Maybe, but there are many, many studies showing that on dating apps, it's 80% of the women choosing 20% of the men. Many women are also fairly ignorant about how unrealistic some standards (over 6' tall, makes over $100K/yr.) are.
I honestly have zero problem with people having "unrealistic" standards. You can restrict your own pool as much as you like, as long as you don't complain about not finding any partners.
I (and people in general) have no right to be upset at not meeting what we see as "unrealistic" or "unimportant" standards held by people we are interested in. We are not entitled to a relationship.
(I do think it's kind of sad when e.g. I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius. She said she could go months out and about in a major city and not see a single man she found physically attractive. It's very much not the experience I've had, I see reasonably attractive people everywhere, so I wonder what people are looking for who say there is nobody even worth considering anywhere around them?)
Edit: to be clear, I don't mean she couldn't get dates with people she found attractive, she didn't see anyone attractive at all. Her "type" was incredibly strict: between 6' and 6'2", wavy blond hair, medium length, athletic without being too "muscular", and no brown eyes. She showed us pictures of her past boyfriends and they could have all been identical twins of each other, it was absurd. But hey, again, more power to her, nobody has the right to demand she relax her standards for them.
Not finding anyone physical attractive for months at a time is something that can happen to both sexes. Around the age of forty I, a man, began to feel like I was completely surrounded by unattractive women wherever I go. Not because the women changed or there is anything at all wrong with them, but because with experience, I have a good idea now of how relationships work, and my interest has waned.
I myself have what one might term “unrealistic standards”. At some point, what I was looking for was someone to share experiences with: someone to travel with, watch great cinema or view art with, etc. Yet every woman I have personally been with sought a relationship because they wanted a man to make them feel comfortable, secure, and desired, and that left me bored and feeling used. I don’t complain about this any more or feel entitled to a relationship, I just get on with living alone. But I still understand younger men’s feelings of frustration, and hope that those feelings can get channeled in some non-destructive direction.
>I talked to a friend of mine who had a sense of attractiveness so strict that she literally could not find someone she found physically appealing within a hundred mile radius
I don't think it's that they're ignorant. They probably don't really care if it's unrealistic or not. They're given a platform where they can describe exactly what it is they want, and given the imbalance in men/women on the platform, they've got a decent chance of getting it.
Tangent: where'd you get that number? Not questioning it, I'd just love to know if there's a tool that makes it easy to get intersections with that kind of data.
that's 1 million men spread across the US. For comparison's sake, Greater NYC has ~22 million people. LA has a bit more.
1 million in a country of 330 million is nothing.
Plus there is competition, both in terms of other mates, as well as other priorities. Your ideal man may be in the military and disappearing in 6 months, or working 70 hours a week in a law firm.
I’m not that old but I also never did online dating. Is there a possibility that online dating has a bias for women that are “choosy” (for lack of a better term)?
>Is there a possibility that online dating has a bias for women that are “choosy”
Worse: online dating apps create choosy daters. It is less like "dating" and more like online shopping. People who use such apps are incentivized to drill down using increasingly-specific filters hoping to find the perfect mate, but in reality find themselves with no suitable matches at all. Worse yet, if they do find someone, the false sense of being able to continue refining toward a more perfect mate often drives them away from actually-existing relationships and back to the apps where they fruitlessly search for an "upgrade"
This isn't what the parent comment is talking about, it's talking about how (generally) women's rating of men's attractiveness follows the Pareto principle. This is purely from pictures and profiles, before anyone interacts with anyone else.
If it makes us feel any better, in the same data set, women did actively message and pair up with men they didn't rate as very attractive so.... good for us I guess?
> Men's ratings of women follow the same principle. Practically everything does.
The OKCupid data doesn't bear this out. Men's ratings of women's attractiveness is fairly symmetric. Women's ratings of men's attractiveness is highly skewed and unrealistic.
This asymmetry is a fundamental law of online dating, as inescapable as gravity. If you were genuinely ignorant of this ... I really don't know what to say.
>And I'm telling you, from the female side of the exchange, it takes nearly nothing to be in the top 20% of profiles (could be done in 10 mins of thoughtful effort) and even less to be in the top 20% of conversations (keep pants zipped).
Of all the guys you swipe right on, what percentage are below 5'9?
> Men seem to be under the impression that their desire is the default, that if a woman is on an app, she wants what they want. But raaaaarely do women on these apps, or in general, only want sex.
that's not a problem with men or women, it's a problem with the apps. There should be apps that are strictly for scheduling casual hook ups and other apps that are for people looking for meaningful relationships. At the very least, if an app wants to cater to both markets, there should be a means to filter for that within the app. That way people who only want sex have an easy way to find it and nobody is wasting their time.
It's not just a problem with apps. It's a problem with the people using them. No one wants to admits what type of relationship they're really looking for because they're afraid it will scare off partners.
I guess if some people can get their foot in the door with casual sex and somehow turn that into a meaningful relationship or (perhaps more challenging) get some casual sex out of building a lasting relationship it might benefit some people to lie about what they want, but it seems like honesty would be a lot easier.
While a shit ton of men do in fact sabotage themselves with dick picks, they also work a non-zero amount of times, which sort of drives the whole problem with them.
But no, "it's not that easy" for most men to experience ANYTHING on Tindr. Just go look at posts on data reddits where people export their tindr profile into a visualization. The average "male" experience actually looks most like the experience of a (self described) "fat" woman. This matches what OkCupid found before they were purchased by Match.com and hid that blog post.
There's no shame or problem with women having a powerful market and getting what they need or want from above average men, but at the very least be honest with yourself about the position that puts unlucky or below average men in.
I recommend you ask to "run" a male friend's tinder for a day, especially if they don't do well on tinder. I once let my sister and her friend run my tinder, and it was eye opening just how little it took for them to swipe left on EVERYONE. "I don't like her smile", or "eh" or basically ANYONE below a 9 got left swiped, or anyone that had any opinion at all in their bio. It was insane. I was NOT the level of attractiveness to be that choosy. Even my current girlfriend says my bumble profile wasn't that attractive. Good thing she swiped right though, because she is very happy with the person I ended up being. All she had to do was look past physical appearance, IE, stop looking for 9s that were not interested anyway.
One thing I don't see people discussing (outside of women's spaces at least) is how sexual assault drives poor Tinder satisfaction (for both parties). Way too many women report being sexually assaulted or raped by their Tinder dates, often saying that Match.com does not respond to their accusations, putting other women at risk. Women will of course try to be more choosy from that, because getting raped for wanting a casual date or something is insane.
Both parties report strong dissatisfaction with apps like Tinder. Men swipe right on everyone because that's their only hope of getting ANY attention at all, literally relying on winning the lottery to get a single date, while women are extremely choosy and have very high expectations, because it's their market to dictate, but as long as they both do the "rational" thing, they will continue to suffer, because if you "defect" a la game theory, you objectively have a bad time.
