Another great show! Just a thought on the surrogate sex partners (for incels). I've had this discussion with a few men who haven't had sex in years. There is the option of paying for it but it's not necessarily the PP in VV that we're after. It's someone who wants your PP in their VV. That's where the problem lies.
Truth - there's a huge difference between millionaire athletes/entertainers/business moguls who CHOOSE to pay for sex versus regular guys who HAVE to pay for sex. Being in the latter category has to be the one of the most demoralizing positions imaginable.
I suppose I'm in an unusual position, but I would literally rather buy a girl a cupcake or give her a compliment and receive a smile in return than touch her.
Freshly ensingled mellenial male thrust into the app-dating world. AMA.
It was very interesting to hear more about the female side of the dating app story, it just feels so different to me. What's really interesting to me is I feel like my "value" on dating apps has improved dramatically between the last time I was single and now, giving me an entirely different experience.
The last time getting matches was really difficult. This time I've actually been able to match with good consistency. I'm curious if I've aged up into a bracket where there's just fewer "good" choices, or if I've genuinely increased my attractiveness.
Haha. On further review this makes me sound like I think I'm a sad-sack. I've been assured by all my not-single lady friends that I'm a verified "catch" (good job, own my home in an expensive city, apparently I listen well, etc, etc, humble).
A while ago Sarah asked for our best honest dating advice on twitter and my advice for men was that if the dating market isn't working for you, stop focusing on it and work on your career. Young men don't appreciate how nice it is to have the capacity to increase your 'Sexual Market Value' over time with work whereas women have to constantly struggle to slow its decline.
I would flip that around and say that twenty-something women don't appreciate how much dating market value they have, largely without having to work for it, until they start losing it.
That is to say, the younger women just can't comprehend what it would be like to be ignored, but the vast majority of men are entirely familiar with what it's like to be treated like dirt, even if they grow out of it. I certainly agree the differing age curves have serious consequences.
I disagree strongly with this whole way of thinking. “Sexual Market Value” is a ridiculous concept, a silly misapplication of economic thinking. Dating is not a market. There’s no price mechanism, no buying and selling. The idea of “sexual market value”, that attractiveness can be quantified and compared across people on some linear scale, is preposterous. What’s more, it’s harmful. It encourages people to see themselves as objects to be improved rather than people looking to connect. Dating apps do encourage this way of thinking by reifying people and intermediating human connection through objectified profiles, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy into it, even if you use them. My dating advice is to stop obsessing over the “sexual market value” of yourself and others and instead stay open to the possibility of falling in love.
I am not obsessed with this as I rarely even consider it in my personal life, but it seems like a generally valid approach to analyzing the culture at large and it was long before dating apps. For example, the scandal a few years back where the Harvard soccer team got in trouble for keeping a scoreboard rating women soccer players on a 1-10 scale (a practice I’ve seen duplicated elsewhere). If you want to say that human interaction adds many more complexities than that, I agree with you, but I think there exists in some abstract sense a rating scale that all humans use to judge each other.
And in any case, I was talking about behaviors that I think result from that rating scale, behaviors the frequency and significance and causes of which you may agree or disagree with me with as a empirical questions.
The advice wasn’t for you personally, it was more in response to Pongo’s comment about best honest dating advice. Maybe you don’t consider this stuff in your personal life, but I think a lot of people do and the effect is unfortunate.
A few college kids keeping a misogynistic scoreboard doesn’t mean anything, except that they also buy into this way of thinking.
The idea that “there exists in some abstract sense a rating scale that all humans use to judge each other” is exactly what I’m criticizing. I see no reason to believe that. Sure, people are concerned with relative status, etc. but not in a formalized way, and trying to formalize it is unhelpful and pseudoscientific. It’s also pretty irrelevant to dating success.
I see nothing misogynistic about such a rating scale (and certainly women do the same thing). If your point is that all the research where people rate faces on attractiveness is not a complete understanding of attraction, I would agree that there are pheromones and quirks that people have and all sorts of factors that affect actual relationship behavior. It’s definitely more complicated than a 1-10 scale.
Conversely, the underlying truth is that everyone is making yes or no behavioral decisions all the time, and their brain is a computer which does calculations, and there must be some input and some computation that results in the behavioral output that we see. Romance is not an exception to physical reality.
I also don’t think it’s unfortunate. As with all human behavior it just is. The big bang happened, and then a bunch of molecules collided off of each other, and then we happened. What alternative to judging people on scales do you even envision?
When I was a very active online dater (for two years from 30-32) I didn't have any issue going out with lots of guys. Of course it sucked and was a slog but I met my husband on OKCupid on the second day of 2014 and turned off my profile a week later. My advice to EVERYONE is to not put all your eggs in one basket but also be willing to shut it down for someone who seems worth it.
