Chateau Heartiste

If ¡SCIENCE! was a woman, she’d beg me to fill her belly with my champions.

Thanks to the id-exposing carnal house of online dating, a treasure trove of social science data has dropped, and it confirms numerous pearls of wisdom and Game techniques tenderly curated in the Chateau Heartiste Library of Love.

Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets

Romantic courtship is often described as taking place in a dating market where men and women compete for mates, but the detailed structure and dynamics of dating markets have historically been difficult to quantify for lack of suitable data. In recent years, however, the advent and vigorous growth of the online dating industry has provided a rich new source of information on mate pursuit. We present an empirical analysis of heterosexual dating markets in four large U.S. cities using data from a popular, free online dating service. We show that competition for mates creates a pronounced hierarchy of desirability that correlates strongly with user demographics and is remarkably consistent across cities. We find that both men and women pursue partners who are on average about 25% more desirable than themselves by our measures and that they use different messaging strategies with partners of different desirability. We also find that the probability of receiving a response to an advance drops markedly with increasing difference in desirability between the pursuer and the pursued. Strategic behaviors can improve one’s chances of attracting a more desirable mate, although the effects are modest.

Strategic behaviors — aka GAME — can help a man attract a higher quality girl. Modest? Depends on your definition of success. I’ve always said men shouldn’t expect Game to consistently land them hard 10s, but they can expect to land girls an SMV point or two higher than what they would otherwise manage to pull without Game.

Let’s explore what’s hiding in SCIENCE’s cleavage. First, mate selection studies agree that there is a universal ideal of high sexual market value (SMV, measured as youth and beauty in women and as a combination of traits in men):

It is a common observation that marriage or dating partners strongly resemble one another in terms of age, education, physical attractiveness, attitudes, and a host of other characteristics. One possible explanation for this is the matching hypothesis, which suggests that men and women pursue partners who resemble themselves. This in turn implies that people differ in their opinions about what constitutes a desirable partner or at least about who is worth pursuing. At the other extreme, and more in line with biological studies of mate selection, lies the competition hypothesis, which assumes that there is consensus about what constitutes a desirable partner and that mate seekers, regardless of their own qualifications, pursue those partners who are universally recognized as most desirable. Paradoxically, this can also produce couples who resemble one another in terms of desirability, as the most desirable partners pair off with one another, followed by the next most desirable, and so on. To the extent that desirability correlates with individual attributes, the matching and competition hypotheses can, as a result, produce similar equilibrium patterns of mixing.

The ripples of mate choice that disturb the observable surface of the sexual market indicate much more powerful waves underneath which guide people’s romantic choices.

However, while the two hypotheses may produce similar outcomes, they carry very different implications about the processes by which people identify and attract partners. If there is consensus about who is desirable, then it creates a hierarchy of desirability such that individuals can, at least in principle, be ranked from least to most desirable, and their ranking will predict how and to what extent they are pursued by others. Historically, however, these hierarchies have been difficult to quantify. Since they reflect which partners people pursue, and not just who people end up with, one would need a way to observe unrequited overtures and requited ones to determine who people find desirable. Online dating provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to observe both requited and unrequited overtures at the scale of entire populations.

This explains the category error made by feminists of either sex, by tradcons, and by suckup white knights when they incorrectly conclude that people’s first choice in mate is the mate they end up with. Nope. Bobbing in the wake of every successfully reciprocated choice is the lovelorn detritus of more attractive but unfulfilled choices.

“Aspirational” pursuit of mates completes the full sexual market picture, filling in those blank spaces normally left overlooked by a quantitative data focus on how men and women eventually match up.

We also explore the ways in which people tailor their messaging strategies and message content based on the desirability of potential partners, and how desirability and dating strategy vary across demographic groups.

Play to your audience. Don’t overgame a plain jane, don’t over-beta a hottie.

To study individual desirability, we focus on messages between users of the website in four cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle.

Paper should really be titled, “Aspirational pursuit of shitlib mates”.

