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"Dating", courtship, & market failures

anon_gyre said in #3681 2d ago: received

>>3479
>>3572

PART 1
The topic of marriage, dating, and how to find a waifu for anons have been on all our minds lately. We've vaguely mentioned cultural failures, but I think a more rigorous framework is needed to think about how to navigate no mans land in 2025. I don't have the solutions, so I will propose the model.

Men and women's mating strategies are at odds. Sperm is cheap, eggs are costly. Women are incentivized to invest more per child, and evolved to be choosy--favouring commitment, provisioning, and long-term stability. By contrast men can pursue low-investment, opportunistic mating when possible, favouring quantity over quality. These strategies are in tension, and require social coordination to align interest. Luckily we evolved norms for this.

Enter sexual morality : traditional sexual norms as coordination mechanisms. Enforced monogamy spread male investment widely (~90% of males reproduce in monogamous societies vs 40% for 80% of women in polygamous societies), which reduced male-male competition and potential violence by limiting surplus unmarried men (marriage also lowers T levels). Family and community oversight ensured commitment before sex, making promises costly to break. Shame and stigma acted as the informal enforcement mechanisms, internalizing the costs of reproduction and deterring defection.

Marriage had been slowly unraveling, and I don't have the space nor time to get into the details of this story, but we can fast forward to the 60s--the sexual revolution as deregulation. It removed social costs, shame, and stigma surrounding premarital and casual sex, making sexual access cheaper and more widely available without commitment. The implicit bargain was : we give women their silly rights and in return we get sex drugs and rock&roll. Eventually, this enabled the male short-term mating strategies to flourish without penalty, and eroded women’s ability to effectively screen men for genuine, long-term investment intentions.

Female preference and patriarchal norms. Evolved mate choice prioritizes genetic quality (looks, health), status/resources, dominance, and emotional novelty. Without norms enforcing commitment, these short-term attraction cues override screening for reliability and long-term investment. As top men monopolize sexual access, this amplifies sexual inequality, and the sexual inequality circuits in people's head fire up, as a type of status insecurity/neuroticism, leading to heightened stress levels and overall social tension. This unconstrained female choice becomes simultaneously more selective (for top men) and opportunistic (trading up when possible), increasing competition and social stratification.

Core dynamics in a deregulated sexual market. We hear lots of talk about situationships. For the oldheads here out of the dating game, here's what this really means. Situationships are mostly one-sided misbalanced relations, where high-status men maintain women in a precarious state, offering sex and emotional attention without the commitment of a relationship. Women often accept these imbalanced arrangements, hoping to eventually turn Chad into a boyfriend or simply valuing access to high-status partners over stable relationships with lower-status men. Beyond situationships, the other dynamics in the deregulated market encourage encourage “trading up” behavior where women leave committed partners for better options if available, which results in rotational dating patterns where a small elite of men monopolizes multiple women while many men are excluded entirely.

referenced by: >>3682 >>3685 >>3695

PART 1... received

anon_gyre said in #3682 2d ago: received

>>3681

PART 2
Market failure and externalities. Genuine commitment becomes harder to verify in a low-stigma environment. Beyond the sexual inequalities and surplus of bachelors generated, other externalities include the rise in single-parent households, welfare dependency, and poorer average child outcomes (see africanization of the west https://counter-currents.com/2015/06/back-to-africa/). This one has been a topic on the right, and a broad mystery considering how widespread it is in different countries. I think market failure is a way of looking at it : demographic decline, resulting from delayed marriage, which reduces fertility, and lowers birth rates overall. What these market failures could lead to is likely long-term increase in male-male violence driven by surplus, excluded, low-status males.

Long term projections, cultural polarization. High-fertility, norm-enforcing, often religious or traditionalist subcultures grow in relative share, while liberal, individualistic mainstream segments experience low fertility and demographic decline, and get outbred. Before we get there, society fragments along lines of reproductive strategy and cultural norms. Men and women are increasingly politically polarized, with men veering right and women veering far left. As monogamy decays, Western mating patterns increasingly resemble competitive, polygynous, low-investment systems seen in traditional West African societies, which emphasize mating effort over parenting. Without enforced commitment, reproduction becomes a prisoner’s dilemma, incentivizing mutual defection and pushing society toward low-trust, low-investment equilibria.

Mating is thus truly a deregulated market. Mate selection is today an individualistic, consumer-styled market. Individuals market themselves on short-term signals: looks, status, charm, emotional novelty, hence the rise in looksmaxxing and thirst trapping on TikTok. Platforms and dating apps profit from churn and instability, disincentivizing stable pair bonds, since they remove shared social networks and reputation costs, creating anonymous interactions that incentivize flakiness, dishonesty, and transactional behavior with minimal consequences for defection.

Dating vs Courtship. Courtship was a socially regulated, family-supervised, reputation-driven institution solving the prisoner’s dilemma of human reproduction. Commitment, negotiation, and public signaling preceded sexual access, aligning divergent male and female strategies for mutual investment in children. Shame and stigma enforced honest signaling, deterred defection, ensured paternity certainty, spread male investment broadly, and sustained social trust.By contrast modern dating is an unregulated, individualistic, market-like system where sex often precedes or substitutes for commitment. Short-term attraction cues override reliability, reputation constraints vanish, churn and flakiness are incentivized, and stable pair bonds erode. This produces a large surplus of unmarried, excluded men (see incels), intensifying competition and social fragmentation.

