Stats for nerds
1recommend
6mentions
2people
2022–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If they honestly wanted to help people get together there are a lot of things you could do in terms of mechanism design, but as it is they get paid through monthly subscriptions as opposed to when people pair up so they have the wrong incentives. It doesn’t help that almost all of them, except for Bumble, are owned by the same company, Match Group. There ought to be an antitrust lawsuit!
There is a fundamental problem though that the perception that you have unlimited choice can lead you to never settling down because you always imagine that if you keep looking you’ll find somebody better. Falling in love requires you, for at least a while, believe that that person is absolutely singular and unlike everybody else as Stendhal writes in the classic On Love a.k.a. “Love the one you’re with”
See https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
If I was really going to “do something about it” I’d try to put couples through a structured experience, see
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/14/love-is...
- Her worst crackpot idea was the "date-me experiment" where, looking for a long term partner, she got roughly 10⁴ guys to fill out a form, scored them, dated a few from the very top, and decided that they were not keepers.
It goes against everything we know about love. Stendhal, who was no monogamist, wrote that falling in love was a process of "crystallization" in his classic On Love [1] in which case the person you are falling in love with seems absolutely singular [2] If, on the other hand, you are looking at it from the viewpoint of this is a selection process that is a long and wide funnel, you will never feel this person is singular.
Authors like Slater [3] and Illouz [4] agree that the problem with online dating is that, like Aella, you imagine you're selecting people from a vast pool and that you could always find somebody better if you just sampled more -- so you never fall in love.
Aella's popularity is an interesting question, as I've observed her over time my impression of her intelligence and judgement has gone down as she keeps falling into the most obvious traps, but the rationalist movement she's associated with is selected for incredulosity (e.g. making a Harry Potter fanfic a canon work will do that) and there is not a lot of quality information about sex out there. (When my evil twin went looking for answers in the stacks of a big academic library we were convinced that those answers were not there.)
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53720/53720-h/53720-h.htm
[2] as that state of limerence is a temporary thing nothing stops you from feeling it for different people at different times while still harboring less intense feelings for one or more of them (the point is not mono vs poly but rather Aella is far beyond poly)
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Love-Time-Algorithms-Technology-Meeti...
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
- The conventional analysis is that this is the worst possible way to look for love.
(1) Eva Illouz in
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...
and many other modern authors will say that the longer of a list of lovers you have to choose from the less likely you will choose any of them. Whether you are evaluating a large number of prospects with a large list of criteria (Date me) or evaluating a large number of prospects based on photos (Tinder) the key thing is that the more people you look at the more choices you imagine you have, the more you believe you’ll find somebody better if you look a little longer and the less likely you are to pick any of them.
(2) Stendhal in his classic “On Love”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53720/53720-h/53720-h.htm
describes how falling in love involves a process of “crystallization” in which your love object appears to be singular and absolutely unique. The process of evaluating a long list is the opposite of this. Even if you are polyamorous and believe you can maintain multiple love relationships over time, that part of it where you are head over heels over someone (e.g. “new relationship energy”) is something you feel for one person at a time.
- I have been studying the psychology of love, relationships, attraction, seduction, etc. since last summer. Something I've read over and over again is that that Stendhal's book "On Love" is one of the very few worth reading
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53720/53720-h/53720-h.htm
I read it and agree.
- No one bought books. If one can believe Edward Dahberg, the first run of Thus Spake Zarathusra sold ten copies, the first run of Stendhal's On Love, seventeen copies. That considered, Thoreau selling just more than 200 of the first printing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers appears as a raging success--but he had many literate friends.
Simon Leys, in the essay "Readers' Rewards and Writers' Rewards", quotes the French writer, and sometime publisher, Jacques Chardonne as saying that "Any good book will find 3,000 readers, no more no less." Leys goes on to say the number hasn't varied significantly in last 400 years. (Collected in The Hall of Uselessness)
- This. If I were looking for a magic spell to make people impervious to seducing and being seduced I would make them think the way you do. (e.g. evolutionary psychology, black-pill, any-pill, etc.)
I spend my time thinking about the opposite kind of spell.
I am feeling limerent for someone right now. When it started I was just practicing charming people (which I take absolutely seriously, do it to develop metamours, but also find gratifying in itself) but then I got a response and it really got to me.
I don't compare this person to anyone else. I can't say she is a "7" or an "8" or "9". I don't idealize her absolutely but for all practical purposes she is perfect. I know she is receptive, I know she is vulnerable, I know she'll be disappointed if I don't take the next step. I could go into my past and remember being bullied in school and have many reasons to think I don't measure up but I don't go there because she is on the hook and I know I am good enough.
Also I know most people aren't that good about relationships, don't understand their own feelings, don't understand other people, don't see other people, don't listen, are too self-centered, etc. Based on my own ignorance and not wanting to feed my grandiosity (and conjugate feelings of worthlessness) I resist deciding what percentile my seduction skills are in, but I know my results aren't drawn from the same statistical distribution as the median person.
If you look at survey studies it's not so obvious that young people who are having casual sex are motivated by the desire for sex so much as what casual sex means for their relationship with the group. This is true for both women and men in somewhat different ways. (those "pickup artists" who I distance myself from are a homosocial community of men who like to boast about their conquests with other men and compare their experiences with abstract models who seem impervious to the many joys you can get from being a woman)
If you are looking at love as a process of comparison, sizing up, or sampling you are not going to feel it. If you jump in with both feet it's something different.
As for pretty young women I am still scratching my head because I see a lot of them and it's dawned on me that against all odds some of them like me as an animal but I agree with this guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal
that love starts with admiration. It's easy for me to admire somebody my own age who's got a lot of history and accomplishments but I haven't figured out how to deeply admire somebody young. I'm getting good at "showing not telling" my appreciation for their looks but I if I want to get good quality love and lust out of them in I need to see something that other people don't see and learning to see that and communicate that I see that is important.
I don't have any time for defeatism, actually I get better advice from my imaginary friends than I get from rationalists and manospherists.
The paradoxical thing is that evolutionary psychology seems to have little relevance to human sexual behavior. Probably hunter-gatherers were poly. Female orgasm is a thing but is by no means necessary for reproduction. Different cultures have very different ideas about love, family structure, etc. (Stehdahl's book On Love claims that attitudes were widely different in different countries in Europe and even in times a few decades apart in France.)
