How to use a Dating App, Lesson 2
Selection Bias
“Living my best life” “must love travel” “be my hype man” “growth mindset” “adventurous” “NO HOOKUPS”
Women these days seem rather confused (although they seem certain that they’re not interested in hookups; unfortunately this piece of information will not deter men looking for hookups). Do they want a fulsome career or multiple kids with lots of family time? Yes! Do they want adventurous men without inhibition, interested in travel and novelty, or stable men who work hard and amass wealth? Yes! Do they want financial intelligence and the benefits of frugality (property, investments, etc.) or beautiful cars and the kinds of clothes which require surrendering a great deal of disposable income? Yes! Do they want rugged avatars of masculinity or men with a soft side and personal experience with therapy? Yes! They want it all.
Please keep in mind, these priorities are not necessarily in conflict. I’m pretty tough… and I’ve been in therapy for years. I also have a dating experience which has occurred almost entirely within the South Florida singles scene, which I’m told is rather more shallow and acquisitive than many. Take what I say with these grains of salt.
Nevertheless, my point stands. Women seem to have a fuzzy idea of what they want (kind of) but is this idea realistic? Do they have any workable route to get there? Is there even an acknowledgement that success in dating (like many other areas of life) is largely a reflection of one’s own actions and beliefs? Or… are their goals unrealistic, their plans confused, and their worldview almost completely bereft of a sense of ownership and personal accountability? Those are questions which I will not be answering here. Contemplate them at your leisure. Here I want to give you some more solid lessons on how to use a dating app.
How to Use a Dating App: Lesson 1
Stand Out From the Crowd
How to Use a Dating App - Part 1, Recap
Try to endow your profile with some personal flair. Include meaningful details about yourself. Politely disregard everything your female friends tell you-if they really understood men they would be married, or they would avoid us altogether in favor of lesbianism or celibacy. Avoid mentioning your love of travel and music and food, as these are asinine details to share about yourself. The fact is that no one cares about these thing. Even the people who care about you don’t care about you because you enjoy R & B or have been to Mexico twice. Men will pretend to care about these things because men will pretend to care about anything on your profile but they do not. We do not care.
Ask yourself what features have drawn you towards the men that you’ve fallen for? Now disregard all of those entirely… men don’t care about those kind of things in women either. Nevertheless, men have a very definite and fairly uniform set of criteria we use to evaluate dating prospects. Just as you liked a man’s cleverness or his wry humor or his masculinity or fitness, certain men will like personal attributes of yours. Men tend to be even more consistent in these preferences than women, I think.
The Not-so Good Life
Our culture has struggled to find a compelling narrative for men. What are men? What should they do? What should they be? Essentially, the message seems to be: be less manly. Be soft. Be vulnerable. Be cheerful… even at the cost of ridicule or uncertainty. Don’t be assertive or dominant. Definitely don’t be aggressive. Good luck with that, culture.
Women, however, receive a very clear and enveloping message: the narrative for women is to be everything. Not every single woman is to be everything, of course, but every single woman is to be educated, independently prosperous, professionally successful, confident, mentally healthy, and happy. If you want a husband and kids go for it, I guess. It’s not exactly recommended but you’re adults.
On a more superficial level women are encouraged to seek The Good Life-in advertising and music videos and streaming shows and movies. Women are programmed to aspire to a life of brash self-assurance, surrounded by beautiful things, doing interesting work, with a diverse (although never old or ugly) group of friends. There are not too many white men in flannel or construction workers or farmers in these focused grouped pre-selected groups of friends, I notice… but that could be an oversight. Essentially women are being pushed toward a mildly progressive, consumerist vision of happiness through career and vacation and shopping and nights out. As far as I can tell many women have constructed their lives according to this plan, either due to natural predilections or cultural messaging. They have built responsible, productive, busy, sunny lives… and they want to add a man-the final keystone to the arch of Good Living (although, unlike actual keystones, men-and definitely marriages-are very much optional factors in this equation).
The Insidious Deception of 'The Good Life'
I began writing something based upon my observations about modern young women… then I decided it was not what I really wanted to write, and I discarded it. It’s at the bottom of the post if you’re interested. This will be a hasty and speculative piece because my attitudes in this area are uncertain, and many of my thoughts and beliefs are based on generalizations or impressions. It’s also highly focused on the female sex. Just as the statement that ‘men as a group have a special relationship with physical violence’ seems indubitable to me the claim that ‘women as a group have a special relationship with modern consumer culture’ seems fairly undeniable. Nevertheless, these are not crystallized beliefs. Rather they are blurry ideas, still forming.
It is natural that women should take pride in their lives and want to advertise them to men. Look how busy I am! Look how many cool things I do! Look at my vacations and my pretty dresses and my girly drinks! This makes sense: women have been told to pursue the Good Life and they therefore believe that advertising The Good Life to men will attract The Good Man.
What you must understand, ladies, is that men are not seeking The Good Life and we never were. Many men are struggling to hold their lives together but even the ones who are flourishing are doing it because they love their work or they get exhilarated in the gym or they have a tight group of friends who are nearly brothers, with whom they’ve been through some shit. If you find a man who’s drawn to the superficial or the status-signifying aspects of life (vacations, clothes, restaurants, cars) outside of the context of attracting women: run. There’s an excellent chance that man is a sociopath.
