My dating website profile

[Ex-User (14663)]

Yourmother, the paper they reference in the bigthink article is a study that used prefrences that people in Boston and San Diego in US showed on online-dating sites. So already here I know that any conclusion they draw is useless

Unless it is "women in Boston and San Diego wrote such and such on their online dating profile back in 2003"

 

[kora]

@Yourmother have fun picking out superficial normies who correlate with your theory to date until you reach your holy grail of 100 fucks before...Something happens? What is it? serial sex nirvana ? Thumbs up dude, we all have our goals I guess.

Yeah my tone is salty, we will both get over it I am sure. I have little patience with pseudo "disillusioned" or so called "realistic" views on this kind of thing. It's not realistic, it's reductive. Like that economic premise that states that everyone is a rational agent trying to maximize their own interests, it is essentially false. It cannot take into account the insane complexity and the irrational nature of the behaviors, trying to predict behaviors based on a one dimensional model. Attraction has too many factors in it for you to narrow it down to muscles and riches, personal affinity is important and if we all followed your advice we would turn into an army of clones all playing on formula. It is good that OP has niche interest and is passionate about them, this means that if someone else has those interests they will have found each other, or can learn from each other.

I don't understand when this treating human relationships as a market tendency came into existence but fuck it's everywhere. It's like the ultimate capitalistic brainwashing imo. I dunno what it is with these people. The common point I find is that they have not been "successful" according to their own standards, whatever the designator for success means, often it appears that the criteria for success is accumulating fucks as a measure of one's worth. Like I said, a massive injection of romantic poetry is needed, something that puts beauty, value and intensity personal affinities, interest in PEOPLE back into it, not this weird distorted misanthropic objectification.

Still. Of course, income does matter to some extent to many. As do looks. Traditionally women have had less access to an income themselves. We are only recently emancipated and many of our gender still do not feel so confident about relying on themselves as the male gender, this is obvious. Make a culture where they are on equal economic footing and have been for a while, and I can guarantee you that you won't have any more sugar daddies (or like, only a minority with a weird fetish .) Strange that schoolgirls all scream for Brad Pitt and not Trump no? Give every single playmate Hugh Heffner's money and she will never touch his wrinkled ass again. I firmly believe that the whole "paying for pretty ladies" thing is an expression of economic power of one gender over the other. How much prostitution would there be if everyone had a basic income huh? And the whole valuing looks above all else seems an expression of dumb sexual objectification by emotionally, socially immature or dysfunctional people. Of course EVERYONE wants physically attractive people, we are wired to judge health that way, but as a long term partner, pure looks just don't do it, and men are not nearly as shallow as we are constantly told they are. You for example, would like someone who makes you laugh I believe ? Who teaches you things? Who makes you feel comfortable ? Who impresses you somehow aside from slim prettiness? Who is unique? Or do you like the idea that she is attracted to your wallet ? There are so many healthy young good looking people, why are we not constantly going for all of them ? Because the selection is based on something more complex and individual.


I also spent my adolescent years frustrated as hell, crushing on people and not able to talk to them, I did not as a result decide that I needed to become this optimal phony fitness machine and socially engineer my success onto the holy grail of fucking.

I am highly skeptical concerning the value of an online questionnaire on a dating site when it comes to this topic, be it the daily mail or other, that what people answer in said questionnaire is an accurate prediction of what they will follow in the real context of meeting people and getting attached and sharing things and being intimate. Most of my crushes have been a kind of almost instantaneous thing where I just see the person do/say something or move a certain way and feel a jolt in my stomach before I know anything about their income or whatever. (obviously it peters out or flares up after that based on the following interactions.) Not something I will get easily from a dating site. Though I can get crushes on people from their thoughts as well I guess. In any case I don't see how people can control that kind of energy really. In fact a dating website may be precisely the kind of dissociated objectifying tool that results in this thinking. Yes, I think I have partly answered my own question.


