21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Swiping and Dating Preferences: Gender divides in sex and relationships. “The survey found that women care a lot more about height than men do.”
Plus: “Interestingly, a recent survey found that men in cohabiting relationships are just as satisfied in their relationships as married men, but women in cohabiting relationships are much less satisfied than married women. Much of social progress was supposedly intended to benefit women and instead ended up benefiting men. Perhaps this is one contributing factor to the paradox of declining female happiness. Women used to report having higher well-being than men. Over the past several decades, though, this has reversed. Women’s self-reported happiness has plummeted. Today men report higher well-being than women.”
And:
Here’s a sketch of what might be happening: Men high on the Dark Triad (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) use dating apps. They might make up 10-20% of users. They go on a rampage, sleeping with lots of women, playing games with them, leading them on, ghosting them, lying to them, etc. Dark Triad men are excellent impostors; they are good at mimicking desirable romantic qualities, and are thus able to procure lots of sex partners. The women they sleep with become disillusioned. These women begin to behave in psychopathic and narcissistic ways to protect themselves from emotional vulnerability and pain, and perhaps as a way to even the score with “men” as a category. They learn to avoid Dark Triad men and exploit normal men. These men become confused and upset, and begin to treat other women the same way to “get even.” In short, Dark Triad men mistreat women, who then mistreat ordinary men, who then mistreat ordinary women. Bad behavior drives out the good. A system tailor-made for psychopathic males (dating apps facilitate anonymity, superficiality, and deception) predictably gives rise to a defect-defect equilibrium. Eventually, you have a situation where everyone adopts Dark Triad strategies of emotional coldness, unfeeling callousness, and calculated duplicity to obtain sex and avoid getting hurt.
Everything is going swimmingly. But there’s much more at the link. Including this:
Regarding personal beliefs, there is an interesting paradox here for men and women. Most women today are liberal, yet women are also more likely than men to desire committed relationships. Men who are liberal are, on average, far less interested in committed relationships than conservative men, who are more likely to be interested in marriage. If you don’t date conservative (or “moderate”—a joke I’ve heard is that any man who calls themselves a moderate on the dating apps is a Republican) men, you’ll probably be on the dating apps for a long time. There’s already a scarcity of college-educated men. If you rule out everyone who is right of center, then your dating pool will be very small indeed.
Yes.