So I may have undersold some of the difference between this experience and previous. The apps tell you how many are in your "liked" que so you'll pay to see them. Previously I would have like 10 or 20, with an addition of maybe 5 to 10 a day before. This time I had it active for about a day and a half and had 350+, which to me is an absurd number.
During my last go-round I had a woman as a room mate and we compared. She constantly had over a thousand. I was so overwhelmed at the 350 number I ultimately paused the app after I had like 20 matches that seemed interesting because I didn't want to keep thinking about what could come next or what might be better. Essentially I wanted to close off the opportunity cost of actually getting to know the matches I had made.
And I know the difference. 2 years ago I had all the same financial, educational and professional metrics. But I lost 25 lbs and went from merely a generic "Handsom" to even I (genuinely oblivious) notice that I get checked out now. It just bumms me out that I'm not fundamentally different, yet substantially more marketable.
Here's what I did when I was online so as not to get overwhelmed: I paid for my profile to be private and did all the vetting myself. I would like or send a brief message to men who met my criteria and those were the only ones who could see my profile. It was still an icky experience, but less stressful than having to ignore a bunch of messages from people who were in no way a potential match.
And here's the rub. What "met your criteria?" because all the metrics on this say if your not an 8 or 9 you effectively don't exist on dating apps as a male. That's been my experience.
I went from successful, tall (6'3"), financially set, with an (I hope) decent set of personality characteristics that would make me attractive. But I was slightly over weight. Not a lot. But enough to make me a good 7.
Now I'm all the previous things, and also pretty athletic (5k time is 24:30, 10k is 50ish plus an attention to upper body and core stenght). That's the difference that switched me from invisible to visible. I get it. You have to sift through thousands of messages and why not be choosey. So now that I'm the chosen, I fucking love this system and even though I'm ultimately a serial monogmist, the attention is like crack.
But I did not like it much before. And you're example is probably why.
Well, I think everyone has their own criteria. For me I was looking for someone near my own age, also divorced, preferably with children, who didn't live too far from me, who was also looking for something serious. That's demographics. Second, I was looking for someone who is at least somewhere in the ballpark of me on intelligence and education, and who sounded somewhat compatible on values, interests, etc. Physical appearance was the last thing I looked at after all other things lined up. That has always been relatively unimportant to me - my ex is 5'7 and we were married for 15 years.
This would explain why you found Hinge so unhelpful. I would say that your second set of points is not something that can really be answered effectively in a profile. You can proxy intelligence on career/education slightly, but only by talking to them can you get meaningful answers about those things.
What app/service was this? I don't even know which ones asks about if you've been divorced before, and I'm certainly not volunteering that information.
We should be like Canada who pays for a year long maternity leave. I have a lot of Canadian cousins who are really able to be there for their kids in a way that my American relatives haven’t in their first year. Like I think a lot of stuff around marrying early and having kids early is avoided to some extent because we provides a little support for families and that’s a thing we need to change.
Maternity leave is a good idea and every country should have it, but it's not at all clear that it actually increases fertility rates or leads to people having children younger.
I would be on board if that was funded only by people who have children. I have no children and plan not to. More money out of my pocket to benefit others. Similar to funding student loans when I never went to college. And if you dump that load on the employer, he/she is less likely to hire women knowing they may lose a worker for a year but be forced to pay the salary.
Sure, and since those who have no children are basically free riders on pension plans and other social benefits that depend on taxing the working age population to support the retired, I assume you're good with that being limited to those who pay the financial costs of raising the next generation?
I'm taxed at 39.6% Federal, 13.3% State and 1.5% City (City tax is gross income - no write offs allowed). Property tax is $19,000/year. Health insurance is $1,100/month with a $1,500 deductible. Never used any public health services. I'm completely funding my own retirement without any matching from an employer and should hit my retirement goals before 60. Never took out a student loan. Have been working since I was 14. Where can I send you a check to make up for my freeloading?
Laughing my ass off because I'm in the top tax bracket of a country with universal health care AND a full years publicly funded maternity leave and my tax bite is less than yours.
Also, unless your retirement plan includes single-handedly growing all your own food, building and maintaining all your own possessions, and defending yourself from potential criminals and foreign militaries into your dotage, it appears that you are still dependent on the uncompensated labour of those who raise the next generation- retirement savings don't do much good if there isn't a population of able-bodied people to exchange with.
I had two marriages, one at 23 and one at 42, and I love my current husband (who I met at work) but am so glad that I have my two kids from my first marriage. I never dated online but rarely was without a partner, even when not married. I think there are plenty of people in the world who are funny and smart and interesting and have something to offer, so I don’t really understand why a person can’t just go to the specialty gym cult or church or 12-step meeting or random neighborhood BBQ (like Sarah) or adult softball beer league or a heterodox academy conference (BARPod is doing live shows now!), and find a person they think is great and will be a great father to their future children and friend to them when they have an old lady pillow face.
