I don't think that differences in life expectancy are the main driver for the results seen here. Life expectancy between sexes varies by 3-5 years, so you should expect the average age difference be around 2 years. I don't think this is enough to cause a 12-year difference in the peak dating pools, assuming that the demographics of the single population match the overall population. In reality, the demographics do not match; younger men (<30 y/o) and older women (>50 y/o) are more likely to be single compared to the baseline:
Men and women just on average look for different things.
The reality is that young women are more attractive to men, with youthful looks, an innocence and potentially more submissive.
Conversely older men tend to be more emotionally mature and financely independent, which women find more attractive.
Women start with it all from an attraction point of view and men start with nothing.
Of course people might not like this or have different tastes but in general it seems to be true. I also think there is nothing wrong with these or any other choices of attraction.
Man, am I glad I ignored this kind of stuff and always took shots that I felt were way out of my league when I was in my early twenties.
I approached 5000+ women. The women with the most amazing personalities tended to stick, some of them being models and way out of my league.
Now that I am thinking about it, my chance of anything going somewhere was 0.1%.
People say it’s a numbers game. I’d like to more specifically say: go for volume and then more volume. Meet lots and lots of people in general. Social adventures are more fun than purely looking for love.
My point is: have these low chances (0.1%) been taken into account? I have many stories where people won’t believe it’s true. But when you have a big n, your range gets wider as well.
I am curious if you mean the "chance of anything" as objective, or subjective number here.
0.1% means, after approaching 5000 women, only 5 (1 in 1000) decided to give you a shot. Or was the number higher? (And you are using 0.1% just as a figure of speech?)
If a woman stuck with you, then they are not "way out of your league" - you are exactly in their league. So many misconceptions here.
My point here, there is some subjective level setting, 0.1%, "out of my league" which may or may not be consistent with actual, hard numbers. It does not matter what you think (it's quite counter productive to overthink): what matters is how it plays out in reality. What is the actual statistic. That's what your chance was, that's what your chance is.
> I am talking 10 years back. I didn’t do online dating.
That's a different era. 10 years ago 10 minutes spend on OKCupid and then looking out of the window were enough to realise it doesn't make sense. Nowadays you have no choice.
> Tinder actually can work, but pretty much only if you are an attractive guy
I did actually manage to get close to "attractive guy" for a short period, ie. the sweet spot of decent look, good photos, educated bio, catchy conversation starters, and purchasing the premium subscription. Then at around 200-300 matches and no real life encounters yet... got a nuclear irrevocable ban on the device, email address, and phone number.
I'm close to saying there are really no male winners in online dating. Females notoriously compain all they get is a queue of horny sexual partners willing for short encounter, wouldn't call it a win either.
200-300 matches and no encounters seems very high!
I'd say my match-to-meet ratio is more like 15-30%, and I don't think I'm doing anything amazing. Very average looking, and I just talk to women like humans.
Even my most "I'm not looking for a relationship" profile (I had something like "just out of a long relationship. Looking for something casual." or something like that on my profile) get less matches but the meeting ratio seemed the same.
I was using premium feature to set my location to nearby hotspots with the intent to travel for a meeting. My location at that time was a social desert. This might be a reason for a nil ratio. Anyway feels bad that even at the peak performance still something - the right location - was missing....
I had a situation where a women on Tinder started asking very direct questions about my kinks and sexual proclivities within the two or three messages and while it made me feel very uncomfortable because of the way she asked the questions I never once thought that I should report her or that her kinds of communication shouldn't be allowed on an online dating platform.
I'm really disappointed with the direction that match.com has taken the online dating sector.
I personally prefer my online dating experience to be something like the way OKCupid was before it was acquired, that is to a platform more focused on crafting thoughtful profiles engaging in thoughtful conversations online for a while before meetingin real life.
With that said it's really lame how Tinder has changed due to it becoming the face on online dating apps.
I hardly used it when it first came out but it was designed and billed as a 'hookup app' and now it's full of people looking for life partners or short-term dating and people who are using the app as it was originally intended for are banned?
Like I totally get the whole issue of 90% of the users being male and mercilessly creeping on the 10% of women but why isn't there room in Match.com's strategy for hookup app like Grindr or the way Tinder used to be?
Why isn't there a mainstream hook-up app where it isn't taboo to be forward about sexual intent?
> Why isn't there a mainstream hook-up app where it isn't taboo to be forward about sexual intent?
I think it's ok to be forward about sexual intent on Tinder. I think there's a big difference between "Hi - I like your pics. Are you DTF?" and some possible messages that are "explicitly mentioning sexual intercourse and iniviting for a meeting" (to quote the message you are responding to).
To quote that: "According to this analysis a man of average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females (0.87%)." (And there is a graph showing that rate extending down to 0.1%).
However that is a like ratio, not a match ratio. Given the way Tinder works this isn't the same thing (Tinder is more likely to present women who have liked you).
Keep in mind that people evolved in a completely different environment.
First of all, it was more violent. Go around and chat up 5K women in the stone age, see if you learn something about spear tips. In the modern world I also chatted up a lot of women and it never turned violent.
Second, you couldn't even find 5K women back then. People lived in little tribes that weren't nearly as dense as a modern city, and people tended to not meet people that they didn't meet a lot.
You don't want to get stabbed, and also you don't want to be an outcast within your tribe, because once one woman notices you got no game, she'll tell the rest of your tribe.
So the effect of this is we're all too shy for modern dating. The effective strategy these days is like you say, go and roll the dice over and over.
This costs money and consumes time so is difficult while working full time also one has to be in geographic location where people are curious and willing for "social adventures". In Europe that's maybe a dozen cities in total? So you basically have to sustain yourself in most expensive locations with most brutal housing markets, without income. Then in Europe even within 300km radius there is language barrier and people stereotype heavily based on your ethnicity, quickly grade your desirability, even if it's a native EU ethnicity. In short - it all flows towards hotspots, nothing redistributes of trickles down.
