#701 - Alex DatePsych - Why Is Everyone Choosing To Stay Single?

25:15Well, 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. 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.

25:47It 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 Having met from these dating apps. Then you begin to start to see a pretty close one -on -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 Yet interesting that most people would think that it's a free -wheeling casual sex marketplace and Oh Is that from men as well?

26:25Men are saying that I'm not just on here looking for casual sex. I'm on here looking for a long -term relationship. Yeah, that is for 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? Men have kind of an orientation. A lot of the time we think of men having a strong orientation toward casual sex, but men kind 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.

26:59When I've run surveys, asking these questions, for example, how much do you want to monogamous relationship? Men and women pretty similar, 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. I read this great study on online dating apps that looked at partner preferences for education and attractiveness. Think you actually ended up putting me on today's. So fictitious profiles with manipulated levels of education and photo attractiveness send random invitations for a serious relationship to real online data.

27:37We find that men and women prefer attractive over unattractive profiles, regardless of their unattractiveness, no surprise there. we also find that high educated men prefer low educated over high educated profiles as much as high educated women prefer 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 Yeah, exactly. So the rule there for men on online dating, I guess, you know, be attractive, be educated. Go back to school. Yeah, go back to school.

28:17And for women, yeah, kind of the opposite. Stay out of school, but be very hot, I guess. But really, you know, women. So there's kind of something there that, you know, 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 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 higher education. And they might be, okay, she's kind of a boss babe.

28:52She's too bossy, she's too masculine. They might think she's going to be 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 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 relationships 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.

29:27But you know, there are kind of those stereotypes there. 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 replicated now. And people can always say, ah, but that wouldn't be the case now about the study that's only 10 years old or 15 years old But I do think that we're in a changing time 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?

30:14You going to have to nudge your preferences eventually or, what, 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 realistic. It doesn't seem realistic to me. So I think that it would be interesting to replicate some of these preferences, especially around education, wealth level, wealth disparity, 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?

30:52Yeah, exactly. That's 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 men 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 see, 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?

31:23I don't know about that, but as far as it goes, we know yeah, that it's a signal that is attractive to women and as far as it goes for women, you know, 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 see women 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 going to be enough men to go around in a sense. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. I wonder about the sort of male all men's concern about what women are looking for.

32:03And there was that 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, attractiveness, especially facial attractiveness, it's almost impossible to be liked by everybody. Right. And that's that's literally what that study found. Only one profile out of 100. And you might say, well, this is because women are being too cheesy or another equally valid explanation is that women vary massively in what they find attractive. Right? 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 preferences is impossible.

32:43Exactly. Yeah. Female variance for ratings of attractiveness male faces. It is higher in that sense. women agree less and I would like to see that profile of the guy who got 80 % 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 as 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 going to 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 profound in that sense, because it's like, yeah, you just need someone.

33:27You don't need all of them to like you. Seth Stevens, Davidowitz had a really interesting insight in this, where he leaned into his nerdy look. So he 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 to use that data. And what he found was that, and this was women that were rating him, what he found was that the more that he leaned into his nerdy look, the more extreme attraction results he got back. And he ended up fighting, he said it himself on the episode to me, he's like, dude, I am punching way out of my league.

34:02My miss is, but when her friends, you know, the six months before they met and she said that she was ready to get back on the dating market or something and her friends asked her, what is it that you're into and you know, go around the group or whatever. And I'm into like tall guys are 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 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 because he would have his partner would have passed him by.

34:41Yeah, it's an interesting one. What about dadbods? What have you learned about that, Bodz. So every once in a while on social media, people will post a picture or, you know, basically one of those body fat comparison pictures that you often see if you follow bodybuilding and all of that, which 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 women will say, I prefer the dad bod, right, which is a guy who maybe is a little bit in shape, but not very much.

35:19And this seems to be something that women pretty consistently say, but there's a lot of discourse on that. Like, is that true? And so I asked women, I said, why do you like the dad bod? Why do you not like these other bodies? Because we also see that these other bodies do emerge in female fantasies. For example, the coverage of romance novels, which is kind of the erotic material consumed by women. Those are not dadbods. Those are usually someone who looks like a fitness model. You see Chippendale's dancers. You see, for example, the calendars with the sexy firemen. Any time women consume kind of a visual erotic material, even if it's very light, it tends to be someone who actually is kind of jacked and all that.

36:00And the men are described the same way within those novels. They don't tend to be described as a dadbod. they tend to be described as someone who is tall and 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 a lot of it was like, ah, the body builder comes across as narcissistic. He would make me insecure. He might cheat on me. So there's kind of a lot going into that. They decide, 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 The idea of a man who is more muscular and larger, evolutionary women have a trade -off in their selection of mates.

36:38A 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, I would prefer the dad bod, someone who makes me feel comfortable in a sense as opposed to the really jacked fitness model kind of guy. What, when you're saying that women say that they prefer the dadboard 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 happens to the skew if you get rid of the extreme sort of body builder body, do you know?

37:20Well, very, it's very rare that women, if they see the extreme body builder, they were very rarely seem to say like that's it. It tends to be more 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. What sort of body fat do you think they end up settling on? Can you remember? I would think it would be between 2015. Wow. Wow. All of the guys on a permacut. You don't need to do it anymore. Just let the cheese cake yourself into a new relationship with a hearty.

