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Silicon Valley Singles Are Giving Up On the Algorithms of Love (washingtonpost.com)
The Washington Post: Melissa Hobley, an executive at the dating app OkCupid, hears the complaints about the apps [being unable to find good matches] regularly and thinks they get a bad rap. Silicon Valley workers "are in the business of scalable, quick solutions. And that's not what love is," Hobley said. "You can't hurry love. It's reciprocal. You're not ordering an object. You're not getting a delivery in less than seven minutes." Finding love, she added, takes commitment and energy -- and, yes, time, no matter how inefficiently it's spent.
"You have a whole city obsessed with algorithms and data, and they like to say dating apps aren't solving the problem," Hobley said. "But if a city is male-dominant, if a city is known for 16-hour work days, those are issues that dating apps can't solve." One thing distinguishes the Silicon Valley dating pool: The men-to-women ratio for employed, young singles in the San Jose metro area is higher than in any other major area. There were about 150 men for every 100 women, compared with about 125 to 100 nationwide, of never-married young people between 25 and 34 in San Jose, U.S. Census Bureau data from 2016 shows. That ratio permeates the economy here, all the way to the valley's biggest employers, which have struggled for years to bring more women into their ranks. Men make up about 70% of the workforces of Apple, Facebook and Google parent Alphabet, company filings show.
"You have a whole city obsessed with algorithms and data, and they like to say dating apps aren't solving the problem," Hobley said. "But if a city is male-dominant, if a city is known for 16-hour work days, those are issues that dating apps can't solve." One thing distinguishes the Silicon Valley dating pool: The men-to-women ratio for employed, young singles in the San Jose metro area is higher than in any other major area. There were about 150 men for every 100 women, compared with about 125 to 100 nationwide, of never-married young people between 25 and 34 in San Jose, U.S. Census Bureau data from 2016 shows. That ratio permeates the economy here, all the way to the valley's biggest employers, which have struggled for years to bring more women into their ranks. Men make up about 70% of the workforces of Apple, Facebook and Google parent Alphabet, company filings show.
OKCupid has long used their userbase for social experimentation. They only match people with those unlikely to work out, because it means they keep coming back and paying while thinking "well, it's matching me with people and I'm getting dates, it must just not be the right one." They're especially fans of social justice matchmaking.
Regardless of matching ages, the issue stands. Even OKC admitted it years ago when they did the first analysis of data: men with higher salary ranges on their profile got more responses and more dates.
The raw data is there, you CAN craft the perfect profile, it won't be PC but it's very well known what both men and women want from their first impressions in order to get a first date. I don't know if OKC still publishes the data, they used to when they first started and with some data mining you can make a good profile, initial message etc and your success rate skyrockets. I think my 'success rate' was like 40-50% in terms of responses and I would say about 10% in terms of dates, I still didn't meet my current partner there but I did a number of my previous partners, sometimes simultaneous.
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So, there are a lot more men than women in Silicon Valley. OK, but since babies are born in almost exactly a 50:50 ratio that means that some places in the US must have more available women than men? I presume single men in Silicon Valley can't move to these places since there are no suitable jobs, but perhaps they could at least vacation there. Ahh, perhaps people in Silicon Valley don't get vacations either.
Notes:
1: Since I am in the UK and married I am asking where all the single women are purely out of curiosity.
2: My wife is from a different European country, so I don't see that there is a problem with dating someone in a different US state.
I've had a very solid share of affairs and relationships within the last decade, fuled by a growning aged geek-perspective and the cool that comes with it, a "silver-back" bonus, social dancing and systematically practicing the mating game and doing some PUA research. It worked out very well. Awesome pr0n-style sex, all-out "let's just f*ck like there's no tomorrow" ONSes and all. ... Looking for something different I started to use Tinder last year (Oh the irony, I know). And while the effect in "time-to-business" was palpable, the overall experience wasn't all that spectacular, especially with always-online addicts and ladies with the attention span of a squirrel. I quit after a few weeks. I don't use social media for the same reasons.
Right now I'm having an affair that looks out to become a long-term relationship and we got together in a very old-school regular fashion. Feels awesome. We screw like bunnies 3 times a day on average and are continuously getting better at it. Good sex takes practice with the partner :-) .
My conclusion on this: I do think dating apps can significantly improve your throughput and first-encounter experiences but the actual time it takes to slowly shift your priorities and your experience with one another and start moving together for an LTR won't go away by using some app. There is only so much you can leave to computers and the internet. The real deal always involves humans and "human labour". Especially when it comes to relationships. It's that simple.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Uh, how many dependent males are there? Like, guys with little to no education who couldn't get by on their own because they've been stay-at-home dads and housewi... househusbands? Is that even a word? Is there a market for sugarmoms?
More than you might think at first. I know a *surprising* number of professional 40-something women (doctors, college profs) supporting educated but generally ne'r-do-well "indie filmmaker type" stay-at-home man-baby hubbies.
I think the reasoning is this. "I don't really have the assets/looks/personality that men above or even paralleling my social status want. If I marry someone a little below my station (university staff, male nurses, etc), there'll always be a lot of unspoken tension about that power imbalance. But, if I marry some good-looking 6'2" drifty-doofus who is good with kids, we both know where we stand".