Modern WisdomThe Painful Truth About Modern Dating Culture - Alex DatePsych
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,009 words- 0:00 – 4:10
Why Have Men Stopped Approaching Women?
- CWChris Williamson
What's going on with risk aversion and men not approaching women?
- ADAlex DatePsych
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, uh, less willing to take risks. And a big risk for men, at least a perceived 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 I should say, a positive correlation with that risk aversion and willingness to approach, right? That people who are more risk-averse, much less willing to approach, they tend to have more fears as well, as far as the potential consequences of- of approaching a woman, asking for a date.
- CWChris Williamson
What did they say were the primary fears that these guys were concerned about?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Sure. So some of the primary fears are basically social rejection and social consequences. There were some differences where individuals higher in risk aversion might fear more legal consequences as well, like, uh, some kind of report to HR or the police or even something like that. But it tends to be mostly kind of a fear of, like, loss of- of reputation.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Well, I suppose, you know, we have a basis for this, ancestrally, 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. Uh, so I- I certainly understand from that- that angle. 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," is like (laughs) fucking mortal. It's reality bending. It's so strange. It's such a bizarre... And again, I'm sure that there's loads of guys listening that, "I don't know what you're talking about. I can just go up and talk to anybody." Uh, 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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Absolutely, yeah. And yeah, the most confident man, it doesn't matter, they're gonna be a little bit nervous, at least, approaching a woman. And I think that's something in pickup artist communities that they've kind of caught onto as almost kind of an exposure therapy to that, which, you know, exposure therapy, when people have phobias, they're exposed gradually to whatever the stimulus is that reduces that fear. And so maybe they've kind of caught on, like, approach a hundred women, and you will be less afraid. Yeah, that's what it is. But of course, most men aren't out there approaching a hundred women. And that kind of nervousness, it persists, even if an individual is very, very confident to begin with.
- CWChris Williamson
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, uh, which is p- pretty reliable when you're trying to get rid of all manner of phobias. If it's a spider that you're scared of, or you've agoraphobia and you don't wanna leave the house, you know, it's one step at a time, very, very small exposures, et cetera. Um, and given that this is such a- such a difficult one, I asked, uh... It was ages ago, but I spoke about, um, what it's like for a woman to approach a man and be rejected, and had 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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
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 o- of those expected gender roles in a way, that, you know, "Women will wait." I- And they will say, you know, "I would prefer to be approached by a man." And that's something else that kind of came out in the research. You know, we asked women, uh, "Would you like to be approached more?" And you had about 70 to 80% of women, uh, particularly younger women, even more than older women, that said, "Yeah, I wish men would approach- approach more," but- but they're not gonna do it. The women aren't gonna- gonna approach men, for sure.
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting.
- 4:10 – 9:37
Do Men Need to Be So Risk-Averse?
- CWChris Williamson
So have you looked longitudinally at this? Do you know if men's risk aversion and fear of approach has increased over time?
- ADAlex DatePsych
I don't know for sure, but there- I think there are- is some research on that, that I- that I haven't done, that's, uh, 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-averse than earlier generations. And there's a lot of kind of converging evidence on that, that, you know, 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- they're- they're kind of hesitant to enter the adult world, so to speak.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, Jean Twenge's work in generations is- is fantastic with this, uh, slow life strategy or extended adolescence. Um, I- it explains an awful lot. You know, me and Buss have been talking about this generalized risk-aversion syndrome. Um, and it is, it's across... You know, it 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. Uh, it- it very much is, uh, kind of like the vanguard of risk. I suppose other things, moving out of the house, changing jobs, moving locations, but certainly a- a much lower stakes, more common one, which is what makes it interesting, 'cause 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, it- the felt sense of it is a, you know, world-ending catastrophe.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Exactly, yeah. And something kind of related to that is that, uh, we see, for example, individuals higher in the dark triad, they have more sexual partners, uh, psychopaths as well, people that score high in the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. We see, example, people that have a criminal record may have earlier sexual debuts, 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? It- 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Was it you that discovered 50% of men aged 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yes, that sounds right. (laughs) Yeah. And the men that have-
- CWChris Williamson
I have been throwing that statistic all over the internet, so I'm glad- I'm glad that I got the citation right.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, and the men that have approached are doing remarkably well. A lot of the men who have approached, they- they've- m- 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
I would have to check again, but it might even be higher. It might have been, of the men who had, it might have b- 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.