On the other hand, most Europeans speak more than one language precisely because of how close the next country with a different one is.
Why do you estimate only dozen suitable cities?
And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes? Cambridge (UK) was a good place with smart, fun, and adventurous people, and has a population about 27 times smaller than Berlin.
If your skillset is English, German, and French then you're good to go. Over 30 official languages on the continent produce countless subsets though. Polish, Lithuanian, and Hungarian will not get you far even though knowing these three would be an enormous achievement.
> And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes?
> Cambridge (UK)
I mean locations like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Balearic Islands maybe Munich and Madrid, and few more. British society is heavily class-based, not only language is important but accent as well. What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?
> What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?
Pretty good. Cambridge is far more than the university (despite being smaller than Oxford), and even the university's reputation as being full of toffs is quite overblown (not that they don't exist, but they're far from the majority). Like most UK cities there's a substantial fraction of immigrans: Brits were actually a minority at one point at the startup I work at.
> What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?
Better than you might think. While I have a middle-class South Coast accent, my degree is from Aberystwyth, my friends and acquaintances in Cambridge include a Hong Kong-Canadian dual-national, an Irish drummer, a Scottish goth, two Germans who were aqui-hired into the same startup as me, and an American-British dual-national whose degree was from Belfast.
Even Cambridge, small as it is, is big enough to not be homogeneous, to support multiple different groups for assorted hobbies and special interests — furries, a maker space, game dev, bouldering, kink, LARP, revolutionary communism, music old and new, comedy, … I never fully explored it before I left for Berlin, despite being there for nearly ten years.
You don’t have to be an Etonian.
(That said, post-Brexit, it will be harder to even get into the U.K. than before if you’re an EU citizen…)
I wasted a lot of time chasing women and dated many attractive ones, including a few signed models, in my mid 20s and now I’m married to someone I consider hot (plus a ton other great qualities that models often lack). I think wasted a lot of time. I don’t think you’re wrong at all but this is PUA-centric life advice. If your goal is to have sex with beautiful women, sure, it’s possible (for more than just rich, established, or extremely good looking men), and after great effort and sinking a lot of time in, you can accomplish that and brag to the internet how successful you are.
But, none of that negates what the poster above you is saying. If you spend your younger years focusing on yourself and your career and gaining meaningful life experience instead of chasing thousands of women, that problem should solve itself. I can’t imagine any woman that would make a non-miserable partner would be attracted to the Tucker Max type - although sadly this is what our culture is heading towards.
I think both are true, if you are accomplished, but know no woman (n=0), your chances of finding a suitable partner are very low, same for if you are full of problems but have a big n.
Tbh I don't think this is particularly PUA advice. Clearly if you know more woman your chances of finding one you like who likes you back are higher than if you just wait for someone to present herself to you (which is very unlikely as a man particularly).
> Social adventures are more fun than purely looking for love.
Eh, that's subjective. Personally I rather dislike 'social adventures'. It's probably why I stopped dating relatively early. Eventually I met someone through a friend, but had it come to it I was prepared to be alone rather than engage in what constitutes the modern dating experience.
Young women are more attractive because, through evolutionary selection, men find fertile women more attractive. Genes which caused men to find unfertile women more attractive quickly died out.
This is a naïve take. For instance, it doesn't explain men who find other men attractive. Shouldn't that have died out too since it is significantly more incapable of producing healthy offspring? Human sexuality is absurdly complicated because our brains are absurdly complicated.
I've always found evolutionary concepts to be a bit tautological so the answer to your question is quite straight forward: homosexuality is obviously not so great of a detriment to reproductive fitness because if it was it would be and homosexuals would be as rare as cannibals.
I have a completely unscientific theory that homosexuality is an evolutionary advantage to humans (and maybe some other animals) because homosexual aunts and uncles contribute their resources (time, money, wisdom, etc) to the raising of their sibilings' children since they don't usually have children of their own to raise. So in a family with 2 straight and 1 gay kids, the next generation has the resources of 5 adults to help raise them instead of 4.
Seems like a just so story. E.g. why did that happen instead of say making woman fertile for longer? Why is the sterotype that youth is very attractive in woman, but the same sterotype doesn't apply to the same extent in men? Seems like there are a lot of other possibilities that that justification could argue for.
Sure, its possible or even likely that evolution has something to do with it, but i think you need a more compelling evidence than that to be convincing.
> why did that happen instead of say making woman fertile for longer
Human children takes over a decade to become adults, so it is pretty likely evolution selected for women who stopped getting pregnant once they neared the end of their lifespan. Producing kids is super expensive so better take care of those you already have at that point.
> Why is the sterotype that youth is very attractive in woman, but the same sterotype doesn't apply to the same extent in men
Reasonable theory: Women mostly select men with good genes. Men mostly select women who can get pregnant and survive said pregnancy and bring the kid to adult. The main predictors for a woman being able to get and survive pregnancy is that she has a flat stomach (so not already pregnant) and she is young and healthy. Also existing kids will hurt your kids so better select a woman who doesn't already have kids, which historically meant young women.
Good genes is much more complicated, age is a positive factor here since it means the man could survive for that long but there are all sort of things women could look for here.
Just a question: Why are men's preferences in women so controversial? They don't really matter, women aren't entitled to getting the man she wants. Men prefer young women, why would anyone downvote speculations as to why that is? This isn't like racism where these things generates problems for people.
There’s a lot of hate of men in our society, and it’s hard to notice it because we’ve all been so brainwashed we consider it normal.
E.g. compare societal attitudes: more blacks shot by police => definitely racism => massive protests; more men shot by police => well obviously men are biologically wired to be more violent.
