Mate Selection
TLDR: Old ways of mate selection are being replaced by dating apps, but these apps fail to provide the core ingredients of love. Utopia uses an opt-in signal (via jewelry) of searching for partners, and uses a system of bounties to align incentives.
Prerequisites: None (… but I recommend Public Goods Funding and Adverse Selection!)
I have mixed feelings around dating apps. On one hand, I met my lovely wife on Bumble, and I credit OkCupid for getting me involved with the Rationality community after I moved cross-country as a young man. These were two of the most important connections in my life, and I genuinely have dating apps to thank for them.
On the other hand…
Jokes aside, dating apps can be pretty awful. Adverse selection means that the vast majority of accounts are either inactive, bots, or scammers. If you’re lucky, you’ll get matched with people who are single for the very simple reason that they’re terrible at having healthy relationships. Finding real matches involves slogging through profiles, desperately hunting for those rare few people who are simultaneously (1) human beings that you would want to date and (2) people who would want to date you. Then you get to desperately try to keep them from slipping away while also not coming across as too desperate.
It’s kinda wild that dating apps work at all. They certainly weren’t how people used to meet, and from my anecdotal experience, people mostly seem to think the old ways were better. But the older methods of meeting people are dying out, and this is largely because dating apps are beating them. There’s a growing sense that it’s rude or creepy to pursue/seduce/approach people in public settings,1 often including classmates and coworkers. Unless someone has made it clear that they’re interested in finding a dating partner, they’re seen as off-limits by default. Dating apps offer a rare sense of clear consent to be approached.
On top of selling a step-by-step solution to loneliness, dating apps advertise abundance. They sell a message that, in the age of the internet, relationship partners are everywhere (yes, even in your area), and you’re just a few easy pulls of the slot machine away from winning big. But, like a slot machine, these experiences are designed more to engage than to satisfy. And so they absorb energies that might’ve been more efficiently spent elsewhere, often leading burnout and despair.
The End of Matchmaking
The current culture2 around dating is really, really weird from a historical perspective. The typical human experience, which is engrained in both our evolved psychology and our culture, is to live in a world that centers around the collective will of an extended family, clan, or tribe. In these contexts, picking a mate was far less a question of individual preference and more of one of communal negotiation. The very concept of “dating,” for example, is fairly modern, emerging in the late 1800s and and early 1900s as courtship rituals focusing on family approval gradually fell out of fashion.
The historic (and prehistoric) norm used to be that whether someone’s children found good mates and went on to have grandchildren was of unparalleled importance. Labor, relative to accumulated capital wealth, used to be extremely important and the size of a family was, in many respects, a direct indication of the wealth and power of its members. A family that failed to have children would grow poor due to (absent any social safety net) the declining ability of elders to hunt, plow fields, or defend against attackers. By contrast, a family with many children, in addition to having lots of available labor, could use strategic marriages to strengthen bonds, effectively growing the size of the social support network, making everyone involved more robust to random misfortunes.
This isn’t to say that individual feeling or even romantic love had no part in the old decision making process — merely that it was part of the negotiation between the families that were involved. When elders are powerful, arranged marriages become the norm, with extreme cases like royal families occasionally making arrangements while the bride and/or groom are young children. We can understand the trajectory over the last two centuries as the converse: when family elders lose power (and material interest), they become increasingly passive spectators of the mating decisions of their kin.
These changes ultimately stem from the technological transformation of the industrial revolution, but they manifest in dozens of ways, direct and indirect. Urbanization and geographic mobility exploded the space of economic opportunities while simultaneously pulling people away from the places they grew up. Rising value of machines made land and physical labor relatively less valuable,3 pushing towards smaller families with more emphasis on education and gender egalitarianism.4 As people became more educated and the world changed at an unprecedented rate, traditionalism and religiosity fell away, replaced by unfettered individualism, largely focused on personal joy and excitement. Contraception, especially “the pill” and increasing availability and intensity of pornography further decoupled sex from traditional relationship structures, amplifying the focus on individual satisfaction.
