My takeaway is that many people would rather decide themselves than set a blanket policy, even if results are similar. I feel this way about most consumer searching- say a real estate search: you may have a good idea of the location and specs of the house you're looking for, but much better to set wider filters just in case something interesting comes along that's out of spec in some way. Even if effectively you only consider the ones that would have made it through a tighter filter. I'm not at all surprised this is true for online dating as well.
Interestingly enough, the reason why I do it is because in both real estate markets and dating apps, its extremely common to have questions not answered (or not answered correctly).
For example, in real estate try sorting by decreasing lot size, everything at the top of the search will be microscopic lots where they multiplied the acreage by 1000x or more.
On the dating apps I tried at one point, adding filters for a question filters out everyone that did not answer the question, which is not the desired result for many things, so I just removed the filter altogether and filter manually. So in that case its more of a function of shitty design of real estate and dating apps that caused it for me.
That's our excuse, but in practice when you find yourself swiping left simply because they're not the right age only 5 minutes after you set the age filter, you start wondering if maybe there's a difference between your stated and revealed preferences. I know I do.
> but in practice when you find yourself swiping left simply because they're not the right age only 5 minutes after you set the age filter, you start wondering if maybe there's a difference between your stated and revealed preferences.
Meh…
I almost always set a really wide band on age on dating apps. The catch is that the folks at the extremes have to be exceptional in one or more ways in order to get a positive reaction from me.
Typically it’s:
- Really young people (I’m in the middle aged dating pool) have to show some maturity — I don’t want to date a kid, and I don’t want to date someone with a daddy complex.
- Older ladies need to show some youthfulness. Some people have clearly given up in middle age in terms of taking care of themselves and doing interesting things. I’m not interested in these folks — they seem like they have one foot in the grave to me.
For reference, my dating range has been -15 to +7, so I don’t think I’m being overly narrow in my band. That said, most of my dates are in the -5 to -10 range.
>> The catch is that the folks at the extremes have to be exceptional in one or more ways in order to get a positive reaction from me.
I think this is the crux of the issue - we don't have absolute, binary requirements, we have weighted preferences. "He's a bit older, but then again he looks youthful. OTOH he doesn't have any hobbies. But then again we're aligned politically. Okay, I'll chance it."
A better way would be to allow you to set these weights and have a scoring system, and then you can set a numerical threshold.
>A better way would be to allow you to set these weights and have a scoring system, and then you can set a numerical threshold.
That would be great, but it won't work. Too many people will answer questions incorrectly or not at all, and almost no one will be able to even use the app effectively even if the app designers implemented it. And I have no confidence the app developers would even be able to implement it properly.
Yep that’s where I’m at too, more or less - I’ve given up on imposing strict boundaries on potential matches, I just meet people and see if I like them. One of my buddies is real outraged about it, she thinks I’m wasting people’s time, but I don’t see it that way - I’m consistently surprised at who I end up vibing with, and i don’t know how to set rules for myself that would still allow me to meet those people, while excluding everyone else with no potential. I’d rather just try stuff on and see what fits.
At this point the best I can do for ‘my type’ is weirdos who like me.
> I’m consistently surprised at who I end up vibing with, and i don’t know how to set rules for myself that would still allow me to meet those people, while excluding everyone else with no potential. I’d rather just try stuff on and see what fits.
Great observation.
I’m basically a “look at profile, send a dm if interesting, schedule a meeting if they reply” type of guy.
The first few minutes of a “coffee date” tells me more about the person than any amount of detailed profile or DMing can.
I mostly like this approach too, but the main problem I've found is that I've frequently found that I wished I could end the date within 5 minutes, and feel like I've wasted my time. But I couldn't tell this before actually meeting them in person, and I haven't found a way of gracefully aborting the date early.
Huh? No, I'm asking how to end a date very quickly because it's immediately obvious that it won't work out. I don't want to make up an excuse and then schedule something later, and then contact them afterwards and say I can't make it: that's lying.
1. Schedule date #1 (e.g., at 5pm at a coffeehouse).
2. Schedule anything else at 5:30pm or 6pm. This can be date #2, something with friends, or even just a phone call to someone (like a friend from high school or a dear relative). No need to lie.
3. If date doesn’t work out, just announce your scheduled plan and dip. You might not get out at 5 minutes, but you can get out at 15-30 minutes easily.
4. If date does work out, you can reschedule your plan from point 2 (at 5:30 or 6) and extend date #1. Or you can end date #1 as scheduled and just give positive vibes about round two with that person.
Dating, especially online dating, is a numbers game. You have to figure out how to meet (potentially) a lot of people, ideally in a short period of time.
When I was doing online dating, I typically scheduled 3-4 first dates a day on weekends, or 2-3 first dates on weekdays (again, these were just “get to know you” dates). Most second dates were the only date that day, and third dates were almost always designed for intimate outcomes (in my dating area, you run a serious risk of getting ghosted if the romance isn’t happening by then).
I do have to ask, are you male or female? I’m a male, and I’m not sure how this might be different for females — possibly a very different dynamic.
> it seems like women are not so keen to get to the intimate outcome stage by the 3rd date
At the same time, they might be thinking that you are not getting romantically involved enough, sharing details about yourself, or moving on a direction of an exclusive relationship.
Maybe they are not yet comfortable/intimate enough with you for sex. Maybe you are setting unrealistic expectations based on people you are meeting, and how you are acting during the dates.
Also, don't want to offend you but... WTF? There's no obligation in someone having sex with you just because they've seen you 3 times.
Maybe try to be more forthcoming about your true intentions (sexual relationship instead or romantic), or go to places where people go for hookups (pubs/bars/clubs).
If you are in Japan, then I think romance should be a goal on the second date if the women are over college age (22).
There are very few inhibitions about sex in Japan (in my experience), and most Japanese women I have dated seem to think it’s difficult to find partners who are keenly interested in romance.
I'm in Japan. But I'm not dating women in their 20s. It seems like older women are only interested in long-term relationships, which is understandable of course, but it's quite different from women in their late 20s being happy to go to a love hotel on the 2nd or 3rd date. Maybe I'm missing something.
