In my last post, I described the shift of the dating pool away from the Traditional Life Story (TLS) into a disorganized mixture of niche groups, each seeking their own self-gratifying relationships. The TLS is rare enough, that merely finding the niche itself is a challenge to people in the dating market. Speaking of “finding” the niche is perhaps misleading. Niche groups in the dating pool are mostly informal and ad hoc, or what we will call “illegible.”
In political theory, legibility is the degree to which social arrangements are standardized and formally tracked versus informally maintained by tradition. Think of a ledger in accounting. Author Aaron Renn describes this here.
Conventionally, dating has been a highly illegible institution in that there is no formal or standard way to know exactly who is in the dating pool, their level of interest in dating any specific person, or in dating at all. This was used to preserve honor and good manners as they balanced trying to get what they want out of relationships while avoiding crass objectification. Cultures developed sophisticated traditions of innuendo, social mixer events, and tactics for hint-dropping as a way to signal interest while maintaining deniability at the same time and thus avoiding the tedious and demoralizing aspects of hurt feelings. These are things like dropping handkerchiefs, asking a girl to homecoming, or buying a drink.
This worked well for societies that share a common life story, but as progressivism has broken down this shared outlook, the illegible dating pool significantly increases the difficulty of finding one seeking the TLS. Traditional illegible dating still works to produce semi-random pairing up within the general population, but that is not a very effective way to find people interested in the TLS if it is not driven by closely-knit communities like churches and personal recommendations.
Increasing Legibility
In general, the Internet has greatly increased legibility in nearly everything it has touched. Before Amazon and Ebay were available on your phone, people had no way of knowing prices besides physically visiting a store. The web increased price legibility so much that physical stores suddenly had to compete on price with every online vendor in the world. In similar fashion, the Internet has also increased dating legibility.
Social media normalized the concept of making relationship statuses public information and self-tagging individual attributes like religion, political views, and hobbies.
Singles groups created larger affinity networks around given regions and interests for the purpose of helping singles meet
Dating sites made explicit the romantic intentions, the search process, and standardized the ways to signal interest and more quickly filter candidates.
Hookup apps put the algorithm on crack and greatly increased the speed and superficiality of encounters.
The dating pool has responded with wild interest in online dating. The exact numerical impact of the Internet is not important for our purposes, but meeting online dwarfs all other methods to meet and shows no signs of slowing down.
Whether or not you like this trend, it is the new landscape, and technological changes to the landscape affect everyone. The introduction of automobiles resulted in highways and urban sprawl for everyone, even those who preferred the horse and buggy. Of course, most people prefer the automobile and are willing to accept the downsides to the point that it would be almost impossible to go back, even if you accepted shoveling manure. Online dating is no different.
The SMV Shredder
The increase in legibility for online dating accelerated the pace that people could meet. What once depended on chance now depends on the build-measure-learn innovation cycle of tech startups. Companies with access to large amounts of user data can figure out exactly what factors drive user behavior, and design their product around driving that behavior, and thus maximize the efficiency of finding matches.
The net result is that the best matches pair up quickly and leave the dating pool. We might like to believe that this matching process would involve matching people who like dogs, tennis, or bacce ball, but that’s rarely what actually happens. Instead, think about all the supermodels, surgeons, and real estate developers getting paired up quickly and on down the hierarchy until it reaches an equilibrium. People commonly think that they are looking for shared interests and values but unconsciously are looking for someone who meets their standards of attractiveness, social status, money, and personality who also shares those interest and values (optional).
We can call this concept the Sexual Marketplace Value (SMV). In a normal marketplace, value is assigned to products and services based on supply and demand. This “value” is an abstraction to describe the averages at play. The sexual marketplace assigns value to people based on the supply and demand of desirable traits. Liking tennis is not a highly valued trait the way that physical attractiveness, money, and social status are. The sexual marketplace is of a similar level of complexity to the stock market and one could spend a lifetime analyzing it, but broadly speaking, SMV is as fundamental to relationships as the share price or P/E ratios are to the stock market. It is a strong social taboo to discuss SMV openly, but its critical to understand how the system really works.
For a dating site, this concept introduces a dynamic effect to the group. Higher SMV members will be eliminated quickly, causing the overall SMV in the group to trend down over time unless new members join to replace them. However, there is no reason to believe that the new members who join will be mostly high SMV people, as they would be random people from the dating pool. The group turns into an SMV shredder. Over time, dating sites like this will become full of people who have low eligibility for relationships, and high SMV individuals who stumble onto the site will be swarmed with unwanted interest and driven away, introducing a toxic dynamic to the brand.
To prevent the SMV shredder from destroying the group, dating sites rely on polygamy. Some portion of the population is monogamous, but as I discussed in my last post, we are (almost) all polyamorous now. Sexual promiscuity allows them to keep high SMV people on the site after a successful pairing. This dynamic can explain the drift in sentiment from online matchmaking to online hookups.
