She likes the outdoors, but she is not outdoorsy. Her adventure photos have the unmistakable look of a sunny afternoon somewhere on Amalfi Coast, complete with Athleta tights and Gucci sunglasses. Or a boat trip to Tahoe with her friends. Or a ski run in the Rockies; difficulty: medium. Nothing too crazy but she’s hardly a couch potato.

Chloe is beautiful but not over-the-top hot. It’s her charm that draws you in, her smile and warmth, not the tight dress (although she would look great in one). She seems fun and clearly has fun girlfriends, judging by a group photo sipping espresso martinis at a trendy cocktail bar. And of course for her main profile pic, she chose a tasteful shot with a champagne flute at a holiday function in a fancy San Francisco home.

In other words, Chloe is my dream girlfriend.

Chloe is also 100% AI-generated.

Earlier this year, I found myself back on Hinge again. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t exactly hate the experience, as I wrote last year, but I don’t quite love it either.

The apps work pretty well for me, and a large part of this is constant improvement. Dating can often be competitive, and this time I had a bright idea to study my competition in order to improve. I wanted to know what other successful San Francisco men were doing. What was their game? What were they saying to get all the dates?

There was only one way to find out for sure: run a honeypot. What if I pretended to be an attractive woman, read all of the pickup lines, and… “borrowed” them?

Asking my friends to show their Hinge or Bumble wouldn’t work, because men flirt differently with different women [watch this video for references]. Since I wanted to learn the exact lines to send to my exact dream woman, I had to create her and see what men sent her.

As the title suggests, those aren’t quite the things I ended up learning. But the plan was formed, the North Star clear, and it was time to get to work.

I spent a few hours generating Chloe’s photos. You’d be surprised how hard it is to get ChatGPT to generate 10 different photos of the same person1. After working some prompting magic and adding some Lightroom touch-ups, the profile was ready. Even then, the photos had numerous “AI tells” that I couldn’t remove; e.g. take a look at Chloe’s photo with her “friends”, boating on “Lake Tahoe”:

(Chloe’s on the right)

Instead of having AI write the prompts too, I copy-pasted them from other profiles I liked. I paid for a subscription using my own card (big mistake) so I could see the incoming likes. We were ready to go. I obviously couldn’t get Chloe on camera to get the profile verified as a “real person”2. Turns out, I didn’t need to.

Chloe’s Massive Inbox

In the first 2 hours, Chloe got about 50 likes and 1 rose. I matched back with about 10 guys and started some conversations, trying to be as basic as possible.

In the first 24 hours, Chloe had about 400 likes and 26 roses. Every guy I matched with replied, some within minutes. A few double-texted. I opened the app, quickly got overwhelmed, and closed it again. Where did they all come from and who are these men?

Chloe’s inbox was a roll call of the city’s best bachelors. Every catch, every player, every good guy freshly out of a relationship, and every prominent single gentleman of San Francisco’s modest social scene was right there in her inbox.

No wonder: Chloe was designed for broad appeal. I did expect that she’d garner more interest than a real person whose quirks inevitably narrow her reach. I just hadn’t realized how broad this range can be.

There were numerous techies and finance bros, DJs, investors, firefighters, politicians, doctors, lawyers, burners, broke musicians and successful founders, and at least three guys who rode across Asia or South America on their motorcycles (for some reason, all named “Nick”). There were men with boats, cars, or planes—and sometimes with all of the above. There were short guys and tall guys, men with a bit of a gut and men with chiseled physiques (always photographed by the pool), men in athletic gear and men in suits, all generously mixed in with software engineers wearing refreshingly normal clothes.

It was a firehose, a torrent. I could barely keep up. At first, I flirted back with some of my matches. That quickly got unsustainably exhausting due to the sheer volume. I started sending one-line responses, which didn’t dissuade anyone from pursuing Chloe either.

(Chloe with her friends and apparently her “sister,” according to several suitors.)

After scrolling through a few hundred profiles, I started noticing patterns. Here’s what I learned.

Lesson 1: Nobody Has Any Game

The hours spent curating Chloe’s image were aimed towards one goal, finding out what kind of game successful men had. The real answer was disappointing: nobody has any game. Or more precisely, nobody seemed to have any secret tricks. Chloe’s “Likes Me” page was an endless parade of six-packs, canned lines, and the occasional thoughtful message that I geniunely appreciated. The game of many men is a bulging biceps and a cute face of their dog.

There were a few guys sending “modern” pickup lines (the most popular game of 2026 is to ask playful questions), but most of it was simple, almost basic. Thoughtful compliments. Notes on common interests and questions about them. The ubiquitous “Let me take you out” sent straight with the like. And of course, there was an unhealthy dose of self-disqualification with men practically begging forgiveness for daring to enter thy goddess’s inbox.

Interestingly, some of the hottest guys also sent the most thoughtful messages. Many also simply sent likes without comments.

Lesson 2: It’s Hard to Tell Men Apart

Since Chloe was apparently, every man’s dream, the profiles Hinge showed her were also top-notch. The quality or lack of game wasn’t the problem. The real problem was that I could barely tell them apart.

If you’re looking to hook up with a hot guy, any day is your lucky day. Just pick one of the countless buff dudes with a pretty face and whichever muscle you like popping out.

Otherwise, you’re in trouble.

Shared interests are not going to help you. The mention of “Together we could: […] cook something in my spacious kitchen” in Chloe’s prompt unleashed a rush of chefs, foodies, and home cooks talking about their favorite recipes, listing restaurants they’d take Chloe to, and namedropping brands of kitchenware I’ve never heard of. There were dozens of them, and half of them had absolutely nothing wrong with their profiles.

I truly do understand why so many people over-focus on attractiveness on these apps. Because how else can anyone tell which of these ten guys, might actually create that “spark”? At that stage you have to look at attractiveness as the biggest differentiator.

(Chloe at the “Outside Lands” music festival. SF residents know it’s fake because it’s sunny in the photo.)

Maybe all guys look the same because they’re all chopped? Hardly.

Lesson 3: San Francisco Has a Lot of Handsome Dudes

There are often people complaining how unattractive men in SF are (e.g. these reels), and I just don’t get it. San Francisco has a lot of handsome men. They’re out there with their dogs and their surfboards, sporting square jaws, chiseled face, and tasteful stubble. They’ve got hobbies, they aren’t broke, and they have plenty going on with their lives. I scrolled through hundreds.

Of course, there might be a simple explanation for these complaints. Chloe was deliberately designed to be an attractive prospect. Perhaps the honey in the honeypot was just too sweet to ignore for all the handsome men, who would otherwise be more selective.

A more interesting explanation: research shows that women vary quite a bit in which men they find attractive, and God bless them! That means that some “conventionally handsome” guys are attractive to one woman but look ugly to another, and vice versa. But is it fair to say that the guys in the city are chopped? I don’t think so, and I have seen the counterargument myself.

Lesson 4: And Yet The Bar Is On the Floor

While many men had fun and engaging profiles, half of them—I counted—demonstrated either near zero effort or obvious red flags (and sometimes both). Random photos taken and posted without purpose, shirtless selfies, “open to short”, or the epitome of try-hard: five photos from the same professional shoot, all in the same clothes.

Guys, women really like effort! One of the sexiest things a man can do is to actually try. And half of us are not even trying! Here’s a screenshot of an actual image from an actual man’s profile:

For those listening to an audio version, the profile photo is literally an image of a hat that reads “Maybe AI can generate you some b*tches”. Yes, my dude, I don’t think you realize how ironic it is that you sent your like to literal AI slop. But is there a single human woman on this planet who would find that appealing? What was the thought process, “she’ll see me whining about AI through someone's trashy merch and want to bear my children?”

Then, there’s another side to male attractiveness. Strength, confidence, and a bit of roughness can be appealing, but part of the appeal is showing that you can also clean yourself up, tame that roughness, and exercise some self-control when it matters.

So the unspoken question women are asking is this: can you stop being a total goof and a horndog for one second and put together five normal photos when meeting your future life partner could be at stake?

For 50% of men the answer is apparently, “no”. Luckily, this is a skill issue, not a substance issue.

Lesson 5: A Lot of Guys are Very Eager

Now this is the one I struggle with. I tend to take a few days and exchange a dozen of texts on the apps before asking women out. My time for dates is limited, I have options, and I like to know I’m investing my effort into someone who’ll be fun to talk to.

I learned that this was apparently not the norm. Most men asked Chloe out in the second or third message. Many jumped the gun and asked her out in the like itself. I don’t know if that’s working for them. Maybe it does? Could me taking time bewhy the woman of my dreams is still in my dreams?

(I’ll reveal a little secret: in the next article we will look at how real-life popular women swipe, and what they think about this eagerness. Stay tuned and subscribe!)

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And then I got to experience this eagerness from the other side.

Lesson 6: Being a Hot Girl on a Dating App Takes a Lot of Work

When I was logging in as Chloe, I had no stake in this game. My clock wasn’t ticking and my mother wasn’t on my case about grandkids. Yet even I was overwhelmed.

The app became a chore, and an annoying one. Every incoming like added a little item to my ever-growing to-do list. Every message was welcome at first, but by the second day, it triggered a small anxiety attack. Hinge’s limit on the number of open chats is brutal, and instead of helping, it became just another thing to manage. At a certain point, I was at a complete standstill, opening the app and closing it again, procrastinating on my own experiment.

The guys didn’t give Chloe any room to breathe either. If she didn’t respond, they often texted again, adding more pressure, and I felt that pressure. Double-texting a woman isn’t bad per se, but when the second message also raises the stakes, asks for reassurance or demands more interest, that’s exhausting.

“No pressure” is one of the hottest things a man can communicate to a woman. A demanding double-text usually communicates the opposite.

Even just swiping through the “likes you” page started to get tedious! And forget about sending likes and writing thoughtful messages myself. As the app requested, I sent a few likes after creating the profile, but I never had time to look there ever again.

(Chloe on the ski slopes in the “Rockies”, with a playful caption “Can you guess where this is?” The correct answer is “You can’t,” but many attempts were made.)

The Experiment Unravels

As I was raking in the likes and collecting opening lines, the experiment started becoming real. Too real.

When we open dating apps, we often forget that we are looking at and interacting with real people. That these women and men have emotions and we might be toying with them, intentionally or not. The screen gives us the same detachment as the windshield does during road rage. And while some of it was necessary to run this somewhat antisocial experiment, mine didn’t last long.

I started seeing men pouring their hearts out. Being emotional. One guy blurted “I can’t believe you’re real 😭” and oh man, you were onto something here. I wanted to hug them. I wanted to match and reply, “Stay strong brother, I know it’s hard out there (but maybe low-key ease up on simping tho)”. It was both inspiring and disheartening to see all this effort, all the keystrokes and hours spent typing these texts, on aggregate. The guy who texted “I know you would never match with me but I think you’re so beautiful” almost made me tear up3.

While many men were nonchalant (especially the buff dudes with muscles for personality), some got invested. Some started planning elaborate dates and really putting the effort in, despite Chloe not showing much interest, any interest really. Yes, I know, this much unreciprocated effort is not doing them any favors! But they were doing it, and I did feel bad.

The last nail in the coffin was that my friends whom I knew personally, started sending Chloe roses. Roses are a scarce resource on Hinge: they are a special type of “like” that puts you to the top of someone’s inbox. Users only gets one a week (or buy them for $3 apiece), and my actual friends were spending them on my AI honeypot. Sorry guys! I remember who you are, and I owe you a beer. But this couldn’t continue.

The Hinge Appeal Fiasco

Fortunately, I didn’t have to resolve this ethical dilemma. After mere 40 hours on the app, Hinge promptly banned the account. The photos had obvious AI tells, and well, the profile had belonged to a man named “Paul” just a few short days prior.

Naturally, I appealed via Hinge support. I apologized profusely and explained, with complete sincerety, that I was running an experiment to make dating experience better for humanity. An automated system asked me to prove my identity by sending a photo with my ID; I obliged.

Two days later, the Hinge Adjudicators sent the verdict. I’d paraphrase it as, “based on the documents provided, you are obviously not Chloe (duh!), so we are terminating your account permanently.” Chloe’s brief foray into the San Francisco dating scene was over.

But was it also over for Paul?

The Fresh Start

As for me, the ban was a blessing in disguise. While inconvenient and more expensive, it is possible to work around a Hinge ban. The catch: I had to start completely from scratch. Everything had to be new: all photos, all prompts, the phone number and the bio.

I had to throw everything away and start over. My old profile would’ve been hard to beat, I thought, but I didn’t have a choice. I rummaged through my archives, pulled up photos from the holiday parties and got to work.

Then a weird thing happened. My new profile turned out much better than before. The new prompts felt more natural and through a lucky angle choice, my new main photo looked attractive enough to score a 9.9 on Photofeeler4. More women wanted to match with me than ever before. I started getting roses and thirsty messages. I had more phone numbers from real, stunning, eligible and interesting women than free days in a week.

The whole experience started to feel eerily familiar, as if I just had spent two days living a version of this in someone else’s skin.

I didn’t have to create Chloe. I am Chloe.

And it wasn’t just the inboxes that looked alike: I too am a guy who lives in Pac Heights, hikes in Italy and is often found on boats and ski runs. I too am handsome but not hot, and lead with personality rather than height or biceps, both pretty average. Instead of creating a profile of my dream woman, I subconsciously created a female mirror image of myself.

My numbers were an order of magnitude smaller than Chloe’s, but also much larger than the average guy’s. I learned firsthand how overwhelming it can be to wake up to 20 unanswered texts, how tedious it can be to scroll through the likes, and how it feels to stop responding to people who are trying to plan dates with you, sometimes in a pushy way. I had to become way more selective.

***

Unfortunately, I had to start behaving like Chloe too. I used to say that “women ghost me on the apps”, but a brief survey of my chats revealed that I leave my matches on read just as often. And trust me, I do feel bad. Especially when I meet them later at social events, and they turn out to be amazing people whom I’m now trying to reconnect with (they are understandably reluctant). Now I realize: that woman who had to come up with an awkward excuse to cancel a date with me, she also feels bad.

Which brings me back to the question that started all this: what did I actually learn from the other men? Did the AI honeypot help?

There’s no way of telling if my new profile was better by chance—or if I subconsciously absorbed the little tricks and patterns from the top profiles I had just looked through. My conscious takeaway from the scant screenshots I collected was still the same: nobody has any game. The best guys were simply honest and open, led interesting lives, knew how to show their masculine, attractive side, asked thoughtful questions, and were lighthearted and creative with their prompts.

I was hoping that this experiment would let me better understand men and their secret tricks. But there were no tricks. Instead, for two days, I got an unexpected glimpse of what a life as an attractive woman can feel like on the apps. And the only man I understood better was myself.

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In the follow-up post, we will compare the experiences of Chloe with the experiences of my female friends who are as attractive and eligible as my AI avatar—except they’re real. There were similarities but also certain differences in how they handled the situations Chloe experienced, and we’ll talk about how they dealt with the problems of telling guys apart.

Appendix: Chloe’s Full Profile

It is usually offered with kindness. A friend sees your best qualities and assumes that, if you stopped overthinking and let them show, the right woman would appreciate you. Sometimes the advice comes with examples of men around you who seem to succeed effortlessly by being unapologetically themselves. The intended message is encouraging: you already have what you need.

Yet something about this phrase has always rubbed me the wrong way, and I only recently realized what it was. The problem is the word “just.” It makes authenticity sound like a switch you just somehow forgot to flip, like an umbrella you accidentally left at home. Yet in reality, it is very difficult to “just be yourself”.

See, it is not easy for a man to even discover his true values, let alone to live them and reconcile them with the pressures in his life. It takes years—if it ever happens! Many men understand this difficulty, instincively or consciously, and their visceral rejection of the word choice is unsurprising.

I feel comfortable writing about this now because I am finally doing a pretty good job of being authentic in my own life. It took me decades to get here, and I still would not call the process finished. And neither would I call it “easy”, but I do want to impress on my readers, in the traditional optimistic fashion, that is is possible. You don’t need to copy some “internet alpha” but you might need to have an honest conversation with yourself and/or someone you trust.

So instead of telling you to “be yourself”, I am inviting you on a journey to “become yourself”. Now read on about the steps it took me to get there.

Why “Just Be Yourself” Feels So Unhelpful

The inspiration for this post comes from “What Women Actually Want”, a substack essay that was making rounds a few weeks ago. Among other things, its advice to struggling men centered around (a) being alive, and (b) being authentic.

The advice is directionally correct! This TikTok creator talks about the “man’s vitality” as something women really value.1 An often cited meta-study [Sutton 2020] finds that authenticity is associated with better well-being and social outcomes. Yet the comments to the substack post were full of snark and distrust.

I think I know why. The author repeats the old mantra:

Just be yourself. Just, be, yourself.

Then she illustrates the point with examples like:

an ugly man who doesnt give a fuck and owns it = alpha

an ugly man who cares about it and is clearly insecure = into the mines

What the author omits is the challenge of these tasks, e.g. how difficult it is to know you’re flawed and own it. To own it so well that, for example, if someone calls you “chopped” in a heated argument, you can just brush it off rather than melt down. That takes work!

From that point of view, “Just Be Yourself” is a consumer’s view of a man’s journey towards finding and embracing his inner core. It is an art critic’s quip on the lackluster quality of a man’s work rather than an art teacher’s guidance on how to paint it

Every day, men asked to perform, pressured to comply, invited to serve, and expected to provide. We battle our inner demons, tensions, and tendencies referred to as “toxic masculinity”. We start as children and have to grow up into men whom others can trust and enjoy being around.

None of that is inherently bad. Being a good person for others is part of living in society. Sometimes maturity requires setting aside how we feel in the moment and doing what our responsibilities demand.