 Figure 1 shows the distribution of this quantity separately for men and women in each of the cities. The distribution is roughly consistent across cities, and although women receive more messages than men overall,

Women receive more messages than men. Spread the seed, hoard the eggs. Check.

the distributions for both display a classic “long-tailed” form—most people receive a handful of messages at most, but a small fraction of the population receive far more.

The bottom 10% of women receive fewer than five messages. The bottom 25% of men receive fewer than five messages. Female hypergamy is real. Check.

Corollary: a small fraction of online daters receives most of the messages. Online dating is low investment, low return. Check.

However, desirability is not only about how many people contact you but also about who those people are. If you are contacted by people who are themselves desirable, then you are presumptively more desirable yourself.

The Chateau’s definition of the alpha male co-signed by SCIENCE. Check.

As shown in Fig. 2, for instance, average desirability varies with age for both men and women, although it varies more strongly for women, and the effects run in opposite directions: Older women are less desirable, while older men are more so (18, 19).

The existence of The Wall and men aging like wine, women like milk, vindicated by SCIENCE. Check.

For women, this pattern holds over the full range of ages on the site: The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines.

Men are expendable, women perishable. Check.
SMV sex-based double standards are real and immutable. Check.
Barely legal sexpots and older charming billionaire werewolf fantasies reflect real romantic desires of each sex. Check.
May-December romances are normal and natural. Check.

In keeping with previous work, there is also a clear and consistent dependence on ethnicity (15, 20), with Asian women and white men being the most desirable potential mates by our measures across all four cities.

Desirability is associated with education most strongly for men, for whom more education is always more desirable. For women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable (13); postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women. These measurements control for age, so the latter observation is not a result of women with postgraduate degrees being older (table S2).

LMAO overeducated careerist shrikes BTFO. ps check.

We now turn to the central results of our study. First, we use our desirability scores to explore whether people engage in aspirational mate pursuit (that is, messaging potential partners who are more desirable than they are) and how the probability of receiving a reply varies with the difference in desirability between senders and receivers. […]

The most common (modal) behavior for both men and women is to contact members of the opposite sex who on average have roughly the same ranking as themselves, suggesting that people are relatively good judges of their own place in the desirability hierarchy. The distributions about this modal value, however, are noticeably skewed to the right, meaning that 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.

Note that while both sexes aim out of their league, this has to be weighted against the number of each sex considered attractive enough for sex, and because more women than men get messaged (more men are considered no-gos by women) the result of contacting more desirable prospects is that more women get contacted in general.

…women are more likely than men to receive replies—but among both women and men, the probability of a reply is a decreasing function of desirability gap, more desirable partners replying at lower rates than less desirable ones. The differences are stark: Men are more than twice as likely to receive a reply from women less desirable than themselves than from more desirable ones, and for messages sent to more desirable women, the reply rate never rises above 21%. Yet, the vast majority of men send messages to women who are more desirable than themselves on average. Messaging potential partners who are more desirable than oneself is not just an occasional act of wishful thinking; it is the norm.

Men practice a dragnet strategy; drag the net over the ASCII sea and collect a number of tasty red snappers while keeping the nets open in the hopes of catching that prized sturgeon. Women employ a different strategy; spearfishing. Target only the alpha fish and take aim.

Conditioned on the number of messages sent, men and especially women who reach higher up the desirability ladder tend to write to a less diverse set of potential matches, in terms of desirability gap. This behavior, consistent across all four cities, indicates that mate seekers, and particularly those setting their sights on the most desirable partners, do not adopt a diversified strategy to reduce the risk of being rejected, as one might, for instance, when applying to universities.

Maybe people think very desirable prospects will love them if they “share values” and outlook. Big mistake.

Women initiate far fewer contacts than men, but both sets of curves fall off with increasing desirability gap in all four cities. One might imagine that individuals who make a habit of contacting potential partners significantly more desirable than themselves (large positive desirability gap) would also initiate more contacts overall to increase their chances of getting a reply, but they do the opposite: The number of initial contacts an individual makes falls off rapidly with increasing gap, and it is the people approaching the least desirable partners who send the largest number of messages. A possible explanation is that those who approach more desirable partners are adopting a “quality over quantity” approach, more precisely identifying people they see as an attractive match or spending more time writing personalized messages, at the expense of a smaller number of messages sent.