- CWChris Williamson
That's... I don't know. That seems pretty positive for the approach.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I suppose, you know, there's a- 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, uh, 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- a serious white pill for why you should approach women.
- ADAlex DatePsych
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, 'cause 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 difficulty. 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, yeah, they're probably doing better.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I think William Costello's most recent post about incels found a wildly externalized locus of control.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yes, exactly, yeah. His recent paper, e- exactly that. He looked at the same thing, locus of control and incels had, yeah, that higher external locus of control. You know, people with an external locus of control, they see the world as like, "Things just happen to me. It's out of my control." Whereas people with an internal locus of control, you know, they say, "I make things happen. Things don't just happen to me. You know, what- whatever happens in life, I have some control over that."
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, you asked
- 9:37 – 15:26
Takeaways From Alex’s Survey on Dating Struggles
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, a big one that emerged was fear of rejection. For men specifically, uh, 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, uh, sex differences there. About 70% of women scored highly, which was a six or a seven on a seven-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, uh, much more than men said that they felt there was a lot of sexual pressure and demand for them. So those are- those are things as well. Not finding someone who is physically attractive enough, yeah, women scored higher in that as well. I think that had a Cohen's d 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 'cause I'm afraid to be rejected. Can't make a connection with someone on an emotional or intellectual level as well."
- CWChris Williamson
The intellectual one is so interesting and kind of runs against, I think, a lot of common held dating commentary, uh, on the internet, because it's very difficult for us to quantify what intellectual compatibility or sapiosexual success actually is, right? Like, what- w- no one's talking about that on the internet. You know, they'll- they'll say... And I hear this. Uh, 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 Soho House on a Saturday afternoon in a relatively warm country, you will get so many fascinating stories about girls in their s- from 25 to 40 and their dating challenges. And dude, I... F- it's my ethnographic, like, in-person research center, and I'll just sit and just ask questions or overhear conversations about what people are- are talking about. And a lot of the conversations that these girls are saying is, you know, guys are, um, intellectually immature, emotionally immature. Um, 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- and- and sort of manchildren all over the place. And again, with this, it- it would be, uh, the-... low resolution solution to this would be don't, 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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, exactly. Uh, 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, uh, mean when they're, when they're saying, "I can't find a man who is intellectually compatible." I don't think they- they mean everyone is stupid or they're not high IQ. I think they mean, is it someone that's interesting that can, uh, connect to me emotionally, that can connect to me on a, 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."
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I think just paying attention to people seems-
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... to be incredibly rare. You know, i- it's kind of, I guess guys talk about this a lot, that, um, it sometimes seems to men that when they're in a relationship, women respond to them differently than when they're not. You know, they're just s- 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 r- a committed relationship, you're not trying to pull. So it actually does a couple of things. It lowers the stakes because you're not, there's no such thing as rejection here. Y- she's not on the docket as far as you're concerned. And I also wonder whether, um, some of the sort of chest beating, peacock tail 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, uh, actually comes across as being more intellectually engaging because they're just letting it come and go nice and easily.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, exactly. Some fluency in 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 in visuospatial, but women tend to score a little bit higher in verbal intelligence. So women may be a little bit better at communicating and having those conversations, holding them and, and engaging. And so if, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. How is your one man crusade to try and fix
- 15:26 – 19:11
Trying to Correct the Ideology of Incels
- CWChris Williamson
the cognitive distortions in the incel world going?
- ADAlex DatePsych
It's going well, I think.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- ADAlex DatePsych
A lot of people seem-
- CWChris Williamson
You're a liar. You are a liar. Uh, you're a liar.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, I don't know. People are always very stuck in what they believe. Ideology is very, very hard to shift and people like kind of simple explanations for things, kind of univariant 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 these 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, yeah, particularly in incel communities, you know, they, that community is their friends and their identity in a way.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you wish more incel, uh, forum inhabitants knew?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, I wish that they would perhaps understand more nuance as far as, uh, all of the research related to attractiveness. So it's very, I guess if 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 is kind of a statistical thing, you'll see that in the abstract or whatever report like, "Oh, 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'll be like one on average or something like that. And that's very common in psychology that sometimes the differences are, are relatively small. Uh, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. William's most recent study, I've got part of the abstract here, "Incels significantly overestimate the importance of physical attractiveness and financial prospects to women, and underestimated the importance of intelligence, kindness, and humor. Incels underestimated women's overall minimum mate preference standards as well."