A woman will live for 5 more years. She already has three kids at age 2, 5, and 7. In this scenario it is very likely the reduced resources these kids will have from sharing with a new sibling will reduce their chance to survive more than the 5 year old motherless child will add to the expected number of descendants.
You could argue that it would be better if the genes considered these scenarios better and adapted. But genes are very crude, they can't encode for all those things, so instead they just do what is best in the typical scneario.
Then why do humans die in childbirth (esp. Pre-modern medicine) so much more commonly than other animals?
Additionally, in pre-industrial societies, i think that children become a net positive much quicker, so im not sure the resource calculation is quite as stark.
They only do so in agricultural societies. Hunter-gatherers (how we spent the vast majority of our history) have fewer children spaced further apart. Being on the move doesn’t lend itself to large families.
The child brith death question is a good one. The simple answer is that our brain size (and thus size of our head) evolved much quicker then the needed birthing exit path.
Do they? How can they tell? Do they ask to see the eggs first?
> Genes which caused men to find unfertile women more attractive quickly died out.
Die out? I don't think genes work that way. But maybe language is a stumbling block here.
I will grant you that fertile women have been fertilized historically because tada - here we all are! But that does not in any way mean that all sex was for the sake of fertilization. Or even between semen- and egg-bearing people. And the amount of non-child-producing sex both today and historically seems to suggest that fertility is not the primary concern, let alone cause for non-childbearing sexual urges to "die out."
I can't tell if you just missed the point, lack the background knowledge to understand it, or are pretending not to understand it for some kind of political reason, so I'll try to explain it in a different way.
Men who only sought sex with other men* or with postmenopausal women may have had a lot of sex, as you say, but they also have no descendants (unless a fertile woman raped them at some point, or they were born late enough to donate to a sperm bank). So their genes died out. Even a fairly small inclination in this direction is enough to produce a very large difference in gene prevalence after many generations. In only 200 generations, an allele that gives you an only 5% lower chance of having children will decrease in its relative prevalence by a factor of thirty thousand (0.95 ** 200 = 3.5e-5). That is the way genes work.
Of course most sex among humans (and hominins in general) doesn't produce offspring, and in humans and bonobos (but not chimpanzees) most of it can't possibly produce offspring. That's fine. Sex isn't a limited commodity. Sex is abundant. But hominins, especially humans, are choosy about who they have sex with, and any alleles that can get them to be choosy in a way that will increase their chances of reproducing will become more abundant over time.
Is 200 generations a long time? Hominins are about 300,000 generations old. Australopithecines are about 200,000 gnerations old. Homo is about 100,000 generations old. Homo sapiens is about 10,000 generations old. Agriculture and Catal Hoyuk are about 500 generations old. So I don't think it is.
Does that help?
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* Unless those other men they were having sex with were trans men equipped with a fertile uterus, anyway.
You re picture of the species is modelled on very simple animal behaviour and im afraid its largely wrong.
First its missing the specialization pressure. In a finite habitat, any species not afflicted by disease or predators, bumps repeatedly against the resource-roof in cycles of strife. Evolution, being the dumb, process it is, optimizes for that. So you get, within every population, neuro-subspecies that are heavily adapted to situations in this spiral.
Some of these subspecies actually behave like you predict, because their environment is to unstable and longterm planning is a disadvantage, when your risk seeking behaviour makes you jump on a mammoth with a spear tomorrow.
For others, who thrive in the more peaceful environment (post-conflict/diseases/disaster curve falling back into the habitable zone) they might benefit largely from producing societal byproducts.
"Sexual-Deviants" which your post designated as a die out, have valuable properties for a society.
They can form a third "power-pillar" upholding contracts between the different interests of "pump&dump" and "I-need-longterm-commitment".
Now, this gives us something, called prediction power. And with it, we can predict, that hating non-heteros makes you a more useful creature for the females of the species, who then can choose you as mate and force you to go into the current active social-contract-cult, which will force you to commit.
This "law-producing" biology is so useful, it out-competes the simple biology model, were it not for the resources running out, due to exponential hunger.
I hope we are all grown ups here, who can talk about differences and issues, without freaking out.
The whole topic gets really cool, when you start assembling social machinery from the different neuro-subspecies.
Your comment is too incoherent for me to figure out what you're trying to say, but it sounds like you're suffering from some sort of group-selectionism combined with the naturalistic fallacy? Also projecting the naturalistic fallacy on me, which I very much do not appreciate.
? I do not project anything. I just state how things started out. What we can create from that is completely free, but not knowing how we started out, results in slipping back into old patterns- for example, the LGBT-movement already starts to look like a contract-cult in many aspects.
I don't approve of a person being forced into a culture or lifestyle for his/her sexuality, no matter how much that culture claims to benefit him/her. People should be allowed to transcend biological limitations completely.
I arrived at this model, mainly because the classic evolutionary models couldn't predict alot of things and behaviours i observed in my family, peer group and society.
In my model, you can point to the top of the spiral, and predict, that evolution will produce a creature that has no empathy for anyone, except for the group that produced it. And this creature will try to drag the whole of society into a warlike state. And then you look at the world, and you see them.
Sorry if such looking into our nature makes is a insult to you, but i think knowing is always more helpful.
Humans mostly haven't evolved those things though, as human women can get tons of kids unlike for example bonobo women who barely can get above replacement rates even if they have sex all the time.
Women rape men fairly rarely, and even a woman who raped thousands of men generally cannot have more than a dozen offspring as a result. By contrast, one in every 200 men today has Genghis Khan's Y chromosome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan
This should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: the fact that rape can produce offspring does not make rape morally commendable or tolerable.