This seems to be a bad strategy that exists only because online dating is an evolutionarily novel environment that hasn’t yet weeded out people who practice it. I mean, the definition of anti-Game is trying too hard to impress a more desirable prospect. (Wait for it, because the study addresses my skepticism.)

Both men and women tend to write substantially longer messages to more desirable partners, up to twice as long in some cases. The effect is larger for messages sent by women than by men, although there are exceptions.

Women can be exceptionally cold toward beta males while effusing with egregious feminine ardor for alpha males. Lesson: whether you’re a beta or alpha male, don’t mistake the treatment you get from women for how women treat all men.

Among the groups we study, for instance, it is men in Seattle who have the most pronounced increase in message length.

Seattle is soyboy central. Too much estrogen. Very sad!

[Of the cities studied, Seattle presents the most unfavorable dating climate for men, with as many as two men for every woman in some segments of the user population (fig. S1)].

Isn’t pantifa headquartered in Seattle? No wonder they’re so worked up.

Here, we see an interesting difference between women and men: The women show an increase in their use of positive words when communicating with more desirable partners, while the men show a decrease. The effect size is modest but is consistent across all four cities and statistically significant (P < 0.001; table S4).

Subconsciously, men perceive their upbeat motivational emoting to be a value lowering trait in the company of cute babes. Evidence for the evolved neg?

Buckle up, because here comes the big payoff in term of implications for effective Game tactics used in the seduction of women:

in all four cities, men experience slightly lower reply rates when they write more positively worded messages. Although our analysis cannot reveal the underlying process that gives rise to these behaviors (for example, reinforcement learning), this result may offer a hint about why men tend to write somewhat less positive messages to more desirable partners.

Men have more success at getting responses from more desirable women if the men send less enthusiastic messages. Be A Challenge, Flip The Script, Skittles Man and Bring Da Movies strategies vindicated.

On average, people pursue partners who are roughly 25% more desirable than they themselves are. In the language of matching and competition introduced at the start of this article, it appears that people are pursuing a hybrid strategy with elements of both—they are aware of their own position in the hierarchy and adjust their behavior accordingly while, at the same time, competing modestly for more desirable mates.

If you really want to bang and date an HB8, you’ve got to compete immodestly for the hotties and modestly for less desirable girls. Turn that message rate pyramid upside down; more messages to the hotties, fewer messages to the wannabe thotties.

Our results on aspirational mate pursuit are consistent with the popular concept of dating “leagues,” as reflected in the idea that someone can be “out of your league,” meaning that attractive matches are desirable for but unavailable to less attractive others. Provided that leagues are envisaged as a single continuous hierarchy rather than as distinct strata, our results suggest that, contrary to popular belief, attracting the attention of someone out of one’s league is entirely possible.

Related, I’ve long had to correct misinterpretations of my Dating Market Value categorization system in which ignorant or bad faith readers assume concepts like alpha male and beta male are discrete entities rather than (as this study’s authors state about “dating leagues”) continuous SMV hierarchies.

One might wonder how the patterns we observe online might inform our understanding of offline mate pursuit and dating markets. Online dating differs from offline dating in several important ways (25). Because of the high volume of partners and low threshold for sending a message, competition for potential partners’ attention is likely fiercer online than offline. This may increase the extent to which a hierarchy of desirability exists online and reduce people’s willingness to respond to less desirable mates: When there are plenty of fish in the sea, one can afford to throw a few back. It has also been suggested that consensus about what makes an attractive partner is strongest in the early stages of courtship, when partners do not know as much about one another (26, 27). While it is difficult to study early courtship offline—our method requires unrequited overtures, which are hard to observe in offline interactions—these differences suggest that hierarchies of desirability may be more pronounced online than off.

Now where have we all read this before? Oh yeah. And oh yeah.

Bloody hell, will SCIENCE ever stop slurping my knob?