valentine special: the macro online date-onomics

and how does this reflect romantic relationships, at all?

Did you wonder why you were so fucking alone last Valentine? And still are?

Did you find dating, more specifically online dating, is absolutely horrifying, and you would rather eat a toe?

Did/do you by chance have a penis?

Luckily I’m here to have an explanation for you.

It’s almost cliché to say that men are more visual than women.

That’s why they like big screens, fast cars, and those weird deep-sea fish with lights on their heads. It’s also why they’re supposedly the harsher judges of attractiveness, quick to decide whether a woman is a 10 or a nah within seconds.

Meanwhile, women are thought to be more interested in personality, humor, and a man’s ability to provide—whether that means financial security or just the patience to assemble an IKEA bookshelf without breaking down in tears.

But is that really the case? Here’s what I found interesting:

When asked to rate the attractiveness of an average man or woman, men are actually far more generous than women.

That’s right—despite all the talk about men being superficial, they’re significantly more likely to shrug and say, “Yeah, bang, next question” while women stare at a perfectly normal-looking guy like forensic scientists analyzing a crime scene.

But why does this even matter? Because dating has become a high-stakes game, where people decide your entire worth in the time it takes to dismiss a YouTube ad.

Worse, we’re living in a world where no one actually looks like themselves anymore. Social media has cranked up the beauty scale so high that normal human faces now seem defective, like a factory error. If women are already strict graders, this is only making things worse—raising the question: At what point does a man just give up and list himself on eBay instead?

So what happens next? Are men simply doomed to a life of being slightly below expectations? Should they invest in professional lighting? Or are we all just one bad filter away from realizing none of this even matters?

In the next bit, we’ll investigate whether dating is actually broken—or if we’ve just made it so complicated that no one wants to play anymore.

TABLE OF CONTENTS  
1. the unbalanced scale of hot
2. the macro online date-onomics 
3. the widespread lonely epidemic

1. the unbalanced scale of hot

I think it should be fairly safe to say that, in the grand scheme of online dating, the likeliness to get a date is closely correlated with the likeliness that people find you attractive.

Now, “attractive” can mean a lot of things. “Attractive” means “being able to attract", and a lot of things in a homo sapien can attract potential mates, like looks, humour, kindness, looks, humility, generosity, looks, etc.

But sadly, judging by how the most popular dating apps are designed, “attractive” often means “hot”. “Hot” in terms of looks, not temperature.

How does “hot” determine your chance of getting a date, and actually, how hot you are?

I came across this really interesting blog by OkCupid, one of the most popular websites that you have never heard of, analysing how different women and men judge the opposite gender’s hotness and, correlationally, how likely they are to text. I would try to re-explain the information.¹

We’ll start with a simple line chart. The information I’ll present in this post is not normalized because, as we’ll see, it’s interesting how men and women evaluate looks differently.

Right, so here’s a chart of how men have rated women, on a very scientific scale from 0 to 5. And surprisingly, men have been quite fair about it.

The curve is all nice and symmetrical, a proper classic bell shape, which means men reckon women are just as likely to look like a Greek goddess as they are to resemble a melted candle. Most, though, sit somewhere in the middle, in what Gen Zs would call “mid”, short for “middle” if you don’t know.

Now, considering we’re constantly told that Hollywood, Instagram, and Photoshop have turned men into drooling idiots who expect every woman to look like they’ve just stepped out of a perfume advert, this chart is actually quite refreshing. It turns out that men are, on the whole, pretty realistic. Who knew? I’m a man and I’m surprised.

But before we go congratulating ourselves too much, let’s add another layer to this chart: the messages they actually send. And that’s when things start to get interesting.

When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten. Statistically speaking, men don’t settle. They go big or go home jerking off by themselves.

The female equivalent of the above chart shows a different bias:

Right, so according to this chart, women apparently think that the majority of men look like they’ve been hit in the face with a wet sock. That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? I mean, statistically speaking, most people should be average-looking because that’s what “average” means. Right in the middle, where most people are.

But no—women have decided that “medium” is actually somewhere near the top, and most men are just below average. Ugly little gremlins, if you allow me.