I'm not complaining really, but every time I read stuff about women here not having many inhibitions about sex and sex being really commonplace, I feel like I'm in an alternate universe because that just isn't my experience, but again, I'm not dating women in their 20s any more so I think there's probably a big generational difference.
I think that there may be some specifics that matter (that I may have glossed over).
Note that this is talking mostly about women in their 30s, but also women in their late 20s and early 40s:
- If you’re doing omiai or some proxy thereof, then the push to committing to long term relationships is real. Sex is not really a goal with that process.
- It’s important to know if the date event is known by her family and friends or not. If so, that’s almost like omiai (esp. for women in their 30s), and it puts a lot of pressure on the two of you. They will be questioned non-stop about the date. It’s really unhealthy, imho.
- It’s important to be able to hang out in a place where their friends and family are not likely to find out about the date. This takes a lot of pressure off the woman. This is easy to do in places like Tokyo, but maybe not as easy in towns and smaller cities.
- It’s important to have your own place, imho. It can be awkward and less easy if the guy lives with his parents. Love hotels are nice sometimes, but they are not good for a regular thing, imho.
- Many/most of the Japanese women I dated definitely looked for early commitment, but you have to take that with a grain of salt. Most of them just don’t want to be used for sex only (although some do seek that out), and that’s understandable. That said, you can set reasonable expectations (e.g., “i’m really enjoying getting to know you, and I look forward to more”), and break it off if and when it doesn’t seem right for you.
- I’m not sure if you are Japanese or gaijin, and if gaijin, where you are from. Some nationalities are less popular and/or have very narrow groups who are interested in them. Just find someone like you who has game, and try to do what they do. If you are gaijin, make sure you Japanese is on point. Japan is a very different place (mostly better, imho) when you can speak Japanese.
- Related, go with your friends to places where people go with their friends to unwind and have fun. I have found it very easy to meet people like that — inhibitions are down.
Dating apps have minimum allowed age ranges. So a lot of people probably do this but only because they can’t set a smaller range.
You may think 4 years is plenty wide for most people, but as a 26 year old male I really only am interested in eg 24-26 or even 25-26. There is also an “Elo”/mmr aspect where even if you are ok with dating someone 27-28, the reality of dating is that those women users will reject you at much higher rates than in 25-26, so including them in your range will lower the frequency with which you’re presented even to women that you do want to date due to lowering your “MMR”.
Agreed with other commenters that there are weighted preferences. While I may be ok seeing 22 or 23 year olds and in principle open to dating people in that range, in practice the rate of people I want to date in that range is much lower (but not 0). Same with people older than me.
I’d say including people beyond your actually revealed preferences actually indicates that you are open minded, assuming there are at least some people in that cohort that you are actually interested in, because it shows that you are willing to go through a much higher reject rate to find people who you are interested in.
OKCupid back in the day gave you most of those knobs, but they got removed eventually.
The problem with spreadsheet-style filtering of humans is that in the real world that's not how you fall in love with someone. Someone can be too short, too chubby, of the "wrong" religion or political affiliation, but you still fall in love with them because of their energy, their warmth, their selflessness, their consistency, their presence and so on.
In theory more knobs = more better, but in practice I suspect it backfires by going against the grain of an authentic human mating experience. I can't imagine anything good coming out of the self-commodification and self-objectification that apps push us towards, even as someone who has more than extensive experience playing that game.
>Someone can be too short, too chubby, of the "wrong" religion or political affiliation, but you still fall in love with them because of their energy, their warmth, their selflessness, their consistency, their presence and so on.
Right, and then you get married to them, and then after years of constant fighting, you get divorced because you just weren't compatible in the first place, and those fundamental problems never went away despite all the feel-good emotions you had.
I was under the impression that the reason that the UI of OKCupid has been radically dumbed down is because it was bought by the Match group who wanted the app to look and act more like the rest of their apps.
This is backwards to human history. marriage within the tribe, caste, religion, etc. was preferred. The “knobs” were set by the families and matchmakers. The “love” marriage is more of an anomaly. Rather I’d say many people can make a relationship work and love is effort, not just “click”.
It is possible for humans to survive and even overcome the hardship of effortfully maintaining loveless marriages, just as we can muddle through prison sentences or battles with cancer. People who needed partners in order to meet basic material needs just had to suck it up. In 2023, there is no reason to marry someone without profound and mutual love, and high confidence in the security and durability of that love. The horrifying, life-ruining, soul-eating catastrophe of loveless marriage is what makes it so beautiful and profound when people do chose to get married. That they feel confident enough to take that risk. It is a heartwarming display of optimism and faith.
Yes, however, I suspect that (in the 21st century bourgeois West) we underestimate the ability for two people to learn to love each other profoundly in the context of an arranged marriage where choice is removed from them.
I'd love to see statistics showing how longitudinal life satisfaction compares between societies where marriages are arranged and where there is total freedom of marriage partner choice.
I actually agree with you if we look at this throughout the entire human history. Mating and romance being a necessary pairing seems like a recent phenomenon, the last 200 years or so?
every culture through history has told love stories, so it simply couldn't have been that unusual. in a tribe or small town, for example, you've been together since you were kids, so even if your marriage was arranged, the arrangers knew the landscape. It's a lot easier to make an arrangement with the arrangees are not pissing and moaning.
I find it sociologically fascinating that it’s perfectly acceptable for women to say “don’t you dare swipe right if you’re under 6’” on these sites, but you will get banned immediately if you ask for a minimum cup size or a maximum weight limit, because that’s body shaming.
I suppose it’s a reflection of which side of the marketplace is much harder to retain.
Profound statement. Online dating reveals a whole lot to a careful self-observer- most of it quite uncomfortable or counter to self-image. I'd bet there are many analogs in advertising and other surveillance/tracking heavy industries. "They say they want this, but they consistently click on that"...
This is essentially why I don't order grocery store delivery via the internet. I tried it a couple times, and when the item I wanted was out of stock, they reasonably wouldn't pick a substitute. I think there were some options to specify a substitute, but it's just too much work to make a list and then make an alternative list for every item that isn't there. So I end up going myself and making those decisions ad hoc, which the store picker can't/won't.