37:53Yeah, I remember one of my friends who's been through all manner of different fitness pursuits and weightlifting, powerlifting, bodybuilding, fitness modeling. Good looking kid. And his ex -girlfriend, who is no longer with anymore, perhaps this is a contributing reason why. 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, I've never been happier with you than when you were powerlifting. And for anybody that knows what powerlifters look like, in that sort of 15 to probably, maybe even 25 % as you get up toward the super heavies, they're fluffy.

38:34They're a fluffy bunch. And yet she said that she'd never been happier than when that was the body type that he presented with and I think a concern about intracexual competition, about mate poaching, that must contribute a good chunk of it. It's not quite the same, but guys that are concerned about their partner posting bikini photos on the internet are dueed in a sufficiently well -fitted t -shirt who's walking around a 8 % body fat vascular as hell, and with a good amount of muscle mass see, you know, it's not, you can see what's going on here, right? You can, 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.

39:23Exactly. 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, they experience more jealousy. So it could be that that, you know, if someone is more conventionally attractive, they're going to be getting more attention. Perhaps it evokes more jealousy. They're going to 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.

39:50They're going to 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 attracted, he's got a great body or something like that. Is he going to stay committed to you? Is he more likely to cheat? And that's kind of something 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. 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.

40:24You know, 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 they've got like a pain tolerance, which kind of sexy, right? Like, you know, a whole litany of different things, discipline, reliability, they've probably got 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 other people that also go to the gym.

41:04And it's not the first thing they think. The first thing they think is look at 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 probably percolates somewhere in the back of your mind is, there's probably quite a reliable person. But 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 while not seeming like they care overly about that sort of narcissistic side of stuff.

41:38Yeah, 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 appearances a man basically it's almost a failure. But if you jacked from doing Brazilian jiu jitsu or chopping wood or doing something, 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 sticks for this on the internet. I remember reading a study, a theory that said, one of the reasons why women prefer dad bots is this caloric choice idea.

42:18So a man that is really good looking and 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 on and so forth. Whereas the guy that was the soft fluffy dad bod would presumably have more doorways of potential infertility close to him, which actually means that he it was that dadbods are an indication of better dads was the thought that he's not going to spend his calorie trying to chase after some 21 -year -old because she doesn't care about him.

43:02So I thought that was another interesting kind of second -order effect of the way that women perceive their current mates level of potential strain. Yeah, exactly. And what you said, their dadbods are indicative of better dads. I think that's very insightful and important because yeah, it is kind of the way that of a contrast between long -term versus short -term mate selection. When people, you know, women 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.

43:42And maybe that's why we see dadbod 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 Yeah, what are they called? I'm pretty sure there's a name for them and they're 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.

44:21And yeah, the dichotomy that you have in female erotica is like saying, why are there no, like why is Grand Mar porn not a really popular type of pornography for men to consume many men love their grandmother? And you're like, well, yeah, but like, 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. One of the things that I thought was fascinating, you've been talking about a lot recently, is the libido gap. What's that? So the libido gap, yeah. Basically, the observation that there's a sex difference in libido in sexual desire.

45:01Well, 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 behavioral Neutral 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 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 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 thing.

45:39There's research that indicate what research 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 and attitudes.

46:13The role of testosterone, of course, is a very, very big one. We know testosterone administration to men or women causes the libido to shoot up. And of course, men have much more testosterone than women, naturally, which increases that as well. What's the implication of this? What's the implication of that being a big libido gap? Perhaps that men and women will engage in 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 outside of the relationship, more likely to pursue casual sex. And of course, there's some debate on this from, I say debate, but there's not really much debate at all on this in scientific literature.

46:51Very large men analysis recently conducted in the libido gap found a difference of about 0 .5. So that's about a medium size 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 than men are more open to sex with multiple people and all of that. Yeah, I mean, if you had women with the libido style of men reading women's erotic herb would include a different man on each chapter who would be Tom and Jack and Harry and all the way through.

47:32But it's not, that 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 woman, but like that's men just like, ah, done with that one, like next one. I guess it's like a mental coolage effect in some way, right? That you've got this very rapid desire for sexual variety, even when it's just in your mind.

48:11Yeah, exactly. There is that big difference in the desire for sexual variety. And even in the context of erotic 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 Manit's almost the opposite when these sexual fantasies occur. It'll be like casual sex. Have sex move on to the next person or something like that. Yeah. You looked at a body count in sexual double standards.

48:43What did you learn there? 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, 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? 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 believe it was about 22, 40 % of men, I would have to double check, said, you know, I don't even ask for a body count on the day, which one way to interpret that is they don't care that much.

49:19Another could just be like, I don't want to 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. 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 higher body counts, upwards of 20 partners in a woman, for a man perceiving a woman, upwards of 44 men.

49:58And that's when people tend to start saying, this is kind of a deal breaker. And asking people in the survey as well, have you gone on a date and asked about body count and stopped dating them? About 10 % of men, women said, yes, in a committed relationship even lower, or I think it was like two or three percent 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 it does become a problem. Then people look at that and say, well, what's going on there exactly? Andrew Thomas taught me about this.