But the sense of authentic self is often lost in this process, and no wonder it is! We’re often so consumed by this that many don’t even get to learn who we are. What “Just be Yourself” misses is how to get from here to there. The true objective is to discover the sense of selfe rather than to choose to display it, and to live it, boldly.

The Five Steps to Becoming Yourself

So let’s make the goal concrete. You are trying to reduce the gap between what you value, how you live, and what other people see. That does not mean shaping yourself into what women value; rather it is a process of shaping yourself into what you value.

I’ve gone through this over the last few years and here’s what helped me:

1. Identify your values or rethink what they are

2. Relate things you do in life to those core values

3. Accept things that are in service of these values

4. Change things that are not serving your values

5. Observe how it goes and repeat steps 1-4 until the gap between your life and your values disappears

Congratulations, you have succeeded at “just being yourself”!

It will likely take you years to get there.

Now let’s break it down.

Step 1: Identify Your Values

There are things in life that you hold in special regard. Your first job is to find out what they are.

Separate what you do from what you want to do. Ask yourself hard questions. It helps to write down the answers, so you could return to them later and check if they resonate at a later time.

Values usually include things like integrity, stability, adventure, family, creativity, or service. They don’t have to be “positive”: hustle, self-reliance, dominance, status, and wealth at all costs are also fine. This is not a college admission essay, you can be honest here.

A great way to start would be to ask ChatGPT “I want to discover my true values. What kinds of questions should I ask myself?” It’ll give you a list and take it from there.

Let’s give one example of a hard question. Is it more important for you to be honest or to be successful?

Don’t answer in the abstract, think about it and relate it to your own life. Was there a time when you could steal something without getting caught, and you went for it—or chose not to? Perhaps it was there on the side of the road and you thought it’s free, and your struggling family really needed it. “I will bend the rules if it helps my family” is a totally fine answer! Just be honest with yourself.

One of the reasons why women might actually like assholes is that assholes appear true to their values, unapologetically so. Compare these two:

1. “I get what I want, even if doing so takes lying and manipulation”

2. “I chicken out of difficult moral choices and resent people who make them and win”

Which one is more attractive? The first person may have terrible values, but at least he has agency and conviction. The second has surrendered both. The first one is “Alpha”, the second one is not even “Beta”. Betas are loyal to their leader and get a seat at the table sometimes, while people who just chicken out fill the background.

So pick a lane and stick to it. Conviction is masculine, and authenticity begins when you start knowing your values. The connection between your mind and your inner core (and every meditation teaching will tell you, those are different things) will be visible to everyone and palpable.

Relate Your Values to Your Life and Accept them

Once you identified what you value, ask yourself, how do the things you do relate to them? Look at both what you do and how you do it. Are your choices serving something that matters to you? Are you making them in a way that feels like your own?

One possible outcome is that you discover that something you dislike is nevertheless purposeful. The suffering may be in service of a purpose you genuinely care about, and thus meaningful—or perhaps even attractive?

Imagine you hate your job. The work is pointless, the boss is a model asshole and your peers are QA rejects at the mindless factory of boring. You spend the whole week waiting for Friday, then spend said Friday complaining about office life to your friends.

This is not a life of a Chad. This is a life of a sitcom sidekick.

A better question to ask yourself on a Friday night would be: why do I keep going to work? Does the job support something important to you? Are you feeding your family? Putting yourself through school? Building skills for a career you actually want? Saving enough money to take a risk later? Or perhaps you simply need the salary to complete your collection of every Swiss model train released in the 1970s. It truly does not matter.

Once you understand why you are enduring something you despise, the shame and resentment disappear. You are no longer “trapped in a dead-end job”. You are heroically dealing with idiots every day so that your family has a roof over its head, your future has a foundation, or your tiny replica of the Bernina Express finally has the historically accurate dining car.

The situation may not have improved. Yet, your relationship to it has, and people around you will notice. Your boss might still be an asshole, but now the Chad is you because you don’t give a damn—or are even proud of it.

You do not need to be at the top of the pyramid to succeed at this step. You can follow others, but as long as you know why and follow them with confidence, there isn’t anything wrong with it. It may be because their mission aligns with yours or simply because the rewards they give you make it worthwhile.

Step 4: Change What Does Not Serve Your Values

Relating your values to your life may lead to a less comfortable conclusion: some of the things you do are not serving anything you genuinely care about. Perhaps that job you hate is actually pointless, or you’re doing it only because it sounds impressive? It’s time to think how to change it and make a plan.

A story from my own life comes to mind. For years, I tried to sign up for a variety of startup-y side project (yes, I know this is so San Francisco), but I never seemed motivated to get them really going. I hated myself for it. What kind of a loser am I that I can’t hustle at a second job, like many of my friends do?

When I went through the exercise to identify my values, I found that Community was a bigger value to me than Achievement or Money.

That explained a lot. The feelings of inadequacy show up because of trying to adopt the values I didnt’t care about, the values. I needed to redirect my energy. So instead of coding, I started organizing events, going to parties and improving my social network. And yes, I began writing the Dating Optimist blog.

Suddenly, the hustle got going. I no longer felt like a loser in a room full of my founder buddies. Instead of ranting about dating, I started helping to improve it. And as an added bonus, there was a plenty of tech to build for the survey analysis, data visualization, and illustration design here.

You might need to go through a similar process for different aspects for your life. Starting something new is difficult, but letting go is often harder. You are basically breaking up with a part of yourself, but it’s an important part of this journey. You don’t owe lifelong loyalty to the dreams you once had.

And when you cannot change your life immediately, make a plan. Name the frist step, give it a deadline, and do begin acting on it. Because only talking about big plans and never doing anything about it is one of the least attractive behaviors that a man can show. A plan is agency, but a fantasy without action is just another form of complaining.

Another Option: Find New Ways to Express Your Values

Sometimes the problem is not that a part of your life conflicts with your values. The problem is that you have not yet found a socially compelling way to express it. A commenter on What Women Actually Want asks, what if your authentic passion is “obsessing over model trains”? Won’t you have to give it up?

Of course not. Let’s take a step back.

Imagine that you are a nerdy guy who wonders whether being nerdy is serving you socially. That is the right question to ask, but the answer is not to give up your nerdiness. If curiosity and going deeply into the things that fascinate you is part of your core, giving it up would make you less alive, not more.

But if being nerdy is important to you and relating to many other people also is, ask yourself are there ways to make your nerdiness more relatable? E.g. is your nerdiness about a specific topic or do you just nerd out about anything that interests you? If the latter, can you be a nerd about, say, football?

You might think it’s a contrived example, but I met exactly this person while working at a certain Big Tech Company. He was an extremely nerdy dude who once decided to learn about American football. Then, he fell in love with the sport, and could talk for hours about how strategic it is, etc.

The key, is that you cannot half-ass this: you have to be a total nerd. With memorized stats, lineups, play-by-plays, and odds to match.

Don’t fake it of course, people and especially women can smell it from a mile away. You might havea PhD in Computer Science, but Prudence is absolutely spot on when she writes, “Every woman has PhD in reading the gap between who you are and who you are pretending to be”. It’s not about pandering to the crowd; this is about finding new and creative ways to express your inner purpose.

It is also completely optional. You can keep being a nerd about whatever nerdy thing you’re into, just get really excited and proud that you’re into model trains or Warhammer 30k. This is what Prudence calls “being alive”. The guy who excitedly yaps about his hobbies to a woman is attractive because his passion is attractive, not his hobby.2 She may never care about the Swiss trains but she will notice how your face lights up.

Step 5: Observe and Repeat

Are you done once you have identified your values, made a few changes, started something new, and let go of what no longer fits? Definitely not, for two reasons.

First, there you might have misidentified your values. That is normal: you’re trying to describe the dark, subconscious desires of yourself, and you can’t expect to get them all right from the first attempt.

Maybe you thought you valued achievement, but what you really valued was recognition? Maybe you thought you wanted freedom, but what you actually wanted was relief from one specific obligation? Thankfully, the visceral feeling in your gut will guide you, as will the lack of renewed energy and life satisfaction.

The second reason is that your values change. This is one of the most liberating things in this process: your values don’t have to be chosen for life. Things you valued in the past sometimes do stay in the past, and your work on noticing the changes in yourself is rarely done.

For me, after years spent on focusing on building community, I’m getting a renewed motivation to work hard and focus on achievement and wealth. Don’t worry though, the Dating Optimist blog will stay free, but I might start badgering you to buy my book or something.

The process is therefore less like completing a Facebook quiz and more like being a captain of a ship. You choose a direction, account for the currents, observe where you end up, and occasionally realize that you need a small course correction. Most importantly, do keep sailing.

Seek Guidance

It is no coincidence that discussions of becoming attuned to one’s inner self often arrive alongside ideas from spiritual traditions from across the world. One description in What Women Actually Want puts it this way:

In Buddhism there is a concept of the ‘original face’, it is who you were before you were born <...> The norse concept is called ‘hamingja’

The references to these ancient concepts are especially illustrative as the common idea of such teachings predisposes a process, a part, and a teacher. Following the path to your inner core often takes years and often requires someone to keep you on track, to provide an honest external observation not clouded by your own personal ego.

That guidance does not have to be permanent. Sometimes one well-timed experience is enough to start the process. It could be a semi-ritualistic spiritual guidance (a friend of mine credits a Bhuddist meditation retreat for kicking off his journey), or something more mundane (I had one conversation with a life coach on this). Start with ChatGPT if that’s what it takes, or with watching a youtube video.

Still, be selective. A guide should help you uncover your own values, not hand you a replacement personality. Anyone can tell you what a “real man” is supposed to want. The useful teacher helps you figure out what you want, then challenges you when your actions do not match it.

In Conclusion, Become Yourself

I am already several pages into this post, and we have barely scratched the surface of what it takes to “just be yourself.” There is still more to write, and considerably more to do if you are setting forth on this path.

That difficulty helps explain why the advice is so polarizing. A struggling man may hear “just be yourself” the same way a struggling painter would hear “just paint pretty.” Don’t get me wrong, art critics are useful, they show where the work is unclear, self-indulgent, or fails to landing. But criticism is not instruction, and one often does need a teacher to make progress.

In this blog, I’ve painted the outline of what it may look like, but it’s on you to complete the masterpiece. The main goal was to imprint that becoming yourself is possible even if it seems hard or weird. Many men walk this road unconsciously, vaguely in the right direction. Others do have to give it a conscious effort to get there like I did; there is no shame in that, and you’ll get there faster.

I encourage you to walk this road of Becoming Yourself. Eventually, you will have done enough work that you no longer need to perform, rant, or anxiously search for the “correct” version of your personality. You can simply be what you have become—you can finally just be yourself.

And if you are still unsure how to start on this amazing journey, shoot me an email to askdatingoptimist@gmail.com and I’m happy to share more!

Is that surprising? SF is full of tech nerds, metro-looking finance bros, and performative male hipsters—and don’t get me started about the Castro, the gayest neighborhood in the US. What can we do, short of putting testosterone into the water supply?

Recently, I came across a very new piece of research that suggests a more practical solution. Among a few other findings, the research concludes, in a nutshell, that witnessing random men acting protectively increases the attractiveness of all guys. Yes, of all men, even the less “manly-looking” ones.

While the study only tested a few narrow scenarios, this raises an intriguing possibility. What if healthy masculine behavior changes not only how women see the specific man performing it, but how they feel about men more generally? Could a city’s romantic atmosphere improve when more men act courageously, generously, and protectively, even when nobody they want to impress is watching?

In this post, we’ll dig into the new research, examine what it does and does not prove, and make the case that San Francisco’s supposed masculinity shortage may be more fixable than it looks.

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Hot Off the Presses

A few weeks back, I came across a Chris Williamson podcast episode controversially titled “Why Do Gen Z Women Hate Men So Much?” Most of it works through why young women seem to be souring on men and why men feel increasingly lost, viewed through the lens of evolutionary psychology. A lot of it was familiar territory, but one contribution stood out.

One of the guests, Dr. Tania Reynolds, is an evolutionary psychologist who studies female social dynamics. During the conversation, she mentioned a fascinating piece of her yet-unpublished research. Here is how she described the experiment (via this transcript):

<…> imagine your friend Sarah tells you about an experience with her boyfriend, and in one condition, the boyfriend and her are in a fight and he gets so mad that he punches a wall. And then in the other condition, the boyfriend defends her against this guy coming, trying to rob her. <...>

When we primed women to think of like the man as the aggressor punching the wall, we thought women were gonna dislike the formidable men, but they had the same preferences as normal, where they were totally fine with the formidable guy. But we did find when we primed them with the protector condition, they liked all men more. So, like all men.

Dr. Reynolds was kind enough to share the preprint with me, so I was able to dig into the numbers and methodology.

Protectors vs Providers

The researchers first identified male subjects that appeared more formidable and another group, more softer-looking in the photographs. Let’s call them “Protectors” and “Providers” in this post for simplicity1.

Unsurprisingly, women rated the Protectors as more attractive than the Providers on average, when judging them on physical appeal alone. That’s hardly news: most women are attracted to strength, but the researchers wanted to study how that changes when faced with the realities of men applying that strength.

So the study asked women to re-rate the attractiveness of these same men after hearing a story. That story had nothing to do with the subject; it was about an entirely different guy acting manly: protecting an innocent woman from an assault. And after hearing that story, the attractiveness gap between the Protectors and Providers… disappeared!

This is surprising, but I’m not making this up. Witnessing—no, even simply hearing about—a random man being masculine makes stereotypically “softer” guys seem more attractive, as attractive as “stronger” men.

A Solution for San Francisco

The tech and non-tech scenes in San Francisco are full of men who do not put their strength forward. Tech doesn’t select for strength, and seeing fewer Protector types out here should be no more surprising than seeing more of them in the military. San Francisco, California, is not Norfolk, Virginia2. Besides, in the average tech job, being strong and formidable lands somewhere between irrelevant and a liability.

Some men have resigned to being the second pick in the matchmaking rituals. Dating apps make it worse: they are overly focused on attractiveness and how people look rather than how they act. If you do not look the part, acting manly will not necessarily get you more matches.

Or will it?

The solution to this conundrum might be as simple as doing more manly things in your daily life. What would happen if men started acting more masculine “into the void” without aiming this performance at anyone in particular? If all of us tech nerds did this, women would notice, tell their girlfriends, and perhaps start seeing everyone a little differently.

To be clear, research only shows that effect for a specific type of manly behavior: protecting a woman from assault by other men. But it does raise a question: does this also apply to other things, perhaps producing a smaller effect? If more men opened car doors and took charge when something goes wrong, wouldn’t that make women more excited about dating us in general? Maybe it wouldn’t erase the attractiveness gap, but could that make it smaller?

Another important part here is that you don’t need to act manly in front of the specific woman you’re trying to attract. That helps too, but apparently, just hearing her friend Susan talk about it helps quite a bit.

Doing the Part vs Looking the Part

The most profound implication of this research is that it offers a possibility to counteract our attractiveness-focused dating culture. Looksmaxxing is not the only way to improve your attractiveness on Hinge. My takeaway is that creating an atmosphere of healthy, sexually dimorphic behavior, or “manliness,” can make men in general seem more attractive. However, this can’t be done inside the dating apps, and a venture into the real world—or at least to the social media—is required.

Now, this won’t turn an ugly guy into a model. The differences in attractiveness would still exist. What it bridges is the gap between the average attractiveness ratings of
“Protectors” and “Providers.” In other words, protective acts can’t turn you into Jason Momoa, but they can make sure Joseph Gordon-Levitt does not take a hit for his softer features.

An attentive reader may suggest an alternative explanation to the findings of the study. It could be argued that the key trigger to closing the attractiveness gap was not that some man was acting protective, but rather that some stranger was acting dangerous. Dr. Reynolds’ work addresses this possibility too and finds that the sense of danger alone isn’t moving the needle nearly as much as witnessing a man use his strength for good.

This fits into a broader body of research suggesting that male attractiveness is malleable. Prior work has found that learning more about a man can improve how attractive he seems [Lewandowski Jr., 2007]. Physical appearance matters, of course, but it is not the final score.

So if you do not look especially formidable, there is no reason to give up. You can still do the part even if you do not naturally look it. And on the dating apps, adding a slightly longer bio would not hurt either.

Conclusion—Make it Contagious

Social media and broader cultural shifts have created an outsized focus on attractiveness. Being physically appealing seems so important these days that entire movements (“black pill”) emerged proclaiming that everything boils down to how hot you are.

This new research offers a surprising counterpoint. We knew that a man’s attractiveness is not separate from his acts, but now we know it’s intertwined with how all men behave too. Dr. Reynold’s study only demonstrates this in a few narrow scenarios, but it is reasonable to wonder whether everyday acts of healthy masculinity could produce smaller versions of the same effect. Perhaps someone studies that next.

There is also a second component: the story has to travel. When a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? And when a man does something admirable, does it make anyone else more handsome if Susan never tells her girlfriends?

Men surely do many things that are not admirable, and it’s important to talk about this. But sometimes we do get it right. What would happen if my female readers “spiced up” the group chat with the occasional story about men going out of their way to do something good?

And of my male readers, I ask to simply start acting more manly, even when there isn’t an attractive woman around to “reward” you. You look the way you look, and much of that can’t be changed. But it doesn’t need to! Instead, you can change the way you act, and this may have a roundabout but measurable effect on everyone’s attractiveness as a man—including yours.

Use your strength constructively, take responsibility when something goes wrong, and be generous when you can. Open that door. Pay that bill. Walk between your date and that screaming homeless guy. Ask someone if they’re okay. None of these acts alone will turn San Francisco into Norfolk or Colorado Springs, but they might make the city’s men look a little better. This will add up, science confirms.

And if you are curious how to apply the desire to act manly in your everyday life, email me at askdatingoptimist@gmail.com with any questions!