It's true that the stubborn existence of gay people poses challenges to any kind of simple ev-psych explanation of human sexuality, and it's tempting to conclude that although sexual behavior in sheep and partridges is instinctual, sexual behavior in humans is purely culturally constructed, because humans are rational beings not controlled by instinct, and this is why some humans are gay. This explanation runs into several big problems:
1. Lots of sheep and partridges are also homosexual. Also several hundred other species at least.
2. If you have ever met a human, you know they are not very rational, and cultural conditioning is in a constant pitched battle with human instincts.
3. For decades in the US the standard treatment of male babies born with deformed genitalia was to perform sex-reassignment surgery on them and raise them as girls. If human sexual behavior were purely culturally constructed, then as adults about 90% of them would have sought male partners, like 90% of other children raised as girls. Instead, most of them sought female partners.
4. Homosexuality seems to be a cultural universal.
So, the evidence in favor of the "born this way" hypothesis is pretty overwhelming, especially for men. So, how did "gay genes" not get wiped out?
Among the numerous theories mentioned in the WP article: "There was genetic material being passed down on the X chromosome which both promotes fertility in the mother and homosexuality in her male offspring." (Camperio-Ciani, Corna, and Capiluppi 2004) Another possibility is that being gay is biological and congenital, just not genetic, for example due to fetal hormone exposure or immune response by the mother's body.
Historically, lots of gay men have been voluntarily married to women, had sex with them, and had children with them. This still happens today. I have known gay men who have never had sex with women, but they are very much the exception to the rule. (There are men who are exclusively attracted to postmenopausal women, too, just not very many of them.)
> I have known gay men who have never had sex with women, but they are very much the exception to the rule.
This isn’t at all the case these days. And anyway, it’s also quite common for straight men to have had gay experiences.
Gay sexuality remains a puzzle from a narrow evolutionary point of view. None of the theories that have been proposed is really very plausible. As a gay man it is honestly quite amusing to see all of the bizarre alleged ‘explanations’ that people come up with. Especially since these always seem to be implicitly focused on male homosexuality - not because it’s any more in need of an explanation than any other kind of sexual behavior, but because it freaks people out.
All research in this area seems to pose the basic question as follows: “Well obviously straight people exist, but what could possibly be the explanation for all these aberrant cases?”. It fails to recognize that procreation is just one function of sex. It’s like being surprised that people use their mouths for kissing as well as for eating and talking.
A equally big puzzle is all the non-procreative sex that straight people have. That one doesn't get much research attention though, because straight people aren't considered to be an aberrant case.
> And anyway, it’s also quite common for straight men to have had gay experiences. ... A equally big puzzle is all the non-procreative sex that straight people have. That one doesn't get much research attention though, because straight people aren't considered to be an aberrant case.
I mentioned this in my previous comment: "Most sex among humans (and hominins in general) doesn't produce offspring, ... That's fine. Sex isn't a limited commodity. Sex is abundant."
I think this aspect of human sexuality does get a lot of attention in research; I mean, it's absolutely central to human reproductive behavior. Concealed ovulation, menstruation, extraordinarily high male parental investment for a mammal, extended female sexuality, female copulatory vocalization combined with monogamy, monogamy combined with substantial sexual dimorphism: human sexuality is weird, and every aspect of that sexual weirdness is profoundly connected to non-procreative sex. I mean, we're weird in lots of ways, but sexually speaking, we're total freaks. We're so strange we're practically birds. Except for the sexual dimorphism thing. Even mallards aren't that weird.
And it's wonderful! But very puzzling.
> It fails to recognize that procreation is just one function of sex. It’s like being surprised that people use their mouths for kissing as well as for eating and talking.
The puzzle is not that some organisms engage in non-procreative sex, though; that's a lot more common than bizarre phenomena like mammalian monogamy or concealed ovulation. It's that some organisms, especially males, voluntarily refrain from procreation. There aren't a lot of organisms where that happens: sheep are one example. From an evolutionary point of view, it's a real challenge to explain how instincts for such behavior could be conserved.
The whole naturalistic fallacy you allude to, along with all the Catholic peccatam contra naturam nonsense, definitely contributes to the confusion.
> male homosexuality - not because it’s any more in need of an explanation than any other kind of sexual behavior
It is, though. Female bedbugs, like female organisms of many species, can reproduce without ever voluntarily copulating. (Bedbug penises are the stuff of nightmares.) Even in a species where copulation is 100% voluntary, female homosexuality has to reach a pretty high level before it starts to diminish ω, especially in a high-parental-investment species; you could imagine an elephant species where cows frequently mount other cows and perform oral sex on them* every day, but only have sex with bulls three times per estrus, and only go into estrus every five years. So in every five-year interbirth interval, cows of our hypothetical elephant species would have sex with other cows some 1500 times and bulls three times. The females of this hypothetical species would be 99.8% homosexual. But they'd have just as many offspring as cow elephants of actually existing elephant species.
More to the point, in this hypothetical elephant species, a less-lesbian mutation that caused a cow to copulate with bulls ten times per estrus instead of three times would increase her number of offspring only very marginally, if at all: in the cases where the first three copulations failed to produce offspring, she'd save herself an estrus.
By contrast, a 99.8% homosexual bull elephant would have... a lot less offspring than a regular bull elephant, as long as there's an occasional Casanova bull running around engaging in extra-pair copulation. Not 99.8% less offspring, because there aren't that many cow elephants around (there's no possibility of a Genghis Khan elephant), and elephants practice mate guarding. But a lot less. Maybe 50% less. And being even a little more heterosexual would increase his ω a lot.
So, aside from the knuckle-dragging Victorian factor, there are also totally legitimate ev-bio reasons that exclusive male homosexuality is surprising and challenges naive ev-psych theories more than exclusive female homosexuality.
> None of the theories that have been proposed is really very plausible.
Agreed.
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* Lesbian elephant trunk sex is totally a thing in real life, just not as prevalent as in this scenario.
