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I am both older and was dating on Tinder until 2 years ago (until I met my current girlfriend there). My experience of being a mid-fifties, pudgey, 5,11 (not even over the magical 6 foot barrier!) partially retired academic is that I was able to attract much younger, more attractive women than I would expect. Sure my British accent helps with dating in the US but I will give you an anecdote that was repeated across a large spectrum of the women I dated in that time.
Most were between 25 and 40, professional, smart and often making more money than I do. I'll call one Sandra. She was 30, a computer programmer earning 6 figures, graduated college at 18 and smart, beautiful and accomplished. On our third date I made her breakfast in the morning, and she burst into tears. It emerged that no man had EVER cooked for her. She had even lived with a serious boyfriend between 24 and 29 and he never once cooked, cleaned or did laundry. The fact I had a decorated place with a bed frame and not just a mattress on the floor was a marvel to her. The fact I could cook a few dishes (and I am far from the worlds greatest cook) was astonishing. That I could actually run my own life. I broke up with her because there were some compatibility issues, but she would be a terrific catch.
The 27 yo journalist from New York I dated had similar stories to tell. As did the 33 yo doctor and the 31 yo nurse. Their experience is that what they call high-value men are very rare. But to me what they were even looking for in high-value men is the bare minimum. So the proposition that emerges is that while women's standards may have increased, it seems equally possible that the standard of men has in fact decreased. They were clearly willing to date men who made less than they did, because I made less than virtually all of them. They were also willing to date less accomplished men from a life skills point of view because that is what they had been doing!
If you can cook at least a few basic dishes, make your home look like something livable, dress and groom yourself to a decent standard (including picking out a cologne/scent to smell good, which is in my experience really important) then you are ahead of a lot of men 25-35 in North East of the United States at least as far as I can tell. I'm a chubby, hairy man in my 50's who works part time and otherwise lives off my pension. I should not be able to compete with well put together 25-35yo men in the prime of their life for women who are significantly more attractive than I am. But there appear to be very few of those to compete with.
I courted my first wife when I was 19, 35 or so years ago, and her standards were high. Here and now, if anything women's standards on average appear to be lower as far as I can tell. Now it is quite possibly also true that there are fewer high value women as well, but it's fairly easy to filter for those you want. And at least if you work or live in a city, there are literally thousands to pick from.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Yes, yes, we've heard it all before. 'Just have the skills of a functioning adult and women will flock to you'. Barring all the cases we've seen of where this is... not the case, just because I can make a cheesecake and cook steak with ease doesn't mean the random spawn chance for 'eligible and interested girlfriend' is magically going to bump up in percentage.
You yourself stated that you're partially retirted(IE, have lots of money), academic(IE, likely have a large amount of social skills), likely had your own domicile, exotic factor(british accent), and probably a large number of other factors you haven't mentioned. Congrats, you were a sugar daddy! Older man, lots of money, lots of social catchet, and you're wondering in confusion as to why you were able to pull younger women compared to men thier age?
Man, take the beam out of your own eye before you try to remove the splinter from others.
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I habitually cook and make all the other food-related decisions (ie. what to purchase, when to purchase it, where to go eat out etc.) in our family, and it amazes me how my wife reports that other women, including her mother, have gushed over this when she talks about it. It's fun, relaxing and means that since I take care of the entirety of a large sector of domestic housework I mostly get a free pass on others (chiefly cleaning, which I find fairly less relaxing), what's not to like? And it makes sure you're always in charge of what you get to eat.
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Yes she started settling at 30. Leaving her what, the opportunity to have maybe 3 (healthy) kids at best if he's lucky?
Some women get married at 18. She graduated early but too bad she was the wrong sex for that to matter for her romantic prospects. She had been rejecting marriage for over 12 years!
Who believes that? If he's serious he puts a ring on it within a year. Smart and beautiful woman gets strung along for 5 years. Many such cases! Sad! That must be the one lesson she skipped by spending so much effort on government school.
I know women in the same age range / cohort as these women who are currently married with children and cohabited with their future husbands for years, many of them for more than five years. One of them has been together with the same man for 22 years, and their first child is only 4 years old. Another one cohabited with her man for around 7 years before they had their first child. And so on. So this approach does actually work. (And no, expecting men to put a ring on it within a year is usually not a viable approach.) I’m not saying this is normal, or should be normal, because it takes abnormal levels of self-control, foresight and low time preference on both sides, but not only can it work, but I believe this is unfortunately the only viable approach in the current mating market for people who want to have a family.
However, one crucial aspect is that none of these women paired up with men who “never once cooked, cleaned or did laundry”, or displayed characteristics similar to these – instead, their partners gave obvious signals of willing to maintain a long-term relationship (which is why I find it strange that you left the second half of that sentence out when replying to it). Then again, noticing such signals and then attracting such men into relationships is something the average woman has been capable of doing for millions of years, so I’m sure it’s not that difficult. So yes, I agree that the smart and beautiful woman you mentioned was indeed foolishly strung along for 5 years.
Well being a functional adult seems like a prerequisite to get married since the point of marriage is to be in charge of children.
While it's possible to never have had to cook, 'learning how to prepare food' is as simple as watching a few youtube videos.
