In any case, I can’t help but notice that the things you say you base your commentary on fall into two classes:
The content of existing “dating documents”; and…
Essentially, opinion based on personal experience and interaction, having nothing to do with “dating documents”.
Notably absent is any information whatsoever about, or from, actual consumers of actual dating documents, or data about the efficacy of dating documents, or really anything at all about dating documents and their use, other than the contents of the actual documents themselves.
Given that these documents are written with the intent to be straightforward about what one does and doesn’t want in seeking a long term partner, I’m assuming people would rather know if the person has attributes they highly value in a partner sooner rather than later.
I… don’t quite get this logic. The conclusion seems to not follow from the premise… at all? Could you trace out the chain of reasoning here?
Also, like I mentioned at the start, the post is written as an instructional on how to write one, despite being more of a meta-analysis on dating docs.
Yes, but what makes your recommended way the right way to write a dating document, or even a good way of writing a dating document, or even a not guaranteed to completely torpedo your chances of ever getting a date again way of writing a dating document? Have you successfully gotten dates after having written a dating document in the way that you recommend? Have other people followed your recommendations and then gotten dates?
Re evidence, despite rising popularity, there isn’t actually enough on these dating documents to draw conclusions on what is and isn’t successful. I do think using documents like these are a great idea
But why do you think it’s a great idea? Just because you would prefer it if such things worked?
To be clear, you have no concrete reasons at all to believe that “dating documents” have any effectiveness whatsoever in getting their authors dates, getting them into relationships, etc.? Not even anecdotes?
Threads are largely on Facebook, along with personal conversations. Most of these are with women seeking a nesting partner, and most of these documents are written by men seeking a nesting partner, so in this sense the group I got most of my data from is the target audience. I do think that a lot of this is more generalizable, at least within our community though; knowing whether or not your partner wants kids is useful regardless of gender and sexuality. I think part of what you’re getting at is that it’s ambiguous where each piece of advice is coming from, and you’re definitely right about that—I initially was compiling this information for personal use before deciding it might be worth sharing, hence not having sources and such.
Re the comment you didn’t quite get… the appeal of a dating document is largely from the ability to be upfront about what you want. This is to avoid the common failure mode of dating someone for years only to find a fundamental incompatibility that, if brought up from the start, could have saved a lot of trouble. It’s an attempt to date more efficiently. This is the attitude both readers and writers of these docs bring to the table. In the same way that people might use a specific app to find a specific kind of connection, people have used dating docs as a way of finding someone willing to make things work based on practical alignments like coparenting and such.
I have anecdotal evidence that dating documents are helpful with getting dates, but no actual numbers. What I have found is that the sooner in a relationship couples discuss potential dealbreakers, goals for the future, etc, the more likely they are to either last or have a mutual breakup with no hard feelings. Again, no actual numbers here, but I’m a therapist and have worked with couples and taken workshops that have only supported this belief. In particular, often couples will fall in love, realize that they don’t align on practical things, and then try to make it work anyway, often ending up feeling stuck together (like if they have kids) or having a messy breakup. The reason I think dating documents would work is that they improve upon an existing method for finding a partner, with the addition of built-in disclosures to prevent common failure modes. Plus, even if the document itself isn’t what finds you a match, writing one out is a good exercise in figuring out what you want and showing it to a potential partner is a good way of assessing practical compatibility upfront.
Apologies for not properly answering your questions the first time. It’s been years since I’ve written on LW and I’m both a bit rusty and incredibly nervous. I do appreciate the constructive feedback, and acknowledge that my own experience (being told my ideas are invalid for not having measurable evidence and credible studies to cite) played a part in my response’s tone.
I hate to weigh in with more criticism here, but I’ve also noticed this idea of putting up a long list of requirements on ACX threads and it struck me as rather self-defeating—to imagine that you can usefully define ‘dealbreakers’ in advance and screen people out, or do Zoom calls as the first date instead of in person dates etc.
‘Tell vs Ask culture’ is a great idea and I am fond of telling things too. But telling only works if you can, in fact, ‘tell’ something—unfortunately, when it comes to romance, “we know more than we can tell”. I mean, we live in a world where Mencius Moldbug just got married to a Bard-graduate Peace Corps feminist sex writer for Jezebel! (I can also name among my relatives the improbable pairing of an ardent vegan and her husband, a butcher; decades later, still no sign of divorce.)
It is a trite saying, but it looks like “the heart has reasons reasons know not”, and this catchphrase must be added to the armory along with “the dodo bird verdict” or “the metallic laws” or “correlation!=causation”. I would highlight the studies (excerpts):
To summarize: everyone agrees on who’s hot or not, and it is better to be hot than not; past that degree of assortative mating, predicting pairwise success of romance appears to be essentially impossible.