The story is easy to believe. Many visible men and women of the San Francisco tech scene are late bloomers, people who poured their twenties into work and quietly postponed starting a family—or even picking up the requisite social skills. So when dating gets hard in your thirties, the city itself looks like the obvious culprit.

But is this really a San Francisco problem and packing up is the only option, or is something more boring going on? Dating pool shrinks with age, so could this explain the supposed man-child epidemic all by itself?

Turns out it mostly can, according to the US Census data. As people get older, the ones looking for long-term relationships (which we define as those who will actually marry soon) keep pairing off with each other. A fixed slice of men, meanwhile, will simply never marry, for one reason or another. These are our “Peter Pans.”

Past a certain age, the men who will never marry start to outnumber the ones who still might. When does that happen for women, probably in their 50s? The real answer is, at the age of… 35 (!) Here’s the graph that shows how it changes with time:

That’s right, a 35-year-old woman in the US is just as likely to meet an eligible man who is ready to commit as one who never will be.

And the data has more to say once we dig in. It turns out, men feel the same squeeze, just on a delay. We can also see the best age to go looking for something serious for both men and women. And for anyone tempted to blame the zip code and flee, we also pull data for different states to see if moving would actually help.

The optimistic result of this is that the Peter Pan issue is not necessarily a San Francisco problem, and the data shows it.

Where the Numbers Come From

All of this rests on the American Community Survey (ACS), the big annual survey the US Census Bureau runs to take the country’s pulse on everything from commute times to marital status. It reaches millions of households a year, which is large enough to avoid noisy data issues [ACS 2024].

The tables won’t hand you an answer to “how many single men of appropriate age are likely to marry you?” So I had to make some bold assumptions that the data actually contained the answers to.

For a woman of any given age, I wanted to estimate the size of two groups of men:

• There are the Eligible Men, the ones she would plausibly consider for a long-term relationship, based on age; and

• there are the Peter Pans, the ones who will never marry, for one reason or another.

So how do you pull “will never marry” out of a survey that only knows the present? Here’s how: I treated anyone still reporting “never married” at age 70 as forever single, since by then a first marriage is vanishingly rare. In the data, that’s about 7% of women and 9% of men in the US.

For a man to count as Eligible for a woman of age X, I asked two things of him: that he’s older than her by no more than ten years, and that he’s on track to marry within the next five. The ACS is a snapshot report, so that second part is based on the fraction of men within that bracket who reported having married in that year.

I’ll be the first to admit this flattens some realities of life. Not everyone who stays single does so by choice. Some people are simply unlucky, or particular, or have some traits that make them less desirable. Lumping them all in as “Peter Pans” isn’t fair to them, so let’s be on the same page that this is rough estimate.

The same goes for estimating the number of single people: plenty are in committed relationships but aren’t living together, which is the only thing ACS tracks. However, the surveys that do try to measure this suggest that the correction is only 3-5% for people in their 30s [Turcotte 2013] so this doesn’t change the story.

What the Data Says for Women

After downloading the dataset, I parsed it using Cursor and Anthropic’s Opus 4.8. Put together, here’s what the graphs say for women (repeated from the top of the post)

Two things are pictured. The solid line is the Eligible Men, the ones close enough in age and still likely to marry within five years, counted as a share of all people. It shoots up in the 20s and slides downhill across the thirties as more and more men pair off.

The dashed line is the Peter Pans, and it stays constant throughout the years by definition, because we are tracking the same men across the ages.

We notice that the solid and the dashed line intersect around the age of 35, which is where the amounts of Peter Pans and the Eligible Men reach parity.

The same caveat applies: my science here isn’t very precise. The main goal is to show how this effect works, and that it exists, rather than to compute the exact culprit age, but it is unlikely to move much. The realities on the ground confirm that there are a lot of Peter Pans in the 30s, but it might not be a uniquely San Francisco tech scene problem.

Men are Just Running Late

Now flip the calculation around. For men, the Eligible partners are women zero to ten years younger, and the flat line tracks the women who never marry. Here is what comes out.

Two differences are worth noting. The solid line peaks later, in the 30s rather than the early twenties, and the never-marry line sits a little lower, since fewer women than men stay single for life (roughly 7% against 9%). Together those two shifts push the crossover out to 45 years old.

So men do feel the same squeeze, just a decade behind. A 45-year-old man crosses paths with about as many women still likely to marry as women who never will. And knowing a few of them, dating life isn’t easy for them either. It is the same story, just a chapter later, but the pool still just narrows2 rather than closes.

When is The Best Time to Look?

Beyond confirming that the overdose of man-children is mostly just demographics, these graphs hide a some definitely cheerful stats as well. If the eligible pool expands and then shrinks, there has to be an age where it is at its fullest, the age. So where is it?

For women, the pool of eligible men is largest at 22. For men, the pool of eligible women tops out at 30. After those points both lines slide, the same downhill from the earlier charts, just drawn on one set of axes so you can see them race.

Before anyone weaponizes this, remember that the curves do rest on a rigid assumption about the “appropriate” age gap (zero to ten years) and loosening it would nudge the peaks around. On the other hand, these are not the theories of “sexual market value” or some other black pill bull. These are real numbers from real people collected by the American government, out in the world and far from the online gender discourse.3

The optimistic result is that people in their thirties are far from cooked. Dating is just harder, measurably so, but only like twice as hard. There are diamonds in the rough, and we simply need to go through more of the rough.

Is San Francisco Still Worse?

“But wait,” you might say. “These numbers are averaged across the whole country. It might be worse in the 30s but what if San Francisco is still a bigger disaster?”

Fair, but here is the catch. In more traditional states, fewer people swear off marriage entirely, so the Peter Pan rate should fall. At the same time, people there marry younger—and stay married, which drains the eligible pool faster. One effect helps, the other hurts; so which one wins?

To find out, I ran the same model for California and for Georgia, a state sitting near the other end of the cultural map.

Looks like while Georgia is a bit ahead, it is pretty much a draw:

• California: 11% of men never marry, critical age for women: 33

• Georgia: 9% of men never marry, critical age for women: 34

While the late-thirties dating pool is a touch deeper in Georgia, it’s nowhere near enough to call in a U-Haul. And even if you do, moving will take you a year, and you’ll be in the same pickle.

And if you are still drowning in Peter Pans well past what these graphs predict, the demographics don’t have an answer for you. Perhaps, the traits you’re attracted to (ambition, entrepreneurship, game) are the same traits that make the person unlikely to form a stable relationship and prioritize it over career moves (this Lana Li’s post expands on this topic). The Dating Optimist project exists partly to encourage and inspire such men to become better partners and be more enthusiastic about commitment, but some version of that will still exist.

Conclusion

San Francisco is full of remarkable people. The men and women here are, by and large, smart, driven, curious, and genuinely trying to make the world better. But sometimes, with all these pursuits, the relationships fall by the wayside.

So a lot of us are trying to catch up a little later than planned, and the good news is the challenge is not hopeless. The data confidently shows that the LTR pool in mid-30s is merely 2x smaller than in the “peak” ages for relationship formation. No, not 10x smaller, just twice.

It is tempting to wish the single men of their thirties would simply hurry up and get serious faster. And of course the most serious ones, are already partnered. Perhaps that is just how it works, and perhaps being a good partner is something you can only learn from inside a relationship. Yes, SF men in their 30s are sometimes behind, but if there is one thing the SF tech crowd is good at, it is learning new things.

What helps most is starting sooner. One of my own bigger regrets is how long I waited to make space in my life for romance, and these graphs are a tidy reminder that there really are better and worse times for that. But the second best time to plant that tree is indeed now.

Maybe you didn’t get that lucky, or you tried—and walked out of something that wasn’t working, or you did decide to put your career in order first. That is all okay. Don’t despair. We are in this together, and the same data that measures how much harder it got also says, plainly, that we all can still succeed.

And if you want help telling the genuine late bloomers from the lifelong Peter Pans before you have spent three good dates finding out, reach out at askdatingoptimist@gmail.com.

Appendix: Why the 10-Year Fixed Gap?

Why did I choose a 0-10 year fixed gap rather than compute it? I could pull the actual marriage data and see whom a person of each year is likely to marry. We could compute something that says “a 30-year old woman would marry a 29 to 35 year-old man with 95% confidence”.

This calculation, however, is affected by the availability. Whom people marry isn’t whom they would prefer to marry. The reaction to the structure of that pool would expand the age to fill the gap, whereas I wanted to expose that gap.

Meanwhile, I wanted to build the idea of whom a woman would prefer to marry multiplied by the mutual desire for commitment, so that’s why I chose the fixed age gap.

We all have heard of the “Cuffing Season” right before the winter holidays. I was determined to find out (a) if that is real, and (b) if there are other Seasons of Dating? The social sciences were silent on that one, so I had to run my own survey.

Since we are looking at longer-term trends, I focused on relationships rather than casual dating. I asked Californians in relationships what month their first date happened.

Here's what I found. Dating in the California has three distinct yearly peaks. In addition to the expected January peak, the Bay Area dating market also peaks in April and sharply drops in May before peaking again in August.

Southern California follows a similar pattern, except that the spring peak shifts closer to June.

Apart from satisfying my own curiosity, these findings should inform how you date—or at least how you should feel about dating during certain months. Wall Street confirms: when the market volume is low, volatility increases. Your relationship results become unpredictable, and it’s important to not take a slow month as a reflection of your own value or a signal to change something.

During the troughs in the dating market volume, it might help to let go off the gas a bit–and then lock in when it’s picking back up. I call it “surfing the waves of dating”. Although I have to admit, being an actual surfer may give you much better results (the science is surprisingly clear on this one [1]).

So let’s dive deeply into the data.

Cuffing Seasons Throughout The Year

We’ve all heard about Cuffing Season: the time of the year when people form long-term relationships, short-term situationships, or at least recurring winter “appointments” before the colder months arrives. The intuition makes sense. The holidays are busy, people focus on friends and family, and cold weather makes them less eager to go out, which is inconvenient if your plan requires meeting other humans.

But if the winter Cuffing Season exists, can there be other “cuffing seasons” too?

The underlying mechanism is simple. Singles anticipate a drop in dating opportunities, consciously or not, and try to lock something in before those opportunities become scarce. So the real question is broader: when does dating activity rise and fall throughout the year?

The Relationship Formation Survey

To find out, I ran another survey. I asked people in relationships, long-term or short-term, what month their first date happened.

The phrasing was intentional. I want to figure out the best time for SF singles to put themselves out there. To find that out, we need to look at when the relationships started. However, the body of the scientific works has failed me: there was no studied data for the relationship formation. We have public records for the dates of marriages, but they are scheduled more out of convenience and have little relation to when the newlyweds first met.

Additionally, this serves as a good estimate of dating volume without asking people to recount all their dates. People are more likely to meet a good partner during the high-volume times. But we have to remember that this is a proxy metric: we will get a good idea of where the peaks are, but their relative magnitude may be different from the histograms. If 2x more people meet their partner in April than in May, it doesn’t mean there are 2x more dates, but it does inform us that the difference is significant.

A survey like this requires hundreds of people to produce useful data. My amazing friends filled a survey, for which I’m grateful, but I couldn’t get enough data. So I had to pay for temporary friends and run a survey on Prolific.

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The Three Peaks of Dating in California

After surveying ~250 Californians, and filtering for ages 25-39, I arrived to the following results. The sample includes roughly equal parts Bay Area and Southern California respondents, and we’ll get to the differences between the regions shortly. Here’s the overall histogram for when the first date was:

The data shows three distinct peaks: one in January, one in late summe, and a smaller one around March. The clearest troughs are in June and November.

This is the statewide picture, however, and it did not quite match my personal experience. My brain is annoyingly good at spotting patterns, and I had a feeling something funny has been happening around April-May in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. So I drilled down.

The Bay Area

Here’s a chart for the Bay Area only:1

The peaks and troughs are surprisingly sharp. Anecdotally, this tracks. A lot of people I know travel in May and June, which leaves less time to start new relationships. There is also a lot of travel in October and November, when people seem to disappear into weddings, family trips, conferences, and whatever else Californians do when they claim to be “out of town.”

I did not expect December to be so active. Maybe the festive mood inspires people to put themselves out there, and it’s not as cold as in the Midwest. Or maybe the tech corporate events really are full of action when everyone is dressed to the tee and all the goods are on display.

Either way, the Bay Area pattern is clear: dating does not move smoothly through the year. Like the Pacific Ocean, it comes in waves.

Southern California Moves Differently

Here is the chart for Southern California, with Los Angeles and San Diego combined:2

In Southern California, dating peaks in January, slows down in April, peaks again in July, and then again in August. November and July is still the slowest months.

This is a useful reminder that dating seasons are local. Even within California, the calendar does not behave the same way everywhere. Weather, travel, and work culture all shape when people are available to start something new.

How to Surf The Waves of Dating

So why does this matter to anyone who isn’t a data-obsessed nerd?

The peaks are sharp enough so we can rule out happenstance. They follow the periods in when people are more open to connecting. Entering the dating market during the troughs, when daters are less available, will be simply tougher and less predictable. They say, there is a plenty of fish, but they are in the overseas. The options you keep open haven’t vested yet. The dating pool is drained for maintenance, and jumping into it head first is a surefire way to head trauma.

Even if you are doing well, you might simply get fewer opportunities or worse opportunities for what you have to offer. That does not mean you should quit dating for the month. Love is unpredictable and does not always respect the calendar. But it does mean you should adjust your expectations and perhaps, your approach.

Then, when the wave comes back, paddle.

My Basked With No Eggs

This is the point where I usually share a personal story from a friend, and today I’ll share one of my own. A few years ago, I decided to start focusing on finding a long-term partner after enjoying single life. Unbeknownst to me, I decided to make this heroic shift in May, one of the worst months for dating in the Bay Area.

My results were… quite disappointing. Some of that was on me: I was out of practice dating with intention, and I still had plenty to learn. But looking back at the data now, the market cycle likely affected my outcomes too. I was eager to put all of my eggs into one basket, but my basket was empty.

That year, it made me scared and a bit desperate. I ended up jumping into the first relationship that came along, partly out of fear that I would not find anything else.

Needless to say, that relationship was a total disaster. And now I wonder, what would happen if I simply waited longer? I cannot know for sure. But I do know this: bad timing can make bad choices feel rational.

The Optimistic Take

Of course, you never know when love is going to strike. Some say it happens when you least expect it. In my own recent dating life, however, the airstrikes of love were suspiciously predictable: I met one of my ex girlfriends in January, and two in September, right around the peaks in the survey.

The previous post looked at weekly cycles on dating apps, where the advice was simple: if the app is dead on a given day, put the phone down. The same principle applies here, just on a larger scale. If you see a sudden drop in dating activity, maybe it is time to let go of the gas.

This suggestion still holds true even if the data is slightly off. After all, the sample size is still fairly small, despite that the peaks seem sharp. And if you are outside of California, your peaks and troughs will definitely be different (they’re different even between different parts of the state!) But the advice will remain the same: if things are slow, don’t rush.

Ask yourself, just for fun, what is your dating life like in the peak and slow periods? And when did you meet your partner? I am especially curious about stories from the troughs, if you met the love of your life in say November, how did that happen? Let me know in the comments.

For now, here is the optimistic take: sometimes you are single not because you are unfit, but because it is a bad time in the market. Do not take it personally. Take a break, work on yourself, and get ready for the next cycle.

The tide always comes back.

And if you want to get your dating profile ready for the next dating season starting in August, shoot me an email to askdatingoptimist@gmail.com, and we can work on that.

What could this be? You don’t suddenly become 3x more charming on Wednesday. The underlying reason might be the Weekly Online Dating Cycle: the effect when the activity on the apps rises and falls throughout the week, and guides the response rate to everyone’s messages—including yours.

Is the effect real? I decided to keep notes on this for three weeks, and saw that there indeed are repeated weekly patterns of activity on Hinge. I share them below. For example, I discovered that Tuesday is pretty much the worst day to text on the apps.

This isn’t exact science, even by the Substack standards: this is literally based on a single dating profile in one city. However, you don’t need to know the exact patterns with high accuracy. In the second half of the post talk about how to adapt to these cycles without taking detailed notes. Just like with other digital skills Hinge is testing, you’ll need to pass a very important test in dating: the test of patience.

So why does knowing the patterns make a differece matter? A dating site inbox shows most recent messages first. It is advantageous to be at the top of the list, and you are at the top of the list if your activity coincides with their activity. Otherwise, your message will be buried no matter how good it is.

The post will dive deeper into these factors, but the underlying algorithm is simple. If you fire off a few messages and get no traction, put the phone down and do something else!

Now let’s go into the deep dive and get to the data.

Measuring the Dating Market Cycle

Dating apps patterns mirror the rhythm of our real lives. We typically can’t respond to strangers when we are locked in, busy with work, or on a date with someone else1. We do respond when we are bored or idle (unless you’re so OCD that you have a daily time block for the apps). Multiply that across a city of thousands of users, and you get a surprisingly consistent weekly heartbeat.

Why is it important to know? Well, if such cadence is actually real, then the appeal of your profile and your messages is multiplied by the activity level. When you see a lack of engagement, it might be caused by timing rather than by who you are or what you decide to present on your page.

In order to collect the data, I could do the same thing as sociologists do. For example, [Tyson et al, 2016] created fake dating profiles and actually logged the activity. Sure, creating fake profiles is not entirely fair to other users, but this was for a god cause, I guess. Sadly, they didn’t provide a day-of-week breakdown, but their study was of the utmost quality.

I decided to do something simpler and just log the data from my own Hinge. Luckily, my profile has sufficient volume of daily messages to draw at least some conclusions. I took notes at the end of every day for three weeks over three separate one-week periods (one in August, one in March, one in April). I looked through the timing of the recent messages, and here’s what I found.

