93 Comments
User's avatar
Endy's avatar

Apps have ruined dating.

I had an idea that an app that builds your profile based on what you’re doing and aspire and planning to do that would match you with people living similar lifestyles.

Going to yoga, watching succession, planning a trip to whatever. Coffee snob, watching baseball, foody, etc

Location data and photos could prove it’s not BS but I’m sure someone could figure how to hack that

Expand full comment
Willow Pedersen's avatar

Cool idea! There are so many issues with the way dating apps are designed. I’m not even a user because I don’t want companies to have access to such personal preferences, if I can avoid it. But from what I can tell, they have little regard for the success of matches and mostly just want to keep their user base active. Apparently, people spend ~90 minutes a day on these in the UK (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dating-apps-millenials-10-hours-per-week-tinder-bumble-romance-love-a8174006.html).

Some questions / thoughts on how to make them better: Why do users have to scroll? Why not have something searchable? And why does it have to be a complete waste of time unless you find someone? Hobbies where you meet people organically are at least time well-spent doing something you enjoy and / or learning something.

Also, the incentive structures of dating apps are flawed - these companies would have to take on a different business model in order to actually get rewarded for matching people, rather than getting rewarded for ad views or monthly subscriptions. It would be cool to see something that is more aligned to users’ needs gain traction. Maybe it will be your app! Or maybe Erik will build something :)

Expand full comment
Francisco's avatar

Even with the limited filters that dating apps have, it's easy for men to run out of potential matches. There are significant differences in religious views, political leanings, hobbies, and relationship desires between men and women. If an app were to provide more filtering options, it would quickly become apparent to users that there are few matches available.

Expand full comment
Willow Pedersen's avatar

All you need is 1 :) (Mostly joking, I realize that’s very optimistic!) I hear you. I think better filtering would actually help with this problem. If people could actually filter and find someone who really matched most of what they were looking for, they would probably 1) find someone, 2) save time by realizing there’s no one on that app that they want to date and looking elsewhere, or 3) come to the realization that… (as you point out) there are significant differences, and if they really want a partner, they need to be open to men who are less than 6’ tall, for example. I think maybe 14% of men in the US are over 6’, if I’m remembering right. My friends are always shocked to find that out. Seeing these statistics in real life on an app may help people come back to reality and might help take off some of the pressure women feel from their friends to “not settle.” Or they might chalk it up to option #2 and go back to the endless scrolling and dopamine hits of Tinder. It would take some testing to find out.

Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

That's such a great point.

Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

Sounds like you have some great thoughts!!

Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

Build it!

Expand full comment
Cinna the Poet's avatar

The point you (and others who focus on these numbers) are missing is that men greatly outnumber women on the apps.

The "top 78 percent of women" pool is probably still smaller in absolute size than the "top 20 percent of men" pool in the population you're talking about.

Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

The other part, Cinna is that the men may outnumber the women but up to 60% of them are already in a relationship!!

Expand full comment
Erwin Cuellar's avatar

I feel like we (single men and women), don't have enough time to figure things out in this changing dating environment, before we've run out of runway. There's like a prime 15-year window (from like post-college 22 years old to 37) to do it all; find your match, be fertile, have kids, build up the income to be a good match, and more. Then factor in life changes, and you've cut that window even further (going back to school, career changes, illness, disease, depression, recessions, pandemic). People on apps want to explore as much as possible, while simultaneously marrying someone, it's conflicting free for all.

The apps remind me of food ordering apps. If that's your primary way of finding food (or dates), then you're at the mercy of the apps. Modern daters could learn the dating skills of past, of "hunting and cooking your own food" lol.

Expand full comment
Francisco's avatar

Do you have a source for the “90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0” stat? I tried searching for source and was unable to find any. That seems fairly implausible given that only about 12% of men are over 6’0”. This tweet claims that when women on bumble use search filters, about 30% of them include men 5”10’.

https://twitter.com/eftegarie/status/1501202280120729603

Expand full comment
Ross Andrews's avatar

I would like to see a source for all of the stats. I believe them (they fit with my experience in online dating) but I'm curious about where they came from.

Expand full comment
TGGP's avatar

Scott Alexander wrote that the evidence doesn't seem to match the hypergamy hypothesis:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hypergamy-much-more-than-you-wanted

Expand full comment
Logan's avatar

The Substack "The Nuance Pill" does a good job debunking a lot of these claims as well. Here's their top post: https://nuancepill.substack.com/p/are-dating-apps-facilitating-chadopolies

From the concluding "Summary":

"-Data on dating app outcomes show a high degree of gender parity regarding meeting, dating, have sex, and forming relationships. The distributions of unique dates are also very similar.

-Men outnumber women on dating apps about 3:1. When adjusting for this imbalance, the median match rate for men and women on Tinder evens out. The average woman isn’t matching with a bunch of chads.

-Both men and women have a strong desirability skew, but the people who actually end up exchanging messages and going on dates probably tend to be quite close in terms of their within-gender desirability rank. This is less obvious on swipe apps because for efficiency reasons many men opt for a serial swiping strategy."

Expand full comment
Graham's avatar

WHERE ARE THE FUCKIBG WOMEN THEN 😭😭😭😭

No one my age with a college degree goes out in Vegas, they’re only on apps, or they’ve been in relationships since high school or early college. Where are the single people? Everyone at bars is over 30

Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

Believe it or not, they are wondering where the men are.

