6 ms·

I’d love to see this correlated with data on prevalence of “casual” dating, satisfaction with dating, and something like # of dating partners before marriage. I

I’d love to see this correlated with data on prevalence of “casual” dating, satisfaction with dating, and something like # of dating partners before marriage. I have a strong suspicion that the rise of online dating has had many not-so-great impacts on expectations, satisfaction, and finding a partner in general, but I have very little data to back that suspicion up.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
Norah Vincent in Self-made Man describes her experiences dating women (while pretending to be a man). She observes that, in person, they tend to reject her for not being masculine enough. But she has far more success than most men in translating online contact into dates in person. The women demand extensive correspondence before being willing to meet, and the feminine style of her writing appeals to them in a way that the feminine style of her body and personality doesn't. You can interpret this as evidence that one thing contributing to problems in the online dating landscape is that women don't know what they want. They have one set of requirements for agreeing to a date, and a different -- to some degree conflicting -- set of requirements for thinking that a date went well. (Vincent contrasts contemporaneous experience dating men -- she specifically comments on the coherence between what they want online and what they want in person. To agree to a date, men want to see your picture. And in person, they're happy if you look like your picture.)
- mdorazio 5y ago
  Thanks - I've just added this to my reading list.
- majormajor 5y ago
  I'm having trouble following why this would be a contradictory set of requirements from women vs simply a pickier set of requirements compared to men. "Lots of men are shallow" is an olddddd cliche, no surprise there, but a female perspective being reported as "I want someone I can connect to in words that is also physically attractive to me in person" doesn't read as contradictory to me. (I'm also unclear on what "feminine style of writing" means, but would think for such an experiment to be really useful you'd need to pretend to be a man in your writing as well!) I had far more success in online dating when I started moving towards "let's meet in person as quickly as possible" because (even for me as a man) I found that the physical connection was harder to predict yet also more important than just a text-based one. The only area where my experience doesn't match hers is that I didn't encounter much resistance to something along the lines of "hey, let's meet up in person and see if we can keep this going" after just a few messages.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    That interpretation doesn’t read as a contradiction because its not. My interpretation is that communicating in a feminine style (more subtext, longer messages, longer + consistent correspondence is how I would interpret it) is what will get you a date, but initial attraction and in presence masculinity (communicated via a different conversational style, appearance, and behavior) is what is preferred. So the contraction is that there is a difference in communication styles online and in person.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      I think there is a difference in online and in-person communication styles for most people - at least for those of any literary bent at all, who get beyond stream of consciousness, unfiltered blathering of words into their keyboard - so that's why I don't see any contradiction in preferences of women who might want a literary written communication style but also want in-person chemistry that a woman pretending to be a man wasn't able to create.
  - klipt 5y ago
    > I had far more success in online dating when I started moving towards "let's meet in person as quickly as possible" Preach! I made the mistake initially of putting in lots of effort to woo some very introverted women with long text conversations because I fell in love with their detailed profiles. Then we meet in person and they were inevitably, if not autistic ... severely socially challenged. In the end I married a woman with a very simple dating profile instead. We just clicked really well in person, and she's really smart, just not the kind of person to live on the internet and write really detailed profiles. Which is a good complement to me because I tend towards being that person :-p
    - tolbish 5y ago
      In that sense, having the perfect profile, or at least an elaborate or detailed one, may be a red flag.
      - 5y ago
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  and the feminine style of her writing appeals to them in a way that the feminine style of her body and personality doesn't. I have trouble imagining how that was determined. Everything I have seen indicates women expect you to emotionally bond and establish a relationship before they can get all hot and bothered and men don't typically need that. That may have nothing to do with writing style and everything to do with simply being willing to put in the time.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    I feel like by "writing style" they meant "communication style".
