Are The Straights OK [TEASER]
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Peter. Michael. What do you know about online dating? I'm a big fan because getting brutally judged by 100 people every single day is my love language.

So as Peter mentioned a couple bonus episodes ago, we still don't really know what the format of the bonus episodes is going to be. So while we're in this interregnum period, we basically have like a bunch of leftover research that Peter did for the game and I did for the rules. We didn't really get a chance because these books are fairly old to talk about the paradigm shift for the game.

Right. I read an entire extra book for The Rules podcast that I didn't get a chance to mention. And we just thought it would be fun to have a kind of freewheeling conversation about this shift and what it means and what we've been reading and our

deranged stories of online dating. And by extra research, what Michael means is that he...

countless studies about the impact of online dating on our collective psychology and I went on the most toxic subreddits I could find for weeks on end and I'm ready to talk about it now. I can tell this is happening because every time I've texted you in the last two weeks you've waited four hours to get back to me. I'm like, damn, I'm really into Peter. What's happening with my feelings? The longer I wait to text Michael back, the stronger my position on the podcast becomes. Yeah.

When you double text, that's when I know that I'm the main host. So since we so often talk about bad graphs and charts on the show, I wanted to start by sending you a good chart that is actually genuinely pretty interesting. So I'm going to send this to you and I will let you describe the story that it tells. Okay. Okay.

The title of this chart is How Heterosexual Couples Have Met, data from 2009 and 2017. And it's a graph that maps actually from 1940 to roughly present. And you can see starting a little before the year 2000 and then skyrocketing met online. So like met through friends.

decline starting in 1990. Fucking tanks. Yeah, it goes from like 35% of couples met each other through friends to 20% of couples met each other through friends in the space of like 15 years, which is crazy. Right. And yeah, Met Online is now the plurality, it looks like. It's also very interesting that it's mostly cannibalizing met through friends. Right. Met through church is relatively...

The met in school or met through family have both been declining basically since 1940, just steadily. Like people don't meet through family. People don't marry their high school sweethearts the way that they used to. So these are like much more longstanding trends.

Met through co-workers appears to have declined quite drastically in the 1990s. Part of that is probably like sexual harassment and like more of these kinds of policies at work. Sexual harassment is ruining love in the workplace. You could easily do like a Ben Shapiro podcast like out of this graph. Absolutely. But then, OK, so I actually did a lot of research on like this paradigm shift and like what it means.

So there's basically a couple different waves of increases in online dating. Match.com is founded in 1995. We then get OkCupid in, I believe, 2003. That's when like it goes kind of more mass market. Before this, it was like it was seen as very sketchy. And The Rules actually has like a kind of interesting chapter on online dating where it's all like safety tips. Huh.

But there's now been this rolling snowball that like the more people do online dating, the more appealing online dating is, right? Because that's not seen as like something for weirdos. So it has this big jump up in the OKCupid era in the early 2000s. And then it has another very significant leap up when smartphones take over. So Tinder is founded in 2012. Yeah.

And then we're like really off and running because the sort of modern generation of dating apps essentially narrow the information about dating partners, potential dating partners down to like the things that people actually care about, which is like, what do you look like and how close are you to me? Right. Like how much of a hassle is it going to be to meet up with you? I can't believe there's just like an app for relationships and we let that happen, you know, like a human engagement app. Yeah.

It is. There is something so fucking capitalistic about the whole thing. Right. Left or right? Left or right? Quick. Yeah. Do you like them? It used to be sort of integrated into the rest of your life, right? Like it could happen organically. And now it's just like a completely separate activity that you do.

There were moments in my life when I would just be like hung over on a Sunday morning, eating Doritos in bed, like swiping left on some porch. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, no, no. Lives in Hoboken. That's a big no from me. Yeah.

That thing is, even as you're commodifying everybody else, it's still so fucked up to think about how they're commodifying you. Right. That someone glances at a photo of me for like a tenth of a second. There's like, nope. Ouch. But of course, that's what I'm doing to everybody else. If you saw a montage of everyone seeing your profile and swiping left or right, it would ruin your life. This is another thing with like ghosting, I feel like, where obviously it's like it's rude behavior to just kind of disappear on somebody. Right.

But also I have had people tell me why they don't want to see me again. And like it really hurts to know the specific reason. And I kind of like the plausible deniability of like, oh, maybe that person's like dog died. And that's why they text me back, which is not fucking true. And like, I know it's not true, but unless I have confirmation of it, I can just like tell myself that. Right. I once got an email.

After like a couple months of like a friends with benefits situation with like a full accounting of like every reason ranging from like her own introspection to like my problems. And I was like, I would rather you just text me that I'm an asshole. Yeah. Like this is awful.

