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.
The skew is a retention issue, not a sign-up issue.
You're both looking at the active user base at a given snapshot rather than the actual lifecycle of an account. Women leave dating apps vastly quicker than men do because they get completely saturated by the sheer volume of attention almost immediately. As soon as they lock down a top-tier guy, they delete the app and exit the pool.
Men, on the other hand, stay on the apps indefinitely, swiping into the void because their match rate is dismal. The gender ratio looks insane because the churn rate for women is massively higher, not because men inherently sign up more or because 60% of the guys are secretly in relationships.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
The speedbumps for daters are immense: societal norms, psychological preferences, and system issues. Overcoming the norms and preferences takes effort, but the standard apps don't seem to be helping much.
Dating" apps aren't good at getting people to actually date. They're not good at "matching" either.
I met my wife when I found a niche app with a great system: you could see only one profile per week, and if you both accepted each other then the guy asked the girl out within 24 hours. That meant none of the bulls$ waffling and trading texts, we went out for something other than casual coffee, and I was focused on one person.
If I had seen her profile on a different site in a different structure, she wouldn't have stood out to me, and I not to her.
I think it's a good thing that the apps encourage you to spread out and see as many profiles, because you need to be open to finding somebody anywhere. I'm from Colorado, and I met my wife in Australia. At the same time, it's still up to the user to have the self-awareness to find a niche, be a good person who is loyal and can improve, and commit to a person that you're with.
There is no "the one" for you, even with AI prediction and filtering -- you have to make your own filter.
Except that with the filter they’ll find the 14% tall guys and all the women will chase them just like the current apps. There still are hundreds if not thousands of guys in big metro area that meet the limited “tall, rich, handsome” criteria - which seems like a lot! Except there are probably tens of thousands of women trying to match with them.
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.
Standards are too high. Just about every happy married couple I know basically settled in some way- they would say that though. To them they are getting more out than they put in, because they are willing to look past the downsides in their inevitably flawed partners. The requirement for compatibility are much lower than most people expect, if they can just be willing to take the bad with the good and make a good of it.
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’.
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.
"-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."
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
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.
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.
‘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.
You seem to be imbibing (and spreading) falsehood.
On average both genders are happier in a relationship, and I believe married mothers are the happiest group of all. Look it up. Studies reliabily find that partnered people are happier. For example: "How’s Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point for Happiness. Authors: Shawn Grover & John F. Helliwell
Journal: Journal of Happiness Studiess" In particular, this paper shows there is a causal effect (being partnered causally increases wellbeing).
"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.
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).
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.
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.
The other part, Cinna is that the men may outnumber the women but up to 60% of them are already in a relationship!!
The skew is a retention issue, not a sign-up issue.
You're both looking at the active user base at a given snapshot rather than the actual lifecycle of an account. Women leave dating apps vastly quicker than men do because they get completely saturated by the sheer volume of attention almost immediately. As soon as they lock down a top-tier guy, they delete the app and exit the pool.
Men, on the other hand, stay on the apps indefinitely, swiping into the void because their match rate is dismal. The gender ratio looks insane because the churn rate for women is massively higher, not because men inherently sign up more or because 60% of the guys are secretly in relationships.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
The speedbumps for daters are immense: societal norms, psychological preferences, and system issues. Overcoming the norms and preferences takes effort, but the standard apps don't seem to be helping much.
Dating" apps aren't good at getting people to actually date. They're not good at "matching" either.
I met my wife when I found a niche app with a great system: you could see only one profile per week, and if you both accepted each other then the guy asked the girl out within 24 hours. That meant none of the bulls$ waffling and trading texts, we went out for something other than casual coffee, and I was focused on one person.
If I had seen her profile on a different site in a different structure, she wouldn't have stood out to me, and I not to her.
I think it's a good thing that the apps encourage you to spread out and see as many profiles, because you need to be open to finding somebody anywhere. I'm from Colorado, and I met my wife in Australia. At the same time, it's still up to the user to have the self-awareness to find a niche, be a good person who is loyal and can improve, and commit to a person that you're with.
There is no "the one" for you, even with AI prediction and filtering -- you have to make your own filter.
Except that with the filter they’ll find the 14% tall guys and all the women will chase them just like the current apps. There still are hundreds if not thousands of guys in big metro area that meet the limited “tall, rich, handsome” criteria - which seems like a lot! Except there are probably tens of thousands of women trying to match with them.
That's such a great point.
Sounds like you have some great thoughts!!
Build it!
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.
Standards are too high. Just about every happy married couple I know basically settled in some way- they would say that though. To them they are getting more out than they put in, because they are willing to look past the downsides in their inevitably flawed partners. The requirement for compatibility are much lower than most people expect, if they can just be willing to take the bad with the good and make a good of it.
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
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.
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
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."
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
Believe it or not, they are wondering where the men are.
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.
🤨 I am a patriot and wish to date AMERICAN women who like PIZZA and SUSHI you know AMERICAN FOODS 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
‘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.
There is indeed a shift. As more men succumb to red pill media, there's a definite shift.
You seem to be imbibing (and spreading) falsehood.
On average both genders are happier in a relationship, and I believe married mothers are the happiest group of all. Look it up. Studies reliabily find that partnered people are happier. For example: "How’s Life at Home? New Evidence on Marriage and the Set Point for Happiness. Authors: Shawn Grover & John F. Helliwell
Journal: Journal of Happiness Studiess" In particular, this paper shows there is a causal effect (being partnered causally increases wellbeing).
Unmarried but not celibate.
Single women have more active sex lives than single men
"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.
You have accurately read the tea leaves.
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).
Can be meet other women or is he the inferior one in the relationship who is limited to you?
I was wondering if someone would point that out. We don’t have to have a 1:1 or 1:n relationships.
Poly, open relationships unfortunately only benefit women . That’s another overlooked issue
related:
- Insights from 2,961 First Dates: https://dkras.substack.com/p/sex-differences-attractiveness-and
- On the Future of Dating: https://dkras.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-future-of-dating
What percentage of men will be childless and single by 2030?
Who cares?
We have way too many humans. Darwin at work.
Forgot to include Passport Bros, the only logical way out for average men.
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.
Long distance relationship are miserable, though, I doubt VR goggles will help
Gayyyyyy
It’s all just Hoeflation.
I’ll raise you a question—what’s wrong with being single and childless?
I want to kill myself