I realized this comment only makes sense for extroverts and that many people are introverts who might dread socializing with strangers (I mean, it is awkward even if you like it). I’m not sure the internet and dating apps solve this problem or just create more anxiety.
I'm one of the more introverted people you're likely to meet and I'm now married to a girl whom I met because we always took the same bus route to university and I eventually asked her out. Courage is habit-forming and so is timidity.
I think that is a grey area between young Millenial and elder Zoomer. (Kinda like how, as an '82 baby, I'm either a very young Gen X-er or an elder Millenial, depending upon which source's definition one relies.)
I think Suzy made a great decision taking a gap year. I wish that were the norm for young Americans, taking a year to work or travel before college, thinking carefully about priorities, including whether to go to college at all.
The only dating app I use is Hinge. If you only use the free version, you’re limited in how many profiles you can like each day, which is a great limit to have.
Ironically, I’ve recently thought one of the problems with the internet is too much of it is free. I wonder if there would be less social media outrage and porn addiction if people always had to pay for those things.
When I was online dating, I absolutely hated Hinge. It was my worst app experience. It is impossible to get or to convey enough information to vet people properly. I preferred match and OK cupid (although I've heard it has gone downhill since 2020 which is when I was on it) because it was possible to write a somewhat lengthy profile.
I responded to you on the other thread from me but I wanted to weigh in this.
Before. I found apps like hinge or coffee meets bagle, where you ha e a limited choice and have to interact, to be much more effective for me. On other apps 5 to 10 matches a day would result in maybe 1 to 2 conversations becauee people were playing the numbers game. From the woman's perspective, it didn't matter if she matched or not, there would always be more.
If you stick to the free version, and resist the temptation to pay for anything further, it’s fine. On the whole, though, I don’t think dating apps are especially helpful.
Definitely don't break up the group. I have strict diversity quotas on my podcast feed and I need some left-leaning women that I can actually listen to.
My theory of relationships was a radical egalitarianism. The idea for me was than men and women would line up in pairs based on some comparability in status and complementarity of traits. Half the time the men would initiate relationships, and half the time the women would (and I was definitely looking forward to being in the half of men fortunate enough to have a women get down on one knee and present us with a ring). Some men would cook and clean and do childcare (my father was much this way), and some women would want to work in mines or spend all day in a boardroom downtown. And it would all just aggregate out into a happy harmonious society.
I definitely think the apps are toxic, but I don't think they're the root problem. I think the root problem is that this sort of radical blank slate egalitarianism can't work, because the human animal is so poorly evolved to do it. I definitely think Tinder makes toxic behavior easier, but I don't think that the average woman has any interest in behaving like the average men, whatever positive and negative valuations we might attach to individual behaviors. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for women voting and having equal rights, but they simply are not the same as men, and acting as if they are is a social experiment which has clearly failed.
I also see no obvious solution. Maybe social norms will slowly reach some equilibrium. Right now the pace of technological evolution is so fast we can't keep up with it.
Oh definitely not. It has been challenging to balance the physical and emotional asymmetries between men and women and yet still live with each other and reproduce from the beginning, I'm sure. It has never been perfect and probably never will be, but I do think that monogamous marriage is the best we've come up with thus far, even though it too is far from perfect.
Suzy was great, but my comment will be solely about the bonus content and DJ's coach fucked advice. I think I don't love you anymore. Maybe I do. I paid for the year so I won't quit just yet. Really? Are you so superficial? Or are you joking? Somewhere in the middle? Or is Canada THAT different from the USA?
Stop with plastic surgery. The key to making the world better is being more authentic, not more fake. How is plastic surgery any different than gender transition (with hormones and surgery)? It's exactly the same fear of reality, the same incapacity of acceptance, the same despair that cannot be fixed with a knife or injection, or pushup bra, or any socially engineered lie.
Divorce does not fuck up kids. Fucked up parents fuck up kids. Money obsessed parents also do. As much as I could not stand my kids' father anymore (I was the bad mom quitting him), he is still a great father and we make a great team. Bad parents can be the worst team, married or not. The worst kids I see (and I see many of them because my youngest is in third grade, and I left the father when he was 3, call me Cruella) are the kids of professional parents that want it all, money, material, beauty, social status, and they just don't have any energy left to love their kids and TRULY care for them.
Finally, homeschooling is very hard. As a parent, if you think you cannot be a loving parent AND a teacher, maybe think of just being the best parent you can. This is what can really make a difference.