I’m particularly impressed by Joel et al 2017, where participants spent half an hour filling out several hundred of the most useful survey/psych questions (many extremely similar to what ‘date documents’ record) first, and past the global ‘hot or not’ ratings everyone could agree on, they throw high-powered random forests at trying to predict pairs of men/women, and the pairwise random forests do not merely fail to add much predictive power, they actually make the predictions worse! I, uh, did not predict that.
If you can take hundreds of participants filling out hundreds of tailored survey items about all their preferences and ideals and desired traits of romantic partners, and our highest-powered statistical methods identify less than zero signal, and this is also consistent with other analyses like asking whether your preferences predict satisfaction with partners (apparently not!), then I cannot see any reason for optimism about ‘dealbreakers’ existing and being so important you should structure all dating based on it. They would appear to be highly negotiable; perhaps true dealbreakers exist only in retrospect (such as at workshops or couples consulting therapists in the middle of messy breakups). Note the pernicious learning problem here inherent to screening: how will you ever learn you were wrong to screen out someone based on a supposed ‘dealbreaker’ if you screen everyone that way? It’s not like you (or anyone else) will randomly pick half to go on a date with anyway and diligently acquire a sample of a few hundred n which can show that the two processes have the same (low) success rate for additional dates/relationships...
If neither you nor anyone else can predict your actual romantic compatibility with a random person beyond the basics of assortative mating, no matter how many questionnaires you fill out or dealbreakers you list, because you will ‘click’ with whomever you click, and that’s the end of it, no point asking ‘why’, the heart has its reasons all your dealbreaker reasons know not, etc, then it seems like one ought to be thinking of dating as a numbers game in finding the maximum of n draws, more like the lottery of apple breedingthan filtering airplane flights on Travelocity looking for the perfect flight with zero layovers leaving at noon for $200. When better-than-chance screening is expensive (or impossible), then there’s not much you can do but grow a big field of apple saplings, give each a bite, and wait to get lucky with the next Honeycrisp apple; if you aren’t sampling hundreds, at a minimum (a normal max looks like a log), you’re throwing away a lot of potential gain. The last thing one would want to do is to self-defeatingly throw away lottery tickets based on criteria that won’t matter in the end—each one of them could’ve been Mr Right, no matter how you defined and discarded him as Mr Wrong.
(For the same reason, I am skeptical of attempts to do ‘Zoom first dates’: Zoom is, even at the best of times, alienating and hard to feel any real attachment through. It may be adequate for cold business transactions, but for love...? I think that, like VR for decades, the screen resolution and latency and jitter are simply not there yet, and even something like Project Starline may still be inadequate. So using Zoom may doom a first date that could’ve succeeded, and is worse than dealbreakers because it throws away lottery tickets while wasting a lot more time & effort.)
I’m particularly impressed by Joel et al 2017, where participants spent half an hour filling out several hundred of the most useful survey/psych questions (many extremely similar to what ‘date documents’ record) first, and past the global ‘hot or not’ ratings everyone could agree on, they throw high-powered random forests at trying to predict pairs of men/women, and the pairwise random forests do not merely fail to add much predictive power, they actually make the predictions worse! I, uh, did not predict that.
As far as I can tell, the outcome that the study was trying to predict was perceived compatibility on a four-minute speed date? If that’s the amount of time you have to get to know a person, it doesn’t sound too surprising if the global ‘hot or not’ ratings are the only useful predictor. Many people even reserve deal-breaker questions like “kids or no kids” until the second full date or later.
Given that squidious was talking about cases where people jump into a relationship and might find out about serious problems only much later, e.g. at a point where they might already have kids, it seems that the kinds of long-term issues she was talking about would also go unnoticed in a situation where you only had four minutes to assess the other person.
The authors note this limitation themselves, and seem to say that the actual question squidious is referencing hasn’t even been studied, since it’s methodologically too hard:
The present findings address only obliquely the predictability of long-term romantic compatibility. Even if unique desire in initial interactions is not predictable a priori, a matching algorithm could serve a useful function by surrounding users with partners with whom they would ultimately enjoy long-term compatibility should a relationship develop. Building and validating such an algorithm would require that researchers collect background measures before two partners have met and follow them over time as they become an established couple. To our knowledge, relationship science has yet to accomplish this methodological feat; even the commonly assessed individual-difference predictors of relationship satisfaction and breakup (e.g., neuroticism, attachment insecurity; Karney & Bradbury, 1995; Le et al., 2010) have never been assessed before the formation of a relationship. For these variables to be useful in a long-term compatibility algorithm that also separates actor, partner, and relationship variance, researchers would need to predict relationship dynamics across participants’ multiple romantic relationships over time (Eastwick et al., 2017). Predicting long-term compatibility may be more challenging than predicting initial romantic desire.
Great point. Also, going on speed dates is already a selection effect, for example I consider speed dates to be a waste of time, especially with random people (I think they are usually not preselected?)
To summarize: everyone agrees on who’s hot or not, and it is better to be hot than not; past that degree of assortative mating, predicting pairwise success of romance appears to be essentially impossible.