While some of these changes, like decreasing rates of teenage pregnancy, seem solidly good, others, like decreasing overall fertility are more mixed, and have serious downsides. I see the end of community-based matchmaking as one such costly change. While arranged marriages can be oppressive and awful, the general participation of grandparents and other members of the extended family in the project of securing a mate seems broadly good. A well-aligned family can use their myriad social connections, wisdom, and yes, even social pressure, to help set up marriages that provide enduring benefit to both the couple and the community.
But going back to having significant family involvement in picking mates isn’t really an option any more than we can un-invent the steam engine. People with power and freedom will chafe and balk when pressured to make major life decisions by others, even close family. The only way out is through, and that means finding technologies and systems that can successfully fill the void left by the collapse of communal matchmaking, not just parasitically feed off the growing ache of loneliness.
A Recipe for Love
One of the most frustrating aspects of the current situation is that it’s not like getting humans to fall in love with each other is some impossible challenge. People mostly want to find long-term partners and form deep connections. And when just a few key ingredients are present, they will. But with one major exception, companies and other organizations either don’t have the power to invoke the real recipe for love, or they have no incentive to do so.
What do humans need to become infatuated, fall in love, and choose a mate?
Propinquity — People need to actually spend a bunch of time around each other. Physical proximity is excellent, and in general the higher the bandwidth the better, but there are many forms of this. Reading someone’s words can be sufficient (especially for nerds) but it usually takes a lot of words. Even in a physical setting it usually takes repeated exposure. “Love at first sight” is mostly a myth.
Homophily — People need to identify aspects of the other that resonate with their own situation. The most central aspect of this is having shared relationship goals, but being of a similar social status, economic class, ethnicity, worldview, education, religion, or merely having the same interests is also important. Crucially, these similarities need to be emphasized in a positive way during interaction, without focus on the gaps or disparities.
Validity — People need to see the other person as trustworthy and a valid potential partner in good social standing, such that they feel confident that they won’t be harmed by letting their guard down, either in terms of physical violence, emotional abuse, or reputational damage. The most common form of this is in “social proof,” where a community or friend group implicitly vouches for its members, but it can also stem from more abstract reputation, as long as it feels real to the individual.
Scarcity — Perhaps most importantly, people need feel like they can’t sit back and contemplate their options forever. Absent some kind of stakes or time pressure, people often become indecisive, picky, and superficial, still wanting to perhaps go on dates or have sex, but refusing to seriously invest or commit. This pressure can be general, such as when someone feels the ticking of their “biological clock,” or from a more specific fear, such as the idea that a particular person is “the one” and they’ll slip away unless action is taken.
Traditional settings effectively provided each of these four pillars. And, alas, dating apps offer almost none. (One could argue that they’re decent at homophily, but even there they’re not ideal.) Thankfully, there still is one major institution that helps millions5 of people find love each year: college.6
Colleges provide propinquity in the form of in-person classroom settings where students naturally spend time around each other day after day, as well as at parties and other locations on and around campus.
Colleges naturally produce strong homophily by being selective and placing students in the same context. Just the fact that two people are going to the same school is a good sign on priors for them having similar goals, education, status, and worldview.
Colleges provide easy validity by mixing potential lovebirds into a complex social scene complete with friend groups and reputational gossip.
And colleges provide scarcity in that everyone knows the clock is ticking down to graduation. This natural timeline creates a pressure to not only start dating but to seriously invest and form a bond that’s strong enough to survive the people involved leaving school, potentially traveling across the world, and finding work.
Indeed, in some circles there’s something of an open secret that one of the most important functions of elite universities is helping young people from upper and upper-middle class families find spouses (and network in general).
Unfortunately, this probably isn’t a scalable solution. Going to college is expensive and impractical for people who already have established jobs and careers. Moreover, the very timeline that makes college effective for matchmaking—late teens to early twenties—increasingly misaligns with modern life trajectories. Many people now spend their twenties focused on career development, experimentation, and self actualization. It’s increasingly common for people to only decide they’re ready to settle down as they approach and enter their thirties, sometimes long after their college years have passed. Yet if college demonstrates that the recipe for love still works when properly implemented, perhaps we should ask: What would it take to recreate these four essential ingredients—propinquity, homophily, validity, and scarcity—in formats that serve people wherever they are in life? How can we solidly fill the matchmaking void left by both the decline of traditional family involvement and the inadequacy of dating apps?
