7 ms·

I'm just going to preface this by saying I'm a fairly physically unattractive man (short, Asian, assymetrical face with no strong jawline). The quality of the

by colmvp 10y ago

I'm just going to preface this by saying I'm a fairly physically unattractive man (short, Asian, assymetrical face with no strong jawline). The quality of the women (based on intellect, personality, accomplishments, and appearance) who I've met in real life first before dating have been vastly superior to the women who I managed to find a date with through online dating. Besides the restrictiveness of the online dating medium, specifically its inability to capture personality or warmth, I think another reason is because the women I meet in real life are able to evaluate me individually for who I am whereas in online dating you're practically always being compared to dozens of people. I also think that people are overly picky in online dating and treat their specifications as sacrosanct instead of something to constantly self evaluate. For example, it's fairly common for people to specify a preference for a single race, usually their own. When I used to go on match.com I saw plenty of white women who explicitly noted they only wanted to date white men. Fair enough. And you know, a lot of white women I know in real life might have the same preference given the nature of growing up in small towns dominated by a single ethnicity and having consumed culture that largely glamorizes white men. But they also ended up marry Asian men, not through online dating but perhaps because they got to know them in college or at work or through friends. Likewise I'm certain that some of the women I dated in real life wouldn't have given me a chance in online dating. Perhaps it's because we could share laughter and gain trust in one another before even considering the concept of love. I'm sure there's also studies that show repeated exposure of a person has a positive effect on their perception. And if you read the story in Aziz Ansari's Modern Romance, he mentions a similar anecdote where he met two Indian dudes, one who was struggling to meet anyone through online dating, and the other who exclusively just met women in real life and had no problems in that realm. I guess my unscientific observation is that while online dating is certainly gaining in popularity and can be successful for some people, that it can sort of be misrepresentative of reality.

