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Date-me-docs or any other "long-form" online dating method is a complete meme and I honestly cannot believe that rationalists are so into these things. They're all just cheap talk, smoke, and mirrors. When you're looking for a partner, you need to filter out a ton of people, and you need hard verifiable information to do that. The only hard and verifiable information for people who are otherwise strangers on the internet are:
The rest is just totally made up and fakeable. This is obvious because if you look at the date me docs, all the word-words-words are almost always the same for everybody. You like someone who is thoughtful? You want to have witty and deep conversations? You're into AI and futurism? Wow, truly a rare find.
You need to actually spend time with people in person to figure out the important things. Tinder/bumble/the rest are so popular because they prioritize the information that is verifiable online and get you to actually go and meet up with people. I'm married and I met my wife on hinge, but before that I was extremely active and successful with dating apps, some combination of tinder/bumble/hinge/raya. So take these observations in that context. Also, as a man who dates women these are comments about women but I'm sure something similar applies to men.
(a) A few weeks ago there was an article in the NYT about date-me-docs and it featured a woman in the Bay Area who had one of these. Pretty typical Bay Area woman: Asian, tech worker, pretty cute, had her shit together. And had a super wordsy date-me-doc with a ton of detailed words-words-words. I cold emailed her to set her up with my friend, who is recently single. My email was a pic of my friend (tall and handsome) with two or three bullet points about his background (recruited athlete at very prestigious university; into outdoors stuff), and within a few minutes she responded with her number. For all that hubbub about a date-me-doc, my tinder-lite profile of my friend did the trick.
(b) I travel a lot for work and would almost always use bumble when I had a free night. Bumble lets you specify that you're looking for a relationship. You can just ignore this. I would swipe on these women, match, I'd clearly explain that I'm only there for a couple days, and they'd nevertheless be eager to meet up and hook up. Often these little meetups would lead to a nice connection and we'd keep talking/meet up again next time we were in one of each other's cities (I tend to match with high-income, fancy job, lots of traveling types), but ultimately both parties would know these were just casual flings with a limited shelf-life. That girl whose date-me-doc or coffee-meets-bagel profile talks about how she is looking for a serious relationship is definitely, DEFINITELY fucking randos on the side. Don't forget it. And inversely, women who say they're looking for "something casual" are very often the ones to crazily show up at your office a few months later wondering why you haven't seen them again.
It's much, much easier to fake a personality (especially through some self-promoting long-form writing) than it is to fake how you look. On my myriad dates the frequency with which someone's personality doesn't match what they seemed like online is way higher than the frequency with which someone's looks don't match their pictures (almost never). If you're getting looks catfished a lot, you really scraping the bottom of the app barrel or you need some practice in recognizing how fat women use angles or how chinese women use filters. The point is, there's only so far someone's curated self-description can get you. You just need to meet up.
This confusion is so bafflingly common that there are entire movies and stock characters about this. When you're at work, or in a coffee shop, or generically in public, are you talking about all the weird sexual shit you're into? No? Does that mean you're not into it? Same for women. Of course women are sexual beings, and of course they are not super open about this at inappropriate times. And there's basically no way for you to connect the public to the private until the very last minute. The distance from that introverted Korean software engineer you just met showing you her favorite books to begging you to fuck her throat or cum inside her without birth control, is like, 5 minutes, tops.
Given this, why put any stock what-so-ever in some pre-planned about me document that has no predictive power?
Almost all women have at least tried the apps. But even if they aren't currently on the apps, their friends are, and this impacts them both directly and indirectly. I have matched with women on the apps who set me up with their not-on-the-apps friends, which always leads to app-like behavior (hooking up). This is not to mention any of the general equilibrium impacts of the apps, which are probably huge.
The ONLY benefit I can see of long-form/date-me-docs style of online dating is that it's just another chance to put your profile in front of someone who might not have already seen it or swiped too quickly on a bumble/tinder-style app. So, like, sure, if you have fun writing about yourself and don't mind an embarrassing document being out there, go ahead and do it. But the likelihood that your manic rationalist dreamgirl is going to find you and date you from this is basically 0.
