Interesting article about dating in small town compared to large cities

[loverboy1984]

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200910/why-dating-is-difficult-in-new-york-or-london

[grkBoy]

If someone reports this as spam, I'm going to go ballistic.

 

Reading, then I will discuss.

[Memphis Raines]

i love dating being in a small town where most everyone knows each other.

 

you have knowledge about the other people. just like I got to turn down a woman that was known to have slept with a few other women's husbands.

 

and i know who can't be trusted as far as you can throw them.

 

not to mention, when you have good women going through divorce, or have been divorced because of their jackass husbands, they also know which guys in town can be trusted. which works well for me.

[grkBoy]

It's pretty much saying you get too many choices in a big city.

 

Plus I personally think in a big city you're more prone to running into clashing ideologies. So the girl who dreams of the house in the burbs, husband, children, etc...might run into a lot of guys who never want kids, never want to get married, and only want a nice condo in the big city.

 

In a small town I imagine you'll find many more like-minded folk, although irc333 has been saying for a while how his potential singles still hold the "I'll die alone before I settle" viewpoint and thus these men and women hold the bar high for people who will never appear to them in the small towns...or they go after the married ones.

[Sanman]

An interesting mathematical take on what many already know...a bigger pond means more (sometimes too many) fish. The problem with NYC dating has always been grass is greener syndrome. People who would be considered a good catch anywhere else are not that in NYC. People are also more impatient. Why date the guy in line for the big promotion when you can date plenty of guys who already have the promotion. There will always be something better here. What most fail to consider is whether that better will be willing to have a long-term, honest, faithful partnership to them.

[Imajerk17]

Interesting article, and my background is in a quantitative field so I understand the mathematical reasoning.

 

One flaw is that women do not know what "n"--the number of men they will meet in their lifetime--really is. Another flaw is assuming that women pick rationally. But even then, a good approximation for that strategy (no matter who large it looks like "n" might be) is for a woman to look to settle down when she reaches 27 years old or so (when she is around 37% through her dating career), with the next guy she dates who is cooler than all of her previous boyfriends. And if she doesn't meet that guy, lower her bar slowly until she meets a guy who meets her standards. So I'm not sure it is the number of prospects that make dating hard for women in NYC.

 

Instead, NYC actually has many more single women than single men. So a woman might pick a man who doesn't pick her back. A man has a lot of options there. That I think would dating hard for women there.

[ivalm]

The article is a good example of how NOT to apply game theory. It is true, for a sequential game where you can accept or reject and the other party accepts that decision (and where choices are serial and you can't go back), the presented strategy is optimal.

 

However, real dating is NOTHING like this game and, thus, the evolutionary preferred behavior is NOT what is presented in the article.

 

In fact, we don't simply date and accept/reject in series. People are exposed to A LOT of DIFFERENT individuals, real or not, directly or indirectly (via media, spoken word, etc) that are NOT within our dating sphere, yet that shape our opinion of what is a "good partner." We often change our opinions and can go back and forth between friendship, dating, and other social interaction phases. Furthermore, men do reject women, which completely CHANGES the optimal solution (in the terminology of the article, the prettiest boy doesn't want most (ie, n-1) girls and so it is sub-optimal for the girl to go after the prettiest boy, in fact, it is probably the WORST possible solution).

 

Also, remember that our partner selection is highly affected by social conditioning. In years not long ago, many women married after only several suitors as this was considered "the norm," and there was little option for divorce. Even definition of "prettiness" have shifted, as, for example, for women: in the 19th century we had preference for "curvy" , in early 20th century we had preference for "flat chested" , in mid-late 20th century we had "twiggy", and now we have "slim but well endowed."

 

So, to conclude, I agree that there is some degree of "grass is greener" effect, yet saying that this serial bachelorette game represents the real (or even approximates the real) problem of dating is silly. The presented solution in not optimal in real life and it empirically is not the solution most women use (as can be seen from history).

Edited August 29, 2011 by ivalm