The Biggest Myths About Dating (debunked) - #1133

Have you seen the supposedly most attractive male dance? Research says move your head, neck, and torso, vary the rhythm, use your whole body. Which raises the scientific question: what does masculine dancing even look like? Shadow boxing? British lads doing that en route to a night out may be among the most vaginally repellent things a man can do.

The appealing dance did look somewhat feminine. Attraction research often finds that people assume more masculinity must win, then discover some feminine traits are preferred. Shadow boxing probably destroys the nice illusion that this bloke could actually win a fight.

Exactly. He’s announcing, “Look how hard and aggressive I’d be,” except the only opponent is air. And he’s somehow losing to it.

That gets at why heavy looksmaxxing can give women the ick. An influencer like Clavicular may get attention because he became famous, not merely because he altered his face. For an ordinary follower, obsessive optimisation can signal vanity, narcissism, and short-term mating rather than a real bond.

The old looksmax rule was: don’t announce it. Some methods are dubious, but it’s competitive too. If every guy discovers a beauty trick, the advantage disappears and the baseline rises. Women have lived with that burden for ages: once makeup is normal, skipping it can look unprofessional.

Once you know attractiveness is contrived, the signal feels less reliable. It’s like learning a guy did pickup training or an intensive sex course. We’re fine with people becoming better pianists; we get weirdly uneasy when they train to seem naturally better at being themselves.

Enhanced faces were rated more attractive, but men told about makeup or cosmetic intervention judged them less dateable than men who were unaware. The boost remained, just weakened. People may infer insecurity or less appealing personality traits once they know the work behind it.

That’s the ick: this foggy, peri-conscious, “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something’s off.” Rob’s PhD student is building an evolutionary account of it, which means I am, obviously, on the fucking frontier.

Early evidence suggests women, on average, report the ick more often. It may involve disgust and behavioural immune-system responses, or sensitivity to awkwardness, status, and competence. A missed turn driving or a dead dinner joke can briefly lower attraction, despite being very modern cues.

Men may pay more for passing up a mating opportunity, while women may pay more for choosing badly. A small negative cue can push someone over a threshold: nope, selected out. That does not mean every woman or man follows the same strategy.

The Chad story is overstated. Dating apps concentrate attention at the top, but annual partner data show a similar minority of women having three or more partners, while the common answer for both sexes is one, then zero. Most sex happens in relationships; a more sociosexual minority are largely having lots of sex with each other.

Men and women are more alike here than people assume. The feeling that gorgeous men monopolise the market comes from app metrics, influencer bragging, and viral breakups. Ordinary stories—“we met, liked each other, got engaged”—are not content. There’s huge dark matter of people quietly living normal lives.

So monogamous marriage was, tongue-in-cheek, affirmative action for men? A one-to-one system redistributes access when not every bloke is in the top tenth. We deregulated dating, got late-stage sexual capitalism, and now wonder whether we’re built for pair bonds, serial pair bonds, or something messier.

Probably messier, with individual differences. Serial monogamy seems common; some stay together for life and some are more open to casual sex. But even with guardrails loosened, most people still pair up, are mostly exclusive, fall in love, and focus on one person for a while.

Our virtual experiment manipulated income and local inequality. When someone was poorer, or their sex was economically disadvantaged, they placed more weight on a partner’s resources. That appeared in both men and women. Beauty preferences did not comparably move, and our expected age-preference effect failed to emerge.

Which is intuitively obvious: if I’m broke and women are rich, of course I’d care more about dating someone with money. And if you control resources, age may lose explanatory juice because age is such a major predictor of wealth. Don’t fucking test me. I know this shit.

I’m open on the mechanism: conscious reasoning, evolved sensitivity to scarcity, or both. Hunger and deprivation can shift men slightly toward larger women, and fuller bodies are often linked with beauty under scarcity. Modern hunter-gatherers are not necessarily a perfect ancestral snapshot either.

Every enhancement creates an arms race. Ozempic, makeup, surgery, heels, TRT, Facetune—once signals can be faked, people scrutinise them harder. Are you actually healthy, young, muscular, or speed-running the appearance of those traits? That’s the anxiety we started with.

Men’s grooming and parenting effort have both risen. Weightlifting is a huge part of male beautification, but the quieter shift is that as women gain financial independence, a partner who helps at the nest can matter more. Evidence for increased fathering is stronger than any tidy claim that men are just becoming prettier.

Traits that make someone successful on apps may not make them a good spouse. One study of college Tinder users found higher dark-triad scores than non-users. That does not prove successful swipers are worse partners, but dating-app skill and long-term relationship skill could be substantially separate things.

Maybe looksmaxxers think they’re optimising for women, but hypermasculine face, muscle, and mogging are often male-to-male competition. Formidability predicts mating success in some work better than women’s attractiveness ratings. They shut their eyes, threw a dart at male attention, and landed on something that still works.

Be careful with grand stories about sex differences. Minimising them can be harmful; medical symptoms and social risks can differ. Exaggerating them has harmed people too. Look across societies, methods, and contexts, stay open about mechanisms, and remember averages never tell you everything about an individual.

Boys, this was so fucking fun. We got from shadow boxing and the ick to Chad myths, mate choice, handbags, hamsters, and the bizarre mating marketplace. Go read Rob’s newsletter and books, read Rob’s new book on a billion years of sex differences, and follow me on TikTok. I love you all. See you next time.