mandeepj 10y ago
I 100% agree with your post and I have similar experience in my life. While in real life, we build some kind of background via the way we communicate, get things done and how we come across. All of this is missing online. At dating sites, most of people play with prejudice. I think women do not feel safe at these dating sites so they keep their options reserved.
chinese_dan 10y ago
The other problem I've noticed is that most women don't have a problem finding a date. They can go to a bar, club, library, grocery store and men ask them out. Why do they need to go online in the first place? They are either too picky or have some other major issue. Before I was married, I found dates online all the time. 99% of the women I dated had issues or were too picky. I didn't end up finding my wife until I joined some local meetup groups and met her IRL.
- zajd 10y ago
  I guess that depends on your definition of too picky? If you want to have a partner that shares similar life values to you and it's not that common amongst the population near you (or willing to come up and ask you out) just rolling the dice with random people can get old real quick. Some things are worth being picky about and just dealing with up front. If you can choose from 100 people why not eliminate the ones who don't share your religion, for example.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - GrinningFool 10y ago
    Because you eliminate entire groups of people without considering other attributes - if you met someone and only learned their religion some time later, you might find its not as important to you as you thought. If you rule it out before you can make that discovery , you never know what kind of people you have closed the door on. Of course I'm someone who married the person who couldn't be more different in politics, personality and background - 17 years ago and going strong. So naturally my perspective here is biased - on the basis of criteria I thought were important to me at that age, I have no doubt I never would have considered her if I saw her profile and went by he facts and figures.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  One thing many people that are focused on online dating don't realize is that most of the other users aren't really serious about it. A lot of my female (and some male) friends had an OK Cupid for really no reason other than just to scroll around when bored or because a friend had one.
__s 10y ago
Your anecdote rings with how there are many people who hold racist tendencies, but exclude their friends of said race from those tendencies. Essentially when they think 'all X' they mean 'all X besides those whom I know'
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Is it racist to have physical preferences that conform to "race"? If I were, for example, to like tall men, and therefore have a preference for men of a race which is stereotypically tall, does that make me racist?
  - danharaj 10y ago
    It's a very complicated question because human relationships are complicated. I would say no, and in fact even having a preference for something like skin complexion isn't enough to make one racist. What is racist is stating the preference in terms of race and categorically denying that one would ever be attractive to a person of <race> or <skin complexion> or whatever. I think it would be pretty ugly to say that you would never date a short person, regardless of any implications for one's ideas about race, too. Like, it's different to say "i find tall people attractive" versus "i find short people unattractive". Personal preferences aside, the way society signals which physical features are desirable and undesirable is racist. This is largely commercialized and driven by marketing departments these days but it is rooted in all sorts of institutions that govern the desirability and undesirability of certain bodies. So, as an individual, signaling one's preferences can feed into this structural power that decides who is pretty and who is not. Individual preferences are almost certainly partly influenced by messages society sends us and it's important to keep that in mind.
  - ardit33 10y ago
    Yeah, it is by definition. If you are excluding somebody just because of their race (even if they are tall, handsome, or whatever else your are seeking on a partner), then it is. It is fine, there is nothing wrong with it, as you should do whatever you want with your romantic life, but it is racist as you are excluding a group of people from your dating pool just because of their race.
RandyRanderson 10y ago
I always ask myself: can a person that looks like me, is as smart, has as much money etc... be successful in this situation? The answer (for me) has is almost always "yes" and so the question becomes how did they do it? What failing of mine should I repair?
imaginenore 10y ago
When you make a strict distinction between hooking up and dating, everything starts to make sense. Hooking up stats are rather clear: around 80% of women have sex with around 20% of men. That's why an average looking guy on PoF/CL/Tinder/OkCupid has very little chance compared to real life. This imbalance is actually caused by the guys. Your average guy will throw himself at almost any woman. You join a site, you go through profiles, you message the ones you like. You can easily message 100 girls and get 1 reply. Why? Because every other average guy is doing the same. So an average girl gets 100 messages a day, and there's no way she's replying to all of them - she will pick the top 5-10, and will talk to them. If your face isn't good looking, don't worry. You can compensate with other things. Hit the gym, girls LOVE fit bodies, even though most of them you tell you they want someone funny/smart/interesting. Don't believe the words, believe the actions. When I started gaining muscle, women started paying attention. Other things that help are: confidence, ability to speak calmly and confidently, dressing better than average, treating women as humans, not as princesses. If you want to meet lots of women IRL, pick up an activity with mostly women, like dance, yoga.
- mancerayder 10y ago
  Hooking up stats are rather clear: around 80% of women have sex with around 20% of men. That's why an average looking guy on PoF/CL/Tinder/OkCupid has very little chance compared to real life. While I think this sounds very true, do you have a reference? It completely matches the experience in the city I live in, and I'd love to be able to quote it to people.
  - imaginenore 10y ago
    Sorry, speaking from my experience. And probably most guys experience. Everyone who has been to highschool can see it. OKCupid has some research, but they don't record actual sex encounters. They have stats like "As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium".
    - psyc 10y ago
      HN requires at least two citations per statement. [0][1] Please delete your comment. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22citation%20needed%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22citation%20needed%22&sort=b... [1] http://www.righto.com/2013/09/9-hacker-news-comments-im-tired-of.html http://www.righto.com/2013/09/9-hacker-news-comments-im-tire...
danharaj 10y ago
Here's another thing society does that heavily penalizes "unattractive" men: Men are strongly stigmatized for wearing make-up for personal (as opposed to professional) use. It really isn't fair. A good foundation and some concealer goes a long way. I don't think attractiveness matters past initiating the first date in a cold relationship. Who knows, is it because I've gotten older? Getting to know someone makes their face so dynamic and expressive. Every human face is pretty once you get to know it that way. Perhaps that is why it's easier to date people we're already friends with: we already know how pretty and interesting they are, what more could one want?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- sotojuan 10y ago
  I'm guessing this isn't so much the case in other cultures as I had a few male Korean friends who wore light make up.
  - danharaj 10y ago
    Oh, of course. It even changes with time within the same culture. In the United States at least, away from major cities with a strong culture of liberal individuality, there are extreme social pressures culminating in even violence that police the conduct of both men and women when it comes to self-expression through makeup and fashion.
- projektir 10y ago
  Attractiveness overall seems a more valued trait in women, though, to a rather catastrophic degree. I think men should be allowed to use makeup, and I think the small amounts that would help others wouldn't notice, but, overall, I don't think the fact that women are supposed to constantly worry about their makeup or their hair or their fashion so disproportionately is an advantage. I got the impression that men don't wear makeup mostly because it doesn't really matter. That's a lot of time better spent doing almost literally anything else.
- huherto 10y ago
zlw 10y ago
Being an Asian does not imply unattractiveness. It's one's other properties that determine attractiveness (muscular body, etc). Considering Asian as a property of unattractiveness is racist. Even if you are an Asian yourself.
- wolf550e 10y ago
  Clearly what was meant was that an average white person who was asked to imagine an attractive potential partner, would image a white person of the appropriate gender. Thus asians do not look like the image of "imaginary attractive potential partner" of most people (in the US). This doesn't mean that asians are unattractive. Just that most movie stars are not asians.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  White-Asian marriages are something like 80% white male/asian female, 20% white female/asian male. "Asian" is not an indicator of unattractiveness; "male Asian", on average, is.
nilkn 10y ago
When I last used online dating (4+ years ago), I saw a decent number of height requirements stated explicitly from female profiles. I always found this interesting, not because of the idea itself, but because they chose specific heights as cutoffs. It was particularly common to see women pick 6' as their cutoff. Many of these women were significantly shorter than 6', even if they wore heels. If you're 5'4" (say), can you really tell the difference between 5'10" and 6'? Are those two inches actually a dealbreaker? Walking past men on the street, can you actually filter out all men under 6' accurately and precisely? It seems extremely unlikely that anyone could do that unless they were quite close to 6' themselves. And yet it's trivial to filter out every guy under 6' on a site like OkCupid. The site provides built-in functionality to do so. I'm willing to bet a significant percentage of women stating they require a height of 6' or higher would often be willing in real life to date men much shorter than that, because they probably don't even know what 6' precisely looks like. It's also been convincingly demonstrated that men on dating sites inflate their height by 2 full inches on average. Suppose you don't really know what 6' precisely looks like and go on a date with a 5'10" guy claiming to be 6'. You may not realize he's not actually 6' and believe the claim from his profile. From here on out, your idea of dating "6'" men becomes reinforced based on faulty data.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  I used to be infatuated with a tall women that also thought she was 5'9" I measured her and she was 5'7" and she still was able to book modeling jobs with strict requirements under her adjusted height People liked the proportions and her long legs Maybe some future society won't but the phenotype wins now Just another anecdote about how lying and perception aren't exactly mysterious ways of getting ahead
shin_lao 10y ago
Understand there is a ratio of 10 men to 1 woman on every dating website. Any criteria that reduces the number of choices is good for women as it makes their lives easier. "Well, if I meet someone online he has to be as good as possible right? They are so many men here."