Finally, maybe I am an angry 40 year-old woman. I am not hot, not enthusiastic in bed, I won't do plastic surgery or botox, I have a business with my partner (who failed the same maths class twice in university and ended up a fantastic woke engineer whom I met at work when I was playing the professional woman), I don't have friends because people around are just too superficial to my taste but I am a good mother, fucking smart and I am convinced the sole problem of our society is money and beauty oriented, because those are lies and just like any other obsession, it does not have an end game, which makes it a social disease. I am done.
About the bonus section, I agree you should have Penelope Trunk on. I've followed her blog for > 10 years and she has such a unique perspective on stuff.
One correction: a "lifestyle business" has nothing to do with a "lifestyle brand". A lifestyle business is, quoting wikipedia, " business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle." So this is in contrast to a "proper" startup which tries to grow as much as possible to get an enormous return on investment.
I enjoyed the podcast. Meghan's snarkiness plus Sarah's chill is a winning combination!
I want to push back on one comment that was mentioned - by whom I do not remember: Men are not meeting women's level of success (It was not quite stated that way, but that was the apparent meaning) because they are not attending college in the same numbers.
In defense of men, there are plethora of middle-class employment opportunities for men that do not require bachelor's or master's degrees. In some instances a two-year, community college program will suffice. Men are over represented as police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, electricians, truck drivers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, construction workers, etc...
Yes, some women work work in these fields, but they are a small percentage. On the other hand, there are limited professions women dominate that pay reasonably well that do not require a college degree.
So in a way, perhaps many college educated women do not refuse to date men in traditionally blue collar professions because they are classist. Rather, out of jealously that so many men did not have to spend 4+ years accumulating student loans while studying in a library.
Since this is my area of expertise, I can comment on the cosmetic surgery piece. (1) you absolutely must have a facelift, but probably Sarah is right that you only get one good one. This is related to my second point; (2) the celebrities who have had bad outcomes - this was probably not due to choosing a surgeon unwisely. There are variations in the way that people heal that even the best surgeon cannot control for. One example: Nicole Kidman got a very obvious facelift sometime before Big Little Lies and healed so poorly from it that they had to style her hair such that the part of her face right in front of her ears was covered. It was a really bad outcome, but I doubt that she chose a bad surgeon - sometimes bad outcomes happen for reasons beyond the surgeon's control. Her breast implants, on the other hand, look pretty good. (3) Sarah is right about pillow face with injectables. Lip filler is so common now but it is so obvious and people overdo it and look like ducks or fish. I visited a doctor who did aesthetic procedures and she had so much filler in her face that she was unrecognizable compared to her (15 year old) picture on her website. (4) I think one thing that PT might have been referring to in that blog post is correcting an unattractive feature such as a nose or chin. A nose job and/or a chin implant, depending on one's starting point, can make a huge difference in one's profile and attractiveness and I can tell you from experience that people absolutely treat you better if they are not fighting their disgust response at an unfortunate facial characteristic. Chin implants are the most underutilized cosmetic surgery imo. Lower facial structure is so important to attractiveness (sorry to sound like an incel, I don't take measurements, but by observing who is found attractive versus not/less, it is obvious that facial structure and these distances (length of the midface, for example) are critical to attractiveness. A lot of things cannot be changed, for example the size of one's eyes, women with bigger eyes are at a tremendous advantage, but why not change what you can.
By the same token I completely think that cosmetic surgery is unethical on both the provider and consumer side. So lots of cognitive dissonance but I can't undo the past, so 🤷♀️
On my drivers license is a lie. It says I'm 5' 11", but I'm actually 6' and a bit. I always say that I'm 5' 11", because if I say that I'm 6' everyone will assume I'm actually 5' 11" or 10" or 9" or lower, because the vast majority of men who say that they are 6' are bullshitting! I'm wondering now if this is drastically reducing my dating pool, so perhaps its time to think again!
Y’all should definitely have Penelope on. She had a few viral moments in the 2010s but has been less active in recent years. I imagine it’s because he’s been focused on home schooling her kids. I used to read her obsessively back then. She still publishes occasionally at https://www.patreon.com/penelopetrunk
Another great show! Just a thought on the surrogate sex partners (for incels). I've had this discussion with a few men who haven't had sex in years. There is the option of paying for it but it's not necessarily the PP in VV that we're after. It's someone who wants your PP in their VV. That's where the problem lies.
Truth - there's a huge difference between millionaire athletes/entertainers/business moguls who CHOOSE to pay for sex versus regular guys who HAVE to pay for sex. Being in the latter category has to be the one of the most demoralizing positions imaginable.
I agree.
I suppose I'm in an unusual position, but I would literally rather buy a girl a cupcake or give her a compliment and receive a smile in return than touch her.
Freshly ensingled mellenial male thrust into the app-dating world. AMA.
It was very interesting to hear more about the female side of the dating app story, it just feels so different to me. What's really interesting to me is I feel like my "value" on dating apps has improved dramatically between the last time I was single and now, giving me an entirely different experience.