Do you remember her specific complaints? It would like, it would, it would sear itself into my brain if I ever got an email. Of course. I remember that I could almost recite the fucking email verbatim. That whole, I have like, I like, I can tell you, I can literally tell you what day she sent it on, which I'm not going to do on the off chance that she's a lister and know that she's fully living in the side of my head a decade later. Yeah.

So the way that academics talk about this paradigm shift is most couple formation in the United States before the advent of the internet was done through what they call weak ties.

So your sort of pool of potential dating partners was like friends of friends, coworkers, friends of coworkers. This sort of two to three degrees of separation from people who you know, right? People who you share institutions with, people who you're around. What the internet allowed us to do was to expand this circle of potential dating partners to basically complete strangers.

Right. If you live in New York City, your potential mates are now everyone in New York City. So you've gone from maybe twelve hundred potential matches to, I don't know, three and a half million. Yeah. This has changed the paradigm in a lot of ways in that people tend to date concurrently more.

Like you would have kind of two or three irons in the fire and everyone you're dating also has kind of two irons in the fire in a way that like was kind of seen as like promiscuous or untrustworthy or unethical in a previous generation. It's just sort of like, well, I have two dates in one day and she probably has two dates in one day as well. And like, whatever. I don't want to say it's a necessity, but if you're like swiping, right? Yeah.

and you match with someone, unless you stop and let that play out, you will inevitably end up with situations where you've matched with two people and you're chatting with two people. And I think like the inevitability of talking to multiple people on these apps just led to it being accepted when I think you're right. Like if you described that sort of dynamic to someone from like 15 years ago, they'd be like, oh,

Oh, God. Yeah. That's bizarre and unhealthy and, yeah, promiscuous in some regard. Dude, a personal story. My grandparents lied about how they met for 50 years. They told us on their 50th wedding anniversary, they had always told us that they met on the Capitol steps because they were both living in D.C. It turns out they actually met in a nightclub where my grandma was there with another guy. She was on a date with a dude. Yeah.

And she met my grandpa. My grandpa sort of like made a move, like sent a risky text. And then she was like, okay. And they started dating. He did the Charleston right next to her. And she was like, whoa, who's this guy? It's also very funny to me that no one in the family ever asked any follow-up questions for 50 years. They're like, we met on the Capitol steps. None of us were ever like, how? Right. Why? Like, what was it like? We're just like...

Yeah, an old person story. Sure. I'll tell you what. 50 years from now, there will be grandparents telling the opposite lie because they did meet on the Capitol steps on January 6th, 2021. Ha ha ha!

But I also think, I mean, I think that there are pros and cons of online dating. Like it would be very silly to say like this is bad for society or like this is good for society. Every technological shift is very complicated. But most of the pros and the cons come from this shift from like third degree friends to complete strangers.

So there is some data that interracial marriages are increasing. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. The idea of that is basically that like when you cast the net wider, you're not relying on your friends. Like most people have fairly homogenous friend groups. Once you expand out to complete strangers, it's like, well, then you can do like people of different ages and races and classes. And like there's actually more diversity in dating. You call it bumble. I call it white genocide. Yeah.

That name wouldn't have hit as hard. It's harder to download. Hey, are you on White Genocide? Yeah. There's also some, I honestly think, kind of janky survey data indicating that marital satisfaction is actually higher for people who meet online.

The idea is that you're able to more tightly narrow down your field of partners to people who have like the same ideas of you. Like I want kids and you want kids. You're like, I'm Catholic and you're Catholic. Or you can be more specific when you have more choices. And so there's a lot of debate about this. A lot of...

A lot of the sort of gripes about online dating are this idea of like infinite choice. Like there's just too many people out there. So you're not really going to value the person that you're with. But the other theory of that infinite choice also means that you're able to find somebody who's like more tightly suited to you. Yeah. You can just put a weirdly bitter list of demands in your profile. I want to know the races.

and the types of people you don't want to date. That's the first thing I want to learn about you. Give me some body types that you're not into. But no, but honestly, like this does feel like, you know, obviously there's sort of, I understand the problems of infinite choice, but the opposite end of this is like, I don't know, like 150 years ago, there were towns where like the,

There would be one person of the opposite sex that was your age and you were like, well, that's my wife. Yeah. Obviously. I think there's also like a sort of second order effect of this too, where I think the expectations of marriage have changed over time too. I think it's become much less of like a business-like relationship or something that has

Right. Property ownership or a business partnership. It's much more like people are now looking for soulmates. So it's also jacked up the expectations. Yeah. But then also this shift to complete strangers is also, I think, behind a lot of the downsides.

