Modern Wisdom - #701 - Alex DatePsych - Why Is Everyone Choosing To Stay Single?

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

Alexander DatePsych is a Neuroscience and Behavioural Science researcher whose work focuses on attractiveness and dating. The modern dating world is a difficult universe to navigate, which has led a lot of people to check out of it completely. But does this make people happier to elect loneliness rather than risk heartbreak? Expect to learn why 50% of men have not approached a woman in the last year, the biggest struggles everyone faces when dating, what misconceptions the world has when it comes to dating apps, whether women actually prefer dad bods, why women initiate more divorces, why the normal guy is actually more likely to get the girl and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM)  Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alexander Datecyke. He's a neuroscience and behavioral science researcher who's work focuses on attractiveness and dating. The modern dating world is a difficult universe to navigate, which has led a lot of people to check out of it completely, but does this make people happier to elect loneliness rather than risk heartbreak? Expect to learn why 50% of men have not approached a woman in the last year,

the biggest struggles everyone faces when dating, what misconceptions the world has when it comes to online dating apps, whether women actually prefer dad-bods, why women initiate more divorces, why the normal guy is actually more likely to get the girl. And much more. Next Monday, another huge modern wisdom cinema episode, this time with Patrick Bett, David, host and founder of Value Taiment, an all-round fascinating human, I flew to Fort

Loddedale to record a massive episode with him over there, so you do not want to miss this one going live on Monday. This episode is brought to you by Nomatic. No, literally, it episode is brought to you by Nomatic. No, literally, it's actually brought to you by Nomatic. Whenever I'm on the road, Nomatic is the luggage that I use. It's got a lifetime warranty and some of the best technology I've ever seen. It's so crazy what happens when you upgrade to proper, good quality, highly engineered luggage, whether you're taking a holiday or a weekend trip,

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That's bit.ly slash lettucey slash letter c letter d wisdom and MW15, a checkout. This episode is brought to you by Manscaped. If you are a guy who is still using an old face shaver from four Christmas's ago to trim your gentleman's area, grow up. Come on, join us here in the modern world. There are purpose-built tools for the job and Manscaped lawnmower 4.0 is the best ball and body head trimmer ever created. It's got a cutting edge ceramic blade to reduce grooming accidents, a 90-minute battery so that you can take a longer shave, waterproof technology which allows you to groom in the

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And you can get free shipping worldwide, plus a 20% discount. If you go to manscaped.com slash modern wisdom and use the code modern wisdom, a checkout. That's manscaped.com slash modern wisdom and modern the code modern wisdom, a check out that's manscaped.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom, a checkout. But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alexander What's going on with risk aversion and men not approaching women? Sure, so risk aversion refers to a personality trait or disposition where individuals are basically more accepting or more willing to take risks. So high risk aversion would be individuals who are less willing to take risks and a big risk for men at least to proceed to risk is of course approaching women.

So recently I conducted a survey and I used a measure of risk aversion and I asked about approach behavior, basically approaching for dates, approaching on the street, approaching in a bar, talking to someone at work or in class. And yeah, there's an inverse correlation, or should say a positive correlation with that risk of urgent and willingness to approach, right? That people who are more risk of worse, much less willing to approach, they tend to have more fears as well as far as the potential consequences of approaching a woman asking for a date.

What did they say were the primary fears that these guys were concerned about? Sure. Some of the primary fears are basically social rejection and social consequences. There were some differences where individuals higher in risk of aversion might fear more legal consequences as well, like some kind of report to HR, the police, or even something like that. But it tends to be mostly kind of a fear of like loss of reputation. Yeah, well, I suppose, you know, we have a basis for this,

ancestral, that if you were rebuffed by one of the women in your tribe, that that probably wouldn't do much for your credibility with the rest of the women in the tribe and that your mates might take the piss out of you. So I certainly understand from that,, for the women as well that are listening, the all-consuming fear as a guy of seeing a girl across the room and looking at her and thinking, I should go and say hello because I think that she's nice. It's like fucking mortal, it's reality bending. It's so strange, it's such a bizarre, and again, I'm sure that there's lots of guys listening.

I don't know what you're talking about. I can just go up and talk to anybody. But I think even the average normal risk aversion man has this pretty sort of guttural sense of trepidation before they go and do it. Absolutely. And yeah, the most confident man, it doesn't matter. They're going to be a little bit nervous at least approaching a woman. And I think that's something in pick-up artist communities that they've kind of caught on to,

is almost an exposure therapy to that, but exposure therapy when people have phobias, they're exposed gradually to whatever the stimulus is that reduces that fear. Maybe they've caught on approach 100 women and you will be less afraid. That's what it is. Of course, most men aren't out there approaching 100 women. That kind of nervousness persists, even if an individual is. But of course, most men aren't out there approaching 100 women and that kind of nervousness it persists, even if an individual is very, very confident to begin with. Yeah, I think that was definitely one of the positive sides of the pickup world was that it taught men to overcome approach anxiety just through exposure therapy, right?

It gamified exposure therapy, which is pretty reliable when you're trying to get rid of all manner of phobias, if it's a spider that you're scared or you're agrophobying and you don't leave the house, you know, it's one step at a time, very, very small exposures, etc. And given that this is such a, such a difficult one, I asked, it was ages ago, but I spoke about what it's like for a woman to approach a man and be rejected. And as some really interesting responses from women, that it's like for a woman to approach a man and be rejected and has some really interesting responses from women that it's really painful for them because they almost feel like they've broken the social norm and still not succeeded. So there's kind of two layers of shame that they've had to go through as opposed to I guess

men maybe with only one. Yeah, exactly. And I didn't even look at women approaching men because it is so uncommon, you know, even for very attractive men, they just don't get approached that much. If a man gets approached once or twice a year, you know, he's a Chad now, basically, that's what it is. It's it's super uncommon for men for men to get approached. And it is a violation of those expected gender roles in a way that, you know, women will wait. I would and they will say, you know, I would prefer to be approached by mad. And that's something else that kind of came out in the research. We asked women,

would you like to be approached more? You had about 70 to 80% of women, a particularly younger women, even more than older women that said, yeah, I wish men would approach more, but they're not going to do it. The women aren't going to approach men for sure. Interesting. So, have you looked longitudinally at this? Do you know if men's risk aversion and fear of approach has increased over time? I don't know for sure, but there, I think there is some research on that that I haven't done this. Looked at risk aversion in younger generations and they may be more risk averse. So it might be something that we see particularly with the zoomers, right, with the younger generation,

that they are more risk-verso than earlier generations. And there's a lot of kind of converging evidence on that that they're waiting later in life to take risks, like getting a job, going to school, getting a driver's license, many of these other things that would indicate, okay, they're kind of hesitant to enter the adult world, so to speak.

Yeah, Gene Twangy's work in generations is fantastic with this slow life strategy or extended adolescence. It explains an awful lot. You know me and Boss have been talking about this generalized risk-a-votion syndrome. And it is, it's across, you know, permeates absolutely everything,

but it really, really shows up in dating because dating is largely a game of risk remediation, right? It's how can I kind of deal with the inevitable uncertainty of going up to someone? I don't know if they like me, I don't know if they're single, I don't know if I'm going to look silly. It very much is kind of like the vanguard of risk. I suppose other things moving out of the house, changing jobs, moving locations, but certainly a much lower stakes, more common one, which is what makes it interesting, because it is

lower stakes. It's like, what, you get rejected by somebody when you go up to them, like, what's, there's literally no cost, apart from a tiny little bit of discomfort. And yet, the felt sense of it is a, you know, world-ending catastrophe. Exactly. And something kind of relived that is that we see, for example, individuals higher in the dark triad, they have more sexual partners, psychopaths as well, people that are high in the hair, psychopathy checklist. We see example, people that have a criminal record may have earlier sexual abuse, so they're

having sex earlier in life or having more partners. And these are also all things that are associated with a higher tolerance for risk, or even risk seeking individuals who might enjoy risk more. So it's kind of like, why do they have more partners or something like that? There's some indication that they might actually even select down, so it might not be that they're more attractive, but it could be that they're much more tolerant of risk, or that they even seek risks out.

So these are the people kind of approaching more aggressively, and so they're kind of reaping the fruits of that, so to speak. Was it you that discovered 50% of men aged 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year? Yes, that sounds right. Yeah. I mean, growing that statistic all over the internet. So I'm glad I'm glad that I got the citation, right? Yeah. And the men that have approached are doing remarkably well. A lot of the men who have approached they more than half have gotten a date from it. You know and it goes down if you look to like long-term relationships. How many dates turn into a long-term relationship but the men who are approaching they're doing pretty well actually. Okay so 50% of men aged 18 to 30 haven't

approached a woman in the last year. Of that 50%, 50% of them did get a date. I would have to check again, but it might even be higher. It might have been of the men who had, it might have been even been about 70%, at least got a date or a phone number or some kind of romantic connection there. And it goes down to about 20% that got a long-term relationship out of it,

but sex is higher. So you kind of see it go down like date, sex is a little bit lower, long term relationship is a little bit lower, but mostly they're, yeah, they're kind of people that approach women, they're getting dates from it. That's, I don't know, that seems pretty positive for the approach. And I suppose, you know, there's an argument to be made, well, of course, the kind of guys that are approaching women, they're the ones that are full of the confidence, or they're the ones that know it's a sure thing Of course, they're getting into relationships and having sex and going on dates and getting phone numbers and stuff, but Given the fact that this is an exclusively agentic

Decision that you're making, right? Yeah, sure if you have a little bit more confidence in yourself It's going to make making the decision more easy, but ultimately There's a huge chunk of people in that 50% that are doing it, that probably are just as unsure and just as terrified and just as uncertain as you are. So yeah, I mean, that's a serious white pill for why you should approach women. Absolutely, yeah, that's one of the things that I've come to believe is that, you know, as far as the whole PUA thing and all of that goes, yeah, like a lot of it just comes down to approaching women and it does seem to work.

It's interesting you said, agentic as well, because I have some more data. I haven't put it out yet, but this looks at like, locus of control and dating difficulties. So I asked people to list all of these. What do they think are their difficulties in dating? And then I coded those into a survey, got the responses and I found a correlation with locus of control and dating difficulties. So individuals that have a higher internal locus of Control that are more agentic, they tend to report that they have fewer difficulties dating.