...participants spent half an hour filling out several hundred of the most useful survey/psych questions
Psych questions are not the only info that we can consider here. In advance of actually skimming the studies, here are some things that I predict correlate with relationship success:
Physical proximity
Social status
Financial wealth
IQ (because it positively correlates a little bit with all good things)
Class, with working class people more likely to break up
Height
If none of these correlate with relationship success… I will be much more confused than I currently am.
I don’t know if we’re discussing short-term or long-term success. Are we predicting that they enter into a relationship at all, or that they’re still together 10 years later? I can imagine the latter being much harder to predict. (And one reason I could be bad at predicting the latter is if the former is anti-correlated with it.)
The only things that I know studies have shown to be predictors of how successful a relationship will be are: - Similar IQ (not necessarily high or low, but similar to each other; can’t remember the study specifically) - Lack of Gottman’s Four Horsemen: contempt, criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness (though this has largely been studied by Gottman himself because it’s hard to get anyone else to study your theories in psych)
Honestly maybe I should have just listed the four horsemen and left it at that :P
I am confused about the relevance of hotness. Obviously if you’re hot, more people will want to date you. But does it also improve the long-term success probability once you’re already dating? Hot people have more stable relationships?
Also I realize you have actual studies there but to me this unpredictability sounds like something from another planet. Theory: maybe there is substantial difference between “normie” dating (normies are most of the population) and dating for groups that are on the tail of certain distributions (e.g. intelligence)? Because if you’re on the tail then you need someone else on the tail (or at least skewed to your side) while if you’re in the “bulk” then most people (who are also in the bulk) will do?
I don’t know if it improves success conditional on dating someone; I could tell a story either way—being hot makes you more of a keeper, but then, maybe you’ll be quicker to leave. It’s a competitive market. Doesn’t seem too relevant. The point of the hotness part is that when I say ‘dating success is unpredictable’, that’s bracketing the obvious factor, visible to everyone. Obviously you can predict that a supermodel is probably going to get dates. It’s not interesting to say, “a 5 should probably not try to date a 10”. What is very surprising is, “here are a 5 and a 5; you can ask both of them as many questions as you like, of any sort, feed it into your fanciest statistical model if you need to, and you are still not going to outperform a coinflip in predicting how well their date, as far as we can tell from all our failed efforts to do so”. This is especially surprising because we do this all the time with many other apparently equally formidable social prediction tasks like predicting criminal recidivism or child abuse or suicide: the incremental prediction validity might not be great, but at least it’s not frigging negative variance! I’m not sure what other social psych thing seems to be so precisely null predictive.
this unpredictability sounds like something from another planet.
I agree that it’s very surprising and I’m still looking for a good explanation. The best I have so far is an analogy from evolutionary genetics theories of personality where personality is either stuck as, or possibly deliberately functioning as, a randomizing device (because personality is a hawk-dove model), and this leads to canalization of preferences for obviously desirable traits like health, but then additional preferences are completely inscrutable randomness.
Because if you’re on the tail then you need someone else on the tail (or at least skewed to your side) while if you’re in the “bulk” then most people (who are also in the bulk) will do?
I can’t disprove that but I see no reason to invoke it either. If there were small clusters or niches or heterogeneity like that, I would still expect approaches like random forests to have found them (that’s exactly what they are brilliant at). And I have already explained why there have to be many severe illusions about how effective any selection process is, because no one experiences adequate sample sizes nor do they ever see the counterfactual. As Bacon asked, “where are the sailors who prayed to the idols and did not return?”
Like Vanessa I’m confused about the tails story.
It is clear to me that people highly sort on class/education/iq when choosing a mate. You are saying this isn’t relevant—purely an artifact of who people hang out with? They could have just as easily found happiness outside their class? (Or is this somehow sneaked in by the hotness factor?)
It seems difficult to believe that this does not factor in to long-term compatibility.
Another: I strongly predict your chance of a successful long-term relationship will be much lower if you date somebody serious mental illness or substance abuse problems.
Perhaps you are only claiming there are no predictors for falling in love rather than long-term compatibility?
In that case, selecting on sensible deal-breakers becomes extra important: you can randomly at any moment fall in love with a completely terrible mate.
If love really is so random—the traditional control that family exerted over young people makes a lot more sense
The randomness theory explains assortative mating variables as a mix of desirability and selection effect. To expand on Kaj’s comment and move away from the STEM/nerd stuff, let’s consider the obvious one of politics. Variables like intelligence, income, or education are part of broadly-agreed upon desirability, OK, fine, so they don’t constitute individually-predictive or dyadic factors beyond the net desirability—but how can we explain Republican vs Democrat that way? Half the population thinks Republicans are better, and the other half Democrats, no net there. Some of these studies will do political-related questions as extremely obvious to ask about, and you do see large correlations between spouse’s (pre-relationship) party affiliation in the US population, but still, the study nulls are null.
Does that mean the studies are wrong somehow? Well, maybe a little: range restriction is a problem here. (I would definitely like more diverse studies here, even if the extent of range restriction in them ironically emphasizes my overall point about selection effects, and doesn’t undermine my other points too much.*) But the population correlates are probably more wrong. Because you can’t click with someone you haven’t met! As the joke goes, “don’t marry for money—spend all your time with rich people & marry for love”; if you choose to spend time only with Republicans because you’re a Republican, you will, of course, only find the Republican you click with, and not the equally numerous Democrats you would have clicked with. (How could it be otherwise? What, would you exude a pheromone that only your Democrats counterparts smell from miles away and snuffle their way to your address to ask you out on a date?) This mere proximity manufactures a population correlate, even though there is no individual correlate—nothing intrinsic about being a Republican makes that person more likely to click with you. The speed-dating gets a null on Rep vs Dem because it forces each side to encounter the other side proportionately much, revealing the proportionately-much click. This is the unseen counterfactual.
So, if you spend all of your time hanging out with STEM nerds or EAers, or if you are a celebrity which spends all their time hanging out with celebrities, or if you are an academic who—hard to believe, I know—spends much of their time interacting with other academics… Some of that is the desirability (high SES etc), and then the default for the rest is just “those are the people you meet, so that’s where you meet the people you can click with”.
This is boring and trivial, but it does have the implication for optimizing dating that you should not try to use simple partisan affiliation per se as a screen because it will just produce false negatives, and throw out people you should’ve tried a date with.
* to argue that ‘range restriction means that these studies are irrelevant to criticisms of dating-checklists because their measures have no useful variation’, you’d have to show that the dating-checklists don’t suffer from the same problem as much or worse. Which given the overlap in subject matter and the relative diversity of ‘a bunch of semi-random students at an ordinary university shanghaied by the researchers’ vs ‘the guys I recruit online via Facebook’, is… implausible.
From personal anecdote it seems pretty clear to me people have idiosyncratic preferences orthogonal to general desirability that are real.
Even spending a lot of time with people that don’t fit those preferences does not make them attractive.
I do take your points about the state of the research.
I can’t disprove that but I see no reason to invoke it either. If there were small clusters or niches or heterogeneity like that, I would still expect approaches like random forests to have found them (that’s exactly what they are brilliant at). And I have already explained why there have to be many severe illusions about how effective any selection process is, because no one experiences adequate sample sizes nor do they ever see the counterfactual.
On the one hand I agree that everything I know about this is anecdotal. On the other hand, am I really supposed to believe it’s a complete coincidence that my spouse is a STEM nerd who reads lots of sci/fantasy and is heavily involved with effective altruism[1]? The replication crisis etc left me with a feeling that when common sense and social science studies disagree, there’s a fair chance the studies are wrong. But, shrugs, what do I know...
Oh, and, another thought. There seems to be a pretty strong trend for celebrities to date other celebrities / show-business people. I think there’s also a trend for academics to date other academics. How come those random forests didn’t detect it?
And, I’m pretty sure there is a lot of selection based on ethnicity and religion (more than explainable by geography). Maybe you meant that this is just a “boring” part which we can assume given for the sake of the discussion?
A possible objection is: my spouse is like this because that’s how I’ve been selecting lovers. Okay, but the same is true about e.g. hotness. The aforementioned studies also weren’t causal interventions with control groups, I assume. (Plus, the selection pressure I applied wasn’t strong enough to explain the outcome.)
I think there’s also a trend for academics to date other academics. How come those random forests didn’t detect it?
Likely because all of the people in question were academics, or at least undergraduate ones, so there was no chance to detect differences in how they matched with non-academics:
Sample A consisted of 163 undergraduate students (81 women and 82 men; mean age = 19.6 years, SD = 1.0) who attended one of seven speed-dating events in 2005. Sample B consisted of 187 undergraduate students (93 women and 94 men; mean age = 19.6 years, SD = 1.2) who attended one of eight such events in 2007. Sample size was determined by the number of speed-dating events we were able to hold in 2005 and 2007 and the number of participants we were able to recruit for each event while maintaining an equal gender ratio. All participants, who were recruited via on-campus flyers and e-mails to participate in a speed-dating study, had the goal of meeting and potentially matching with opposite-sex participants. [...]
The present results were obtained with undergraduate samples; a more demographically diverse sample might exhibit matching by sociological factors such as age, socioeconomic status, cultural background, or religious background.
Has anyone looked into applying some sort of dimension reduction and then looked into whether the people who are high and low on PC2 differ in any sort of identifiable way?
It seems one of the issues coming up here is that I was assuming dating documents would be written out honestly and in good faith. In particular, I was assuming that those that aren’t doing so won’t be taking my advice anyway. I also recognize that there’s a certain degree of self-knowledge I’m assuming, because largely these documents are written by people who have dated enough to know what they do and don’t actually want. I didn’t notice this when writing the document out, but I do now.
I also suspect that the lack of examples given makes it look like I’m endorsing preferences that I don’t want to endorse, purely because I’m telling people to list out their preferences. So for example, it’s not uncommon for women on dating apps to plausible-deniability-joke about a preference for dating men over 6 feet, which isn’t something I’d endorse listing as a dealbreaker. However, if someone is single and already has a child, it makes sense that they’d have dealbreakers related to this, like a potential partner wanting kids at all, and non-negotiables, like details about how they wish to raise and parent their child. Some of these might even be non-negotiables and dealbreakers for people who don’t yet have kids.
For a less child-centric example (because it’s too easy to point to kids as a reason to be upfront): I am a therapist, and know that I have a tendency to do a lot of emotional labor for people I’m close to. In the past, people have taken advantage of this, so I have pretty strict boundaries about how willing I am to do said emotional work for someone I’m dating. As a result, I have a strong preference that anyone I’m dating who would benefit from therapy be in therapy, so they have an outlet for all of this that isn’t me. I’ve seen other dating documents where people mention things like a tendency to get into heated arguments, difficulty understanding their own emotions, high impulsivity, etc. The thing is, these traits could be a big deal for some people, and a non-issue for others. Some therapists don’t have any difficulty setting emotional boundaries with their partners, some people who love arguments are better able to keep themselves in check, etc. So it’s hard to say universally which traits are most important to be discussed upfront, because they differ so widely.
What do you mean by this? Threads where?
In any case, I can’t help but notice that the things you say you base your commentary on fall into two classes:
The content of existing “dating documents”; and…
Essentially, opinion based on personal experience and interaction, having nothing to do with “dating documents”.
Notably absent is any information whatsoever about, or from, actual consumers of actual dating documents, or data about the efficacy of dating documents, or really anything at all about dating documents and their use, other than the contents of the actual documents themselves.
I… don’t quite get this logic. The conclusion seems to not follow from the premise… at all? Could you trace out the chain of reasoning here?
Yes, but what makes your recommended way the right way to write a dating document, or even a good way of writing a dating document, or even a not guaranteed to completely torpedo your chances of ever getting a date again way of writing a dating document? Have you successfully gotten dates after having written a dating document in the way that you recommend? Have other people followed your recommendations and then gotten dates?
But why do you think it’s a great idea? Just because you would prefer it if such things worked?
To be clear, you have no concrete reasons at all to believe that “dating documents” have any effectiveness whatsoever in getting their authors dates, getting them into relationships, etc.? Not even anecdotes?
Threads are largely on Facebook, along with personal conversations. Most of these are with women seeking a nesting partner, and most of these documents are written by men seeking a nesting partner, so in this sense the group I got most of my data from is the target audience. I do think that a lot of this is more generalizable, at least within our community though; knowing whether or not your partner wants kids is useful regardless of gender and sexuality. I think part of what you’re getting at is that it’s ambiguous where each piece of advice is coming from, and you’re definitely right about that—I initially was compiling this information for personal use before deciding it might be worth sharing, hence not having sources and such.
Re the comment you didn’t quite get… the appeal of a dating document is largely from the ability to be upfront about what you want. This is to avoid the common failure mode of dating someone for years only to find a fundamental incompatibility that, if brought up from the start, could have saved a lot of trouble. It’s an attempt to date more efficiently. This is the attitude both readers and writers of these docs bring to the table. In the same way that people might use a specific app to find a specific kind of connection, people have used dating docs as a way of finding someone willing to make things work based on practical alignments like coparenting and such.
I have anecdotal evidence that dating documents are helpful with getting dates, but no actual numbers. What I have found is that the sooner in a relationship couples discuss potential dealbreakers, goals for the future, etc, the more likely they are to either last or have a mutual breakup with no hard feelings. Again, no actual numbers here, but I’m a therapist and have worked with couples and taken workshops that have only supported this belief. In particular, often couples will fall in love, realize that they don’t align on practical things, and then try to make it work anyway, often ending up feeling stuck together (like if they have kids) or having a messy breakup. The reason I think dating documents would work is that they improve upon an existing method for finding a partner, with the addition of built-in disclosures to prevent common failure modes. Plus, even if the document itself isn’t what finds you a match, writing one out is a good exercise in figuring out what you want and showing it to a potential partner is a good way of assessing practical compatibility upfront.
Apologies for not properly answering your questions the first time. It’s been years since I’ve written on LW and I’m both a bit rusty and incredibly nervous. I do appreciate the constructive feedback, and acknowledge that my own experience (being told my ideas are invalid for not having measurable evidence and credible studies to cite) played a part in my response’s tone.
I hate to weigh in with more criticism here, but I’ve also noticed this idea of putting up a long list of requirements on ACX threads and it struck me as rather self-defeating—to imagine that you can usefully define ‘dealbreakers’ in advance and screen people out, or do Zoom calls as the first date instead of in person dates etc.
‘Tell vs Ask culture’ is a great idea and I am fond of telling things too. But telling only works if you can, in fact, ‘tell’ something—unfortunately, when it comes to romance, “we know more than we can tell”. I mean, we live in a world where Mencius Moldbug just got married to a Bard-graduate Peace Corps feminist sex writer for Jezebel! (I can also name among my relatives the improbable pairing of an ardent vegan and her husband, a butcher; decades later, still no sign of divorce.)
It is a trite saying, but it looks like “the heart has reasons reasons know not”, and this catchphrase must be added to the armory along with “the dodo bird verdict” or “the metallic laws” or “correlation!=causation”. I would highlight the studies (excerpts):
https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/2007-kurzban.pdf
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2017-joel.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7431040/
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2020-sparks.pdf
https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/technology/2022-eastwick.pdf
https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/themathematicsofbeauty.html
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)01019-2
Background:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/www.jonathanstray.com/97467f7930b9decf9a1d28071aa425861266436f.pdf
https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/2006-nettle.pdf
https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/www.unm.edu/6888763aec13e565751712e873573288dcc9efdd.pdf / https://www.gwern.net/docs/www/www.larspenke.eu/3f832c213297e15c79a5e96a8db4180aabf7bcfa.pdf
To summarize: everyone agrees on who’s hot or not, and it is better to be hot than not; past that degree of assortative mating, predicting pairwise success of romance appears to be essentially impossible.
I’m particularly impressed by Joel et al 2017, where participants spent half an hour filling out several hundred of the most useful survey/psych questions (many extremely similar to what ‘date documents’ record) first, and past the global ‘hot or not’ ratings everyone could agree on, they throw high-powered random forests at trying to predict pairs of men/women, and the pairwise random forests do not merely fail to add much predictive power, they actually make the predictions worse! I, uh, did not predict that.
If you can take hundreds of participants filling out hundreds of tailored survey items about all their preferences and ideals and desired traits of romantic partners, and our highest-powered statistical methods identify less than zero signal, and this is also consistent with other analyses like asking whether your preferences predict satisfaction with partners (apparently not!), then I cannot see any reason for optimism about ‘dealbreakers’ existing and being so important you should structure all dating based on it. They would appear to be highly negotiable; perhaps true dealbreakers exist only in retrospect (such as at workshops or couples consulting therapists in the middle of messy breakups). Note the pernicious learning problem here inherent to screening: how will you ever learn you were wrong to screen out someone based on a supposed ‘dealbreaker’ if you screen everyone that way? It’s not like you (or anyone else) will randomly pick half to go on a date with anyway and diligently acquire a sample of a few hundred n which can show that the two processes have the same (low) success rate for additional dates/relationships...
If neither you nor anyone else can predict your actual romantic compatibility with a random person beyond the basics of assortative mating, no matter how many questionnaires you fill out or dealbreakers you list, because you will ‘click’ with whomever you click, and that’s the end of it, no point asking ‘why’, the heart has its reasons all your dealbreaker reasons know not, etc, then it seems like one ought to be thinking of dating as a numbers game in finding the maximum of n draws, more like the lottery of apple breeding than filtering airplane flights on Travelocity looking for the perfect flight with zero layovers leaving at noon for $200. When better-than-chance screening is expensive (or impossible), then there’s not much you can do but grow a big field of apple saplings, give each a bite, and wait to get lucky with the next Honeycrisp apple; if you aren’t sampling hundreds, at a minimum (a normal max looks like a log), you’re throwing away a lot of potential gain. The last thing one would want to do is to self-defeatingly throw away lottery tickets based on criteria that won’t matter in the end—each one of them could’ve been Mr Right, no matter how you defined and discarded him as Mr Wrong.
(For the same reason, I am skeptical of attempts to do ‘Zoom first dates’: Zoom is, even at the best of times, alienating and hard to feel any real attachment through. It may be adequate for cold business transactions, but for love...? I think that, like VR for decades, the screen resolution and latency and jitter are simply not there yet, and even something like Project Starline may still be inadequate. So using Zoom may doom a first date that could’ve succeeded, and is worse than dealbreakers because it throws away lottery tickets while wasting a lot more time & effort.)
As far as I can tell, the outcome that the study was trying to predict was perceived compatibility on a four-minute speed date? If that’s the amount of time you have to get to know a person, it doesn’t sound too surprising if the global ‘hot or not’ ratings are the only useful predictor. Many people even reserve deal-breaker questions like “kids or no kids” until the second full date or later.
Given that squidious was talking about cases where people jump into a relationship and might find out about serious problems only much later, e.g. at a point where they might already have kids, it seems that the kinds of long-term issues she was talking about would also go unnoticed in a situation where you only had four minutes to assess the other person.
The authors note this limitation themselves, and seem to say that the actual question squidious is referencing hasn’t even been studied, since it’s methodologically too hard:
Great point. Also, going on speed dates is already a selection effect, for example I consider speed dates to be a waste of time, especially with random people (I think they are usually not preselected?)
Psych questions are not the only info that we can consider here. In advance of actually skimming the studies, here are some things that I predict correlate with relationship success:
Physical proximity
Social status
Financial wealth
IQ (because it positively correlates a little bit with all good things)
Class, with working class people more likely to break up
Height
If none of these correlate with relationship success… I will be much more confused than I currently am.
I don’t know if we’re discussing short-term or long-term success. Are we predicting that they enter into a relationship at all, or that they’re still together 10 years later? I can imagine the latter being much harder to predict. (And one reason I could be bad at predicting the latter is if the former is anti-correlated with it.)
The only things that I know studies have shown to be predictors of how successful a relationship will be are:
- Similar IQ (not necessarily high or low, but similar to each other; can’t remember the study specifically)
- Lack of Gottman’s Four Horsemen: contempt, criticism, stonewalling, defensiveness (though this has largely been studied by Gottman himself because it’s hard to get anyone else to study your theories in psych)
Honestly maybe I should have just listed the four horsemen and left it at that :P
I am confused about the relevance of hotness. Obviously if you’re hot, more people will want to date you. But does it also improve the long-term success probability once you’re already dating? Hot people have more stable relationships?
Also I realize you have actual studies there but to me this unpredictability sounds like something from another planet. Theory: maybe there is substantial difference between “normie” dating (normies are most of the population) and dating for groups that are on the tail of certain distributions (e.g. intelligence)? Because if you’re on the tail then you need someone else on the tail (or at least skewed to your side) while if you’re in the “bulk” then most people (who are also in the bulk) will do?
I don’t know if it improves success conditional on dating someone; I could tell a story either way—being hot makes you more of a keeper, but then, maybe you’ll be quicker to leave. It’s a competitive market. Doesn’t seem too relevant. The point of the hotness part is that when I say ‘dating success is unpredictable’, that’s bracketing the obvious factor, visible to everyone. Obviously you can predict that a supermodel is probably going to get dates. It’s not interesting to say, “a 5 should probably not try to date a 10”. What is very surprising is, “here are a 5 and a 5; you can ask both of them as many questions as you like, of any sort, feed it into your fanciest statistical model if you need to, and you are still not going to outperform a coinflip in predicting how well their date, as far as we can tell from all our failed efforts to do so”. This is especially surprising because we do this all the time with many other apparently equally formidable social prediction tasks like predicting criminal recidivism or child abuse or suicide: the incremental prediction validity might not be great, but at least it’s not frigging negative variance! I’m not sure what other social psych thing seems to be so precisely null predictive.
I agree that it’s very surprising and I’m still looking for a good explanation. The best I have so far is an analogy from evolutionary genetics theories of personality where personality is either stuck as, or possibly deliberately functioning as, a randomizing device (because personality is a hawk-dove model), and this leads to canalization of preferences for obviously desirable traits like health, but then additional preferences are completely inscrutable randomness.
I can’t disprove that but I see no reason to invoke it either. If there were small clusters or niches or heterogeneity like that, I would still expect approaches like random forests to have found them (that’s exactly what they are brilliant at). And I have already explained why there have to be many severe illusions about how effective any selection process is, because no one experiences adequate sample sizes nor do they ever see the counterfactual. As Bacon asked, “where are the sailors who prayed to the idols and did not return?”
Thank you for your scholarship, gwern!
Like Vanessa I’m confused about the tails story. It is clear to me that people highly sort on class/education/iq when choosing a mate. You are saying this isn’t relevant—purely an artifact of who people hang out with? They could have just as easily found happiness outside their class? (Or is this somehow sneaked in by the hotness factor?) It seems difficult to believe that this does not factor in to long-term compatibility.
Another: I strongly predict your chance of a successful long-term relationship will be much lower if you date somebody serious mental illness or substance abuse problems.
Perhaps you are only claiming there are no predictors for falling in love rather than long-term compatibility?
In that case, selecting on sensible deal-breakers becomes extra important: you can randomly at any moment fall in love with a completely terrible mate.
If love really is so random—the traditional control that family exerted over young people makes a lot more sense
The randomness theory explains assortative mating variables as a mix of desirability and selection effect. To expand on Kaj’s comment and move away from the STEM/nerd stuff, let’s consider the obvious one of politics. Variables like intelligence, income, or education are part of broadly-agreed upon desirability, OK, fine, so they don’t constitute individually-predictive or dyadic factors beyond the net desirability—but how can we explain Republican vs Democrat that way? Half the population thinks Republicans are better, and the other half Democrats, no net there. Some of these studies will do political-related questions as extremely obvious to ask about, and you do see large correlations between spouse’s (pre-relationship) party affiliation in the US population, but still, the study nulls are null.
Does that mean the studies are wrong somehow? Well, maybe a little: range restriction is a problem here. (I would definitely like more diverse studies here, even if the extent of range restriction in them ironically emphasizes my overall point about selection effects, and doesn’t undermine my other points too much.*) But the population correlates are probably more wrong. Because you can’t click with someone you haven’t met! As the joke goes, “don’t marry for money—spend all your time with rich people & marry for love”; if you choose to spend time only with Republicans because you’re a Republican, you will, of course, only find the Republican you click with, and not the equally numerous Democrats you would have clicked with. (How could it be otherwise? What, would you exude a pheromone that only your Democrats counterparts smell from miles away and snuffle their way to your address to ask you out on a date?) This mere proximity manufactures a population correlate, even though there is no individual correlate—nothing intrinsic about being a Republican makes that person more likely to click with you. The speed-dating gets a null on Rep vs Dem because it forces each side to encounter the other side proportionately much, revealing the proportionately-much click. This is the unseen counterfactual.
So, if you spend all of your time hanging out with STEM nerds or EAers, or if you are a celebrity which spends all their time hanging out with celebrities, or if you are an academic who—hard to believe, I know—spends much of their time interacting with other academics… Some of that is the desirability (high SES etc), and then the default for the rest is just “those are the people you meet, so that’s where you meet the people you can click with”.
This is boring and trivial, but it does have the implication for optimizing dating that you should not try to use simple partisan affiliation per se as a screen because it will just produce false negatives, and throw out people you should’ve tried a date with.
* to argue that ‘range restriction means that these studies are irrelevant to criticisms of dating-checklists because their measures have no useful variation’, you’d have to show that the dating-checklists don’t suffer from the same problem as much or worse. Which given the overlap in subject matter and the relative diversity of ‘a bunch of semi-random students at an ordinary university shanghaied by the researchers’ vs ‘the guys I recruit online via Facebook’, is… implausible.
From personal anecdote it seems pretty clear to me people have idiosyncratic preferences orthogonal to general desirability that are real. Even spending a lot of time with people that don’t fit those preferences does not make them attractive.
I do take your points about the state of the research.
On the one hand I agree that everything I know about this is anecdotal. On the other hand, am I really supposed to believe it’s a complete coincidence that my spouse is a STEM nerd who reads lots of sci/fantasy and is heavily involved with effective altruism[1]? The replication crisis etc left me with a feeling that when common sense and social science studies disagree, there’s a fair chance the studies are wrong. But, shrugs, what do I know...
Oh, and, another thought. There seems to be a pretty strong trend for celebrities to date other celebrities / show-business people. I think there’s also a trend for academics to date other academics. How come those random forests didn’t detect it?
And, I’m pretty sure there is a lot of selection based on ethnicity and religion (more than explainable by geography). Maybe you meant that this is just a “boring” part which we can assume given for the sake of the discussion?
A possible objection is: my spouse is like this because that’s how I’ve been selecting lovers. Okay, but the same is true about e.g. hotness. The aforementioned studies also weren’t causal interventions with control groups, I assume. (Plus, the selection pressure I applied wasn’t strong enough to explain the outcome.)
Likely because all of the people in question were academics, or at least undergraduate ones, so there was no chance to detect differences in how they matched with non-academics:
Has anyone looked into applying some sort of dimension reduction and then looked into whether the people who are high and low on PC2 differ in any sort of identifiable way?
Agreed that fake dealbreakers are a bad plan. Ignoring real dealbreakers (long term plans around family and finances) is also a bad plan.
It seems one of the issues coming up here is that I was assuming dating documents would be written out honestly and in good faith. In particular, I was assuming that those that aren’t doing so won’t be taking my advice anyway. I also recognize that there’s a certain degree of self-knowledge I’m assuming, because largely these documents are written by people who have dated enough to know what they do and don’t actually want. I didn’t notice this when writing the document out, but I do now.
I also suspect that the lack of examples given makes it look like I’m endorsing preferences that I don’t want to endorse, purely because I’m telling people to list out their preferences. So for example, it’s not uncommon for women on dating apps to plausible-deniability-joke about a preference for dating men over 6 feet, which isn’t something I’d endorse listing as a dealbreaker. However, if someone is single and already has a child, it makes sense that they’d have dealbreakers related to this, like a potential partner wanting kids at all, and non-negotiables, like details about how they wish to raise and parent their child. Some of these might even be non-negotiables and dealbreakers for people who don’t yet have kids.
For a less child-centric example (because it’s too easy to point to kids as a reason to be upfront): I am a therapist, and know that I have a tendency to do a lot of emotional labor for people I’m close to. In the past, people have taken advantage of this, so I have pretty strict boundaries about how willing I am to do said emotional work for someone I’m dating. As a result, I have a strong preference that anyone I’m dating who would benefit from therapy be in therapy, so they have an outlet for all of this that isn’t me. I’ve seen other dating documents where people mention things like a tendency to get into heated arguments, difficulty understanding their own emotions, high impulsivity, etc. The thing is, these traits could be a big deal for some people, and a non-issue for others. Some therapists don’t have any difficulty setting emotional boundaries with their partners, some people who love arguments are better able to keep themselves in check, etc. So it’s hard to say universally which traits are most important to be discussed upfront, because they differ so widely.