Morally, this is a disaster, and it is especially for those seeking the TLS. High numbers of sexual partners (commonly called “body count”), in addition to being sinful according to the Bible, is terrible for marriages and children. You can’t turn a ho into a housewife. The final result is that dating sites have destroyed most of the benefit that increased legibility offered if you are looking for the TLS. As this algorithm gets more concentrated, the line between dating, hookups, and prostitution becomes blurred. Polyamorous behavior began with serial monogamy and evolved into overt sexual hookups, but if unlimited sexual hookups for fun are ok, why not for profit? If Tinder is dating on crack, OnlyFans is Tinder on crack.
Some dating sites try to solve this by overtly marketing to a niche, like to Republicans, Christians, or farmers, etc. but ultimately they suffer the same dynamics of SMV shredding or polyamory, depending on the niche. The only way for these sites to survive long term is to have a low enough cost that a large pool might as well join and just accept the consequences.
The Iron Law of Singles Groups
Singles groups are like a modified version of a dating site. They have similar SMV dynamics but are usually free or nominally low cost, and lack the matchmaking algorithms. Rather than overtly matching, the group serves as a place to mingle so that matches occur organically. The SMV shredder occurs just like it would in a monogamous dating site, but they also face a unique problem emergent from their casual, mingling nature, which I call the Iron Law of Singles Groups. It states that, “All singles groups grow toxic apart from deliberate intervention to prevent it.”
Whereas dating sites create interactions between individual members, singles groups create interactions between the whole group at a time, which introduces the ability for members to influence one another. Each group will develop its own culture out of the sum of the interactions of all members over time. Ideally, you would want the most eligible members to have the most influence over the culture, but as successful pairings occur, the remaining population will skew towards the least eligible, causing them to have the most cultural influence. Narcissistic, man-hating women who nag, triangulate, or manipulate will obviously be passed over by higher value men, just as men who are effeminate, pushovers, and woman-pleasers will be passed over by women. Ultimately, it sets the group on a toxic spiral along the lines of a woke human resources meeting. Even a singles group overtly focused on conservative Christians who want the TLS will still face this dynamic.
The Future of Dating
What are the takeaways here for those seeking the TLS?
First, this is not merely a demographics problem. We are not struggling to merely find and match the right people. The settings, platforms, and cultures of where people meet has a strong influence on most people, and you can’t count on people simply having an iron will that can’t be influenced. We need the cultural, moral, and religious capital to overcome this.
Second, neither online nor offline dating is necessarily the right answer. Every method has its advantages and its hazards. There are some obviously wrong answers but neither online or offline should be categorically rejected.
Third, that high SMV is always beneficial. Coming from a position of strength gives you the most options and the best opportunity to find a suitable outcome. Practically speaking, this means that individuals need to critically examine themselves for ways they can increase their attractive traits. They should improve their physical appearance with good diet, exercise, clean grooming, dressing well, and good hygiene. Women should cultivate a gentle, submissive, quiet, and helpful demeanor. Men should labor to increase their monetary earnings as much as is reasonably possible, seek to lead well, and maintain a strong frame.
Fourth, we need married people to be invested in the future of dating for singles. The health of the overall dating ecosystem benefits everyone, even those who are already married. Married people will still have single children, grandchildren, friends, church members, and neighbors who will face the toxic dating pool. By having an investment in the dating pool when they are not directly in the market themselves, they can bring objectivity and sanity and prevent some of the cultural rot. Being married in and of itself does not make someone high SMV or a special beacon of wisdom for the poor, unmarried plebs, but those who have a sense of competence and nobility ought to remember the principle of noblesse oblige and support where they can. However, care must be taken to not be out of touch to the rapid changes of the market since they were single. One of the safest ways to invest in singles is to show them in-home hospitality that models proper family life.
Do you have any takeaways I have missed?
I think the only thing you missed between the two posts is the role that *age* is playing in a lot of this. To somewhat build on my comment on that previous post, a woman who makes the mistake of going to college today, unless she's lucky enough to meet her spouse there, is flushing 4-5 years, half a decade, of her prime dating and childbearing years down a toilet for a career she may not even really WANT but everyone else around her has convinced her she wants, "needs," "should," whatever passive-aggressive nonsense is dumped on HS and college-aged girls these days. By the time she gets out of college, the men who make the best husbands, have the best sexual discipline, etc. are already married, already locked down their wives.
If you're "traditional," dating after 30 is a joke or a unicorn. After 35? Your options are divorcees. Past 40? Wait for the widowers, I guess. Single men wanting that TLS marry YOUNG, even now, and even "traditional" women often don't realize that. Get your degree at 45 if you insist on doing so, but have your babies when God meant you to and when the GOOD men are still available.