So that's another thing too, is that more agentic individuals in that sense, like you said, they're probably doing better. Yeah, I think William Costello's most recent post about in cells found a wildly externalized locus of control. Exactly. Yeah. His recent paper, exactly that, he looked at the same thing, locust control and in cells had, yeah, that higher external locust of control, you know, people with an external locust of control, they see the world is like, things just happened to me. It's out of my control. Whereas

people with an internal locust of control, you know, they say, I make things happen. Things don't just happen to me. Whatever happens in life, I have some control over that. Yeah, you asked people that survey, I really loved it. You asked people about the biggest struggles with dating, they were experiencing, that were holding them back. What were the big takeaways that you learned from that? Well, a big one that emerged was fear of rejection.

For men specifically, dating apps, a lot said, they just don't do well on dating apps. That was another big one that emerged was fear of rejection. For men specifically, dating apps, a lot said, you know, they just don't well do well on dating apps. That was another big one. A lot had to do with compatibility, and particularly some big sex differences there. About 70% women scored highly, which was a 6 or a 7 on a 7 point Likert scale, and said, I can't find someone that I'm intellectually attracted to, which is something that I didn't expect to be so high, but apparently not being able to make an intellectual connection was one. Another difference was a lot of women, much more than men said that they felt there was

a lot of sexual pressure and demand for them. So those are things as well. Not finding someone who was physically attractive enough, yeah, women scored higher in that as well. I think that had a Cohen's deal of about 0.6. So about a medium-sized difference there. So those are all things like, I can't find someone I'm attracted to.

I'm afraid to approach people because I'm afraid to be rejected. Can't make a connection with someone on an emotional or intellectual level as well. The intellectual one is so interesting and kind of runs against, I think, a lot of common held dating commentary on the internet because it's very difficult for us to quantify what intellectual

compatibility or the CPU sexual success actually is, right? Like, no one's talking about that on the internet. You know, they'll say, and I hear this, a SoHo House as a research base for you to go out of should be one of the first places that you look at. If you sit around the pool at any so-ho house on a Saturday afternoon in a relatively warm country, you will get so many fascinating stories about girls from 25 to 40 and they're dating challenges. And dude, I, it's my ethnographic like in-person research center. And I'll just sit and just ask questions or over here conversations about what people are talking about. And a lot of the conversations that these girls are saying is, you know, guys are intellectually immature, emotionally immature.

They don't really understand how to take care of themselves. And then I say, okay, so have you tried dating older? Like if you looked at, you know, 30, 35, 40, they say, yeah, and, you know, these problems aren't necessarily solved by the passage of time, that there are, you know, adult infants and sort of man children all over the place. And again, with this, it would be, the low resolution solution to this would be,

don't worry about trying to become intellectually or emotionally interesting or mature just earn more and you will be able to offset your emotional immaturity that would be kind of common held internet wisdom at least for a lot of men. Yeah exactly I think a lot of people don't think about that and something I noticed when I followed up and I and I saw that it was so big on that intellectual compatibility, I asked people, well, what does that mean to you

when you see a question like that? And a lot of men interpret it to mean like, but I'm very intelligent, I have a very high IQ. And I don't think that's exactly what women mean when they're saying I can't find a man who is intellectually compatible. I don't think they mean everyone is stupid or they're not high IQ.

I think they mean, is it someone that's interesting that can connect to me emotionally, that can connect to me on a mental level and relate to me, which is related to cognitive abilities, part of what's called social cognition, theory of mind, how well do you understand the emotional states of another person, how well can you predict accurately what the other person is thinking? I think not being boring is actually a really big part of it as well as far as that intellectual compatibility. If you have nothing that you relate on, you know, being able to relate to someone is probably a big part of it where if everyone's hobbies are different, you know, someone could be really smart, but you still might not find intellectual compatibility

there. So it's not necessarily men are stupid. I think everyone's dumb. But it could be kind of like you said, you know, I have a hard time relating to these men. They seem very immature in that sense. Yeah, I think just paying attention to people seems to be incredibly rare. You know, it's kind of, I guess, guys talk about this a lot that it sometimes seems to men that when they're in a relationship, women respond to them differently, when they're not. They're just sat around a dinner table or a bar or whatever, just having a chat. And I wonder whether that kind of gets rid of a few things, the fact that you're, if

you're in a committed relationship, you're not trying to pull. So it actually does a couple of things. It lowers the stakes because there's no such thing as rejection here. She's not on the docket as far as you're concerned. And I also wonder whether some of the sort of chest beating peacock tell fluffing that kind of goes on when guys feel like they need to do a thing to impress a girl, and maybe even counter signals that they don't like. Whereas the dude that sits back and asks what she's interested in or just kind of lets this person waffle on at them actually comes

across as being more intellectually engaging because they're just letting it come and go nice and easily. Yeah, exactly. Some fluency and conversation there is probably really related to it as well because something we know about sex differences in intelligence is that men tend to score a little bit higher and visceral spatial but women tend to score a little bit higher and verbal intelligence. So women may be a little bit better at communicating and having those conversations, holding them and engaging. And so if men are not in general, you know, if they're a little bit worse, women might struggle to find that. Like, is this someone that can kind of just ramble on in a sense? Can they, can they hold an interesting conversation in that way? And I think that might also be related to kind of what they think of when

they say intellectually compatible. Yeah, how is your one man crusade to try and fix the cognitive distortions in the in-sale world going? It's going well, I think a lot of people think you're a liar. You're a liar. You're a liar. Yeah, I don't know. People are always very stuck in what they believe. Ideologies vary very hard to shift and people like kind of simple explanations for things, kind of univariate explanations. Like this is this, whereas human behavior is very, very multivariate. There's so many different things that contribute to why someone might do well at dating or not, you know, why someone might come across as attractive or not.

And people tend to focus very exclusively on just one thing without taking into account the big picture and at least become belief systems that people adopt ideologically in a sense and shifting their beliefs in a way is also kind of difficult because it's almost like it can cause cognitive dissonance but it's also perhaps abandoning an identity that they relate with and I think you see that you're particularly in cell communities. You know, that community is their friends and their identity in a way. What do you wish more in cell forum inhabitants new? more in cell forum inhabitants new?

Well, I wish that they would perhaps understand more nuance as far as all of the research related to attractiveness. So it's very cool. I guess it was a specific thing that I wish they knew, perhaps interpreting effect sizes because you will see in a lot of papers and this kind of a statistical thing. You'll see that in the abstract world of a report like ah the more attractive person got more women XYZ or you know

the dark people with the dark triad were more attractive they had more partners but then you will look at the effects and it will be like one on average or something like that and that's very common in psychology that sometimes the differences are are relatively small But I don't know if people always understand that when they're just reading the abstract of the results initially, that just because there's a significant effect, it doesn't always mean that it's a meaningful or a large effect. Yeah, Williams, most recent study, I've got part of the abstract here, in cells significantly overestimate the importance of physical attractiveness and financial prospects to women

and underestimated the importance of intelligence, kindness and humor, in cells underestimated women's overall minimum mate preference standards as well. Yeah, that's the thing. And of course, that's basically that whole black pill ideology that looks rain supreme. And you could say that, and there's some research that would support that, right? That looks are often, they're very important. No one can deny that. They're up there as far as the hierarchy goes But if you say only looks matter and everything else

Doesn't contribute at all that's not a very good picture either I did a men a meta analysis looking at lifetime sexual partners and Physical attractiveness and the effect was very small that it had a head just g of like point one four So it's like okay, speaking I like what's that? Yeah, what just the effect was very small. It had a headgear of like 0.14. So it's like, okay. I like what's that. Yeah. What just, it means a very small effect. So if it's 0.3 in psychology, that's about average. So we're looking at something that's pretty small. So it's kind of like,

yeah, more attractive men. They have more sexual partners over the lifetime, but not very much. It's not a really big, big difference. So there's other things going on there. A lot of those are behavioral. How do men with a lot of sexual partners act differently? And they might be a big difference, might be they seek them out. There's larger effects for something like behavioral dominance, for example. What do you mean the behavioral dominance, kind of aggression, interpersonal aggression, male male competition, even things like athleticism and sports, participating in a competitive sport. Those are things actually that predict having more sexual partners, better than physical

attractiveness does. And again, this can kind of go back to risk aversion and impulsiveness, risk seeking, that men who might seek out those environments, they're typically not the kind of man that are afraid to approach women and shoot their shot. It's a whole suite of different things, but yeah, I, you know, competence is sexy. You see, you see a girl who's good at pickleball or something, even if you don't care about pickleball and you're like, yeah, that's, that's kind of hot. Like it's cool that that she's able to do something.

She's got physical control of a lot or or a good singer, or a good poet, or whatever. You know, it kind of doesn't matter what it is, but any degree of competence and especially anything that approaches mastery is just, it's sexy, it's cool. Yeah, exactly, especially for men, and David Busky ran, of course, a large multinational status, or multinational study on status cues for men. And yeah, a lot of the ones at the top are basically signals of competence. Two of them were having a higher level of education or attending a prestigious university, earning more money, those sorts of things.

