#701 - Alex DatePsych - Why Is Everyone Choosing To Stay Single?
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Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is Alexander date psychic. He's a neuroscience and behavioral science researcher whose work focuses on attractiveness and dating. The modern dating world is a difficult universe to navigate, which has made a lot of people to check out of IT completely. But does this make people happier to elect loneliness rather than risk? Hot break, expect to learn why fifty percent of men have not approached the woman in the last year.

The bigger struggles everyone faces when dating, what misconceptions the world has when IT comes to online dating apps, whether women actually prefer dead birds, why women initiate more divorces, why the Normal guy is actually more likely to get the girl, and much more next monday, another huge modern wisdom cinema episode, this time with Patrick bet, David, host and founder of value taints and all round fascinating human. I flew to a foot ladder, il, to record a massive episode with him over there. So you do not want to miss this one going live on monday. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome alex under date psych.

What's going on with risk aversion and men not approaching women?

sure. So risk of version refers to a personality, trade or disposition where individuals are basically more accepting or more willing to take risks. So high risk aversion would be individuals who are less willing to take risks. And a big risk for men, at least a perceived risk is, of course, approaching women. So recently, I conducted a survey and I used the measure of risk version, and I asked about approach behavior, basically approaching for dates, approaching on the street, approaching in a bar, talking something at work or in class. And yeah, there is an inverse correlation or to a positive correlation with that risk aversion in and willingness to approach, right, that people who are more rescuer's, much less willing to approach, they tend to have more fears as well as far as the potential consequences of of approaching a woman asking for a date.

what did they say with the primary fears that these guys were concerned about?

sure. So some of the primary fears are basically social rejection and social consequences. There were some differences where individuals higher risk version might fear more legal consequences as well like, uh, some kind of report to H.

R. The police or even something like that. But IT tends to be mostly kind of a fear of like loss of a reputation.

Yeah why suppose you know we have a basis for this accessaries that if you were robust by one of the women in your tribe, that that probably wouldn't do much for your credibility with the rest of the women in the tribe and that your mates might take the piece out of you.

So I I certains understand from that that angle for the women is a well little listening, the all consuming fear as a guy of seeing a girl across the room and looking at her and thinking I should go and say hello because I think that she's nice, like fucking mortal. Its reality bending. It's so strange, it's such a big b. And again, i'm sure that there is lots of guys listening that I don't know you're talking about. I can just go and talk to anybody, but I think even the average Normal risk aversion man has this pretty sort of guttering al sense of trepidation before they go to do IT.

And ah the most confident man IT doesn't matter. They're gonna a little bit nervous, at least approaching a woman. And I think that something in pick up artist communities that theyve kind of caught onto is almost kind of an exposure therapy to that which, you know, exposure therapy, when people have fob us, they're exposed gradually to whatever the stimulus that would do.

Is that fear? And so maybe you've caught on like approach one hundred women and you will be less separate. Yeah, that's what he is. But of course, most men are out there approaching a hundred women. And that kind of nervousness IT persists even even individual is very.

very confident to begin with. Yeah, I think that was definitely one of the positive sides of the pickup world was that IT taught men to overcome approach anxiety just through exposure therapy, right? IT game, a fight exposure therapy, uh, which is keep pretty reliable when you are trying to get rid of all manner of phobias. If it's spider, yes, cared, or you agraphena and you don't leave the house one step at a time. Very, very small exposures at such a um and given that this is such a such a difficult one, I asked IT was ages ago but I spoke about um what it's like for a woman to approach a man and be rejected and as i'm really interesting responses from women that it's really painful for them because they almost feel like they've broken the social norm and still not succeeded so this kind of two layers of shame that they've had to go through as opposed to, I guess, men maybe with only one .

yeah exactly and I didn't even look at women approaching men because IT is so uncommon. You know, even for very attractive men, they just don't get approach to that much. If a man gets approached one or twice a year, you know, he's a chat.

Now basically that's what he is. It's super uncommon for for medicate approached and IT is a violation of those expected gender roles in a way that, you know, women will wait, I would and they will say, you know, I would prefer to be approached by man. And that's something else that kind came out in the research.

You know, we asked women, uh, would you like to be approached more? And you had about seventy to eighty percent of women are particularly Younger women, even more than older women. That said, yeah, I wish men would approach, approach more. But but they're not going to do IT the women are gonna .

prove men for sure. interesting. So have you looked longer totally at this? Do you know if men's risk aversion and fear of approach has increased over time?

I don't know for sure. But there I think there are is some research on that, that I haven't done this looked at risk aversion and in Younger generations, and there may be more risk averse. So IT might be something that we see, particular with the zoom s, right, with the Younger generation, that they are more for risk of birth than earlier generations. And there's a lot of kind of converging evidence on that, that you they're waiting later in life to take risks like getting a job, going to school, getting a driver's license, many of these other things that would indicate OK the kind of enter the adult world to speak.

Yet, gene twin, these work in generations is is fantastic with this, uh, slow life strategy, or extended at lessons, IT explains an awful lot. You know, me and both have been talking about this generalized risk versions syndrome. And IT is IT to cross, you know, her, me, it's absolutely the everything.

But IT really, really shows up in dating because dating is largely a game of risk remediation, right? Is how can I kind of deal with the inevitable uncertainty of going up to someone? I don't know if they like me. I don't know if they're single, I don't know if i'm going to look silly. Uh, IT very much is a kind of like the vanguard of risk expose other things, moving out of the house, changing jobs, moving locations, but certainly a much lower stakes, more common one, which is what makes an interesting, because IT is lower stakes is I what you get rejected by somebody when you go up to them, like what there's literally no cost apart from a tiny little bit of discomfort and yet at the felt sense of IT is a in a world ending catastrophic exactly .

ah and something kind of religion that is that a we see, for example, individuals hire e in the dark triad, they have more sexual partners, a psychopath. S is, well, people that store high in the hair psychology checklist. We see example, people that have a criminal record may have earlier sexual abuse, so they are having sex earlier in life or having more partners.

And these are also all things that are associated with a higher tolerance for risk, even risk seeking individuals who might enjoy risk more. So kind of like, why do they have more partners or something like that? There's some indication that they might actually even select down. So IT might not be that they're more attractive, but IT couldn't that they're much more tolerant of risk whether they even seek risks out. So these are the people kind of approaching more recipe ly, and so they are kind of reaping the fruits of that.

so to speak. Was IT you that discovered fifty percent of manage, eighteen to thirty, haven't approached the woman in the last year?

Yes, that sounds right. Yeah, I am .

growing that statistics all over the internet. Glad, glad I got the location right.

yeah. And the men that have approached are doing remarkably well. A lot of the men who have approached the more than half have gotten a date from IT. You know, if IT goes down, if you look to the like, long term relationships, how many dates turn into a long term relationship? But the men who are approaching, they're doing pretty well actually.

okay. So fifty percent of men age dating to thirty, having approached women in the last year of that, fifty percent, fifty percent of them did get a date.

I would have to check again, but I might be didn't be higher, might have been the men who had IT might even been about seventy percent at least got a date or a phone number or some kind of romantic connection there. And IT goes down to about twenty percent the'd got a long term relationship out of IT, but sex is higher. So you can see that go down like date. Sex is a little bit low or long term is a little bit lower. But mostly they are the kind of people that approach women.

They're getting dates from IT. I don't know that seems pretty positive for the approach. And I suppose you know there's an argument to be made.

Well, of course, the kind of guys that are approaching women, they're the ones that are full of the confidence or are the ones that know it's a sure thing. Of course, they're getting into relationships and having sex are going on date and getting phone numbers and stuff. But given the fact that this is an exclusively agent's decision they are making, right? Yes, sure.

If you have a little bit more confidence in yourself is going to make making the decision more easy. But ultimately, there's a huge chunk of people in that fifty percent that are doing IT. The probably are just as unsure and just as terrified and just as uncertain as you are. So yeah, not to a serious White pill for why you should approach women.

absolutely. Yeah that's one of the things that i've come to believe is that you know as far as the whole p way thing and all of that goes yeah, like a lot of IT just comes down to approaching and IT does seem to work. It's interesting you said agents as well, because I have some more data, I having put IT out yet, but this looks at like locus of control and dating difficulties.

I asked people to list all of these. What do I think are the difficulties in dating? And then I coded those into a survey of the responses, and I found the correlation with local of control and dating difficulty. So individuals that have a higher internal loss of control that are more agents, they tend to report that they have fewer difficulties dating. So that's another thing too, is that more agented individuals in that sense, like you said, they're probably .

doing Better. Yeah I think William costolo s most recent post about in sales found a wildly externalized locals of controlled .

exactly his recent paper exactly that. He looked at the same thing, local control. And in sales had yeah that hire external loss of control.

You know, people with an external look of control, they see the world is like things just happen to me out of my control. Where's people with an internal local control? You know, they say I make things happen.