of online dating. There's a lot of studies that show an association between heavy use of dating apps and higher rates of anxiety and depression. Although, of course, we don't know the cause, like the direction of the cause. It could be you're depressed because you're on Tinder. It could also be you're on Tinder because you're depressed. There's also the thing of like just women being like constantly fucking harassed and having like dick pics sent to them and like the insane levels of just bullshit that especially women have to deal with.

on the internet it's like well i'm a complete stranger you're a complete stranger i can just send i can send a thousand women the same dick pic on the chance that one of them is going to respond right positively although i've never actually heard of that working but i think people just find it really humiliating to be treated like this just to have other people constantly treating you like a stranger right like they're canceling on you they're saying fucked up like the the things that people send in these messages to each other are like really fucking mean

It really grinds you down. And I think a lot of that really does come from this idea of like you are replaceable. It also just speeds up the entire process, like in the same for the same reasons that you're often, you know, juggling multiple people that you're kind of dating at once. That also means you're experiencing an amount of rejection. Yeah. That someone from 1945 would be totally unfamiliar with, let's say. Right. Right.

You're just going through volume. Yeah, it can become a real numbers game. I mean, dating has always been a numbers game, but like the degree to which it's a numbers game has significantly increased, right? That you match with 2,500 people and then you go on 500 first dates

and you go on 80 second dates and you go on 33rd dates. It's like you just kind of run through the conveyor belt. Right. But in that process of narrowing it down, there's a huge amount of just like emasculating, humiliating, terrible behavior that you have to just accept. I'm in this process. I've been single for the last six months or something. And like sometimes you do meet up with people who just have this like weariness about them.

We're like, you can tell they've done this a million times and they don't really want to be doing it. And there's like, how many siblings do you have? Where did you grow up? And you're like, look, man, I don't want to be here either. We just have to get through this. We're going to do it together. We were talking about the I was making a joke about the angry profile rant, which is like a type of a type of dating profile you come across where like,

Their about section is basically just like this super bitter. Yeah. Either a list of demands or maybe like an outward facing complaint of sorts. Yeah. Sometimes I kind of get it, right? Like, oh, yeah. If you've had like a bad few weeks on the apps or whatever, I get the impulse to just pop into the, you know, the about section of your profile and be like, ah.

Can I read you a Bumble profile that I saved? Absolutely. I cannot stop like saving these. He's 50. By the way, 50-year-old gay man. He says, not interested in over 50 or anyone with depression, insomnia, or anxiety. I like my high IQ and earning a good salary at what I do. So if you don't, then we're not a match. I seek to build a life. God.

I love these people. In his mind, there are a notable amount of people who are bothered by high IQs. Yes. Yes.

So much so that he's like, I'm going to put it out there. Yeah. I'm not going to lower my IQ for you. On Gator, like on Grindr, a thing you see a lot is like no time wasters. I'm not, I'm not here for time wasters as if someone's going to look at that and be like, ah, I'm a time waster. Okay. This guy's not, this guy's not in it for me. It's like no idiots. Like no one identified, like no one thinks that that's them. So it doesn't, it doesn't weed out.

One guy, I still, my favorite, this was like a decade ago, someone on their Grindr profile just wrote hot people only. Nice. Right. That's everyone. Everyone would like people they're attracted to. The absolute worst part of those profiles is when they put a physical requirement in that you can see in profiles. Yeah. When people are like white people only. It's like, this is a fucking app with pictures. Yeah.

So obviously the whole purpose of those types of profiles is just to like inject a little bit of negativity into someone's day. Yeah, that's awful. If you're fat and you're swiping, not only do you have to like deal with whatever general stress you have from being on the dating scene, but then every now and then you get to see someone be like, no fat people, please. I came up in the

era of Grindr where like, I swear to God, like one in five profiles had like no fats, no femmes, no Asians. Right. And like people, this was so fucked up. People would like try to be fucking cute about it. So people would put no rice, no spice. Jesus Christ. To be like, no, I guess like no Asians or Africans or like, it's not even clear to me what the fuck that means. But it's like, so not only have you done like the racist text, it's like, oh, you're trying to be fucking cute about your racist text.

Right. Like, wow, you're like you're a complete fucking asshole. And also you're just like not funny and like don't seem remotely like bothered by it.