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      Personality and writing style or communication style tend to be related. Meeting in person exposes you to many factors more than just looks. Smell is a big thing that people are often not consciously aware of but if you are a heterosexual female and you meet a woman dressed as a man, you may subconsciously react to "This doesn't smell like a man. Something ain't right." Voice tone is another. It has nothing to do with communication style, but her voice just may not be deep enough for a heterosexual woman to go "Yeah, I would hit that." People seem to think it boils down to "looks" or something and that doesn't really fit with what I understand about life, the universe and everything.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > Smell is a big thing that people are often not consciously aware of but if you are a heterosexual female and you meet a woman dressed as a man, you may subconsciously react to "This doesn't smell like a man. Something ain't right." No comments on smell were noted, but she did get comments about not being hairy.
        DoreenMichele 5y ago
        Commenting on smell tends to not be socially acceptable and people are often not consciously aware of it. Hairiness is definitely a gender difference and helps people sort the boys from the girls, so to speak.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Pretending to be a man to see how its like to court women online? Sounds reasonable. Pretending to be a man, irl, wearing a disguise? I'm not sure that translates to anything. Saying women rejected her for not being masculine enough could easily be a nice way of saying "while I wouldn't dare question whether you are, in fact, a man, here in front of me, something about this feels off putting for me".
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    One girl she dated revealed afterwards that she had referred to Ned as "my gay boyfriend". I'm not sure what difference you see between "rejecting someone for not being masculine enough" and "questioning whether they are, in fact, a man".
    - majormajor 5y ago
      > I'm not sure what difference you see between "rejecting someone for not being masculine enough" and "questioning whether they are, in fact, a man". I wonder what percentage of these women would've guessed right had she straight-up asked "do you think I'm a man or do you think I'm a woman pretending to be a man"? That's the difference - the idea that someone you're dating is deceiving you on such a huge level isn't something that's going to be at the front of your mind by default. (Though I have a higher-level question here: why are we simply believing stated reasons for rejection? People lie about that all the time. It's not you, it's me. People try to avoid confrontations. Someone who's blatantly lying to everyone else has to consider the possibility that they're being lied to as well.) I have no problem accepting two things from this account: high-effort communication helps, and not being in disguise helps. I think anything beyond that is largely speculative and especially don't see any contradictions.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > I wonder what percentage of these women would've guessed right had she straight-up asked "do you think I'm a man or do you think I'm a woman pretending to be a man"? This is a question that can't be usefully asked -- it would never come up in any normal circumstance, so just the fact that you asked tends to give the answer away. > not being in disguise helps. Women don't seem to agree with you. I've seen some pretty dramatic "makeup / no makeup" picture spreads.
- tessierashpool 5y ago
  > You can interpret this as evidence that one thing contributing to problems in the online dating landscape is that women don't know what they want. I suppose you can! It's intensely bizarre that you would, though. Another way to interpret it would be to say that there's a certain minimum level of communication skills that some of us aren't quite meeting.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Norah Vincent is also a professional writer, and a lesbian. Not surprising that she's good at wooing women with the written word.
- nradov 5y ago
  So apparently Norah Vincent disguised herself and lied to women for the sake of writing a book. That seems really creepy and unethical.
xwdv 5y ago
Your suspicion is best hypothesized as “Social media has people thinking they have so many options, but in reality most of them aren’t even worth it.”
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  The market is not clearing due to participants not properly pricing each other. Or the participants are not desirable enough for the other party. The former can be helped by letting your network decide your price as they may be able to do it more objectively, so anyone introduced to you by your network is likelier to be in your price range. This, of course, depends on you having access to a good network, but I suspect that is also on the decline.
  - freewilly1040 5y ago
    Well, if marriage is the "purchase", you should also include the case that people are finding the terms of the purchase itself to be not worth it.
- nicbou 5y ago
  The odds are good, but the goods are odd
JackPoach 5y ago
I've met my wife on a dating site (mind you, that was 16 years ago). While personal experience does not equal 'data', one of the greatest things about dating apps/sites from the male prospective is actually getting access to women who ARE interested in meeting guys/sex/relationships. That doesn't mean they'll pick you personally, but it's better than approaching a woman who's in a relationship and/or is not interested in dating (and your advances annoy her).