by colmvp 10y ago

mandeepj 10y ago

I 100% agree with your post and I have similar experience in my life. While in real life, we build some kind of background via the way we communicate, get things done and how we come across. All of this is missing online. At dating sites, most of people play with prejudice. I think women do not feel safe at these dating sites so they keep their options reserved.

chinese_dan 10y ago

The other problem I've noticed is that most women don't have a problem finding a date. They can go to a bar, club, library, grocery store and men ask them out. Why do they need to go online in the first place? They are either too picky or have some other major issue. Before I was married, I found dates online all the time. 99% of the women I dated had issues or were too picky. I didn't end up finding my wife until I joined some local meetup groups and met her IRL.

zajd 10y ago
I guess that depends on your definition of too picky? If you want to have a partner that shares similar life values to you and it's not that common amongst the population near you (or willing to come up and ask you out) just rolling the dice with random people can get old real quick. Some things are worth being picky about and just dealing with up front. If you can choose from 100 people why not eliminate the ones who don't share your religion, for example.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- GrinningFool 10y ago
  Because you eliminate entire groups of people without considering other attributes - if you met someone and only learned their religion some time later, you might find its not as important to you as you thought. If you rule it out before you can make that discovery , you never know what kind of people you have closed the door on. Of course I'm someone who married the person who couldn't be more different in politics, personality and background - 17 years ago and going strong. So naturally my perspective here is biased - on the basis of criteria I thought were important to me at that age, I have no doubt I never would have considered her if I saw her profile and went by he facts and figures.
sotojuan 10y ago
One thing many people that are focused on online dating don't realize is that most of the other users aren't really serious about it. A lot of my female (and some male) friends had an OK Cupid for really no reason other than just to scroll around when bored or because a friend had one.