Signaling Singleness
One very basic starting point in moving to a better world is to bring back one of the primary uses of the wedding ring. Specifically, it used to be the case that if someone (especially someone young) didn’t have a wedding ring, they were assumed to be available as a potential mate. This is an extremely useful signal in that it creates social affordance for attempting to court/seduce someone. It also is part of a weird, toxic assumption that all unmarried people (especially women) are “fair game.”
The solution is easy: create an opt-in(!) common-knowledge signal that someone is hoping to find a new partner. These kinds of signals are arbitrary, but in one possible Utopia, I can imagine that people wear a single earring to indicate that they’re interested in finding a new partner. (Because they’re single… get it?)7 Perhaps a dangling earring could indicate a preference for men, and a stud-earring could indicate a preference for women.8
The diversity and complexity of jewelry means that it’s possible for many other signals to be sent in a similar way, such as preference for long-term relationships over more casual hook-ups, or whether someone does or doesn’t want kids. But I think it’s probably mostly a trap to try and encode many signals. People mostly have complex feelings around what they’re looking for, and those kinds of complexities are probably best left to actual conversations between people. Indeed, many people (especially young men) realize their preferences are actually quite flexible only after meeting someone who they really like.
The complexity of things is why I don’t suggest using left/right ear to indicate preference for men/women. Indeed, almost nothing is a true binary, and thus would be a mistake to associate with which side the earring is worn. But, because people will be people, culture will probably try to find something to indicate by left vs right, and thus I think it should be used for the one notable exception to the “just have a conversation about it” heuristic. I think Utopians wear their earring on their right ear to indicate a preference for flirting, and their left ear indicates a preference for more up-front, direct expressions of interest. Some people strongly dislike bluntness, and prefer to be slowly seduced, while others tend towards obliviousness and need a more direct approach. Importantly, unlike other relationship preferences, this one is best established before the parties have any conversation, and needs to be unambiguous, since it sets the scope of what kind of conversation is good.
A great thing about using jewelry in particular is that it serves as something of a fashion statement, serving its natural purpose of attracting the eye, and also allows the person to show off who they are. See someone with a black-skull stud earring with ruby eyes? That can tell you a lot about who they are! And it serves as an obvious (and flirty) conversation starter: “I love your earring!”
The Utopian earring signal is not a replacement for the wedding ring. The unending band of marriage is more significant than just “not looking for a new partner.” Plus, some people, such as those in polyamorous relationships, can wear both an earring and their wedding ring to help make it clear to people that they’re in an open relationship.
My guess is that Utopia also has at least one holiday oriented around the art of flirting, in which events (especially dances) are thrown for people looking for love where it’s understood that flirting with those wearing a single earring is actively good, rather than just allowed. Through holidays like this, Utopia helps teach young people the skills needed to find good mates and have fun while doing so.
Asking someone out who isn’t wearing an earring is not considered inherently rude in Utopia, but it is considered risky. If the person being asked out gives a harsh rejection, that’s allowed — they didn’t ask for that sort of attention — and further advances are seen as sexual harassment. But by contrast, it is considered a faux pas in Utopia for someone wearing an earring to be mean to someone who expresses interest in them, even if they’re not feeling it from that suitor. Making space for people to find the courage to ask someone out is the whole point of the earring signal, and while a polite refusal is always okay, a nasty put-down is the sort of thing that damages that space and hurts society.9
In Utopia, when someone asks someone else out on a date, it is strongly expected that the asker will pay for food, transportation, and everything else.
Utopian Mate Selection
People finding quality mates is an important problem, and Utopia doesn’t just settle for having a passive signal that someone is open to being approached. Utopia also has markets and infrastructure!