thaumasiotes 5y ago

Norah Vincent in Self-made Man describes her experiences dating women (while pretending to be a man). She observes that, in person, they tend to reject her for not being masculine enough. But she has far more success than most men in translating online contact into dates in person. The women demand extensive correspondence before being willing to meet, and the feminine style of her writing appeals to them in a way that the feminine style of her body and personality doesn't. You can interpret this as evidence that one thing contributing to problems in the online dating landscape is that women don't know what they want. They have one set of requirements for agreeing to a date, and a different -- to some degree conflicting -- set of requirements for thinking that a date went well. (Vincent contrasts contemporaneous experience dating men -- she specifically comments on the coherence between what they want online and what they want in person. To agree to a date, men want to see your picture. And in person, they're happy if you look like your picture.)

mdorazio 5y ago
Thanks - I've just added this to my reading list.
majormajor 5y ago
I'm having trouble following why this would be a contradictory set of requirements from women vs simply a pickier set of requirements compared to men. "Lots of men are shallow" is an olddddd cliche, no surprise there, but a female perspective being reported as "I want someone I can connect to in words that is also physically attractive to me in person" doesn't read as contradictory to me. (I'm also unclear on what "feminine style of writing" means, but would think for such an experiment to be really useful you'd need to pretend to be a man in your writing as well!) I had far more success in online dating when I started moving towards "let's meet in person as quickly as possible" because (even for me as a man) I found that the physical connection was harder to predict yet also more important than just a text-based one. The only area where my experience doesn't match hers is that I didn't encounter much resistance to something along the lines of "hey, let's meet up in person and see if we can keep this going" after just a few messages.
- meowkit 5y ago
  That interpretation doesn’t read as a contradiction because its not. My interpretation is that communicating in a feminine style (more subtext, longer messages, longer + consistent correspondence is how I would interpret it) is what will get you a date, but initial attraction and in presence masculinity (communicated via a different conversational style, appearance, and behavior) is what is preferred. So the contraction is that there is a difference in communication styles online and in person.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    I think there is a difference in online and in-person communication styles for most people - at least for those of any literary bent at all, who get beyond stream of consciousness, unfiltered blathering of words into their keyboard - so that's why I don't see any contradiction in preferences of women who might want a literary written communication style but also want in-person chemistry that a woman pretending to be a man wasn't able to create.
- klipt 5y ago
  > I had far more success in online dating when I started moving towards "let's meet in person as quickly as possible" Preach! I made the mistake initially of putting in lots of effort to woo some very introverted women with long text conversations because I fell in love with their detailed profiles. Then we meet in person and they were inevitably, if not autistic ... severely socially challenged. In the end I married a woman with a very simple dating profile instead. We just clicked really well in person, and she's really smart, just not the kind of person to live on the internet and write really detailed profiles. Which is a good complement to me because I tend towards being that person :-p
  - tolbish 5y ago
    In that sense, having the perfect profile, or at least an elaborate or detailed one, may be a red flag.
    - 5y ago
DoreenMichele 5y ago
and the feminine style of her writing appeals to them in a way that the feminine style of her body and personality doesn't. I have trouble imagining how that was determined. Everything I have seen indicates women expect you to emotionally bond and establish a relationship before they can get all hot and bothered and men don't typically need that. That may have nothing to do with writing style and everything to do with simply being willing to put in the time.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I feel like by "writing style" they meant "communication style".