The Weekly Cadence

Here is the consolidated picture from my notes. This is, again, data from just me, in San Francisco specifically, weighted toward people in their late 20s and 30s with white-collar jobs, so calibrate accordingly if you’re in a different city or targeting a different demographic.

Sunday. Morning is okay, midday is meh, afternoon and evening are very active. This one surprised me; I used to think Sunday night was a graveyard, since people are wrapping up trips, prepping meals, and bracing for Monday. But the late afternoon into evening actually pops.2

Monday. Morning gets one polite reply each. Midday is dead because everyone’s at work and pretending to be productive. Evening is moderately active, the “I survived Monday” wind-down crowd.

Tuesday. Morning and afternoon are dead. Tuesday night is a bit active but never the showstopper. This is the slowest day of the week overall.

Wednesday. Morning is okay, midday picks up, afternoon is very active. Wednesday night is almost dead, which is counterintuitive but consistent in my notes. My theory: people are tired by Wednesday and saving social energy for Thursday onward.

Thursday. Morning, midday, and afternoon are all but dead. But Thursday evening is the single most active block of the week. If you only had one window per week to send openers, this would be it. People are mentally already in the weekend and starting to make plans.

Friday. Morning is moderately active. Midday dies. Afternoon comes back to moderate (the “what are we doing tonight” energy). Friday night—dead again because, well, people are out.

Saturday. Morning and midday are moderately active. Night is dead for the same reason as Friday. Saturday afternoon, after brunch, can have a nice little burst.

So these are the patterns I observed. What are the patterns found in the research?

Is it similar to Social Media Usage?

Interestingly, The Bumble Times report, while being less detailed, mostly agrees with the activity patterns discovered in the study, and the peak times match the ones listed here.

[Tyson et al, 2016] contains a graph of daily activity but doesn’t provide a day-of-the-week breakdown.

An alternative explanation is that the chart above very closely resembles3… The social media engagement graph! Here’s the chart for Facebook from [Sprout Social].

This doesn’t mean that Hinge users treat is as the same dopamine machine as, say, Instagram. Perhaps, lots of swiping on dating apps and socials alike happens in a general “leisure time”.

But we also do find uncanny similarities between what makes a viral TikTok and a successful dating site message: it has to be sent at the right time. Hinge algorithms don’t automatically pop messages from the “best” matches to the top of the inbox, yet.

The Counterintuitive Move: Put the Phone Down

Now my data is for San Francisco, so how is that useful for you if you’re in Paris, you might ask. But you don’t need to know the exact timings for your city. Just like in Control Theory, there is a way to adjust on the fly without knowing the parameters of the underlying process.

Our natural instinct, when one person doesn’t respond, is to text someone else. Then someone else. And again, and again. Surely at least one of them will reply. So we keep texting until we’re out of matches.

But this is exactly what the app is testing. Hinge rewards patience and punishes the natural human response to silence: speaking to fill it. If you blow through your queue in the off-cycle, then your messages will be at the bottom of their inbox when they do log in. And you are even less likely to get a text back!

Here’s what to do instead. If two or three people in a row don’t respond, you’re probably in a dead window. The right move is to put the phone down and do something else. Go for a walk, cook dinner, work on your Substack (I am writing this on Wednesday night indeed), or open TikTok instead if that’s what it takes. Poker players quit early on their off night, and so might you.

The Optimistic Take

The standard advice when you’re not getting traction on Hinge is: fix your profile, fix your photos, fix your openers, or even fix yourself. This all could help, but sometimes, “it’s not you, it’s me” indeed: the people on the apps could be just out of sync with you.

It could be simply logging in when everyone else is busy with life, and dealing with that by sending increasingly frustrated and sloppy messages hoping for a reply. The better move is to just stop and return to the messaging later. A similar algorithm in software is called Exponential Backoff: if a node can’t reach a server, wait for a bit and try again instead of sending more traffic and potentially overloading it.

Yes, it does require patience, but patience is an important skill in relationships, and by far not the only dating skill that Hinge quietly tests.

The apps, turns out, do not reward whoever sends the most messages or the best messages. They reward whoever sends the right messages in sync with others. Whatever you’re doing instead of refreshing the app, that’s the magic sauce that increases your success. It helps to also be memorable, but you can’t swim against the tide. Surfing the waves of the activity trends will get you much farther than trying to fight them. The tide always comes back.

And if you also want to make a Hinge profile popular enough to have a statistically significant stream of likes and messages, reach out to me at thedatingoptimist@gmail.com and I’ll help you out.

The comments enthusiastically filled the epistemic gap. They offered theories such as worry for the offspring height, insecurity, or male preferences, but they seemed shaky and came without evidence. So I started looking for a simpler explanation: what if it’s not psychological at all?

Picture yourself as a 5-foot-tall woman in a crowded night club. The taller men in front of you block your view of many shorter men behind them (and often block your view of the DJ and the crowd). An average height guy might now seem a bit shorter than he actually is, relative to the taller men who remain visible. I call this the Night Club Effect. To my knowledge, this is the first exploration of the subject in this way. Here’s an overexaggerated1 illustration of the concept:

In this post, I test that idea with a 3D simulation of a crowded room. The question is simple: how much does the Night Club Effect distort the comparative heights of men—for women of different heights? The answer is measurable albeit not huge. The crowd geometry can make a guy in the same height percentile look about 1.5 inches shorter for 5 ft tall observer. And for a taller, 6ft observer, the men in the same height bracket look 2 inches “taller” than they actually are. That does not explain the entire preference drift, but it pushes the data in the right direction.

This is not just a nightclub thing, of course. The same logic should apply in any crowded space, and without the crowd, the effect disappears. We’ll return to the implications of this in the conclusion, and for now let’s dive into the data and look at the pictures.

As usual, we start with a sneak peek to the key outcome of this work: a graph on how female height affects the perception of men’s height in comparison with other men.

Other posts on Height

1. Yes Women Prefer Tall Men but Data Shows They’re Surprisingly Realistic (link)

2. The Great Height Illusion: We’re All An Inch Shorter Than We Appear (link)

3. The Night Club Effect: Why Short Women Like Tall Men (this post)

What the Old Model Explained—and Didn’t

In the previous post on height, I proposed two models to put women’s stated preferences into context.

Fair-Match Height pairs the tallest woman with the tallest man, then the second-tallest woman with the second-tallest man, etc. That gives everyone the tallest partner possible assuming everyone is matched.

Real-Match Minimum does the same but in small groups, and averages over the whole population. This model fit the claimed preferences much better.

Overall, the Real-Match model fit the middle of the bell curve well, while the preferences of shorter and taller women strangely deviated (read here). Shorter women wanted men who are taller than the model’s prediction, and vice versa. I refer to this as “preference drift” but it emerged without an explanation.

The commenters stepped in and offered a variety of theories:

• Tall genes for offspring — Short women unconsciously select tall partners so their children won’t inherit their stature.

• Population-level averaging — A pairing instinct pulls extremes toward the middle.

• Competitive market dynamics — men like short women, so they simply win the competition for tallest men.

• Insecurity — The shortest women are often the most height-conscious in their demands.

• Calibration error — Some short women state a “6+” rule without actually knowing what 6’ looks like.

Those theories seemed hard to verify and relied a lot of unclear and contradicting assumptions. If there is an explanation, I thought, it ought to be simpler. What if shorter and taller women just see the world vastly differently?

“Why is Everyone so Tall Here?”

A few years ago, a friend and I had an absolutely terrible night out at a local dance club in San Francisco. We approached women, got nowhere, and struck out multiple times. Frustratingly, I blurted out: “No wonder. Everyone is so freaking tall here.” My taller friend looked at me wearily and disagreed; to him, everything seemed normal.

We moved on to other explanations of our poor results. I forgot about this until randomly walking past that night club last month. And then it dawned on me.

What if the height preference drift could be explained by how differently short and tall women experience the crowded spaces? What if my perception that “everyone is tall here” was just an illusion: a shorter or even an average person simply can’t see other short people behind tall guys.

Note that for the rest of this post, we are going to make a huge—and untrue assumption—aimed exclusively to help us study this narrow effect. We are going to assume that women care a lot about height, and that they percieve the man’s height in relation of other men’s heights. It’s not really the case, but we are asking ourselves a question: if it was true, what would it explain?

Studying this directly in real night clubs sounded expensive, time-consuming, and like a great way to get thrown out for showing up with a laser rangefinder and a notebook. So I did the next best thing and built a 3D computer simulation instead.

Luckily, my engineering background is in computer vision and graphics, which makes me extremely qualified to over-engineer this.

A Virtual Night Out

To test the Night Club Effect, I built a simple 3D simulation of a crowded room. Here’s an example of a 30x30 ft floor and 200 people centered around the lone observer. We use an internationally recognized color coding: guys are in blue, gals in pink-ish.

Now let’s put ourselves directly to an eye level of a 5 foot tall observer in the middle of the room and look around. This video shows what that observer would see,2 and how lots of shorter men are hidden behind other men who are close by.

Here’s a single-image representation of this video: a 360-degree view from this obsrver. People whom she sees are highlighted in different colors, and the people who are mostly occluded are marked in black.

The simulation lets us vary the observer’s height, the density of the crowd while keeping the distribution of male and female height consistent with the NHANES data compiled by CDC. I created 2000 virtual scenes3 with matching height distribution. When computing the effect on height, I rendered the same scene from the perspective of different observers, ranging from 4’11’’ to 6’2’’.

How Observer Height Changes the Room

Once the simulation is in place, the first question is straightforward: if two women of different heights stand in the same crowded room, do they actually “see” different male height distributions?

This rests on the assumption that humans are just height-reading machines. The reality is more nuanced, of course. In this piece, I aim to study just the height question in isolation from other factors.

Now, the difference in distributions might seem slight. After all, what does an inch or two of a difference make? But let’s look at an example.

Consider a 5 foot tall observer who can’t see a lot of shorter men behind an average sized guy. To her, another average sized guy would seem like the shortest man in the room! Whereas he’s actually in the top 20% of men in the area!

However, if the woman were 6 foot tall, she’d clearly see many more guys:

Notice how in the first scene, the agerage guy was the shortest man out of the two visible guys, but in the second scene, he’s taller than most visible men (#2 out of 5).

And once that baseline shifts, so does the apparent height of a man in the same height bracket. A man who should register as appropriately tall can now look a bit short, simply because the shorter comparison set has dropped out of view.

Impact of the Night Club Effect

Here is how the Night Club Effect changes the perceived heights.4 In this graph, we show how much shorter (negative values) or taller (positive values) the man in the same percentile would stand ad to an observer of every height, according to the simulations.

So at the lower end of the spectrum, the guy needs to be up to 1.5 inches taller to match the relative height criteria. However, at the higer end, the guy can to be up to 2 inches shorter without sacrificing his chances.

Does It Explain The Preference Drift?

In the first post I ran a 70-person survey among my friends to determine the real height preferences. Secretly, I compared them with the Real-Match minimum model.

How does our new model compares with the old model and the survey results?

The purple line is the updated model, and the dashed green line is the original Real-Match Minimum model.

For taller women, the new model fits the survey data like a glove. For shorter women, the model is not enough to explain the entire preference drift on its own, but it significantly moves it int the right direction. 1.5 extra inches may move a man from “average” to “bottom 25th percentile”.

What do Shorter Women Say?

Now, how does this effect compare with the actual experience of shorter women in night clubs?

First of all, being short in a nightclub sucks. A friend of mine is recounting her experiences: you can’t see the DJ, you can’t see most of the crowd, and most of whom you can see is your own crew. When taller people talk to you, it’s hard to hear each or even look at each other without mutual neck pain.

And that’s if they even notice you! In the words of my friend, “I got a black eye just from some tall guy’s elbow while he was dancing at Bill Graham. He never even noticed”. The Observability Effect goes both ways. In physics, we call this Helmholz Reciprocity Principle: the obstructed men are as invisible to you as you are to them.

I have to admit that I cheated in the video above a bit and made the people very close to the observer invisible (for informational purposes). The reality of being short at a night club looks more like this:

My friend also had some tips on how to work around this effect in crowded spaces: move around a bit to see more people and ask them questions, looking beyond their superficial qualities such as height. But most importantly, to my friend, the Night Club Effect doesn’t change her perception of men at all. So perhaps, it indeed is just a geometric curiosity.

What Can We Learn From This

First of all, I didn’t mean this to be a defining underlying theory of attraction. The Night Club Effect shows that a measurable and significant part of the height preferences can emerge from sightlines alone. I can’t prove that it does; I can only prove it can, and it does rely on some assumptions about how people percieve each other’s tallness. I’m sorry, this is just how descriptive science works. Welcome to the Journal of Substack Originals.

The effect only gets us part of the way from the Real-Match model to the observed preferences, so clearly something else is going on too. Maybe some of the psychological or social explanations from the comments are a better explanation.

We also learn that in crowded spaces, shorter men and women are at an outsized disadvantage. I wouldn’t necessary recommend that shorter people avoid night clubs, but it’s something to be aware of. You’re just less likely to be seen and if you are, you may be more likely to be judged unfairly. I do notice that the more crowded the space is, the worse my results are (I’m 5’10’’), but some further research is needed on that.

That is also a useful reminder for dating more broadly. What we consider hard requirements may just be a geometric curiosity. We already know that the apps and group chats distort things, but now we know that in person meetings are not immune either if you’re in the wrong rooms.

So before we turn dating into a checklist, it is worth remembering that perception can be noisy. We can’t approach romance with a ruler and a set of Excel formulas. Because sometimes, we simply can’t see the forest behind the tall trees, literally.

And if you ever want to find out how to make a great online dating profile, or ask literally anything, send me an email to askdatingoptimist@gmail.com .

Appendix 1: Separating Presence from Observability

Wait, if we thought that taller women can see everything, why does our simulation show that they decrease the percieved height? There are two effects at play:

1. Observability: A tall woman (e.g. 6ft) is still shorter than a lot of men (15% of men are 6ft+). They may be “too short” for her but if they’re close by, they will occlude other, taller men, so the geometric effect still applies.

2. Presence: The tallest and shortest men and women are rare and might not even appear in the scene when the selection is truly random.

We can separate these effects in our simulation, as shown in the following diagram.

It could have gone the other way, so this is not something that I expected to happen, and defninitely not to the same degree.

Most curiously, sometimes these effects pull the height in the opposite directions. For a 5’6’’ woman, the presence effect reduces and the observability effect decreases the perceived height.

In the previous sections, we discarded the presence effect since Real-Match Minimum already is a presence model.

Appendix 2: How I Calculated The Height Adjustment

Teh height adjustment was calculated as follows. For any given observer height:

1. Find out the percentile by height she represents (e.g. 5’0’’ woman would be the bottom 10%-ile)

2. Find out the matching male height overall (e.g. bottom 10 %-ile by height for men is 5’5’’)

3. Find out the matching male height among the visible men in the scene—what is the tallest man from the bottom 10% of visible guys.

4. Average his height across all 2000 simulations: in different scenes, this will be a vastly different man, depending on the distribution of people on the floor.

5. The difference between this height average and the matching percentile height in step 2 is the height differential we plotted in the graphs. For a 5’0’’ woman, that average difference is about 1.1 inches down.

And yet, things often break down here. The man invites you somewhere too close or too far, too early to too late, too short or too long, or somewhere too fancy or too casual, too planned or too improvised. Surely, his failure to invite you in the right way shows your incompatibility, his lack of care or cluelessness, reveals his true dating intentions, or puts too much pressure on you, and he should know better. Or does it?

Sometimes it does, but often it doesn’t mean anything deep. The real problem is that the shared script of dating has largely disappeared.

Back in the day, we used to have a pretty good, widely accepted idea of what needs to happen on a date. For example, today many think a “dinner and a movie” date is way too much: you are stuck in the theater for hours and can’t even talk! Gosh, even dinner is too much for many modern city daters. Yet back in the day, it used to be a gold standard of dating.

It’s okay that the scripts change with the times, but we haven’t come up with the new ones that are universally agreed on. Worse than that: a lot of people are convinced that there is a common standard—except that everyone has a different thing in mind. Guided by personalized algorithms, we all have high convictions in completely different courtship rituals. We link these mismatches to deeper incompatibilities when it could be simply watching different tiktoks.

In this post, I’ll show how opposite different people’s convictions on early stage dating can be, and share some tips on communicating through this. If society hasn’t come up with a shared script, we have to take matters in our own hands and reconstruct it ourselves, date-by-date.

This post is Part 4 of The Pipeline Series, which examines the underlying reasons of a problem of only connecting with misfit suitors:

1. You are not around them (Part 1)

2. You are around them, but they are not choosing you (Part 2)

3. They are choosing you, but you are not choosing them (Part 3)

4. Recovering the Shared Script of Dating (this post)

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Of TikToks and Men

I recently saw an amusing TikTok reel where a creator from New York was venting that the men she talks to never text her on weekends, and no they weren’t married. I found not texting on the weekends thing weird but sure, everyone has their quirks.

Later, on that very same day, a friend of mine told me that she never texts men on weekends. According to her, weekends are “me time,” and it is far too early to share them with men in the talking stages.

Honestly, I can see both sides. This is exactly the sort of thing that comes down to personal preference. If these two people tried to date each other, they would drive each other crazy unless they knew to talk about it. But I also see clearly that they’re willing to negotiate around their preferences: my friend told me she would, and the tiktok creator keeps dating these men despite complaining about them.

And that is far from the only example. Consider two preferences two of my friends shared with me, along with what how they would handle it if the man got it wrong:

• “If a guy invites me for dinner as a first date, I don’t respond and just ghost”

• “If a guy invites me for anything other than a dinner, I don’t respond and just ghost”

Now, I understand that people have preferences. I understand why dinner can feel too intense and constricting to some (“imagine being stuck for two hours with someone you do not vibe with”). I also understand why drinks can feel unfairly low-effort (“I run a company and going on a date has such a huge opportunity cost that it better be worth it”).