The obvious conclusion to draw from all this is that complex human feelings and behaviors can’t in general be given reductive evolutionary explanations. There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Evolutionary theory has contributed approximately zip to our understanding of human sexuality. But it sure has contributed many volumes to the literature on it. Sadly, much of the allegedly scientific literature on homosexuality just rewords Catholic doctrine on the subject in the language of pop evolutionary psychology.
> The obvious conclusion to draw from all this is that complex human feelings and behaviors can’t in general be given reductive evolutionary explanations.
Agreed.
> There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Yup. I'm a lot more confident that gay people exist than that ghosts exist, though :)
> Gay people are pretty used by now to being told that we don’t “fit in” to some overarching theory of nature that’s currently orthodox.
Agreed. It's tiresome.
> Evolutionary theory has contributed approximately zip to our understanding of human sexuality.
That's a point where I disagree, though I think most of what it's contributed is negative: debunking all kinds of wishful thinking on the part of neo-Victorians and Catholics.
> By all means continue to be puzzled that reproduction doesn’t explain every aspect of human behavior.
I don't plan to start being puzzled about that. Maybe you intended to post your comment on a different thread?
If reproduction doesn’t explain every aspect of human behavior then what exactly is supposed to be the puzzle posed by homosexuality? It is one trait that decreases a man’s chance of reproducing, along with many others that are widely attested throughout recorded history and given far less attention. To be puzzled by it you literally have to be puzzled that not every man is a optimal baby making machine.
Not to misinterpret kragen's excellent points or assign interpretations, but I believe the only surprise you find in this thread is from a biology standpoint. The practice or expressed preference of not seeking to be an "optimal baby making machine" is somewhat not the point in a repr-evo biology discussion, but the phenomenon is curious and intriguing to anyone with a passing interest in the sciences of life.
No judgement or opinion emitted, and especially not in matters of social sciences.
Yes I know. I’m asking what is puzzling about it from a biological point of view. As I said, men can have all kinds of traits that reduce their chances of reproduction. It is not at all uncommon for a man to have one or more of these.
Which ones are you thinking of? Are they traits we have in common with rams? Things like taking vows of celibacy are more easily explained as culturally created behavior, among other things because rams and mice don't do it and nobody is born a monk.
Yeah, it's astounding. I thought about mentioning that, since it's another piece of evidence for the Lady Gaga thesis, especially with the NLGN4Y antibody mechanism evidence. But it seemed like weaker evidence than the infant-reassignment-surgery thing, which is pretty conclusive, and my comment was already far too long for the kind of person who needs this stuff explained to them. (Similarly with the prenatal SDN size stuff.)
I mean, boys with just four older brothers are also growing up in a pretty different environment from firstborn boys or boys with just four older sisters. Just because this would be precisely the opposite environmental effect that conventional postnatal environmental theories of homosexuality predict doesn't mean there's no postnatal environmental effect.
> Do they? How can they tell? Do they ask to see the eggs first?
They can't tell. They are just attracted to women who look a certain way. They are attracted to women who look that way because they are descended from men who were attracted to women that looked that way.
It's similar to the old story about how giraffes got long necks so they could reach higher leaves in the tree. Giraffes don't look at each other and think "wow, he can reach a lot of leaves!" They look and think "wow, he's got a long neck!" Why are they attracted to long necks? Because they are descended from giraffes who were attracted to giraffes with long necks, and those giraffes were, on average, more successful at getting leaves from trees.
You're replying social sciences to a biology comment, where the mechanism described above can absolutely be shortened to "genes die out" in a given population pool.
> The reality is that young women are more attractive to men, with youthful looks, an innocence and potentially more submissive.
That's a really weird way to look at things. Especially the last claim. You're disregarding the whole biological angle.
Male partners (whether consciously or instinctively) look for a healthy female to produce "the best" offspring possible.
Males are biologically able to produce a healthy offspring for much longer than females. And considering menopause, there's an absolute deadline for producing any offspring.
Considering the overpopulation of earth, not sure why anyone would prioritize "producing offspring". Maybe someone driven by very base biological urges, sure. But if you just put some thought into it: why bring a child into world with rather grim, resource-constrained future?
Rough googling produces 89.6% of people become parents and it stands to reason that some of that remaining 11% would have wanted them but died first or were sterile.
The numbers suggest the vast majority of people prioritize producing offspring for whatever reason. It’s likely 10,000 reasons not one. Social pressure, for the grandparents, because everyone else is, because I want to pas son my genes, because she/he was too hot to worry about protection that night, etc.
The largest single issue with your comment though is that most of us probably don’t see the future as a grim resource constrained fact. Life over here in the West in 2020 is pretty good, historically speaking and in absolute terms. Even for the worst amongst us. We can backslide quite a bit and still be looking positivity towards our descendants expected quality of life. As for the developing world, in most of those places the quality of life has been a rocket ship during their lifespans so it would be rough for them to come that conclusion as well I would imagine.
I understand climate change is scary and recognize it could be the end but when faced with existential dread like that some people lay down and curl up while most people stand up and push forward harder. There are 1,000 ways we all die but billions of possibilities so I personally choose to live in today and face just the 1 death that comes for us when it comes rather than all 1,000 possibilities every time some hack journalist wants to clickbait up their revenue that quarter.
> Rough googling produces 89.6% of people become parents and it stands to reason that some of that remaining 11% would have wanted them but died first or were sterile.
I'm guessing that those figures are for previous generations. In my extended familiy it is 37.5%, immediate family 0%.
This is of course true in a very general sense, but both men and women can radically up their game if they genuinely care to and are halfway-smart about it. There are lots of things about how to relate to others in a friendly and self-assertive wrt. sexuality that society does a very bad job of teaching the general public about, and that can make a real difference.
Yeah, if you are smart enough, you could compensate in other ways, but is seems the reality is different. People aren't smart enough on average to compensate for the simple factors which seem to guide people make the decisions.
