[Lazare]

I mean, given a roughly 1:1 gender ratio that would be difficult to be entirely true. And I suspect if you speak with many women, you'll get some pretty strong pushback on this. More systematically, surveys consistently show equal levels of dissatisfaction with their dating lives between men and women.

For both men and women, it's actually relatively easy to find a partner that you wouldn't consider dating; finding an optimal partner is hard.

[commandlinefan]

> equal levels of dissatisfaction

Women usually complain about not being able to find “good” men, though, while men report not being able to find _any_ women.

[Lazare]

I would be somewhat skeptical of that without hard evidence.

It's certainly trivial to find (many, many) examples of single men complaining that there are literally no women in the dating pool while simultaneously discounting out of hand all women who are too fat, have had too many prior partners, are too ugly, are too tall, are older than them (or in extreme cases, are the same age as them), make too much money, have incompatible political or religious views (generally but not always being too leftist), violate some cultural norm (piercings, dyed hair, vegan, etc.), and so forth. And none of those are hypotheticals, but actual examples I've seen in the wild. Repeatedly!

So while yes, I would be willing to believe that more men than women might report that there are "no available partners", that may have more to do with a difference in language than a difference in the actual objective dating landscape.

(To be clear, I don't have hard evidence to prove this is the case; I'm just noting I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that it could be the case, and haven't seen any hard evidencr to the contrary. Hence, my skepticism.)

[jojobas]

Would you count that women consistently rate 80% of men as below-average-looking for evidence? Source: okcupid.

[Lazare]

Absolutely not. If anything, that's further evidence of my point, and I literally almost mentioned it before deciding my comment was getting a bit rambling already.

Anyhow, assuming for the sake of argument that OKCupid's data is valid and replicates, then there's two responses:

The short and somewhat silly argument is that women also say they care about attractiveness a lot less than men do, so it all averages out. Men care about attractiveness and have an accurate perception of it; women don't care about it and have an inaccurate perception of it. Neither a big deal nor surprising.

The longer point though is that yes, men, judging women's attractiveness, say very different things than women do, when judging men's attractiveness (again, if we believe OKCupid's data). But that doesn't tell us anything about how men and women perceive attractiveness, it just tells us how they talk about attractiveness, and in the exact same way that we might be skeptical when a man says "there's literally no one to date" (and suspect they mean there's just no one they feel meets their standards who will date them), we might be skeptical of a woman that marks most men down as being below average attractiveness. Is there, say, some bit of cultural conditioning pushing women to rank men as unattractive when they don't want to date them for a non-appearance reason? Or to rank men as unattractive to avoid seeming too eager, even when they do find them attractive? How often do women end up dating men they rank as unattractive, and how does this rate compare to the rate of men dating women they rank as unattractive? And we could go on, but the point is that when you start to dig into it, the pattern falls apart, suggesting this is a quirk of the survey design at best, and not an real insight into meaningful differences betweem male and female bahaviour.

[jojobas]

Whatever you say might be true, but it doesn't change the fact that say on Tinder, 95% of women go after 5% of men. It might not be physical looks as such, but whatever the metric is, women want the top, at least for casual relationship.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/mbf6wg/oc_...

(There's gender imbalance on tinder but it's not enough to explain 20:1 difference).

[Lazare]

Again, you're assuming that men and women are using the app in the same way, and that a "like" means the same thing. If you assume that women typically only "like" men they would be open to dating, but men will "like" anyone even vaguely plausible with a plan on filtering out poor matches later in the process, you'd see data like this, but it wouldn't support your conclusion. (Is this happening? No idea; again, you'd need more data.)

Further, and much more importantly, you're looking at data showing how often men and women like potential partners, but you're trying to deduce from it how often men and women are liked by potential partners. It's interesting that women apparently only "like" 3.2% of the men they see, but that does not in any way suggest that only 3.2% of men will be "liked" by a woman.

Consider two hypothetical worlds:

In world 1, each woman is very selective (and is only open to dating 1% of men), but every woman has selected a different 1% to be interested in.

In world 2, women are unselective (and are open to dating 30% of men), but all women have chosen the same 30% of men to pursue.

Obviously both worlds seem to differ signiicantly from our own, and each has some challenges! But fairly obviously despite women in world 1 being 30 times pickier, all men could at least in theory find a partner who wanted to date them, whereas in world 2 the majority of men would never do so. And yet if you replicated the graph you linked for world 1, it would have the red bar for the female line take up 99% of the graph. It's really not showing what you think it is.

(Again, I have to stress: I am not trying to claim I know how dating or attraction works, or what the median experience for using a dating app is actually is like; I am instead pointing out that nobody seems to know this, because we lack data.)

[2muchcoffeeman]

I bet the age groups that are dissatisfied are different though.

[AzzyHN]

I mean, you can look at dating app statistics. Women get to be (or have to be, depending on how you look at it) much choosier than men

[Lazare]

Such statistics can be difficult to parse. Hypothetical:

Person A chats with five people. Two seem okay, two seem like poor choices, one seems unhinged and is quickly blocked. Of the two good options they go on a date with each, selects one of them, and forms a relationship.

Person B is deluged with messages, many of them vulgar. After some filtering, they end up trying to hold coversations with twenty different people, but struggle to form a connection with any of them. Eventually they go on a date with the person who seems the best, it goes okay, and they form a relationship.

In this example, is person A or B able to be "choosier"? Which experience would you prefer if you could choose? I would argue that quantity is not valuable independent of quality. Or to put it another way, I suspect you would find that most single women would argue they have no greater number of acceptable choices than single men do.

The (obviously real) difference in the number of men sending women unsolicited pictures of their genitals compared to women sending men such pictures isn't really relevant.

[default_friend]

I don’t think dating app stats are that reliable. Like matching != sustained interest. They don’t say much about relationship outcomes