The real reason to filter out short men is they tend to have exactly this sort of complex about it. It's the king part not the lambo you don't want to miss.
FWIW, as someone 5'8", I also filter out women who are taller than me. So I don't hold any grudges against women who filter out men who are shorter than them. And I think "giraffe ladies" actually have it equally as bad as short kings. Most men don't want to date someone taller than them. I think what some men find annoying is when short women filter out men under some arbitrary height. But personally I don't really care, that's their right to do (newsflash: people have preferences), and the better looking they are, the more of a reason they have to do it anyway.
Also, not all dating apps require you to list your height, so you can omit it from your bio at the risk of a disappointed look upon first meet, but that's up to you to make up for with confidence.
Many taller women have a dismissive attitude toward anyone shorter than them. I once had a 6'1" woman become infatuated with me. She let it be known that someone taller than me was "too short". It isn't worth the bother fighting against instinct.
Of course woe to the man who expresses equivalent arbitrary requirements on fixed physical attributes in their selection criteria.
I’d caution against universalizing these preferences. I’m dating someone an inch taller than me and height so far isn’t a problem. I’d be sad if I didn’t meet her because of worrying about what she’d think about my height
It's more of an outlier than a norm IMO. It is wrong to say everyone has particular preference about height, but for majority there is IMO, even though it's not what we want to see/hear. I was significantly more successful in dating, when I had height filter set to women 2 inch shorter than me (right from getting matches).
That may be true but the last three of four women I went on dates with were about my height (5’10) and it’s not something I ever consciously sought out. I do think that’s an outlier considering last time I was single all my dates were shorter than me, but I’d have had much fewer options lately if I had imposed that restriction on myself.
If you are doing it for dating app “elo” purposes that’s more understandable though.
Yes, but just because that's my preference and I'm not *that* short. Most girls are shorter than me. If I were 5'3" or something, then it would obviously be more difficult to have such a preference. I do feel a lot of empathy for those guys.
I'm pretty sure that most women are just not attracted to men even moderately shorter than themselves but they're too prideful to admit it so we get stuff like what you're saying and 'I want to date a guy I can wear heels around.'
Most people would rather just hear 'I'm not attracted to you because of an immutable physical characteristic' than some wishy-washy and nebulous dig on their personality.
Having preferences is still a problem (a real problem) when your preferences are utterly unrealistic and ridiculous. Such as not-so-attractive 5'2" women demanding to only date men who are 6'4", or 60-year-old men refusing to date women older than 30.
Of course, I guess you could argue that people like this really shouldn't be in relationships to begin with, so it's better if they maintain their preferences and standards and refuse to budge, effectively self-opting out of the dating pool.
Why are unrealistic preferences a problem for anyone but the person with the unrealistic preferences?
The only way someone else’s standards become a problem for you is when you feel entitled to that person’s attraction (“I’m a 7 and she’s a 6, therefore she should give me a chance. But she only talks to 9s, the nerve!”). But you’re not actually entitled to anyone’s attraction, so that’s on you, not on them.
>Why are unrealistic preferences a problem for anyone but the person with the unrealistic preferences?
Did you read my 2nd paragraph?
>The only way someone else’s standards become a problem for you
For me personally, that's right. For society as a whole, suppose that everyone suddenly decided they would only date model-beautiful people. Pretty soon, everyone is terminally single, no one forms families or has children, and society dies out within a couple of generations (unless a different way of raising children is found, such as keeping them all in government-run institutions, but this still entails a radical change to society).
> I'm pretty sure that most women are just not attracted to men even moderately shorter than themselves
I don't deny some people aren't attracted to people their size or shorter AND short men tend to have insecurities that manifest themselves sometimes negatively AND it's become a fad/meme for women to go for tall guys.
The kind of hate that's been going around recently about short men isn't all that different from the bald man hate in the 80s and 90s IMO.
I generally agree with everything you're saying here, but I don't think that there's any sort of exceptional hate directed towards short men at this point in time, nor do I think that it's women being attracted to tall men is a fad/meme.
Yeah, I phrased that poorly. I didn't mean to imply that it was any more or less but rather that it is in the limelight. Hate is also the wrong word, it's more of a making light of the reality.
Similar here, I tend to filter by age on these apps not because that's what I'm strictly into but because in my limited experience older ladies tend to be more thirsty/desperate and that makes it difficult for me... I know I can meet a person above set age limit who will tick required boxes but chance of memorably awkward date seems too high.
I think that depends on your definition of "thirsty." The older ladies tend to be more interested in long-term dating, while the younger ladies are often (rather enthusiastically) open to short-term dating with older guys.
I am certainly not at risk of being used as luxury good buyer. But a meet over a free (for her) meal can be fine and not at all awkward IMO, this way it doesn't feel like I am wasting someone's time if it turns out I am not interested (and if she's not interested well I got a conversation out of it).
lol. I love this attitude. The lack of self awareness that rejecting people that have had negative experiences causes negative experiences. Have you talked with people who are short, dated them, and/or attempted to talk to them when they go on a negative spiral?
yes? why do you assume I'm talking out of my ass here lol.
It's your responsibility to not let your negative experiences poison your soul. I have never personally filtered out short men but I've also seen enough of them with this nasty incel-lite attitude about why no one wants to date them that I understand why someone would.
You stated a hard preference on why you don't like short men here:
> The real reason to filter out short men is they tend to have exactly this sort of complex about it.
It's 100% fine to have your preference, and even more reasonable to not want to be around people who have aggressive attitudes. But don't be surprised when that group looks terrible when your viewpoint is nothing but that negativity you associated with them.
I do this for pretty much everything. I prefer not filters at all, but if there's too much data to manually scan through, I'll use the bare minimum necessary to get the dataset down to a size I can manually deal with it.
The reason I started doing this is because there are too many tagging errors, and setting filters wide reduces the accidental omission of relevant items.
Also, as you mentioned, setting the loosest possible filter allows for serendipitous discoveries.
This is the fundamental difference between active search and happenstance. The first starts with a practically infinite set that must be whittled down, the second an empty set that requires some effort to make additions. Outside of traditional matchmaking human courtship used the second for all of history until a decade or so ago!