Expand full comment
User's avatar
Comment deleted
Mar 3
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

Thanks for being so forthcoming, Ed. It sounds like things have been very frustrating for you. I go into why men and women are having difficulty connecting right now: https://syngleeconomycs.substack.com/p/parallel-universes-why-singles-struggle

If you chose to be a monk as a part of a life goal, that would be great. If it's not what you truly want, then you'll run into more frustration.

Expand full comment
Critical Conditions's avatar

Look overseas.

Expand full comment
Graham's avatar

🤨 I am a patriot and wish to date AMERICAN women who like PIZZA and SUSHI you know AMERICAN FOODS 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Expand full comment
Critical Conditions's avatar

Lol! Nice.

Expand full comment
Torless Caraz's avatar

Good post. The stats alone, without even considering the particularities of the demands on each side, paint a dismal picture.

This is not just a lifestyle issue, but a civilizational one, especially considering the profile of people who reproduce (who, let's put it gently, will not be the ones to maintain a complex society up and running). So it's a big problem, which requires big solutions.

We could start with sex segregation, which was the norm in basically all of history prior to the 1960s, when, coincidentally, we stopped producing men of geniuses. This would revive love, and make more robust educated men. And, quite frankly anything which makes men outcompete women in status and economically is part of the solution. The liberals answer to this is "let's die out and import massive amount of 'migrants' ". No thanks.

Expand full comment
T. Eran Dalex's avatar

Yeh, when I saw option 2), I was like “I mean… that doesn’t seem so bad. Making more men into gigachads sounds good to me!”

Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

Women don't need gigachads, they need men who groom themselves, have good hygiene and see them as human beings and not a neon sex sign.

Expand full comment
T. Eran Dalex's avatar

I speak memese, but as a translation of what I actually mean, your comment is close. Those things + useful + good character sound like gigachad to me.

Expand full comment
Yoav R's avatar

We still produce genius men, and either they are quite normal and well adjusted like Terence Tao or deranged like Elon Musk. Much the same as it used to be.

Expand full comment
Sarah Stroh's avatar

I believe polyamory can also have the effect of taking the pressure off of women to find that "100% perfect" guy they are after (and maybe give others a chance.)

When my partner and I started dating 3ish years ago, he wasn't sure he would be ready to have kids when I needed him too (I was 31 and he was 27). But I thought hey, we're non-monogamous, so let's keep dating anyway. I can still meet others while we're together. Low and behold, cut to today, and we are expecting our first baby together in January :). We;re both very happy (and still non-monogamous).

Expand full comment
Katerina's avatar

I was wondering if someone would point that out. We don’t have to have a 1:1 or 1:n relationships.

Expand full comment
Black Pilled Paki's avatar

Poly, open relationships unfortunately only benefit women . That’s another overlooked issue

Expand full comment
Black Pilled Paki's avatar

Can be meet other women or is he the inferior one in the relationship who is limited to you?

Expand full comment
Evie Gray's avatar

‘45% of women will be childless and single by 2030’…and they will be happier and live longer than their married counterparts.

As a woman who has used dating apps on and off over the past 5 years, I’ve noticed a change in the type of man using them. There’s a lot of low effort and ambivalence happening. Not sure if that’s also the experience of men with women, but I recently lasted 3 days back on the apps after 2 years break. It felt weird and off. Things are definitely shifting.

For me, though, staying single is also a perfectly comfortable and happy choice for now.

Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

There is indeed a shift. As more men succumb to red pill media, there's a definite shift.

Expand full comment
Black Pilled Paki's avatar

Unmarried but not celibate.

Single women have more active sex lives than single men

Expand full comment
bobby valentine's avatar

"A society with too many isolated men and no war to send them to is a scary situation. A term for this is the bare branches theory: the idea that when you get enough branches on a family tree that have no hope of growing new branches, you end up having to drum up a war with an enemy outside of your country, otherwise, they will decay your country from the inside."

I firmly believe that this is strongly related to the wave of men buoying Trump and this new wave of fascism we are witnessing.

Fantastic essay, bravo, bravo.

Expand full comment
Syngle Economycs's avatar

You have accurately read the tea leaves.

Expand full comment
El Monstro's avatar

What percentage of men will be childless and single by 2030?

Expand full comment
Black Pilled Paki's avatar

Who cares?

Expand full comment
Stephan Cook's avatar

We have way too many humans. Darwin at work.

Expand full comment
Brian Doran's avatar

I think about this sometimes in relation to Balajis network state idea. If you wanted to truly find your “soul mate”, why are you limiting it to a 15 mile radius of your geographical location? I get it, we all have jobs and friends and homes and hobbies IRL, but if you found the absolute perfect match but they lived 750 miles away, and you could meet them digitally/holographically in the metaverse or on the Vision Pro, wouldn’t one of them up-end their life to make it work? Or do you have a cloud relationship with some sort of black mirror technology to supplement the physical demands?

That means leaning even further in to app culture, but I fear that the cat is too far out of the bag in terms of hypergamy and preference seeking. The same way that dopamine/phone addiction is too far gone, which is probably the root cause of the dating app issue anyways. To peel back hypergamy you have to peel back social media and then smart phones and then digital life in general. It’s an immense uphill battle.

Expand full comment
Neurology For You's avatar

Long distance relationship are miserable, though, I doubt VR goggles will help

Expand full comment
Rawform's avatar

I’ll raise you a question—what’s wrong with being single and childless?

Expand full comment
Joshua's avatar

Forgot to include Passport Bros, the only logical way out for average men.

Expand full comment
Jubei Raziel's avatar

It’s all just Hoeflation.

Expand full comment