The last time getting matches was really difficult. This time I've actually been able to match with good consistency. I'm curious if I've aged up into a bracket where there's just fewer "good" choices, or if I've genuinely increased my attractiveness.
Haha. On further review this makes me sound like I think I'm a sad-sack. I've been assured by all my not-single lady friends that I'm a verified "catch" (good job, own my home in an expensive city, apparently I listen well, etc, etc, humble).
A while ago Sarah asked for our best honest dating advice on twitter and my advice for men was that if the dating market isn't working for you, stop focusing on it and work on your career. Young men don't appreciate how nice it is to have the capacity to increase your 'Sexual Market Value' over time with work whereas women have to constantly struggle to slow its decline.
I would flip that around and say that twenty-something women don't appreciate how much dating market value they have, largely without having to work for it, until they start losing it.
That is to say, the younger women just can't comprehend what it would be like to be ignored, but the vast majority of men are entirely familiar with what it's like to be treated like dirt, even if they grow out of it. I certainly agree the differing age curves have serious consequences.
I disagree strongly with this whole way of thinking. “Sexual Market Value” is a ridiculous concept, a silly misapplication of economic thinking. Dating is not a market. There’s no price mechanism, no buying and selling. The idea of “sexual market value”, that attractiveness can be quantified and compared across people on some linear scale, is preposterous. What’s more, it’s harmful. It encourages people to see themselves as objects to be improved rather than people looking to connect. Dating apps do encourage this way of thinking by reifying people and intermediating human connection through objectified profiles, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy into it, even if you use them. My dating advice is to stop obsessing over the “sexual market value” of yourself and others and instead stay open to the possibility of falling in love.
Giving me personal advice is likely a dead end.
I am not obsessed with this as I rarely even consider it in my personal life, but it seems like a generally valid approach to analyzing the culture at large and it was long before dating apps. For example, the scandal a few years back where the Harvard soccer team got in trouble for keeping a scoreboard rating women soccer players on a 1-10 scale (a practice I’ve seen duplicated elsewhere). If you want to say that human interaction adds many more complexities than that, I agree with you, but I think there exists in some abstract sense a rating scale that all humans use to judge each other.
And in any case, I was talking about behaviors that I think result from that rating scale, behaviors the frequency and significance and causes of which you may agree or disagree with me with as a empirical questions.
The advice wasn’t for you personally, it was more in response to Pongo’s comment about best honest dating advice. Maybe you don’t consider this stuff in your personal life, but I think a lot of people do and the effect is unfortunate.
A few college kids keeping a misogynistic scoreboard doesn’t mean anything, except that they also buy into this way of thinking.
The idea that “there exists in some abstract sense a rating scale that all humans use to judge each other” is exactly what I’m criticizing. I see no reason to believe that. Sure, people are concerned with relative status, etc. but not in a formalized way, and trying to formalize it is unhelpful and pseudoscientific. It’s also pretty irrelevant to dating success.
I see nothing misogynistic about such a rating scale (and certainly women do the same thing). If your point is that all the research where people rate faces on attractiveness is not a complete understanding of attraction, I would agree that there are pheromones and quirks that people have and all sorts of factors that affect actual relationship behavior. It’s definitely more complicated than a 1-10 scale.
Conversely, the underlying truth is that everyone is making yes or no behavioral decisions all the time, and their brain is a computer which does calculations, and there must be some input and some computation that results in the behavioral output that we see. Romance is not an exception to physical reality.
I also don’t think it’s unfortunate. As with all human behavior it just is. The big bang happened, and then a bunch of molecules collided off of each other, and then we happened. What alternative to judging people on scales do you even envision?
When I was a very active online dater (for two years from 30-32) I didn't have any issue going out with lots of guys. Of course it sucked and was a slog but I met my husband on OKCupid on the second day of 2014 and turned off my profile a week later. My advice to EVERYONE is to not put all your eggs in one basket but also be willing to shut it down for someone who seems worth it.
So I may have undersold some of the difference between this experience and previous. The apps tell you how many are in your "liked" que so you'll pay to see them. Previously I would have like 10 or 20, with an addition of maybe 5 to 10 a day before. This time I had it active for about a day and a half and had 350+, which to me is an absurd number.
During my last go-round I had a woman as a room mate and we compared. She constantly had over a thousand. I was so overwhelmed at the 350 number I ultimately paused the app after I had like 20 matches that seemed interesting because I didn't want to keep thinking about what could come next or what might be better. Essentially I wanted to close off the opportunity cost of actually getting to know the matches I had made.
And I know the difference. 2 years ago I had all the same financial, educational and professional metrics. But I lost 25 lbs and went from merely a generic "Handsom" to even I (genuinely oblivious) notice that I get checked out now. It just bumms me out that I'm not fundamentally different, yet substantially more marketable.