So yeah, all of these signals of competence, especially for men, seem really important as far as attracting women. And even that could be related to something like intellectual compatibility. If you're having a conversation with someone and they seem like like they don't know what they're talking about, they haven't done anything that would indicate some kind of mastery or expertise. Perhaps you would think like that's not someone on my level intellectually. Why do you think it is the case then that there is a metamine on the internet of intelligence, kindness and humor, not really being all that

important, and yet in the data, it seems like that actually is. In your survey, 79% of women said that they were struggling to find somebody that they were intellectually compatible with. How, what's the reason that this appears to be overlooked, especially in the sort of in-sale world? Well, I think for one, everyone thinks they're really smart, everyone thinks they're really funny. And so they might think, but I'm all of these things, I have a really good personality, right? A lot of people think that about themselves, maybe they don't. And so they don't see that they're not reaping the awards from that because they don't actually meet those criteria. Another could be because part of that mean is probably true

that, you know, if someone is very, very low and looks at something like that, you know, but they are interesting and funny and all of that. Yeah, they can still struggle more in dating if they're not hitting that bar, that threshold, so to speak, you know, friend zone in that sense. Right, yeah, this is one of the things that I think I realized when I first started researching

some of the in-self forums they are inhabited by you know some unbelievable percentage of them have a physical disability Many of them and you're a divergent in one form or another and what you have is People who are really really out on the tail when it comes to sort of just normative Like everything, right and what that means is that when it comes to normative everything. What that means is that the philosophy that is derived from the people out on the tails

gets used by the people that actually start to move a little bit closer toward the bell curve. If somebody who physically presents in a really, really unusual way, absolutely, like LMS very well, maybe the hierarchy that's most important to you looks money status in a black pill language. But I'm not convinced that that's true as soon as you meet the standard threshold, but again, it's very un falsifiable. A lot of the philosophy is that that's just cope or that it's stated versus revealed preferences from women that they don't actually care about intelligence and kindness and humor because they're just going to go home with giga chat in any case that it is just going to be, you know, an

Andrew Tate disciple that's going to come in and sweep her off her feet no matter what, like alpha fucks beat a book, blah blah blah. Like it's very, very un falsifiable, which is why when I see you venture into these debates and discussions one-on-one on Twitter that I applaud you. I never get involved, but I applaud you from the sidelines for trying to stand your ground. Yeah, I think what you said is important, and it's kind of related to how I see it as well. It's better to understand, looks as kind of a threshold, like a bar that must be met,

rather than something that, where at increasing levels, it just keeps returning exponential benefits so to speak. As soon as someone hits that threshold like, okay, this person passes, you know, as they, as they call it in the black field, the lookstest, they pass the lookstest, then everything else kind of comes into play, right? And someone can pass that lookstest, but if they don't have any of those other things, they might still struggle in dating a lot. That's actually really, really important for women because women And someone can pass that look test, but if they don't have any of those other things, they might still struggle in dating a lot. That's actually really, really important for women because women meet a lot of people who do pass the look test, right? And then they have to compare their options with one another, you know, but do they

have all of these other things too? Because it's not that women are necessarily short from options, but as far, at least as far as looks go, because to use an example, I ran a study with faces months and months and months back. And I picked faces from the Chicago Face database that were pre-rated as being below average in attractiveness. And I had the participants rate them again. So below average attractiveness, strong correlation there, agreement that these are less attractive faces. And then instead of asking, rate these faces, I that these are less attractive faces.

And then instead of asking, rate these faces, I put them up just a binary, would you date yes or no? And all of these faces got about 25% of women that said they would. So most women don't have to like the individual. Only some percentage of women have to like the individual, right? You don't need 100% of women. That seems to be very common that looking at research on faces that agreement from women on faces is much lower than it is agreement for men. Men agree they correlate much strongly in their ratings of an attractive female face than women do for an attractive male face. So there's a lot of more variation for women and that means that you know a lot of men no matter what they look like they're not going to be attractive to most women.

And when they are, it's important that they have other qualities and criteria that facilitate it past that point. Like, okay, he looks okay. What do you think most people misbelieve about online dating? You know, we've gone through many generations of myth and meme about what online dating is and isn't. What do people misunderstand about the world of online dating? Well, a very common popular perception is that online dating apps are used to facilitate

hookups. Most people use online dating to facilitate long-term relationships. Between 20% to 30% tend to say, okay, I'm using it as a hookup app. The rest are saying, I'm not engaging in hookups, I'm engaging in long-term relationships. Another has to do with how much people extrapolate from matches and swipes, right? That match rates for women are, of course, much, much higher. A big part of that is because the ratio on these apps is very imbalanced, right? There's many, many more men on these apps. It can be three to one. It can be as high as seven to one.

The statistics start always clear because the apps don't tend to release that. But these are things that can skew these match rates. But then when you look beyond match rates, when you look at messages, when you look at people who report having met from these dating apps, then you begin to start to see a pretty close one-on-one ratio, that at least for the people who are able to get some matches, they seem to kind of facilitate sexual encounters, relationships relatively well. Yeah, it's interesting that most people would think that it's a free wheeling casual sex marketplace.

And is that from men as well? Men are saying that I'm not just on here looking for casual sex. I'm on here looking for a long-term relationship. Yeah, that is for men, about 70% long-term relationship, about 30. And of course, I think a lot of men, if casual sex landed in their lap, they would probably be open to it. But if you ask them, like, what are you really looking for? Men have kind of an orientation.

A lot of the time we think of men having a strong orientation toward casual sex, but men kind of have both. Men have a strong orientation toward casual sex, but also a strong desire for long-term monogamous relationships. And it's a little bit different from women. When I've run surveys, asking these questions, for example, how much do you want to monogamous relationship? Men and women pretty similar, both indicate high orientation toward monogamy.

But if you ask, how open are you to casual sex? That's when you begin to see a difference that men are much more open to casual sex, women hardly open at all. So men are kind of open to either, but tend to desire a committed relationship. I read this great study on online dating apps that looked at partner preferences for education

and attractiveness. Thank you actually ended up putting me on to this. So fictitious profiles with manipulated levels of education, photo attractiveness, send random invitations for a serious relationship to real online datas. We find that men and women prefer attractive over unattractive profiles, regardless of their unattractiveness, no surprise there. We also find that high educated men prefer low educated over high educated profiles, as much as high educated women prefer high educated over low educated profiles, with preferences similar for attractiveness

but opposite for education, two groups are more likely to stay single, unattractive, low educated men, and unattractive, high educated women. Yeah, exactly. So the rule there for men on online dating, I guess, you know, be attractive, be educated. Go back to school. Yeah, go back to school. And for women, yeah, kind of the opposite, stay out of school, but be very hot, I guess. But really, you know, women, so there's kind of something there that, you know, as far as preferences go, women tend to want a man who is a little bit higher in status than they are. And it's still the case in Western society as much as people kind of Like to say degrees don't matter and all of that. It's still a very robust status signal having a degree having some level of education

And I think for men there might even be a current stigma in modern times towards women who have Higher education. They might be okay. She's kind of a boss babe, she's too bossy, she's too masculine, they might think she's, she's going to be more liberal, perhaps, or more feminist or something like that. So there are some negative stereotypes we see now associated with more educated women, but I guess something important to remember in all of that,

if people are looking at this and thinking, like should I be in this way, they're taking it kind of normative, is that men and women both with a higher level of education, they're much less likely to get divorced. They're much less likely to have relationship problems, higher relationships satisfaction.

So really everyone really should be thinking like, ideally I would have a highly educated mate if it's a man or a woman. But there are kind of those stereotypes there. Yeah, it's a difficult one man. The, what is it? For every standard deviation increase in a woman's IQ, her chance of marriage drops by 35%, I think.

And it's literally the inverse for men. I'd be really interested to see this stuff replicated now. And people can always say, ah, but that wouldn't be the case now about a study that's only 10 years old or 15 years old. But I do think that we're in a changing time with more women going to university, more women being socioeconomically successful. There has to be an awful lot of pressure on both men and women to begin to skew their preferences around what they think here, because you're just going to end up in a sex ratio hypothesis hell. If you don't, right? You're going to have to nudge your preferences eventually,

or, what, I mean, you don't necessarily, everyone can just sort of split off into their own, like, siloed, sex siloed worlds, but that seems realistic. It doesn't seem realistic to me. So I think that it would be interesting to replicate some of these preferences, especially around education, wealth level, wealth disparity, to just see more than anything,

whether a change in the imbalance between men and women, which we are seeing, is able to nudge this or whether these are kind of like the thermodynamics of sex difference dating attraction. Yeah, exactly. That's a tricky situation in the modern environment, especially in Europe. You're seeing many more women going to university than men. And at the same time, we kind of see that preference, which is a stated preference that women would prefer men who has a similar level of education or more. So it's kind of like, what do we do for that?

You know, I tried to encourage me and I see, yeah, stay in school, you know, at least as far as like dating and stuff goes, yeah, it's, it's, get that piece of paper even if, you know, that's going to help. Is that enough, is that enough of a reason to go to the university or whatever, I don't know about that. But as far as it goes, we know, yeah, that it's a signal that that is attractive to women. And as far as it goes for women, you know, if,, if we're gonna see a lot of women working, making more money, we're seeing this wage gap that's basically disappeared.

And we see women emerging with more education, they might have to kind of settle in that sense. They might have to kind of adjust their preferences or there's not gonna be enough men to go around in a sense. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. I wonder about the sort of male men's concern about what women are looking for. And there was that study as well that I found only one profile out of 100 was liked by more than 80% of women. So as you said earlier on, attractiveness, especially facial attractiveness, it's almost impossible to be liked by everybody.

Right, and that's literally what that study found, the only one profile out of 100. And you might say, well, this is because women are being too choosy. Or another equally valid explanation is that women vary massively in what they find attractive. Right, that if you have high variance, that also means that trying to find a face that threads the needle of 100 different women's very unique idiosyncratic preferences is impossible.

Exactly. Yeah. Female variance for ratings of attractiveness, male faces. It is higher in that sense. Women agree less. I would like to see that profile of the guy who got 80% that liked it because that is remarkable. And I think that's one of the things that discourages people about dating apps that they're like, oh, I swiped 100 times. I only got five matches or something like that. It's like, you got five matches.

And out of those five people, can you not get a date? You only need one. You don't need 80% of people to like you. And 80% of people are never going to like you. You know, if it's men, women, or whatever the case may be. But yeah, those are the statistics. I think that kind of discourage people when they see them, but the implications are perhaps not as as profound in that sense because it's like, yeah, you just need someone. You don't need all of them to like you. Seth Stevens-Devidoots had a really interesting insight in this where he leaned into his nerdy look. So he used a website to split test different versions of his

own appearance, beard, no beard, glasses, no glasses, long hair, short hair, like how should I dress all the rest of it and then used that data. And what he found was that, and this was women that were rating him, what he found was that the more that he leaned into his nerdy look, the more extreme attraction results he got back. And he ended up fighting, he said it himself on the episode to me is like, dude, I am punching way out of my league. My miss is, but when her friends, you know, the six months before they met and she said that she was ready to get back on the dating market or something and her friends asked her, what is it that you're into and, you know, go around the group or whatever. I'm into like tall guys or I'm into like athletic sort of guys.

Got to her and she says, I love nerds. I'm really, really super attracted to nerds. So had he have diluted down the more extreme sides of his physical appearance and the way that he presents and what he talks about, he would have ended up missing out on basically outsized returns in the mating market because his partner would have passed him by. Yeah, it's an interesting one. What about dadbods? What have you learned about dadbods?