Now, here’s where it gets weird: despite rating nearly all men as visually offensive to the eyes, women still go ahead and message them.

This raises an important question—are they just sending pity messages? Or are they thinking, “Well, he looks like a human thumb, but maybe he’s got a nice personality”? Either way, something’s not adding up.

So, before we get the answer to that, which of course would need a more scientific approach than doing a survey on a dating site, in the end, it turns out it’s not men who have unrealistic expectations—it’s women. Shocking, really. The whole thing seems a bit like a game where no one understands the rules, but the winners are the people who look like they belong in a perfume advert.

This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s.

Now let’s take a look at how senders’ and recipients’ attractiveness affect reply rates, not just the number of messages sent.

As you’d expect, more attractive people get more replies. And since they themselves get so many more messages than everyone else, they write back much less frequently. Here’s the graph for female senders, plotted in evenly-spaced “attractiveness groups.”

And here’s the one for male senders.

Now, here’s something odd: when really good-looking men message women who’ve been rated less attractive, their success rate drops like a bad soufflé.

The obvious explanation would be that these men are just incredibly handsome spammers, firing off messages like some sort of well-groomed spambots. But OkCupid’s controlled for that—because they are very serious scientists—and besides if that were true, why would the more attractive women be falling for it?

No, something else is going on here. Probably a self-confidence thing. Or maybe these women just assume it’s a trap. Like, “Why is this man, who looks like he belongs in Hollywood, talking to me? Is he part of a hidden camera show? Am I about to be scammed?”

Finally, let’s throw all these numbers onto a chart so we can see, in cold, hard data, just how much your face affects your chances of getting a reply. Unsurprisingly, the more attractive you are, the more likely you get a reply. And the more Y chromosomes you have, the less likely you are also to get a reply.

2. the macro online date-onomics

Meeting online is the most common way to meet your partner now. Online and dating are the two words that now go hand in hand together, toward a miserable yet lengthy marriage. You cannot talk about dating without talking about online.

Online dating is a big sorting hat, instead of putting you into Gryffindor or Hufflepuff, it puts you into "Gets Matches" or "Invisible."

Women, for example, swipe right on men over 1.8 meters tall, or if you want to be weird about it, around 6 feet, most of the time, even though in real life they’d probably settle for someone with a personality.

But that makes sense—when you’ve got two seconds to make a decision, you go with the visible and obvious: height, jawline, and whether or not he looks like he eats soup with his hands.

a. how online dating change dating dynamics

But it’s not just about swiping. Online dating has fundamentally changed how people approach relationships.

Back in the day, if you wanted to leave a relationship, you had to do it the hard way—by walking out the door and risking running into them on your way to school.

Now, you can ghost someone while sitting on the toilet, knowing there are literally millions of other people out there ready to replace them. If your partner so much as breathes weirdly, why stick around? Just keep swiping until you find someone who doesn’t sound like a punctured accordion.

Turns out, this has consequences. Couples who meet on apps are much more likely to break up in the first three years than those who meet through friends and family.² Probably because friends and family actually know what you’re like and set you up with someone who won’t flee at the first sight of your “fun fact” about trains.

Also, there’s social pressure—if your mum introduced you, you can’t break up without her knowing. And no one wants that kind of conversation unless it’s super necessary.

The other thing dating apps have done is industrialize hypergamy, which is a fancy word for “dating up.” Women want the best men, no matter where they are on the social ladder. Men also want the best women, but crucially, they’re much more picky.

Biologically, this does not make any sense in the slightest—sperm is basically free, try to ask for any on social media and a bunch of creeps will fly into your inbox. But eggs, eggs are expensive. If sperm was money, it would be Monopoly cash. Eggs are the gold bars in the banks.

But dating apps don’t actually match people up into perfect couples.

The top 4.5% of men get most of the attention³, while the bottom 95.5% of men fight over the women who aren’t swiping right on the same top-tier guys. It’s like a game of musical chairs where most people don’t even get a chair, and the ones who do aren’t sitting down for long.

Women, optimally, will all try to date these top men, but crucially, they also want relationships, while the men mostly just want… not that. And why wouldn’t they? If you’re a man with infinite options, why pick just one when you can be the human equivalent of a sample platter?