Here's what I did when I was online so as not to get overwhelmed: I paid for my profile to be private and did all the vetting myself. I would like or send a brief message to men who met my criteria and those were the only ones who could see my profile. It was still an icky experience, but less stressful than having to ignore a bunch of messages from people who were in no way a potential match.
And here's the rub. What "met your criteria?" because all the metrics on this say if your not an 8 or 9 you effectively don't exist on dating apps as a male. That's been my experience.
I went from successful, tall (6'3"), financially set, with an (I hope) decent set of personality characteristics that would make me attractive. But I was slightly over weight. Not a lot. But enough to make me a good 7.
Now I'm all the previous things, and also pretty athletic (5k time is 24:30, 10k is 50ish plus an attention to upper body and core stenght). That's the difference that switched me from invisible to visible. I get it. You have to sift through thousands of messages and why not be choosey. So now that I'm the chosen, I fucking love this system and even though I'm ultimately a serial monogmist, the attention is like crack.
But I did not like it much before. And you're example is probably why.
Well, I think everyone has their own criteria. For me I was looking for someone near my own age, also divorced, preferably with children, who didn't live too far from me, who was also looking for something serious. That's demographics. Second, I was looking for someone who is at least somewhere in the ballpark of me on intelligence and education, and who sounded somewhat compatible on values, interests, etc. Physical appearance was the last thing I looked at after all other things lined up. That has always been relatively unimportant to me - my ex is 5'7 and we were married for 15 years.
This would explain why you found Hinge so unhelpful. I would say that your second set of points is not something that can really be answered effectively in a profile. You can proxy intelligence on career/education slightly, but only by talking to them can you get meaningful answers about those things.
What app/service was this? I don't even know which ones asks about if you've been divorced before, and I'm certainly not volunteering that information.
We should be like Canada who pays for a year long maternity leave. I have a lot of Canadian cousins who are really able to be there for their kids in a way that my American relatives haven’t in their first year. Like I think a lot of stuff around marrying early and having kids early is avoided to some extent because we provides a little support for families and that’s a thing we need to change.
Maternity leave is a good idea and every country should have it, but it's not at all clear that it actually increases fertility rates or leads to people having children younger.
I would have considered a second child if I had a year at home with my son.
Fair point.
I would be on board if that was funded only by people who have children. I have no children and plan not to. More money out of my pocket to benefit others. Similar to funding student loans when I never went to college. And if you dump that load on the employer, he/she is less likely to hire women knowing they may lose a worker for a year but be forced to pay the salary.
Sure, and since those who have no children are basically free riders on pension plans and other social benefits that depend on taxing the working age population to support the retired, I assume you're good with that being limited to those who pay the financial costs of raising the next generation?
I'm taxed at 39.6% Federal, 13.3% State and 1.5% City (City tax is gross income - no write offs allowed). Property tax is $19,000/year. Health insurance is $1,100/month with a $1,500 deductible. Never used any public health services. I'm completely funding my own retirement without any matching from an employer and should hit my retirement goals before 60. Never took out a student loan. Have been working since I was 14. Where can I send you a check to make up for my freeloading?
Laughing my ass off because I'm in the top tax bracket of a country with universal health care AND a full years publicly funded maternity leave and my tax bite is less than yours.
Also, unless your retirement plan includes single-handedly growing all your own food, building and maintaining all your own possessions, and defending yourself from potential criminals and foreign militaries into your dotage, it appears that you are still dependent on the uncompensated labour of those who raise the next generation- retirement savings don't do much good if there isn't a population of able-bodied people to exchange with.
Um, a quick Google search for "federal tax rates" shows that the highest septile of income taxes is 37%?
yeah I wish I could only pay taxes for non defense/war expenses but that's not how any of this works.
I had two marriages, one at 23 and one at 42, and I love my current husband (who I met at work) but am so glad that I have my two kids from my first marriage. I never dated online but rarely was without a partner, even when not married. I think there are plenty of people in the world who are funny and smart and interesting and have something to offer, so I don’t really understand why a person can’t just go to the specialty gym cult or church or 12-step meeting or random neighborhood BBQ (like Sarah) or adult softball beer league or a heterodox academy conference (BARPod is doing live shows now!), and find a person they think is great and will be a great father to their future children and friend to them when they have an old lady pillow face.
I realized this comment only makes sense for extroverts and that many people are introverts who might dread socializing with strangers (I mean, it is awkward even if you like it). I’m not sure the internet and dating apps solve this problem or just create more anxiety.
I'm one of the more introverted people you're likely to meet and I'm now married to a girl whom I met because we always took the same bus route to university and I eventually asked her out. Courage is habit-forming and so is timidity.