In particular, Utopia aligns the incentives of dating apps and similar services with those of their customers through a system of partnership bounties. When someone starts actively looking for a partner, they pay in any amount of money to an escrow service to serve as a bounty.10 Anyone can, with consent, see how big a person’s bounty is. Most dating services, such as dating apps, don’t charge any direct fee, but require a users to have a non-trivial bounty posted in order to participate.
Bounties are indefinite, and can’t be withdrawn.11 When two Utopians start dating, and go through various stages of the relationship escalator, one of the important steps to demonstrating commitment is for each of them to award their partnership bounties to whatever matchmaking service was most instrumental in helping bring them together.12 Thus, in order for a dating app to make money, it needs to get its users to seriously commit to each other and successfully exit the dating pool, aligning incentives.13 There’s a meme in Utopia that if you’re failing to find love, you should offer matchmakers more money.
Utopia has some online dating services/apps, and thanks to concepts like spam penalties, and the alignment of incentives, they’re slightly better than in our world. But, because they lack the ingredients of propinquity, validity, and scarcity, they tend to be outcompeted by matchmaking businesses that focus on more effective pathways to serious connection. In particular, the primary way that Utopians find mates is by going to singles events and venues, such as dances, often with assistance from a professional matchmaker who collaborates with venue hosts.
To concretely highlight one possibly story, let’s consider a young man named Adam who decides he wants to find a lady to partner up with, and maybe marry. He starts by saving up a day’s worth of income (e.g. ~$200) and posting it as a partnership bounty. He then creates an account on a popular dating billboard website, which verifies that he has a meaningful bounty, and writes a little bit about himself and what he’s looking for. A skilled grandmother named Beth who works part-time as a matchmaker, and pays a small fee to be able to search the website, spots his profile and sends him a message suggesting they make time for a video-call where she can give him tips on finding a partner in his area.
On the call, Beth tries to get a handle on who Adam is, and who to match him with. She finds out that he likes kayaking, and knows a girl his age named Carol who does group kayaking. She gives him some tips on flirting and suggests that they schedule a follow-up call so they can talk about how it went.
A week later, Adam tells Beth that he didn’t really like Carol because he didn’t think she was beautiful enough. Beth, wise and experienced, listens patiently, asks him about his sense of beauty, and nudges him towards being less superficial. Still, she accepts that maybe he needs to go on more dates and really understand the best choice problem. She says she has more ideas for beautiful women to set him up with, but she only works long-term with people who post a bounty of at least five times what he currently has. He grudgingly saves up, and then continues to receive her help.
Eventually, Adam meets Eve at a night-club and they fall in love. Even though Beth didn’t specifically tell Adam to go to that club, he credits her advice for helping him learn how to approach, flirt with, and ask people out, and so he awards his bounty to her as a way of expressing gratitude. Eve doesn’t share Adam’s perspective, and instead gives her bounty to the club. They break up the following year, and Adam begins his search again by posting a new bounty.
The search for lasting connection is still difficult in Utopia, even with the support of more people and institutions with aligned incentives. Dating is naturally hard. But with the right culture, institutions, and attitude, it can also be satisfying and magical.
One notable exception seems to be low-key flirting. With flirting, the plausible deniability of it theoretically allows one to slowly seduce someone without violating any social norms, and then only after the other party has expressed interest, the explicit ask can be made. Unfortunately, flirting poorly is increasingly forbidden, and young men tend to have very little practice due to fearing backlash to not being smooth. A lot of the best in-person dating help for men, in my eyes, comes down to teaching how to flirt in safe ways combined with building confidence to actually try it. Still, in our age of screens, it’s a dying art.
By “current culture” I mean a heavily WEIRD one — something centered on Western norms around romance. These norms are most concentrated in the Anglosphere, Europe, and some parts of East Asia such as Japan, but are in the process of spreading to other parts of the world, especially cities.
The industrial revolution, to be clear, generally increased the value of both land and labor. Industrialized workers are capable of producing more per unit of time or energy than before, and the same land can yield more benefit thanks to everything from superior farming and mining techniques to the opportunity to set up roads and solar panels on it. My point was merely that the value of these other factors of production didn’t increase as sharply as the value of capital.