Marriage was a cultural technology solving the coordination problem between male and female reproductive strategies.

How do we even begin courting women in 2025 given the structure of the market and the underlying incentives?

referenced by: >>3683

PART 2... received

anon_gyre said in #3683 2d ago: received

>>3682

ADDENDUM
>Women are incentivized to invest more per child, and evolved to be choosy--favouring commitment, provisioning, and long-term stability.
>Evolved mate choice prioritizes genetic quality (looks, health), status/resources, dominance, and emotional novelty. Without norms enforcing commitment, these short-term attraction cues override screening for reliability and long-term investment.

Just as a clarification, women evolved to invest heavily per child, favouring male commitment and provisioning for long-term stability. But mate choice also prioritizes short-term cues of genetic quality. In regulated systems these preferences were forced to align in one partner; deregulation allows them to decouple, enabling opportunistic trading up and short-term selection for these attraction cues as I've stated.

ADDENDUM... received

anon_viza said in #3684 2d ago: received

Good analysis. Civilisationally, this is (hopefully) a self-resolving issue - we will have turmoil because the change in environment means our mate selection and reproductive strategies are maladaptive, but like you pointed out there are people who are still forming stable relationships and having children. There a a few different factors which are somewhat intercorrelated: low IQ, religiousity, slow life history strategy (k selection), genetic conservatism/traditionalism. Basically reproduction is bifurcated like you said between low IQ/conservatard mystery meat mutts, and high IQ k selective trads with strong genetic desire to reproduce. Obviously the former category outnumbers the latter.

Of course, currently there is little difference in reproductive success between r selective groidspawners and high investment k autists because social safety net has a dysgenic effect. As mid and high IQ libtards are bred out of gene pool, a combination of civilisational collapse (competency crisis) and an inherently more conservative population means this unnatural state of affairs will hopefully end. This isn't a guarantee, but the absence of high agency libtards hopefully means the dysgenic masses will be unable to implement their interests (resource extraction from actual competent humans), and thus we end up with countries ruled (and increasing populated) by high IQ conservatives who have an inherently desire to reproduce. This is the only genetic archetype which can survive and thrive in our modern environment. In the meantime, we should focus on reducing the dysgenic underclass growth as much as possible by restricting immigration, deportations, and making it harder for them to reproduce. Just need to ride out the destructive, short sighted libtard pathology which is currently sustaining them.

In terms of personal conclusions, it's important to recognise that slow life history strategy women who genuinely want children exist. This will cluster with high IQ - good genetic stock. Your goal has to be to find this person, which is obviously easier said than done. Probably worth investigating the bundle of correlations here and then deriving an actionable plan for seeking one out, which would take some work and analysis.

Good analysis. Civil received

anon_legy said in #3685 2d ago: received

>>3681
I’ll give a higher effort response later but one point i will be pedantic on: what is happening since the sexual revolution is not mating. Actual mating still largely happens on the traditional monogamous model, despite some decay around the edges. The sex drugs and rock and roll is not mating. It is asexual simulacra. To put it pointedly: if there are no kids, it is not mating.

In this way and in others, i think your terminology is full of unexamined tropes that we should strive to overcome. The whole evolutionary psychology paradigm at this point has become rote assumption, but i am very skeptical that that is what is actually happening in human cognition or sexuality.

referenced by: >>3686

I’ll give a higher e received

anon_gyre said in #3686 2d ago: received

>>3685
I'll be happy to hear any pushback. Agreed on the terminology, I wasn't sure how else to phrase it. Basically my goal was to try and outline why I think people who 200 years ago would've had families today suffer, and this having to do with broader norms and incentive structures. Evo psych can be a bit dubious but I think the general framework still stands even if you replace certain of the motivations I highlighted with other things. A lot of this has been built of my personal experience and observations into the "dating" world.

I'll be happy to hea received

anon_beni said in #3687 2d ago: received

Great post and timing for it. Will write a related piece for the conversation soon.

Some things I'd mention:
• Think genes/IQ are overrated, but the race factor is not insignificant. More important is prenatal development and nutrition. No baby will do well if born preemie or choked by the umbilical cord.
• USA becoming like West Africa is true. Ever since the 50s/60s/70s the USA has become culturally more Bantu (you see it with the sports and entertainment industries), and there really needs to be a better name than "white flight" because how were these people responsible for the degenerate behaviors of others moving in? Having lived in the American South, you really see the separation even if there is no official segregation.

Great post and timin received

anon_beni said in #3688 2d ago: received

Clarification: separation in quality of stores and shelves depending upon the demographic majority, not separation between people (it is the lack of it leading to the behaviors noted in this thread).

Clarification: separ received

anon_beni said in #3689 2d ago: received

Btw since the State has outlawed local violence, carrying a big dog with you can be of social help:
• So you don't get Karmelo Anthony'd due to high impulsivity (I don't like to argue with Bantus for that reason)
• Politics at the street level is about how many people are with you and how many people around you already agree with your viewpoint, having a dog gives you maybe 0.5-1.25 of a boost but you have to know when to cut loose due to a bad environment
• Talk/words/humor is used to try and control those with more power. Generally I don't like to aggress on people but talking back looks stupid in a way that brandishing isn't. You'll have to figure out how to put people in their place. If you are long-term disposition your strength is organizational capacity which extends to social means in potentially threatening and more effective ways than wordplay/humor guys.

Btw since the State received

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