Things don't just happen to me. You know what? whatever. Happens in life. I have some control over that.

Yeah, you asked people that survey. I really loved that. You ask people about the biggest struggles with dating they were expecting that were holding them back. What were the big takeaway?

The island from that? Well, a big one that emerged with fear rejection for mine, specifically a dating apps. A lot said, you know, they just don't well, do well on dating apps. That was another big one. A lot had to do with compatibility, and particularly some big sex differences there.

About seventy percent women scored highly, which was a six or a seven on a seven point, like red scale, and said, I can't find someone that i'm intellectually attractive to, which is something that I didn't expect to be so high. But apparently not being able to make an intellectual connection was one another. Difference was a lot of women, much more than men, said that they felt there was a lot of sexual pressure in demand for them.

So those are those are things as well. Not finding someone who was physically attractive enough. You yeah, women scored higher than that as well.

I think that had a colon's deal about point to six, so about the medium size difference there. So those are all things like I can't find someone i'm attracted to. I'm afraid to approach people because i'm afraid to be rejected, can't make a connection with someone on an emotional intellectual level as well.

The intellectual one is so interesting and kind of runs against, I think, a lot of common held dating commentary on the internet because it's very difficult for us to quantify what intellectual compatibility or sapo sexual success actually is, right?

Like what no one's talking about that on the internet, you know we'll say and I heard this, I so whole house as a research base for you to go out of should be one of the first places that you look at. If you sit around the pool at any sohle house on a saturday afternoon in a relatively warm country, you will get so many fascinating stories about girls in that from twenty five to forty and their dating chAllenges. And dude, I it's my ethnographic like in person research center and i'll just sit and just ask questions or over here conversations about what people are talking about.

And a lot of the conversations that these girls are saying is guys of intellectual imaging emotionally immature um they don't really understand how to take care of themselves. And then I OK so if you tried dating older, like if you looked at, you know thirty, thirty five, forty, they say, yeah and you know, these problems aren't necessarily solved by the passage of time that there are adult infants and and sort of man children all over the place. And again, with this is IT would be the low resolution solution to this would be, don't don't worry about trying to become intellectual or emotionally interesting or mature, just earn more and you will be able to offset your emotional immaturity that would be kind of common health internet with limit, least for a lot of men.

Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people don't think about that. And something I noticed when I followed up and I and I saw that he was so big on that compatibility, I ask people, what does that mean to you when you see a question like that? And a lot of interpreted to mean like, but i'm very intelligent.

I have a very high I Q and I don't think that exactly what women mean when they're saying I can't find a man who is intellectually compatible. I don't think they they mean everyone is stupid or they know hi I Q. I think they mean, is that someone that's interesting that can uh connect to me emotionally, that can connect to me on on a mental level and relate to me, which is related to cognitive abilities, part of what's called social cognition theory of mind.

How well do you understand the emotional states of another person? How well can you predict accurately what the other person is thinking? I think not being borrow ing is actually a really big part of IT as well as far as the intellectual compatibility.

If you have nothing that you relate on, you know, being able to relate to someone is probably a big part of IT where if everyone's hobbies are different, you know someone could be really smart, but you still might not find intellectual compatibility there. So it's not necessarily men or student. I think everyone's dumb, but IT couldn't be kind of like you said, you know, I have a hard time relating to these men. They seem very immature in that sense.

Yeah, I think just paying attention to people seems to be incredibly rare. You know it's kind of, I guess guys talk about this a lot that um IT sometimes seems to mend that when that in a relationship women respond to them differently, them when they're not, you know they just SAT around the dinner table or a borrow whatever just having a chat and I wonder whether that kind of gets rid of a few things.

The fact that you if you're in a committed relationship, you're not trying to pull. So IT actually does a couple of things that lose the stakes because you're not there's no such thing as rejection here. She's not on the docket as far as your concerned. And I also wonder whether um some of the sort of chest beating peacock tail flowing that kind of goes on when guys feel like they need to do a thing to impress ago and maybe even counter signals that they don't like. Why is they do the sit back and asks what she's interested in or just kind of lets this person waffle at them are actually comes across as being more intellectually engaging because that just letting IT come and go nice easily yeah exactly.

Some fluency and conversation there is probably really related to as well because something we know about, sex differences in intelligence is that men tend to score a little bit higher and visual spatial, but women tend to score a little bit higher and verbal intelligence. So women may be a little bit Better at communicating and having those conversations, holding them and engaging.

And so if if men are not in general, you know, if there little bit worse, women might struggle to find that. Like, is this someone that can kind of just ramble on in the sense? Can they can they hold an interesting conversation in that way? I think that might also be related to kind of what they think of when they say intellectually compatible.

Yeah, how is your one man cruisie to try and fix the cognitive distortions in the install world going going well.

I think a lot people.

you a liar, you are a at your life.

Yeah, I don't know. People are always very stuck in what they believe. Ideology is very, very hard to shift.

And people like kind of simple explanations for things, kind of universe explanations like this, is this. Where is human behaviors? Very, very multivariate. There are so many different things that contribute why someone might do well, editing or not, you know, why someone might come across as attractive or not, and people to focus very exclusively on just one thing without taking into account the big picture. And at these become belief systems that people adopt ideologically and a sense.

And shifting their beliefs in a way is also kind of difficult because it's almost like IT can cause code into distance, but is also perhaps abandoning and identity that they relate with. And I think you see that are particular insel communities. You know they that community is their friends and their identity. In a way.

what do you wish more in so for inhabitants, new?

Well, I wish that they would perhaps understand more new ones as far as a all of the research related to attracting me. So it's very I guess IT was a specific thing that I wish they knew, perhaps interpreting effect sizes because you will see in a lot of papers and it's a statistical thing.

You'll see that in the abstract or of a report like, oh, the more attractive person got more women, X, Y, Z, or you know, the dark people with the dark triad were more attractive. They had more partners. But then you will look at the effects and will be like one on average or something like that. That's a very common in psychology that sometimes the differences are are relatively small. But I don't know if people always understand that when they are just reading the abstract of the results initially, that just because there's a significant effect IT does not mean is a meaning or a large effect.

Yeah William's most recent study, i've got part of the abstract here in sales, significantly over rested mate the importance of physical attractiveness and financial prospects to women and underestimated the importance of intelligence, kindness, humor in sales, underestimated women's overall minimum make preference standards as well.

Yeah, that's thing. And and of course, that's part of basically that whole black pill ideology that looks rain supreme. And and you could say that and there's some researchers that would support that, right? That looks are often they're very important.

No one can deny that they're up there as far as the herky goes. But if you say only looks matter and everything else, uh, doesn't contribute all, that's not a very good picture either. I didn't analysis, looking at lifetime sexual partners and a physical attractively.

And the effect was very small that had a hedge. G you like point one force. So like, okay.

speak england.

I like you just IT means a very small effect. So if it's point three in psychology, that's about average. So we're looking at something that's pretty small.

So it's kind of like, uh, yeah, more attractive men. They have more sexual partners over the lifetime, but not very much. It's not a really big, big difference. So there's other things going on there. A lot of those are behavioral. How do you mean with a lot of sexual partners act differently and they might be a big difference might be they seek them out, uh, there's larger effects for something like behavioral dominance, for example.

What do you mean?

Behavioral dominance, uh, kind of aggressions, interpersonal aggressions, male male competition, even things like athleticism in sports, participating in a competitive sport, those are things actually that predict having more sexual partner Better than physical. Attractive is us. And again, this can kind of go back to risk version and impulses, this risk seeking that men who might seek out those environments so they typically not the kind of Manda afraid to approach women and shoot their shot.

Um it's a whole sweet of different things. But yeah, I you know competence is sexy. You see, you see of a girl he was good at pickle ball or something even if you don't care about pickaback, you like, yeah that's that's kind of hot like it's cool that that she's able to do something she's got physical control of about a good singer or a good power, whatever.

You know, like a kind of doesn't matter what IT is, but any degree of competence and especially anything that approaches mastery, is just. It's sexy. It's cool. Yeah exactly.

Especially for men and David bus, he ran, of course, a large multination status mul multination study on state scuse for men. And A A lot of the ones at the top are basically signals of competence. Two of them were having a higher level of education or attending a procedure university, earning more money, those sorts of things.

So yeah, all of these signals of competence, especially for men, seem really important as far as a attracting women. And even that could be related to something like intellectual compatibility. If you are having a conversation with someone and they seem like like they don't know what they talking about, they haven't done anything that would indicate some kind of mystery or expertise. Perhaps you would think, like that's not someone on my level.

Why do you think this is the case then, that there is metam on the internet of of intelligence, kindness and humor not really being all that important. And yet, in the data, IT seems like that actually is. In your survey, seventy nine percent of women said that they were strugling to find somebody that they were intellectually compatible with. How what's the reason that disappears to be overlooked, especially in the sort of in sale world?

Well, I think for one, everyone thinks they're really smart. Everyone think think they're really funny. And so they might think, but i'm all of these things.