50:29And if you actually look at the curve of how it works, zero, I think for both men and women, zero is rated about as attractive as seven to 10, right? So it peaks that the peak of this is around about between two and four and then zero is the same as like, you know, nearly double digits. So yeah, there is this. There is a little bit of an aversion. Did women, well women more of us to male virgins than men were to female virgins? I didn't find that in mind and I think in the other one in the paper that was by Steve Stewart Williams and Andrew Thomas that you refer to. I don't think there was that much of a difference.

51:08I don't know if there was a significant difference or not, but if there was, it would have been a small one. But there does seem to be kind of, yeah, that aversion there. I guess in practice, of course, you know, if you ask our 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. What do you mean when you talk about sexual double standards, then how does that get folded in here? Sure, so the idea of sexual double standards is attitudes towards sexual behaviors that are different for men and women.

51:40An 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 a parable or something about promiscuity, the idea that if a man has sex with many women, 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 closing, you know, some even have kind of reversed. And particularly when it comes to things like having sex with a minor or a sexual assault, they mostly seem to be gone.

52:19So it's kind of like, yeah, people do seem to judge these things not as different for men and women at this point. That's interesting. What about the sexual assault and sex with a minor thing? like what's going on there? Sure, so an example of that is when a teacher who is a woman has sex with a male student, when a teacher who is a man has sex with a female student, are these view differently? It seems to be, if you look at discourse on it, that they are differently, that men and women, if it's 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 send 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.

53:10Interesting. What about the guys who demand virgins? Like who are these people? 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 me and 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.

53:43They 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 might want your first experience to be with someone else who is at that age, those men, they don't make a lot of money. But what happens also is you have individuals who persist in that desire for virginity into an older age, age 30 or something. And it's like you're a 30 year old man and you're looking for a virgin.

54:15That's like two or three percent of the male and female population at that age. Women who are 18 years old in virgins, typically do not want to date someone who's 30, 35, or something like that. And so it becomes increasingly unreasonable with age. It may persist in virginity until there are mid -30s and they say, oh, I'd still like a virgin, they're going to have to come terms with like, that's not in the cards for them. Yeah. It's an interesting one, man. Again, I do especially for the young men. Like the important qualifier here is especially if you're a guide that is a virgin. You know, there's something it's you're going to feel emasculated by your partners, is the disparity in sexual experience, right?

54:55You're supposed to be, here I am my first time, I'm taking charge, I'm finally becoming a man, and 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. 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 it seems to be that it's more male, male signaling than it is desirable to women. So women actually rate men that are very from mischievous, a little bit less desirable, a little bit more negatively.

55:30But 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 something that men are encouraged to believe about themselves. That if they're less sexually successful, they're less desirable, they're less attractive. but often that's more messaging that tends to come from other men than women, I think. Did you see Jeremy Boring tweet earlier on today about what the red pill is doing to marriage? No, no. So Jeremy Boring, CEO of the Daily Wire, he's been featured on a lot of the productions and stuff.

56:05He said what the red pill is doing to marriage, basically sort of degrading marriage, saying that it's a bad deal for men, etc, etc. You've looked at a good chunk of this, right? What's happening with marriage and divorce is like what are the real stats that people are missing here? Sure. So yeah, as far as the red pill goes, it's you know promotes a lot of very cynical narratives particularly in the context of marriage and it's you know not a homogeneous ideology or said beliefs or whatever, but you do see a lot of discourse on divorce that opting to says you know 50 or 60 % of people get divorced, it's mostly initiated by women.

56:42Okay, but there are individual differences in who gets divorced and who doesn't. For every married man across the board, and I think this is something that gets wrong, the risk of being divorced is not 50%. That's going to be determined a great deal by the individual characteristics within that relationship. What kind of things contribute to the divorce? Infidelity is a big one. Alcohol abuse is a big one. economic problems. So just by avoiding, you know, simple things that you know are going to cause a divorce flat out. Don't drink, don't get broke. Exactly. Yeah. Just these very basic things is going to drop the divorce rate way down.

57:19You 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 Yeah, Jeremy boring tweeted The fact that women initiate 80 % of divorce is evidence that some manifestations are of evil are more common in women in 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.

58:04That seems like a very, very odd claim to make that there's manifestations of evil. That's not for me to say that women initiating divorce that there's some perverse incentives that could be going on there. There's all manner of reasons why this sort of thing could happen. And many of them are probably pretty unspeakable. But evidence that some manifestations of evil are more common in women. I mean, why do women initiate more divorces and what are the reasons that they give for that? Sure, so yeah, 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.

58:48But there's a lot of different reasons. actually the reasons why women initiate divorces very complex topics so 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 They're much more likely to be physically abusive all the some recent research has called that into question as well It perhaps domestic violence within relationships is actually pretty similar for men and women men are more likely simply to stay in relationships when the relationship is bad.

59:24And 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, relationships had a 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 alimony, child support, and all of these things. It's usually the case that women interstate of poverty and stay below the poverty line for a few years.

1:00:00Following divorce and that men tend to remain more financially successful following their divorces as well. There's very high agreement in divorce couples as well on why the divorce happened. Both couples tend to indicate that we grew apart is simply one of the large reasons. Most divorces as well, if they look at who initiated it, they often ask, whose idea was this or who brought it up first. But if you asked, did you both want the divorce? You see a 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.

1:00:34The 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 he 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. Yeah, Adam Lane Smith, psychotherapist, ex -psychotherapist, now relationship coach, you know, sat through thousands of couples across his career.

1:01:04And 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 just straight up blindness to many, many, many signs for years and years and years from his partner. And you know, Adam's is, you know, he's fucking pro men for 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 think that he's been truthful when he just says like 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 I There's no more there are no more hints that I can drop.

1:01:53We 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. And yeah, I think it's Adam, Adam seems 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 he's so far gone, but she needs to finally be able to actually get all of this stuff off her chest. So you know, you could maybe say that this is a communication problem.

1:02:31Maybe it's a failure of cross -sex mind reading between the sexes that women are communicating their discontent and their issues in ways that men aren't picking up on, that men aren't being sufficiently perceptive. And like, those would be some ways. But 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? Well, I think there's a situation where men will simply stay in a bad relationship. Almost to the end, they just may not much less likely to kind of end it when all of the writing is on the wall.

1:03:13There are very explicit things that cause divorce, as well, drug abuse, more common in men, and infertility, more common in men, and just looking at those two things that already closes to 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, 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 not being in a relationship that they don't want, which can go back to all of the evolutionary reasons, women being more selected and that sort of thing.

1:03:58Women seem to be less pressured to remain in a relationship when they're genuinely unhappy with it, more ready to move on. 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 haven't got anybody. Well, I don't know about that for sure because sometimes we see those bottle necks in the Y chromosome, which indicates, okay, there were actually many more women than to men.

1:04:35So it's almost like if they left the 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 the dominant mating pattern is basically serial monogamy that people, you know, unlike the prairie bowl 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 to 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?

1:05:06And we form really long relationships compared to most mammals, but they don't seem to be lifelong relationships. And that seems to respond to kind of the gestational age, I guess, 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 also the case as well that not having lifelong bonding can increase genetic fitness from genetic diversity. So if someone has a long -term relationship, 15 years, they have some offspring, they get to the end of that time period. They divorced, they might still have some time to have new offspring with a new mate.

1:05:44So we still have this long -term mate formation, but kind of with some diversity of offspring in that case. How do you think we should balance the scales that, if what you say is right, and I believe that you are right as well, I don't think that Christopher Ryan and Sexett Dawn is perfectly the accurate serial monogamy seems to be what makes sense and sassura and monogamy I think it's sometimes referred to us. 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 a marital advice has been that you're supposed to stay together through thick and thin in sickness and in health till death to us part.

1:06:30We have constructed a value system, even outside of people that are super Christian, that break ups and devolves and stuff. It's not something that you're supposed to do. You made your commitment to the partner and you're going to stick together forever. Do you ever think about this cultural mismatch to our sort of evolutionary predisposition? Yeah, definitely. Certainly we have, you know, the last 2000 years of rules that say, you are married to someone you say 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 love, for example, there's different kind of stages of love or different components of love.

1:07:12One 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. And 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 going to 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.

1:07:48in 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. 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 restart the process? So to speak. And there's not a good solution are good to answer there as far as like prescriptive. What should people do?

1:08:19And 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 and say like just stay together forever avoids a lot of problems even you know if the relationship is not ideal in that sense. Yeah, it's interesting, man, this... I don't know. I wonder what a different kind of religion would have been that said, marriages are supposed to stay together for ten years, and then at that point there's some weird ceremony where you have to prove that you still care about each other and both partners, it has to do it independently, and some weird, raw -shark -like detector test, and then you come back together, and if it works, you do.

1:09:09I don't know, But 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 an awful lot of embedded genetic predisposition in there to encourage us to, okay, like we're done here now. Now, one of my favorite ones is 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.

1:09:59The 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 one of the concerns for extending, prolonging the pre -child section of any relationship. Couples that get together at university, they're 2021, 22, and they think, yeah, we'll start having kids with more 30. There can be some risks associated with that. if this theory turns out to be right. Yeah, exactly. And that's another thing too, kind of related to romantic love, transitioning into committed love.

1:10:40People pass 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. I read a blog post from you that was called the normie gets the girl. What do you mean when you say the normie gets the girl? Sure. So I did this with some vignettes descriptions of different individuals. This was related to kind of the ambivalent sexism inventory, which has constructs of hostile sexism and benevolent sexism.

1:11:20And I created vignettes, a man who is basically like a hostile style 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 light boat, that sort of thing. 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.

1:11:52but 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 have these other vignettes. One was like a manosphere beliefs, black pill kind of beliefs, rated really, really low by women, kind of related to hostile sexism there, and then a normal vignette. A guy who just thought, you know, things are fine. I don't get into these, you know, gender war ideology or whatever the case may be. And that's kind of rated the highest. And so that's, you know, and there was another that was an egalitarian or feminist man kind of rated medium.

1:12:29So there's of course a lot of discourse on that. What kind of men do women like, you know, 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 feminist necessarily in a man. They don't want to man at the same time who is highly misogynist or kind of a 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. 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?

1:13:11A little bit, but not much. I asked women for feminist identification or not. And the women who did identify the feminist, they 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 thing. What was second? Was benevolent sexist man second? I believe the benevolent sexist man was second. And I think for the feminist condition, the benevolent sexist man was second, and I think for the non -feminist condition, there was a man who was kind of a traditional masculine vignette and I think that was second.

1:13:50But across all of them, yeah, kind of the norwegai was the one that, you know, the women said they related to the most. Well, don't forget, you know, kind of like we said, somebody's body is not just the body. It is a representation of many other things about them, their worldview and the way that they show up and their personality and all this sort of stuff. The things that you believe about men and women is also an implication of how much time is this guy gonna spend on Twitter? How much time is this guy going to spend arguing with people on Reddit? Like how often am I gonna have to sit at dinner and hear him harp on about some weird YouTube video that he's just watched or whatever?

1:14:29You know there's an implication downstream from a lot of this. Yeah exactly. People see that and I think when people see extreme beliefs and ideology they wonder you know how stable is this person going to be and all of that. If someone sees someone who's kind of normal, they relate to them more because most people aren't extreme red pillars or extreme feminists or something like that. Most people do kind of share a mix of attitudes and they might lean a little bit left a little bit right. But for the most part, they're not typically focused on this gender war ideology. If they think like, yeah, especially if it comes to hostile attitudes toward the opposite sex, you know, hostile sex as a matter of sphere, whatever the case may be.

1:15:10Then it's almost like, you know, is my partner going to hate me? You know, are they going to get into a relationship with a racist as a black person? Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty much like that. These are, these are beliefs that do not help people in endating, you know, and they probably manifest in behavior and even if people never share them in very subtle ways that are not going to be entirely fulfilling for the opposite sex. Did you see those TikToks floating around about a month or a couple of months ago So of liberal women lamenting the fact that they couldn't find any traditional men that would hold the door open for them and consider paying on the first date, because all of the liberal men that they were trying to date, it was basically what they described was a cookie -cutter conservative man is what they wanted.

1:15:52Yeah, exactly. And I think that's closely related to that what's called benevolent sexism in the literature. And I would dispute myself personally. This is not something I would call sexist, but that's what they called it. And it's kind of, you know, there's been research and it gets women prefer men who score a little bit higher in benevolence sexism. And these are kind of like traditional conservative attitudes and beliefs that are things like holds the door or something like that, even if the women identify is more left. So it seems to be that on the one hand, you know, if they think about the conscious preferences, they might think, you know, I want a man who is more egalitarian.

1:16:27But when it comes down to a lot of behaviors, they still expect behaviors that are very congruent with traditional gender roles with the man paying for the bill the man holds his door He picks her up at her house and so on and even physically the same, you know as far as like a man who is Behaviorally dominant who's physically masculine and all of that Yeah, it's a State didn't reveal preferences kind of coming to the front yet again. What's that talab quote? He says something like around my family or in the home I'm a socialist, in my neighborhood, I'm a communist, at my state level, I'm a libertarian and at the national level I'm a conservative, something like that.

1:17:10It kind of feels a little bit like that, that you've got what a woman might want men at large to be like. I would prefer to not have hostile sexism from this entire 50 % of the population sent toward me and my girlfriends. I would prefer that we had a more egalitarian world. The sufferings and the challenges of women are understood and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But when it finally comes down to it, the meat and potatoes brass tax of getting into bed and getting into a relationship with somebody, you know, this is the problem I think that has largely gone under the radar but may come back to Biter in the ass a little bit further down her career.

1:17:50Alex Cooper from Call Hadaddi was, you know, spent, made a career extolling the virtues of casual sex. You know, treat him like you don't like him, how to have sex and not catch feels. You know, like relationships are kind of useless and pointless. But for the last three years, it turns out that she's been having this whirlwind romance with the guy of her dreams. And then she released a, maybe it was a podcast or a post talking about how beautiful the proposal was in a Rose Garden and he got down on one knee and it was exactly a sheet envisioned. And he go, this wasn't the story that you promised your audience.

1:18:28This wasn't the life that you said that all of the people following you, the millions and millions and millions of women that were listening to you should lead. And I think, you know, I've got this theory about how hypocrisy is a purpose -built melody for the intellectual, technological, social media rage because it's basically a before and after, a cognitive before and after photo, right? This is what you said previously and this is what happened in the future. You said that getting into relationship and marriage was totally pointless and you extolled the virtues of your rose garden proposal.

1:19:03It just, the dissonance just bleeds out of all of these conversations. And, yeah, I think stated in revealed preferences, what is it that is politically, socially popular for women to post about on the internet compared with what are they actually going to want to get into a relationship with at the end of the day? Yeah, exactly. I think as far as people talk about, you know, there's research from a feminist perspective that talks about, you know, the man should do more chores in the house and the sex when we better and all of that. But at the end of the day, I think it really is the case, you know, that women do not want to be the man in the relationship.

1:19:44They don't want the man in the relationship to be the woman. They do kind of seem to want those roles to some extent, even if politically those stated preferences are for highly egalitarian organization and there's probably some balance where they don't want to be bombarded with the most restrictive kind of gender roles and a sense, but at the same time, a man who's more dominant, who's going to take charge, who's going to lead, who's going to drive the car and pick the restaurants, and that sort of thing. It's just, you know, there are certain elements there. Are they associated typically with masculinity?

1:20:20Yes, but you're like being decisive standing well under pressure. Like though it is, where do you want to go for dinner tonight? I'll just there we go. We'll choose. I think it's funny that the memes and the cliches kind of often hold some of the greatest truth in them. There was this Catherine Walter study on testing assumptions about human mating psychology, She'd deal breakers and make preferences. 50 ,000 participants from 56 countries, both men and women, prefer short -term partners who are kind, healthy, attractive, women had higher ideal preferences for short -term mates than mended. And most participants, 59 to 80 % preferred the same type of ideal mate for short -term and long -term relationships.

1:21:06What's the implication of that? Yeah, brilliant. And I think that study is very consistent with pretty much all of the past research and evolutionary psychology on short and long -term made preferences. Somehow it has gotten into the popular discourse that an entirely different kind of person is who is desired for short and long -term. But really, it seems to be like, no, the same traits are desired in short and long -term, but some might be weighted a little bit differently in small ways on average. So a man who's funny and charismatic, long -term, short -term, both perfect, a man who's physically Yeah, he's also desirable both as a long term and short term mate, but in short term mating context, you know physical attractiveness it might be a little bit higher preferred, but it's kind of like yeah anyone who's desirable as a long term mate is also going to be desirable as a short term mate and vice versa.

1:21:57Yeah, man. I don't know. They the this metamine of having wildly different mating preferences for both. That being said, we said it earlier on, you know, the person that you're going to fantasize about is not necessarily the person you need to, but even with that, let's roll another filter, as you said, that hyper -masculine guy might be great to think about when you're behind the safety of a page. But if you have this very overbearing, physically sort of dominant guy, there's an awful lot of probably associated fear that comes with that. In some regards, it can be sexy, but another regards, it's just going to be terrifying.

1:22:35You know, the post me too, world, I wonder, I wonder what sort of times up in me too as a cultural phenomenon has done to women's preferences when it comes to male behavior and body type and stuff like that. I would not be surprised if we see women, you know, inculcating this concern about two men that are overly dominant and it really wouldn't surprise me if the end result was we should opt for more feminized men. Even if it was only a little bit, it would be very surprising if it was the other way. Yeah, exactly. You can see kind of that shift culturally, perhaps, towards men who are less dominant or less threatening.

1:23:21And there's a lot of assumptions about that kind of related to the dad bot thing. I posted an image and it was kind of like, yeah, the more muscular man is going to be more threatening. Someone said, you know, he looks like he might be a massagingist. So you see a man who's simply because he's jacked, they think he's going to be a massagingist. So you already have kind of that that association there. So what does that mean that like the skinny weakling is going to be a feminist or something like that? We have kind of those those associations and if that's what they think they want is like the feminist man, maybe they're going to pick the skinny guy, but at the end of the day, you know, there's probably not too large of an association between attitudes in that sense.

1:23:58Jim bros have a branding problem, man. They need to go through an advertising agency to fix this shit. Yeah, yeah. And there was a recent study that was pretty interesting on that that found, okay, men who are more muscular are perceived as being more conservative on average. And I think there's also some research in the past that indicates that as well, that men with a higher grip strength, for example, also tend to be a little bit more right -linging and they tend to score a little bit higher in social dominance orientation. So sometimes these perceptions that people form, they can kind of reflect accuracy and that's related to something in psychology that they don't like to talk about very much.

1:24:32It's called stereotype accuracy because we always say, don't judge people based on stereotypes, but at the same time, some stereotypes reform them because we see frequencies, base rates in the population a lot. Patent recognition. Yeah, pattern recognition, exactly. Six main red flags. Gross, clingy, addicted, promiscuous, apathetic, and unmotivated. Perhaps unsurprising to have those. These broad buckets seem to be quite well replicated. within each of them there's subgenres of promiscuity and apathy and whatnot. The most interesting thing that I learned from that study was women find promiscuity even less attractive than men in short -term relationships.

1:25:12Yeah, and that's I think a thing that a lot of men get wrong and you can tell them this and show them past papers that found this that women do not desire men with a very high sexual history in a sense and you know there's good reasons for that. Even in a short term mating context, you know, why are women more averse to short term mating? One reason we know women have higher disgust sensitivity than men do as a sex difference Disgust sensitivity a fear or disgust aversion to pathogens We know that women can contract STDs or STIs More easily than men can and that sort of thing so every sexual partner a woman has is a risk of exposure to disease in that sense So a highly promissuous man.

1:25:53Okay, at the same time every sexual encounter a woman has even if it's short -term also represents a risk of I guess a lack of resource and a risk of pregnancy, a lack of investment. So it's kind of like if this is someone that's having sex with a lot of people and I get pregnant, how willing are they to invest in me? And I don't think that's an explicit cognition that women have that would be something under the surface in a sense, you know, from the evolutionary perspective, but yeah, there's a lot that signals, you know, and I think as well, aside, you know, we kind of draw this line short and long term mating, but I don't think it's entirely clear that people always perceive of their short term mating as simply unrestrictly casual sex, a lot of short term mating, especially in actual behavior, is kind of the jump off point to long term mating, you know, you have a one night stand, is it because you intended to have a one night stand?

1:26:43Or is it because you liked the guy and you wanted to continue dating and then go stupid, you know, or whatever the case may be. So or the same with like situationships and all of that. People start saying, well, we're going to have sex every once in a while, but what are we? Down the line six months, you find both people have fallen in love and now they're in a relationship. So it's not always the case that, you know, there's a clear line between long and short term and actual behavior. Yeah. So just to reiterate those six main red flags, gross, clingy, addicted, promiscuous, apathetic and unmotivated.

1:27:14And before I read the results, I tried to think what would be the highest, what would be the biggest red flag for men and for women. And I thought for women it would be gross, largely because of the disgust sensitivity. But then the highest rated one was clinging us. That's the biggest red flag for women. Why do you think that's the case? What does that Let's say about women and why the fuck is no one talking about this on the internet? I'm not entirely sure why cleanliness would be the highest one. But I think something in kind of the mating psychology of women is that they do want to man who they can depend upon and not someone that they have to be a mommy too in a sense.

1:27:58So if it's the sense that this is someone who's not independent, who's not emotionally stable or strong that you can lean upon, that could be a big red flag to women in that since clinging this could also represent a threat, kind of like a stalker as well. Someone who's very clinging and all of that, like, you know, could they behave in a way that's emotionally volatile and perhaps hurt me? But I'm not entirely sure. These are just kind of guesses that come to my mind. I read Models by Mark Manson, which is probably 10 years old now. So most people will know Mark for Suddhalat, I'm not giving a fuck, really great book, but he actually wrote a, I guess we call it kind of like ethical pick apart history, but toward the back end of the Neil Strauss era in 2013, 14, and he identifies that I, this study wasn't out, maybe he read some stuff, but it seems to just be like, field tested advice.

1:28:52And he, he called it something different, he called it neediness, not cleaniness, but I think that the sentiment is the same. And he just drills out the one lesson that everybody that reads models takes away is that neediness is the number one turn off for women. And for guys can't be too needy. One of the or a few of the things that I reflected on after reading that were over being overly pliable as a man is a signal of low status that if you can, it's why the, you know, the never get the girl as a meme, right? The simping for women is an ineffective mating strategy because what it suggests, first off is that you have no other options.

1:29:36If you did have, if you were spending eight hours a day messaging me, I know that you're not spending eight hours a day messaging some other girl as well unless you've got a really good AI bot assisting you. Secondly, it suggests a low bar, a very low standard, to the point where it's probably a concern that somebody else, some other woman could come in and quite easily slipstream this exact same low level of self -esteem from you, so your level of dedication to me is going to be less. And then finally, I guess there's just some brute force playground logic that I want the thing that other people want, right?

1:30:17I don't necessarily want it when I can play with it, and whenever it's available to be played with me, I want the thing that's a little bit more sort of mysterious and eloof, and it's a little bit more difficult to get. So that's my three -pronged, bro -science theory about clingingness. Yeah, I think so. And these are kind of deal -breakers or red flags in early relationship formation as well. So that can signal something very different from down the line. So let's say we have someone who is very invested in the relationship, but it's really, really early. And then you might have kind of an incongruent signal.

1:30:50Like why is this person already so attached to me? We've only been speaking for one week. But if you look at a married couple and you say, okay, they text a lot or something like that, this is kind of like, oh, that, you know, that might actually be more desirable. That might like commitments, the needs. Women seem to really want commitment and investment and attention and time. but somehow at the beginning of a relationship, that can signal kind of, it can be the opposite of what is attractive, and then later on down the line, it can be kind of more appropriate in that sense. Yeah. What about, you're talking about marriage and some of the stuff that's going on.

1:31:25Al Pacino is, who's the guy, some Hollywood celebrity that's just going to another massive age gap relationship? I can't remember who, one of those kind of old legend actors. What do you think is the reason for age gap to boot? So one idea that I had was intracexual competition, right? The idea that, you know, if you have a mating pool, it's going to be people similar to your own age. So, or a mating pool of mates that are more desirable, that have more resources or something along those lines. So it could be the case that when people see an age gap relationship, they are thinking, you know, So this is someone being pulled from my mating pool in a sense by someone outside of that range.

1:32:12If that were the case, we might see age differences between men and women in age gap taboos. So I looked at that, but I didn't find an age difference for women. Women seem to approve or disapprove of age gaps about the same across the board. So sometimes we get that discourse that says, you know, it's old women that are jealous of young women or sometimes you say, hear people say, no, it's young women that disapprove more because, you know, old people are gross or whatever the case may be, but it doesn't seem that there's an age difference like that for women. But for men, there was. So young men disapproved of age gaps more than older men, which maybe does is kind of congruent with that self -interest perspective or with intersectional competition.

1:32:53But rather than in men, it would be in women in that case because if young men see, you know, age gaps is pulling women from their dating pool and women do already date up in age, they might be more threatened by that. They might say, yeah, age gaps are an appropriate why? Well, because they're stealing the women from you, basically, in a sense. And I've even heard people argue that explicitly. They said, you know, serial monogamy and age gaps are stealing the young women. And that's why young men are our single or something like that. So that could be one thing. But I don't think that explains all of the taboo.

1:33:24I think a lot of it is kind of cultural. You have kind of a narrative of power and balances. But But at the same time, I looked at hierarchical relationships where there might be a power imbalance. Someone, a boss and employee, that doesn't seem to have as much of an effect as age gaps either. So that's kind of one explanation you often see from feminist, this idea that there's a big power imbalance in age gaps. They're probably often isn't and people don't seem to disapprove as much of power imbalances when the age is close. So it seems to be the case that there is this taboo that's not entirely explained.

1:33:57And I think it might just come down to kind of kind of an Ick in a sense for some people and that's kind of, you know, a feeling that people have is just kind of a visceral revol ocean. And I think why that might occur is when people think of dating someone who is much older, they just simply think from their own experience, I'm not attracted to much older people. I could not imagine dating Al Pacino, you know, a woman who's 20, she's Al Pacino, look at him. That's gross. And that's all it comes down to. A lot of taboos can simply emerge from that visceral feeling like yuck. And then the rationalizations come in is because of lack of consent or a power imbalance or somebody that's being manipulative with their wealth or their status or whatever it might be.

1:34:40Exactly. People, that's what happens. A lot of the time we experience emotions first and then we come up with explanations for those emotions. And I think that can be what happens when people feel that visceral it. You know, they think, you gross. and yeah, then they come up with rationalizations to explain why it's gross. Maybe those aren't the real reasons, you know, but that's what they felt in the moment and and that's how they feel now. Interestingly something I found there was people who had had age gap relationships, of course, they were more approving of age gaps. So because I see some discourse on that as well as is it, you know, a lot of people have had an age gap relationship, a lot of women, true.

1:35:15And they said, you know, they learn from their bad experiences. And if that were the case, you would expect people that had age gap relationships to disapproved, but it was the opposite. So it doesn't even seem to be the case that they're driven by like bad experiences, you know, those people actually seem to support them more. Interesting what you said about how women dating older creates a death of potential female partners for younger men because the younger women are captured by slightly older men. And there's not really a way to bestow this wisdom onto younger men, but like one day in a couple of years time, you will be those older men.

1:35:55It seems, I totally get it. Like, you know, if you're a guy who's 22 and all of the girls are getting flown out to God knows where by 38 -year -olds, like, yeah, that's going to suck. But ultimately it's just like a diluted gerontocracy, right? Yeah, exactly and that's kind of related, you know, we have like the pure statistics that say you know like 60 % of men are single between 20 and 30 and you know 30 % of women are single Why is that are they sharing the man what's going on a lot of that gap can actually be explained simply by women dating outside of that age range on average. So for the bit, and it's much more pronounced among, you know, 18 to 25 than it is even among 25 to 30.

1:36:42So it seems to be the case that it's a real effect if you're a man who's like 18 to 23 or something like that. You know, a lot of those women that you could otherwise day, they're gonna be dating up. You're 18 now, so you're probably not gonna date down, you know, which is what the older men are doing. So you do kind of see it balance out down the line, but it does kind of create a singles gap, especially for like really really young men and I think you know I don't know if it's always super obvious Looking at the landscape where if they think you know the women are sharing like the same Chad who's in their class That's the same age where a lot of that.

1:37:14Yeah, it's just women dating up a little bit and there's no you know The average age gap is not huge. It's you know two to four years or something like that But a lot of people are dating outside of the average and when you total all of those up, you know You get something like around 20 % of women who are between 18 and 30 we're dating men older so that yeah already pulls a big, big chunk of women out. Mmm. Yeah, I love the less conspiratorial explanations for this stuff. That's one of the reasons that I really like your work, man. Like for all that we both get accused of being blue -pilled cooks or misogynist bigots, depending on who it is that's looking at what we've written or said.

1:37:53You know, it's like, it's just a calming, pretty well -balanced, nice, gentle, look at what is the data say, what do we know about human psychology, how can we marry these two together? Isn't that interesting? The world's probably not quite as fucked as you think it is. I guess it's a very peaceful way to look at what is quite a chaotic world, I think. Yeah, exactly. Human psychology, very complex, so many variables. So you always have to have a very nuanced perspective. It's rarely just as simple as x, y, and z. There's always so many different things. Going on and if people can calm down a little bit, look at the big picture and be a little bit stoic about it if they're in a difficult situation.

1:38:32It's not always roses, but it's usually not the full black pill either in that sense. What are you researching next? What can people expect from you? So right now we're looking at some data on only fans, on attitudes about only fans and only fans workers and this is just going to be some descriptive data. This is looking at because this seems to be a topic that actually people might be afraid to explore in the research a little bit because they're afraid that it's kind of stigmatizing but at the same time people do seem to have you know overwhelmingly negative attitudes about this and as far as impacts of only fans on future relationship prospects will someone date an only fans worker will this hurt their future your job offerings and also related to that what kind of political attitude to beliefs might predict, support for that kind of work or the opposite of support for that kind of work.

1:39:24Hmm, very, so you are delving deep into the archives of only funds. Is that what I'm hearing? Yeah, that's what we're looking at now. You're looking at attitudes about it. I can't believe you finally managed to get your recreation and your work to come together appropriately. Alex, these episodes do, I look at the clock and it's been an hour and 40 minutes and it feels like It's been five. I really appreciate the time I get to spend with you. Uh, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things you're doing. Sure. So we've got the website date psychology .com on Twitter at date psych and YouTube Alex dot date psych.

1:39:54Thank you, man. Catch you next time. Thank you.