Quite a lot of anecdotes here that seem unironically ripe with certainty about what seems to me to be a well-made series of ironic analyses. 'Women between x and y would never look at a man over k if not for ____'. Sounds like my toxic relative who won't shut up about the plight of western civilization.
Dudes, loneliness is hard, but try to let it affect your outlook for the positive. Someday, if you aren't too hung up on your insecurities and can tell a joke or two, you'll hit it off with someone. If she's cool, she won't care about your car or your height or your age or whatever. Maybe there's variation in this over time, but who knows.
Just get out there, take care of yourself, and be sociable but not too trying ;)
Typical generic, infantilizing dating advice, about as effective as telling unattractive people to just "be themselves".
Dating norms exist. They vary from culture to culture and over time. The natures of norms and humans are such that there will be large scale average behaviors and some varying proportion of the population will consist of outliers. Toxically optimistic platitudinous advice such as this only ensures a perpetual class of lonely, dissatisfied people, primarily men.
Historically the rate of reproduction among men has varied, anywhere from 4/5 to 1/17. Lonely men need to be proactive and most importantly realistic, and understanding current preference norms and in what ways these men fall into or outside of them is critical to evaluating which aspects of themselves they may improve, and to what degree their immutable characteristics realistically limit their chances of attracting mates that they desire.
Hypergamous cultural norms, like those toward which the west is moving, create masses of perpetually frustrated men, many of whom who at best lose interest in participating in society, and at worst become bitter and violently antisocial. Thus movements which tilt dating norms toward hypergamy create unstable and dysfunctional societies. I know that your advice is given in good faith, but your relative is not the toxic one.
I didn't say anything about not working on yourself, but it's gotta be for your own approval. If you only try to establish connections with ppl based on how much money you make, well you're kind of narrowing a funnel a bit hey? This sort of rhetoric seems less about self-improvement and more about blaming people for your need to do so. Can't be framed as "Hey I fixed X, now will you sleep with me!?". The work should be put into (imo) just being more comfortable to be around and less of a goober if you are one.
When was the last time you just had an unassuming conversation that went well with someone down at the cafe, or met people at your gym that you vibed with? To say it's likely to find someone if you have zero charisma, aren't outgoing, have no hobbies, no sense of humour, and no beauty would be foolish, but then you're probably not even getting out from behind your computer at that point. That said, people have even met their spouses in World of Warcraft, so hope is not all lost.
The problem with using government statistics (including the American Community Survey, as far as I can tell) is that "single" is roughly equivalent to "anyone who is not married", which is very different from "willing to date".
That means that people who are in a committed relationship but haven't gotten married yet, or perhaps never want to get married, are considered single. There are also people who are simply not interested in dating or relationships. Consequently, the dating pool is even smaller than the statistics would suggest (assuming we're not counting currently-married people who are in the dating pool due to separation, infidelity, or being in a poly/open relationship).
Could you be more specific or provide examples of a government census that asks about relationship status beyond legally recognized partnership situations?
I'm only familiar with the US and that data seems to be hard to come by. In the EU the European Social Survey seems to have pretty comprehensive questions although it's not from a government agency.
I just put "unmarries partnership" or couples and "cohabitating partners" into Google and there was tons of it. Census itself seems to answer questions like these.
I followed quite a lot of sociology lately for fun and they play with these a lot too.
Ah, that's reasonable. One issue with with the census questions is that they're mainly focused on defining a "household" and ignore situations like being in a relationship but living separately. But married + cohabitating should give a good first-order approximation of the non-single population overall.
Unfortunately, non-scholarly articles about dating pretty much always use the legal definition of "single", probably because deciding who is single in the dating sense is so tricky.
This data ignores the common preference each gender has for age. It's as common for a heterosexual man to be 10 years older than his partner, as it is for a man to be two years younger. This would be more meaningful if the data was weighted by the probability of a marriage for each given age and gender.
There are a lot of posters making this general point in terms of common sense and evolutionary biology, but the post we're responding to is about statistics.
There is a statistical (and therefore actionable) way to weight the curves, in terms of likelihood of marriage between a man and a woman of a given age. Getting the relevant data might be difficult, but all marriages are recorded, and matching the names of the relevant parties to other records showing their age may at least be contemplated.
If anyone has a few months to pull this together I'm sure we'd all enjoy it!
This omits the rather obvious problem that men are much more likely to date younger women. So the dating pool might be largest for men around 50 because of all the single women over 50 - but most of those men won't consider them.
People might be quick to point out anecdotes to the contrary - as there are always exceptions, but it's still generally true. It has been that way probably for all human history as women are more attracted to status in general and men to youth and beauty (proxies for virility.)
Which leads me to think it must be really lonely being a single women over 50. Also if you're a man of that age into older women, you've basically got the market to yourself.
> Which leads me to think it must be really lonely being a single women over 50
On the other hand, if they were a woman who dated an older man, they certainly didn't care about 'taking away' (for lack of a better term) that opportunity from a woman closer to his age. Younger guys are at a disadvantage due to lack of status/maturity and nobody sheds a tear when they go through long periods of bachelorhood without luck.
yea I concur. everything up to mid 20's was a long dry spell. Now I'm in my late 30's and easily meeting women 10+ years younger than me. Helps that I hit the gym, have a successful career and am well read and well travelled. I've had a few women my age that I knew when I was younger who are still single and now showing interested in me (I was friendzoned to hell before) but why bother with them when my options keep getting better as I age?
This comment made my day. I'm 31, founder of startup in an area I genuinely have high hopes for but is neither taking off nor dying.
I also moved to Europe from the bay area to do this, at age 28 feeling like I had one more adventure in me.
The uncertainty of the startup and knowing there is no way I would ever accept regular employment (software/computer vision/robotics if curious) in Europe has made me extremely hesitant to think about family.