So what’s left is this weird, lopsided system. Men swipe on everyone hoping for a match, women swipe only on a select few, and the dating apps sit back and watch, knowing that no one is ever really happy. But don’t worry—next time you get ghosted, just remember: it’s not you, it’s the algorithm.

Statistically, an average-looking bloke can expect about one “like” for every 115 women who see his profile. Which means that if he wants a date, his best bet is to just keep swiping until his thumb falls off.

This creates a weird paradox where both men and women end up lonelier. Women aren’t getting the commitment they want from the top men, and men aren’t getting anything at all.

A staggering 28% of men under 30 reported having no sex in the past year, which is double what it was a decade ago⁴. That’s not just an increase—that’s a medieval level of celibacy. In the past, these men would have been sent to monasteries or off to fight in wars. Now, they just stay in their bedrooms watching porn and arguing with strangers on Reddit. Progress.

b. the matching problem—supply and demand

Sex ratios shape dating culture in big ways.

Scientists have discovered that people change their romantic behavior depending on how many of them there are.⁵

If there aren’t many women around, women are very reserved, like Victorian heroines waiting for a marriage proposal. But when there are too many women, they decide casual relationships are fine after all.

On the other hand, if there are too many men, the men start pretending they’re deeply interested in commitment as if they’ve just discovered the concept of emotional stability. If there are too few of them, they start to act like the protagonist of a harem anime.

It’s almost as if dating works like a market—supply and demand.

Dating apps mess with this balance, creating an artificial sex ratio where there are way more "dateable" women than men. Men, having the standards of a Labrador retriever, swipe on nearly everyone. strategically. Women, on the other hand, filter ruthlessly.

Women tend to date across or up in terms of status, while men will date across or down. But here’s the issue: women are now 60% of college students. The median woman is starting to outearn the median man.

Meanwhile, a significant portion of men aged 25-54 are unemployed or have simply left the workforce altogether. More men aged 18-34 are living with their parents than with a romantic partner. Which means that even though lots of women want a relationship, there simply aren’t enough “successful” men to go around.

There are four possible solutions to this mess:

1. Women start dating down economically (unlikely, since most women would rather eat glass than date a man who calls himself an “entrepreneur” but has no income).

2. The median man magically starts outearning the median woman (but considering many men’s main hobbies are energy drinks and conspiracy theories, that seems improbable).

3. Generally normalised polyamory (so that the best men can date multiple women, and women can date multiple men).

4. [Most likely] Society just stops marrying altogether, and people turn to artificial wombs and AI girlfriends (so we all get a dystopian future and no sex). Not far fetch if we’re looking East and see Japan and Korea out there in the water drowning in low birth rates.

None of these options sound great. But history tells us that a society with too many single, frustrated men is a very bad idea. There’s even a theory for this: Bare Branches.

The idea is that if enough men are cut off from the family tree, they’ll eventually get angry enough that the government has to find something for them to do, like start a war. Throughout history, these surplus men were often sent off to fight, invade, or just generally cause havoc.

Monogamy used to be a social technology designed to keep this whole system from descending into chaos. Societies that practiced monogamy flourished because they solved the “extra men” problem. Everyone got a partner, more or less, and things were relatively stable. But that only worked when there were enough decent men to go around.

Of course, zooming out, even the idea of romantic love is pretty new. Historically, marriage had very little to do with love and everything to do with making sure your family didn’t lose their sheep farm.

Nietzsche (who, to be fair, was not known for his thriving love life) pointed out that romantic love had already started to ruin marriage by the late 1800s. Tocqueville observed that in America, they didn’t arrange marriages—but they did make sure their daughters picked wisely.

And even then, love wasn’t about butterflies and stolen glances—it was about picking someone who would be a good parent to your kids. Over time, that kind of partnership turned into something deeper, something more meaningful than just the desire to jump into bed with each other.

The real issue is that modern dating has swung so far in the opposite direction that it’s now mostly about optimizing for the shallowest traits possible. In the past, people didn’t choose their partners at all.

Now, we choose them based on their height, abs, and ability to take a mirror selfie. In trying to find “the best,” we may have lost sight of what actually makes relationships work.