I love this.
Haven't had a chance to listen yet but 27 is a young millenial, not a zoomer.
I think that is a grey area between young Millenial and elder Zoomer. (Kinda like how, as an '82 baby, I'm either a very young Gen X-er or an elder Millenial, depending upon which source's definition one relies.)
I think Suzy made a great decision taking a gap year. I wish that were the norm for young Americans, taking a year to work or travel before college, thinking carefully about priorities, including whether to go to college at all.
The only dating app I use is Hinge. If you only use the free version, you’re limited in how many profiles you can like each day, which is a great limit to have.
Ironically, I’ve recently thought one of the problems with the internet is too much of it is free. I wonder if there would be less social media outrage and porn addiction if people always had to pay for those things.
Yeah, I did the opposite of Suzy (rushed into college and out), and I regret it. Given a moment to think, I might have made some better choices!
How have you found Hinge? I've never used it and find myself newly in a position where I will likely need it.
When I was online dating, I absolutely hated Hinge. It was my worst app experience. It is impossible to get or to convey enough information to vet people properly. I preferred match and OK cupid (although I've heard it has gone downhill since 2020 which is when I was on it) because it was possible to write a somewhat lengthy profile.
I responded to you on the other thread from me but I wanted to weigh in this.
Before. I found apps like hinge or coffee meets bagle, where you ha e a limited choice and have to interact, to be much more effective for me. On other apps 5 to 10 matches a day would result in maybe 1 to 2 conversations becauee people were playing the numbers game. From the woman's perspective, it didn't matter if she matched or not, there would always be more.
If you stick to the free version, and resist the temptation to pay for anything further, it’s fine. On the whole, though, I don’t think dating apps are especially helpful.
When Sarah mentioned the OK Cupid blog post about races and who messaged who on their site, I totally remembered reading that myself. It's archived! Here it is. Definitely interesting stuff. Sarah's recollection was also quite accurate. Some of their other posts are great too. https://web.archive.org/web/20100821055448/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-race-affects-whether-people-write-you-back/
Definitely don't break up the group. I have strict diversity quotas on my podcast feed and I need some left-leaning women that I can actually listen to.
My theory of relationships was a radical egalitarianism. The idea for me was than men and women would line up in pairs based on some comparability in status and complementarity of traits. Half the time the men would initiate relationships, and half the time the women would (and I was definitely looking forward to being in the half of men fortunate enough to have a women get down on one knee and present us with a ring). Some men would cook and clean and do childcare (my father was much this way), and some women would want to work in mines or spend all day in a boardroom downtown. And it would all just aggregate out into a happy harmonious society.
I definitely think the apps are toxic, but I don't think they're the root problem. I think the root problem is that this sort of radical blank slate egalitarianism can't work, because the human animal is so poorly evolved to do it. I definitely think Tinder makes toxic behavior easier, but I don't think that the average woman has any interest in behaving like the average men, whatever positive and negative valuations we might attach to individual behaviors. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for women voting and having equal rights, but they simply are not the same as men, and acting as if they are is a social experiment which has clearly failed.
I also see no obvious solution. Maybe social norms will slowly reach some equilibrium. Right now the pace of technological evolution is so fast we can't keep up with it.
Hard agree with all of this. Evo psych for the win!
Evo psych may provide a theory to explain the problem, but I take it you agree with me that there are no easy fixes.
Oh definitely not. It has been challenging to balance the physical and emotional asymmetries between men and women and yet still live with each other and reproduce from the beginning, I'm sure. It has never been perfect and probably never will be, but I do think that monogamous marriage is the best we've come up with thus far, even though it too is far from perfect.
Suzy was great, but my comment will be solely about the bonus content and DJ's coach fucked advice. I think I don't love you anymore. Maybe I do. I paid for the year so I won't quit just yet. Really? Are you so superficial? Or are you joking? Somewhere in the middle? Or is Canada THAT different from the USA?
Stop with plastic surgery. The key to making the world better is being more authentic, not more fake. How is plastic surgery any different than gender transition (with hormones and surgery)? It's exactly the same fear of reality, the same incapacity of acceptance, the same despair that cannot be fixed with a knife or injection, or pushup bra, or any socially engineered lie.
Divorce does not fuck up kids. Fucked up parents fuck up kids. Money obsessed parents also do. As much as I could not stand my kids' father anymore (I was the bad mom quitting him), he is still a great father and we make a great team. Bad parents can be the worst team, married or not. The worst kids I see (and I see many of them because my youngest is in third grade, and I left the father when he was 3, call me Cruella) are the kids of professional parents that want it all, money, material, beauty, social status, and they just don't have any energy left to love their kids and TRULY care for them.
