, there’s nowhere else for it to go.

Regarding the casino comparison: casinos are an established institution that we might categorize as “mildly exploitative”, and we have a mature moral/ethical framework around permitting them to exist, judging people who they exploit, etc. (Like, we DO permit casinos to exist, we say things like “enjoy them responsibly and expect to lose because the house always wins”, we would respect someone who refuses to attend casinos because they know they have a gambling problem, and so on.) I think the casino comparison is valuable mostly because we currently DON’T see dating apps as mildly exploitative pickiness-inducers, and we probably should.