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2026-09-08

Date me (notes to self)

Disclaimer

• personal
• target audience - strictly myself

2026-09-08

Update

• It is a bit funny.
• The surface-level criteria from both sides seem to be roughly looks, status and humour/fun.
  • Median woman does appreciate looks, status and humour/fun, atleast in superficial 60 second judgments.
  • I too prefer a partner who crosses a certain looks threshold, and is atleast somewhat capable of appreciating some aspects of life. Basically I also care about looks and fun in a partner, I just don't have a very high bar, that's all. I don't care about partner's status but I care about them being independent and not under their parents' control.
• Living in same city is a mandatory criteria, since we don't yet have tech to have sex remotely lol.
• The long-term criteria I notice so far are mono/poly, kids and "acceptance" frontiers around core values.
• The main deep confusions I still have are:
  • why do women care about men's status? (I know the evolutionary explanation, I wanna understand why this survives reflection)
  • acceptance frontiers around core values - this sounds like a multi-year project tbh, to actually deeply understand this
• In an ideal world, you can use community to pre-filter all this.
  • Ideally I should be part of a community that grants high status (i.e. respects, admires, appreciates) to the things I also actually respect, and finds fun the things I actually find fun.
  • If I was hypothetically part of such a community, then I won't feel like I need to pretend to be someone I am not, in order to score high on the status or humour/fun metrics.

2026-08-21

Shifting this section out of the document and putting a condensed version there, because it could benefit from more "show dont tell"

My extreme traits

• See also: My personality test results
• My guess is that I am above 90 percentile honest. Should be self-evident looking at this blog lol.
• I am decent (but maybe not 90 percentile) at keeping commitments. As per Ray Dalio personality test, I am 52 percentile reliable. I think I am most reliable as a support during actual emergencies. If there is no emergency, I tend to avoid making promises (exceptions exist). Saying all this based on personal experience (can't share here for privacy reasons).
• As per Big 5 personality test (and also my own observations), I am above 90 percentile on Conscientiousness. I have a decent level of executive function and can handle responsibility (atleast while my mental health is not bad).
• I have never been IQ-tested but I am probably atleast 80 percentile on IQ. I know mainstream society considers it low status to boast about your IQ, but I honestly believe a lot of specific competence is just downstream of IQ + Conscientiousness + putting in the hours. And I think a lot of people value competence.
• As per Big 5 personality test (and also my own observations), I am above 90 percentile on Openness to Experience. As per Ray Dalio test, I am above 90 percentile Adventurous. This will be very obvious to you if you read my personal experiences above, or hear more of the details that are not shared above.
• As per Ray Dalio personality test (and also my own observations), I am above 90 percentile on Creativity. I never figured out a very organised way to do this though (like becoming a composer or artist or similar). I used to draw and invent a lot of mazes as a kid, if that counts.
• As per Ray Dalio personality test (and also my own observations), I am above 90 percentile on Independence and being not Status-seeking. I think this should also be obvious looking at my worldview or past and present life plans.
• I am probably 90 percentile on making notes about people. I have a bad memory but I want to deeply understand people, hence this. Expect me to have hundreds of pages of notes about you if we spend a few years together.

2026-08-15

Update

• deleted this link from main document as I think this is no longer relevant
  • My older (now abandoned) date me doc - Biased by Geoffrey Miller's criteria, which I trust but only partially. It is too aimed at the median man or woman, and I'm not aiming to be either the median man, or look for median woman.
• restructured the doc based on some feedback
• shifted this section to notes to self

I have not tried to share a lot of info about myself on this doc itself. Why?

1. I don't yet know what is the best way to sell myself and who my target audience is. Hence I am just spamming lots of info instead.
   • The basic stack to attract the median woman atleast via a superficial 60-second judgement seems to just be looks, status and humour as far as I can tell.
     • For looks, you can see my photos above.
     • For humour, I am not a very funny person and not really trying to be one.
     • For status, the median woman (looking for LTR, in my socioeconomic class, in my city) as far as I can tell, has internalised status heirarchies revolving around their partner getting a corporate job and being respected by both families and having hobbies and so on. I clearly intensely dislike the status heirarchies of mainstream society. Median woman doesn't appreciate more niche markers of status.
   • I also clearly don't want to attract the median woman and I seem to be aiming for someone niche.
   • I don't have a very good understanding of these niches. What would some women like about me in particular, and which particular types of women these are. I haven't better scoped out who is my target audience basically.
2. I increasingly think that some of this stuff is best done via "show, don't tell".
   • See also: Why use "show, don't tell" on date me docs
3. Some things I actually can't post publicly, to protect privacy of others.
   • For instance, I can't publicly post about romantic things I've done for women in the past.

2026-06

Update

Note 1

• I know this is something like the 4th or 5th "date me" document I have written but a part of me wants to scrap it and rewrite it yet again. Here's why:
  • The document is 95% correct only, but it doesn't carve reality at the joints.
  • You could say this is just neuroticism or anxiety, but I don't actually think this fully explains it.
  • Great explanations are simple and elegant. The document is below is not elegant. Hence I will work more on it.
  • I am interested in outlier outcomes in life, and am willing to pour outlier amounts of effort into it, even if some of that goes to waste.
  • Meme
    • Broke: Optimise distribution - as in optimise for all the surface-level stuff of how you appear to others
    • Woke: Optimise product - figure out more core stuff such as your values and so on, such that you become more attractive to others on the market
    • Bespoke: Reality-distortion field - understand relationships so deeply that you can persuade lots of other people that they'd want to become the person you want them to be, even if currently there are zero people on the market for you.

Note 2

• Note to self - This is a skill issue on my part and I should probably try to fix this soon. Maybe I should go pay for some surveys or interview some women over this. Need practical data, not theoretical data. Trust revealed preferences not stated preferences, because people lie a lot on this topic for status-related reasons.

Note 3

• As of 2026-06, I have deliberately chosen not to do more theory on this. Either actually meet people, or do surveys, or both, and report results here. Prefer the X Y format when writing more on this topic.

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