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, that's the thing. And that, and of course that's part of basically that whole black pill ideology that looks reign supreme. And, 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, they're up there as far as the hierarchy goes. But if you say only looks matter and everything else, uh, ha- doesn't contribute at all, that's not a very good picture either. I did a med- a meta-analysis looking at lifetime sexual partners and, uh...... physical attractiveness. And the effect was very small. The, it had a Hedges' g of, like, 0.14, so it's like, "Okay, more effective-"
- CWChris Williamson
Speak English, Alex. What's that?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah. Well, it 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, uh, yeah, more attractive men, they have more sexual partners over their 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. Uh, there's larger effects for something like behavioral dominance, for example.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you mean there?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Behavioral dominance, uh, kind of aggression, interpersonal aggression, male-male competition, even things like athleticism in 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, and impulsiveness, risk-seeking, that men who might seek out those environments, they're typically not the kind of men that are afraid to approach women and shoot their shot.
- 19:11 – 25:01
Why Competence is Sexy
- ADAlex DatePsych
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. It's a whole suite of different things. But yeah, I, I, you know, competence is sexy. You see, you see a, a, 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 like kind of hot." Like, it's cool that, that she's able to do something. She's got physical control of her bo-... Or like a g- good singer or a g- good poet or whatever, you know, like it, 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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, exactly, especially for men. And David Buss, he ran, of course, a large multinational status, or multi- multinational study on s- 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, uh, 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, uh, 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."
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think it is the case, then, that there is a, a meta meme 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, in your survey, 79% of women said that they were struggling to find somebody that they were intellectually compatible with. How ... Uh, uh, what's the reason that this appears to be overlooked, especially in the sort of incel world?
- ADAlex DatePsych
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, uh, they're not reaping the rewards from that because they don't actually meet those criteria. Another could be, because, you know, part of that meme is probably true, that, you know, if someone is very, very low in looks or something like that, you know, but they, they are interesting and, and funny and all of that, yeah, they can, they can still struggle more in dating if they're not hitting that bar, that threshold, so to speak. You know, friend zone, in, in that sense.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Yeah, this is one of the things that I think I realized when I first started researching some of the incel forums. They are inhabited by, uh, you know, uh, some unbelievable percentage of them have a physical disability, many of them are neurodivergent 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, uh, uh, just normative, um, like everything, right? (laughs) And 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. So, you know, yeah, if you're somebody who, uh, physically presents in a really, really unusual way, absolutely, like LMS very well may be the hierarchy that's most important to you, looks, money, status in black pill language. Um, but I'm not convinced that that's true as soon as you meet the, you know, the, the standard threshold. But again, it's very unfalsifiable. A lot of the, the philosophy is, um, that that's just cope or that it's, uh, 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 Chad 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 the books, blah, blah, blah. Like, it's very, very unfalsifiable, which is why when I see you venture into these debates and discussions one-on-one on Twitter that I kind of applaud you. I mean, I don't, I never get involved, but I applaud you from the sidelines for trying to stand your ground.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, I think what you said is, 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 pill, the looks test, they pass the looks test, then everything else kind of comes into play, right? And someone could pass that looks 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 looks 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, are necessarily short from options, but, uh, as far, at least as far as looks go... Because to use an example, I ran a study with faces, um, uh, 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 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, uh, 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 gonna 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."
- 25:01 – 34:45
What People Misunderstood About Online Dating
- ADAlex DatePsych
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, a- 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. You know, 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 kind of 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 aren't 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, uh, having met from these dating apps, then you begin to start to see a pretty close one-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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it's interesting that most people would think that it's a freewheeling casual sex marketplace. And, uh, 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"?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah. That is, that is from 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?" You know, men have, uh, kind of a- a s- uh, 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, uh, "How much do you want a monogamous relationship?" Men and women, pretty similar. You know, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
I read this great study on online dating apps that looked at, uh, partner preferences for education and attractiveness. Think you actually ended up putting me onto this. So fictitious profiles with manipulated levels of education and photo attractiveness send random invitations for a serious relationship to real online daters. We find that men and women prefer attractive over unattractive profiles, regardless of their own attractiveness. No surprise there. We also find that high-educated men prefer low-educated over high-educated profiles as much as high-educated women prefer i- 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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah. Exactly. So the rule there for men on online dating, I guess, you know, be attractive, be educated.
- CWChris Williamson
Go back to school.
- ADAlex DatePsych
And for women- Yeah. Go back to school. And for women, yeah, kind of, kind of the opposite. Stay out of school, but be very hot, I guess.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- ADAlex DatePsych
But really, you know, women... So there's, there's kind of something there that, you know, as- 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, uh, 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 a higher education. They might think, "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, um, 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, in all of that, if people are looking at this and thinking, like, "Should I be 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 relationship satisfaction. So really, everyone really should be thinking like, you know, ideally, I would have a highly educated mate if it's a man or a woman. But, you know, there are kind of those- those stereotypes there.
- CWChris Williamson
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, uh, replicated now and, you know, people can always say, "Ah, but that- that wouldn't be the case now," about a study that was- that's only 10 years old or 15 years old. But I- I do think that we're in a changing time, uh, 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, like, sex ratio hypothesis hell if you don't.Right? You- you- you're going to have to nudge your preferences eventually or... Well, I mean, you don't necessarily. Everyone can just sort of split off into their own, like, siloed, like, sex-siloed worlds, but that seems r- realistic. It- it doesn't seem realistic to me. So, I think that it would be interesting to replicate some of these preferences, especially around education, uh, wealth level, wealth disparity, um, 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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, exactly. That's, uh, 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 a man who has a similar level of education or more. So, it's kind of like, what do we do for that? You know, I try to encourage men. I say, "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 gonna 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, you know, we're seeing this wage gap that's basically disappeared, and we're, we see women, uh, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I, um, I wonder about the sort of male, men's concern about what women are, are looking for. And there was that, uh, uh, 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, um, attractiveness, especially facial attractiveness, it's almost impossible to be liked by everybody, right? And that's- that's literally what that study found, that 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, like, idiosyncratic, uh, preferences is impossible.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Female variance for, uh, ratings of attractiveness, male faces, it is, it is higher in that sense. Women agree less. And I would like to see that profile of the guy who got, uh, 80% that- that liked it because that is remarkable. And I think that's one of the things that discourages people about dating apps. If they're like, "Oh, I swiped 100 times and 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 gonna like you, you know? If it's men, women, or whatever the case may be. But yeah, it's, 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 'cause it's like, yeah, you- you just need someone. You don't need all of them to like you.
- CWChris Williamson
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz had a really interesting insight in this where he leaned into his nerdy look, so 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 (laughs) - used that data. And what he found was that, and this is women that were rating him, what he found was that the more that he leaned into his nerdy look, the more, um, extreme attraction results he got back. And he ended up fi- he said it himself on the episode to me. He's like, "Dude, I am punching way out of my league. My missus..." But when her friends, you know, the six months before they met, and she said that she was ready to get back in the dating market or something, and her friends asked her, "What is it that you're into?" And, you know, they go around the group or whatever. "Oh, 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, uh, 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, uh, because he would have, his partner would have passed him by. Uh, yeah, it's an interesting one. What about, um, dad bods? What
- 34:45 – 44:50
Women’s Preferences For Dad-Bods
- CWChris Williamson
have you learned about dad bods?
- ADAlex DatePsych
(laughs) So, every once in a while on social media, people will post a picture or, uh, you know, uh, 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- 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, you know, there's a lot of discourse on that. Like, is that true? And so I asked women, I said, "Why- why do you like the dad bod? Why do you not like these other, uh, bodies?" Because we also see that these other bodies do emerge in female fantasies. For example, the covers of romance novels, which, you know, is kind of the erotic material consumed by women, those are not dad bods. Those are usually someone who looks like a fitness model. You see, you know, Chippendales dancers. You see, for example, the calendars with the sexy firemen. An-anytime women, uh, consume kind of a visual erotic material, even if it's very light, it tends to be someone who a- actually is kind of jacked and all that, and- 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- this dad bod?" And- and a lot of it was like, "Ah, the bodybuilder comes across as narcissistic. He- he would make me insecure. He might cheat on me." So, there's kind of a lot going into that, that it's 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, you know, 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, you know, "I would prefer, uh, the dad bod, someone I'm, who makes me feel comfortable in a sense, as opposed to, like, the really jacked fitness model kind of guy."
- CWChris Williamson
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- what happens to the skew if you get rid of the extreme sort of bodybuilder body, do you know?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, very, it's very rare that women, if they see the extreme bodybuilder, they ru- very rarely seem to say like, "That's it." It tends to be more of, of, 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 fluffier guy." I don't think-
- CWChris Williamson
What sort of body fat do you think they end up settling on? Can you remember?
- ADAlex DatePsych
I would think it would be between 20 and 15.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. Wow, all of the guys on a perma-cut, you don't need to do it anymore-
- ADAlex DatePsych
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... just let i- d- c- cheesecake yourself into a new relationship with a hottie. Yeah, I, I remember one of my friends who's been through all manner of different fitness pursuits, he's done weightlifting, he's done powerlifting, he's done bodybuilding, he did fitness modeling, good-looking kid, and his ex-girlfriend who he's no longer with anymore, m- perhaps this is a, uh, contributing region why, uh, 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, um, "I've never been happier with you than when you were powerlifting." And for anybody that knows what powerlifters look like, they're in that sort of 15 to probably maybe even 25%, you know, as you get up toward the super heavies, uh, they're fluffy. They're a fluffy bunch. And, um, yet she said that she'd never been happier than when that was the body type that he presented with. And I, I think, uh, you know, a concern about intrasexual competition, about mate poaching, um, it, 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, f- vascular as hell, and, and with a good amount of muscle mass, you, you know, it's not, it is, you can see what's going on here, right? You can s- you can make a lot of inferences about what's, what's happening underneath the T-shirt, in kind of the same way that a super party-hugging dress does for women.
- ADAlex DatePsych
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, uh, 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, uh, is he going to stay committed to you? Is he more likely to cheat? And that's kind of something that, that women said, you know, that he seems like, he seems like he could be narcissistic. He cares too much about his appearance, and, you know, I would worry about him being unfaithful.
- CWChris Williamson
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, 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, uh, they've got like a pain tolerance which is kinda sexy, right? Like, you know, a whole litany of different things, discipline, reliability, they've probably got a, 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, 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, it probably percolates somewhere in the back of your mind, is, "That's probably quite a reliable person." But, uh, 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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
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 unmasculine behavior is what some people said that, you know, it's like, "You should not care so much about your appearance as a man," basically. It's almost a feminine thing to do.
- CWChris Williamson
Ah, but if you're jacked from doing Brazilian jujitsu 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, uh, a theory that said one of the reasons why women prefer dad bods is this, uh, caloric choice idea. So, um, a man that is really good-looking and, and, 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 infidelity closed to him, which actually means that he- i- it was that dad bods are an indication of better dads, was the thought, that he's not gonna spend his calorie trying to chase after some 21-year-old because she doesn't care about him. So, I thought that was, uh, a- another interesting kind of second order effect of the way that women perceive their current mate's, uh, level of, um, uh, potential strength.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And- and what you said there, dad bods are indicative of better dads, I think that's, uh, very insightful and por- and important. Because, yeah, it is kind of a contrast between long-term versus short-term mate selection, when people s- you know, women, uh, 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 bods 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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. Um, and yeah, i- it- the dichotomy that you have in female erotica is like saying, "Why are there no..." Like, "Why is grandma porn not a really popular type of pornography for men to consume? M- many men love their grandmother." And you're like, "Well, yeah, but, like, I d- you d- 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. Uh, one other thing that I thought
- 44:50 – 48:43
The Gap in Libido Between Sexes
- CWChris Williamson
was fascinating you've been talking about a lot recently is the libido gap. What's that?
- ADAlex DatePsych
So, the libido gap. Yeah, basically, the observation that there's a sex difference in libido, in 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- in behavioral psychology in a sense, you know? A lot of differences between men and women are small, but when it comes to sexual behavior, it's- it's pretty large. And this is something that 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, uh, 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, like, sexual acts and experimentation, that sort of a thing. There's research that indicate... well, researched very, very consistently across the years, across countries, indicates, you know, 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, in attitudes. The role of testosterone, of course, is a very, very big one. We know, you know, testosterone administration to men or women causes their libido to shoot up. And of course, men have much more testosterone than women naturally, which increases that as well.
- CWChris Williamson
What's the implication of this? What's the implication of there being a big libido gap?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Perhaps that men and women will engage in, uh, 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, uh, outside of the relationship, more likely to pursue casual sex. And of course, there's some debate on this from, uh... I- I say debate, but there's not really much debate at all on this in the scientific literature. Very large meta-analysis recently conducted on the libido gap found a difference of about 0.5, so that's about a medium-sized 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, that men are more open to sex with multiple people," and- and all of that.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I mean, if you had women with the libido style of men, reading women's erotica would include a different man on each chapter. It wou- would be Tom, and Jack, and Harry, and d- d- d- d- d- all the way through. But it's not, there 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- a woman. But like, that's... men just like, "Ah, done with that one." Like, "Next one." Uh, I guess it's like a- a mental Coolidge effect in some way, right? That you've got this- this, uh, very rapid desire for sexual variety, even when it's just in your mind.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, exactly. There- there is that big difference in the desire for sexual variety. And even in the context of erotica 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 men it's almost the- the opposite when these sexual fantasies occur and will be like casual sex, have sex, move on to the next person or something like that.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. You looked at, uh, body count and sexual double standards.
- 48:43 – 51:30
Is It Important to Ask About Body Count?
- CWChris Williamson
What did you learn there?
- ADAlex DatePsych
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, uh, 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? Uh, 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, I believe it was about 20 to 40% of men, I would have to double-check, said, you know, "I don't even ask for a body count on a date," which one way to interpret that is, you know, they don't care that much. Another could just be like, "I don't wanna 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. You know, 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, of higher body counts, upwards of 20 partners in a woman, for a man perceiving a woman, upwards of 40 for a man. And that's when people tend to start saying, uh, "This is kind of a deal breaker," you know? And asking people in the survey as well, "Have you gone on a date and, uh, asked about body count and, and stopped dating them?" About 10% of men and women said, "Uh, yes." In a committed relationship, even lower. I think it was like two or 3% 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, that it does become, become a problem. Then people look at that and they say, "Whoa, what's going on there exactly?"
- CWChris Williamson
Andrew Thomas taught me about this, and if you actually look at the curve of how it works, uh, zero, I think for both men and women, zero is about, rated about as attractive as seven, seven to ten, right? So it peaks, the, the peak of this is roundabout sort of between two and four. Uh, and then zero is the same as like, you know, nearly double digits. Uh, so yeah. There is this... There is a little bit of an aversion. Did women... Were women more averse to male virgins than men were to female virgins?
- ADAlex DatePsych
I didn't find that, uh, in mine. And I, and I think in the other one, in the paper that was by Steve Stuart Williams and Andrew Thomas that you referred 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've been a small one. But there does seem to be kind of, yeah, that, that aversion there. I guess in practice, of course, you know, if, if you ask, "Are 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 leading them to that persistent virginity, I suppose.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. What do you mean when you
- 51:30 – 55:54
Sexual Double Standards Between Sexes
- CWChris Williamson
talk about sexual double standards, then? How does that get folded in here?
- ADAlex DatePsych
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, you know, a, a parable or something about promiscuity, the idea, you know, that if a man has sex with many, men and wo- men and women, y- 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, they're closing. You know, some, some even have kind of reversed, and particularly when it comes to things like having sex with a minor or sexual assault. They mostly seem to be gone. So it's kind of like, yeah, people do seem to judge these things not as, uh, different for men and women at this point.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting. What, what about the sexual assault and sex with a minor thing? Like, what's, what, what's going on there?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Sure. So an example of that is when a teacher who is a woman has sex with a male student, when a teacher who, 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, if it's a, 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, you know, if it was a minor male, they would view it less negatively.
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting. What about the guys who demand virgins? What, like, who are these people?
- ADAlex DatePsych
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, 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, uh, into an older age, at age 30 or something. It's like if you're a 30-year-old man and you're looking for a virgin, that's like, you know, like 2 or 3% of the male and female population at that age. Women who are 18 years old and virgins typically do not want to date someone who's 30, 35, or something like that. And so it becomes increasingly unreasonable with age. If men persist in virginity until their mid-30s and they say, "Oh, I'd still like a virgin," they're gonna have to come to terms with, like, that's not in the cards for them.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. It's an interesting one, man. I, I, again, I do, especially for the young men, like, the in- 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 partner's th- 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, uh, 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.
- ADAlex DatePsych
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 this 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, uh, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Did you see Jeremy Boreing,
- 55:54 – 1:11:00
What the Red Pill is Doing to Marriage
- CWChris Williamson
uh, tweet earlier on today about what the red pill is doing to marriage?
- ADAlex DatePsych
No, no.
- CWChris Williamson
So Jeremy Boreing, CEO of The Daily Wire, uh, he's been featured on a lot of their productions and stuff. He said what, uh, what the red pill is doing to marriage, basically sort of, uh, degrading marriage, uh, saying that it's a bad deal for men, et cetera, et cetera. You've looked at a good chunk of this, right? What- what's happening with marriage and divorces? Like, what are the real stats that people are missing here?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Sure. So yeah, as far as the red pill goes, it's- you know, promotes a lot of very cynical narratives, uh, particularly in the context of marriage. And it's, you know, not a homogenous, uh, ideology or set of beliefs or whatever, but you do see a lot of discourse on divorce that often just says, you know, 50 or 60% 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 getting divorced is not 50%. That's going to be determined a great deal by the individual characteristics within that relationship. You know, what kind of things contribute to divorce? Infidelity is a big one. Uh, alcohol abuse is a big one. Economic problems. So just by avoiding, you know, (laughs) simple things that you know are gonna cause a divorce, flat out, that's already gonna-
- CWChris Williamson
Don't cheat, don't drink, don't get broke.
- ADAlex DatePsych
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, and yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Jeremy Boreing tweeted, um, "The fact that women initiate 80% of divorce is evidence that some manifestations a- of evil are more common in women, something society, and frustratingly Christian society, has been trying to obscure since we turned over all of our moral authority to women in the 20th century." That seems like a very, very odd, like, claim to make, that there's manifestations of evil. That's not for me to say, that, like, women, uh, initiating divorce, that there's some, like, perverse incentives that could be going on there. There's all manner of reasons why, why this sort of thing could happen. Many of them are, are probably pretty, like, unspeakable. But evidence that some manifestations of evil are more common in women, I don't know. I mean, why- why are women... why do women initiate more divorces and, and what are the reasons that they give for that?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Sure. So yeah, I'll- 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 divorce is very complex topic, so I'll- 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. Uh, they're much more likely to be physically abusive, 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. Uh, 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, relationship 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, uh, alimony, child support, and all of these things. It's usually the case that women enter a state of poverty and stay below the poverty line for a few years following divorce, and that men tend to, uh, remain more financially successful following their divorces as well. And there's very high agreement in divorced 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 ask, 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, you know? 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, you know, initiating the divorce, but it's really rarely the case that the man is just, like, chilling and 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. That's...... very, very rare that that happens.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Adam Lane-Smith, psychotherapist, ex-psychotherapist, now relationship coach, and he's sat through thousands of couples across his career. And h- 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- 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- 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- I- I think that he's being truthful when he just says, "Look, 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 ... Th- th- like, I- 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. Uh, and, yeah, I think it's ... Adam-Adam seemed to think that the ... 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- off her chest. So, you know, you could maybe say that this is a communication problem. Maybe it- maybe it's a failure of cross-sex mind reading between the sexes, that women are communicating their, uh, discontent and their issues in ways that men aren't picking up on, that men aren't being sufficiently perceptive. Like, those would be some ways. But w- what ... 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?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, I think, I think it ... I think there's like a- a situation where men will simply stay in a bad relationship almost to the end. They just ... Men are much less likely to- to kinda end it when all of the writing is on the wall. There are very explicit things that cause divorce, you know, as- as well. Drug abuse, more common in men. Uh, infidelity, more common in men. And just looking at those two things, that already closes th- 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, uh, 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, uh, not being in a relationship that they don't want, which can go back to, you know, all of the evolutionary reasons, women being more selective and that sort of a thing. Women seem to be less pressured to remain in a relationship when they're genuinely unhappy with it. More ready to move on.
- CWChris Williamson
Is that because ancestrally 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- they haven't got anybody.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Well, I don't know about, I don't know about that for sure. Because sometimes we see those bottlenecks in the Y chromosome, which indicates, okay, there were actually many more women than- to men. So it's almost like, if they left a 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 dominant mating pattern. It's basically serial monogamy, that people, you know, unlike the prairie vole or- or some other animal, we don't tend to mate 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 seemed to correspond to kind of the gestational age, I guess, or- 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 a- also the case as well that, you know, not having lifelong bonding, uh, can increase genetic fitness from genetic diversity. So if someone, you know, 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.
- CWChris Williamson
How do you think we should, uh, balance the scales, that if what you say is right, and I- I- I believe that you are right as well, I don't think that Christopher Ryan and Sex At Dawn is- is perfectly accurate. Serial monogamy seems to be what makes sense ancestr- monogamish, I think it's sometimes referred to as. But we've created a cultural world where that is looked ... You know, Jeremy Boring is- is a probably a pretty good example of what the last 500 years of- of, uh, marital advice has been, that you're supposed to stay together through thick and thin, in sickness and in health, till des- death do us part. Um, we have constructed a value system, even outside of, you know, people that are- are super Christian, that, you know, breakups and divorce and stuff, it's- it's not something that you're supposed to do. I mean, you made your commitment to the partner and you're going to stick together forever. Do you ever think about this, uh, cultural mismatch to our sort of evolutionary predisposition?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, definitely. Certainly we have, you know, the last 2,000 years of, of rules that say you are married to someone, you stay 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, on love, for example, there's different kind of stages of love or different components of love. One is called passionate or romantic love, and 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. In 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 in 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. Uh, 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, and restart the process, so to speak? And, uh, there's not a good solution or a good answer there as far as, like, prescriptive what should people do. And, 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 know, norms would emerge that say, like, "Just stay together forever." It avoids a lot of problems (laughs) even, you know, if the relationship is not ideal in that sense.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it's interesting, man. This... I don't know. I, I wonder what a, a different kind of, uh, religion would have been that said marriages are supposed to stay together for 10 years, and then at that point there's some weird ceremony where you, you have to prove that you still care about each other enough, and both partner has to do it independently in some weird Rorschach lie detector test, and then you come back together and if it works you do... I don't know. But, um, yeah, 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. You know, there's, there's an awful lot of embedded, uh, genetic predisposition in there to encourage us to, "Okay, like I'm- Like, we're done, we're done here now." Um, you know, one of my favorite ones is, um, 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, you know, one of the concerns for, um, extending, prolonging the pre-child section of any relationship. Uh, you know, couples that get together at university, they're 20, 21, 22, and they think, "Yeah, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll s- we'll start having kids when we're 30," there can be some risks associated with that if this theory turns out to be right.
- ADAlex DatePsych
Yeah, exactly. And, and that's another thing too, kind of r- related to romantic love transitioning into committed love. Uh, people past 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.
- CWChris Williamson
I read a blog post from you
- 1:11:00 – 1:20:39
Why the Normie Gets the Girl
- CWChris Williamson
that was called The Normie Gets the Girl. What do you mean when you say, "The normie gets the girl"?
- ADAlex DatePsych
Sure. So I did this with some vignettes, descriptions of different individuals. This was related to kind of, uh, the ambivalent sexism inventory, which has constructs of hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. And I created vignettes, a man who was basically, like, a hostile sexist, which is often kind of negative, sexist attitudes toward 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 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 a thing. Uh, 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 had these other vignettes. One was like a manosphere beliefs, black pill kind of beliefs, rated really, really low by women, kind of related to the hostile sexism there. And then a normie vignette, a guy who just thought, you know, "Things are fine. I don't get into these, you know, uh, gender war ideology," or whatever the case may be. And that's kind of rated the highest. And so that se- 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, a- 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, uh, feminist necessarily in a man. They don't want a man at the same time who is highly misogynist or kind of the 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.
- CWChris Williamson
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?
- ADAlex DatePsych
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 vignette a little bit higher, but mostly you still see the same pattern, that the normie is still the most attractive. Benevolent sexist man still gets rated higher than the hostile sexist man, that sort of a thing.
Episode duration: 1:40:07
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