The same goes for coffee dates, walking dates, cocktail dates, activity dates, event dates, weekday dates, and weekend dates. For how soon the guy wants to meet, whether he texts or calls, iPhone or Android, that sort of things.

I’m not challenging anyone’s preferences but I do wonder if these are the right thing to ghost or unmatch over. Wouldn’t communicating be a better strategy?

Just today, a post popped up on my substack feed, where a guy was unmatched for the grave crime of using the word “cute” to compliment the woman. So now we’re unmatching over thesaurus? Seriously?

Sure, the preference differences might signal a broad disconnect. But it might simply mean he happened to watch a different “Ghost the Guy if He Does THIS” tiktok than you did rather revealing a real long-term mismatch in values.

Is this Actually Compatibility?

Now, this applies to more than just the first-date venue. When to invite, how far in advance, which days work best, how elaborate the date should be, how much it costs. We all have preferences. The question is whether they really belong in the same category as family values, integrity, or relationship goals. Here’s something you might find revealing.

Based on the sentiment of my single guy friends, men rarely care about where to invite you, when to text you, or whether the first date is drinks or coffee. They are usually just trying to get to know you while making sure you feel safe and do not get bored. Men are also trying to not get used by someone not actually interested in them (for a free dinner, or for company to some event or an errand), but mostly we don’t care.

And men know that women often think about comfort, safety, and romance a bit differently. That’s why many men lean heavily on outside advice and shared scripts for inspiration. The issue is that he may have absorbed a slightly different script than you.

So my suggestion here is not that you take over and start planning dates for men. It is that you help him lead you to a date you actually feel good about. If he suggests something that does not work for you, acknowledge the initiative and ask to adjust. Tell your reasons so that he also knows how to adjust. A compatible man will be happy to hear what would make you more comfortable and even more excited to meet as well as accommodate your preference.

And if you want to help the logistics along, reply a little faster to the man whom you’re already planning to meet. You’ll see the importance of this when we explore this common question.

Why Don’t Men Just Ask?

A natural question here is: why don’t men just ask what kind of date you prefer? The answer is: some do. But the men who do, they lose.

Let’s put ourselves in a typical man’s shoes for a moment. Many women see it as unmasculine, low-effort, or vaguely uninspiring when a man asks too many logistical questions instead of simply making a plan. Now, I didn’t find any research on this but here’s why I think it’s the case. I’ve seen countless Hinge profiles that express such preference (e.g. “The best way to ask me out: naming a time and place”1) but I’ve seen zero profiles that wish men would ask about where to invite and re-confirm every step of the process.

So from the man’s perspective, being decisive but occasionally wrong will usually get him more dates overall than being perfectly accommodating but hesitant.

There also are practical reasons. Any back-and-forth incurs delays2. Every man instinctively understands that a delay means more time for something to go wrong, for the conversation to lose momentum, for somebody else to pop up on the apps, or for life to simply get in the way before the date ever happens. We men have anxieties too—we just aren’t allowed to show it.

So yes, men could ask more questions, and some men definitely could dial down on their pushiness. But many have learned that a clear suggestion works better than an open-ended committee process, on average. That is why so many default to making a plan and hoping you like it or push back: decisiveness is usually a stronger strategy.

The tradeoff is that sometimes they guess wrong. Here’s what you can do about it.

Reconstructing The Script

We have to reconstruct the shared script by communicating our own personal desires and preferences. Now it does matter how you communicate your preferences. In my experience, effective response consists:

• Validating their suggestion and effort

• Stating what makes you uncomfortable with reasons or alternatives

• Keeping the momentum going (by explicitly agreeing to some aspects of the invitation)

Here are a few situations and how it can work in practice.

Scenario 1: Date Too Intense

Sometimes men invite you to elaborate first dates that require large time commitment. They usually are excited to share something amazing, but you might not share this excitement. Communicating this can be as simple as “Hey I love that you invited me for the sunset cruise, but it seems too much for the first date. How about some drinks in the city instead?”

Notice how this contains the three key compontnes of Validating, Stating, and Momentum.

Another phrasing a friend of mine used after being invited to an event out of town: “wow that’s quite the adventure for a first date lol! Why don’t we start off with a drink around here?”

Scenario 2: Dinner vs Drinks

If you would prefer to have dinner instead of the standard drinks date, try saying this: “Friday night sounds good! I appreciate you inviting me to this bar X, but I prefer getting to know people over dinner. Pick the place that you like and I’m flexible on cuisine.”

In addition to the key coomonents, this message encourages the man pick the restaurant which assuages the concerns about a “free dinner”.

Scenario 3: Inviting too Quickly or Talking too Much

Sometimes men don’t invite you out over text quickly enough. I was surprised to learn from my friends, how frequently they would ghost a man for just that.

If you do that, it might be helpful for you to learn that men get ghosted for inviting out too quickly too! Men can’t guess what your personal level of comfort is and there is no universal standard.

If you get an invite too quickly, a text similar to “I appreciate the invite, but I’d be more comfortable getting to know you a bit more on here!” could help. That would be fine for me, but a few guys in the comments feel it a bit stilted, so there are alternatives:

• Coming with an excuse (“I can’t this weekend”) followed by an actual question about the guy

• ignore the invitation and respond to other parts of the message, etc.

If you feel the conversation is dragging too long, here are a few things my matches sent me (as you can tell from my posts, I do have a tendency for talking too long):

• “I’m not one for too much chit-chat on Hinge, but would love to meet up for a date in the near future”

• “You might have to figure that out in person” in response to a question about her. I followed up with a date invitation.

  

Scenario 4: Change of Venue

Sometimes you like the idea in general but aren’t comfortable with the specifics. Here’s an example of a date my friend was invited to. “I appreciate that you invited me to do coke at your mansion for the first date but how about…” actually scratch that. Ghost away. I thought this was all fiction, but apparently not.

On a more serious note, saying you aren’t comfortable with, say, axe throwing, or aren’t into Topgolf is totally normal. Just tell the man what you’d enjoy more and let him choose. This way you’ll have a date that’s comfortable for you and still let him handle the planning.

A Safety Thing?

I also understand that, sometimes, it feels safer to ghost than to push back and express a preference. That is especially true when you do not know how a man will react, and when even mild criticism of his date idea might bruise a fragile man’s ego. And sure, if a guy reacts badly when you ask to adjust the plan, ghost away!

But at some point, in some form, you are going to have to learn how this man responds to your preferences, whether he gets rude and defensive or makes you feel comfortable speaking up. What is a safer time for that than when you’re just texting? If a man reacts badly to your preferences, is that someone you want to date long-term?

But there’s more to that. A friend of mine, SF-based clinical psychologist Dr Ida Taghavi (check out her website) shared some interesting research with me. Being assertive doesn’t just help you get better at scheduling. Assertiveness in women is linked with better well-being and better romantic outcomes [Jandhyala 2024]! Besides, some men think it’s hot when a woman can assert herself.

Successful relationships require communication. If there is something to focus on during courtship, is how you communicate through differences and disconnects. Ghosting over the first hardship is a very valuable signal for the viability of this relationship—or lack thereof.

And to close out this post, I’ll share a funny story.

The Conveyor Belt Omakase

If you want another counterpoint to the idea that a first date invitation is indicative of long-term compatibility, let me tell you about a friend of a friend, let’s call him Steve.

Steve had a very particular approach to first dates. He made a standing reservation at a fancy omakase restaurant for 8pm every Friday. Every week, he finds a new woman and invites her for dinner, pretending it’s spontaneous. For a first date, it was undeniably impressive. A second date was very often in the cards, but more often, the evening continued at his apartment, conveniently located nearby.

If you don’t know this and were just getting invited for a sushi date, he’d have checked all the boxes. Proactive—check, good taste—check, well off—check (it wasn’t a cheap restaurant), and probably well-connected too since he could get a reservation there on such a short notice—just for you!

Yet how would you feel if you knew about this strategy from the beginning? Or if you realized that while the restaurant was not cheap, dinner there costs only about as much as two cocktail dates and Steve is probably saving money in the long run?

Steve is a genius. He’s running his dates as conveyor belt sushi joint and yet comes across as more thoughtful than 90% of men who invite you out.

This is not to say that every guy who goes above and beyond is secretly wretched. It just shows that the nature of the invitation and the nature of a man’s intentions are not always the same thing. There is a saying about judging a book by its cover, and judging a man solely by where he invites you can fall into the same trap. And on the opposite end, awkward and imperfect invites that don’t fit your script may still come from the bottom of the man’s heart.

Conclusion

The shared script of dating is gone, and it’s not coming back anytime soon. We are no longer operating from one common set of assumptions about what early dating is supposed to look like. We have different expectations around texting, planning, pacing, effort, safety, and what even counts as a good first date.

That does make modern dating messier. But it does not have to make it hopeless.

Of course, not everything is negotiable. Some reactions really do tell you something important. If someone argues with your preferences, ignores your requests, or makes you feel unsafe, that is useful information.

But a lot of these disconnects are not deep incompatibilities. Often, they are just collisions between two scripts that both people assumed were normal. And if that is true, then the solution is not to close the door ar the sign of a mismatch, but to communicate a little more clearly and let the man lead you to a mutually enjoyable experience.

Remember the post I linked where a guy was unmatched after saying “cute”? If you keep reading, you’ll learn that the author actually matched with that man again, talked about it, and they are dating now! If that’s not a testament to how arbitrary our filters may be, I don’t know what is.

I know it can be hard to communicate through disagreement. But if my friend found the strength to reply to the guy who invited her to do blow in a mansion (even if he was blocked shortly after), then asking to switch to a cocktail bar in a different neighborhood should be a no-brainer.

Hopefully, by now, the leaks are patched, the roadblocks are gone, and the right men are finally making it through to first dates with you. Congratulations. Your Dating Pipeline is up and running, so the hard part is done… right?

And if you’re having difficulties with the dating pipeline, or want any help with setting up your dating profile, send me an email to askdatingoptimist@gmail.com.

And yet, once things start progressing into texting, dates, or early relationship stages, something feels off. The pipeline looks healthy and full. But too many end up ghosting, flaking, putting in weak effort, keeping their relationship goals vague, or simply manipulating you. Or maybe you’re simply… not that attracted to them!

It’s again tempting to conclude that there are no good men left. After all, if this many men are approaching you, surely some of the best ones are too. If these men disappoint, what hope is there for the rest?

But that conclusion only follows if you are consistently selecting the most compatible men from the options in front of you. What if that is the next leak in the pipeline: that the right men are choosing you, but you are not choosing them.

In this post, we will explore a few reasons that might be happening. My goal here is not to offer a complete theory of mate selection, or to coach every reader through the entire process of choosing a partner. I want to show that the dating pool may not be rotten at all, and that with a bit of awareness, better framing, and some learnable skill, it becomes much easier to sift through the rubble.

So let’s look at a few common ways the right men fall by the wayside, and what you can do about it.

This post is Part 3 of The Pipeline Series, which examines the underlying reasons of a problem of only connecting with misfit suitors:

1. You are not around them (Part 1)

2. You are around them, but they are not choosing you (Part 2)

3. They are choosing you, but you are not choosing them (this post)

4. Roadblocks During Date Setup (3 weeks after)

The Final Leak: Selection

Whole books, blogs, and coaching programs are devoted to the problem of selecting the right man. Will this one post explore that subject with anything close to the depth it deserves? Hardly. But that is not my objective here.

With this blog, my goal is to improve the dating scene in San Francisco. So for this post, I am drawing from recurring themes I have been hearing from my friends over the last few months, and using those as a rough proxy for what is happening in our city.

A few patterns kept coming up:

• Getting Distracted With the Six Pack

• Mistaking Intensity for Interest

• Creating Arbitrary Roadblocks for Date Setup

There are two more patterns that came up which broadly fit into the categories above:

• “I’m Just Not Attracted to Any of Them”

• “Everyone who hits on me is a Peter Pan / Fuckboy”

I am sure more women in this city are going through some version of the same things, and I hope this is useful to them too. But at the very least, I hope it gives my friends something worth thinking about.

We will save the “Creating Arbitrary Roadblocks” for a larger post next week. For now, let’s talk about arguably more foundational and important patterns, starting with this.

Pattern 1: Getting Distracted With The Six Pack

Three (!) of my friends went through this experience, so I suspect it is not a rare one. One friend’s story in particular captures it well.

A friend of mine got back on the apps with a very clear goal in mind. She wanted a man who was consistent and “makes an effort” (her words). Shortly after, she texted me asking for wine bar recommendations. I asked why.

“See, this guy wants to meet me, but he didn’t suggest a place,” she said. “So I wanted to send him a list”.

Of course, this man was very, very attractive. So much so, that my friend got distracted from her goals. Instead of having a man who makes an effort to pursue her, she was doing most of the efforting for a man she was pursuing. And of course, he ghosted her on the day of their date, as men who don’t make any effort often do.

That was not even the saddest part. After that experience, she got so upset that she just… deleted the apps! So did two other friends of mine after similar experiences1. It is heartbreaking to watch my good friends walk away from the biggest channel for meeting great men because of one disappointing encounter. And he wasn’teven a fit to begin with!

To Red Pillers: I also don’t question her goals in the slightest. No, she didn’t subconsciously want to meet an “alpha male” Chad, and she showed that by finding a long-term boyfriend shortly after. We all can get distracted by physical beauty, men and women alike. And it is okay to get distracted! It is okay to reach for the stars, to chase the most attractive prospect or let him chase you.

Just not let such prospects occupy the entirety of your inbox or of your night. A ripped low-effort douche is often the first guy to text you or to approach you, but not the man you’re obligated to choose.

Great Game Doesn’t Mean Great Compatibility

Same goes for people with great game. It is really hard to say “no” to a confident man who is a great flirt and say “yes” to a man who struggles to find words, especially if they are side-by-side at the same bar. I get it, it would be very hard for me to say “no” to a stunning woman too.

But a confident guy with great game can talk to any woman, and he does, so there’s much less signal in him hitting on you. His charm is real but also broadly distributed. This tiktok puts it well.

Compare it with a man who’s struggling and fumbling as he’s talking to you. He is putting much more effort to hit on you than a player who dishes out game on the regular. Doesn’t this send a stronger signal for how attractive he thinks you are and how much effort he’s willing to put in pursuing you?

This might partly explain why “everyone who hits on me is a fuckboy”. What if fuckboys are just… better at hitting on you, so much so that attempts by other men barely register? When one guy is putting you on a rollercoaster of emotional swings and laughter, a “we should get a drink sometime” from someone quieter doesn’t land.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with pursuing outgoing men with great game. They’re fun and cool, I’m one of them, and I love hanging out with them too!2 But if your inbox is still full of douchebros, night after night and week after week, it’s worth asking if the distractions won over substance in the battle for your attention. Perhaps it’s time to diversify the investments, and add some safer bonds to the high-risk / high-reward stocks.

Pattern 2: Mistaking Intensity for Interest

Have you ever been lovebombed? Has a man ever promised you the world, written poetic texts about how excited he is to have you in his life, invited you on extravagant dates3, and painted vivid pictures of all the epic vacations you are supposedly going to take together? Only for all of that to abruptly end in an equally expressive text about how it is not the right time if not outright ghosting?

This feels disappointing, heartbreaking, and confusing. You might ask, why would someone do this, and the answer is simple. Because lovebombing works.

Here’s why. Some women come to expect a very particular level of interest from men they date. For some, that means strong, vocal, overwhelming enthusiasm, and anything less reads as lukewarm. For others, oddly enough, the opposite is exciting: distance, unpredictability, and a man who takes two days to text back because of course, he is just so busy and important. In both cases, the underlying assumption is the same: the interest must be intense, in one direction or the other, or else it does not count.

Obviously, no single man can satisfy both these preferences out of the gate. But men love to be accommodating! So if you have a preference for being lovebombed, someone will surely accommodate that and put on a show.

And might not even be just to manipulate you: let’s not forget that putting on a show is also fun for the performer! But genuine interest may take multiple forms and is not always loud.

Imagining a Healthy Attachment

Let’s ask, are these extreme patterns healthy? You must’ve heard of attachment theory. Let’s imagine what early dating of two securely attached people would look like.

At first, it would probably look a little unremarkable. They would be excited, but still unsure. They would want to see each other, so they would text enough to keep the momentum going and make plans happen. They would be warm, but they would not make huge declarations they could not possibly be certain of yet. They would be reliable, which means they would not play games just to create a feeling. They keep their promises, so they don’t promise anything big just yet.

Then, as they get to know each other better, the warmth, certainty, and level of investment grows. They also start adjusting to each other’s preferences. One person likes “good morning” texts, the other hates them but wants to make the partner happy. One likes frequent check-ins, the other prefers a bit more space. They figure that out, talk about it, and adapt.

That is what healthy interest often looks like. Not flat and hot-and-cold but paced; not overwhelming, but responsive. The difference is not just how two people match each other’s mold or how strongly they feel; it is how honestly they express it, and how well they adjust to each other as things develop.

We never saw this type of interest in the Disney films, and we don’t see this in the most controversial tiktok reels, so no wonder it doesn’t light us up. But then again: we can both reach for the stars and stay grounded.

But Doesn’t This Sound Boring?

One pattern I keep hearing is some version of, “I’m just not attracted to men who hit on me”. And that makes sense. Just like attraction doesn’t mean compatibility, compatibility doesn’t mean attraction. You need both.

I can relate to this more than you think. If I’m flirting with a woman, and instead of laughing along and keeping up the bit, she suddenly hits me with attachment theory and her long-term goals. I can feel my attraction wane in real-time. But I recognize this is my personal preference, so I’m not going to ghost her or write her off. I will use this as an opportunity to share my long-term goals too, and go right back to flirting once we are on the solid, shared ground.