I have a really good personality, right? A lot of people think that about themselves. Maybe they don't. And so they don't see the they're not reaping the awards from that because they don't actually meet those criteria. Another could be because no part of that mean is probably true that you know if someone is very, very low and looks for something like that, you know, but they are interesting and funny and all of that and they can still struggle more in dating if they're not hitting that bar that thresh holds, so to speak, you know friends zone in in that sense.

right? Yeah, this is one of the things that I think I realized when I first started researching some of the inself forum. They are inhabited by some unbelievable percentage of them have a physical disability, many of them and eua diversion in one former another. And what you have is people who are really, really out on the tail when IT comes to sort of uh just Normative um like everything right. And what that means is that the philosophy that is derived from the people out on the tales get used by the people that actually start to move a little bit closer toward the belt cuve.

So you know, yeah if you're somebody who physically presents in a really, really unusual way, absolutely like l ms very well may be the hierarchy that most important you looks money status in a black, the language um but i'm not convinced that that's true as soon as you meet the the standard thresh hold but again, it's very unfilled sizable. A lot of the philosophy is that that's just cope or that its stated versus revealed preferences from women that they don't actually care about intelligence and kindness and humor because they are just going to go home with giga chat. In any case, IT is just going to be you, an Andrew tate disciples. It's going to come in and sweep of feet no matter what, like alphaworks be the books baba, like it's very, very unfaltering ble. Which is why when I see you venture into these debates and discussions, one on one on twitter, that I kind of apology I know I don't never get involved by apology you from the sidelines for trying to standard .

ground yeah I think what you said is, is important and it's kind of related to how I see this one is Better to understand looks as kind of a threshold like a bar that must be met rather than something that where at increasing levels, IT just keeps returning exponential benefits, so to speak. As soon as someone hits that thresh like, okay, this person passes, you know, as they is, they call them to like the looks test.

They pass the looks test, then everything else kind of comes into play, right? And someone could pass that looks test, but if they don't have any of those other things, they might still struggle in dating a lot. That's actually really, really important for women, because women need a lot of people who do pass the looks test, right? And then they have to compare their options with one another, you know.

But do they have all of these other things too? Because it's not that women are necessarily short from options. But as far at least as far as looks go, because to using example, I ran a study with faces months and months, months back, and I picked faces from the chicago face database that were prevented as being below average and attractiveness.

And I had the participants rate them again. So below average, attracted and strong correlation there, agreement that these are less attractive faces. And then instead of asking, great these faces, I put them up just a binary.

Would you date yes or no? And all of these spaces got about twenty five percent of women that said they would. So most women don't have to like the individual.

Only some percentage of women have to like the individual, right? You don't need one hundred percent of women. And that seems to be very common that, uh, looking at research on faces, that agreement from women on faces is much lower than IT is agreement for men.

Men agree they corporate much strongly in the ratings of an attractive female face than women do for and attractive male face. So there's a lot of more variation for women. And that means that you know a lot of men, no matter what they look like, they're going to be attractive to most women. And when they are, it's important that they have other qualities and criteria that facilitated past that point. Like, okay, he looks OK.

What do you think most people may believe about online dating? You know, we've gone through many generations of myth and me about what online dating is and isn't. What do people misunderstand about the world of online dating? Well.

a very common popular perception is that online dating apps are used to facilitate hook ups. Most people use online dating to facilitate long term relationships between twenty thirty percent ten to say, okay, i'm using is a hook cup APP. The rest of saying i'm not engaging ing in hookup s, i'm engaging in long term relationships.

Another as 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. There's many, many more men on these apps can be three to one IT can be as high as to one, just not always clear because the apps don't tend to release that.

But these are things that can cee these matrix, but didn't. When you look beyond matter 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 one ratio, at least for the people who are able to get some matches. They seem to kind of facilities, sexual encounters, relationships relatively well.

Yet interesting that most people would think that it's a free eeling casual sex marketplace. And is that from men as well, ming, that i'm not just on here looking for casual sex. I'm on here looking for a long term relationship.

Yeah that that is for man, about seventy percent long term relationship, about thirty. And of course, I think a lot of men, if casual sex landed in the lap, they would probably be open to IT.

But if you ask him, like what are you really looking for? You know men have kind of a uh, orientation a lot of the time we think of men having a strong orientation toward casual sex, but men kind of have both men have a strong orientation toward casual sex, but also a strong desire for long term organist relationships and is a little bit different from women when i've run service asking these questions, for example, ah, how much do you want to monogamist relationship? Million women, pretty similar, know both indicate high orientation toward monogue.

But if you ask how open on you to casual six, 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. So fictitious profiles with manipulated level of education photo attractiveness send random invitations for serious relationship to real online data.

We find that men and women prefer attractive over unattractive profiles regardless of their unattractiveness. No surprise that 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 me on online dating, I guess, you know, be attractive, be educated, yeah go back to school. And for women, yeah 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 as far as preferences go, women tend to want a man who is a little bit higher in status than they are and is still the case in western society. As much as people kind of uh, like to say degrees don't matter, all that is 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 and modern times towards women who have, uh, higher education, they might think, okay, she's kind of a boss baby.

She's too bossy, she's too massive. They might think she's she's going to be a more liberal perhaps, or more feminism, something like that. So there are some negative stereotypes we see now, as with more educated women.

But I guess something important to remember in in all of that if people are looking at this and thinking like, should I be this way, they're taking kind of Normal tive, is that men and women, both with a higher level of education, they're much less likely to get divorce. They are much less likely have relationship problems, higher relationship satisfaction. Or really, everyone really shouldn't thinking like, you know, ideally I would have a highly educated me if it's a man or a woman. But you know, there are kind of those those stereotypes there.

He had to difficult among the with the forever standard deviation increase in a woman's like her chance of marriage drops by thirty five percent, I think and it's literally the inverse for men. I'd be really interested to see this stuff uh, replicated now and people can always say, but that that wouldn't be the case now about the study that is only ten years old or fifteen years old.

But I do think that we're in a changing time um with more women going to university, more women being sells you economically successful. That has to be an awful lot of pressure on both men hed women to begin to screw their preferences around what they think here. Because you're just going to went up in a like sex ratio hypothesis.

Hell, if you don't, right, you going to have to nudge your preferences eventually. Or what are necessary. Everyone can just split off into their own like silos, like sex silos worlds. But that seems realistic IT doesn't seem realistic to me. So I think that I would be interesting to replicate some of these preferences, especially around education, uh, wealth level, wealth disparity um to just see more than anything whether a change in the imbaLance between man and women, which we are seeing is able to nurture this, or whether these are kind of like the thermal dynamics of sex different stating .

attraction yeah exactly that H A turkey 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 man who has a similar level education or more.

So it's kind of like, what do we do for that? You know, I try to encourage medica stay in school, you know, at least as far as like dating and stuff goes a it's give that piece of paper even if you know that's going to help. Is that enough? Is that enough of a reason to go to the university whenever I don't know about that? But as far as IT goes, we know, yeah, that is a signal that that is attractive to women. And as far as IT goes for women, you know if if we're going to see a lot of women working, making more money, you overseeing this wage gap that's basically disappeared. And where 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 mental go .

around in the yeah yeah an interesting one. I I wonder about the sort of male men's concern about what women are are looking for. And there is that study as well that I found only one profile out of one hundred was liked by more than eighty percent of women. So as you said earlier on, attractiveness is especially facial attractiveness.

It's almost impossible to be liked by everybody, right? And that's that literally what that study found, that only one profile out of one hundred, you might say what this is because women are being too choose or another equally valid explanation is that women vary massively and what they find attractive, right? That if you have high variance, that also means that trying to find a face that threats the middle of one hundred different women very unique like idiot syncs tic preferences is impossible .

exactly yeah yeah female variants for uh ratings of attractively mal faces IT is IT is higher in that since women agreed less. And I would like to see that profile of the guy. You've got eighty percent that like IT because that is remarkable.

And I think that's one of the things that discourages people about dating apps that they're like all I swiped one hundred times and I only got five matches or something like that, 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 eighty percent of people to like you, and eighty percent of people are never gonna you. You know if it's men, women or whenever the case, maybe but yeah those are the statistics I think that kind of discourse people when they see them but the implications are perhaps not as is profound in that sense because it's like yeah you you just need to someone you don't need all of them to like you.

said Stephens dividual tes had a really interesting insight in this, where he leaned into his noddy look, so used the website to split test different versions of his own appearance. Beard, no beard. Glasses and no glasses.

Long, short, like, how should I dress all the rest of IT and then just use that data. And what he found was that and this is women that we've writing him. What he found was that the more that he landed into his nerdy look, the more um extreme attraction results.

He got back and he ended up right, he said at himself on the episode to me, as I did, I am punching way out of my league. My miss is. But when her friends, six months before they met and SHE said that he was ready to get back on the dating market or something in her friends, asked her, what is that that you're into and you go around the group or whatever.