Indeed. Which is why one should keep in mind that if you're taking it slow with your potential The One on cute, quirky coffee, art exhibit, kayaking dates or whatever, it's likely some other guy(s) has/have banged or is/are banging her through (a) Netflix and Chill-type "date(s)." You're not the only guy she's talking to. And until you've banged her, you're just another random chump in her phonebook texting her, if she even bothered to save your number at all.
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You seem to have an extremely warped view of female promiscuity. I'm in my late twenties and am a PMC, cosmopolitan:
The average 'number' of most of my friends (after 10-14+ years of having sex) is somewhere between 4 and 12 sexual partners. There are absolutely some very promiscuous outliers (and the opposite), but most women aren't 'fucking randos'. A substantial proportion of them have never had sex outside of a 'real' relationship. Most have never fucked someone from an app. Almost none of these people are socially conservative (actually the only right-adjacent, tradcath-meme-posting, red-scare-listening woman I know is one of the most promiscuous people I've met lol), almost all grew up in NYC etc.
I think for some men who get a lot of self-worth from casual sex, admitting that the women they're fucking are all from the most promiscuous decile of the female population dampens their perceived manly achievements. They would much rather believe that the girls they're fucking are outwardly 'good girls' caving into their masculinity while stringing along a sexless beta provider orbiter on the side until they decide to settle down, than accept that they're part of a (comparatively) small group of promiscuous men sleeping with a (comparatively) small group of promiscuous women who are, for lack of a better term, easy.
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I think that for the kind of people who are into writing dating docs, it probably takes them about 10 minutes to write one, because these tend to be highly verbal people. And the downside is probably almost non-existent. It is unlikely that the kind of person who would dislike the fact that you wrote a dating doc would ever find out that you had written one unless you post it on your Twitter or some other social media that is similarly famous and where anyone can see what you write. And there is nothing forcing people to post these things on Twitter as opposed to other social media. So if you really feel like writing a dating doc for some reason, you can easily do it and then just go also try to meet people at the bar or whatever. So I think that the whole debate about dating docs is rather pointless because it doesn't take much time investment to write a dating doc and in practice it is probably unlikely to cause any harm.
That said, yes, one probably should not pin all of one's hopes on a dating doc. Better to try multiple ways of finding sex partners.
I agree, these are all nerds in their weird little Silicon Valley nerd community who love writing and maybe this works for them, who knows.
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the definitely here makes this statement false. Many women have hook ups on the side while claiming to only want a serious relationship but the percent is not 100. Furthermore as guy hooking up with such women it is easy to overestimate the percent as you are quickly filtering out those who don't.
Yes, I'm sure the percentage of potential employers who are lying about having a collegial atmosphere, high impact, great advancement opportunities, excellent work-life balance, and unlimited PTO that everyone totally uses freely is not 100%, but if job-hunting it'd be foolish and naive to act based on any other assumption.
I had always assumed that, “🔍 not sure yet”, was the plausible deniability option, but perhaps it’s not subtle enough if rubes like me can figure it out.
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The 'definitely' here means: If you meet 'that girl whose date-me-doc or coffee-meets-bagel profile talks about how she is looking for a serious relationship' you should assume she is fucking randos on the side. Not: 'I counted and it's exactly 100% guys'.
But the actual statistics show that participation in casual sex is very low, not even a majority of women do it.
It's a case of a promiscuous minority having an outsized impact on the market, because they remain on the market longer.
"Not even a majority" is a wide range, though, and there's a big difference between 10% and 49% when it comes to this sort of thing. I'm also curious how such a fact was even determined, because just because someone believes they're not having "casual sex" doesn't mean the sex isn't casual. Whether or not it was casual is often determined after-the-fact, often due to mismatched (sometimes outright fraudulent) expectations beforehand.
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