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How the Hell Does [Asking People Out] Work, Actually?
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Can’t remember if that study was the one that used messages received or a rating panel.
Attractiveness has some degree of subjectivity, but when measured over large groups it becomes pretty universal and repeatable.
First, it’s really really important to remember that “attractiveness” covers a wide variety of desirable traits (personality, job status, etc.) beyond just being physically attractive.
I wouldn’t term it as “ugly people should stick with ugly people,” but in a crass way it’s correct. Whether they should or not in some moral sense, people tend to pair off along similar levels of attractiveness. It’s called the “matching phenomenon” and it’s well-studied (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matching_hypothesis). Or as this study puts it, “equilibrium patterns of mixing.” (http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaap9815)
Greedy and self-delusional is a fantastically negative way to describe messaging people you find attractive.
People are unlikely to message people they find unattractive. I have no idea how attractive I am on an objective scale but, according to the statistics you quoted up-thread, people tend to be paired with people who are as attractive as they are, implying I must have some innate sense of my own attractiveness and, thereby, am unattracted to people less attractive than I am.
If everyone I message is roughly as attractive as I am or more so then the average relative attractiveness of the people I message will always be greater than 0%. For every person 20% more attractive than me whom I message I'd have to go out of my way to message someone I am statistically likely to find unattractive for it to ever balance out. And if I send messages to twenty people, the majority of whom are around as good looking as I am but one of whom is really, really attractive but happens to share a lot of interests with me...wallah, my average is now pushing into "greedy and self-delusional".
I've had a few matches on Tinder where my initial message got the reply "oh, sorry, I didn't notice before on your profile that you want a relationship, I'm not ready for that right now".
The first woman I ever fell in love with said she didn't want to be in a relationship but was interested in being friends with benefits. I turned her down, saying I didn't think I would find that satisfying compared to a committed relationship.
Now, though, I wonder if that was a mistake. Maybe it would have eventually become a real relationship? If nothing else maybe I would have gotten experience and built confidence.
Self-delusional is pretty judgemental as well, which is why I called it 'fantastically negative'. There are much less mean ways to phrase that like, say, 'overly-optimistic'.
But my point remains that, mathematically and logically, the percentage of relative attractiveness between messagers and messagees is always going to be positive because people don't try to date people they find unattractive. Twenty percent is actually low enough, all things considered, that I'd say people are probably, by and large, fairly realistic about who they're messaging.
Yes, you should pursue short term or casual relationships if they interest you. They would definitely be good for you to develop social skills.
Don’t go into them hoping they will turn into something other than what they explicitly say they want.
Even if you're dating in search of a serious relationship you shouldn't lead with that. It puts a tremendous amount of pressure on any prospective partner.
If you're 'casually dating' someone and the two of you have the chemistry, for lack of a better term, for a 'serious dating' relationship then it will happen on its own.
And yes, going out with a number of people casually where some of them dump you and you dump some of them and some of them you just go your separate ways after a date or three will build your confidence.
On the one hand, that kind of shallow arrangement also means you don't need to stop looking for more, if she objects to you doing so then "friends with benefits" isn't enough for her either. There's no sunk opportunity cost.
On the other, in this specific case, you loved her and she was only willing to return the occasional roll in the hay. Both sides of asymmetric relationships like that are breeding grounds for that special romantic resentment that is just poison in the soul. Every relationship is better if both sides have similar desires from it.
Edit: To clarify: You should absolutely not approach every new relationship like you want it to be your one and only. Friends with benefits is fine if you're on the same page with things. Casual dating is good, even if you want more, because it's always different and it's not always special. No matter how much confidence and experience you have, you won't know a serious relationship when you walk into it and excluding casual relationships will exclude potentially serious ones with it.
So, in 2009 OKCupid did a little bit of data analysis based on their user ratings. They studied two things: How men/women tended to rate the other sex, and how often men/women tended to message those people relative to their attractiveness rating. Almost always, if somebody brings up the study, they will only talk about the ratings and not the messaging, and use it to draw conclusions about women; "this proves the 80% statistic", "women are picky and judgmental", etc. But that's not the whole story at all.
So, men tended to rate women at a nearly perfect bell curve, while women tended to rate men with a lopsided distribution; a lot of people rated 2/5, and very few people rated 5/5. Now, it's important to note these ratings are based on OKCupid users, which may not be representative of the general public. However, when it came to messaging, the opposite trend emerged; men almost exclusively messaged extremely attractive women (4/5 average or higher), while women tended to message men almost irrelevant of their ratings, with a slight bias against men rated 1.5/5 or less.
So, what conclusions can we draw from that? Not a whole lot, really. The biggest issue is that this is a study of a specific dating subculture, presumably using data from the late aughts, and the original study is lost to time so the methodology can't be double checked. Maybe women only messaged in such an "egalitarian" fashion because they are bombarded with messages, so any level of active response will start to look like the overall distribution. Maybe the men using dating apps in 2008-2009 really were less attractive than normal (there was still definitely a stigma against online dating then). Maybe part of men's huge messaging rate to attractive women is that anybody who could take and upload good photographs in that time period was more likely to have other signs of being a "real" profile with something to discuss. We can definitely spitball, but it's absolutely not enough to make sweeping statements like "women find 80% of men ugly" or whatever.
A place to deal with this is at least a third of the reason the Internet Dating thread exists and continues to exist. And a key bit of advice that's often been repeated is that online sites/apps are a tool but it helps to have other avenues to switch focus on or just generally take a break when the yelling into the void of the online side gets too soul crushing. There's been at least one study I've read about that concluded that dating apps can erode self-esteem which is borne out by many experiences.
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Does it though? The vast, vast majority of messages I've sent on dating sites have been ignored without even looking at my profile at all which suggests a high proportion of physical attraction in the judgement as the profile picture is attached automatically
I may be weird in this regard, but even though I didn't lose my virginity until I was 28 (I'm 30 now) I was never ashamed of not having had sex because I wanted a girlfriend who was very similar to me in terms of interests and didn't value the idea of sleeping around for its own sake.
However, my most recent break-up was very hard on me because she went from seeming very interested in me at the start to ghosting me. I think part of the problem was that we didn't have that much in common and I'm much more confident talking to a fellow nerd, but I'm afraid another part of it was that I just wasn't as experienced as she expected me to be.
I thought I had been making progress with my mental health and confidence before then, but afterwards I think I felt the worst I ever had and I'm afraid to go through that again. So maybe I do need to start some kind of low-stakes relationship.
So silly me I thought giving her a valentines gift would be nice. O the rumors and comments made
She did everything in her power to avoid me and the only comment she told me was Why did you want to ask me out could you done that discreetly? Why the gift? Do you know what that did?
Also she used her best friend to talk to me often to gather info about me and why I liked her.
Pretty much this and what followed made me very wary of making friends or talking to people. As this happened the late summer into the summer of the next year.
I have been on dates I did not know was a date till much later.
I had no idea how to ask her out that was a mental block in my mind I ran over and over I still have this problem as I just don't know how
“Would you like to get a drink/coffee sometime?”
Yeah, people confuse what happened with nobility from what happened with your average person throughout history. Mostly cause we know more about the nobility, at least in popular culture. But as far as I remember your average non-noble married a lot older then people think (in their 20s, often first trying to secure a means of living and a place to live and living with their family until that was possible) and marriages weren't arranged.
I think the actual number lacks enough context to say much of anything but I think with all the other information it just highlights the degree to which the rules of interaction are not clear for many, especially in the context of increasing awareness and scrutiny of male/female power dynamics (ie - sexual harassment is a thing and we are looking at it more closely then ever), continuing and extremely strong cultural norms (ie - men ask women out and that's how it must be) and a general lack of places where people can meet other people in a context that encourages or forces interaction that gets over both the first issue and the more general issue where people maybe just wanna buy some cereal rather then have a conversation or the like.
It kinda goes back to that whole question of asking people out at work. If not there, then where? And yet there's all sorts of ambiguities in asking someone out at work too.
If you want to talk about dating with any sort of science behind it, stuff is gonna have to get quantified and numbers are gonna be used. And when you start describing human behavior with numbers, it’s gonna have some overlap with some crazy theories too. It can’t be helped.
You can only really kind of talk about really opaque big picture things with large population sets and even then it's fraught with nonsense.
We can, however, talk about society as a whole and why it makes dating suck for everyone from men to women and everyone in between. Those things are much easier to quantify.
I posit that the primary problem is humans.
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A few generations ago in the US it was very, very common for people to learn how to dance ballroom and other partnered dances and I think a big part of the reason was to provide a venue where the opposite sexes met up and were encouraged to interact at a time meeting people through work was less viable. That option is still around and one I'm a big fan of but not everyone lives near a dance venue or can afford lessons/cover charges.
Church would be another common way but obviously not an option for non-believers today. Even for the faithful, not every church has enough single people of an appropriate age demographic. At least one middle aged wife made some really awkward attempts at playing matchmaker at the church I used to meet with trying to get us guys to go somewhere she was trying to get the one single young adult woman to go to.
As a society it feels like we've shed more social interaction venues or at least cut back on how prolific many are compared to new ones popping up.
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You know what? It really doesn't.
To me it sounds like DIY exposure therapy, basically. You found a situation where you could confront your fears (of approaching women) in a safe environment (because everyone involved knows exactly what the rules are and there's less at stake emotionally). I think that's a perfectly fine way to get comfortable interacting with women in a semi-intimate context, as long as you understand the limits and boundaries of that approach (and it sounds like you did).
Honestly, I'm really glad you found something that worked for you.
(For the record, I am a woman, in case that affects how anyone reads this post.)
* Different people have different preferred dating strategies, and these can conflict -hard-. Some people were raised to be direct and honest, and other people were raised to play games, and there's just an endless array of preferences that do not mesh well. You also have different levels of exclusivity that can be really confusing even between monogamous folks.
* It's easy to get anxiety over the risk of damaging an existing friendship with that person. Many people consider the end of a romantic relationship to also be the end of all friendship or even association with that person. Even if it doesn't happen, you create questions about past and future motivation for the friendship. I expect this is even worse for demisexual persons.
* The risk of making a bad choice. STIs, trauma, abuse, stalking, assault, financial harm, etc.
* The risk of sticking with a bad choice and missing much better opportunities and then whups now the best (and/or most fertile) time of your life is gone.
* The risk of making a good choice but with built-in excruciating choices down the road (love and family vs. career and self-actualization, etc.)
* All the consequences of everyone else's bad experiences that they aren't able to move past - OKCupid after 30 is a sea of bitterness and "no drama" warnings.
* Plenty of life choices are still verboten, and they're not easy to bring up without basically outing yourself and dealing with that bit of stress, especially if the other person is revolted.
* Trying to avoid hurting someone with the timing of sharing your interest - do you freak someone out or risk being a rebound by asking someone out the instant they break up, or do you never ask them because by the time you think they're ready they're already in another relationship?
* Sometimes someone says something weird that strongly suggests that they're sideways telling you that they're not interested before you even ask but did they mean YOU or just everyone not involved in the conversation?
* Sometimes you do nice things for a person because they are neat people and now they're going to feel pressured - I've literally had someone voice this emotional, instinctual response even knowing me for years
Personally, I don't can't really ask women out, but instead occasionally get asked in various ways. I've had a few accidates where I didn't actually realize they thought it was a date, and my share of the spontaneous makeout sessions after bumping hands, but for those I'm interested in I'm too terrified of causing them discomfort or risking our friendship.
Put me in front of a crowd, a cliff above jagged rocks, an angry wolf, or a drunk with a knife, or a manager who needs to be told they're wrong, hey I'll handle it. But goddamn don't ask me to ask a woman out I'd rather deal with my needle phobia that causes me to hyperventilate.
Edit: And yeah, my parents were really bad at giving me dating advice, unsurprisingly.
Let me preface this by saying I dated very little before getting married, but do people really jump straight to asking someone out?
Like if I met someone a few times, and they seemed like someone I would like, it wouldn’t even occur to me to ask them out.
At first I would just seek them out more wherever we happened to overlap. So if we are coworkers maybe I stop by their desk to chat more often. Or if it’s someone at my gym maybe I ask a few more questions about their weekend instead of just saying hey.
That usually progresses to asking if the want to join in other activities (not really dating ones though). Usually it would be some kind of a group activity, but even if it wasn’t it would be something I would do even if they didn’t come, so it wasn’t really a date but more a joint activity. Like “hey I don’t know if you like rock climbing but I like to go every know and then. You should come sometime.”
By then I will have gotten to know them quite a bit, and it doesn’t seem so forward to ask them out on a clear date type activity.
And I know this explicitly rules out dating people you only meet once or twice, so I’m not trying to say it is the only way (or even the best way), but I’m curious if it is more the norm to get to know someone first in this way or to just ask them out first and then get to know them.
The people in your major will be forced to be around you (and possibly interact with you) for the duration of your degree. In much the same way your coworkers are forced to be around/interact with you until someone changes jobs. And with the way the job market has changed, 4 years is not that much shorter than the amount of time most people stay at the same job/company.
Ignoring, of course, the obvious issues with asking out someone who works for you.
Some people explicitly find it weird to date a friend. I imagine these are the people who tend to also never talk to someone again if they break up.
In college, you have to deal with someone for a semester.
At work, you could have to deal with someone for decades. I mean, not these days, but historically.
-Direct chain-of-command: If you ask someone out lower than you, then that person may not feel freely able to decline without consequence. If you ask out someone higher than you, then you're very much risking looking like you're trying to climb the ladder via sexual favour. Its less likely that a fellow student will be in this sort of position of authority (at least for any length of time).
-Post break up awkwardness (or even just during fights): Lots of relationships fail and if they go badly wrong, and then the results can be poisonous to either or both you. You can appear unprofessional and damage your advancement prospects (or even wind up fired). Maybe if you're in a very small program, this might be a factor, but most undergrad courses are pretty huge and even if you make one class awkward, it probably won't travel too far.
Of course, plenty of workplace relationships do wind up working and people keep trying them, but they do have some very distinct pitfalls that a lot of people (including me) have learned the hard way.
Yeah, sometimes! It has the benefit of being a less stinging rejection (if it is one) because this is a person you haven't known very long, don't yet have a crush on, and can easily just go 'oh well, nothing ventured nothing gained' and move on along with your day.
It's pretty much the same as meeting up with someone that you spoke with on tinder. You'll find out on the date if anything is there.
Going through the whole develop feelings before asking them out process is nice and all, but I can barely remember the last time I just randomly had a crush on someone I regularly saw in my life. Plus, at a certain point I started to really shy away from the idea of dating someone in my friend group. Screwing up that social dynamic is even worse than screwing up your workplace by asking out a coworker (also not something I'm keen on).
And while you mentioned group activities first, that's pretty intimidating to put someone in a big group of your friends when they don't know anyone.
Its really hard to do the first time since, yeah, your brain is probably shooting a billion worst case scenarios at you. But, honestly, once you just out and ask a few people out for drinks, you'll realize that its the least stressful option -by far-, for everyone involved. Its just over and done. Even when you get turned down, its surprisingly not that big of a deal, even if other people see it go down (you might even find that it increases people's opinions of you if you can ask someone out and gracefully handle a decline).
I am perfectly fine with having a conversation with anyone just asking them on a date is well it seems an impossible task and I don't know why. It's not the fear of rejection. As I have some tales of that and the interesting excuses I was given of why they felt they could not follow though.
I just don't know what it is. It doesn't really help I look meancing and have a voice that is akin to a dog that learned to talk {deep and growly}
Speaking as a psychologist, this really isn't the case at all and I don't understand why it's a claim that you're making.
'X is bad, and they deserve their problems' is always a popular line of thought.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Generally speaking people who meet and get on great and are available want to spend time together and grow closer through it. You don't say "would you like to go on a date to the movies?" you say "oh shit I'm really excited for the new Spiderman movie too, hey we could go and see it together?" and they say "yeah sure and let's go for food first, I always get so hungry and fidgety if I don't haha" and then you laugh and they laugh and boom, date.
Then after the movie you go to the tram stop with her and say "hey I had a great time!" and she says "yeah me too, we should do this again" and if it feels right you kiss her and boom, now you're dating. But not too much kissing! That's too soon. Can't rush these things, you let the seed of mutual desire grow so to speak.
It's not explicit or laid out, in my experience. It's organic and unspoken, growing mutual attraction and such.
My wife and I started out "casual" and progressed to more serious. The key was just to be very honest with our expectations with each other. I was dating other women as well when we met, and I made sure she knew that when i asked her out. She said she was fine with this. After a while, I informed her that I was interested in getting more serious, and that I had stopped dating other women, and I asked her how she felt about that. She coyly responded that this was ok with her. Eventually though, I found myself getting more and more attached, and was no longer satisfied with our "casual" arrangement. Once again, I told her, very straightforward. This time, she became uncomfortable. As such, I immediately offered to back off (there were tears), as i didn't want her to be uncomfortable. I told her I would leave her be for a bit, but that I would remain available for a while if she ever reconsidered. We stopped dating for about a month or two, after which, she called me. I re-stated that my feelings hadn't changed, and she informed me that it took her missing me to make her realize that she felt the same way I did, and the rest is history...
I guess what I'm trying to get at is, I recommend just starting at the casual level, and be honest with your partner about your expectations of the relationship as your feelings evolve. I did the same thing with my ex before my wife. After a while, it became obvious our expectations for each other were incompatiable, we had an honest talk about it, and we broke up. Breaking up sucks, but denying your expectations and trying to fake your way through a relationship is unfair to both yourself and your partner.