I wish there was something more that I could do beyond blocking people. No, you should be able to pick one person that you can kill through the apps. Exactly. That's also another, I don't know if straight people do this, but another like genre of online date is where they just want to complain about online dating the whole time. Yeah, that's a thing. I always find it like a weird sort of like Mobius strip Escher painting of an interaction where it's like you're on a date and you're complaining about how hard it is

to get on a date with someone. And I'm like, right, you should do the date. You're on it. Yeah. I don't know that I've had that exact experience, but I have, I have had online dates where they were like,

how's Bumble going for you or something like that. It's funny because it makes sense. A big part of your life is that you are going on these dates, trying to find someone, and then you're trying to get to know someone. Right. And they're trying to get to know you. What's something about you? Well, going on three dates a week. That's a pretty big part of your life. What are your hobbies? I spend about 20 hours a week in various stages of online dating. Exactly. It would be weird to edit that out.

Yeah, exactly. But also it's like weirdly self-referential to be like, dating is going really well for me. I had sex with three people today. What's your acting been like? It's like breaking the fourth wall. Like everyone knows that we're all play acting to a degree, but like you don't really talk about it. One of my pet peeves is like people who do like meta conversations who are like, let's change the subject. Or like, I don't want to talk about that. I'm always like,

Like you can just change the subject if you want to change. You don't have to say let's change the subject. You can just actually change the subject. But you then get these people who have like a script in their heads of like how the first date is supposed to go.

So you like ask something and they're like, I don't want to talk about that on the first date. Right. Okay. I'm sorry. I failed the test now, I guess. Anyone who like overtly talks about the topic of conversation weirds me out because then it makes me think about the structure of the conversation rather than just having a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. I hate that shit. That's very weird. And that's actually very common where people are like,

expressly dictating the terms of the conversation to you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you're just like, what the hell? What the fuck's going on? We talked about this in the game episode, but we ended up cutting it out. But I think also because online dating creates this kind of numbers game, people then try to like gamify it or like make it as effective as possible. I think there's like a kind of a TED Talk brain thing of like, I want to have the most efficient first date, right? So like, I'm going to skip over the small talk. I don't want to talk about the weather, like what you do. I want to skip to like the meaningful stuff.

So I've also gone on dates with people that, you know, you're like, oh, how was your day? And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. What are your three passions? What's the last thing that made you cry? I will be getting up and exiting immediately. That is game over for me. But

thing is like i get it because like small talk can be fucking excruciating but also something that endears you to someone else is like can you just make pleasant small talk with a stranger like i want someone who can like go through a talk about the weather and not make it weird for the other person or try to essentially make themselves the center of attention by being like no no we're gonna do my essay questions what i think is if someone if someone gives you this like

staged, like describe your ideal vacation bullshit. You're not going to learn anything. But if I ask you, how was your day? I'm going to learn a lot about you because I cannot be with someone who doesn't take that as a prompt to complain about their job. When I was on a date and I was like, how was your day?

And someone was like, it was great. And like walked me through their day and everything was fantastic. I'm like, no, this is over. If someone was like, my boss is an asshole. I'm like, yes, let's talk about date number two. I'm already there. It's like when you ask somebody what was high school like, and they're like, everything was fine. I was popular. Like the kids, they liked me. I'm like, all right, I have places to be. Check, please. I want trauma from you. I want hurt. Right.

But that's the point of small talk. You get you're getting at the little edges of a person's being. I actually did a decent amount of reading on the conventions of small talk for the rules episode because I genuinely find small talk like extremely interesting. And, you know, everyone understands the purpose of small talk very differently. But one of the reasons why these like essay question approaches, I think they're very understandable, but they're not as effective is that

the purpose of small talk is to speak about something very superficial that you have in common to look for other commonalities, right? Like, oh, it was raining today. Oh, I hate it when it rains. Oh, I like being inside. I also like being inside. And it's like, okay, we're both introverts. You can zigzag your way into deeper forms of commonality and just sort of feel somebody out. Like, are you a weirdo? Do you take turns in conversation? And like, you can't

sort of skip that part because the purpose of small talk is like an audition yeah yeah now I'm comfortable going deeper with this person but if they basically fail that test then you want to pull back right and so whenever people try to leapfrog it it's always like well the boring part is kind of important like we have to sort of work our way up to like when was the last time you cried you can't

Skip to that. I need to build some rapport with you to know that I can trust you. And a lot of rapport is also just like, do we have chemistry? And by chemistry, I don't even always mean do we have things in common? I mean, is there like...

a dynamic to our conversation that I enjoy. Do we pitter-patter effectively? How's our rat-a-tat-tat? No, so is she sarcastic? Is she feminine? Do I want to stroke her long hair? These are the things that you're trying to determine about females. Michael, putting yourself in the straight guy's shoes. That's just what I assume that you guys look for. Staring across the table like, I want to touch her hair. Speaking of which, do you want to talk about this toxic subreddit that you've been reading for a while?

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

I've never looked into like how this has manifested among women or like kind of what this looks like among female oriented online communities. So take take take me down the rabbit hole, Peter.