Eh enough with the only just coherent wall of ramblings, let me finally offer my OWN personal advice for OP and answer this thread :

USE THE REAL WORLD AS AN INTERFACE AND DITCH THE DATING PROFILE

You are an academic with niche interests, keep being passionate about what you love because that is attractive (and anyway I doubt you can change yourself to fit in). Find a way to integrate academic social settings (through work or studying) and build a social sphere with these people which will be more effective than anything else in filtering out who suits you and who does not than clicking through profiles, be it for friends or for romance. Have fun. On the plus side you will lose weight from not being on your ass in front of a screen and anyway, B.I.G is cool and got ladies even though he is far too fat. Yourmother will say it's only because he's rich but I think it's also because he got mad skills on the mic that entertain everyone and was very funny. Also don't worry about your age, 34 is young, many people have gotten into relationships much later, and if you are black (idk if you are) you probably have the amazing added superpower of skin not really showing age.

 

[QuickTwist]

IDK, to say we know literally nothing about attraction seems like cutting ourselves short a bit.

I think a decent way of looking at it is that different people have different things they find attractive/compatible with. My guess is if you start to plot these things like points on a graph, a pattern will emerge.

Pretty much no women actually desires an incompetent, unconfident, ugly fool. They may go after someone with these characteristics if they feel desperate, or they are at the bottom of the hierarchy or if they are just a sadistic bitch. But I would say a normal woman who is, say a junior or senior in college, probably is attracted to someone who impresses them in some way shape or form. It could be intelligence, charisma, looks, ect. but something about a guy who is higher in the hierarchical system is probably more attractive than someone at the bottom.

People have subconscious ways of figuring out where they are in the hierarchy to know who they should be attracted to. This goes for both men and women.

I guess I have a problem with over gaming attraction/love interests. I think it's the sort of thing that brings out the worst in people. There is also something to be said for the lack of actually seeing the person and how they engage with the world as a whole that exemplifies how compartmentalized people get when browsing the opposite sex's profile on some dumb site that is probably making hand over fist kind of money by just giving people a place to people shop. It's kinda sickening tbh.

 

[Yourmother]

Yourmother, the paper they reference in the bigthink article is a study that used prefrences that people in Boston and San Diego in US showed on online-dating sites. So already here I know that any conclusion they draw is useless

Unless it is "women in Boston and San Diego wrote such and such on their online dating profile back in 2003"

Then here is a study that doesn't just use Boston and San Diego.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/...tatistically_proven_fact_that_nobody/d5bn3oa/

It uses 37 different cultures, for your reference. Click the link. I also cited 4 studies, are all 4 of them wrong?

Seriously, there are countless studies that have all come to the same conclusion. Females value wealth and status. You just do a quick search on google scholar. Not one of them agree that women don't prefer wealth and status. At this point, you'd be completely delusional to suggest that women don't care about wealth or status. Is that what are you arguing here?

@higs, "Of course, income does matter to some extent to many. As do looks. " So we agree now. That's good. Sure, of course people of similar interests will want to get together. But money and looks can't hurt.

 

[QuickTwist]

Then here is a study that doesn't just use Boston and San Diego.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/...tatistically_proven_fact_that_nobody/d5bn3oa/

It uses 37 different cultures, for your reference. Click the link. I also cited 4 studies, are all 4 of them wrong?

Seriously, there are countless studies that have all come to the same conclusion. Females value wealth and status. You just do a quick search on google scholar. Not one of them agree that women don't prefer wealth and status. At this point, you'd be completely delusional to suggest that women don't care about wealth or status. Is that what are you arguing here?

@higs, "Of course, income does matter to some extent to many. As do looks. " So we agree now. That's good. Sure, of course people of similar interests will want to get together. But money and looks can't hurt.

Females value what wealth and status represent, not those things specifically. There is a correlation between these which is why you think it is the way you think it is.

 

[Yourmother]

Females value what wealth and status represent, not those things specifically. There is a correlation between these which is why you think it is the way you think it is.

Right. Do you have anything to support that statement? All of the studies so far have explicitly stated that women prefer wealth and status. Where did that claim come from, and what evidence supports that?

 

[redbaron]

If you have an attraction to someone, them also being wealthy doesn't hurt. But wealth is a prime or major attractor only for the superficial and attraction certainly does exist outside of the simple paradigms of looks/money.