So what would you in a mirror-image version of this situation, when you meet a man whom you aren’t attracted to, but you wish you were?

There are two sides to that. On one hand, men of San Francisco need to step it the hell up. New Yorkers make fun of us, and deservingly so. We need to dress better, flirt better, and accept that maybe your amazing achievements as a Senior Staff Researcher at a Hot Shot Startup need to also be paired with a sense of humor, a touch of courage, and some social skill. I learned these skills the hard way myself, and I’ll be sharing what I found with men of San Francisco in the coming posts.

On the other hand, not all attraction is immediate.

Familiarity May Create Attraction

Some women’s attraction grows with familiarity. The more time they spend with a man, and the more they learn about him, the more attractive he starts to seem. Research concurs [Albada 2006]. Another fascinating study showed that just learning more about a man literally makes him more physically attractive to women [Lewandowsky Jr., 2007]. As in, his face gets better attractiveness ratings if a short bio is attached.

Are you taking advantage of this effect? Some men can woo anyone from the first interaction, we even talked about them in this post. But most men aren’t like that, and their attractive qualities take longer to surface.

For some women, their attraction to men also emerges slowly just in general. Joyce Zhang (an SF-based dating coach) has written an amazing article on how to recognize and navigate this situation, “The Face Test”.

This does not mean forcing yourself to date men you feel nothing for. It means not treating “he is not sweeping me off my feet in minute three” as the same thing as “there is nothing here”, and Joyce’s post shows how to identify that.

That’s why I also think that ordinary, imperfect initiative matters. Contrary to what the Internet says, “We should get a drink sometime” is a very strong signal of interest. These words didn’t randomly type themselves! Out of all the things that man could do with his time, he suggested a drink with you. This means something.

Yes, there are no games, there is no exhilarating flirting, no extravagant vacations in the picture, and no fancy dinner dates just yet. But that all may be in the cards if you respond “We should”, and let the man take it from there.

Conclusion

Some reader’s takeaway from the previous post was actually to change what type of men they should focus on. That’s one of the possible takeaways, and hopefully, this post gave a better picture of where the right man may be dropping off.

This post is in no way asking you to start talking to unattractive men. I wish we all could just magically become 50% more attractive to each other… But for now, we can simply take more time knowing people, and who knows what we’ll find out about them—or about ourselves.

And this is my optimistic message for the readers of The Pipeline Series. If your end results are toxic or unsatisfying, that doesn’t mean the dating pool is poisoned. Perhaps, the pipeline is leaky, and that is something you have the power to fix. Perhaps, the answer might be to remove distracting clutter and give someone just more time to squeeze through the filters.

So yes, keep your standards, care about effort, values, compatibility. Vent about hilariously bad dates! But let’s also not confuse mismatches in flirting style with major value differences, beauty or game with compatibility, and intensity, whether anxious or avoidant, for genuine interest.

Once the promising men are emerging, or you decided to give a chance to someone, it’s time to set up the date. That’s when the final leak happens, and we’ll talk about this in the next and final post in the series, on Arbitrary Roadblocks For Date Setup. Stay Tuned!

And if you need to call a plumber to troubleshoot and fix the pipeline, email me at askdatingoptimist@gmail.com, and I can help you out.

But what if you fixed that part, and still the men you actually want are not stepping forward? This is the second leak. Maybe, you are around the right men, but they are not choosing you.

At this point, it is completely fair not to blame yourself. A lot of men are simply dropping the ball. Some are shy, rusty, passive, or so indirect in their effort not to seem creepy that they accomplish nothing if they even try. Too many men have abdicated their role in creating romantic momentum. This post is not about how to reach these men. It is about how to better reach the ones who want to, and can.

You are not powerless in this situation. You can’t make the right man approach you, but you can make it easier for him to do so, to either talk to you at a bar, or for him to stand out from an endless stream of likes on Hinge.

This post is Part 2 of The Pipeline Series, which examines the underlying reasons of a problem of only connecting with misfit suitors:

1. You are not around them (Part 1)

2. You are around them, but they are not choosing you (this post)

3. They are choosing you, but you are not choosing them (coming soon!)

4. Roadblocks During Date Setup (3 weeks after)

Leaks Happen Here

It’s totally fine to expect that men make the first move. But every man has limited amount of attention, time, and frankly, courage. It’s important that the right man chooses to spend that limited resource to hit on you, as opposed to other things (chatting with his friends or hitting on someone else).

If you are at the right clubs, bars, sports leagues, or apps, men should be approaching you in droves. If they aren’t, here are the few common reasons why.

• Acting unapproachable

• Having presentation that is not appealing to men most compatible with you

• Being into a type of man who struggles to make the first move

• Or men not being super clear that they are hitting on you

There could be other reasons too. But these are the ones that came to mind most often from my own interactions with women and from complaints I have heard from female friends. So let’s troubleshoot this the same way as in the previous post—how I troubleshoot a stuck data pipeline at work.

Acting Unapproachable

Sometimes when you’re out an about, you don’t want to be approached by strangers. Perhaps you are hanging out with a friend you haven’t seen in a long time, or you just want to enjoy the day (no explanation is owed to anyone). You likely project this desire to others. Such signals include turning your back to the crowd and ignoring people who make eye contact with you. And men feel that and often respect it.

But sometimes you are open to meeting someone. Maybe, after reading part 1, you even went out of your way to be in that room or a bar. It would be a shame to do all this work and accidentally signal that you want to be left alone. (These gals said it best, and this)

In these moments, it’s important to send different signals. These include:

• Turning towards the room

• Turning towards and examining interesting strangers who come to your vicinity

• Making all kinds of subtle interest gestures (here’s a tiktok that resonated)

Here is a post that dives a bit deeper into how to act approachable and just… live your life in a way that welcomes and invites connection.

You certainly don’t owe every man a warm reception, but creating a small opening for them to make their move goes a long way.

Why Acting Unapproachable Invites Misfits

Here’s a catch. Even if you don’t send such signals, you will still be approached. Think however, what kind of a man would push through the wall of disintrest. Will it be a respectful man who reads the room and recognizes boundaries? Or will it be the kind of a guy who barges into groups and routinely interrupts others for the benefit of his own agenda?

These men are easy to identify and reject, sure (unless you consider disrespect for others a sign of a successful “alpha”, no judgment). But then let’s ask, what does this do to the your perception of men hitting on you. If only the pushiest men break through your guard, then of course it will start to feel like all men who hit on you are obnoxious. It may be a true descriptions of the sample but not necessary a true description of men available for you to date.

Let’s also separate being unapproachable and being “hard to get”. Playing hard to get actually increases your value in the eyes of your suitors [Birnbaum 2020]. This however only works if the man is inspired to make a move on you, makes that move, and discovers it’s harder than it seems.

Yes, being more approachable will increase the number of misfits hitting on you. But acting closed off will not neatly screen for quality. More often, it screens for men who are more comfortable pushing past other people’s boundaries. And that is usually not the filter you were trying to build.

Approachability Matters on Hinge Too

The same principles apply on dating apps: yes, it is possible to seem unapproachable on Hinge. This might come in a form of overt negativity in the profile (“Don’t date me if…”), or prompts that don’t give guys anything to work with (“I’m overly competitive about: everything”).

Some men swipe right on everything; they’ll be completely unfazed by this. Most of them will be misfits. But being approachable on Hinge gives the right guy the inspiration and the tools to demonstrate his connection to you.

Say, you want to find a man who likes, idk, board games. A man mentioning board games in his opening message is a surefire way for you to find that connection in the endless stream of likes. If your profile gives him that opening, most of your work is done.

It also helps to take a second look at your photos, and ask, “Does this person seem warm and friendly”? E.g. I’ve discovered a completely unscientific but useful heuristic: people who don’t look into the camera in most of their photos end up being dead prospects. Perhaps something subconscious is revealed when they’re reluctant to face their potential partner.

The goal here is not to filter out the wrong man. The goal is to increase the chance that the right man will make himself stand out to you personally and to inspire him to put the work in.

You’re Into Men Who Struggle to Make First Move

San Francisco is full of nerdy guys, some of whom tend to be shy. If you are into this energy, if your profile says “talk nerdy to me”, or “My Love Language: teach me something about science” (real examples by the way), then congratulations! You moved to the right city to find these men!

The catch is that these men are often less experienced, less proactive, and slower to create romantic momentum. It may take them longer to make the first move, then longer to make the second one, and so on. Some of them will stall out entirely while others will suddenly rush things because they did not read the room well.

What to do about it is a topic for a different, bigger blog post. Briefly, men do need to step it up, especially if their struggles come from unresolved social issues. I hope this blog is helping on this front. There may also be some things women can do here, such as being more accepting of imperfect initiative, a bit more patient with awkward starts, and a bit more willing to help move the interaction along when the man is otherwise promising. I’ll write my own thoughts on this later, for now you can check out this blog post.

Presentation is Part of the Message

It is no secret that men are visual, and that physical appeal matters. Some people like to rush past this point and say that long-term relationships are really about personality and compatibility. True enough. But the “high-value” men you most want are usually not choosing between looks and compatibility. They are screening for both.

It is definitely not my place to tell women how to dress. I’m also not breaking any news when I say that the way you look matters to men, a lot. But I need to make it. Even in San Francisco, the city of CEOs in turtlenecks and dress codes on life support, the best-dressed bird often gets the worm.

It’s not just about the looks: what you wear sends a message. If you want to attract a man who is smart, sophisticated, and put together, it may help to present these qualities in your own appearance. Same goes for being artsy, rebellious, reserved, easygoing, outdoorsy, etc. People are not only reacting to the physical appear but to the vibe and identity.

Appealing presentation includes fitting in the room. Dressing up for the gala at the opera, and dressing down for Zeitgeist—is there a better way to show your social adjustment? Most people in San Francisco underestimate the power of dressing up and presenting the attractive side of themselves, especially in a city that hides behind being “functional” and pretends not to care.

Although men surely need to step up here much more than women do—more on that in a different post.

Sometimes He Is Hitting On You, Just Badly

And finally, there is a category of situations where a man’s game is so indirect, awkward, or contrived that the woman does not recognize it as interest at all.

Here’s a rule of thumb. If a random man started talking to you and you’re unsure why, he is hitting on you. Exceptions exist, but this is a safe operating assumption.

If you like him, and his game is bad, help him out a little. You do not need to do his job for him, but you can answer his questions without knowing where it’s going or just hold eye contact a bit. If you are feeling particularly generous, you can even ask, “Would you like to invite me for a drink?” Note the phrasing here: it still leaves him in the driver’s seat, and he still has to make the move.

My suggestion is simple: every man gets one direct hint. Just one. After that, he needs to take it and lead.

Of course, not every random conversation is romantic. There are social and tactical reasons a man might be talking to you without hitting on you (e.g. his friend might be interested in your friend and he is just keeping you company). Or he may be married and simply chatting because you seem fun and approachable. Assuming romantic intent is a safe bet, but all kinds of possibilities exist.

That is part of the fun, honestly, and I hope you enjoy the thrill of discovery.

Conclusion

Modern dating lives in an interesting contradiction. Many traditional gender roles have weakened or disappeared (e.g. women are catching up to men in earnings [Pew Research 2022]), and good riddance to plenty of them. But one old instinct remains remarkably stubborn: a lot of women still like it when a man shows initiative, creates momentum, and chases a little, at least in the beginning.

There is nothing anti-modern about admitting this. Courtship is not a power struggle, it is a collaboration. Like partner dancing, it works best when both people enjoy the part they are playing. The man needs to step forward, sure. And the woman does not need to do his job for him, but she can choose to make it easier for the right man to succeed.

That is the point of this post. If you are already in the right rooms, around the right men, and still not getting the results you want, the answer is not always to lower your standards or to conclude that all men are hopeless. Sometimes the better move is to patch the next leak in the pipeline. Make yourself a little easier to approach. Make your profile easier for the right man to connect with. Recognize when your type may be slower to create momentum, and when a promising man is fumbling his way toward you, consider giving him one clean chance to get it right.

You are not trying to make it easier for the wrong men to waste your time. You are trying to make it easier for the right men to choose you.

And in the next post, we will get to the final leak in the pipeline: what happens when the right men are choosing you, but you are not choosing them.

And if you need to call a plumber to troubleshoot and fix the pipeline, email me at askdatingoptimist@gmail.com, and I can help you out.

Offline is not much better. You meet men when you go out, you chat, you exchange numbers, and then nothing comes of it.

You aimlessly browse the “Likes You” section and the word that comes to mind is “meh”. Lots of low-quality dudes, sure, but there is also not anything wrong with many of these men. They are just not your men. In this article, we will lovingly refer to them as misfits.

And at some point, the thought arrives. “Is there something wrong with me that 90% of the guys in my inbox are misfits?” It is tempting to lead with judgment. To assume the city is broken, the apps are broken, or you are broken. But would it be wise to treat this like a character flaw when it might be a systems problem?

Here’s the twist. If only 90% of the men who hit on you are not your type, congratulations! That is normal. That is the dating market working as designed. When the number creeps toward 100%, then it’s worth to ask yourself questions.

As an AI engineer, I’m familiar with these types of problems. When my AI system produces weird outputs, I do not judge the outputs. I troubleshoot the pipeline by asking where the valuable data is leaking out so that the good results don’t surface.

Your dating life is also a pipeline. It starts with a pool of eligible men and ends with one of them taking you out on a date or marrying you. If the pipeline is leaky, great candidates can drop out at predictable stages:

1. You are not around them.

2. You are around them, but they are not choosing you. (Part 2)

3. They are choosing you, but you are not choosing them (Part 3)

4. Roadblocks During Date Setup (Part 4)

Part 1 covers the first leak. We are going to focus on “where do the misfits come from” and “are you actually around the men you want”, both online and offline.

Where do the Misfits Come From?

Your Hinge inbox will always contain profiles you do not find attractive. Offline, men you are not attracted to will still shoot their shot. This is not a reflection of your desirability, and it does not mean you’re “chopped asl”.

A guy hitting on you usually means one thing: he likes you. He likes you so much in fact, that he’s mustered enough courage to walk up or reach out. It does not necessarily mean he is confident you are on his level, or that he has accurately assessed what you are looking for.

There is also a boring scientific explanation here. Female tastes vary. In some studies, only about a third of women’s ratings of men is explained by consensus attractiveness, and as much as half or more reflects individual taste and personal chemistry. [Germine et al, 2016] In other words, most men are attractive to someone, just not to you.

Here’s the kicker. Men who swipe right on you or approach you do not know your tastes. Only you do. They are relying on you to measure them against your standard.

So yes, your inbox will be full of misfits. And in a weird way, that can be good news. If 1,000 men swipe right on you, which is not unheard of in a big city, a 90% misfit rate still leaves you with 100 potential matches. That is more than you can realistically date in a year.

The misfits are just background noise. The real problem starts when men you actually want are not showing up, or are not making it through to dates. That is when we stop judging the pool and start troubleshooting the pipeline.

Pipeline Problem 1: You Are Not Around Them

In order for an eligible suitor to ask you out, you need to be in his vicinity. Romantic, I know. But if your routine keeps you in the wrong rooms, the right men can’t choose you, because they never even get a chance to see you.

Imagine one woman wants to find a successful, “work hard/play hard” overachiever who works in tech and loves the grind. Another woman wants a down to earth, kind and chill dude, who values friends and used to be a drummer in a rock band. So who should go to a social event at Shack151, and which one would grab some beers at Zeitgeist2?

If you lived in SF long enough, you know what type hangs out where. Use your superior knowledge of the area and your connections to your advantage.

Adding Variety to Routines

Of course it’s often difficult to find time to go to those places. A modern city man or woman’s life is filled with events and routines that make our lives rich and bring connectedness. As a bonus we often meet people through being out with the usual friend group.

But sometimes our routines exclude the kind of people we want to meet. Some exclude men altogether! Certain activities are designed or just end up doing that. Think pilates, solidcore, a book club with your girlfriends, a weekly Survivor watch party at a gay bar in Castro.

Now let me be clear that there is nothing wrong with any of that. It’s important to connect with your girlfriends, to feel safe in their community, to let your guard down and socialize without the need to appeal to men. This way you’ll also avoid all the misfits!

But if your goal is to find a romantic companion, or at least to let him find you, would it be wise to add some variety to such routines? Think about where the kind of man you want might hang out, and once in a while, swap your usual night for that. Bringing a friend or two will make it more fun while keeping that connectedness (but remember that 5 people may be too much).

Not everything has to be about dating. But some of your life can be about not accidentally eliminating your dating options.

The Unmatched Reach of Online Dating

This is where dating apps absolutely shine. Logging in on Hinge puts you in front of the majority of eligible men in your city. If you are reasonably attractive and have an alright profile, every single man in San Francisco will see you. Dating apps have other problems but reach isn’t one of them.

One note on the online dating pipeline: when you just sign up, you are matching with everyone who is already on the site. Once you swipe through them and drain the pool a little, the flow will drop naturally to only the new singles.

That drop is not proof that your appeal dropped or men got worse. It is just the reality of supply. You moved from browsing the entire inventory to the “new arrivals” crate in this old-school used record store. If you’re still unsatisfied, it might be worth considering adding other channels to meet guys. However, it might also be Pipeline Problems 2 and 3, so don’t give up yet—not until at least reading the next week’s blog post.

Church Function as the Original Dating App

Since the dawn of time, most matchmaking happened at community events, not speed dating. Think church functions, country fairs, and, if we’re feeling dramatic, Victorian balls. The explicit or implicit goal was simple: put eligible people in the same place and give them an opportunity to court each other.

Modern city life has no shortage of events that can fill the same purpose. I host and attend themed parties, secret raves, and fancy galas and meet lots of wonderful people. These are the modern day country fairs. People find dates there all the time, and at the very least they find friends.