So every once in a while on social media, people will post a picture or, you know's basically one of those body fat comparison pictures that you often see if you follow bodybuilding and all of that Where it shows like here's someone with 30% here's someone with 25% here's someone with 20 and so on And it will get down to you know guys who are stage lean who are just jacked and very lean and if you ask women Which body do you prefer a lot of women will say, I prefer the dad bod, right? Which is a guy who maybe is a little bit in shape, but not very much. And this seems to be something that women pretty consistently say, but there's a lot of discourse

on that, like, is that true? And so I asked women, I said, why do you like the dad bod? Why do you not like these other bodies? Because we also see that these other bodies do emerge in female fantasies. For example, the coverage of romance novels, which is kind of the erotic material consumed by women, those are not dead bodies, those are usually someone who looks like a fitness model. You see Chippendale's dancers, you see, for example, the calendars with the sexy fireman, any time women consume kind of a visual erotic material, even if it's very light, it tends to be someone who actually is kind of jacked and all that.

And the men are described the same way within those novels. They don't tend to be described as a dad bod. They tend to be described as someone who is tall and, you know, kind of lean. He's got abs and that sort of thing. So I asked women, you know, why do you like this dad bod? And a lot of them was like, ah, the body builder comes across as narcissistic. He would make me insecure. He might cheat on me. So there's kind of a lot going into that.

They're just like, hmm, do women prefer these dad bods? Perhaps because they signal some kind of comfort. They're not as threatening to women. And even the idea of a man who's more muscular and larger, evolutionary women have a trade-off in their selection of mates. A strong man who's tall and physically imposing can protect them, but he also represents

more of a physical threat to them at the time. So you have a lot of different converging things that might make a lot of women say, I would prefer the dad bod, someone who makes me feel comfortable in a sense, as opposed to like the really jacked fitness model kind of guy. What, when you're saying that women some say that they prefer the dad bod over the stage lean guy, what about if they're given a much more normal, you know, 10% 11% body fat guy who has a good

amount of muscle mass? What happens to the SKU if you get rid of the extreme body builder body? Do you know? Well, it's very rare that women, if they see the extreme body builder, they were very rarely seem to say like that's it. It tends to be more of the leaner kind of fitness model, but still much more muscular than the average man. But still, in that case, they tend to say, you know, I don't want that. I want kind of the fluffer kind of fitness model, but still much more muscular than the average man. But still, in that case, they tend to say, you know, I don't want that.

I want kind of the fluffier guy. What sort of body fat do you think they end up settling on? Can you remember? I would think it would be between 20 and 15. Wow. Wow, all of the guys on a permacut, you don't need to do it anymore. Just let the cheese cake yourself

into a new relationship with a hot tea. Yeah, I remember one of my friends who's been through all manner of different fitness pursuits and weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding, fitness modeling. Good looking kid. His ex-girlfriend who is no longer with anymore, perhaps this is a contributing reason why, once said to him as he was prepping for a show and sort of dialing in his body and getting down to be super lean, she said, I've never been happier with you than when you were powerlifting. And for anybody that knows what power left is look like, in that sort of 15 to probably, maybe 25% you know as you get up toward the super heavies at Defluffy. There are a fluffy bunch and yet she said that she'd never been happier than when that

was the body type that he presented with and I think a concern about intracexual competition, about mate poaching, that must contribute a good chunk of it. You know, kind of the, it's not quite the same, but guys that are concerned about their partner posting bikini photos on the internet, you know, a dude in a sufficiently well fitted t-shirt who's walking around at 8% body fat, vascular as hell, and with a good amount of muscle mass,

you know, it's not, you can see what's going on here, right? You can make a lot of inferences about what's happening underneath the t-shirt in kind of the same way that a super party hugging dress does for women. Exactly, yeah. And something else kind of related to that in the research is individuals who have partners who are more attractive

if they're men or women, they experience more jealousy. So it could be that that, you know, if someone is more conventionally attractive, they're gonna be getting more attention. Perhaps it evokes more jealousy. They're gonna be afraid, like you said, of mate poaching. They're going to be afraid, okay, this person might cheat and there is some actually indication that for men,

but not for women, that men who are a little bit more attractive might commit infidelity, a little bit more, they're gonna have more sexual partners. So there can be that perception, and it's not maybe perhaps totally inaccurate that, okay, if you get a guy who's very attractive, he's got a great body or something like that, is he going to stay committed to you,

is he more likely to cheat? And that's kind of something that women said, you know, that he seems like he could be narcissistic, he cares too much about his appearance, and you know, I would worry about him being unfaithful. Yeah, it's, I've always thought about this that somebody that's in good condition, physically, it says an awful lot about them beyond simply what it's going to feel like to get them naked in bed. You know, if somebody has trained consistently for a decade,

you know, so much about them, you know, that they're probably not a massive degenerate drinker because it would be very difficult to stick to the protocol if you did that, that they are reliable, that they can deal with discomfort, that they are able to overcome hard things, that they've got like a pain tolerance, which kind of sexy, right? Like, you know, a whole litany of different things,

discipline, reliability, they've probably got a pretty robust friend group from going to the gym, all that sort of stuff. And that you just, you tell that, but it's kind of a little bit like a hidden signal because the only people that really know that are other people that also go to the gym. And it's not the first thing they think.

The first thing they think is look at the nice shoulders or the good ass or whatever it is that they're looking at. But the people that have spent enough time decoding what this means, and I do think that it probably percolates somewhere in the back of your mind is, there's probably quite a reliable person. But yeah, you also end up with a bit of a difficulty on the bodybuilder side. I wonder whether this is part of the allure of CrossFit athletes, that because it's not done specifically for aesthetics, guys are able to get themselves into good condition whilst not seeming like they care overly about that sort of narcissistic side of stuff.

Yeah, that could be because there was that perception as well that it's kind of a vain behavior. And in that sense, almost an unmasculing behavior is what some people said that. You know, it's like you should not care so much about your appearances, a man basically, it's almost a failure. But if you're jacked from doing Brazilian jiuiu Jitsu or chopping wood or doing some other thing,

your body has come along as a byproduct of a pursuit that you actually care about. So I remember a while ago and I got a lot of stick for this on the internet. I remember reading a study, a theory that said, one of the reasons why women prefer dadboards is this theory that said one of the reasons why women prefer dadbods is this caloric choice idea. So a man that is really good looking and like lean and in good condition, if you give him one calorie, there is, there are more avenues open to him outside of his committed relationship and his family to which he could spend that calorie, right? So the resources have more different angles for him to go down

because there's going to be other mating opportunities, so on and so forth. Whereas the guy that was the soft fluffy dad bod would presumably have more doorways of potential infertility close to him, which actually means that he, it was that dadbods are an indication of better dads was the thought that he's not going to spend his calorie trying to chase after some 21-year-old because she doesn't care about him. So I thought that was another interesting kind of second-order effect of the way that women perceive their current mates level of potential strain. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And what you said, their dadbods are indicative of potential strain.

Yeah, exactly. And what you said, their dad buds are indicative of better dads. I think that's very insightful and important because yeah, it is kind of a contrast between long term versus short term mate selection. People, you know, women have a strong orientation towards long term.

Very few women have a strong orientation towards short term. So when you see women express their preferences, they're often talking about in the context of who would I date, who would I like to have a relationship with, perhaps not as often as, you know, who would I like to have a one-night stand with. And maybe that's why we see dad buds selected if you post those pictures. They'll say, yeah, this is kind of what I would like. They're thinking about long-term, but then you maybe see the more ripped jacked guy appear

as a character in female fantasies where it's more sexually oriented because within the context of a fantasy, it's safe. But that doesn't mean that that same man would be safe in the context of a real life relationship. Yeah, what are they called? I'm pretty sure there's a name for them. Are they not called like cinnamon rolls or golden retriever men or something. I'm pretty sure this shows how terminally online I am that I know this, but I'm absolutely sure that they're called cinnamon roll men or golden retriever men. And yeah, the dichotomy that you have in female erotica is like saying, why are there no, why is grandma porn not a really popular type of pornography for men to consume

many men love their grandmother? And you're like, yeah, but like, it's horses for courses here. And for women, the thing that they fantasize about might not be the thing that they want to get into a relationship with long term. One other thing that I thought was fascinating, you've been talking about a lot recently is the libido gap. What's that? So, the libido gap, yeah.

Basically, the observation that there's a sex difference in libido and sexual desire. Well, there's a sex difference in sexual desire, attitudes, and behaviors. And this is probably one of the largest sex differences that we see, kind of in behavioral psychology in a sense. A lot of differences between men and women are small, but when it comes to sexual behavior, it's pretty large and there's something you can see from lines of converging evidence as far as that goes that men have a higher libido, men have a higher desire to have sex with more people, sex more frequently, tend to have more open attitudes toward casual sex, seeking more sexual variety,

even if it's within a relationship, more sexual variety as far as sexual acts and experimentation, that sort of thing. There's research that indicate, well, research very, very consistently across the years, across countries indicates men cheat more than women do. That's an example of the libido gap as well. If you look at research under FMRI

and all of this isn't always entirely clear, men tend to respond to erotic images a little bit more strongly. If you look at research using attention paradigms, if you present, for example, naked bodies of men and women, it draws the visual attention of men more as well. So, men pay more attention to that. So, you have all of these converging lines of evidence that there is a gap in sexual desire in libido and attitudes. The role of testosterone, of course, is a very, very big one. We know testosterone administration to men or women causes the libido to shoot up, and of course, men have much more testosterone than women, naturally, which increases that

as well. What's the implication of this? What's the implication of that being a big libido gap? Perhaps that men and women will engage in sexual behaviors differently. They will pursue them differently. That men will pursue sex more frequently in a relationship, men are more likely to pursue sex outside of the relationship, more likely to pursue casual sex.

And of course, there's some debate on this from, I say debate, but there's not really much debate at all on this in the scientific literature. Very large men analysis recently conducted in the libido gap found a difference of about 0.5. So that's about a medium size difference, but for psychology, actually quite large. So we know that this is real, but there are people who kind of deny it, they say, you know, it's cultural or something like that. Of course, women have the same amount of libido.

If you ask men and women though, they both tend to indicate, yeah, we know that men have a larger libido, they may know more open to sex with multiple people and all of that. Yeah, I mean, if you had women with the libido style of men reading women's erotic would include a different man on each chapter, it would be Tom and Jack and Harry and all the way through, but it's not. That tends to be one protagonist throughout the whole story, right? Whereas I think what's the average number of partners that men go through in a single sexual fantasy?