__s 10y ago

Your anecdote rings with how there are many people who hold racist tendencies, but exclude their friends of said race from those tendencies. Essentially when they think 'all X' they mean 'all X besides those whom I know'

ben_jones 10y ago
Is it racist to have physical preferences that conform to "race"? If I were, for example, to like tall men, and therefore have a preference for men of a race which is stereotypically tall, does that make me racist?
- danharaj 10y ago
  It's a very complicated question because human relationships are complicated. I would say no, and in fact even having a preference for something like skin complexion isn't enough to make one racist. What is racist is stating the preference in terms of race and categorically denying that one would ever be attractive to a person of <race> or <skin complexion> or whatever. I think it would be pretty ugly to say that you would never date a short person, regardless of any implications for one's ideas about race, too. Like, it's different to say "i find tall people attractive" versus "i find short people unattractive". Personal preferences aside, the way society signals which physical features are desirable and undesirable is racist. This is largely commercialized and driven by marketing departments these days but it is rooted in all sorts of institutions that govern the desirability and undesirability of certain bodies. So, as an individual, signaling one's preferences can feed into this structural power that decides who is pretty and who is not. Individual preferences are almost certainly partly influenced by messages society sends us and it's important to keep that in mind.
- ardit33 10y ago
  Yeah, it is by definition. If you are excluding somebody just because of their race (even if they are tall, handsome, or whatever else your are seeking on a partner), then it is. It is fine, there is nothing wrong with it, as you should do whatever you want with your romantic life, but it is racist as you are excluding a group of people from your dating pool just because of their race.

RandyRanderson 10y ago

I always ask myself: can a person that looks like me, is as smart, has as much money etc... be successful in this situation? The answer (for me) has is almost always "yes" and so the question becomes how did they do it? What failing of mine should I repair?

imaginenore 10y ago

When you make a strict distinction between hooking up and dating, everything starts to make sense. Hooking up stats are rather clear: around 80% of women have sex with around 20% of men. That's why an average looking guy on PoF/CL/Tinder/OkCupid has very little chance compared to real life. This imbalance is actually caused by the guys. Your average guy will throw himself at almost any woman. You join a site, you go through profiles, you message the ones you like. You can easily message 100 girls and get 1 reply. Why? Because every other average guy is doing the same. So an average girl gets 100 messages a day, and there's no way she's replying to all of them - she will pick the top 5-10, and will talk to them. If your face isn't good looking, don't worry. You can compensate with other things. Hit the gym, girls LOVE fit bodies, even though most of them you tell you they want someone funny/smart/interesting. Don't believe the words, believe the actions. When I started gaining muscle, women started paying attention. Other things that help are: confidence, ability to speak calmly and confidently, dressing better than average, treating women as humans, not as princesses. If you want to meet lots of women IRL, pick up an activity with mostly women, like dance, yoga.

mancerayder 10y ago
Hooking up stats are rather clear: around 80% of women have sex with around 20% of men. That's why an average looking guy on PoF/CL/Tinder/OkCupid has very little chance compared to real life. While I think this sounds very true, do you have a reference? It completely matches the experience in the city I live in, and I'd love to be able to quote it to people.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  Sorry, speaking from my experience. And probably most guys experience. Everyone who has been to highschool can see it. OKCupid has some research, but they don't record actual sex encounters. They have stats like "As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium".
  - psyc 10y ago
    HN requires at least two citations per statement. [0][1] Please delete your comment. [0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22citation%20needed%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22citation%20needed%22&sort=b... [1] http://www.righto.com/2013/09/9-hacker-news-comments-im-tired-of.html http://www.righto.com/2013/09/9-hacker-news-comments-im-tire...

