[blq10]

The list of things the commenter you're replying to brought up, in addition to "be attractive", is table stakes for receiving an iota of romantic attention from women.

We talk a ton about unrealistic beauty standards, "men talking, women listening", etc - but I have to wonder, maybe the world where women marry people one income decide above them is almost guaranteed to be a world where men are just more competitive in the workplace, even at the expense of running over their female colleagues. The incentives curve says that to expect anything at all of women, you have to be successful, ideally wealthy. So, you get the behavior the incentives curve tells people to enact.

An incentives curve that is set, ironically, by women

[johnny22]

> The list of things the commenter you're replying to brought up, in addition to "be attractive", is table stakes for receiving an iota of romantic attention from women.

that's not true though. I'd say it's not great to be "ugly" (for some definition of the word) but you don't have to attractive. Heck, you can even be pretty poor, but as long as you you're a decent person to be around, it's not that hard.

[xp84]

Perhaps anecdotally a lot of guys find their way somehow (heck, I myself somehow landed a few serious relationships before I was successful, and I wasn’t above average looking then) but when guys read that women expect 6’ and 6 figures which is a very common thing you hear, and you consider that’s like 1% of men that fit just those criteria, it’s pretty off-putting to men who aren’t that and don’t expect to be that.

It’s certainly not all women, of course, but there are women who feel they shouldn’t “settle” for “less” than that. As though men who are 5’9 and make $85k are dirtbags or as though tall rich guys will treat you better or be better fathers. It is contributing to the big decrease in marriage even happening, in my opinion, as evidenced by increased average age of first marriage in the West.

To be perfectly clear: I’m not daft enough to think that no guys who aren’t in this “shallowly-defined 1%” are getting dates or getting married. Rather, I’m saying that culturally we are now saying it’s very okay, or even best practice, to be incredibly shallow in evaluating men, and that’s as wrong as evaluating women by their measurements.