It's like four or something, right? Like four or five, I think that they cycle through in one sexual fantasy, you know, for the women, that might be the first time that you've heard that if you're a woman, but like that's men just like, I don't know that might be the first time that you've heard that if you're a woman, but like that's Men just like I don't with that one like next one. I guess it's like a Mental Coolidge effect in some way, right? That you've got this this a very Rapid desire for sexual variety even when it's just in your mind Yeah, exactly there there is that big difference in the desire for sexual right, and even in the context of erotic and women's fantasies, you'll often see that it's kind

of a process of taming that man over time. So it's even almost like a long-term orientation, even in the context of sexual fantasies. Like, you know, it's sexy and all of this, but then at the end, they're together in a relationship. And with man, it almost the opposite when these sexual fantasies occur, and it'll be like casual sex, have sex, move on to the next person or something like that. Yeah, you looked at a body count and sexual double standards. What did you learn there? So that's kind of interesting because there's a lot of discourse, of course, on body count primarily on the internet. One of the things that I was curious about was, do people even ask, you know, a lot of men don't even seem to ask, which could indicate,

you know, because some people indicate that it's really important for them, right? A very low body count to the point that, you know, you have men who say, you know, I would really prefer a virgin wife. And at the same time, you have men that, you know, say they don't care at all. So, I believe it it was about 22 40% of men, I would have to double check said, you know, I don't even ask for body count on the day, which one way to interpret that is, you know, they don't care that much. Another could just be like, I don't want to know, right? Then asking about ideal body count, it's actually pretty similar for men and women, and in the survey that I did and in past research, that seems to be the case that both men and women

seem to prefer a lower body count in partners of the opposite sex. The ideal, it's not zero, if someone's a virgin, that seems to be kind of a red flag, both for men and women, surprisingly, on average. Some men do prefer a virgin, of course, but seems to be about two to three. And then as it increases, it of course drops off. But people seem to be pretty tolerant of higher body counts, upwards of 20 partners in a woman for a man perceiving a woman upwards of 44 men. And that's when people tend to start saying, this is kind of a deal breaker, you know, and

asking people in the survey as well, have you gone on a date and asked about body count and stop dating them, about 10% of men and women said, yes, in a committed relationship, even lower, I think it was like two or three percent for women and men. So it doesn't seem to be quite the deal breaker that a lot of people think that it is, but it's when you get to these excessively high body counts that it does become a problem. Then people look at that and say, well, what's going on there exactly? Andrew Thomas taught me about this. And if you actually look at the curve of how it works, zero, I think for both men and women, zero is about rated as attractive as seven, seven

to ten, right? So it peaks that the peak of this is around about between two and four, and then zero is the same as nearly double digits. So yeah, there is this, there is a little bit of an aversion. Did women, well women more of us to male virgins than men were to female virgins? I didn't find that in mind. And I think in the other, one, in the paper that was by Steve Stewart Williams

and Andrew Thomas that you refer to, I don't think there was that much of a difference. I don't know if there was a significant difference or not, but if there was, it would have been a small one. But there does seem to be kind of, yeah, that a version there. I guess in practice, of course, you know, if you ask our women more averse to the virgins, they might be because they remain virgins, right? But that wouldn't be because they're virgins. That would be because of whatever else is leaving them to that person's

virginity, I suppose. What do you mean when you talk about sexual double standards, then how does that get folded in here? Sure. So the idea about sexual double standards, then how does that get folded in here? Sure, so the idea of sexual double standards is attitudes towards sexual behaviors that are different for men and women. An example of that kind of in popular culture, we have a saying that says if a key will open any lock, it's a master key, but if a lock is opened by any key, it's a bad lock. So that's kind of a parable or something about promiscuity. The idea, you know, that if a lock is opened by any key, it's a bad lock. So that's kind of a parable or something about promiscuity. The idea, you know, that if a man has sex with many women, you know, he's a player, he's really good.

If a woman does it, it's really, really bad. So there's some discourse on this. More recent research has indicated, okay, a lot of these sexual double standards are going away. They're closing, you know, some even have kind of reversed. And particularly when it comes to things like having sex with a minor or a sexual assault, they mostly seem to be gone. So it's kind of like, yeah, people do seem to judge these things not as different for men and women at this point. That's interesting. What about the sexual

assault and sex with a minor thing, like what's going on there? Sure. So an example of that is when a teacher who is a woman has sex with a male student, when a teacher who is a man has sex with a female student, are these viewed differently? It seems to be, you know, if you look at kind of discourse on it, that they are kind of viewed differently, right? That men and women, you know, if it's a woman that's having sex with a minor male student,

perhaps is judged less strongly, although some of the recent research on that has indicated actually that's not the case, that people seem to view this just as bad, but perhaps in the past that was more the case, that if it was a minor male, they would view it less negatively. It's interesting. What about the guys who demand virgins?

Like, who are these people? Sure. So again, related to body count in that case, you do have people that show a very strong preference for virginity. If you ask men, you know, how many past sexual partners would you prefer in a partner? We have kind of that Goldilocks zone sweet spot that's like three or something like that. Someone who's not entirely inexperienced, but you do have people that show a very strong preference for virgins. And who do those tend to be? They tend to be young men who probably are themselves virgins, you know, less sexually experienced. They tend to have lower levels of education, lower levels of

income. So that seems to be the case that, you know, and it's not entirely an unreasonable desire or expectation. Because if, you know, if you're a man who's 18 years old, half of the female population is going to be a virgin. If you're a virgin, you know, you might want your first experience to be with someone else who is at that age, those men, you know, they don't make a lot of money. But what happens also is you have individuals who persist in that desire for virginity into an older age, age 30 or something. And it's like you're a 30-year-old man and you're looking for a virgin, that's like, you know, like two or three percent of the male and female population at that age. Women who are 18 years old in virgins typically do not

want to date someone who's 30, 35 or something like that. And so it becomes increasingly unreasonable with age. It may persist in virginity until they're made 30s and they say, oh, I'd still like a virgin, they're going to have to come terms with like, that's not in the cards for them. Yeah. It's an interesting one, man. I, again, I do especially for the young men, like the, the important qualifier here is especially if you're a guy that is a virgin. You know, there's something, it's, you're, you're going to feel emasculated by your partners,

the disparity in sexual experience, right? You're supposed to be, here I am, my first time, I'm taking charge, I'm finally becoming a man and, oh, she's teaching me all of the things that I need to do. That doesn't feel like, I don't know, that doesn't seem like the dream that most men probably perceive for their first time. Yeah, exactly. And there's a lot that's kind of related to that.

So related to sexual double standards, we know, for example, that men tend to view other men with more sexual partners as higher in status. And it seems to be that it's more male, male signaling than it is desirable to women. So women actually rate men that are very promiscuous, a little bit less desirable, a little bit more negatively. But for men, it's pretty much a linear relationship. Like the more sexual partners you have, the more of a man you are in a sense, right? And that filters into all of our cultural narratives and scripts. So it's

often, you know, something that men are encouraged to believe about themselves, that if they're less sexually successful, they're less desirable, they're less attractive, but that often that's more messaging that tends to come from other men than women, I think. Did you see Jeremy Boring tweet earlier on today about what the red pill is doing to marriage? Jeremy Boring, CEO of the Daily Wire, he's been featured on a lot of the productions and stuff. He said what the red pill is doing to marriage, basically, sort of degrading marriage, saying that it's a bad deal for men, etc, cetera. You've looked at a good chunk of this, right? What's happening with marriage and divorce is like, what are the real stats that people are missing here?

Sure. So, yeah, as far as the Red Pill goes, it's, you know, promotes a lot of very cynical narratives, particularly in the context of marriage. It's, you know, not a homogenous ideology or set of beliefs or whatever, but you do see a lot of discourse on divorce that opting just says, you know, 50 or 60 percent of people get divorced, it's mostly initiated by women. Okay, but there are individual differences in who gets divorced and who doesn't. You know, for every married man across the board, and I think this is something that gets

wrong, the risk of being divorced is not 50%. That's going to be determined a great deal by the individual characteristics within that relationship. What kind of things contribute to the horse? Infidelity is a big one. Alcohol abuse is a big one. Economic problems. So just by avoiding simple things that you know are going to cause a divorce, flat out,

that's all we're going to do. Don't drink, don't get broke. Exactly, yeah. Just these very basic things is gonna drop the divorce rate way down. You know, if you look across demographic groups, individuals with a higher level of education, men and women both, much less likely to be single, much less likely to get divorced. So already being within these certain demographic groups, drops it way down, but you do kind of have that narrative out there in the red pill and all of that that, you know,

marriage is a bad deal for men and they hear many anecdotes about people who get divorced and they lose all of their things or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, Jeremy Boring tweeted, the fact that women initiate 80% of divorce is evidence that some manifestations of evil are more common in women, something society and frustratingly Christian society has been trying to obscure it since we turned over all of our moral authority to women in the 20th century. That seems like a very, very odd claim to make that there's manifestations of evil. That's not for me to say that like women initiating divorce that there's some like perverse incentives that could be going on there. There's all manner of reasons why this sort of thing could happen. Many of them are probably pretty

like unspeakable, but evidence that some manifestations of evil are more common in women. I didn't, I mean, why do women initiate more divorces and what are the reasons that they give for that? Sure. So, yeah, there's a lot of focus on that. That's kind of the narrative, isn't it? That women initiate more divorces and that kind of puts the onus on women like, oh, if you initiate the divorce, it's your fault. But there's a lot of different reasons. Actually, the reasons why women initiate divorces very complex topics So I'll kind of go through some of these but

Because someone initiates a divorce does not mean that they are at fault for the divorce, right? So we do see for example, you know men and women both men also will admit this, you know when they get divorced I cheated at a rate about twice that of women They're much more likely to be physically abusive. All Although some recent research has called that into question as well, that perhaps domestic violence within relationships is actually pretty similar for men and women. Men are more likely simply to stay in relationships when the relationship is bad. And if they do kind of want out, they're just simply less likely to ask for the divorce. We know over time, over long periods of time, relationships had a satisfaction for women.