But events only work if you treat them like a new channel, not a weekly loop. Social circles cluster over time. You start seeing the same people, and if you weren’t lucky to match with one of them, the pipeline dries out again. If that is happening, it might be worth checking out a party that is outside of the immediate comfortable circle.

Wait, Why Is It About Women?

Before we conclude the post, I must address one point that my readers and reviewers raised. Why is this post so gender-specific? Don’t men face this too and don’t they need to make adjustments?

There are two aspects to this. First, very few men experience an abundance of people hitting on them or sending them likes on Hinge, and even fewer see it as a problem. This can be easily explained by the same variability of female tastes (also remember that the OkCupid attractiveness graph has been debunked e.g. [Nuance Pill]).

More importantly though, the desire to go places where the potential partner might hang out is the typical mode of operation for men. Routinely and almost immediately, every party, bar, event, or function is scrutinized via the lens of, “will there be any girls there?” And if the answer is yes, “what kind?”

There are other areas where men might make more adjustments to improve their dating life, but being intentional about how to meet people isn’t one of those, in my experience.

Reframing Being Intentional

A lot of people say they’re “intentional about dating”. In practice, it got lately reduced to “I’m dating to find a long-term partner” (as Cosmopolitan of all places rightfully criticizes3).

For this series, I want to reframe “intentional” as taking intentional actions to achieve your romantic goals. Not by leading with judgment or tightening the filters, but by adjusting the parts of your life that control who even gets a chance to find you.

Part 1 covered the first leak. Are you around the men you want, or is your routine quietly filtering them out before they ever see you?

A friend of mine had a goal. She wanted a down to earth man with a Big Lebowski vibe, the kind you might actually find at Zeitgeist. So she did something refreshingly unromantic. She started hanging out by pool tables in the neighborhood dive bars, because she correctly guessed that this species of man migrates there.

Pretty soon, she found exactly that boyfriend. And as a bonus, she got genuinely good at pool along the way!

She improved her pipeline, and it worked for her. So my optimistic message for you is this. The next time you think that there are not great guys left, try examining your dating pipeline and checking for leaks.

In Part 2, we move to the next leak. What happens when you are around the right men, but they are not choosing you?

And if you need to call a plumber to troubleshoot and fix the pipeline, email me at askdatingoptimist@gmail.com, and I can help you out.

Naturally, the next question emerged: what happens if you don’t get it right? If the consequences of a mistake are severe, maybe it is safer to not try at all. You make a wrong move when hitting on someone and she labels you a creep, gossips, posts on TikTok, and gets you fired. Or, at the very least, you become “that guy” in your social circles.

My dude. Literal sexual predators are running this country, and you think that awkwardly touching a woman’s arm at the wrong moment is going to have long-lasting consequences? Women get groped on public transit every day with no recourse, and you’re afraid to hold hands on a date?

The experiences women routinely deal with are orders of magnitude worse than your isolated awkward misstep. My friends concur: the consequences they would dish out on the creeps would not be severe if the infraction was light and isolated. From this lens, the fear sounds more like anxiety than accurate risk assessment. So let’s work on this anxiety and fight it with knowledge of how to handle such missteps, should they occur.

In this final installment of “It’s Really Easy to Not Be a Creep,” we look at what women do about creepy encounters, what happens when they see the same guy again, and how to address it with dignity.

This Post is Part of the Series

“It’s Really Easy to Not Be a Creep”

1. “Following and Lying” - Part 1

2. “She Shouldn’t Need to Tell You” (Physical Overreach and Lingering) - Part 2

3. “Is it Creepy when He’s Hot?” - Part 3

4. “Oops, You Creeped Her Out. What Now?” - this post

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So You Ran Into Her Again

In this series, I asked my female friends to recount how men creeped them out when hitting on them in SF. After they shared their stories (see Part 1 and Part 2), I posed some follow-ups. We explored the “what if he was hot?” in the previous post, but I was also curious about what happens socially after a creepy interaction. So I presented this hypothetical:

Imagine you’re at a party and you see the same guy again. What would you do? Would you warn other women about him?

The answers were as insightful as they were anticlimactic.

“I would avoid him, but not at great inconvenience,” said one of the friends, and explained, “I wouldn’t leave the room if he’s there, but I also wouldn’t seek him out.” Another would approach similarly: she wouldn’t alert others, but she would keep an eye out for additional red flags.

Interestingly, the third friend went further. “He was very nice otherwise, maybe he didn’t realize it was creepy? I just personally wouldn’t [do that creepy thing]. I’d tell my friends what I told you, but I wouldn’t write him off.”

I double-checked that I was hearing her correctly. Not only would she not escalate it, but she wouldn’t even avoid him. She compared it to workplace conduct: “If it’s the first offense, then consider it a misunderstanding, and things can be addressed. On the other hand, if it was something more severe, I would absolutely mention it the day it happened to everyone.”

This was striking. It turns out that women give considerably more leeway than many men imagine, especially when the behavior is isolated and doesn’t repeat. Although, the reason could be “social proof”: showing up in a shared social setting provides credibility. A man who is part of the same community is evaluated differently than a random stranger.

However, the simplest explanation is this: when women feel safe and have an opportunity to observe you for longer, they are generally capable of distinguishing between malice and awkwardness.1

But we can take this one step further.

The Power of Owning Up

I then asked a follow-up question.

What if the guy notices you, comes to you, and says something like:
“Hey, I’ve been thinking about how I approached you that day. I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. That wasn’t my intention, but I can see how it may have come across that way. I won’t repeat it.”

The reaction was unexpectedly positive.

One friend said she would appreciate that he owned up to it and, more importantly, that he wasn’t asking for anything in return. Just making a clean exit without an attempt to turn it into flirting or to fish for reassurance.

She sounded genuinely impressed by the hypothetical. So impressed, in fact, that I briefly wondered whether this would actually increase her opinion of the guy, even though the previous interaction was creepy in her eyes.

Another was also appreciative that he’s “making an effort and giving [her] space.” By which she meant space to make her own decisions without pressure. Approaching someone again after the first failed attempt might not be seen as “giving space” physically but it’s about the space mentally.

So we can dissect the elements of how to own things up like a man:

• acknowledge how this made her feel

• own up to your mistakes and take responsibility

• apologize

• ask for nothing in return and exit the conversation

In fact, this is how you apologize in any adult context, including dating and later stages of relationships.

It goes without saying that it’s most important to stop the creepy behaviors right away. None of this would work if she were observing you at a party doing the same old creepy stuff. But also.

You Don’t Have to Wait

In fact, you don’t have to wait until you run into each other again. You can address your own behavior right then and there: on your date or privately with her shortly after.

I don’t even need to ask my friends for hypotheticals here. See, I didn’t always get everything right myself. I’ve had my share of missteps2. While some are still unrectified, there were times when I did find the strength and the awareness to apologize promptly—often on the very same date when I made the wrong move. It was often well received, so I can vouch firsthand about the efficacy of owning up.

And I understand why. Over the course of a long relationship, there will be many moments that require both partners to acknowledge mistakes, recalibrate, and move forward. In that sense, an early misstep is not a disaster; it’s a peek into the future. You get to test how both of you handle accountability—maybe even on the first date.

Gossip

“Okay,” you might say, “maybe your friends are just unusually forgiving. But what if she starts spreading rumors before I can rectify it?”

Valid question, but this isn’t a huge concern for three reasons.

First, it does happen but gossip often requires something more dramatic than, say, “lingering”. If you recall my friend’s words, she would tell everyone only “if it was something more severe.”

When talking about gossip specifically, another friend concurred “women generally wait for multiple kind of repeated offenses before they vocalize anything [...] mindful of the fact that we might’ve read the situation wrong. Obviously this is harder when it’s a physical interaction. But when it’s a social kind of thing, we often—or at least I do—[ask] if maybe I got it wrong”. So it’s safe to say that unless you do something violating or repeated, there are more severe situations to talk about.

Second, for men who repeatedly behave in ways that make women uncomfortable, gossip is almost unnecessary. You’ve seen the guy who makes lewd jokes, flirts aggressively with women 20 years younger, leers from the corner without engaging, or barges into groups trying to hit on the most attractive women. His behavior is on full display without the need for the grapevine.

And finally, the harshest, most vitriolic gossip I’ve encountered didn’t come from first dates or awkward advances. It came from really severe behaviors or bad breakups.

You have to understand that sharing information about bad behaviors is important. This is how women (and people in general) protect each other. Even at work, people conduct reference checks for that reason. So unless you repeatedly display the same creepy behaviors, the fear of being socially destroyed over one mistake is largely misplaced.

To Conclude

I’m not going to claim that reputational consequences never happen. They do and they should, and yes, often they do happen to people who don’t deserve it. But what also happens far more often is men getting away with intentional, repeated, and malicious behavior for years. At work and in social circles, in politics and in the entertainment industry. Against that backdrop, a single awkward mistake that is acknowledged and not repeated barely registers.

As long as you don’t commit sexual violence, as long as you put effort in learning how to be excellent to each other, then you mistakes won’t ruin your reputation. They’ll be a natural and unavoidable part of your journey towards a healthy romantic and social life.

Times again, this comes to taking responsibility, one of the most essential and attractive qualities of a man. Your mistakes don’t define you, but how you handle them does.

This concludes the “It’s Really Easy to Not Be a Creep” series. I’m grateful to my friends who were willing to share their stories and tolerate my follow-up questions. These conversations were honest, sometimes uncomfortable and vulnerable, and consistently more nuanced than the internet discourse would suggest.

And to my male readers, I hope that they provided the insight and the encouragement you needed to put yourself out there.

For now I’m grateful for you bearing with me focusing on this topic for so long. We’ll do something different for the next post.

Hopefully you are now ready to apply the newly learned lessons in the wild. Early in the year is the best time to get back on the apps. If you have any other questions or need help setting up your dating profile, email me at askdatingoptimist@gmail.com and I’ll help you out!

Can attractive men get away with creepy behaviors?

The answer to this is yes, of course they would, and why is it so shocking? Attractive people can get away with more stuff in dating, just like senior people at work, funny people in social life, and strong people in the streets of Tenderloin. Is that a surprise?

But this leeway has limits, and even Chads aren’t exempt. #MeToo made it clear that even rich, famous, and powerful men routinely creep out women. So after my friends shared their stories about creepy men, I followed up with a hypothetical: how would it change if the creep was hot? The answer was nuanced but consistent: poor game would land better, but violating physical touch wouldn’t.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but oh boy, it is to some! Certain Manosphere sections (“Black Pill”) tout this simple and ancient fact, that people who have more can get away with more, as a grand revelation that underpins a whole new philosophy of human interaction. They conclude (incorrectly) that unless you’re attractive, you can’t do anything to succeed with women.

In this post, I’ll argue that this belief comes from drawing correct logical conclusions from incorrect assumptions. The culprit is copying creepy behaviors that only work for attractive men and then blaming “the system” when those tactics fail.

We also explore how to live in the world where attractive people don’t have to work as hard. Becoming more attractive in this world will make you less creepy, to a limit. But that’s not the only path.

This Post is Part of the Series

“It’s Really Easy to Not Be a Creep”

1. “Following and Lying” - Part 1

2. “She Shouldn’t Need to Tell You” (Physical Overreach and Lingering) - Part 2

3. “Is it Creepy when He’s Hot?” - this post

4. “Oops, You Creeped Her Out. What Now?” - next week

What My Friends and Research Say

Let’s start by giving voice to my friends and their experiences. After hearing their stories, I asked the same follow-up question, and one participant even anticipated that I’d ask it:

If the guys were more attractive, would you find the interaction less creepy?

Some said it would be perceived differently. E.g. the woman who shared Story 2 (about a guy stopping her in the street and being in her face):

Yes of course! If the guy was like a Brad Pitt, I’d be happy to stand closer to him and more excited to talk to him.

The woman who shared Story 1 (about a guy following her to a grocery store) had a different take:

A little bit yes, maybe I’d be more open to talking to him. But the overall behavior would have still creeped me out.

However, in Stories 3 and 4, when it comes to physical contact, the answer was a unanimous “no.” Women who read the post flagged that as well.

The research corroborates this nuance. It is indeed well-researched that people subconsciously stand closer to attractive people [Rumsey 2006]. In some contexts (e.g. when the subject consented to be touched beforehand), touch from attractive people was deemed more pleasant. [Novembre 2020] is particularly interesting because the researchers used machines to both simulate touch and to measure how positive the response was (via brain scans).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I didn’t find any research where women were touched by strangers and then asked to evaluate how that went. The only thing I could find was the study on perception of sexual harassment [Savery 1997]. Participants said that attractive people were perceived as less inappropriate, but the actual numbers are “7/10 inappropriate rather than 9/10”—still creepy across the board. So this only proves the point my small sample size made: touching someone without getting to know them is still creepy even if you’re Chris Hemsworth.

What About That Creep with a Hot Girlfriend?

You’ve probably seen this before: a couple where the guy behaves in ways that feel awkward, rude, or outright creepy, and yet he’s clearly partnered. Sometimes the couple is even famous. Doesn’t that disprove the idea that creepy behavior matters?

Not really. One thing my friends mentioned: some women do choose to put up with weird stuff from men if they meet their other life goals through that companionship (fame, power, money). E.g. while most would consider an older guy hitting on a very young woman creepy in isolation, some women might prefer to date an older guy due to “personal reasons”. No judgment here.

This isn’t limited to dating and is akin to putting up with an abrasive boss because the job pays well.

And just like with the jobs, this falls apart the moment the person finds a different way to meet their goals. So if you’re deciding what to optimize for next—learning how to be less creepy or becoming rich and famous enough that people put up with you—I’d strongly recommend the former. Wildly, this take seems surprisingly controversial.

Why Are Men Convinced They Have to Be Rich or Hot?

Many men observe that rich or attractive guys get away with more in dating and draw a bleak conclusion: unless you’re hot or wealthy, you don’t stand a chance.

On one level, this is a straightforward logical mistake, called “Denying the Antecedent”. If A implies B, this does not mean “not A” implies “not B”. That is, if being rich implies dating is easier (which is true!), it does not follow that not being rich implies dating is impossible. You just have less margin for error.1

But the issue goes deeper than a simple logical mistake.

A common Black Pill assumption is that women only respond to dominance, aggression, or low-investment behavior. Well, if you insist that treating women like “low-status” “females” is the right way to go about courtship, then yes, you do need to be very attractive to pull that off. If your strategy is to be pushy right away, dismissive, or overtly sexual early on, you’d better have a six-pack and a square jaw.

The flawed reasoning goes like this:

• Convince yourself that an ineffective courtship strategy is the only thing women like

• Observe that only super attractive men can pull it off

• Conclude that only super attractive men can succeed with women

There’s no formal logical fallacy here. The logic is internally consistent. The problem is that it rests on a bad premise.

Large parts of the internet have convinced themselves to adopt ineffective courtship patterns and then treat the resulting failures as proof that the system is rigged. They’d be far better off shedding those patterns and learning how to be pleasant and attentive rather than obsessing over looksmaxxing.

Instead of taking flirting tips from Andrew Tate, learn them from, I don't know, James Bond. Like honestly, who would you rather be?

Learning from More Attractive Men

But we have to take a step back here. Some things will work well for your attractive friends, but it doesn’t mean they will work for you. In fact, it’s often the opposite. What your more physically gifted friends do will never work for you if you want the same results.

The reason is simple: laziness. Your hotter friends will settle on the easiest tactic that works for them. You’re likely not hot enough to pull off that exact thing. And even if you can, your results will be different. That is okay.

Think back to the 6’6’’ guy from the height post. He is not creepy by any measure, but he’s not the most flirty or proactive either. Often, he’s just kind of standing there. And he still gets a lot of attention. Do you think that strategy will work for you?

However, some of my friends are both physically gifted and proactive. They’re warm, funny, socially skilled, and they’ve got abs. If you have friends like that, learn from them, even if they will get better results by doing the same thing as you.

Luckily for most of us, men usually appear more attractive because of what we do, not because of what we are. Presence, confidence, and humor are under our control, and their effects compound. If you do things that James Bond does (including kicking ass at something that has nothing to do with dating), you will in turn also seem more attractive.

Work Rules for Chad and Doug

There’s a well-known comic that gets passed around every time this topic comes up. Chad2 gives Susan a compliment at work, and it’s charming. Doug does the same thing—and suddenly HR is involved. The intended moral is as obvious as it’s grimly discouraging.

While revisiting this comic, I noticed something I hadn’t before. Look at Doug’s body language. He doesn’t just look less attractive than Chad, he looks scared. Unsure. Apologetic. So much so that I feel uncomfortable looking at him.

How would Doug do if his body language was calmer and more confident? I asked ChatGPT to help him out.

Now that looks much better. The guy in the bottom panel would not trigger a panic call to HR, even if he doesn’t get a date.

Doug could also learn other things from the hypothetical Chad. As a naturally flirty person, Chad likely wouldn’t ask Susan out on the spot. He would give Susan a compliment, flirt a bit, and move on with his day, lifting everyone’s mood. If there were signals of comfort, maybe he’d ask her out later.3

And Doug doesn’t need Chad’s jawline to adopt this. He could simply spend a bit more time on mutual discovery and showing his attractive side (often in non-romantic ways) before making his moves. Yes, he is more likely to be rejected, but HR won’t be rushing to pin him onto the “Creep of the Day” board.

Besides, everyone is someone’s prize, and I know women who will find the body language of the Chad in the top panel slimy and repulsive.

Comfort vs Attraction

Chad’s success in the “Work Rules” comic can be viewed through the lens of comfort as well as the lens of attraction.

Instead of “people give him more leeway because he’s attractive,” a different thing might be happening. People might give him leeway because they feel more comfortable around him, and attractiveness is one of the fastest avenues for building up comfort.