Reducing it to, "females value wealth" is not the logical conclusion to draw from the studies being linked. There's definitely people for whom money makes the major component of attraction, but it's mostly secondary. Not to mention that studies of happiness fairly unanimously debunk the idea of money having a causal relationship to happiness.

And really, happiness is a more accurate measure of a successful relationship - if pursuing people based on money and looks isn't making you happier, it's not really achieving the goal of a personal relationship in the first place.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

Then here is a study that doesn't just use Boston and San Diego.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/...tatistically_proven_fact_that_nobody/d5bn3oa/

It uses 37 different cultures, for your reference. Click the link. I also cited 4 studies, are all 4 of them wrong?

Seriously, there are countless studies that have all come to the same conclusion. Females value wealth and status. You just do a quick search on google scholar. Not one of them agree that women don't prefer wealth and status. At this point, you'd be completely delusional to suggest that women don't care about wealth or status. Is that what are you arguing here?

@higs, "Of course, income does matter to some extent to many. As do looks. " So we agree now. That's good. Sure, of course people of similar interests will want to get together. But money and looks can't hurt.

First of all, actively looking for studies that support your preconceptions is called confirmation bias, and will always lead to unreliable inference.

I'll agree the study you linked is a pretty good one though. It has some interesting discussion on evolutionarily designed differences between males and females.

But they use the same method as everyone else does in these kind of studies and thus incurs the same problems:

1) They specifically aim at marriage as the definition of reproductive success. So already here we know that it is limited to specific traits, because if a woman is looking to settle down and make babies, obviously she will prefer someone with a stable income.

2) They measure the importance of traits via questionnaires. This creates a separation between what a woman will say and how she actually reacts in real life. Clearly if you ask someone: do you prefer a mate with good wealth, they will say yes. But the way to test whether that is actually true in practice, you have to send two guys who are exactly equal in every respect except their wealth level into a bar and see whether there is a significant difference in their probabilities of finding a mate.

3) They don't take into account the level of wealth in question. Are they talking about the difference between someone who doesn't have a job and someone who has a stable income, or someone who has a stable income and someone who is considerably wealthy.

4) Looking at the statistical results they present, the score for wealth usually is 1 to 1.5 standard errors from 0, so even though it seems to play a role, it explains only a small amount of the variance in preferences. Even when limited to a small questionnaire, there seems to be a lot of other factors that would be better predictors. The same goes for looks in their results. The only factor that was clearly significant was "ambition and industriousness" which consistently had standard errors of around 1/4th of the score.

 

[kora]

Seriously, there are countless studies that have all come to the same conclusion. Females value wealth and status. You just do a quick search on google scholar. Not one of them agree that women don't prefer wealth and status. At this point, you'd be completely delusional to suggest that women don't care about wealth or status. Is that what are you arguing here?.

No, I am arguing that saying as you stated that it is the principle factor in mate choice and that people are fundamentally superficial is wrong.

Obviously if you give a questionnaire asking people “would you rather have 100 dollars or 20 dollars” no one will be different. It’s rational choice reduced to its essence. But in the real world the decisions will not be conclusively taken this way, though there may be a preference expressed in a context dissociated from human interaction, and you are incorrect in stating this is the fundamental factor. Perhaps I could offer a questionnaire saying, “would you rather have somebody who makes you feel loved, understood or who is exciting surprising and entertaining with 3000 dollars a month vs someone who is incredibly rich and buff but boring who do you choose.”

Also, what Serac said. Specifically 2) which I already mentioned.

 

[chalkdust]

Peace your mother I am wondering what you would say if I said I am eyeing a masters in folklore specifically Caribbean folklore.

Higs thank you for the kind words.

 

[kora]

Also the questionnaire does not control for common causes, for example, I have the growing intuition right now that people who use dating websites tend to be more superficial than average in their relationship choices which would skew the results further. How about comparative statistics between people who use dating websites and people who don’t ? It certainly seems to be the case that the structure of the interactions encourages superficial reduction of people, it’s like judging whether someone would be a good friend from a fucking CV, you ever written a CV ? I know for sure mine do not reflect what I am really like as a person. You’re just cut off from too much information that you would get from real interaction.

Chalkdust you are welcome.

 

[Black Rose]

Chalkdust you are welcome.