It declines faster as well. So there's a lot of reasons why women initiate divorces, but that doesn't necessarily mean that women destroyed the relationship, right? A lot of the time those initiations of divorce can be responses. There's also a lot of narrative, for example, that women get a lot out of divorce, that doesn't seem to be the case when looking at alimony, child support and all of these things. It's usually the case that women interstate of poverty and stay below the poverty line

for a few years. Following divorce and that men tend to remain more financially successful following their divorces as well. There's very high agreement and divorce couples as well on why the divorce happened. Both couples tend to indicate that, you know, we grew apart is simply one of the large reasons. Most divorces as well, if they look at like, who initiated it, they often ask,

whose idea was this or who brought it up first. But if you asked like, did you both want the divorce, you see really high agreement there that both of them are like, yeah, the relationship was over. So that's also something to consider. It seems to be rarely the case that it's simply a unilateral thing. The relationship at that point has deteriorated. Both people know it.

She might ask for it first and that might emerge in the statistics as the woman initiating the divorce, but it's really rarely the case that the man is just like chilling and he thinks everything is perfect and everything's going well. And then she says, I want a divorce and he's just blindsided. I don't know. I don't know why that happened. And then she takes everything I wanted the divorce and he's just blindsided. I don't know, I don't know why that happened. And then she takes everything. That's very, very rare that that happens.

Yeah, Adam Lane Smith, Psychotherapist, ex-psychotherapist, now relationship coach, you know, sat through thousands of couples across his career. And he's adamant about this that the couple comes in and sits down and something catastrophic is about to happen. And to the guy, he hasn't, it's either willful ignorance or just straight up blindness to many, many, many signs for years and years and years from his partner.

And you know, Adams is, you know, he's fucking pro men for an awful lot of this. I don't think that he's got any reason to simp for women's desire to have no fault divorce or whatever. I think that he's been truthful when he just says, like, you know, guys can get into a habit that keeps them blind to what's going on in their relationship and the female partner gets to the stage where they say, I, there's no more, there are no more hints that I can drop. We need to go to counseling. And then they sit down in counseling and this woman kind of unloads all of this stuff.

And the guy looks across and can't believe what is coming out of his partner's mouth. And yeah, I think Adam seems to think that a lot of the time couples counseling is done by a couple as an almost an excuse by the woman so that she doesn't feel too guilty. Like she's already made her mind up and it's already so far gone, but she needs to finally be able to actually get all of this stuff off her chest. So you know, you can maybe say that this is a communication problem.

Maybe it's a failure of cross sex mind reading between the sexes that women are communicating their discontent and their issues in ways that men aren't picking up on, that men aren't being sufficiently perceptive. And like those would be some ways but we understand that women initiate file for divorce more than men. Why do you think that that's the case? Like what is it about women or their experience within a marriage that's causing that to be them that does it? Well, I think there's a situation where men will simply stay in a bad relationship.

Almost to the end, they just may not much less likely to kind of end it when all of the writing is on the wall. There are very explicit things that cause divorce, you know, as well. Drug abuse, more common in men, infidelity, more common in men, and just looking at those two things, that already closes to the gap, to who initiates. But then we have other things as well, like declining marital satisfaction, which does decline faster in women. I think women are more willing to move on in that sense, perhaps. I think, you know, we know, for example, that in single women,

they're much more likely to report being voluntarily single. Women are probably more okay than men in many ways, as far as leaving a relationship and as far as not being in a relationship that they don't want, which can go back to all of the evolutionary reasons, women being more selective and that sort of thing. Women seem to be less pressured to remain in a relationship when they're genuinely unhappy with it, more ready to move on. Is that because, ancestral, women would have had a surplus of potential suitors. So for men, it makes sense for them to remain steadfast and robust, even in their shitty relationship, because the relationship may not be that good, but at least it's a relationship.

You know, most of my male friends, they haven't got anybody. Well, I don't know about that for sure, because sometimes we see those bottle necks in the Y chromosome, which indicates, okay, there were actually many more women than to men. So it's almost like if they left the man, would they be able to find another one? I don't know for sure about that. But something that seems to be very consistent across humans is we have this the dominant mating patterns, basically serial monogamy that people, you know, unlike the Prairie

Vol or some other animal, we don't tend to make for life or with our first sexual partner and stay with them forever. People have some girlfriends, they break up, they get married, they might stay married 10 or 15 years, they get a divorce, they marry someone else. So people have an orientation toward monogamy that's much stronger than many of the other apes, right? And we form really long relationships compared to most mammals, but they don't seem to be lifelong relationships. And that seems to correspond to kind of the gestational age, I guess, or the developmental age of children, that there is a period of time when people might need to stay together to ensure the survival of offspring. It could be

also the case as well that, you know, not having lifelong bonding can increase genetic fitness from genetic diversity. So if someone has a long-term relationship, 15 years, they have some offspring, they get to the end of that time period, they divorce, they might still have some time to have new offspring with a new mate. So we still have this long-term mate formation, but kind of with some diversity of offspring in that case. How do you think we should balance the scales that if what you say is right, and I believe that you are right as well,

I don't think that Christopher Ryan and Sexett Dawn is perfectly accurate. C-Real monogamy seems to be what makes sense and Sessor and monogamy, I think it's sometimes referred to us, but we've created a cultural world where that is, you know, Jeremy Boring is a probably a pretty good example of what the last 500 years of marital advice has been that you're supposed to stay together through thick and thin in sickness

and in health till death to us part. We have constructed a value system even outside of people that are super Christian, that breakups and divorce and stuff, it's not something that you're supposed to do. You made your commitment to the partner and you're going to stick together forever. Do you ever think about this cultural mismatch to our sort of evolutionary predisposition? Yeah, definitely. Certainly we have, you know, the last 2000 years of rules that say, you are married to someone you say with them for life.

And at the same time, yeah, we have that mismatch between that and what people seem to want to do. And looking at research on love, for example, there's different kind of stages of love or different components of love. One is called passionate or romantic love. that seems to be the feeling neurobiological that people experience when they say they're in love and that usually doesn't persist for decades and decades and some people it does but it usually doesn't and that tends to wane after about three to

five years somewhere in that area and that's kind of consistent with, you know, that developmental trajectory, you know, people fall in love, they have kids, the kid is a little bit old enough now. Past that point, people are gonna be a little bit more willing to move on, but of course, then there's committed love and all of these other facets of love where people still maintain really strong bonds, almost as a friendship and a relationship.

But then that comes to a point, you know, 15 years down the line, people might think, okay, I'm with a partner, I'm very committed to them. We're like best friends. We have a lot going there, but at the same time, you know, that passionate love is missing. They want something else in addition to that, and so they're kind of faced with that, that choice or decision, you know, do they just continue in that relationship, or do they kind of move on and restart the process? So to speak, and there's not a good solution or a good answer there as far as like prescriptive. What should people do? And that's of course where all of these beliefs like religion and things come into play that tell people

like you should do this, you should do that. And I think even, you know, even when people fall out of that passionate love, even if they have a bad relationship, breakups are still often really, really hard for them. So it makes a lot of sense that, you relationship, breakups are still often really, really hard for them. So it makes a lot of sense that norms would emerge and say, like, just stay together forever. Avoid a lot of problems, even if the relationship is not ideal in that sense. Yeah, it's interesting, man.

I don't know. I wonder what a different kind of religion would have been that said, marriages are supposed to stay together for ten years, and then at that point there's some weird ceremony where you have to prove that you still care about each other and Earth, and both partners have to do it independently and some weird, raw shark-like detector test, but when you fold on top, contraceptive technologies and liberated sexual norms and a sex-positive society and stuff like that, it really doesn't surprise me that we're seeing divorce rates increasing. There's an awful lot of embedded genetic predisposition in there to encourage us to, okay, like I'm, they were

done, were done here now. You know, one of my favorite ones is couples that have stayed together for quite a while before having children can often find themselves randomly falling out of love with each other. And there's an evolutionary explanation for this, which is almost never would you and a partner have stayed together for a long period of time without trying to have children. The only reason that that would have been the case is if one of you had a fertility issue and you don't know if it's you and you don't know if it's them,

but you definitely know that there is a 50% chance that you're going to have this problem fixed if you decide to move on. And this is one of the concerns for extending, prolonging the pre-child section of any relationship. Couples that get together at university, they're 2021, 22, and they think, yeah, we'll start having kids with more 30. There can be some risks associated with that if this theory turns out to be right. Yeah, exactly. And that's another thing too, kind of related to romantic love, transitioning into committed love. People pass that point. They have invested into the relationship. So there's a question of like, what things in that relationship drive commitment?

If there are kids, that might be a reason to stay together and be committed and try to work things out for a longer period. But if not, you know, you have to wonder. I read a blog post from you that was called The Normie Gets the Girl. What do you mean when you say The Normie Gets the Girl? Sure. So I did this with some vignettes,criptions of different individuals. This was related to kind of the ambivalent sexism inventory, which has constructs of hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. And I created vignettes, a man who is basically like a hostile sexist, which is often kind of negative sexist attitudes for women. And then benevolent sexism is another facet of that. And this is,

it's called sexist by the individuals who created this inventory, but I think there's a reason to question if these are sexist behaviors. They seem to be more traditional attitudes toward women, like women should be first on the lifeboat, that sort of thing. And I had women rate, you know,

how attractive is this man for short, long term, and all of that. So short, long term, yeah, it's pretty closely related, but you see that men high in hostile sexism, they get rated pretty low. Men high in benevolent sexism tend to get rated a little bit higher. And then I have these other vignettes. One was like a manosphere beliefs, black pill kind of beliefs rated really, really low by women, kind of related to hostile sexism there. And then a normative vign a guy who just thought you know things are fine I don't get into these you know uh gender war ideology or what if the case may be and that's kind of rated the highest

and so that's you know and there was another that was an egalitarian or feminist man kind of rated medium so there's of course a lot of discourse on that. What kind of men do women like, you know, and all of that. And it seems to be the case that women don't want someone who is super egalitarian or someone who is super feminist necessarily in a man. They don't want to man at the same time who is highly misogynist or kind of a manosphere, ideologue. They want a guy who's a normal guy, basically, who has kind of normal status quo ideas about women and sex roles and gender roles. Did this change based on the political leaning of the women in question? Did you find that left-leaning women were more open to having a feminist male partner

and vice versa? A little bit, but not much. I asked women for feminist identification or not. And the women who did identify as a feminist, they, they did rate the egalitarian being a little bit higher. But mostly, you still see the same pattern. That the norm is still the most attractive. Benevolent sexist man still gets rated higher than the hostile sexist man. That sort of thing. What was second? Was benevolent sexist man second? I believe the benevolent sexist man was second.

