Dating Over Thirty is a sub for discussion and advice on dating and the dating phase of relationships for people over the age of 30.This is not a place to post personals or 'looking for' or hookups. A few days after he suggested it, he ended up changing his mind and said he'd rather go later in the year for money reasons. Lately, it feels like our sex is way more intimate (holding hands, kissing longer), but it may just be that I'm catching feelings and that's what I'm perceiving. At the beginning of the relationship, I was totally fine. 'Thirty-five-year-old man still single' is a phrase that will set alarm bells ringing for many. Zoe Beaty speaks to men in their 30s who say they're struggling with stereotypes, too.
You're at a party and you see someone cute across the room. They glance at you, maybe even smile for a second, then carry on with their conversation. You feel the room shrink, your heart rate quicken, your face go red: You're crushing on this stranger, hard. But then the sensible part of your brain tells you to forget it: That person's way, way out of your league.
Wait a second, you counter: Do dating 'leagues' even exist?
At this point, Elizabeth Bruch, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, crashes in to your thought process (and this news article). Yep, she says. Leagues do seem to exist. But you're not alone in trying to escape yours: 'Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,' she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people 'out of their league.'
In fact, most online-dating users tend to message people exactly 25 percent more desirable than they are.
Bruch would know. She's spent the past few years studying how people make decisions and pursue partners on online-dating sites, using exclusive data from the dating sites themselves. 'There's so much folk wisdom about dating and courtship, and very little scientific evidence,' she told me recently. 'My research comes out of realizing that with these large-scale data sets, we can shed light on a lot of these old dating aphorisms.'
In the new study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, Maryville dating online. Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a 'popular, free online-dating service' between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.
Imagine for a second that you are one of the users Bruch and her colleagues studied—in fact, imagine that you are a very desirable user. Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you and you replied, then your score would fall.
The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. 'A defining feature of heterosexual online dating is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who establish the first contact—more than 80 percent of first messages are from men in our data set,' the study says. But 'women reply very selectively to the messages they receive from men—their average reply rate is less than 20 percent—so women's replies … can give us significant insight about who they are interested in.'
The team combined all that data by using the PageRank algorithm, the same software that helps inform Google's search results. It found that—insofar as dating 'leagues' are not different tiers of hotness, but a single ascending hierarchy of desirability—then they do seem to exist in the data. But people do not seem universally locked into them—and they can occasionally find success escaping from theirs.
The key, Bruch said, is that 'persistence pays off.'
'Reply rates [to the average message] are between zero percent and 10 percent,' she told me. Her advice: People should note those extremely low reply rates and send out more greetings.
Michael Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at Stanford University who was not connected to this study, agreed that persistence was a good strategy. 'The idea that persistence pays off makes sense to me, as the online-dating world has a wider choice set of potential mates to choose from,' he told me in an email. 'The greater choice set pays dividends to people who are willing to be persistent in trying to find a mate.'
Of the study as a whole, he said: 'I think its conclusions are robust and its methodologies are sound.'
Yet what also emerges from the data is a far more depressing idea of 'leagues' than many joking friends would suppose. Across the four cities and the thousands of users, consistent patterns around age, race, and education level emerge. White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower.
Bruch said that race and gender stereotypes often get mixed up, with a race acquiring gendered connotations. 'Asian is coded as female, so that's why Asian women get so much market power and Asian men get so little,' she told me. 'For black men and women, it's the opposite.'
But 'what we are seeing is overwhelmingly the effect of white preferences,' she cautioned. 'This site is predominantly white, 70 percent white. If this was a site that was 20 percent white, we may see a totally different desirability hierarchy.'
'Other people have done research using data from online-dating sites, and found similar racial and gender hierarchies,' said Rosenfeld, the Stanford professor.
And Bruch emphasized that the hierarchy did not just depend on race, age, and education level: Because it is derived from user behavior, it 'captures whatever traits people are responding to when they pursue partners. This will include traits like wittiness, genetic factors, or whatever else drives people to message,' she said.
Here are seven other not entirely happy takeaways from Bruch's study:
- In the study, men's desirability peaks at age 50. But women's desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.
How Age Affects Online-Dating Desirability Among Heterosexual Men and Women
'I mean, everybody knows—and as a sociologist, it's been shown—that older women have a harder time in the dating market. But I hadn't expected to see their desirability drop off from the time they're 18 to the time they're 65,' Bruch told me.