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    Personality and writing style or communication style tend to be related. Meeting in person exposes you to many factors more than just looks. Smell is a big thing that people are often not consciously aware of but if you are a heterosexual female and you meet a woman dressed as a man, you may subconsciously react to "This doesn't smell like a man. Something ain't right." Voice tone is another. It has nothing to do with communication style, but her voice just may not be deep enough for a heterosexual woman to go "Yeah, I would hit that." People seem to think it boils down to "looks" or something and that doesn't really fit with what I understand about life, the universe and everything.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > Smell is a big thing that people are often not consciously aware of but if you are a heterosexual female and you meet a woman dressed as a man, you may subconsciously react to "This doesn't smell like a man. Something ain't right." No comments on smell were noted, but she did get comments about not being hairy.
      - DoreenMichele 5y ago
        Commenting on smell tends to not be socially acceptable and people are often not consciously aware of it. Hairiness is definitely a gender difference and helps people sort the boys from the girls, so to speak.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Pretending to be a man to see how its like to court women online? Sounds reasonable. Pretending to be a man, irl, wearing a disguise? I'm not sure that translates to anything. Saying women rejected her for not being masculine enough could easily be a nice way of saying "while I wouldn't dare question whether you are, in fact, a man, here in front of me, something about this feels off putting for me".
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  One girl she dated revealed afterwards that she had referred to Ned as "my gay boyfriend". I'm not sure what difference you see between "rejecting someone for not being masculine enough" and "questioning whether they are, in fact, a man".
  - majormajor 5y ago
    > I'm not sure what difference you see between "rejecting someone for not being masculine enough" and "questioning whether they are, in fact, a man". I wonder what percentage of these women would've guessed right had she straight-up asked "do you think I'm a man or do you think I'm a woman pretending to be a man"? That's the difference - the idea that someone you're dating is deceiving you on such a huge level isn't something that's going to be at the front of your mind by default. (Though I have a higher-level question here: why are we simply believing stated reasons for rejection? People lie about that all the time. It's not you, it's me. People try to avoid confrontations. Someone who's blatantly lying to everyone else has to consider the possibility that they're being lied to as well.) I have no problem accepting two things from this account: high-effort communication helps, and not being in disguise helps. I think anything beyond that is largely speculative and especially don't see any contradictions.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > I wonder what percentage of these women would've guessed right had she straight-up asked "do you think I'm a man or do you think I'm a woman pretending to be a man"? This is a question that can't be usefully asked -- it would never come up in any normal circumstance, so just the fact that you asked tends to give the answer away. > not being in disguise helps. Women don't seem to agree with you. I've seen some pretty dramatic "makeup / no makeup" picture spreads.
tessierashpool 5y ago
> You can interpret this as evidence that one thing contributing to problems in the online dating landscape is that women don't know what they want. I suppose you can! It's intensely bizarre that you would, though. Another way to interpret it would be to say that there's a certain minimum level of communication skills that some of us aren't quite meeting.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BurningFrog 5y ago
Norah Vincent is also a professional writer, and a lesbian. Not surprising that she's good at wooing women with the written word.
nradov 5y ago
So apparently Norah Vincent disguised herself and lied to women for the sake of writing a book. That seems really creepy and unethical.

xwdv 5y ago

Your suspicion is best hypothesized as “Social media has people thinking they have so many options, but in reality most of them aren’t even worth it.”

lotsofpulp 5y ago
The market is not clearing due to participants not properly pricing each other. Or the participants are not desirable enough for the other party. The former can be helped by letting your network decide your price as they may be able to do it more objectively, so anyone introduced to you by your network is likelier to be in your price range. This, of course, depends on you having access to a good network, but I suspect that is also on the decline.
- freewilly1040 5y ago
  Well, if marriage is the "purchase", you should also include the case that people are finding the terms of the purchase itself to be not worth it.
nicbou 5y ago
The odds are good, but the goods are odd

JackPoach 5y ago

I've met my wife on a dating site (mind you, that was 16 years ago). While personal experience does not equal 'data', one of the greatest things about dating apps/sites from the male prospective is actually getting access to women who ARE interested in meeting guys/sex/relationships. That doesn't mean they'll pick you personally, but it's better than approaching a woman who's in a relationship and/or is not interested in dating (and your advances annoy her).