I am into like tall guys, or I am into like athletic. So of guys got to hurry. He says, I love nurse. I really, really super attracted to nurse.

So had he have diluted down the more extreme sides of his physical appearance in the way that he presents and what he talks about, he would defended up, missing out on basically outsize returns in the mating market because he would have his partner would have passed him by um yeah an interesting one. What about um dad boards? What do you learn about dad boards?

So every once in a while on social media, people will post a picture or you know, I basically one of those body fat comparison pictures that you often see if you follow body building. And all of that work shows like, here's someone with thirty percent, here's someone with twenty five percent, here's someone with twenty and so on. And they will get down to, you know, guys who are stage lean, who are just jack and very lean.

And if you ask women, which one do you prefer? A lot of women will say, I prefer the dead boat, right? Which is good guy, who maybe is a little bit in shape, but not very much. And this seems to be something that women pretty consistently say. But now there's a lot of discourse on that.

Like, is that true? And so I asked when I said, why? Why do you like the dead boy? Why do you not like these other bodies? Because we also see that these other bodies do emerge in female fantasies.

For example, the covers of romance novels, which, you know, is kind of the erotic material consumed by women. Those are not dead birds. Those are usually someone who looks like a fitness model. You see, you know, chip and deals dances. You see, for example, the calendars with the sexy firemen.

Anything women a consume kind of a visual erotic material, even if it's very light IT tends to be someone who got actually is kind of jack, all that and the manner described the same boy within those novels. They don't tend to be described as a dad ball. They tend to be described as someone who was tall and you know, kind of lean. He's got ABS and that sort of thing.

So I asked women, you know, why do you like this? This dead bott. And and a lot of was like, oh, the body builder comes across as arctic stic.

He he would make me insecure. He might cheat on me. So this kind of a lot going into that, they decided, do women prefer these dead bods? Perhaps because they signal some kind of comfort. They're not as threatened to women. And even the idea of a man who is more must learn in larger, you know, evolutionary women have a trade off in their selection of mates, a strong man whose tall and physically imposing can protect them, but he also represents more of a physical threat to them at the time. So you have a lot of different converging things that might make a lot of women say, you know, I would prefer uh, the dad board, someone who makes me feel comfortable in a sense as opposed to like the really jacked fitness model kind of guy.

What when you're saying that women, some say that they prefer the dad board over the stage, lean guy, what about if they are given a much more Normal, you know, ten percent, ten percent body fight guy who has a good amount of muscle mass? What happens to the sky if you get rid of the extreme sort of body, body, body, do you .

know well, is very rare. That women, they see the extreme body builder. They very rarely seem to say, like that's IT. IT tends to be more of of, of the leader kind of fitness model, but still much more muscular then the average man. But still in that case to say, you know, I don't want that, I want kind of the fluffier guy.

What kind of fat do you think they end up settling on? Can you remember.

I think IT would be between twenty .

and fifteen. Wow, wow. All of the guys on a pera cut, you don't need to do IT anymore. Just let cheese cake y yourself into a new relationship with a hott. Yeah, I I remember one of my friends who's been through all manner of different fitness pursuits, don weight lifting and power lifting instead, body building did fitness modeling, good looking kid and his x girlfriend who is no longer with anymore. Perhaps this is contributing reason why, once said to him, as he was prepping for a show and sort of dalling in his body and getting down to be super lean, SHE said, um i've never been happier with you then when you were power lifting and for anybody that knows what power left is look like the in that sort of fifteen to probably, and maybe even in twenty five percent. You know, you get up toward the super heavy, the floppy.

There are a fluff y bunch and um yet he said that sh'd never been happier than when that was the body typed that he presented with an I think you know a concern about inter sexual competition about mate poaching um that must contribute a good chunk of you know kind of the it's not quite the same but guys that are concerned about their partner posting bikini photos on the internet. You know dude in a sufficiency well fitted t shirt whose walking around to eight percent body at vasculature hell and with a good amount of muscle mass and it's not you can see what's going on here, right? You can you can make a lot of influences 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 exactly yeah and something .

else kind of religious in the research is individuals who have partners who are more attractive if their men or women, uh, they experience more jealousy. So IT could be that that, you know, if someone is more conveniently attractive, they're to be getting more attention. Perhaps IT devotes more jealous y they're to be afraid, like you said of mate, poaching going to be afraid.

Okay, this person might cheat. And there is some actually indication that for men, but not for women, that. Man who a little bit more attractive might commit infidelity a little bit more.

They are going to have more sexual partner. So there can be that perception and is not maybe props totally accurate than okay, you've got a guy is very attractive. He's got a great body or something like that.

Um is he going to stay committed to you? Is he more likely to cheat? And that's kind of something that that women said. You know he seems like he seems like he could be arcs stic. 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 in good condition physically IT says an awful lot about them beyond simply what it's going to feel like to get them naked in bed you know, if if somebody has trained consistently for a decade, you know so much about them, you know that they are probably not a massive to generate drink IT. 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, the whole litany of different things, discipline, reliability, they're probably got A A pretty robust friend group from going to the gym, all that sort of stuff and that you just you tell that, but it's kind of a little bit like a hidden signal because the only people that really know that are other people that also go to the gym, and it's not the first thing they think. The first thing they think is look at the nice shoulders, or the good as, or whatever IT is that they are looking at. But the people that have spent enough time decoding what this means, and I do think that IT probably percussive somewhere in the back of your mind, is that's probably quite a reliable person. But yeah, you also end up with a bit of a difficulty on the body bell outside. I wonder whether this is part of the illusion of ross fit athletes, that because it's not done specifically for aesthetics, guys are able to get themselves into a good condition while while not seeming like they care overly about that sort of nassi stic .

side of stuff. Yeah, that could be because there was that perception as well. That is kind of a vain behavior. And in that since almost an on masculine behavior is what some people said, that like you should not care so much about europe as a man. Basically it's almost.

But if you jacked from doing brazilian shopping word or doing some other thing, your body has come along as a by product of a pursuit that you actually care about. So I remember a while ago, and I got a lots stick for this on the internet, I remember reading a study, a theory that said one of the reasons why women prefer dead d boards is this a chloric choice idea? So um a man that is really good looking and like lean and in good condition, if you give him one calorie, there is there are more avenues open to him outside of his committed relationship and his family to which he could spend that salary, right? So the resources have more different angles for him to go down because this is going to be other making opportunities on and so on. Whether the guy that was the soft fluff y dad board would presumably have more doorways of potential infidelity close to him, which actually means that he IT was that dad boards are an indication of Better dads, was the thought that is not going to spend his calories during a chase after some twenty one year old because SHE doesn't care about him so I thought that was a another interesting kind of second order effective the way that women perceive the current mates level of um potential strain yeah .

exactly yeah what you said that dad bods are indicative of Better dad. I think that's very insightful and important because yeah that is kind of a contrast between long term versus short term. Makes selection people women have a strong orientation toward the long term, very few women have a strong orientation to in short term.

So when you see women express their preferences, they're often talking about in the context of who would I do, who would I like to have a relationship with, perhaps not as often as you know, who would I like to have a one night stand with? And maybe that's why we see dad budd selected. If you post those pictures, i'll say, yeah, this is kind of what I would like. They're thinking my long term. But then you maybe see the more ripped jack guy appear as a character in female fantasies where it's more sexually oriented because within the context of a fantasy is safe, but that doesn't mean that that same men 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.

Are they not called like cinnamon on roles or golden retriever man or something? I'm pretty sure this shows how terminally online am that I know this but i'm absolutely sure that they called cinnamon n roll man or golden retrieve a men um and yeah the dichotomy that you have in female article is like saying, why are they know like, why is grandma porn not a really popular type of pornography for men to consume? Many men love their grandmother, and you like rock, yeah, but like horses for courses here.

And for women, the thing that they fantasies about might not be the thing that they want to get into a relationship with long term. A one of the thing that I thought was fascinating, you've been talking about a lot recently as the lab dio gap. What's that?

So the libido gap, yeah, basically the observation that there's a sex difference in libido, in sexual desire, well, there's a six difference and sexual desire, attitudes and behaviors. And this is probably one of the largest sex differences that we see kind of in behavioral psychology in the 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, uh to to have more open attitudes toward casual sex, seeking more sexual variety, even if within a relationship more sexual variety far as like sexual acts and experiment that sort of the thing. There's researchers that indicate what search is very, very consistently across the years, across countries, indicates you know men cheap more than women do.

That's an example of the libido gp s as well. If you look at research under F M R I. And although 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 paradigm, 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 label and attitudes. The role of testers, of course, is a very, very big one in administration to men or women causes they will be able to shoot up. And of course, men have much more test cost than women, naturally, which IT increases that as well.

What's the implication of this? What's the implication .

of that being a big libidos APP, perhaps, that women, women will engage in a sexual behaviors differently. They will pursue them differently. That men will pursue sex more frequently in a relationship.