Or maybe we’ve just collectively run out of good men.

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3. the widespread lonely epidemic

I think I will never do the topic of dating justice if I don’t talk about actual economics related to dating. Because the problem of dating is not as minor as the problem of being slightly fed up with your mom's cooking.

When large numbers of men check out of the dating game, it doesn’t just mean more male loneliness epidemics, it does, but that’s beside the point—it means fewer marriages, fewer kids, and eventually, an aging population that is not at all suitable for working.

a. fewer marriages, fewer kids

Legally speaking, one can only marry one, unfortunately for the weeb who’s obsessed with the idea of a harem. But since one can only marry one, you can see the problem when everyone’s competing in the top 20% and pretending the remaining 80% don’t exist. 20% of men in the world are around 800 million men. These 800 million men will settle for another 800 million women. The rest of the world is just going to have to compromise, or die lonely, or both.

This phenomenon is part of the reason marriage rates are plummeting, and birth rates are following close behind.

It’s not just a trend—it’s a full-blown shift in how societies function. Countries like Japan and South Korea are already feeling the effects of this change, with record-low birth rates and an increasing number of people opting out of relationships altogether.

The consequences of this aren’t just personal—they're deeply structural. With fewer marriages come fewer kids, and when birth rates tank, a country starts walking toward demographic decline.

Fewer marriages mean fewer households pooling resources to buy homes, invest in their futures, and build generational wealth. Housing markets shift as demand fluctuates, and economic inequality widens.

The traditional path of "get married, buy a house, have kids, save for retirement" is becoming less of a default setting and more of a privilege reserved for a shrinking portion of the population.

b. an aging workforce

Sorry for looking at humans only in terms of their labour value and not who they are on the inside, but theoretically speaking, fewer babies today mean fewer workers tomorrow. And when a country’s workforce shrinks, the entire economy takes a hit.

Think about it—fewer young workers mean fewer taxpayers, fewer consumers, and an ever-growing population of retirees who rely on social services. Everything provided to the dependants does not grow on trees quite literally, they will have to come from someone else.

Countries like Germany, known for the high quality of their products, and China, known for the high quality of their knock-off German products, are scrambling to stop their populations from shrinking into oblivion.

Their strategies? A delightful mix of throwing money at families, pushing robots into factories, and politely suggesting that people just keep working until they drop.

Take China, for instance. For decades, the government enforced the one-child policy with an iron fist, only to realize—much too late—that if you stop people from having kids, you eventually run out of workers.

Worse, since Chinese culture is heavily biased towards men, if people get only one shot at having kids, you doctors better make sure my child has a penis when it comes out.

And since that, the male surplus problem has come become quite fucking disastrous, the whole countrywide.

Who would have thought? Since 2016, they’re frantically reversing course, rolling out incentives like tax breaks, housing subsidies, and even direct cash payments to encourage childbirth. But funnily enough, it turns out people don’t particularly want to have more kids when the cost of raising them is astronomical and work-life balance is a distant dream.

So, China is also leaning heavily into automation, building eerily efficient factories where robots do all the work. Meanwhile, there’s talk of raising the retirement age, because when the young won’t work, you can always just make the old keep going. Genius.

Germany’s fucking worrying chart—the Steptone Group

Germany, on the other hand, has taken a different approach. Instead of convincing Germans to have more babies—an effort about as successful as getting a cat to fetch—it has opted to import its future workforce. The country has been actively recruiting skilled workers from abroad and welcoming migrants to fill labor gaps, most notably during the 2015 refugee crisis.

On top of that, Germany’s government offers generous parental benefits, childcare support, and, crucially, paid time off—things that might actually make people consider having children. And like China, Germany is also investing in robots, because if humans don’t do the job, machines definitely will.

At the heart of it, both countries are facing the same crisis but responding in ways that highlight their cultural differences. China, with its strict control overpopulation policies, is relying on internal adjustments—automation, workforce restructuring, and incentives—while Germany, with its more open social model, is betting on immigration to keep things running.

In the end, though, both nations are just trying to answer the same existential question: if no one wants to have kids, who exactly is going to run the economy in 50 years?

d. incels

When you have a massive pool of men who feel left out of the dating economy, strange things start to happen. Throughout history, large groups of unmarried, disconnected men have been linked to political instability, extremism, and social unrest.