I have no concern for my future earning potential, besides the difficulty of getting back to the US with covid (I'm not American, yet...).
30 hit like a truck though, and a year and a half on hold with covid doesn't help. Thanks for sharing your experience of being basically me +10 years.
Might consider getting my sperm frozen though. How would "Don't worry, I froze my sperm" work as a tinder line?
You think this is great / that it might be great, but it is not: It is creapy. You'd find out about this at some point and drop it. Women do not work like that.
you have plenty more adventures in you! I've got 5 years on you and still kicking. As a CTO, it helps to keep your mind fresh with new experiences. Some of my best ideas have come from walking around new surroundings.
My advice for staying young
1. cut down the sugar
2. limit alcohol
3. lift weights regularly
4. stay out of usa, its unbelievable toxic to be there now
europe is great. I'm a US citizen but my startup is in london.
I don't understand your comment about freezing sperm though. Unless you have some medical issue fertility issues don't usually occurs for men until decades after 30.
> This omits the rather obvious problem that men are much more likely to date younger women. So the dating pool might be largest for men around 50 because of all the single women over 50 - but most of those men won't consider them.
There's some truth to this but the difference between 48 and 52 isn't very important if you're 50. Men don't draw a sharp distinction at that age where they refuse someone two years older but are happy with someone two years younger. Beyond that, you really aren't going to find many attractive 30 year old women interested in you if you're a typical 50 year old man. (No offense intended to anyone, but balding, somewhat overweight 50 year old men with bland personalities just aren't in high demand with women that age.)
Is obviously a non linear effect that increases as a function of the age difference. There's no step function at any magical age.
I feel like I shouldn't have to clarify that.
Also if you're a 50 year old man with high status you'll fare substantially better than a 20 year old man with low status with 30 year old women.
I've personally been outcompeted by balding, portly middle aged men with women my own age when I was in my twenties. Not that anecdotes mean much, but it's pretty universally true about humans. It even holds with primates and other social animals in general, not just humans.
Assuming you are right, you must add one more thing to your hypothesis that men around 50 have the largest dating pool: you must have some status and wealth to access the younger women.
A broke, non handsome, average 50 year old guy will have exactly 0 access to women between 18 and 35.
> A broke, non handsome, average 50 year old guy will have exactly 0 access to women between 18 and 35.
I have seen tens of counter examples to this in the West. Men often get more confident, more stable, and more stable as they get older, and the world itself simply treats them more respectfully.
If you otherwise is an interesting person that takes care of himself (ie. don't look like you've given up), you don't need wealth. That's a myth that needs to die. Sure, once you're past 40 or so, you need to pay more attention to how you look, but that's just the reality of getting older.
I've heard stories of men in their 50s (if I remember correctly), that were broke and homeless, but still had plenty of hot, young women in their life.
People (the women) don't start with asking "how much money do you make" and might not discover that, until they're a bit in love already, and thereafter they might think it doesn't matter that much?
So being happy (having created a happy life for oneself) and taking care of oneself (and others) is what matters more I suppose
The case of age gap between men and women is greatly overstated on HN. The average age difference (for a heterosexual couple) is 2.3 years. In 64 percent of heterosexual couples, the man is older.
There is age gap, but you all wrote about it as if 45 years old routinely dated 23 years old. They don't.
For a lot of history, women did not get to pick their partners. Moreover, marriage was an economic institution, not a romantic one. And there were also limitations on males: military service and expectation they will be providers pushing their marriage age higher.
You can't just bring in system in which participants have severly limited options and then claim it is all individual choices.
In the plot where x-axis is man's age, and y-axis is eligible dating pool population, 'peak' refers to the age (place along the x-axis) at which the man's eligible dating pool is largest (highest along the y-axis). This is indicated by the vertical pink dotted line.
The main problem, and I see this a lot in this type of analysis, is it completely takes attraction out of the equation. It is assumed that all men are attracted to all women, and vice versa. In reality, if you're not attracted to someone, they are not in your pool, regardless of any other factors.
Any such analysis must be conducted on a per-sex basis as the game is completely different for men and women. In fact, it's debatable whether the creepiness rule applies to older women, or to women at all for that matter.
To do this properly for men, the number of available older women needs to be heavily attenuated. According to this, 60 year old women are in the dating pool for 35 year old men. How many 60 year old women do you really think a 35 year old man will find attractive? A vanishingly small number. Conversely, men find the women on the bottom end of their creepiness band disproportionately attractive. But not enough to balance it out. I suspect it would be more realistic to simply rule out all older women.
For women, attraction is different. Women do not have a preference for younger men. In fact, the opposite would seem to be true, especially since women do have a preference for wealth, stability and status. So, using the same example of a 30 year old woman, think about the limits of the non-creepy dating pool. How many 25 year old men will be attractive to her? Not many. But, equally, how many 60 year old men will be attractive to her? Also not many. However, it is probably also the case that not many men in general are attractive to her.
There are so many other confounding factors. Like, for example, the fact that women can't do much to change their level of attractiveness, they're either attractive without trying, or they're not, while for men it's necessary, and often sufficient, to build attraction through hard work (similar to how male in other species do courtship displays).
I find the reluctance to take attraction into account to be, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, delusion. It makes any analysis like this, frankly, ridiculous.
> In fact, the opposite would seem to be true, especially since women do have a preference for wealth, stability and status.
I repeatedly see this claim in Anglosphere discussions and books but see counter examples within my culture. Slavic women (Polish, Russian, Ukrainian) desperately hooked up to men they perceived as higher status (attractive Italian, Spanish, French, German etc) then betrayed and rejected. Traumatised later on these women intentionally picked less attractive men (chubby, bald, lower, from sexist cultures, average job) so they are sure these men got something "above their league" and they'll never desert them. Basically prioritising stability (but not necessarily security) over wealth and status.
That's a good observation though, e.g wifes of former president of US went for wealth and status with no stability. Some coincidentally are Slavic as well. Just getting all three of them seems extremely difficult as I cannot imagine a man that would volunteer to offer all three simultanously.
I’ve been having similar thoughts but in the end it is just bitterness. It is true that there is some poetic justice in it but how is unneccesary suffering ever justified.
Dig deeper if you feel your emphaty dissapearing. It is never a good sign.
For several reasons, I believe that people already care more about lonely young men, on the following grounds:
1. Lonely young men are the subject of hundreds of recent news articles,
2. In the reverse situation, on a thread about lonely young men, nobody would comment to remind us about lonely old women - or, if they did, they would be downvoted to oblivion.
I stated on HN that old people suffer from loneliness and was downvoted both times.
It did not even had anything to do with gender and I was more provocative with other things. It is more that on in those debates, HN kind of idealized old people as being above human needs or some such.
You've replied to a post about older women, adding nothing to the conversation except to remind us that younger men are important, because that's the societally acceptable way around.
The only reason HN cares about young men is that most users here are young men. Young women, old men and old women don't care about young men at all. And the fact that the concerns of old women are still brought up here is evidence that society actually values old women a great deal considering how different this demographic is from them.
Exactly, it would be absolutely perfect if 50+ women were attractive to young men. The fact that women lose fertility (which also makes then less attractive biologically) earlier than men is not something to feel good about.
The sex ratio also turns around in the age bracket 40-50. The evolutionary and attraction factors aside, statistically both young men and old women are abundant.
I'd be lying if I said I never had similar thoughts, but consider this: maybe 1 time in a hundred that woman would have been the love of your life. Who knows?
Ignores the apparent fact that polygamy and rapid serial monogamy are very common in under-25's but happens a lot less with married people. So young people have a lot more mates available by sharing.
How do you figure polygamy happens more with younger folks - or are you conflating "polygamy" with "casually dating/having sex with more than one person"?
And isn't "rapid serial monogamy" just dating one person at a time? And this doesn't seem so much different than 20 years ago, though it might look different than earlier times when parents had more direct control over who their daughter dated/married. (and of course folks date most folks for a short time: it takes time to get to know someone - hence 6-12 month relationships happening quite often.
Yes. Young people have more concurrent partners than old people so there are more available. I'm not talking about cultural changes over time, just behavioral changes as people age.
Polygamy isn't relationship drama, though: And it is pretty normal for folks to end relationships in 6-12 months. It takes time to get to know someone. Again, these can be healthy enough relationships while they last.
It's much worse than the article suggests. The article doesn't explain why people don't marry. People who marry before middle-age often have secure attachment styles. The dating pool from middle age on consists primarily of people with insecure attachment styles. Relationships with insecurely attached people are especially problematic. If you're not married, but want to be, look for widows or widowers with secure attachment styles, and work on developing secure attachment.
This is actually a very good point often missed in similar discussions. People have different personalities and traumas and some are more suited for stable relations (what you call secure here) and some are less (anxious/avoidant types in this framework). And as you can imagine, more secure personalities find partners in life sooner.
Because of that both later age dating pool and also dating app pools are in general scewed towards insecure types. Doesn’t mean dating 20yo is a guarantee for a more stable person, but chances are generally higher.
On the other hand, I feel, security increases with the age, but for a very small portion of the population actively working on it (therapy, practices, ceremonies).
Do you have evidence for this besides 2 links to books on Amazon that I can't currently read? My searches aren't finding much in the way of papers and such.
I hope that advances in biology will make fertility a choice and allow most human beings to enjoy life without constantly worrying about kids and mates.
Pursue whatever it is that gives them happiness or satisfaction.
Some people like to travel. Others may like to research. Yet others may want to really focus on their careers. Their choices should not be held hostage by arbitrary biological phenomena that can be controlled with technology.
- pointless statistical analyses
- creepy transactional views of intimacy
- facile evo-psych explanations of sexual attraction
- misogynist ressentiment
- the plight of the incel as today's #1 social issue
- mechanistic proposed solutions to loneliness which will benefit neither the men using them or the women they're used on
One of the nice things about this site is that reading the comments is totally optional. Since it sounds like you already knew what you were going to find here, maybe everyone would have been better off if you’d simply moved along without complaining?
Unfortunately that wasn't the case here. They didn't actually think they missed anything.
Looking at the rest of the comments in this thread though, I don't see many that fit their narrative at all. So in reality, they missed the boat entirely.
Sorry, but I don't believe you. You said "HN relationship bingo card" and you play Bingo in one sitting, on one day and not across multiple threads. Perhaps it's just a bad analogy.
If you think you're doing well [0] with these kinds of comments, then I'm fine with that :) Have a good one!
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
The rest of your points are entirely valid, but this is absolutely not. Every living thing with a brain is in some sense acting as a utility maximizer. If you're not getting something you want out of a relationship, you won't partake it in it. Denying this is delusional.
But the delusion is a useful one which boosts reproductive success, presumably because humans take a long time to become independent, so its absence is creepy.
(Does this count as an example of “facile evo-psych explanations of sexual attraction”?)
‘Course not. Regardless, I observe[0] that people find transactional attitudes towards intimacy to be creepy — denouncing people for feeling thusly does not make them like it.
Similarly telling men that they are creepy for liking young slim women wont make them like old fat women more. People don't discuss these things to get laid, they do it because discussing things is fun.
The article has one major flaw: you either want to date people that are younger than you or older than you. Not both. So the analysis should be split in two.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...
50% of men under 30 are single, compared to ~25% of men 30 and above.
49% of women over 65 are single, compared to ~27% of women under 65.
Edit:
Here are the population proportions for each of the age bands in the above source (numbers fudged from https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...):
It's not too hard to calculate the age of the average single man/woman. The average single man is ~43. The average single woman is ~51.