If you’re building a house you don’t frame the thing and then build out the bathrooms and add tile and accessories and paint before you finish the rest. Still less do you complete the roof before you build the walls. The sad fact is that woman have been sold a vision of life which revolves purely around themselves and their shopping preferences and their travel plans and career prospects. Then they try to shove a man into the equation. Life simply doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason that the previous generations of (almost) uniformly solid marriages were comprised of people who met in high school or age 20. They constructed their lives together… they didn’t build their pet-having, cocktail-drinking, vacation-taking dream life and then try to glue another (very different) adult human onto it. It can be done but it’s difficult, for a number of reasons.
I cannot correct the cultural narrative-I wouldn’t even know where to start. I can tell you that if a husband and kids are the lowest priorities for you in constructing a life your situation may end up reflecting that. I’m here to tell you how to use a dating app. You’ve probably walked a ways down a path of professional preoccupation and borderline narcissism, indulging your whims to whatever extent your disposable income has allowed. That’s your affair. Here are some tips…
Selection Bias
You want to advertise the features which are going to draw you toward good and decent men, of every kind. We do not really care about your vacations or your career or even your hobbies.
Here is a list of priorities according to which men evaluate female dating prospects, in order of most important to least:
(1) Attractiveness (mostly physical)
(2) Kindness and virtue
(3) Mental health (crazy? not too crazy?)
(4) Intelligence
(5) Interests / career / activities / blah, blah, blah…
Select photos based upon this list. You want pretty photos but if you’re too obvious about trying to show off your body we will note this. You might bristle at the presumption of men (who are often insanely promiscuous and completely dishonest) judging women on the basis of modesty. Bristle all you want! Men who are looking for relationships usually prefer sensible and kind and modest women. We’re not (usually) looking for an accessory to our Good Life. We’re looking for a lifetime friend (and not a photo insert on Instagram) and a sexual partner and a mother to our future children, more or less in that order.
Do not include pronouns. This is is huge red flag for most men. We can tell you’re women. If we can’t we’re not matching with you anyway. When I see ‘she/her’ on a profile I don’t note the fact that the person is a woman. I already knew that. Dating apps set it up this way. I note the fact that there’s a roughly 50% chance that the person has bizarre political or cultural attitudes which they learned in graduate school and which have been reinforced in HR trainings. Those attitudes are not necessarily a deal-breaker but they usually indicate a certain level of entitlement or psychological instability. It’s not about who you are and what you believe. Do you believe that people are whichever sex/gender they believe themselves to be? Do you want a relationship with a capable and rugged man? You’re going to have to pick. Capable and masculine men do not believe this. Ever. None of us do. Forget your pronouns.
Tell us what you want. Do you want kids? Do you want to be married? Yes? Then tell us please. If the answer is no then you’re fair game for hookups, regardless of anything else on your profile. On Hinge there’s a place where women can state they’re “figuring out their dating goals”. If you’re a woman trying to figure out you’re dating goals the only way that including this is going to help is by helping to initiate a vast personal experiment of unserious men who are trying to casually sleep with you for minimal effort. Remember ladies: we’re men. “Figuring out dating goals” is literally meaningless to us (I couldn’t tell you what it means… honestly). If you’re not looking for love in an intentional and serious way then you’re looking for sex. That is how we view the world. We understand that your perspective is quite different but we’re so used to hearing vague and sentimental (and sometimes flagrantly contradictory) things from you that we tend to kind of tune out proclamations like this. Sorry.
Factor in dishonesty. It must be said: many men are seeking a wife. Many men are seeking whatever they can get. Some smaller number are seeking something else but we can disregard them. They’re probably mostly weirdos. You first task in selecting among men is to ascertain which category they fall into. This can be difficult… it can take months. I will discuss this more in the next part of this essay but please remember: many men are dishonest. Just as you don’t prize absolute honesty when you go to a job interview (you want to get the job, not disclose the fact that you had trouble waking up sometimes) men often do not prioritize honesty in this situation. If a certain kind of man sees a profile with information about the personal importance of Church and Our Lord Jesus Christ he does not think ‘Oh… she’s religious. I’ll move on’. He immediately begins to calculate how much subterfuge and pretension he might have to use to manage to have sex with this woman. This is not every man… it might not even be most. But it’s a lot of them.
In the next part of this series I will give you some suggestions about how to select matches and how to engage with men on the apps. I haven’t given you every piece of wisdom I can about setting up your profile but I’m tried of typing and you’re an adult. Just forget the cocktails and dresses and drinks. You’re trying to attract men after all. We don’t really care about that stuff.
Physically we might be superficial and many of us are chronically flaky… but there are many men out here who are really seeking deep connection. We’re looking for kindness and originality and stability-not people pretending to have those things for social media.
The gap between those two kinds of people is immense.
Good luck!
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James, I love your writing on this topic! It is so grounded in reality and truly asks what women (and men) are bringing to the table. Incredibly good writing that has lifted my spirits!
I met my husband online almost 24 years ago on a dating site (excite personals). I don't remember it being this complicated. I guess people weren't quite as shallow then because there was no instagram or tik tok. All I can say is thank God!