And I think for the feminist condition, the benevolent sexist man was second. And I think for the non-feminist condition, there was a man who was kind of a traditional masculine vignette. And I think that was second. But across all of them, yeah, kind of the norwegai was the one that, you know, the women said they related to the most. Well, don't forget, you know, kind of like we said, somebody's body is not just the body, it is a representation of many other things about them, their worldview and the way that they show up and their personality and all this sort of stuff. The things that you believe

about men and women is also an implication of how much time is this guy going to spend on Twitter? How much time is this guy going to spend arguing with people on Reddit? How often am I going to have to sit at dinner and hear him harp on about some weird YouTube video that he's just watched or whatever? There's an implication downstream from a lot of this. Yeah, exactly. People see that and I think when people see extreme beliefs and ideology, they wonder how stable is this person going to be and all of that. If someone sees someone who's kind of normal, they relate to them more because most people aren't extreme red pillars or extreme feminists or something like that. Most people do kind of share a mix of attitudes and they might lean a little bit left, a

little bit right. But for the most part, they're not typically focused on this gender war ideology. If they think like, yeah, especially if it comes to hostile attitudes toward the opposite sex, hostile sex is a matter of sphere, whatever the case may be. Then it's almost like, is my partner going to hate me? Are they going to really get into a relationship with a racist as a matter of sphere, whatever the case may be, then it's almost like, you know, is my partner going to hate me? Are they going to get into a relationship with a racist as a black person? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty much like that. These are beliefs that do not help people in dating, you know, and they probably manifest in behavior and even if people never share them in very subtle ways that are not going to be entirely fulfilling for the opposite

sex. Did you see those TikToks floating around about a month or a couple of months ago of liberal women lamenting the fact that they couldn't find any traditional men that would hold the door open for them and consider paying on the first date because all of the liberal men that they were trying to date, it was basically what they described was a like cookie-cutter conservative man is what they wanted. Yeah, exactly. And I think that's closely related to that what's called benevolent sexism in the literature. And I would dispute myself personally.

This is not something I would call sexist, but that's what they called it. And there's been researches and it gets women prefer men who score a little bit higher in benevolent sexism. And these are traditional conservative attitudes and beliefs. There are things like holds the door or something like that, even if the women identify is more left. So it seems to be that on the one hand, if they think about the conscious preferences, they might think, I want a man who is more egalitarian, but when it comes down to a lot of behaviors, they still expect behaviors that are very congruent

with traditional gender roles, with the man paying for the bill. The man holds a door, he picks her up at her house, and so on, and even physically the same, as far as a man who is behaviorally dominant, who's physically masculine and all of that. Yeah, it's stated in revealed preferences kind of coming to the front, yeah, again.

What's that taleb quote? You say something like around my family, in the home I'm a socialist, in my neighborhood, I'm a communist, at my state level, I'm a libertarian, and at the national level, I'm a conservative, something like that. It kind of feels a little bit like that, that you've got what a woman might want men at large

to be like. I would prefer to not have hostile sexism from this entire 50% of the population sent toward me and my girlfriends. I would prefer that we had a more egalitarian world. I would sufferings in the challenges of women are understood and the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when it finally comes down to it, the meat and potatoes brass tax of getting into bed and getting into a relationship with somebody, you know, this is the problem I think that has largely gone under the radar, but may come back to bite her in the ass, a little bit further down her career. Alex Cooper from Call Hadadi was, you know, spent, made a career extolling the virtues of casual sex. You know, treat him like you don't like him, how to have sex and not catch feels, you know, like relationships are kind of useless and pointless. But for the last three years, it turns out

that she's been having this whirlwind romance with the guy of her dreams. And then she released a, maybe it was a podcast or a post talking about how beautiful the proposal was in a rose garden and he got down on one knee and it was exactly a sheet envisioned. And you go, this wasn't the story that you promised your audience. This wasn't the life that you said that all of the people following you, the millions and millions and millions of women that were listening to you should lead. And I think, you know, I've got this theory about how hypocrisy is a purpose built melody for the intellectual technological social media range because you can show it's basically a before and after, a cognitive before and after photo, right?

This is what you said previously, and this is what happened in the future. You said that getting into relationship and marriage was totally pointless, and you extolled the virtues of your rose garden proposal. The dissonance just bleeds out of all of these conversations. And yeah, I think stated and revealed preferences, what is it that is politically socially popular for women to post about on the internet compared with what are they actually going to want to get into relationship with at the end of the day. Yeah, exactly. I think as far as people talk about, you know, there's research from a feminist perspective that talks about, you know, the man should do more chores in the house and the sex when we better and all of that. But at the end of the day, I think it really is the case, you know, that women do not want to be the man in the relationship.

They don't want the man in the relationship to be the woman. They do kind of seem to want those roles to some extent, even if politically those stated preferences are for highly egalitarian organization, and there's probably some balance where they don't want to be bombarded with the most restrictive kind of gender roles and a sense, but at the same time, a man who's more dominant, who's going to take charge, who's going to lead, who's going to drive the car and pick the restaurants, you know, and that sort of thing. Yeah. It's just, you know, there are certain elements there.

Are they associated typically with masculinity, yes, but you're like being decisive, standing well under pressure. Like, though, it is. Why do you want to go for dinner tonight? I'll just, there we go. We'll choose. Um, yeah, I think it's a, there's funny that the memes and the cliches kind of often hold some of the greatest truth in them.

There was this Catherine Walter study on testing assumptions about human mating psychology, deal breakers and mate preferences. 50,000 participants from 56 countries, both men and women, prefer short term partners who are kind, healthy, attractive, Women had higher ideal preferences for short-term mates than men did, and most participants, 59 to 80% preferred the same type of ideal mate for short-term and long-term relationships. What's the implication of that? Yeah, brilliant. And I think that study is very consistent with pretty much all of the past research and evolutionary psychology on short and long term made preferences. Somehow it has gotten into the popular discourse that, you know, an entirely different kind

of person is who is desired for short and long term. But really, it seems to be like, no, the same traits are desired in short and long term, but some might be weighted a little bit differently in small ways on average. but some might be weighted a little bit differently in small ways on average. So, you know, a man who's funny and charismatic, long term, short term both. Perfect. A man who's physically attractive. Yeah, he's also desirable both as a long term and short term mate, but in short term mating context, you know, physical attractiveness, it might be a little bit higher preferred, but it's kind of like, yeah, anyone who's desirable as a long term mate is also going to be desirable as a short-term mate and vice versa. Yeah man, I don't know, the this metamine of having wildly different mating preferences for both.

That being said, we said it earlier on, you know, the person that you're going to fantasize about is not necessarily the person you need to, but even with that, let's roll another filter, as you said, that hyper-masculine guy might be great to think about when you're behind the safety of a page. Right? But if you have this very overbearing, physically sort of dominant guy, there's an awful lot of probably associated fear that comes with that. And in some regards, it can be sexy, but in other regards, it's just going to be terrifying. In a sort of a post-MeToo world, I wonder what sort of times up in MeToo as a cultural phenomenon has done to women's preferences when it comes to male behavior and body type

and stuff like that, I would not be surprised if we see women inculcating this concern about two men that are overly dominant, and it really wouldn't surprise me if the end result was we should opt for more feminized men. Even if it was only a little bit, it would be very surprising if it was the other way. Yeah, exactly. You can see kind of that shift culturally, perhaps, towards men who are less dominant or less threatening. And there's a lot of assumptions about that kind of related to the dad-bought thing.

I posted an image and it was kind of like, yeah, the more muscular man is going to be more threatening. Someone said, you know, he looks like he might be a massagingist. So you see a man who's simply because he's jacked, they think he's going to be more threatening. Someone said, he looks like he might be a massagingist. So you see a man who's simply because he's jacked, they think he's going to be a massagingist. So you already have that association there. So what does that mean? The skinny weakling is going to be a feminist or something like that.

We have those associations. And if that's what they think they want, is the feminist man maybe they're going to pick the skinny guy. But at the end of the day, you know, there's probably not too large of an association between attitudes in that sense. Jim bros have a branding problem, man. They need to go through an advertising agency to fix this shit. Yeah, and there was a recent study that was pretty interesting on that that found, okay, men who are more muscular are perceived as being more conservative on average. And I think there's also some research in the past that indicates that as well, that men

with a higher grip strength, for example, also tend to be a little bit more right-leaning and they tend to score a little bit higher in social dominance orientation. So sometimes these perceptions that people form, they can kind of reflect accuracy. And that's related to something in psychology that they don't like to talk about very much. It's called stereotype accuracy because, you know, we always say don't judge people based on stereotypes But at the same time some stereotypes reform them because we see frequencies base rates in the population a lot pattern recognition. Yeah pattern recognition exactly Six main red flags gross clingy addicted promiscuous

gross, clingy, addicted, promiscuous, apathetic, and unmotivated. Perhaps unsurprising to have those. And these sort of broad buckets seem to be quite well replicated. Like within each of them, there's subgenreers of promiscuity and apathy and whatnot. The most interesting thing that I learned from that study was women find promiscuity even less attractive than men in short-term relationships. Yeah, and that's, I think, a thing that a lot of men get wrong and you can tell them this and show them past papers that found this that women do not desire men with a very high sexual history in a sense and you know there's good reasons for that.

Even in a short-term mating context, you know, why are women more averse to short-term mating? One reason we know women have higher disgust sensitivity than men do is a sex difference. Disgust sensitivity, a fear or disgust, aversion to pathogens. We know that women can contract STDs or STIs more easily than men can and that sort of thing. So every sexual partner or woman has

is a risk of exposure to disease in that sense. So a highly promiscuous man. OK, at the same time every sexual encounter a woman has, even if it's short-term, also represents a risk of, I guess, a lack of resource and a risk of pregnancy, a lack of investment. So it's kind of like, if this is someone that's having sex with a lot of people and I get pregnant, how willing are they to invest in me? And I don't think that's an explicit cognition that women have, that would be something under the surface in a sense,

from the evolutionary perspective. But yeah, there's a lot that signals, and I think as well aside, we kind of draw this line short and long term mating. But I don't think it's entirely clear that people always perceive of their short term mating as simply strictly casual sex. A lot of short-term mating, especially in actual behavior, is kind of the jump-off point to long-term mating. You know,

you have a one-night stand. Is it because you intended to have a one-night stand, or is it because you liked the guy and you wanted to continue dating and then he ghosted you, you know, or whatever the case may be. So, or the same with like situationships and all of that. People start, you know, saying, well, we're going to have sex every once in a while, but what are we? Down the line, six months, you find both people have fallen in love and now they're in a relationship. So it's not always the case that, you know, there's a clear line between long and short term and actual behavior. Yeah. So just to reiterate those six main red flags, gross, clingy, addicted, promiscuous, apathetic, and unmotivated. And before I read the results, I tried to think what would be the highest,

what would be the biggest red flag for men and for women. And I thought for women it would be gross, largely because of the disgust sensitivity. But then the highest rated one was clinging us. That's the biggest rated one was clinging us. That's the biggest red flag for women. What, why do you think that's the case? What does that say about women and why the fuck is no one talking about this on the internet?