Evidently, back in late Qing Dynasty China, there weren’t enough women to go around, which—shockingly—turned out to be a problem. Thanks to a mix of female infanticide, rich blokes hoarding wives, and just some truly horrendous math, the country ended up with loads of unmarried men wandering about with nothing to do.

They were called "bare branches" (光棍, guānggùn), which sounds quite poetic until you realize it’s just a fancy way of saying "blokes with no chance of a date."

The big question isn’t whether the world will adapt—it always does—but how. And I can think of one of the most obvious and straightforward ways that people, men specifically, adapt to the modern dating scene: incels (involuntary celibate).

When large numbers of men find themselves locked out of the dating market, many start looking for explanations. In the age of the internet, that search often leads them to incel communities—online spaces where romantic frustration festers into resentment. At first, these forums serve as places to vent, but over time, self-pity hardens into anger.

The narrative shifts from "dating is hard" to "the system is rigged against us." Women are no longer individuals with preferences; they become shallow and hypergamous, always chasing the top 10% of men.

Society itself is blamed for “feminizing” men, making them less desirable and stripping them of the status they once had. Some take it even further, believing they are genetically doomed to be alone, convinced that no amount of self-improvement can change their fate.

This isn’t just harmless online frustration—it has real-world consequences. Some incels withdraw entirely from society, dropping out of work, social life, and even basic self-care. Others spiral deeper into conspiracy theories, feeding each other a worldview where women are the enemy.

In extreme cases, this resentment has turned into violence, with self-identified incels carrying out mass attacks as acts of revenge. What started as a dating imbalance has become a cultural and psychological crisis, breeding loneliness, radicalization, and, in some cases, real harm.

Put simply:

a society where a huge number of men feel disconnected from family life is not a stable society, regardless of whose fault that is.

where does this leave us?

Fixing this won’t be easy. Dating apps have no incentive to fix it (they make money off frustration), and people aren’t going to suddenly stop seeking the “best” partner available.

So, what’s the way out? It might require rethinking how relationships form in the first place—maybe shifting away from hyper-globalized dating apps back to more localized, community-driven ways of meeting people. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ll all just have to accept that the dating economy is just as broken as everything else.

Either way, if you’re stuck swiping with no luck—congratulations. You’re just another victim of capitalism.

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conclusion

Online dating was supposed to democratize romance, offering limitless possibilities at our fingertips. Instead, it has formalized attraction into an algorithmic economy—one that mirrors real-world inequalities but magnifies them at scale.

The result? A small percentage of men reap most of the rewards, while the majority navigate a landscape of dwindling matches, fading hope, and an ever-growing sense of detachment.

As women outpace men in education and earnings, the traditional dating script is coming apart at the seams. The old model—one where men provided stability and women sought security—no longer holds. But no viable replacement has emerged. Instead, we see a fractured market where high-status men hoard attention, women raise their standards, and the median man quietly exits the game.

So what happens next? Society must recalibrate. Some will embrace new norms: polyamory, transactional relationships, or AI-driven companionships. Others will push for a cultural shift, urging women to "date down" or men to "step up." But perhaps the real question isn’t just about solutions—it’s about consequences. In optimizing for endless options, have we sacrificed what actually matters?

Dating apps promised us freedom, but in the end, they may have only delivered fragmentation.

footnote

1. Christian Rudder, Your Looks and Your Inbox, Dating Research from OkCupid

2. The report, by the Marriage Foundation, suggests that those who meet online are at higher risk of divorce because they could be 'relative strangers' when they marry. The report surveyed 2,000 people who had married aged 30 or over. Research has found that 12% of couples who met over the Internet did not make their third – anniversary, compared to just 2% who found love via family or friends.

3. Neyt, B., Vandenbulcke, S., & Baert, S. (2019). Are men intimidated by highly educated women? Undercover on Tinder. Economics of Education Review, 73.

4. According to the General Social Survey

5. Moss, J. (2015). Imbalanced Gender Ratios Could Affect Views About Casual Sex and Hook-Up Culture. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin