2026-01-04
I dislike dating as a status game
Disclaimer
I dislike the extent to which many people around me [1] treat dating as a status game. This post is me exploring why.
- Self-fulfilling prophecies
- As a man, if you rank highly on objective [2] metrics that make you dateable, you are more likely than the average man to treat women as expendable and remind them you have many options besides them. You may even be rationally correct in doing so, atleast in the early stages of dating. You don't have to actually utter the words, you will probably signal it in your behaviour anyway.
- Because such men exist, if you give out the signals of someone who has a lot of options, this in turn makes it more likely you are one of these men. So you are now incentivised to pretend you have a lot of options, regardless of whether you actually do, because this makes you more likely to have more options. "Fake it until you make it" and "manifestation" are other common terms for this behaviour.
- This sort of salesmanship has a lot in common with stag hunts, which are present across many other domains in life. If you want to coordinate a lot of people towards a goal, it helps if you tell each person that everyone else is already on your side, regardless of whether they actually are. "Self-fulfilling prophecies" are an important mechanism people use to coordinate in general. This is common when trying to start a startup or start a political party or similar group.
- Are self-fulfilling prophecies all fraud?
- In my head, I find it hard to separate "being extremely good at winning stag hunts via self-fulfilling prophecy-styled rhetoric" from outright deception and fraud. Parasitic language games by Hazard Spence does a good job explaining why. The objective criteria (looks, conscientiousness, protectiveness, etc) still matter, and playing the self-fulfilling prophecy game sufficiently well means lying about where you stand on the objective criteria. The lying could be telling actual lies or lying via omission.
- To put in simple words, I think it is way better to actually be a good match for your partner, than to use status games and self-fulling-prophecy-styled-rhetoric to pretend to be one. Successfully using such rhetoric blurs their ability to see you clearly, and this is bad. If you are actually a good match, they should just be able to see that directly, you shouldn't have to use salesmanship on top.
- I wonder if this is why I have an aversion to becoming good at sales in general, across all domains in life. In my professional life, I am trying to start a mass movement against AI companies. This is exactly the type of goal where a leader who uses self-fulfilling-prophecy-styled rhetoric would help. But I seem to refuse to do any of it.
- Maybe rejection is good?
- I also seem to see it as morally wrong in some small way to seduce a woman into being with you, knowing full well that there exist other people who are a lot better suited to her than you are. I generally prefer relationships where both people are happy in it, and neither person is being kept away from way better options. I want to optimise for the long-term interest of my partner even if that long-term interest ultimately means her not being with me.
- This is also why I nowadays sometimes see being rejected by someone I like as a good thing. "Maybe you do in fact have some information that makes it correct for you to reject me and find someone better, and maybe I do in fact want you to find someone better if that is the case." I am aware men and women reject each other for stupid reasons basically all the time, but I want to give the benefit of the doubt that maybe the other person is not stupid. At the very least, maybe the type of person I want to attract long-term is not stupid about these things.
- I am also genuinely confused why women attach so much value to men who are high status.
- I understand that if you are a woman, and you notice a man has many admirers (both men and women), this gives you useful information about them. At the very least, it tells you they are safe to hang around with.
- But once you do have actual information about the person, obtained by spending time with them, you can then trust the actual information, instead of using status as a proxy signal for it. So while I understand using status as a signal to evaluate strangers, I don't see why this should be used if you actually know them to some extent.
- I understand that women are evolutionarily hardwired to value status in men.
- For most of human history, women had to rely on their partners to protect themselves from actual physical violence from third parties. (Today they can rely more on the institution of the nation state instead, atleast in those countries with good rule of law. [3]) As a woman, attaching yourself to a man who is respected by many people, decreases the likelihood you will experience violence or rape or similar. Because this fact was true for tens of thousands of years (and probably even was true for apes, I think?) there was probably some evolutionary selection pressure for women valuing status. (I have not actually looked at the evidence base behind this though, so this is a weak opinion. Many evo bio explanations are easy to spin in whichever direction is convenient, until you actually look at the evidence.)
- Even if it is hardwired, is the wiring so strong that you can't undo it?
- Some wirings are in fact that strong. The wiring for physical attraction is very strong for example. As a man, I find most fat women unattractive. I can't simply change this wiring by telling myself "actually fat women probably have just as valuable personalities as other women".
- Other wirings are not that strong. For instance, as someone with a lot of technical knowledge, I naturally gravitate to people (both men and women) who also have a lot of knowledge. But I am able to reflect on this and realise that actually this preference isn't fundamental, I am capable of dating women who aren't as knowledgible or educated as me, and I can be really happy in those relationships.
- I am curious to know if women's desire for high status men is a preference they can change after reflection or not.
- As a personal orientation, I don't actually want to waste time accumulating options?
- My current understanding of dating is that once a woman satisfies certain basic criteria, I should just commit to them, because a lot of the value of relationships comes from keeping them long-term. I am sympathetic to the idea that relationships are built not found. I don't see the value in holding out and waiting years for someone who is an 8.5/10 in terms of longterm compatibility, if I have already found someone who is an 8/10, assuming finding 8/10s is not hard. (Note that these scores are for longterm compatibility, and not physical attraction.)
- That being said, this is still a weak opinion because I lack data. Maybe outlier amazing relationships do in fact exist, are in fact worth waiting for, instead of committing to people who are good for you but not amazing for you. Maybe there are people out there who are 15/10 in terms of longterm compability to me, but I never even considered this possibility, because my very idea of what 10 means is calibrated by the people I have already met.
- I currently have a lot of probability mass on "commit to decent relationships" being better than "wait for amazing relationships" for me personally. Ultimately the only way to be sure is to get more data, be it personal experience or anecdotal data from others or large internet datasets.
- In my head it sounds endearing to say to someone, "you know what, there might exist other women in this world who are better for me than you are, on objective criteria like looks or education or whatever. But I choose you anyway." I like this type of sentiment, but I don't know how others perceive it.
[1] I think this probably applies to many human cultures across time and space, not just "people around me", but I am less sure about that part. If it applies to many cultures, then me saying I dislike status games in dating is the same as saying I dislike human nature, which is basically "old man yells at cloud". But also fuck it this is my personal section so I will be more tolerating of expressing my own emotions here.
[2] Let's skip the whole debate on what these objective criteria are. I am currently somewhat sympathetic to Geoffrey Miller's criteria, but it doesn't matter what they are, I think most people agree that some objective criteria exist. When I say objective criteria, I just mean criteria that are universally shared by most women, as opposed to criteria that are unique to each woman.
[3] I am aware that proving you were raped in court is still hard today, even in countries with good rule of law. I'm saying most of human history was probably worse than this, if you did not have a male elder or partner to protect you. There's also a whole related discussion on culture, and who society was more likely to believe, which I will leave out of scope of this post.
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