danharaj 10y ago

Here's another thing society does that heavily penalizes "unattractive" men: Men are strongly stigmatized for wearing make-up for personal (as opposed to professional) use. It really isn't fair. A good foundation and some concealer goes a long way. I don't think attractiveness matters past initiating the first date in a cold relationship. Who knows, is it because I've gotten older? Getting to know someone makes their face so dynamic and expressive. Every human face is pretty once you get to know it that way. Perhaps that is why it's easier to date people we're already friends with: we already know how pretty and interesting they are, what more could one want?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sotojuan 10y ago
I'm guessing this isn't so much the case in other cultures as I had a few male Korean friends who wore light make up.
- danharaj 10y ago
  Oh, of course. It even changes with time within the same culture. In the United States at least, away from major cities with a strong culture of liberal individuality, there are extreme social pressures culminating in even violence that police the conduct of both men and women when it comes to self-expression through makeup and fashion.
projektir 10y ago
Attractiveness overall seems a more valued trait in women, though, to a rather catastrophic degree. I think men should be allowed to use makeup, and I think the small amounts that would help others wouldn't notice, but, overall, I don't think the fact that women are supposed to constantly worry about their makeup or their hair or their fashion so disproportionately is an advantage. I got the impression that men don't wear makeup mostly because it doesn't really matter. That's a lot of time better spent doing almost literally anything else.
huherto 10y ago

zlw 10y ago

Being an Asian does not imply unattractiveness. It's one's other properties that determine attractiveness (muscular body, etc). Considering Asian as a property of unattractiveness is racist. Even if you are an Asian yourself.

wolf550e 10y ago
Clearly what was meant was that an average white person who was asked to imagine an attractive potential partner, would image a white person of the appropriate gender. Thus asians do not look like the image of "imaginary attractive potential partner" of most people (in the US). This doesn't mean that asians are unattractive. Just that most movie stars are not asians.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
White-Asian marriages are something like 80% white male/asian female, 20% white female/asian male. "Asian" is not an indicator of unattractiveness; "male Asian", on average, is.

nilkn 10y ago

When I last used online dating (4+ years ago), I saw a decent number of height requirements stated explicitly from female profiles. I always found this interesting, not because of the idea itself, but because they chose specific heights as cutoffs. It was particularly common to see women pick 6' as their cutoff. Many of these women were significantly shorter than 6', even if they wore heels. If you're 5'4" (say), can you really tell the difference between 5'10" and 6'? Are those two inches actually a dealbreaker? Walking past men on the street, can you actually filter out all men under 6' accurately and precisely? It seems extremely unlikely that anyone could do that unless they were quite close to 6' themselves. And yet it's trivial to filter out every guy under 6' on a site like OkCupid. The site provides built-in functionality to do so. I'm willing to bet a significant percentage of women stating they require a height of 6' or higher would often be willing in real life to date men much shorter than that, because they probably don't even know what 6' precisely looks like. It's also been convincingly demonstrated that men on dating sites inflate their height by 2 full inches on average. Suppose you don't really know what 6' precisely looks like and go on a date with a 5'10" guy claiming to be 6'. You may not realize he's not actually 6' and believe the claim from his profile. From here on out, your idea of dating "6'" men becomes reinforced based on faulty data.

cloudjacker 10y ago
I used to be infatuated with a tall women that also thought she was 5'9" I measured her and she was 5'7" and she still was able to book modeling jobs with strict requirements under her adjusted height People liked the proportions and her long legs Maybe some future society won't but the phenotype wins now Just another anecdote about how lying and perception aren't exactly mysterious ways of getting ahead

shin_lao 10y ago

Understand there is a ratio of 10 men to 1 woman on every dating website. Any criteria that reduces the number of choices is good for women as it makes their lives easier. "Well, if I meet someone online he has to be as good as possible right? They are so many men here."