A woman with an aggressive approach to marriage should do just that (and not wait to be in her late 20s to get aggressive either).
For the 2015 woman I recommend joining alt-right circles. For the 2023 woman there's America First.
A woman that would go out of her way to find a man that is interested in cooking is actually a red flag in my point of view.
That means that she is either not too motivated to cook because she doesn't like it, she doesn't like the idea of pleasing her husband and family, is unconfident in her (poor) cooking skills...
Or that she expects her husband to shoulder a large share of cooking duty because her family is so non-traditional that she cannot expect any female relative to ever help when she is heavily pregnant, postpartum or sick.
That latter one is incredibly common and you should consider it carefully with the rest of that potential wife if you ever want a large family.
Unless you already have an incredibly supportive family which will provide more than enough help, but then why would you have any issue getting married, what did you do with that highschool sweetheart arranged by your parents before your birth?
What proper women should be looking for imo is a man that is capable of being a single income earner and provide moral guidance to the family.
Having a healthy supportive family is also very important but again, people like that get off the market really quickly.
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I appriciate the hopium but you are aware that not a single one of those things can be conveyed through online right? After all they wont be able to tell if I can make a bed or cook from a photo.
When there is so much overwhelming data that only the top percentile attractive men have any sucess at all on OLD, I dont think any further conversation on the matter would be fruitful. Congrats on your success nonetheless.
My wider point was the damage done to the social fabric by the Internet. There are nth order effects. Imagine Sandra meets a guy and likes him her friend who is an OLD fiend might make a drunken remark about how Sandra could do better. Sandra could technically do better. Sandra gets marginally anxious about her status. But that comment wouldnt be made if the social fabric wasnt frayed. Sandra would have better friends, etc etc.
Sure they can, if you pick the right pictures. One of mine for example was a picture of me cooking. Another was of me helping a friend build a wall. In your profile, put that you are taking cooking classes and ask to swap recipes. Make a joke that you're only on Tinder to steal secret family recipes.
It may require different tactics, and you can't rely on meeting them and being charming while you are both half-sloshed but if a chubby old bastard like me can do it, then there is no reason most people with a lick of sense who want to date for marriage and are looking for someone the same can't. But you have to work at it. Spend time on your profile, and your pictures, stage em if you have to. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Have 5 or 6 openers ready to go, and check the profile and pics if you do get a match so you can come up with something witty.
Sure you might not match many and then 50% won't even respond and another 25% will peter out after hellos. But that 25% is still more than you get through by being introduced by friends in the old days. It's a numbers game in a very different way than traditional dating was when I was a lad. There the issue was finding someone available and getting close to them in the first place. But you only need one.
Thanks for the advice, but.
Very naive of to assume anyone ever reads bios. Countless experiments with literal pedophilic shit in dating profile bios have shown to still work if the pictures are sufficiently good enough. You are correct about the pictures that a lot more gets extrapolated from them than they should.
Sure. My match rate was 3/100 swipes, message reply rate 2/10,message -> date rate 0. Realistically this is still less time consuming than how it was done in ye old days. But it feels extremely degrading, just going window shopping and being rejected by 97% of the people. I settled on not working up the mental faculty to not let that get to me. Btw, the women I match with online are much worse than ladies I saw in real life. It's really not worth it.
And I don't want to. I plan on just trying irl after I am done with graduate school and can get a higher-paying job, which should improve my prospects. I don't want to put on a clownshow and have ready made lines and stage shit just to be considered worth having gone out with, that is not how humans operate. I am not ready to dispense all my sense of self-respect.
I think this is just an update of how we used to have to do it pre-mobile phones. You think you just approached a girl you really wanted on a wing and a prayer? You thought about what you wore, what you looked like, had some good lines, hell, maybe you brought a wingman to make you look good. None of this is new. It is exactly how people operate. You leveraged everything you possibly could. Sure if you just want to pick a girl up in a bar, for sex, then whatever, low pressure, though even there if you were going out with that in mind, you would definitely dress and plan accordingly, but we are specifically talking about looking for your marriage partner.
Your one job at the start is to get your foot in the door. And that means putting your best foot forward. Especially if you are aiming for someone high-value who therefore would have had a lot of approaches. The beginning stages of flirtation and courtship are all about making yourself look as good as you possibly can. If you're not willing to do that, then you will probably lose to the people who are. With my first wife, I fell for her the day I saw her, so I found out she was going to a mutual friends party and then I found out everything I could about her, talked to a couple of female friends about her, had my buddy there to wingman. A person to love is unlikely to fall into your lap. Working for it is going to increase your odds.
Now there is another option, after my first wife passed, I met my second wife through a group of friends and we were friends first, and dated second. That way your foot is in the door in a different way. That is a much lower pressure situation, but it's much less certain. It's a more passive approach (at least at first). But requires you to be able to tell when someone is interested in you (or hope she will take initiative which is a gamble). It's definitely still workable.
But OLD is a replacement for the first method, the cold pick up where you don't know the woman in advance, and that largely hasn't changed in how you have to get that first yes as far as I can tell having had experience of both. You have to work to signal you are someone worth paying attention to. And yes, being conventionally attractive reduces the amount of work you might have to do for sure, just to be clear.
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