16 ms·

Peak non-creepy dating pool

178 points by bribri 5y ago

iratewizard 5y ago
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.
- samatman 5y ago
  This was well put, thank you. 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!
  - zdkl 5y ago
    Challenge considered. Are there unified (federal) marriage & birth certificate online registries for the US or is that a matter for archives?
eloff 5y ago
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.
- colmvp 5y ago
  > 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.
  - cultofmetatron 5y ago
    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?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway1fe4 5y ago
      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? Anyway, thanks for the HN therapy.
      - 5y ago
exporectomy 5y ago
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.
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  Right, but then we'd have to add a checkbox to accept or deny groups that exhibit high levels of relationship drama. Personally though ... hard pass.
  - hans-moleman 5y ago
    Very insensitive comment
  - Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    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.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  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.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    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.
getpost 5y ago
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. https://www.amazon.com/Attached-Science-Adult-Attachment-YouFind/dp/1585429139/ https://www.amazon.com/Attached-Science-Adult-Attachment-You... https://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Disturbances-Adults-Treatment-Comprehensive/dp/0393711528/ https://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Disturbances-Adults-Treatm...
- exporectomy 5y ago
  This stuff is awful. So many lives ruined by having it in either themselves or their spouse.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  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.
  - cyberbanjo 5y ago
    Both are available on SCIHUB
- kilroy123 5y ago
  This might be true but my gut and experience says it's way more complicated than that.
- vernon99 5y ago
  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).
stopping 5y ago
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: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/ 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/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...): 18-29: 17% (Avg. age ~24) 30-49: 28% (Avg. age ~40) 50-64: 21% (Avg. age ~57) 65+: 17% (Avg. age ~72) 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.
- Guthur 5y ago
  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.
  - drno123 5y ago
    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.
    - 5y ago
pm90 5y ago
This is a pretty good analysis. 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.
- enw 5y ago
  What do you mean by "enjoy life"?
  - pm90 5y ago
    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.
jari_mustonen 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
e_y_ 5y ago
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).
- watwut 5y ago
  That is not true for governmental statistics in general.
  - e_y_ 5y ago
    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.
    - watwut 5y ago
      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.
      - e_y_ 5y ago
        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.
brailsafe 5y ago
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 ;)
- tryonenow 5y ago
  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.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    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.
ultrastable 5y ago
HN relationship thread bingo card: - 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 am I forgetting anything?
- duckmysick 5y ago
  > am I forgetting anything? Meta comments about HN relationship threads.
- wayneftw 5y ago
  > am I forgetting anything? Yes, you're forgetting to be curious.
  - bs_alumna 5y ago
    Soliciting feedback is an indicator of curiosity.
    - wayneftw 5y ago
      Perhaps, if it were said unsarcastically. 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.
      - ultrastable 5y ago
        not claiming the things I listed make up all or even most of threads on my subject, just that they seem to show up every time
        wayneftw 5y ago
        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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

178 points by bribri 5y ago

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.

samatman 5y ago
This was well put, thank you. 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!
- zdkl 5y ago
  Challenge considered. Are there unified (federal) marriage & birth certificate online registries for the US or is that a matter for archives?

eloff 5y ago

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.

colmvp 5y ago
> 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.
- cultofmetatron 5y ago
  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?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway1fe4 5y ago
    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? Anyway, thanks for the HN therapy.
    - 5y ago

exporectomy 5y ago

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.

aetherspawn 5y ago
Right, but then we'd have to add a checkbox to accept or deny groups that exhibit high levels of relationship drama. Personally though ... hard pass.
- hans-moleman 5y ago
  Very insensitive comment
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  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.
Broken_Hippo 5y ago
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.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  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.

getpost 5y ago

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. https://www.amazon.com/Attached-Science-Adult-Attachment-YouFind/dp/1585429139/ https://www.amazon.com/Attached-Science-Adult-Attachment-You... https://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Disturbances-Adults-Treatment-Comprehensive/dp/0393711528/ https://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Disturbances-Adults-Treatm...

exporectomy 5y ago
This stuff is awful. So many lives ruined by having it in either themselves or their spouse.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
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.
- cyberbanjo 5y ago
  Both are available on SCIHUB
kilroy123 5y ago
This might be true but my gut and experience says it's way more complicated than that.
vernon99 5y ago
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).

stopping 5y ago

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: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/ 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/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...): 18-29: 17% (Avg. age ~24) 30-49: 28% (Avg. age ~40) 50-64: 21% (Avg. age ~57) 65+: 17% (Avg. age ~72) 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.

Guthur 5y ago
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.
- drno123 5y ago
  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.
  - 5y ago

pm90 5y ago

This is a pretty good analysis. 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.

enw 5y ago
What do you mean by "enjoy life"?
- pm90 5y ago
  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.

jari_mustonen 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

e_y_ 5y ago

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).

watwut 5y ago
That is not true for governmental statistics in general.
- e_y_ 5y ago
  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.
  - watwut 5y ago
    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.
    - e_y_ 5y ago
      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.

brailsafe 5y ago

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 ;)

tryonenow 5y ago
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.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  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.

ultrastable 5y ago

HN relationship thread bingo card: - 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 am I forgetting anything?

duckmysick 5y ago
> am I forgetting anything? Meta comments about HN relationship threads.
wayneftw 5y ago
> am I forgetting anything? Yes, you're forgetting to be curious.
- bs_alumna 5y ago
  Soliciting feedback is an indicator of curiosity.
  - wayneftw 5y ago
    Perhaps, if it were said unsarcastically. 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.
    - ultrastable 5y ago
      not claiming the things I listed make up all or even most of threads on my subject, just that they seem to show up every time
      - wayneftw 5y ago
        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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html