In my dating app experience, I noticed I didn’t trust the null matching for filter fields.
Also, when I exhausted my search results in a metro region of 5million+ in a few weeks, I didn’t trust that the filters were working the way I wanted.
Agree that some profiles filled out the absolute minimum, but I quickly noticed that they weren’t active (or matching with me) and wouldn’t have made good dates anyway.
Anecdotally I've found the opposite. Whenever I see a couple that didn't meet on dating apps, I ask the woman if she would have swiped right on the man if she _did_ see him on an app, she always says "no". It seems women are way less picky when meeting in-person.
This is absolutely true, but the woman also doesn't have to sift through 100's of potential suiters in real life also.
You have touched on one the biggest issues with online dating, woman getting overwhelmed with matches resulting in having to be picky about things that perhaps they would be less concerned with if they met in real life.
I've read stories about how some woman have unenthusiastically swiped right on a guy based on their profile, but after meeting they ended up hitting off.
The next successful iteration of a dating app is either none at all or one that figures out how to detoxify the online dating process.
"Real life" provides tons of "gatekeeping" of all sorts, the online systems have to (badly) replicated it on some small number of inputs.
(example: if you meet someone at a college, you ALREADY have tons in common simply from the fact that you're at the same college, and colleges also incidentally filter for a bunch of other things, too)
Let's also acknowledge that in real life, their preferences on a person's size isn't based on ideals or [mostly] overblown ego of what they deserve.
On a college campus: If a dude wants a woman with FFFs, and the population is mostly Bs, he's going to have to come to reality, otherwise he's going to be lonely. That doesn't happen on online dating when you're inundated with a large population.
Online dating de-contextualizes people and no amount of filtering can change that.
When you meet people IRL you have some context for them and want they like to do. For example, I met my wife as she was the roommate of a new male friend I'd made. Because of our shared friend, I was pretty confident when she said she liked biking or hiking, that it was at the same level I did, because that's something that friend group was in to.
It helps that we have a somewhat automated system for determining if we like someone in a romantic way. But this system only really works in real life.
One hand you have the: Standards and practices of the site you have their standards of your preferences. I.e. Don't like trans people and have bad/ignorant opinions or stances about them? You could get easily removed and restricted from the site. (That is not my stance.. but it causes people to hide what their preferences are and it causes you bad experiences with people who you don't click with) In Chicago and a trumper? You're going to have a bad time stating your preference/likewise for the opposite in the biblebelt.
Another: You have encourage groups of people who put little effort or intent in maintaining a profile
Another: You have to know what your audience who you don't know yet wants and how they want to be approached.
It goes against their rules and conduct guidelines based on emotional manipulation hinged on intrinsic values that Americans hold on fairness, equality, and societal support for 'disadvantaged' individuals.
I have a feeling someone is going to reply with a hostile response, but my root stance at an OLD is to support people being who they are and help people get together consensually to get it on.
I would definitely like to keep some non-existing ideals of fairness and equality in America out of my bedroom and personal life. This is spilling over to non-Americans as well.
As for the lack of existence of societal support for 'disadvantaged' individuals, have you seen the practically modern slave labour in prisons ?
Have you seen the homelessness and opioid epidemics that nothing is being done for ?
I would much rather help these folks before helping social media addicted upper middle class kids. They have enough help already.
>I would definitely like to keep some non-existing ideals of fairness and equality in America out of my bedroom and personal life
Don't use American services then? Unless I'm missing something, you don't have to use any online dating platform at all, more so not one that is based in the United States.
From my understanding most Americans are centrists and have established a status quo that is neutral on the LGBT+ group [other than the negative social pressure related to that group has pushed]. The newer contracts and deplatforming has been based on progressive idealogy violently put in place.
I would say that most Americans want nothing to do with that in their bedrooms, but when we have to deal with that from our platforms we have to.
>From my understanding most Americans are centrists and have established a status quo that is neutral on the LGBT+ group
Can you point to anything substantial that supports this idea? The majority of Americans support same-sex marriage [1], and almost three-quarters of Americans (71%) said that being gay is morally acceptable [2].
Most Americans are liberal, which is why platforms move to ban hate mongers and extremists. Instagram doesn't care in the slightest about protecting LGBTQ folks. They just understand that most people don't want to participate in a hateful cesspit.
There is a reason that Truth Social and whatever right-wing trash app comes next will never gain any sort of mainstream traction, most people support deplatforming hate mongers.
This is not exactly how imperialism works. The export of American culture is the most massive export of culture humanity has experienced. It is simply unavoidable in the West.
(self) introspection is also hard. An end user may not even consciously know they have a filter, nor the relative weight of that filter (people are often analog, outside of extreme subjects).
The site might not even capture a variable that's important. E.G. it isn't mandatory to answer if someone enjoys kelp basket weaving; which might be someone's favorite hobby. However that's extremely niche and people in the data set would probably outright skip over that question entirely as well as related questions that might composite towards a value in that field. Or maybe it's like gardening but there's so much ambiguity about the scale and seriousness that asking a question doesn't provide good results outside of an interactive conversation.
The original nerds who started the site did a bunch of data analysis. Summary: men wildly outnumber women, women feel overwhelmed, men inevitably become desperate, and stated preferences don't reflect actual evidence at all. For example, I recall them saying that women would say they would never date a guy who posted a shirtless photo, but every shirtless-photo-posting guy who looked even slightly decent got way more matches. Also, the data on racial preference was pretty sad.
There is always a trope that if a man's online dating profile says 6"+, he is 5'10". As an extremely short dude (5'3"), I was always super up front about my height. I'd rather not waste the time with someone who isn't attracted to someone so short. I've always had a smaller dating pool than those around me, but it hasn't stopped me from finding meaningful romantic relationships. I am just thankfully that I am funny.
What’s fun is getting the perspective from a 5'10" woman who uses dating apps.
Average woman in the US is 5'4", and if a guy pads their 5'9" to 6'0", she might not notice unless she is specifically paying attention. However, to the 5'10" woman, there’s a big perceptual difference between talking to someone who’s 2" taller than you and someone who is 1" shorter than you, and it’s not something you even pretend to not notice. (I was a bit shocked to learn that some 5'9" men had the audacity to put 6'0" on dating profiles. Like, 5'9" is average. It’s not even short, to begin with.)
I'm 5'10" and I'm not going to lie about my height for a date. Frankly, the sort of person who would disqualify me for being too short would also disqualify me for having a disability.
I'm more interested in finding someone I'm compatible with than getting the most possible matches.
I always had a picture of me in front of a gas station exit door, showing me standing on the floor, not wearing a big hat, obviously taller than the 6' mark on the door.
> Like, 5'9" is average. It’s not even short, to begin with.
I agree it's stupid, but I suppose the name of the game from the male perspective is to (at least appear to) be above average.
Honesty is the best policy, but I can't help but be curious about what online dating would be like if everyone was in fact honest? Most people are average, by definition, yet selective pressure in dating is for everyone to seek out those that are better than average, even though they themselves may not meet that lofty goal.
> I agree it's stupid, but I suppose the name of the game from the male perspective is to (at least appear to) be above average.
I can be sympathetic to the reasoning where men feel like that’s the name of the game, but (as the saying goes) it’s a stupid game, and if you play it, you win stupid prizes.
Someone who lies about their height to puff themselves up, to a typical observer, will appear to be insecure. Like, that’s the kind of insecurity you’d see exaggerated in a sitcom to make people laugh! My observation is that people who build build good relationships don’t ask for this kind of external validation, they don’t try to appear impressive to complete strangers, instead, they meet somebody and leave the platform. If your goal on Tindr is to “win Tindr” (which seems to be some people’s goal), your behavior is going to keep landing you back on the platform, where you “win”, instead of landing you in a relationship.
I don't think you understand how dire the situation is for most men. If you don't lie you don't get anywhere near a match. Doesn't matter how honest and self confident and secure you are. You won't get the match. If you do lie, then you have small chance at least, especially since most women will happily filter <6" guys but can't tell the difference in real life.
I'm 6'0'' and the first comment I'd get on a first date was often, "oh wow, you're actually 6'0". Lying about it is so common that women simply assume the guy is shorter.
My dating life predates online apps, but when I met my wife, I told her I was 5'8" (in-person, so it's not like I could really lie). Anyways, I might just be 5'8" with cowboy boots and perfect posture (and these days, I'm secure enough to admit I'm just 5'7"). She wasted no time in calling me on it. She's 5'4", so average height for a woman. We still joke about it today (20 years after that first date).
But, wow, the audacity to claim a 3"+ difference? That's ballsy.
I think I've seen that before.. but I'm 5'10"/5'11" on a good day. I'm not going to lie about how talk I am because someone has a silly preference. Also, if they ask, I unmatch. To me, it's just such a weird preference.
These things are difficult because people are difficult.
My sister is a tall (6’) woman. It’s really difficult. Shorter men find her intimidating, assholes consider her fat, and insecure 6-6’4” guys get weird about heels and other things.
Men and women are picky about different things. I’m a guy and am really tall, and didn’t really care about height of a partner. Other attributes mattered more or less to me. These things are some combo of hardwired instincts, social pressures/norms, and personal preferences.
I’m glad that I missed modern online dating though.
> I’m glad that I missed modern online dating though.
Hear, hear. I feel like I was lucky enough to go through the best of online dating, when it was a little quirky and more honest all around, than whatever it is now.
Yes exactly, By including [hobby] here, you're able to weed out people you won't connect with for other reasons.
Going back to hiking as an example, you can weed out unfit people without having to actively filter them out, as they'll see your profile and your like of "hiking" and self select out. People do this with a lot of things on their profile, they don't seriously care about whatever that thing is just what it represents.
Imagine my surprise when 98% of all people I've ever seen claim to like hiking meant at most a hour or two walk up a hill, versus something that could take over a day with several thousand foot elevation changes.
Honestly, I love hiking. My family does maybe a dozen or so hikes per year - and every hike is under six hours, often under four. Perhaps we need a different word for the two activities.
I would say what you do is hiking and anything that takes over a day is “backpacking”. Then you can get into “urban” vs “backcountry”/“remote”/“wilderness”.
As someone with a disability, this tracks lol. I don't outright disclose my disability on my profile (saved for dms, as some people can be creepy), but I say my idea of 'hiking' is more like a casual stroll in the local botanical gardens.
- God/faith in the first line of profile
- credit score
- homeowner status
- have a job/career
- vaccine status
- political party (and demands for the partner’s party affiliation)
- FlatEartherism and other outlier conspiracy theories
- the “three sixes club”
- Dan Savage’s “GGG”
> Users deploy racial filters sparingly. For example, black women pass through 36% of other users’ filters, compared with 44% for women of other races. This gap is similar to the effect of one inch of height for men. However, just 24% of black women are liked as prospects, versus 37% for non-black women—an impact as great as 11 inches of male height.
I need to figure out if this dataset is available somewhere for analysis because an equivalence of 11 inches of height is somewhat shocking to me. It's a much bigger effect size than I expected, but maybe that just means I have to update my worldview. It may also have to do with the demographics of the daters interested in women using the League app.
Also, if I'm reading the first graph correctly, the penalty at the filtering stage for being a women 5'6"-5'7" or taller is worse than being a man between 5'2" - 5'3". Just not what I expected.
Posted this in reply to a different comment, but wanted to post it here too for visibility. Please let me know if you disagree with my interpretation of how to read the data from the graphs.
___
You have to look at it on the Economist and not the archive.vn mirror.
Y axis is Height (or whatever you've set in the "Show by drop down" and X axis is the title of the graph, "Share of possible matches removed via filters, %". Hover over a point and the graph becomes much easier to understand.
E.g. one point shows
> Hispanic men, 25-29 years old, 6'0"-6'1". Filtered out by 9% of possible matches
Each of the circles represents a group that is defined by a permutation of Race/Gender/Age/Height. I think size of circle represents size of that population in the dataset. In the case of my example, the circle for "Hispanic men, 25-20 years old, 6ft-6ft1in" was small, so there probably aren't many men fitting that specific combination in the data set. You also see intuitively that the circles for men 5'5" or shorter are small and the circles for women 6'0" or taller are smaller, corresponding to our intuitions that men that short or women that tall are less common in the overall population.
Change the "Show by" filter and make sure the second option changes to the corresponding Age/Height/Race filter
Observations
============
1. First option Age: If you are 29 or younger, you are more likely to be filtered out if you are a man than a woman. If you are 30 or older, you are more likely to be filtered out if you are a woman than a man. This corresponds to my expectations.
2. First option Height: Similar, with the cutoff being 5'5" or 5'6". This roughly makes sense I guess, but I would have thought that women 5'8"-5'9" would be less prone to being filtered out on the first pass.
3. First option Race: For every race but one, you are more likely to be filtered out as a woman than as a man. This was surprising to me. Unsurprising is that the one category this flips is Asian - Asian women are less likely to be filtered out, Asian men are more likely to be filtered out. "Everyone" is open to dating White, Other, Hispanic, None Given, with relative penalties for being Black, Indian, Asian.
[edited for clarity and to better reflect the graphs I was looking at]
Huh. Yet another test with the first graph with all filters.
Make sure to apply "All Filters".
Observations
============
1. filter out rates rise significantly compared to just looking at a single Age Filter/Race Filter/Height filter. This makes sense and the change between "[specific] filter" and "all filters" is most apparent for height and race. My intuition is that people are more likely to set up age filters than other types of filters.
2. Show by Race: Men are filtered out less frequently than women for every race. There are way more white users of the app than any other ethnic group.
3. Show by Height: Men don't get filtered out more than women until they are 5'1" and under. Apparently, as a 5'3" man you are less likely to be filtered out than a 5'3" woman. This is very surprising to me.
4. Show by Age: Men from 35-49 are the least likely overall to be filtered out. For every age group, you are more likely to be filtered out as a woman than as a man. This is again surprising to me, especially in the younger brackets.
So awkwardly, you should ignore the above observations due to a misreading of the site. I also can't go back and add an edit applying a warning to them, I guess because of a time limitation on edits?
> Hispanic men, 25-29 years old, 6'0"-6'1". Filtered out by 9% of possible matches
This was a misquote. Actually instead of saying "Filtered out by 9%", the article says "Filtered out 9%". So Hispanic men in this age and height bracket created height filters that reduced the size of the overall candidates available to them by 9% of the population. It is NOT that they are rejected by 9% of the population.
Correcting the above 2 posts based on this new understanding:
1. First option Age: Among those aged 30 or older, age filters are more restrictive among women than men. Men aged 35-49 have the most permissive age filters, with my guess being because they are more willing to see matches from younger women. Among those aged 20-24, men set up age filters that reduce the candidate pool more than the age filters set up by women in the same age bracket.
2. First option Height: Among those 5'6" or higher, women set up much more restrictive height filters than do men. This is not surprising and corresponds to the observation that women often want a man who is not a lot shorter than they are. Among those 5'5" and shorter, men set up more restrictive height filters than do women. This makes sense under a general understanding that short men may feel emasculated by dating a much taller woman, or alternatively that they would be comfortable in such a relationship but are trying to improve the success rate of their matches since their experience is they will be rejected by much taller women.
3. First option Race: For every race but one, women set up more restrictive racial dating filters than do men. I was somewhat surprised about this, and that black women apparently set up comparatively restrictive racial filters when compared to any other racial/gender demographic. Note that this restrictiveness reduces when you look at "All filters", suggesting that black women are therefore comparatively less restrictive in their filters with respect to age/height. The one place where this flips is Asians, which has a completely different implication than what I had thought under the old misunderstanding of the data. This means that Asian men set up more restrictive race filters than do Asian women. Perhaps this is a strategy to attempt to increase their successes with people who do get shown their profile? I.e. a similar approach to that taken by men 5'5" and shorter?
1. filter out rates rise significantly compared to just looking at a single Age Filter/Race Filter/Height filter. As before, this makes sense but the implications are different following my updated understanding of the graphs. If you add the effect of more filters, of course you reject more of the potential population. What changes is the implication of the observation that the change between "[specific] filter" and "all filters" is most apparent for height and race. This means that actually people do not set up very restrictive age filters, but do set up more restrictive height/race filters. The "restrictiveness" of the age filters may have more to do with the age demographics of the population using League.
2. Show by Race: Race does not have a very strong effect on the distribution of filter restrictiveness, but there are some exceptions. For example, among men, Indian men appear to set up the most restrictive filters and Hispanic men appear to set up the least restrictive filters.
3. Show by Height: This basically shows the same relationship as for the "Height Filter" graph. Comparing the "Height Filter" and the "All Filters" version, two interesting results stand out. Men from 5'2"-5'5" have overall filters set up that produce similar levels of restriction as taller men. This suggests that men in this height range are attempting to broaden their dating parameters in race/age to "make up" for their height disadvantage. Men 5'1" and under may be doing the same thing, but still cut out a much larger portion of the population than their taller peers. Women 6'2" move very little on this graph when you switch "Height Filter" and "All Filter". This means that most of their "filtering power" can be accounted for by their height filter and they may have relatively broader race/age filters.
4. Show by Age: Men from 35-49 have the least restrictive filters overall. This isn't that surprising. Among women, those aged from 25-34 have the least restrictive filters. Also not very surprising.
I wonder if apps could be updated to show filters as a percentage of excluded matches. So if you filter age to say, 20-30 years old, it would say “hey this excludes 43% of users on this app”.
Then maybe have a total exclusion percentage for all filters on the app. So it at least raises awareness to users that maybe their struggle with getting matches is related to their settings rather than some other attribute.
One thing it seems always goes unsaid about online dating is that women HAVE to be extremely picky, because a huge proportion of them have experienced sexual assault or rape from a date met on these platforms. Even when they haven't personally experienced it, they know people who have. Match Group is notoriously bad at doing ANYTHING about sex criminals on their platforms
From what I've seen from 20 years of serial online dating as a male in the SF Bay area, women will throw all caution to the wind for attractive men, since they're basically happy for whatever happens usually. Ive had countless women agree to first dates at my house or their house. While my more homely looking friends will be forced to jump through hoops for safety.
While I agree with your sentiment, I'm not sure how "being picky in order to avoid sexual assault" aligns with minimum height requirements. If anything, it would imply the opposite.
> She reported the events to the police, which didn’t lead to criminal charges.
You can report anything to the police. The fact that it didn't lead to charges is suspicious. How do you as a company take a random person's words who makes a severe accusation against another indiviudal that isn't backed up with another authority?
The vast majority of sexual assaults and rapes don't lead to any case at all, because prosecutors don't like to take hard-to-win cases to court and a sexual assault or rape case is pretty much impossible to convict. Criminal conviction requires "beyond a preponderance of a doubt", and how in the holy hell are you ever supposed to meet that with "he didn't stop when I told him to" and "she said yes"? It's basically a contract disagreement but there's no physical contract and no evidence of things that happened. It usually means a victim cannot get justice unless the people involved are stupid or willing to bypass the accused constitutional right to a fair and legit trial.
The strategy described in the article is basically to be liberal in what you accept but conservative in what you choose.
Stated preferences are what someone wants you to think-they-think. They are incredibly misleading. As someone who tends to be both an acquired taste and a revealed preference, dating sites and apps are a waste of time and probably deeply psychologically harmful. Slot machines that pay out in coins are heavily regulated because they are considered socially harmful, but ones that pay out in dates are somehow empowering. If I didn't know better I'd say they were a conspiracy of pet food manufacturers.
I actually think that the straight dating pool over about the age of 30 is not large at all, and that the advertising style of the apps hampers any instinctual "stopping problem" sorting, where you really just become addicted to the potential like a slot machine. I'd even argue that fake profiles on dating sites that create opportunity costs against finding a real partner sabotoge individuals reproductive opportunities and will be remembered as being on the wrong side of history.
The data comes from The League app which actively promotes itself to those you have been told they are too picky or have too high of standards. Generalizing online daters based upon data from The League might not be appropriate.
It's a fair point and I hadn't seen anything about League before this article. I explore some observations based on manipulating the graphs down thread in the comments, and make a similar point that observations which are surprising may be more reflective of the population using the app specifically.
Having said that, a quick google for any comparable data set doesn't seem available. So while the limitations are important to keep in mind, for now, this is the only data set that I'm aware of. My approach is to take it with a grain of salt, but not to completely ignore it.
Online dating is incredibly superficial by design, so it is no wonder that those who use it do so in superficial ways. Even with the best of intentions the platform itself will push them in that direction.
I've long since sworn them off. Like social media, they present a case for being useful but to the extent they were it is greatly outpaced by the damage they do to people and society.
Yeah, it took me a bit too. You have to look at it on the Economist and not the archive.vn mirror.
Y axis is Height (or whatever you've set in the "Show by drop down" and X axis is the title of the graph, "Share of possible matches removed via filters, %". Hover over a point and the graph becomes much easier to understand.
E.g. one point shows
> Hispanic men, 25-29 years old, 6'0"-6'1". Filtered out by 9% of possible matches
Each of the circles represents a group that is defined by a permutation of Race/Gender/Age/Height. I think size of circle represents size of that population in the dataset. In the case of my example, the circle for "Hispanic men, 25-20 years old, 6ft-6ft1in" was small, so there probably aren't many men fitting that specific combination in the data set. You also see intuitively that the circles for men 5'5" or shorter are small and the circles for women 6'0" or taller are smaller, corresponding to our intuitions that men that short or women that tall are less common in the overall population.
My apologies, this was a misquote. Actually instead of saying "Filtered out by 9%", the article says "Filtered out 9%". So Hispanic men in this age and height bracket created height filters that reduced the size of the overall candidates available to them by 9% of the population. It is NOT that they are rejected by 9% of the population.
Contrasting online dating with my imagination of "village dating":
In a setting with a small selection, I find I naturally look for qualities - things I like about someone I'm around. If someone has a couple of nice qualities, that's enough to enjoy their company.
In a setting with a large selection, I try to narrow the difficulty of the choice by looking for disqualifiers - things I don't like about people.
When I’m looking for cars to buy on fb market or Craigslist, I use very general terms and never the feature filters like transmission, drive train, body style, even fuel type. So many people enter the wrong thing (it doesn’t matter if is done knowingly or on purpose because the result is the same), or don’t enter any information at all and it is unclear if the search function will include null fields (usually it does not). Instead, I browse the list and now that Facebook curates it via some opaque algorithm, it is unclear if I get to see the “full list”.
I would guess people on dating sites are using the same logic. If I can’t trust the filters, just give me everything and I’ll sort from there. When the stakes are as high as finding a life-parter, or even someone you can trust to be intimate with, the cost of a missed opportunity is just too high.
At the risk of stepping into a minefield, I would suggest that this article implies that racial differences are "simple" (such as primarily about appearance (and color of skin)).
In reality, racial or social/cultural differences involve many attributes which group together. For example, some racial groups may be much more family oriented, rarely gathering or moving about without multiple family members.
One might be open to the idea of dating someone from a very different background (or "race" (skin color)), but that person may also still be selecting for potential partners who they think will live a similar life.
No matter what supposed race, the environment and background one grows up in tends to shape behavior and mentality. And beyond initial outward appearance, these behaviors may be obvious and visible. And when such a behavior is very different from your own, you may choose to pass on that person based on what you believe will be behavioral differences. So you may be open to dating someone of that "race", but you may want someone who is still more similar in lifestyle and thinking.
These are interesting things to think about, but it's all just a distraction from the bigger issue. The bigger issue is that dating sites, or any type of intentional dating search, is probably a wrong approach to finding a partner or mate.
In normal life, especially before the internet, people would go places somewhat regularly - the same grocery store, a particular church, an office, or some recurring social activity. In the normal course of their routine, they would see some of the same people frequently. And perhaps they would have a conversation with some of them; and some subset would be fascinating or attractive. Maybe they would find friends, and maybe some of those friends would become closer and additional feelings would develop.
But with intentional dating, especially with sites like OkCupid (which initially was much better than it is today), you might be tempted to believe you had found the perfect match! The other person was attractive, and they had answered so many questions with almost identical answers to you that they _must_ be the perfect person for you. That sets up an incredibly high expectation.
In reality, there is more that matters... and some of what matters is not visible for some time. Instead of a cautious courting process (aka old school going out, the step before "dating"), two people think they are a good match and want to race toward the goal. Unfortunately, it is possible to both be so fixated on the apparent perfection of the match that much time passes before there is a realization that neither truly knows or understands the other.
Maybe AI can help here :P. I joke, but at this point I think it might be as or more effective than current online dating in terms of finding a good partner for a given goal. And still, it would be worse than the organic process that existed for 99.999% of human existence.
I think it's partly because we believe our ideals to be who we are and not what we aspire to.
If you set your filter to 5'0", you can say you consider shorter people. And you can say it's for some other reason that you don't date them. As you obviously don't mind, because you don't filter them out explicitly. But it's odd that nobody under 5'6" fits any of your other criteria.
We want to be seen as people who are non-biased, non-discriminatory, and all that. However, when there are real consequences, we tend to reveal ourselves.
Online dating is the myth of unlimited choice. Why settle for anyone, why look at a profile, when you can just swipe after .4 seconds of looking at photo? There are so many choices there is just no need to waste time when you can just..keep..swiping.
> Dating/sexuality is one of the last processes (in the U.S.) where discrimination based on protected characteristics is still allowed to take place so overtly.
Thank god. As an exclusively gay person, I quite overtly discriminate against over half the population when I look for potential dates, and exclusively heterosexual people do the same.
As a person not seeking a romantic partner, I discriminate against 100% of the population. :)
I would assume you also have some preference within the subset of gay [folks of your gender] as well. It's not necessarily right or wrong. But it's still, by definition, bias. The data in the article showed systemic bias against Black women.
Marriage is a process that arguably promotes wealth equality (by averaging), which is why it should be at least noted that certain people have unequal access to marriage with a preferred partner.
I don't understand what insight this is supposed to bring.
"Discrimination" is often used as a loaded word in many contexts, but when looking for sexual or romantic partners it's not a negative word. Saying "when looking for dating partners you are discriminating" is tautological; it brings no new information to the table.
If you like veggie food but not beef you're also discriminating. So?
>Marriage is a process that arguably promotes wealth equality (by averaging)
That's an argument you would lose, as forever people have mostly stayed within their Socieo-economic status and when you get even a little higher in the wealth game you are often taking that explicitly into account.
> That's an argument you would lose, as forever people have mostly stayed within their Socieo-economic status
While I strongly disagree with pretty much the entire point athrowaway1324 is making, this part isn't really correct. I remember reading a study about a decade or so ago that socioeconomic mixing in marriage used to be much more common, and found this article [1] summarizing the result:
> If anything, people are more likely than ever to marry into their own class, as a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research showed this year. Of people born in 1958, just over a third of women had a partner from the same class as themselves: 38% married up, while 23% married down. For those born in 1970, 45% married into the same class; of those born between 1976 and 1981, 56% married into the same class, with a far smaller proportion (16%) marrying up.
Previously, you used to see much more "mixing" in the cases of, for example, a businessman marrying his secretary or a doctor marrying a nurse. Of course, there is a whole separate discussion about the power dynamics in those situations.
>Previously, you used to see much more "mixing" in the cases of, for example, a businessman marrying his secretary or a doctor marrying a nurse. Of course, there is a whole separate discussion about the power dynamics in those situations.
Anti-sexual harassment training, and more broadly the discouraging of socialization between men and women, has reduced the opportunity for men and women to marry. The flip side of the leering male executive no longer being able to chase his secretary around a desk to try to pinch her on the butt is another executive not being able to politely court the secretary he is in love with (and vice versa).
I don't have a good answer for how to get the one without the other, but both are consequences of modern sensibilities.
Except marriages go a lot farther back than 1960. An extremely short blip of less SES equal marriages during a period of historic class mobility, at least in the US, does not change the broad reality.
Everyone has preferences for all kinds of reasons. Some people don't like bald guys or short guys or whatever. Are you saying folks should be pressured to date someone they don't find attractive?
> Are you saying folks should be pressured to date someone they don't find attractive?
No I am not. What I am saying is that these preferences are merely places in U.S. society where discrimination objectively occurs, and sometimes people seem not to be cognizant of that.
I think I understand what you are saying, but I must ask: who is not cognizant that wanting/rejecting sexual or romantic partners is an act of discrimination?
Some people like to pretend that looks don't matter, but even they discriminate by something, be it looks, or status, or cultural background, or shared interests. Otherwise the next random person to come along would be as good as anyone as a dating or sex partner.
> who is not cognizant that wanting/rejecting sexual or romantic partners is an act of discrimination?
The commenter above, who said "older ladies need to show some youthfulness" and "they seem like they have one foot in the grave to me" could have been a bit more cognizant.
The commenter who said "older ladies need to show some youthfulness" and "they seem like they have one foot in the grave to me" could have been a bit more cognizant.
"older ladies need to show some youthfulness. Some people have clearly given up in middle age in terms of taking care of themselves and doing interesting things. I’m not interested in these folks — they seem like they have one foot in the grave to me"
did I misrepresent with my selected quotations? I'm glad they're frank about their preferences, it's just how they choose to phrase it was just a little tactless, that's all.
These are actual human people we're talking about, not just meat. Dating has real economic consequences, and this commenter seemed to get an inappropriate amount of enjoyment out of -- what I'd argue at least is -- kicking people down due to a protected characteristic (age).
So yes, their comment is a decent example of the lack of perspective I was discussing.
You left out the part which allowed you to misrepresent him as being ageist!
Some people have clearly given up in middle age in terms of taking care of themselves and doing interesting things. I’m not interested in these folks
As for your condescending "people, not meat" comment, WTF? The guy doesn't want to be with a sad sack. Guess what? He's human, too, and he doesn't have to resign himself to the sad sack state of others just for the sake of their humanity.
> by doing this you are becoming an active agent of discrimination
No.
NOBODY is obligated to subsume their own humanity for the sake of another's. Full stop.
Nobody should be forced to date someone they do not want to date. Selection filters are "discrimination" only in the most simplistic of terms, but it is not "discrimination" in the way you are trying to couch it in your comments.