I'm not entirely sure why clinging us would be the highest one. But I think something in kind of the mating psychology of women is that they do want to man who they can depend upon, and not someone that they have to be a mommy too, in a sense. So if it's the sense that this is someone who's not independent, who's not emotionally stable

or strong that you can lean upon, that could be a big red flag to women in that sense. Clinginess could also represent a threat, kind of like a stalker as well. Someone who's very clingy and all of that, like, you know, could they behave in a way that's emotionally volatile and perhaps perk me? But I'm not entirely sure,

these are just kind of guesses that come to my mind. I read Models by Mark Manson, which is probably 10 years old now. So most people will know Mark for Suddhalat subtle art of not giving a fuck, really great buck. But he actually wrote a, I guess you'd call it kind of like ethical pick a part of three, but toward the back end of the Neil Strauss era in 2013, 14. And he identifies that, this study wasn't out. Maybe he read some stuff, but it seems to just be like, field-tested advice.

And he called it something different. He called just be like, fields tested advice. And he, he called it something different, he called it neediness, not cleanliness, but I think that the sentiment is the same. And he just drills out the one lesson that everybody that reads models takes away is that neediness is the number one turn off for women. And for guys, can't be too needy. One of the, or a few of the things that I reflected on after reading that were over Being overly pliable as a man is a signal of low status That if you can it's why that you know the simps never get the girl as a meme, right? It the the simpses simping for women is a

ineffective mating strategy because what it suggests, first off, is that you have no other options. If you were spending eight hours a day messaging me, I know that you're not spending eight hours a day messaging some other girl as well, unless you've got a really good AI bot assisting you. Secondly, it suggests a low bar, a low, a very low standard, to the point where it's probably a concern that somebody else, some other woman, could come in and quite easily slipstreamed this exact same low level of self-esteem from you. So your level of dedication to me is going to be less. And then finally, I guess there's just some brute force playground logic that I want the thing that other people

Want, right? I don't necessarily want it when I can play with it and whenever it's available to be played with me I want the thing that's a little bit more sort of mysterious and eloof and it's a little bit more difficult to get So that's my three-pronged bro science theory about clinging us Yeah, I think so. And these are kind of deal breakers or red flags in early relationship formation as well. So that can signal something very different from down the line. So let's say we have someone who is very invested in the relationship, but it's really, really early.

And then you might have kind of an incongruence signal. Like, why is this person already so attached to me? We've only been speaking for one week. But if you look at a married couple and you say, okay, they text a lot or something like that, this kind of like, oh, that, you know, that might actually be more desirable. That might like commitments, the needs. Yeah. Yeah. Women seem to really want commitment and investment and attention and time. But somehow at the beginning of a relationship, that can signal kind of, it can be the opposite of what is attractive and then later on down the line, it can be kind of more appropriate in that sense. Yeah. What about, you're talking about marriage and some of the stuff that's

going on. Al Pacino is, who's the guy, some Hollywood celebrity that's just going to another massive age gap relationship? I can't remember who, one of those kind of old legend actors. What do you think is the reason for age gap to booze? So one idea that I had was intersexual competition, right? The idea that, you know, if you have a mating pool, it's going to be people similar to your own age. So, or a mating pool of mates that are more desirable, that have more resources or something along those lines. So it could be the case that when people see an age gap relationship, they are thinking, you know, this is someone being

pulled from my mating pool in a sense by someone outside of that range. If that were the case, we might see age differences between men and women in age gap taboos. So I looked at that, but I didn't find an age difference for women. Women seem to approve or disapprove of age gaps about the same across the board. So sometimes we get that discourse that says, you know, it's old women that are jealous of young women or sometimes you say, hear people say, no, it's young women that disapprove more because, you know, old people are gross or whatever the case may be, but it doesn't seem that there's an age difference like that for women. But for men, there was.

So young men disapprove of age gaps more than older men, which maybe does is kind of congruent with that self-interest perspective or with intracexual competition. But rather than in men, it would be in women in that case, because if young men see age gaps as pulling women from their dating pool, and women do already date up in age, they might be more threatened by that. They might say, yeah, age gaps are inappropriate. Why? Well, because they're stealing the women from you, basically, in a sense.

And I've even heard people argue that explicitly. They said, serial monogamy and age gaps are stealing the women from you, basically, in a sense. And I've even heard people argue that explicitly. They said, serial monogamy and age gaps are stealing the young women. And that's why young men are single or something like that. So that could be one thing, but I don't think that explains all of the taboo. I think a lot of it is kind of cultural. You have kind of a narrative of power and balances,

but at the same time, I looked at hierarchical relationships where there might be a power imbalance, someone a boss and employee, that doesn't seem to have as much of an effect as age gaps either. So that's kind of one explanation you often see from feminist, this idea that there's a big power imbalance in age gaps, they're probably often isn't,

and people don't seem to disapprove as much of power imbalances when the age is close. So it seems to be the case that there is this taboo that's not entirely explained and I think it might just come down to kind of kind of an ik in a sense for some people and that's kind of you know a feeling that people have is just kind of a visceral revol ocean and I think one of that might occur is when people think of dating someone who is much older they just simply simply think from their own experience, I'm not attracted to much older people. I could not imagine dating Al Pacino, you know, a woman who's 20, she says, Al Pacino, look at him, that's gross. And that's all it comes down to. A lot of taboos can simply emerge from that visceral feeling like, yuck. And then the rationalizations come in is because

of lack of consent or a power imbalance or somebody that's being manipulative with their wealth or their status or whatever it might be. Exactly. Yeah. People, that's what happens. A lot of the time we experience emotions first and then we come up with explanations for those emotions.

And I think that can be what happens when people feel that visceral, you know, they, they think, you gross. And yeah, then they comeceral, you know, they think you're gross. And yeah, then they come up with rationalizations to explain why it's gross. Maybe those aren't the real reasons, you know, but that's what they felt in the moment. And that's how they feel now. Interestingly, something I found there was people who had had age gap relationships, of course, they were more approving of age gaps. So because I see some discourse on that as well as you know, a lot of people had an age gap relationship a lot of women true. And they said

you know they learned from their bad experiences. And if that were the case you would expect people that had age gap relationships to disapprove but it was the opposite. So it doesn't even seem to be the case that they're driven by like bad experiences you know those people actually seem to support them more. Interesting what you said about how women dating older creates a death of potential female partners for younger men, because the younger women are captured by slightly older men. There's not really a way to bestow this wisdom onto younger men, but like one day in a couple of years time, you will be those

older men. It seems, I totally get it. Like, you know, if you're a guy who's 22 and all of the girls are getting flown out to God knows where by 38 year olds, like, yeah, that's that's going to suck. But ultimately, it's just like a diluted gerontocracy, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of related, you know, we have like the Pue statistics that say, you know, like 60% of men are single between 20 and 30, and you know, 30% of women are single. Why is that? Are they sharing the man? What's going on? A lot of that gap can actually be explained simply by women dating outside of that age range on average So for the and it's much more pronounced among you know 18 to 25 than it is even among 25 to 30

So it seems to be the case that it's a real effect if you're a man who's like 18 to 23 or something like that You know a lot of those women that you could otherwise day They're gonna be dating up. You're 18 now, so you're probably not going to date down, which is what the older men are doing. You do kind of see it balance out down the line, but it does kind of create a singles gap, especially for really, really young men. I don't know if that's always super obvious looking at the landscape, or if they think the women are sharing the same Chad who's in their class, that's the same age.

But a lot of that, yeah, is just women dating up a little bit. And there's, you know, the average age gap is not huge. It's, you know, two to four years or something like that. But a lot of people are dating outside of the average. And when you total all of those up, you know, you get something like around 20% of women who are between 18 and 30, we're dating men older. So that, yeah, already pulls a big, big chunk of women out. Mm, yeah, I love the less conspiratorial explanations

for this stuff. That's one of the reasons that I really like your work, man. Like for all that we both get accused of being blue-pilled cooks or misogynist bigots, depending on who it is that's looking at what we've written or said. It's just a calming, pretty well-balanced, nice, gentle look at what is the day to say, what do we know about human psychology? How can we marry these two together? Isn't that interesting? The world's probably not quite as fucked as you think it is. It's a very peaceful

way to look at what is quite a chaotic world, I think. Yeah, exactly. It's human psychology, very complex, so many variables. So you always have to have a very nuanced perspective. It's rarely just as simple as x, y, and z. There's always so many different things going on. And if people can calm down a little bit, look at the big picture and, you know, be a little bit stoic about it. If they're in a difficult situation, it's not always you know roses but it's usually not the full black pill either in that

sense. What are you researching next? What can people expect from you? So right now we're looking at some data on only fans, on attitudes about only fans and only fans workers and this is just going to be some descriptive data. This is looking at because this seems to be a topic that actually people might be afraid to explore in the research a little bit because they're afraid that it's kind of stigmatizing, but at the same time, people do seem to have overwhelming negative attitudes about this

and as far as impacts of only fans on future relationship prospects, will someone date and only fans work there? Will this hurt their future job offerings and also Related to that what kind of political attitude to beliefs might predict? Support for that kind of work or the opposite of support for that kind of work Very it so you are delving deep into the archives of only fans. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah, that's what we're looking at now. You're looking at attitudes about it I can't believe you finally managed to get your recreation and your work to come together appropriately.

Alex, these episodes do, I look at the clock and it's been an hour and 40 minutes and it feels like it's been five. I really appreciate the time I get to spend with you. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things you're doing. Sure, so we've got the website, datepsychology.com, Twitter, a date site, and YouTube, Alex.datepsych. Thank you, man. Catch you next time. Thank you.

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