By far, the biggest factor that led to patriarchy was the plow. As agriculture became the dominant style of producing food, men became significantly more economically productive thanks to their increased upper-body strength, and specifically, the ability to use plows to turn soil before planting. With increased economic value came increased social power, and that, in turn, led to treating women almost like slaves or property. To this day, societies with their roots in plow-based agriculture have notably higher levels of patriarchal gender norms.
Global population ≈ 8e9
Annual marriage rate ≈ 5 per thousand people
Fraction of couples that met at college/university ≈ 7e-2 (This may be lower in the global context, idk.)
Marriages per year attributable to higher ed ≈ 2.8e6
This number is obviously different than the number of people who fall in love with a serious partner each year at college, and it’s also a different number from the counterfactual difference from the world where nobody went to college. Still, “millions” seems like the right order of magnitude.
Also other kinds of school, including high school. I’m focusing on college because I think the case is stronger. But certainly applaud those lucky souls who find lasting, high-quality relationships in high school.
The core idea is asymmetry. Someone with lots of ear piercings might make their solo earring more prominent. People with balanced earrings would be seen as simply wearing jewelry.
Bisexual/pansexual people could perhaps wear one of each in the same ear or an earring that’s a combination, or a single hoop earring. Gender and sexuality is messy, and the point is to open up a canvas for communication, rather than rigidly define a code.
If someone is rejected by someone wearing one earring, they should generally accept that and look elsewhere. Firm, blunt rejections should always be taken seriously. (One possible Utopian rejection that is both polite and firm is: “am nooh soon beeneymeek weep owey” — “never again see my ear.”) But also, some people (usually women) like to be pursued, and I think the earring signal helps make space for soft rejections that are ambiguous about whether the other party is allowed to keep flirting with them and/or ask them out again in the future.
There are multiple escrow platforms, privately owned, which compete in various ways. The world government does, however, keep a centralized list of all the platforms and enforces adherence to a standard internet protocol, such that when someone requests to see someone’s bounty balance, they get the true figure in a reasonable amount of time, regardless of which platforms the bounty is hosted on.
These escrow platforms are allowed, with transparency to their users, to act like a bank and hold most of their wealth in the form of stocks, bonds, and other assets, rather than cash.
To help encourage love (and natalism!), the world government allows people to have their personal shell companies contribute directly to partnership bounties, thus making the bounties effectively tax-free.
When someone dies or otherwise leaves a platform, their investment is donated to a charity of their choice, selected when the initial money is paid. Most bounty platforms nudge users to selecting charities which focus on helping unattractive or otherwise disadvantaged people find love.
Only corporations with an explicitly stated goal of matchmaking are allowed to collect partnership bounties, mostly to discourage abusing the system by having a couple say that one of them, or a friend, was most instrumental in bringing them together. In situations where no corporation was involved, the money can be donated to charity. (The system does still experience some abuse, but it’s not the norm and doesn’t impact that much money. In the case of extremely rich people who post huge bounties, elite dating services will often demand a contract be signed guaranteeing the money will go to them if successful.)
Polyamorous people are slightly disadvantaged in that dating services run the risk of introducing that person to partners, only to have them refuse to pay out their bounty. Poly culture in Utopia thus considers these people freeloaders who hurt the reputation of those in the poly community, and there’s a norm of awarding bounties with each new serious partner, even if one doesn’t fully exit the dating pool. Dating services often check a user’s history of awarding bounties if they’re known to be poly.
I feel like there should be some standardized online dating profile of people who opt into being available, and a way of publicly accessing the profiles of those within, say, 100 feet of you. That would help with filtering while minimizing invasion of privacy.
One idea that I wanted to squeeze into this essay, but didn't find a place for is the idea of a way, on a dating website, to signal interest in dating someone *only if* they've also indicated a specific interest in dating you. This was the basis behind the old reciprocity.io site (now defunct, IIUC), and seems like a neat idea in contexts where it would be costly to show interest to those who aren't interested.