Why All Dating Discourse Is Terrible

A while back, the blogger Cartoons Hate Her had a great tweet:

a problem is that basically nobody is “qualified” to talk about dating bc if you’re successful then you don’t have enough experience and if you’re not then why should anyone listen to you

The obvious solution, of course, is for poly people to talk about dating.

You might object that poly people presumably only date poly people, who are a very weird group that doesn't generalize to normal people.¹ This is true, but it is a special case of a general problem, which is that everyone's dating pool is a weird group that doesn't generalize to normal people.

If I were to generalize from my personal experiences dating men,² I'd conclude:

• Men are passive. You must initiate flirting, ask them out, plan all the dates, decide when to escalate commitment, and make all major decisions in the relationship.

• Perhaps relatedly, all men are painfully shy and easily frightened in social situations.

• Men are disagreeable. If you date a man, you will forever have to keep track of all his petty disputes with all your other friends, lest you innocently mention someone in conversation and then get treated to a five-minute disquisition on all their flaws.

• Men find it very attractive when you monologue at them for twenty minutes about American foreign policy during the Cold War.

• Men find it easy to be polyamorous. Monogamous men are a cryptid, like Bigfoot or cisgender heterosexual LARPers.

• Men find it attractive when you're sad and they can help you. If you don't need them, they feel useless and might start directing their disagreeableness at you. Be sure to regularly ask them for things and then thank them.

• Men love cuddles. You should hug men and pet their hair and let them put your head on their chest. The only thing men love more than cuddles is the cuddles being accompanied by facts about American foreign policy during the Cold War.

• To a straight man, the ideal woman is Michelle Rodriguez from The Fast and The Furious. The best things a straight woman can do for her attractiveness are cut her hair, stop shaving her pits, and wear tanktops everywhere. (Motor oil stains optional but encouraged.)

Obviously, this is nonsense.

I don't consciously search for shy, passive, disagreeable, cuddly men with a crush on Michelle Rodriguez. It feels subjectively like that that's the only kind of man that exists. But in reality, I'm selecting for these men in ways I don't notice. Sometimes I select particular people by displaying my own traits. (I have bright green hair and visible biceps. I infodump about the book I'm reading at the slightest provocation.) Sometimes the way I approach relationships filters people out. (I flirt in a very assertive, direct way, which means I attract more passive partners.) Sometimes I myself am subconsciously seeking particular traits. (I gravitate towards the person in the room with the most anxious body language. I once went on a date with a girl and it felt super weird and dissonant for no reason I could name, until I suddenly realized that she always agreed with me.)

Everyone agrees that your social group filters your partners for you. You meet different people at the Society for Creative Anachronism than you do at an evangelical Christian megachurch, and people who go to loud nightclubs are different from either of them. Even if you're on a dating app, Tinder has a different culture than OKCupid,³ which in turn is different from Grindr. And if your dating site profile shows off your blue hair and pronoun pin, you'll have a different dating pool than if you have a MAGA hat and a shotgun.

But monogamous people often underestimate the strength of filtering happening within a particular social group. When you're poly, you see a much larger sample size of other people's partners, which makes you realize just how hard everyone is filtering. If Alice is dating one person, well, that one person has any number of idiosyncratic traits. If Alice is dating five people, you suddenly realize that everyone she dates is a blonde exvangelical programmer who conscientiously drives at the speed limit.

Sometimes this is tragic. I had a girlfriend in college who dated the worst people. Like, I'm not even talking about the multiple rapists, or the fact that in spite of being a bi poly atheist, she dated multiple people who attended Pensacola Christian College. That barely touches on the exciting new vistas of terribleness her partners were constantly pioneering. I'm talking "tell her that she should either lose weight or gain weight, because right now she's too fat for normal people and not fat enough for fetishists like him."⁴

I remember asking her, "where the hell do you find these people?" I don't mean to victim-blame—her partners' awful behavior was their own fault, not hers. And I knew she wasn't consciously choosing to date people who treated her like shit. But clearly she was, on some level, filtering for terrible people.

People filter for terrible partners less dramatically, too. "Why do women all hate sex?" "Why are men all misogynists?" "Why are all queer people batshit Communists?" "Why are all men/women/people commitmentphobes?" Because you're picking them.

"If all your partners suck, it's because you're choosing partners who suck" is conventional wisdom. But the filter is equally powerful about everything else. It has the power to make all your girlfriends transgender, or into musical theater, or extroverted, or ambitious women who want to romantically do your quarterly reviews together.

And this is why dating discourse is always stupid.

I can say all kinds of true things about how to date the kind of people I date. "You should ask them out," for example, or "they are just really into tank tops", or "you can drag them to whatever activities you like best and they’ll just go along with this", or "have you considered that all your best friends can be your exes?" And all of this advice is completely fucking useless unless you happen to be filtering for the same people I am.

Conversely, a straight woman who says "men like chaste aspiring stay-at-home moms with long hair and no tattoos" might well be accurately reporting her experience. But she herself is filtering. Maybe she gives off a very trad vibe; maybe she has hair down to her butt; maybe she herself dismisses guys with tattoos without a second thought; maybe she keeps opening conversations by talking about her favorite antifeminist YouTubers. Whatever.

Another woman who wants (say) a religiously serious family man with a good job might well find that men in her dating pool are indifferent to tattoos but care deeply about whether she likes reading science fiction and playing D&D. Presumably, she projects a shy, nerdy vibe—the kind of girl an Orson Scott Card fan wants to take home to Mom.

All this means that people's advice and complaints primarily reflect, not great truths about love and dating and gender relations, but their own idiosyncratic way of moving through the world. So even in the best cases, where no one is making up emotionally satisfying daydreams, dating discourse winds up consisting of people lobbing anecdotes back and forth at each other, each person accurately representing their own lives.

1. As opposed to dating bloggers and influencers, who are very normal people who only ever have typical experiences.

2. I chose "men" because the generalizations are funnier than my generalizations about dating women.

3. Do people still use OKCupid?

4. People keep assuming I was an exception and, lol, I had poorly handled borderline personality disorder, I was not. I flatter myself that I was above average in quality among her partners, though.