Men more likely to pursue sex a outside of the relationship more likely to pursue casual sex. And of course, there's some debate on this from H I. I say debate, but there's not really much debate all on this.

In the scientific literature, very large men analysts recently conducting in the little gap found a difference of about point five. So that's about a medium sized difference. But for psychology, actually quite large. So we know that this is real, but there are people who kind of deny IT to 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 have to indicate, yeah, we know that men have a larger level, that men are more open to sex with multiple people and and all of that yeah.

I mean, if you had women with the libido style of man reading woman's otia would include a different man on each chapter would be tom and jack in Harry, an all the way through.

But it's not that tends to be one protagonist throughout the whole story, right? Where is, I think, what's the average number of partners that men go through in a single sexual fan site, like four something right? Like four or five, I think that they cycle through in one sexual fantasy.

You, for the women, that might be the first time that you ve heard that if you are a woman, but like that man, just like done with that one, like next one, I guess it's like a mental coolidge effect in some way, right? You've got this. There's a very rapid desire for sexual variety, even when it's just in your mind.

Yeah, exactly there. There is that big difference in the desire for sexual rewriting, even in the context of erotica and women's fantasies. You will often see that is 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, know, it's sexy and all of this. But then at the end, they are together in a relationship. And with men is almost the the opposite. When these sexual fantasies occur, and we like casual sex, hale x, move on to the next person or something like that.

Yeah, you looked at a body count and sexual double standards. What did you learn that?

So that's kind of interesting because there's a lot of discourse, of course, on body count, primarily on the internet. One of the things that I was curious about was, uh, do people even ask? You know, a lot of me don't even seem to ask, which would indicate, you know, because some people indicate that is really important for them, right?

A A very low body count to the point that, you know, you have men who say, I would really prefer a virgin wife and at the same time you have men that you know say they don't care also, I believe was about twenty to forty percent of men I would have to double check said, you know, I don't even ask for a body come them today, which one way to interact that is know they don't care that much. Another 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 end 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 is not zero.

There's someone's a virgin that seems to be kind of a red flag. Both women, women, surprisingly on average, you know, some may do prefer emerging, 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 a higher body counts upwards of twenty partners in a woman for a man percent a woman upwards of forty four men. And that's when people to start saying, uh, this is kind of a deal broker, you know and asking people in the survey as well. Have you gone on the date and, uh, asked about body count them and stop dating them.

About ten percent of men, women. And yes, in a committed relationships, even lower. I think IT was like two, 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 that they become a problem. Then people look at that, they say, what's going on there?

exactly. Andrew Thomas told me about this. And if you actually looked at the cove of how IT works, zero.

I think for both men and women, zero is about rated about as attractive as seven seven to ten right? So IT peaks that the peak of this is round about the stuff between two and four um and then zero is the same as like no needy double digits uh so yeah there is this there is a little bit of innovation. Did women were women more of us to male versions than men were to female versions?

I didn't find that um in mind and I and I think in the other one in the paper that was by Steve or Williams Andrew Thomas to referred to, I don't think there was that much of a difference. I don't know there was a significant difference or not, but if there was, that would have been a small one. But there does seem to be kind of you that a version there.

I guess in practice, of course, you know, if if you ask, are women more averse to the virgins? They might be because they remain virgins, right? But that wouldn't because their virgins. That would because of whatever else is leading into that. But 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 devil standards is attitudes towards sexual behaviors that are different for men and women. In 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 imi, key is a bad lock. So that kind of you know a parable or something about promiscuity. The idea, you know that if a man has sex with many, many women, he's a player.

He's really good. If a woman does IT is really, really bad. So there's some discourse on this. More recent researchers is indicated, okay, a lot of these sexual double standards are going away there. They're closing, know some some even have kind of reverse. And particularly when IT comes to things like having sex with a minor or sexual assault, they mostly seem to be gone so it's kind of like, yeah, people do seem to judge these things not as uh, different for men and women at this point.

That's interesting. What what about the sexual assault? Sexual the minor thing, like what's what's .

going an example of that is when a teacher who is a woman has sex with a male students, when a teachers who who is a man has sex with a female student. Are these view differently? IT seems to be, you know, if you look at kind of discourse on IT that they are kind of view differently, right?

That men, women, you know if it's if it's uh, women that having sex with a minor male students perhaps is judged less strongly. Although some of the same research on that has indicated actually that's not the case that people seem to view this just as bad. But perhaps in the past that was more the case that, you know, if IT was a minor mall.

they would do IT less negatively. interesting. What about the guys who demand virgins? Well, like, who are these people?

sure. So i've been related to body counting. That case, you do have people literally very strong preference for virginity. If you ask when you know how many past sexual partners would you prefer in the part we have a kind of that that goldie's zone sweet spot.

It's like three or something like that, someone who's not entirely, but you do have people to 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 less sexually.

They tend to have lower levels of education, lower level of income. So that seems to be the case that you know and it's not entirely an an unreasonable desire or expectation because of know if you're man who's eighteen years old, half of the female population is going to be a virgin. If you're a virgin, you know, you might want your first experience to be with someone else who is at that age.

Those men, you know, they don't make a lot of money. But what happens also, as you have individuals who persist in that desire for virginity, uh, into an older age, at age thirty or something and second thirty year old men, and you're looking for a virgin that's like, you know, like two or three percent of the male and female population at that age. Women who are eighteen years old and virgins typically do not want to date someone who thirty, thirty five or something like that.

And so what becomes increasingly unreasonable with a edit? Men persist in virginity until mid thorium and they say, I still like a virgin. They're onna have to come terms with like that the ds them yeah.

it's an interesting woman I do, especially for the Young men like the the important qualifier here is especially if you're a guide that is a virgin is something it's you're going to feel in massu later by your partners the despite in sexy experience, right you'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 kind of related to that. So related to sexual double standards.

We know, for example, that man men in to view other men with more sexual partners as higher and status. And this seems to be that is more male male signal than IT is desirable to women. So women actually rate men that are very promiscuous with less desirable, a little bit more negatives.

But for minutes, it's pretty to let me you a relationship like the more sexual part you have, the more of the menu are in the sense, right? That filter is into all of our cultural narratives and scripts. So it's often you know something that men are encouraged to believe about themselves, that if they are less sexually successful, uh, they're less desirable, they are less attractive. But that often that's more messaging that tends to come from other men than women. I think.

did you see jeremy boring a tweet early on today about what the red pill is doing to marriage? No, no. So jeremy boring sea of the daily wire is being featured on a lot of their productions and stuff.

He said, what what the red pillow is doing to marriage basically sort of degrading marriage, saying that is a bad deal for man at such a you've loved to a good chunk of this, right? What's happening with marriage and divorce? Like what are the real stats that people are missing here?

sure. So yeah, as far as the red pill goes, as you know, promote a lot of very cynical narratives, particularly in the context of marriages and you know not a homogeneous uh, ideology you have believed so whatever, but you do see a lot of discourse on divorce that opting to says, you know fifteen sixty percent of people get divorce is mostly initiated by women, okay, but there are individual differences in who gets divorced, ed, and who doesn't.

You know, for every married man across the board. And I think this is something is wrong. The risk of woman horse is not fifty percent.

That's going to be determined a great deal by the individual characteristics within that relationship. Know what kind of things contribute to the orse. Infidelity is a big one.

Uh, alcohol buse is a big one. Economic problems. So just by avoiding, you know, simple things that you know gonna cause IT, the worse flat out .

actually don't drink.

don't get broke exactly yeah just these very basic things is going to drop the divorce rate way down. You know, if you look across demographic groups, individuals with a higher level of education, men and women, both much less likely to be single, much less likely to get divorced, so already being within these certain demography groups drops IT way down.

But you do kind of have that narrative out there in the red pilling all of death that, you know, marriage is a bad deal for man. And they hear many anecdotes about people who get divorced, ed, and they lose all of their things, or whatever. Yeah.

yeah, jermy boring tweet. The fact that women initiate eighty percent of divorce is evidence that some manifestations of evil, a more common in women, something society and frustrating the Christian society, has been trying to obscures since we turned over all of our moral authority to women in the twenty years century.

That seems like a very, very odd like claim to make that these manifestations of evil, that's not for me to say that like women, uh, initiating divorce, that does some like perverse incentives that could be going on that there's all kind of reasons why I think that happen. Many of them are probably pretty like unspeaking able, but evidence that some manifestations of evil are more common. Women, I don't know why, why women, why do women initiate more devices? And what are the reasons that they give for that?

sure. So yeah, this what to cus on that that's kind of the narrative business that women initiate more divorces. And that kind of puts the honest on women like, oh, if you initiate the divorce is your fault.

But there is a lot of different reasons, actually, the reasons why women initiate the horses. Very complex topic, so kind of go through some of these. But because someone initiated 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 divorce, I cheated at a rate about twice that of women. Uh, they're much more likely to be physically abusive or some recent research has called that in the question as well, that perhaps domestic violence within relationships is actually pretty similar for man and women. A men are more likely simply to stay in relationships when the relationship is bad.

And if they do kind of want out, they will just simply less likely to ask for the divorce. We know over time, over long periods of time, relationship satisfaction for women IT declined faster as well. So there's a lot of reasons why women initiate divorce, 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 m to be the case when looking at uh aleman's child's support in all of these things. It's usually the case that women interstate of poverty and stay below the poverty line for a few years following divorce and that maintained to uh remain more financially successful following their divorce as well.

And there's very high agreement in divorce couples as well. And why the divorce happened, both couples tend to indicate that, you know, we grew apart is simply one of the large reasons most divorces as well. They look at like who initiated.

They often ask whose idea was this or who brought IT up first? But if you asked, like, did you both want the divorce? You see really high agreement there that both of them like, yeah, the relationship was over.

So that's also something to consider. IT seems to be rarely the case. That is simply a unilateral thing.

You know, the relationship at that point has deteriorated. Both people know IT SHE might ask for IT first, and that might emerging. The statistics is the woman initiating the divorce. But it's really, really the case that the man is just like chilling and fix everything is perfect and know everything is going well and then he says, I wanted the vorce and he just blind sided I know I don't know why that happened and then SHE takes everything that very, very rare that that happens .

yeah adam lane smith, psychotherapy, psychotherapy now relationship coach. You SAT through thousands of couples across his career, and he's adamant about this, that the couple comes in and sits down, and something we catastrophic is about to happen. And to the guy, he hasn't IT either willful ignorance or or just straight blindness to many, many, many signs for years and years and years from his partner.

And you know, Adams is, you know, he's fucking roman for an awful lot of this. I don't think that he's got any reason to simp for women's to have no fault divorce or whatever. I think that he's been truth when he just says luck, 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 like, does no more. There are no more hints that I can drop. We need to go to counseling and then they sit down in counseling. And this woman kind of unloads all of this stuff and the guy looks across and can't believe what is coming out of his partners mouth. And yeah, I think it's adam.

Adam seemed to think that the a lot of the time couple's counselling is done by a couple as an almost an excuse by the woman, so that he doesn't feel too guilty like shit already made her mind. And it's already so far gone. But SHE needs to finally be able to actually to get all of this stuff of just so you know, you could maybe say that this is a communication problem.

May maybe it's a failure across sex, mind reading between the sexes, that women are communicating, that h discontent and their issues in ways that may not picking up on that may not being sufficiently perceptive like those would be some wise. But we understand that women initiate filed 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 I think if I think there's A A situation where men will simply stay in a bad relationship almost to the end, they just mean are much less likely to to kind of edit when all the riding is on the wall. There are very explicit things that cause divorce, you know as as well drug abuse more common and then uh, infidelity more common in men.

And just looking at those two things that already closed to give out to who initiates. But didn't we have other things as well, like declining marital satisfaction, which does decline faster? And women, I think women are more willing to move on in that since 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 OK than men in many ways as far is leaving a relationship and as far is not being in a relationship they don't want, which can go back to, you know, all of the evolutionary reasons, women being more selected and that sort of a thing. Women seem to be less pressure to remain in a relationship when they're genuinely unhappy with IT, more ready to move on.

Is that because necessarily women would have had a surplus of potential suitors? So for men, IT makes sense for them to remain steadfast and robust even in the city relationship, because the relationship may not be that good, but at least it's a relationship. You know, most of my male friends that they haven't got anybody.

Well, I don't know. I don't know about that for sure because sometimes we see those bottle next in the White chrome room, which indicates, okay, they're actually many more women than to men. So it's almost like if they left the man with the people to find other one.

I don't know for sure about that, but something that seems to be very consistent across humans as we have this, the dominant mating patterns, basically serial monogamy, that people, you know, unlike the prai villa or some other animal, we don't tend to make their life, or with our first sexual partner and stay with them forever. People have with some girlfriends, they break up. They get married.

They might stay, marry ten to fifteen years. They get divorce. They marry someone else. So people have an orientation for an organize that's much stronger than many of the other apes, right? And we form really long relationships compared to most mammals, but they don't seem to be life long relationships.

And that seemed corresponds to kind of the gestational age, I guess, s or or the developmental age of children that there is a period of time when people might need to stay together to ensure the survival of offspring. IT could be also the case as well that you know, not having lifelong bonding, uh, can increase genetic fitness from genetic diversity. So one you know has a long term relationship.

Fifteen years they have some offspring. They get to the end of that time period they divorce. They might still have some time to have new offspring with a new mate. So we still have this long term mate formation, but kinda diversity of offspring. In that case.

how do you think we should um baLance the scales that if what you says right now, I I believe that you are right as well. I don't think that Christopher in sex at dawn is is perfectly accurate sea real monogamy seems to be what makes sense ancel monogamist. I think it's sometimes referred to us, but we've created a cultural world. Well, that is, let you know, jermy boring is is a probably a pretty good example of what the last five hundred years of of marital advice has been. You're supposed to stay together through thick, thin, in sickness and in health till that that to his part um we have constructed a values and even outside of you know people that are a super Christian that you know break up and divorced stuff, it's not something is supposed to do made you a commitment to the partner and you go to stick together forever. Do you have think about this, a cultural mismatch to our sort of evolutionary pretty position?

Yeah, definitely. Certainly we have, you know, the last two thousand years of rules that say you are married 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 on love, for example, there is different kind of stages of love, or different components of love. One is called passionate or romantic love. And that seems to be the feeling neurobiological that people experience when they take their in love.

And that usually doesn't persist four decades and decades in some people. That does, but I usually doesn't. And that tends to waive after about three to five years, somewhere in that area.

And that kind of consistent with, you know, that developmental sectory. You know, people fall in love. They have kids. The kids is a little bit old enough. Now past that point, people are gonna little bit more willing to move on.

But of course, there's committed love and all of these other faces of love where people still maintain really strong bonds almost as a friendship in a relationship. But then that comes to a point, you know, fifteen years down the line, people might think, okay, i'm with a partner. I'm very committed to them.

We're like best print. Uh, we have a lot going there. But at the same time, you know that passionate love is missing. They want something else in addition to that. And so that 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 in and restart the process? So of speaking, there's not a good solution or good to answer there.

As far like prescriptive, what should people do and and that, of course, where all of these beliefs, like religion and things come in to 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, break ups are still often really, really hard for them. So IT makes a lot of sense that you know, norms would emergence, say, like just stay together forever IT avoid a lot of the problems, even know if the relationship is not ideal. And that since.

yeah, it's interesting on this, I don't know, I wonder what a different kind of religion would have been that said, marriage is supposed to stay together for ten years. And then at that point is some weird ceremony where you you have to prove that you still care about each other enough, and both partner has to do IT independently in some weird row, shock, lie, detect the test, and then you come back together.

And if IT works, you do, I don't know, but yeah, when you fold on top contraceptive technologies and liberated sexual norms and the sex positive society and stuff like that. IT really doesn't surprise me that we're seeing divorced rates increasing. You know does an awful lot of embedded uh genetic predisposition in there to encourage us to okay, like i'm they would done was done here.

Now know one of my favorite ones is um couples that have stayed together for quite a while before having children can often find themselves randomly falling out of love with each other and there's an evolutionary explanation for this which is almost never would you and the partner have stayed together for a long period of time without trying to have children. The only reason that that would have been the case if one of you had a fatlings 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 fifty percent 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 three child section of any relationship.

Uh, you know, couples that get together, university, the twenty, twenty one, twenty two. And I think yeah start having kids. One of thirty. 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. Uh, people 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 army gets the girl. What you mean when you say the omi gets the ago?

sure. So I did this with some thing. Yes, descriptions of different individuals. This was related to kind of, uh, the ambivalent sexism inventory, which has constructive hospital sexism and the evolving sexism.

And I created him, yes, a man who is basically like a hostile sexist, which is often kind of negative sexist attitudes, certain women. And then but that sexism is another fast of that. And this is it's cause sexist by the individual who created this in story.

But I think there's a reason to question if these are sexy behaviors. They seem to be more traditional. Attitudes to red women, like women should be first on the lifeboat, that sort of the 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, that is pretty closely related. But you see that min high and hostile sexism, they get ready.

Pretty low man high in banana sexism tend to get rated a little bit higher. And then I have these other thing. One was like a manos here, beliefs, black pill kind of beliefs rated really, really low by women, kind of related the hostile sexism there.

And they are enormous. Yet a guy who just thought, you know, things are fine. I don't get into this, you know, uh, gender war ideology or what if the case may be and that kind of rated the highest.

And so that seem you and there was another that was an egalitarian or feminist man kind of rated medium. So there's, of course, a lot of discourse on that. What kind of men do women like 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 the man.

They don't want a man at the same time who is highly mission ist, or kind of the manos here ideology. They want a guy in a Normal guy, basically, who has kind of Normal status. Al, 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?

A little bit, but not much. I asked women for feminist and identification or not. And the women who did identify the feminist, they did rate the egalitarian being at a little bit higher.

But mostly you still see the same pattern that the nomi is still the most attractive. But never lets sexist man still get rated higher than the hospital. Sexist man, that sort of the thing.

What was second was benevolent sexist man, second.

I believe the benefits exist. Man was second. And and I I think for the feminist condition, the benevolent, sexy man was second. And I think for the non feminist condition, there was a man who kind of a traditional masculine india, and I think that was a second. But across all of them, yeah kind of the nori guy 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, um somebody y's body is not just the body IT is a representation of many other things about them, the world view and the way that they show the personality know this, all stuff. The things that you believe about men and women is also an implication of how much time is this guy going to spend on twitter? How much time is this guy going to spend arguing with people on redit? How often I going to have to sit at dinner and hear him hop on about some weird each video that he's just watched or whatever you know there's an implication downstream from a lot of this.

Yeah, exactly. People see that. And they I think when people see extreme beliefs and ideology, they wonder, you know, how stable is this person want to be? And all of that, if someone sees someone who's kind of Normal, they relate to them more. Because, you know, most people are the extreme red pillars or extreme feminist, something like that. Most people do kind of share a mix of attitudes, and you know, they might lean a little bit left, a little bit right, but for the most part, know they are not typically focused on this ginger war ideology if they think like, yeah, especially if there comes the hostility, attitudes towards opposite sex. No hostile sex is a the s be then it's almost like, you know, is my partner going to hate me .

know I into a relationship with a racist as a black person yeah.

yeah. It's pretty much like that. These these are beliefs that do not help people in in dating, 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.

Six, did you see those tiktok around about a month for a couple months ago of a liberal women lamenting the fact that they couldn't find any traditional men that would hold the door open for the moon and consider paying on the first date, because all of the liberal men that they were trying to date with, basically what they described was a like cookie cut. A conservative man is what they wanted yeah exactly.

And and I think that's closely related to that what's called the evolved sexism in the little litter and and I I would dispute myself personally, this is not something I would call sexy, but that's what they call IT.

And it's kind of know there's been research of indicates women preferred men who score they would hire in benevolent sexism and these are kind of like traditional conservative attitudes and believes that 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 uh, the conscious preferences, they might think, you know, I want the man who is uh, more egalitarian. But when IT comes down to a lot of behaviors, they still expect behaviors that are very concerned with traditional gender roles. But the man paying for the bill, the man holds the door, he picks up her house and so on, in and eating physically the same, you know, as as far as like a man who is behaviorally dominant, who's physically masculine .

in all of that, yeah, it's a they didn't reveal preferences kind of going to the front yet again. What's that talib quote? He says something like um around my family or in the home i'm a socialist in my neighbor d i'm a communist at my state level i'm liberati and the national level I O contain something like that.

He kind of feels a little bit like that that you've got um what a woman might want men at large to be like. You know, I would prefer to not have hostile sexism from this entire fifty percent of the population sent toward me in my girlfriends. I would prefer that we had a more galilean world, the sufferings in the chAllenges that women are understood in the ba.

But when IT finally comes down to IT the meeting and potato es brast 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 making back to bike in the ass a little bit further. Downhole d korea, alex Cooper, from cold her daddy. I was, you know, spent we made a career extolling the virtues of casual sex.

You treat him like you don't like him. How to have sex and not catch fields like relationships are kind of useless and pointless. But the last three years, IT turns out that she's been having this war win romance with the guy of her dreams.

And then SHE released a, maybe is a podcast for a post talking about how beautiful the proposal wars in a rose garden. And he got down on one knee. And IT was exactly as sheet envisioned. You go, this wasn't the story that you promised your audience. This wasn't the life that you said that all of the people following you, the millions and millions and millions of women they 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, uh, technological, social media rage because you can show is 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 is totally point.

Listen, you extol the virtues of your rose garden proposal IT just the distant, like, just bleeds out of all of these conversations. And yeah, I think state and reveal preferences. What is that? 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, this research from a feminist perspective that talks about the man should do more chores in the house in the six way Better in 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. They don't want the man in the relationship to be the woman. They do kinds seem to want those roles.

To some extent, even if politically, those uh, stated preferences are for highly egalitarian h organization. And there's probably some baLance you know where they don't want to people embarked with the most restrictive kind of gender roles in a sense. But at the same time, you know a man who's more dominant, who's gonna charge onna lead, going to drive the car and pick the restaurant, you know, and that sort of the .

thing yeah which just, you know, there are certain elements are they associate IT typically with masculine ity? Yes, but you being decisive, standing well under pressure like IT is, where do you want to go for dinner tonight? I'll just we go will choose yeah I think it's is funny that the memes and the cliche is kind of often hold some of the greatest truth in them.

There was this Katherine walter study on testing assumptions about human mating psychology, deal breakers and make preferences. Fifty thousand participants from fifty six countries, both men and women, prefer short term partners who are kind, healthy, attractive. Women had higher ideal preferences for short term mates, then ended. And most participants, fifty nine, eighty percent, preferred the same type of ideal mate for short term and long term relationships. What's the implication of that?

Yeah, brilliant. And I think this is that study is very consistent with pretty much all of the past research and evolutionary psychology on short and long term mate preferences. Somehow, IT has gotten into the popular discourse that, you know, an entirely different kind of person is who is desired for short and long term, but really, and seems to be like, no, the same traits are desired in short and long term.

But some might be waited a little bit differently in small ways on average. So you know a man who's funny and charismatic, long term, short term, both perfect. A man who physical attractive, yet he's also desirable both.

There's a long term and shorter mate. But in short term in context, you know physical attractive this that 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 yeah, I don't know. They do um this metam of having wildly different mating preferences for both dub being said, we said IT earlier on.

You know the person that gonna fantasize about is not necessarily the person need to but even with that literal another filter, as you said, that hyper masculine guy might be great to think about when you're behind the safety of a page, right? But if you have this very overbearing, physically sort of dominant guy, there's an offer a lot of probably associated fear that comes with that. In some regards that can be sexy, but another regards, this is going to be terrifying. And I think of post me too well I wa I wonder what um sort of times up and 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 inducing this concern about to Manda overly dominant and IT really won't surprise me if the end result was we should opt for more feminized the men even if IT was only a little bit IT would IT would be very surprising if I was the other .

way yeah exactly. You can see kind of that shift culturally perhaps towards men who are less dominant or less threatening and and there's a lot of assumptions about that kind of related to the dead box thing I posted in the image and that was kind of like, yeah the more muscular man is is going to be more someone said, you know, he looks like he might be a massage ous so you see a who's simply because he's jack, they think he's gonna a mass genus so you already have kind of that that association there. So what does that mean that like the skinning weakling is, is going to be a few minister, 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 gonna a pick the skinny guy. But at the end of the day, you know, this probably not a too large of an association between attitudes in that sense.

Jim brows have a branding problem. Man, they need to go through an advertising agency to fix this ship.

Yeah, yeah. And there is a recent study was pretty interesting on that. They found, okay, men who are more muscular perceived as being more conservative on average.

And I think there's also some research in the past that indicates that as well that with a higher grip strength, for example, also tend to be a little bit more right leaning and they tend to store a little bit higher in social dominance orientation. So sometimes these perceptions of the people form, they can kind of reflect accuracy. And its related to something in psychology that that they don't like to talk about very much. It's called stereotype accuracy because we always say don't judge people based on stereotypes, but the same time some stereotypes reform them because we see frequencies based rates .

in the pulag recognition .

yeah pattern recognition.

exactly the six main red flags gross clinic addicted promiscuity as apathetic and unmotivated perhaps unsurprising to have those and know these sort of broad buckets seem to be quite well replicated, like within each of them, sub genres of promise, cute and apathy and what not like. The most interesting thing that I learned from that study was women find promise cute even less attractive than men in short term relationships.

Yeah and that I think of think that a lot of them get wrong and you can tell them this and show them, uh, pass papers that found this that women do not desire me with a very high uh, sexual history in a sense and you know there's good reasons for that even in the short term made context. You know, why are women more averse to short term made?

One reason we know women have higher discussed sensitivity than men do is a sex difference, discuss sensitivity, a fear or discussed, uh, aversion to pathogens. We know that women can contract S T V or st s more easily than men can, and that sort of a thing. So every sexual partner a woman has is a risk, a of exposure to disease in that since.

So I highly promised you as man, okay. At the same time, every sexual encounter a woman has, even if a short term, also represents a risk of, uh, 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 taping sex with a lot of people and I get pregnant, how willing are they to invest in me and and I don't think that's explicit cocoa nian that women have that would be something under the surface in the sense, you know from the evolutionary perspective.

But yeah, there's a lot of signals you know and and I think is well aside, you know we we kind of draw this line short and long term meeting, but I don't think it's entirely clear that people always perceive of their short term meeting is simply under, you know strictly casual sex. A lot of short term meeting, especially in an actual behavior, is kind of the jump off points to long term meeting. You know, you have a one night stand.

Is that because you intended to have a one night stand, or because you like to the guy and he wanted to continue dating and then he ghost ge, you know, or whatever the case, maybe so or or the same with like situations, ships and all of that. People start in and saying, well, we're gonna sex once and well, but what are we down the line? Six months you find both people left all in love and out their own relationship. So it's not always the case that there's a clear line between long and short term and actual behavior.

Yeah so just to reiterate, those six main red flags grow clingy, addicted, promiscuous, pathetic and unmotivated. And before I read the results, I tried to think what would be the highest? What would be the the biggest red flag for men and for women? And I thought for women, that would be gross, largely because of the discuss sensitivity.

But then the highest rated one was cleaning. Ss, that that's the biggest red flag for women. Which why do you think that's the case? What does that say about women? And why the fuck is no one talking about this on the internet?

I'm not entirely sure why cleaning ss would be the highest one, but I think something in kind of the mating psychology of women is that they do want a man who they can depend upon and not someone that they have to be a mommy to, in a sense, you know.

So if it's the sense that, you know, this is someone who's not independent, who is not emotionally stable or strong that you can lean upon, that could be a big red flag to women in that since cleaning this could also represent A A threat, kind of like a stalker as well, someone who's very cleanly and all of that like, you know, could be behave in a way that emotionally volatile and perhaps hurt me. But i'm not entirely sure these are just kind of guesses. Come to my mind.

I read models by mark manson, which is probably ten years old now, so most people will know a lot, giving a fuck really great book. But he actually wrote I think we all a kind of like ethical pick up to three but to all the back end of the nail zero two thousand and thirteen fourteen um and he identifies that this study wasn't out maybe he read some stuff but IT seems to just be like field tested advice. And he he called IT something different.

He called IT neediness not cleaning ss, but I think that the sentiment is the same. And he just drawls up. The one lesson that everybody that reads model takes away is that neediness is the number one, turn off a women and for guys compete unai.

One of the are few. The things that reflected on after reading that over being overly able as a man is a signal of low status. That, if you can, is why the, you know, the simple, never get the goal as a mean, right? The simple simply for women is a ineffective mating strategy. Because what IT suggests, first of, is that you have no other options. If you did, if you were spending eight hours a day messaging me, I know that you're not spending eight hours a day message some other girl as well unless you've got a really good A I bot assisting you.

Uh uh secondly, IT suggest a low bar, a low um 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 slip stream this exact same low level of self esteem from you so your left of dedication to me is going to be less and then find me, I guess, this just some bruford playground logic that I want the thing that other people want. right? I don't necessary want IT when I can play with IT and whatever it's available to be played with me.

I want the thing that's a little bit more sort of mysterious and aloof and it's a little bit more difficult to get. So that's my three pronged bro science theory about cleaning. Ss.

yeah, I think so. And these are kind of deal bickers or red flags in early relationship formation as well, so that considering 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 inconsequent signal like why is this person, uh, already so attached doing? We've all live in 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 kind of like, oh, that know that might actually be more desirable.

that might like commitment than me.

Women would seem to really want commitment and investment and attention in time. But somehow at the beginning of a relationship that can signal all kind of, uh, is the IT can be the opposite of what is attractive and then later on down the line, that can be kind of more appropriate than this.

Yeah, what about you'd talking about marriage and some of the stuff that's going on? A alpaca? O is he who's the guy some hollywood celebrity is just go to to another massive age gap relationship? I can't remember who one of those like kind of old legend actors. What do you think is the reason for age gap to booze?

So one idea that I had was into sexual 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 our 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, uh, this is someone being pulled from my mating pull, in a sense, by someone outside of that range. If that were the case, we might see age differences between men and women in age gap. H 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 can say here, people say, know, it's Young women that disagree more because, you know, old people are gross and whatever the case may be. But IT doesn't seem there's an age a 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 congress with that self rest perspective or with into sexual competition.

But rather than in men, IT would be in women in that case. Because if Young men see, you know, age gaps is calling 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 gap are inappropriate.

why? Well, because they're stealing the woman from you basically, in a sense, you know and and i've even heard people argue that explicit. They said, you know, serial monogenic and age gaps are stealing the Young women, and that's why Young men are, are, are single or something like that.

So that could be one thing. But I don't think that explains all of the taboo. I think a lot of IT is kind of cultural.

You have kind of a narrative of power in baLances. But at the same time, you know, I looked at hierarchical relationships where there might be a power warn baLance. You know someone, a boss and employee that doesn't seem to have as much even effect is age gaps either.

So you know, that kind of one explanation you often see from feminist, this idea that, you know, there's a big power and baLance in age gaps there probably often isn't. And people don't seem to disapprove. As much power and baLances win, the age is close.

So IT seems to be the case that there is this taboo. It's not entirely explained. And I think IT might just come down to kind of kind of ik in a sense for some people.

And and that's kind of you know a feeling that people have is just kind of A A visual revolution. 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 Albertino. You know, a woman who's twenty. She's alpaca ino look at him. That's gross and that's all IT comes down to. A lot of taboos can simply emerge from that visual feeling like yak.

And then the rationalizations commit is because of lack of concerns or a power in baLance. So somebody that's being manipulative with their well for their status or whatever IT might be .

exactly are people that's what happens a lot of 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 visually, you know they they think you growth.

And yeah, then they come up with rationalizations to explain why IT gross. Maybe these are the real reasons, you know, but that's what they felt in the moments 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, this is a, you know, a lot of people who had the age of relationship. A lot of women, true, and they said, you know, they learn from their bad experiences.

And in fact, were the case, you would expect people that had age gap relationships to disapprove, but IT was the opposite. So IT doesn't even seem to be the case that they're driven by like bad experiences. Those people actually seem to support them. More interesting .

what you said about how, uh, women dating older creates a death of potential female partners for Younger men because the Younger women are captured by slightly older man IT does not really a way to pistole this wisdom on a Younger men. But like one day in a couple of years time you will be those old men IT seems I totally get IT like, you know if if you're a guy whose twenty two and all of the girls are getting flown out to god elsewhere by thirty eight year olds, like, yeah that's that's going to suck but ultimately it's just like a like a diluted gerontocracy, right?

Yeah exactly. And that's kind of related. You know we have like the pew statistics that say, you know like sixty percent of men or single between twenty and thirty, and you know thirty percent of women are single.

Why is that? Are they sharing the men? What's going on? A lot of that gap can actually be explained simply by women dating outside that age range on average.

So for the and it's much more pronounced among you know eighteen to twenty five than IT is even among twenty five to thirty. So IT seems to be the case. That is a real effect.

If your man whose like eighteen to twenty three or something like that know a lot of those women that you could otherwise day, they're gna be dating up. You're eighteen now. So you're probably not going to take down, which is what the older men are doing. So you do can see IT baLance out down the line, but that does kind of create a single 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 worth. They think you know the women are sharing like the same chat who's in the class is the same age, but a lot of that yeah is just women dating up a little bit and doesn't you know the average gap is not huge as 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 twenty percent of women who are between eighteen and thirty who are dating men older so that yeah already post a big, big chunk of .

women out yeah I I love the less conspiratorial explanations for this stuff. That's one of the reasons that I really like your workman like for all that we both get accused of being e blue pelt, cook or or mastodon is big gets depending on who IT is that looking at what we ve written or said, you know, it's like it's just a coming pretty well baLanced, nice, gentle locket.

What is the day to 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, do you think? IT is, I guess you is. It's a very peaceful way to look at what is quite a chaotic world. I .

think yeah, exactly. It's 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, Z. There is always so many different things going on. And if people can calm down a little bit, look at the big picture and you know be a little bit stock about IT, if if they're in a difficile situation, is not always, you know, roses, but is 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 gonna some descriptive data this is looking at, uh, because this seems to be a topic that actually people might be afraid ID to explore in the research a little bit because they're afraid that is kind of stigmatizing. But at the same time, people do seem to have no overwhelming negative attitudes about this.

And and as far as impacts of only fans on future, uh, relationship prospects, will someone date in only fans worker? Will this hurt their future or job offerings? And also related to that, what kind of political attitude belief might predict support for that kind of work or the opposite of support for that can work very?

So you are delving deep into the archives of only fans is what i'm hearing yeah.

that's we're looking attitudes about IT.

I can't believe you finally managed to get your recreation on your work to come together appropriately. Alex, these episodes do I look at the clock and it's been an hour and forty minutes and IT feels like it's been five. I really appreciate the time I get to spend with you. Ah what should people go? They won't keep up to date with all of the things you're doing.

sure. So website date psychology that come on twitter, a date psych and youtube. Alex, that data. Yc.

thank you, man.

Catch you next time. Thank you.