Finally, homeschooling is very hard. As a parent, if you think you cannot be a loving parent AND a teacher, maybe think of just being the best parent you can. This is what can really make a difference.
Finally, maybe I am an angry 40 year-old woman. I am not hot, not enthusiastic in bed, I won't do plastic surgery or botox, I have a business with my partner (who failed the same maths class twice in university and ended up a fantastic woke engineer whom I met at work when I was playing the professional woman), I don't have friends because people around are just too superficial to my taste but I am a good mother, fucking smart and I am convinced the sole problem of our society is money and beauty oriented, because those are lies and just like any other obsession, it does not have an end game, which makes it a social disease. I am done.
I still love you (like it has any impact).
I think you might be taking us a bit too literally. xx - Meghan
We cannot really trust you anymore since you wrote that article about sports and gender ;)
Heart this x3000
Thanks for another great episode!
About the bonus section, I agree you should have Penelope Trunk on. I've followed her blog for > 10 years and she has such a unique perspective on stuff.
One correction: a "lifestyle business" has nothing to do with a "lifestyle brand". A lifestyle business is, quoting wikipedia, " business set up and run by its founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more; or to provide a foundation from which to enjoy a particular lifestyle." So this is in contrast to a "proper" startup which tries to grow as much as possible to get an enormous return on investment.
I enjoyed the podcast. Meghan's snarkiness plus Sarah's chill is a winning combination!
I want to push back on one comment that was mentioned - by whom I do not remember: Men are not meeting women's level of success (It was not quite stated that way, but that was the apparent meaning) because they are not attending college in the same numbers.
In defense of men, there are plethora of middle-class employment opportunities for men that do not require bachelor's or master's degrees. In some instances a two-year, community college program will suffice. Men are over represented as police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, electricians, truck drivers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, construction workers, etc...
Yes, some women work work in these fields, but they are a small percentage. On the other hand, there are limited professions women dominate that pay reasonably well that do not require a college degree.
So in a way, perhaps many college educated women do not refuse to date men in traditionally blue collar professions because they are classist. Rather, out of jealously that so many men did not have to spend 4+ years accumulating student loans while studying in a library.
Since this is my area of expertise, I can comment on the cosmetic surgery piece. (1) you absolutely must have a facelift, but probably Sarah is right that you only get one good one. This is related to my second point; (2) the celebrities who have had bad outcomes - this was probably not due to choosing a surgeon unwisely. There are variations in the way that people heal that even the best surgeon cannot control for. One example: Nicole Kidman got a very obvious facelift sometime before Big Little Lies and healed so poorly from it that they had to style her hair such that the part of her face right in front of her ears was covered. It was a really bad outcome, but I doubt that she chose a bad surgeon - sometimes bad outcomes happen for reasons beyond the surgeon's control. Her breast implants, on the other hand, look pretty good. (3) Sarah is right about pillow face with injectables. Lip filler is so common now but it is so obvious and people overdo it and look like ducks or fish. I visited a doctor who did aesthetic procedures and she had so much filler in her face that she was unrecognizable compared to her (15 year old) picture on her website. (4) I think one thing that PT might have been referring to in that blog post is correcting an unattractive feature such as a nose or chin. A nose job and/or a chin implant, depending on one's starting point, can make a huge difference in one's profile and attractiveness and I can tell you from experience that people absolutely treat you better if they are not fighting their disgust response at an unfortunate facial characteristic. Chin implants are the most underutilized cosmetic surgery imo. Lower facial structure is so important to attractiveness (sorry to sound like an incel, I don't take measurements, but by observing who is found attractive versus not/less, it is obvious that facial structure and these distances (length of the midface, for example) are critical to attractiveness. A lot of things cannot be changed, for example the size of one's eyes, women with bigger eyes are at a tremendous advantage, but why not change what you can.
By the same token I completely think that cosmetic surgery is unethical on both the provider and consumer side. So lots of cognitive dissonance but I can't undo the past, so 🤷♀️
On my drivers license is a lie. It says I'm 5' 11", but I'm actually 6' and a bit. I always say that I'm 5' 11", because if I say that I'm 6' everyone will assume I'm actually 5' 11" or 10" or 9" or lower, because the vast majority of men who say that they are 6' are bullshitting! I'm wondering now if this is drastically reducing my dating pool, so perhaps its time to think again!
😆 what! Reclaim 6'!
That's hilarious!
Y’all should definitely have Penelope on. She had a few viral moments in the 2010s but has been less active in recent years. I imagine it’s because he’s been focused on home schooling her kids. I used to read her obsessively back then. She still publishes occasionally at https://www.patreon.com/penelopetrunk
Dearest Meghan,
According to Hollywood, 52 year-olds are very welcome at the FBI Academy.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18076310/
Ugh, why is it not called "Feds: The Rookie"?
Great episode, gals!