'But I was also surprised to see how flat men's desirability was over the age distribution,' she said. 'For men, it peaks around age 40 or 50. Especially in New York.'
- New York is a men's market, at least according to this particular study.
It's not just that older men are considered most desirable in New York.
'New York is a special case for men,' Bruch told me. 'It's the market with the highest fraction of women. But it's also about it being an incredibly dense market.'
- Seattle is a women's market—and also the only place where men succeed by sending longer opening messages.
'Seattle presents the most unfavorable dating climate for men, with as many as two men for every woman in some segments,' the study says.
Across all four cities, men and women generally tended to send longer messages to people who were more desirable than them. Women, especially, deployed this strategy.
But the only place it paid off—and the only people for whom it worked with statistically significant success—were men in Seattle. The longest messages in the study were sent by Seattle men, the study says,'and only Seattle men experience a payoff to writing longer messages.'
- Women's prospects dim not only as they age, but as they achieve the highest level of education. Free dating website near new fairfield ct.
A more educated man is almost always more desirable, on average: Men with postgraduate degrees outperform men with bachelor's degrees; men with bachelor's degrees beat high-school graduates.
'But for women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable,' the study says. 'Postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women.'
Dating At 35 For Men
How Education Affects Online-Dating Desirability Among Heterosexual Men and Women
- Men did not find more success when they sent happy messages.
Across all four cities, men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because 'in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.'
- Almost no one messages users less desirable than they are.
Most people seem to know their position on the hierarchy because they most contact people who rank the same. 'The most common behavior for both men and women is to contact members of the opposite sex who on average have roughly the same ranking as themselves,' Bruch and her colleagues write.
But the overall distribution is skewed because 'a majority of both sexes tend to contact partners who are more desirable than themselves on average—and hardly any users contact partners who are significantly less desirable.'
- Your online-dating experience is not as bad as this poor woman's in New York.
'The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,' the study says. This is 'equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.' Yikes.
Imagine for a second that you are one of the users Bruch and her colleagues studied—in fact, imagine that you are a very desirable user. Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you and you replied, then your score would fall.
The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. 'A defining feature of heterosexual online dating is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who establish the first contact—more than 80 percent of first messages are from men in our data set,' the study says. But 'women reply very selectively to the messages they receive from men—their average reply rate is less than 20 percent—so women's replies … can give us significant insight about who they are interested in.'
The team combined all that data by using the PageRank algorithm, the same software that helps inform Google's search results. It found that—insofar as dating 'leagues' are not different tiers of hotness, but a single ascending hierarchy of desirability—then they do seem to exist in the data. But people do not seem universally locked into them—and they can occasionally find success escaping from theirs.
The key, Bruch said, is that 'persistence pays off.'
'Reply rates [to the average message] are between zero percent and 10 percent,' she told me. Her advice: People should note those extremely low reply rates and send out more greetings.
Michael Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at Stanford University who was not connected to this study, agreed that persistence was a good strategy. 'The idea that persistence pays off makes sense to me, as the online-dating world has a wider choice set of potential mates to choose from,' he told me in an email. 'The greater choice set pays dividends to people who are willing to be persistent in trying to find a mate.'
Of the study as a whole, he said: 'I think its conclusions are robust and its methodologies are sound.'
Yet what also emerges from the data is a far more depressing idea of 'leagues' than many joking friends would suppose. Across the four cities and the thousands of users, consistent patterns around age, race, and education level emerge. White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower.
Bruch said that race and gender stereotypes often get mixed up, with a race acquiring gendered connotations. 'Asian is coded as female, so that's why Asian women get so much market power and Asian men get so little,' she told me. 'For black men and women, it's the opposite.'
But 'what we are seeing is overwhelmingly the effect of white preferences,' she cautioned. 'This site is predominantly white, 70 percent white. If this was a site that was 20 percent white, we may see a totally different desirability hierarchy.'
'Other people have done research using data from online-dating sites, and found similar racial and gender hierarchies,' said Rosenfeld, the Stanford professor.
And Bruch emphasized that the hierarchy did not just depend on race, age, and education level: Because it is derived from user behavior, it 'captures whatever traits people are responding to when they pursue partners. This will include traits like wittiness, genetic factors, or whatever else drives people to message,' she said.
Here are seven other not entirely happy takeaways from Bruch's study:
- In the study, men's desirability peaks at age 50. But women's desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.
How Age Affects Online-Dating Desirability Among Heterosexual Men and Women
'I mean, everybody knows—and as a sociologist, it's been shown—that older women have a harder time in the dating market. But I hadn't expected to see their desirability drop off from the time they're 18 to the time they're 65,' Bruch told me.
'But I was also surprised to see how flat men's desirability was over the age distribution,' she said. 'For men, it peaks around age 40 or 50. Especially in New York.'
- New York is a men's market, at least according to this particular study.
It's not just that older men are considered most desirable in New York.
'New York is a special case for men,' Bruch told me. 'It's the market with the highest fraction of women. But it's also about it being an incredibly dense market.'
- Seattle is a women's market—and also the only place where men succeed by sending longer opening messages.
'Seattle presents the most unfavorable dating climate for men, with as many as two men for every woman in some segments,' the study says.
Across all four cities, men and women generally tended to send longer messages to people who were more desirable than them. Women, especially, deployed this strategy.
But the only place it paid off—and the only people for whom it worked with statistically significant success—were men in Seattle. The longest messages in the study were sent by Seattle men, the study says,'and only Seattle men experience a payoff to writing longer messages.'
- Women's prospects dim not only as they age, but as they achieve the highest level of education. Free dating website near new fairfield ct.
A more educated man is almost always more desirable, on average: Men with postgraduate degrees outperform men with bachelor's degrees; men with bachelor's degrees beat high-school graduates.
'But for women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable,' the study says. 'Postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women.'
Dating At 35 For Men
How Education Affects Online-Dating Desirability Among Heterosexual Men and Women
- Men did not find more success when they sent happy messages.
Across all four cities, men tended to use less positive language when messaging more desirable women. They may have stumbled upon this strategy through trial and error because 'in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages.'
- Almost no one messages users less desirable than they are.
Most people seem to know their position on the hierarchy because they most contact people who rank the same. 'The most common behavior for both men and women is to contact members of the opposite sex who on average have roughly the same ranking as themselves,' Bruch and her colleagues write.
But the overall distribution is skewed because 'a majority of both sexes tend to contact partners who are more desirable than themselves on average—and hardly any users contact partners who are significantly less desirable.'
- Your online-dating experience is not as bad as this poor woman's in New York.
'The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation,' the study says. This is 'equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.' Yikes.
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Could you ever date an incel? You know, the men on the internet who claim to be involuntarily celibate? I never considered that some women might answer ‘yes' to that question, but that was before I saw #DateAnIncel, a self-proclaimed online matchmaking service says its purpose is to connect members of the 'minority group' with 'true love.'
The first time I discovered #DateAnIncel was through News.com's Australia reporter Marnie O'Neill, who wrote an article on the supposed service. She says the website and corresponding Twitter account apparently isn't 'a joke or a hoax,' and actually reached out for a comment. So I did the same, by tweeting at the mysterious 'Made in California' web developer (or team), asking for a follow back so I could DM them. My wish was their command, and a few days later I got the notification. But in the meantime, I signed up to find the incel of my dreams.
Little did I know that my curiosity of what love looks like for the notoriously misogynistic group would lead me down a rabbit hole of Chads and Beckys, Reddit banning, questionable morals, and Facebook stalking.
Dating After 35 Reddit
The Game Is Afoot
First things first: I am not actually interested in dating an incel. I don't relish the thought of talking to someone who blames women for his inability to find a partner, plus I already have a girlfriend who would be pretty offended if I filled this form out seriously. But I had an ulterior motive: I wanted to understand how incels, who typically blame women for their inceldom, could still be interested in dating a someone from a group they resent so much.
This website promised that incels and their partners could experience loving, fruitful relationships, but I wasn't convinced that could be possible. In fact, I was eager to hear from the source himself to explain exactly how that would work. But I didn't think they'd be eager to play defense. So I tried to sleuth my way to their true identity.
One of the easiest ways to find someone's IP address is to exchange email with them, and the application on #DateAnIncel claimed an 'all-star matchmaker' would reach out within 2-3 working days.
So I played Stacy (what incels call women who are conventionally attractive and date ‘Chads,' or hyper-masculine guys that don't have issues finding a girlfriend) and filled out the form like I was looking for love in all the wrong places. After a few weeks, my inbox was bone-dry and my DMs were left on read, so I had to dig a little deeper.
With the Mission: Impossible theme playing in my head, I successfully tracked #DateAnIncel's IP address using my iMac's ping function. It showed that the owner's location was in a small Pennsylvania town, not California like the website claimed. I won't share the details of what I was able to find with real estate websites and Facebook's advanced search settings, but I have reason to believe that the creator of #DateAnIncel is a twenty-something college graduate living in the Keystone State. I shot him a Facebook message along the lines of 'sorry to bother, but would you happen to own an incel dating website domain?' I never heard back. So I moved on to my next target: incels in the market for a date.
An Inconvenient Truth
For a crash course in inceldom, I typically would have turned to Reddit, where communities like /r/theredpill, a community where people discuss everything from pick-up tips to the latest Jordan Peterson video, run rampant.
That wasn't possible due to the fact that Reddit banned /r/incels in November 2017. Popular posts on the subreddit included 'all women are sluts' and 'reasons why women are the embodiment of evil.'
So I went somewhere the light of Reddit and even its more insidious little brother, 4Chan, don't shine: the official incels forum, incels.me.
The invels' violently bigoted rhetoric first reached the mainstream thanks to one of its followers, then 22-year-old Elliot Rodger. If his name sounds familiar, it's because on May 23, 2014, in Isla Vista, California, Elliot fatally stabbed his three male roommates, drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house near the University of California Santa Barbara, shot and killed six people, and then committed suicide in his 2008 BMW coupe.
Before his death, Elliot recorded and uploaded a YouTube video called 'Elliot Rodger's Retribution' where he detailed his plans to punish women for rejecting him and men who succeeded where he had apparently failed. He also wrote a 141-page manifesto blaming women for his virginity, having 'never even kissed a girl' despite being an 'ideal magnificent gentleman.' Elliot was an unabashed incel, and I was afraid to familiarize myself with the discussions that led him on a toxic rampage.
The Incels forum has nearly 41,000 threads with over 750,000 posts. It has 6,500 members now, with new ones joining every few minutes. One of them, reluctantly, was me. I quickly glanced past threads with categories like 'SuicideFuel' and 'Experiment' to search for #DateAnIncel. There were a few separate discussions about the website, that all came to one conclusion that surprised me: every single incel thought the form was for doxxing.
One incel, who has a YouTube channel with 26 subscribers, posted a video called 'New Dating Site Aimed At InCels Is A TRAP.' I became its 243rd viewer. I was surprised that the vlogger, who has 23 videos about being an incel, showed his face and spoke without using a program to alter his voice. It was disturbing nonetheless to see a man openly discuss his misogynistic leanings without a shred of apology. I didn't finish watching, since he didn't have any proof that the site was for doxxing. No one did, not even incels.me's site administrator, who emailed me a few curt responses to my questions.
He wouldn't offer up a name or phone number, not that I was really expecting him to. He instead went by SergeantIncel, or Serge, for short. Serge wrote that even if #DateAnIncel didn't open the doors to 'doxxing, IP leakages, trolling and moking [sic],' he still wouldn't use online dating to escape celibacy. And yet, Serge also told me that a so-called healthy relationship for an incel would look like any other partnership.
'The fact a person is incel doesn't change anything regarding their expectations,' he wrote. Others disagreed. Forum user 'ihatewomen94' asked 'How could you actually think a (site) for ugly males in dating would be a real thing?' and 'MyWaifuIsDead' states 'Even with my low iq I know not to join up.'
Dating At 35 Reddit
Incels say they hate women, and there's no denying the overtly dangerous sexism intertwined in their definition, but when I tried to understand what incels want from women, I realized that their violence is ultimately rooted in fear. The idea of dating, or of a service for their romantic interests, sent the forum into a tailspin. According to them, women only want to dox them, expose them, and mock them.
The incel community is mystifyingly close to self-realization. They understand that women despise them, and they nearly realize that it's their own fault, but it's not for the reasons that they think. Their self-proclaimed ugliness or low IQ aren't the problems. Incels are so embroiled in their own victimization, that they blindly hate and push away their objects of desire while arguing that they deserve love, sex, and affection. I have enough reason to believe that #DateAnIncel was a hoax or a joke all along, but ultimately, what's more interesting is the curtain separating incels from reality.
I don't have the answer to the culture of toxic masculinity that sends young men into the incel spiral. But a culture that encourages blame, whether it's directed toward immigrants, the 'other side,' or women, tells its privileged ranks that they're the oppressed ones. In the case of incels, who have largely found the freedom to openly propagate hateful rhetoric towards women online and in real life, that couldn't be less true.
