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It is interesting (kind of scary to me) that this is totally stripped out of all humanity. Dating is now a game, people are prospects and they receive rates fro

by soneca 13y ago

It is interesting (kind of scary to me) that this is totally stripped out of all humanity. Dating is now a game, people are prospects and they receive rates from 0 to 10. These are not just metaphors anymore, this is how people are actually considering others human beings. It became the paradigm of finding a partner. This formal meeting where both sides are constantly analyzing their partners and odds, i.e., dates, inevitably leads to this paradigm. It is just like job interviews, you can't possibly get to know deepily each candidate, so you have to create artificials proxies that will help you to chose wisely. And this proxies are wrong most of the times. But when finding a partner you can possibly have time to meet another person more deeply. Actually, you do that all the time, at work, at your neighborhood, with friends and friends of friends. But that is not longer a possibility if you have spent all your life not interest at all in people surrounding you, waiting for the time when you will chose a person from a shelf to marry you. Tl;dr: I don't think is much about successfull women high expectations, but about women didn't have much interest at all in another humans and now think of a partner as a product. And they don't get how this 'product' has a mind of its own now.

mattgreenrocks 13y ago
You're hitting on a fundamental truth here: dating's crappy power dynamics actively chips away at our very humanity. We're to be content with these cheap proxies and massive game-playing, because, well, sorry, everyone else has bought in too. This is most closely evidenced by proponents of every creepy dating mindset: "it must be true, because this is what animals do!" Maybe this is the fallout of mass consumerism, and a lifetime of being told that you can have it all. Dating sites pander to this too, by implicitly advertising love as just a mere SQL query away: SELECT * FROM candidates WHERE gender = 'm' AND salary > 150000 AND height > 72 SELECT * FROM candidates WHERE gender = 'f' AND age < 27 AND looks > 9.8 I've always thought a dating site that was less search-y and more experiential (aka requires time to actually meet people) could be a profitable niche. You meet people first, then get access to look at their profiles. As for expectations, I love what my pastor said: "you probably don't deserve the person you think you deserve."
anotherevan 13y ago
> It is interesting (kind of scary to me) that this is totally stripped out of all humanity. Yeah. How many of the people in the article talked (and some of the talk on this page) makes my skin crawl. First my qualifications to talk on this: I have absolutely none. I somehow managed to stumble into love, got married at 22, and over 20 years later still going strong (with a few rough patches and a lot of work put in along the way.) The only thing I can boast to be being extremely fortunate. I was an over-weight, socially inept nerd at 22 (these days, I am a little less socially inept, maybe.) So I've never really had to seriously 'compete' in the dating 'game'. I was trying to find the right word to describe how most of the people in this article and discussions viewed finding another human being to spend the rest of their lives with and create more human beings with and couldn't find the word. When I showed the article to my wife she nailed it straight away: mercenary. Dehumanising would be another word I will use, too. The women who attended that lecture in hopes of capturing the interest of an alpha-male creep me out the same way as when I read articles about pick-up artists and how they think about preying on a woman's insecurities to get laid. It's all about accomplishments and not relationships. Dehumanising. Was it Ovid who said, "If you want to be loved, be loveable."? Perhaps becoming loveable may entail cultivating interests that don't just involve computer games, or learning how to "dress metro" as some have advised. But I bet developing an attitude of treating people with some basic dignity and compassion will go a long towards being loveable and attracting someone you want to live the rest of your life, rather then categorising everyone on a scale of one to ten or as opportunities to exploit.

by soneca 13y ago

mattgreenrocks 13y ago

You're hitting on a fundamental truth here: dating's crappy power dynamics actively chips away at our very humanity. We're to be content with these cheap proxies and massive game-playing, because, well, sorry, everyone else has bought in too. This is most closely evidenced by proponents of every creepy dating mindset: "it must be true, because this is what animals do!" Maybe this is the fallout of mass consumerism, and a lifetime of being told that you can have it all. Dating sites pander to this too, by implicitly advertising love as just a mere SQL query away: SELECT * FROM candidates WHERE gender = 'm' AND salary > 150000 AND height > 72 SELECT * FROM candidates WHERE gender = 'f' AND age < 27 AND looks > 9.8 I've always thought a dating site that was less search-y and more experiential (aka requires time to actually meet people) could be a profitable niche. You meet people first, then get access to look at their profiles. As for expectations, I love what my pastor said: "you probably don't deserve the person you think you deserve."

anotherevan 13y ago

> It is interesting (kind of scary to me) that this is totally stripped out of all humanity. Yeah. How many of the people in the article talked (and some of the talk on this page) makes my skin crawl. First my qualifications to talk on this: I have absolutely none. I somehow managed to stumble into love, got married at 22, and over 20 years later still going strong (with a few rough patches and a lot of work put in along the way.) The only thing I can boast to be being extremely fortunate. I was an over-weight, socially inept nerd at 22 (these days, I am a little less socially inept, maybe.) So I've never really had to seriously 'compete' in the dating 'game'. I was trying to find the right word to describe how most of the people in this article and discussions viewed finding another human being to spend the rest of their lives with and create more human beings with and couldn't find the word. When I showed the article to my wife she nailed it straight away: mercenary. Dehumanising would be another word I will use, too. The women who attended that lecture in hopes of capturing the interest of an alpha-male creep me out the same way as when I read articles about pick-up artists and how they think about preying on a woman's insecurities to get laid. It's all about accomplishments and not relationships. Dehumanising. Was it Ovid who said, "If you want to be loved, be loveable."? Perhaps becoming loveable may entail cultivating interests that don't just involve computer games, or learning how to "dress metro" as some have advised. But I bet developing an attitude of treating people with some basic dignity and compassion will go a long towards being loveable and attracting someone you want to live the rest of your life, rather then categorising everyone on a scale of one to ten or as opportunities to exploit.