Think of it this way. Most behaviors I listed in these posts are only creepy when strangers do them (perhaps, except Lying). Intimate touch, following each other around, and staying together after the fun part is over are essential components of long-term relationships. But couples who engage in that have lots of comfort built up over time, and this moves from creepy to “okay” to “desired” and then to “expected.”

So perhaps, to some extent, an attractive man seems less of a stranger, subconsciously, and that’s what [Rumsey 2006] picked up on. Within this theory, comfort is the main currency, and attraction is a method to acquire it, but not the only one.

Conclusion

So where does this leave us?

• Awkward, clumsy, or ineffective advances do land better when the guy is attractive. That’s real; it’s supported by research, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone;

• Things like unwanted physical contact are off-limits regardless of how hot the guy is. Attractiveness does not override comfort and safety;

• Attractive men often have to try less hard to get the same results because that’s just how it works, and

• None of this should be surprising!

If you believe only hot, rich, or powerful men can succeed, it’s worth asking whether you’re copying or internalizing ineffective behaviors that only work for attractive men—and then blaming the game when they fail. Many guys get rejected not because of their qualities or personality but because they’re using strategies demanding a level of desirability they don’t yet have.4

The more reliable path is simpler and less cynical: learn where your leeway is and build attraction through things you can control. Sure, being more attractive will reduce—but not eliminate—creepiness. But becoming less creepy through your behavior will get you farther than trying to become untouchably hot.

And unlike looks, that’s a skill you can actually practice.

In the next post, we’ll give an example of such a skill: owning up to your mistakes. Stay next week for a take on “What to do if you Creep Someone Out by Accident.”

If you have any follow-up questions about dating that you aren’t comfortable sharing in the comments, email me at askdatingoptimist@gmail.com .

The previous post on “Following and Lying” sparked a discussion. While many found the advice useful and actionable, some felt the framing was moralizing and that I didn’t make a coherent case for why certain things are worth avoiding. These reactions highlight how easy it is for behavior to feel minor on one side and uncomfortable on the other, which will be the focus of this post too.

Most of this post boils down to a simple idea: comfort comes before contact. Many guys fail here not because to bad intentions, but because they rush a step, misread a moment, or assume they’ll be told explicitly when to stop.

As before, we continue with the same theme: taking accountability and shifting the burden of discomfort from the other person onto ourselves. In fact, the main conclusion is in the title: she shouldn't need to tell you how she is feeling about your physical contact or presence. To get there, I'll show how you can change your approach to touch and timing. This will safeguard you from being creepy without rejecting your drive to be romantic.

This Post is Part of the Series

1. “Following and Lying” - previous post

2. “She Shouldn’t Need to Tell You” (Physical Overreach and Lingering) - this post

3. “Is it Still Creepy If He’s Hot?” - next week

4. “Oops, You Creeped Her Out. What Now?” - the week after

   

More Patterns in the Wild

In Following and Lying, we focused on behaviors that become uncomfortable because of what they might lead to. Physical Overreach and Lingering are different: they are uncomfortable on their own. They’re also harder to navigate.

See, the goal with Following or Lying is to avoid them. However, proximity, touch, and time together are important, crucial components of fulfilling romantic interactions. So they do need to happen, but in the right way. Done the wrong way, they become these creepy patterns:

1. Physical Overreach—persistent or violating physical contact before it’s welcome

2. Lingering—failing to leave when it’s clear she doesn’t want to continue the conversation

You can read how I approached these stories in the previous post. The examples below aren’t the worst ones I heard, they’re simply the clearest illustrations of these concepts. You can also spot traces of the other patterns we discussed earlier.

Story 3

A few friends and I were shopping at a Lululemon store. We were trying things on and chatting about fabrics. I mentioned that I wanted something softer, like the shorts I was wearing. One of my friends reached over and felt the fabric.

A guy nearby overheard the conversation. He approached us and cheekily asked, “Can I also check?”

Without waiting for an answer, he touched the fabric and then grabbed the hemline of my six-inch workout shorts.

Story 4

This one happened to a friend of mine. She went on a first date with a guy she met on the apps. They had a good time; she liked him. When she was about to head home, he offered to drop her off. She wasn’t planning to invite him over, but he insisted, and she didn’t see a reason to refuse the ride.

After he dropped her off, he got out of the car and followed her to the front of her building, which she hadn’t planned on. They chatted for a bit. After a polite goodbye kiss, he took her hand and placed it on his crotch.

Stories 5 ad Infinitum

In case you feel inclined to comment that that the problem isn’t that pervasive: I’m sharing only the oddest stories here for brevity. When it comes to physical overreach, there are many, many more.

One friend told me her Hinge date put his hand on her hip during first-date drinks and kept repeating this and escalating despite her discomfort. Another had a date “guide” her into a bar five minutes in. Instead of placing his hand on the small of her back (which could be hot later on but still too quick 5 minutes in), he put it on her butt (definitely off limits that early). And that’s without getting into unsolicited dick pics from “friends,” which, yes, also happened to people I know.

I’ve witnessed this myself, too. Last year, I had a guy thrown out of a club in France for groping a woman after inviting her for a “dance” and leaving her in tears. This definitely is a frequent and important topic.

Physical Overreach

Many women expect men to initiate, but this doesn’t mean anything goes. Physical contact must be mutually comfortable, consensual, and not rushed. The trick here is to make sure it’s welcome without asking for explicit consent at every step or creeping a person out. And yes, it is a thin line to walk, and yes, this is a skill us men need to learn.

I hope I don’t need to tell you why unwelcome physical contact is violating. If you struggle with understanding this as a guy, imagine it’s another man groping you rather than a hot girl.

Getting this wrong, like in the stories I shared above, will feel creepy1. But when done correctly, there won’t be any large mutual discomfort, even if you don’t get it exactly right. So let me break this down.

Touch Does Not Cause Attraction

A common myth, often pushed by red-pill content, is that touching a woman creates attraction by signaling dominance. They got it backwards: touch from a stranger is violating. People want physical contact after they feel safe and comfortable, not as a way to manufacture those feelings.2

They did get a different thing right: for many women, attraction stalls if a man doesn’t initiate [1] [2]. Some even say they can’t ever feel turned on unless the man takes the first step. The missing piece here is the order, summarized by this formula:

It starts with “Comfort” first and touch follows later, after sending and receiving signals of that comfort.

How to Tell If Contact Would Be Welcome

The short answer is: watch for signals, but you still won’t know for sure until you try.

A useful reframe helps here. On your date, you’re not trying to “make her like you”. You’re figuring out whether you’re mutually comfortable with each other. Think of the date as an experiment rather than a recipe, and you, the man, are responsible for conducting it. This process does require trial and error, and your objective is to make sure the “error” in this “trial” (if it occurs) doesn’t make her feel scared or violated.

The key to this is to do it slowly and incrementally. Notice how in the stories above, one woman considered it creepy when a guy touched her clothing, whereas it took a whole hand-on-the-genitals situation to creep another. The issue wasn’t the magnitude of the act itself; it was that both guys rushed it.

Do not:

• Rush the next step of physical intimacy

• Use touch as a way to generate attraction

• Rely on hearing “no” as the only way to learn that the contact is unwelcome

• Let fixation on being physical drive the interaction

In motorcycling, we call this target fixation. If you focus too hard on the obstacle you’re trying to avoid, you ride straight into it (same with skiing, cycling, and other high-speed sports). Dating is not an exception. If you’re overly focused on getting physical, that focus leaks into everything you do—and it’s visible and repulsive.

Instead:

• Learn to initiate physical intimacy safely and respectfully

• React to and watch for signs of reciprocity

• Pay attention to how your partner responds and back off at the first sign of discomfort even if they don’t say anything

• Remember that your date is not a sexual object and express your desire tastefully

Should I Ask?

At this point you might ask: How do I actually tell if contact is welcome? Do I need to ask “May I touch your arm?”

First of all, asking wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Some women will be repulsed by it, but many will welcome it, and your chances of being a creep will be greatly reduced. There are masculine, confident ways to inquire (e.g. saying “I want to kiss you” has been my go-to when in doubt) but if overused, this will kill the vibe real quick. That said, if you know that you aren’t good at reading social cues, asking is a responsible thing to do.

The real answer is to be flirty and incremental. On a skillful date, both the man and the woman will give each other signals of comfort and then make small gestures that are just beyond the current boundary. If the gesture is welcome, congratulations, you’ve learned that you have “More Comfort”.

Comfort → Signals → Contact, in Practice

Remember, you start by noticing signals of comfort. In the workout shorts story, it had to be at least a “she is comfortable enough to engage in a conversation with me”. Touching a stranger’s clothing or hair is definitely creepy, as is any physical move before she even talks to you.

In the second story, the signal could be her asking, “would you like to come over?” when hanging out in the car. Which is still NOT a permission to put her hands on your dick, but is a signal that you might try kissing her with a bit more passion and see how that goes.

Other signals of comfort include: she’s smiling at you, she’s talking to you and doesn’t just give one-word answers, she’s moving closer to you, or making little physical moves herself (touching your knees with hers, touches your shoulder, etc).

Once you’ve received those signals and things feel right, there’s space for slightly more contact. Be incremental. Start with something as simple as standing close to her without touching (e.g. when browsing books or pastries at a coffee shop). See whether she closes the distance, too, or backs off. Then do something that might seem just friendly, e.g. put your hand on her shoulder when it feels natural, and see how she responds. Then go from there.

Silence, freezing, or the lack of enthusiasm is a “no”. Other signals of discomfort include twitching, pulling away, getting up and moving somewhere, changing the topic, etc. If you see those, back of and maybe—and only if your mutual comfort improves—try again later.

For some men, none of this feels intuitive. There’s plenty of advice that spells out these steps explicitly [for more introverted guys] [for more assertive guys] [for more analytical guys]. Watching this can feel cringe, overly mechanical, or even objectifying, but this is how the sausage is made. If that’s what it takes to turn the men of San Francisco into safe and interesting daters, then let’s live with a little cringe, at least for now.

Lingering

Once the interaction is over, it’s over. Leave.

Whether it went well or poorly, whether you got her number or got a polite excuse, the moment has passed. There’s no upside to staying.

Think back to the guy in Story 4 who insisted on continuing to hang out even though the woman wanted to go home. He’d had a good date and would have had an even better second one. Lingering turned a positive interaction into an uncomfortable one, and would likely tank his chances even if he didn’t get handsy.

Lingering came up in a story from the previous post, when a man stopped a woman on the street and didn’t leave despite clear disinterest. When approaching in public, you do need to talk a bit before exchanging contacts, but this is easy to overdo. If she’s responding enthusiastically, assume she likes you in general, not that she wants to talk to you right then and there.

Many women won’t tell you explicitly that you should go. Perhaps, it boils down to safety. Telling a certain type of man that he needs to leave may damage his fragile ego, which can provoke anger. Or perhaps, it’s a test of whether you care enough about her to notice her nonverbal cues—an important relationship component. Whatever the reason, this is the reality we need to work with.

Do not:

• Stay around hoping to turn disinterest into interest

• Keep engaging for too long, even if things are going well

• Rely on her to tell you when to leave

Leaving timely matters when things are going poorly, but it is as important to leave when things are going well. Staying too long is one reason women are conflicted about being approached when they’re out with friends—even if they like you, they still want to enjoy their evening. Knowing when to leave is part of your value proposition.

Instead:

• Watch for signs of interest, and leave when they’re not there

• Respect her time and assume she has other things she wants to do

• Leave her wanting more of you

A man who has a life outside of chatting up women at bars is generally more attractive. Leaving a conversation before she’s tired of you is often a good move. But this edges into advice about being desirable rather than just not being creepy, so I’ll stop there and talk a bit more about the physical.

“The Underreach”: Taking It Too Slow

San Francisco, like most places, has no shortage of men who rush physical contact. It also has plenty of men who do the opposite and initiate slower than desired. If this is you, I’ve got good news:

1. You’re extremely unlikely to be called a creep—congratulations!

2. Many women tend to give a lot of leeway to men they like who move slowly.

One story comes to mind. A friend of mine, who’s a very mild-mannered gentleman, took three dates to kiss his now wife. She almost had to ask him to do it. According to a certain strain of dating advice, she was supposed to lose interest or put him in the “friend zone.” That didn’t happen; instead they’re happily married.

Some women do expect faster escalation. Some give fewer signals and still want you to be more proactive, assertive, or even aggressive. But if you’re at the stage of worrying whether you’re being creepy, it’s better to give up on optimizing for that group for now. They’ll get bored and quietly drop off, and you can come back to that as you learn to navigate consent.

Think of this as playing the game on easy mode first. Higher levels come with higher risks, and I must add, not necessarily better rewards.

Staring as Physical Contact

Physical contact can also be nonverbal. I consider staring a form of physical contact.

A lot of those TikTok videos about guys “staring” at women at the gym are indeed overblown, but they are getting to something real. Seen through this lens, staring without engaging is similar to touching without engaging. It’s not as severe, but it’s not neutral either.

However, looking at someone can still be the first step in a mutually enjoyable interaction. So here’s a simple rule. You get one look that’s longer than a glance. After that, you either go talk to her, or you move on. Deal?

It Still Starts With Taking Responsibility

Like in the previous post, avoiding being creepy comes down to taking responsibility. That means looking for signs that you’d be welcome before engaging, paying attention to how the other person reacts, and not relying exclusively on them pushing back when things feel off. This makes you not just a better date, but a better partner and a better person to be around.

If some of the stories about physical overreach didn’t strike you as particularly bad, there’s a simple explanation. I asked my friends to share moments when someone made them uncomfortable while trying to hit on them. If I asked the about their experience with something severe, like sexual violence, we’d have different stories.

It’s honestly a miracle that women still go out, engage with, and love men despite all the shit we put them through. Let’s do our part and treat our partners with care and respect from the early stages. Let’s learn how to be proactive, interesting, and spicy without being careless.

It is not rocket science but thinking about it like a scientist helps. Remember, a failed experiment is not your fault, but conducting an experiment irresponsibly is. You don’t start testing new explosives by wiring them up inside a crowded, multi-story lab on a Wednesday afternoon. Observe the results before taking the next step, learn how to be safe before learning how to be spicy, and you’ll be fine.

This wraps up common creepy patterns—let me know in the comments or over email if I missed something. Next week, we’ll talk about whether it’s creepy if the guy is hot. And for now, I’ll demonstrate how to avoid lingering by wrapping up this post.

Next up in the series:

If you have any follow-up questions about dating that you aren’t comfortable sharing in the comments, email me at askdatingoptimist@gmail.com .

One of the most commonly cited reasons is fear–the fear of being seen as creepy. If you spend time on TikTok, about half of the videos that feature, mention, or discuss approaching women in public will have their comments full of “it will never work” or that you’d “just get called a creep”.

It’s understandable: TikTok is full of rage-bait like “I just called the cops on the guy who looked at me at the gym”. However, after talking to my female friends about their real-world experiences, I discovered that the behaviors women actually find creepy are rarely that subtle. They are miles closer to stalking and assault than to your “Would you like a raisin?” pickup line failing to land.

The good news is that these behaviors are trivial to avoid. Even better, if you do occasionally make someone uncomfortable, it does not create an unerasable blot on your reputation if you handle it well. Once you accept accountability for the impact of your actions rather than just your intent, things will fall into place.

So let’s replace the fear and anxiety with knowledge drawn from real stories of our peers rather than the TikTok clickbait. After all, it’s our responsibility as pursuers to make our advances with grace and learn how to not creep people out. It’s not hard to do.

This Post is Part of the Series

1. “Following and Lying” - this post

2. “She Shouldn’t Need to Tell You” (Physical Overreach and Lingering) - next week

3. “Is it Creepy when He’s Hot?” - next week

4. “Oops, You Creeped Her Out. What Now?” - the week after

What Women Consider Creepy

I asked my friends to share stories of uncomfortable encounters they’ve had with men in San Francisco. While the stories varied, common themes emerged. Every example had at least one of the four patterns, and often a few at the same time:

1. Following—moving with her just to hit on her, or worse, instead of hitting on her

2. Lying—misrepresenting your intentions or personality to score points

3. Physical Overreach—making physical contact before it’s welcome

4. Lingering—failing to leave when it’s clear she doesn’t want to continue the conversation

I’ll break these down in detail in the sections that follow and in the next posts in this series. For now, the goal is simpler: to show what these behaviors look like in real interactions that my friends shared.

In every conversation, I asked them to point out the specific moments that made it creepy. Once this was clarified, I asked some follow-up questions (and you’ll have to wait for the 3rd post in the series to find out what they were).

Not everyone had an example ready. About a third of the women I spoke to said nothing particularly creepy came to mind. Good news for us men!

Others did. Let me share a few of those stories. These are real experiences—probably not even the worst ones—shared by my female friends about their interactions with some men in San Francisco. Pay attention if you can spot the behaviors listed above!

Story 1

I was coming from [a workout class], and stopped by the baking section at [this grocery store]. I had my headphones in when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I was confused, maybe it’s an employee trying to alert me of something. So I take the headphones out.

But there’s this guy, and he says “Oh I love your style” complimenting me on what I’m wearing. And it’s so weird because I’m coming from a workout class and I don’t look that good. I’m wearing workout clothes and leggings and look like shit [...]

He asks what I’m getting, and I reply I’m getting some ingredients for a cake. I was caught off guard, so I returned the question to him. And he said that he works out a lot and was getting some protein. And he didn’t look like he worked out at all! Why is he saying this? [...]

Did the creepiness stop here?

He asked if I wanted to get some wine sometime. I said sure so he would leave, and gave him my number. He put it into his phone and then left the store without buying anything. What was he doing here? [...] And why was he in the baking aisle?

I did not respond to his texts.

Story 2

This happened on the [...] street. I was walking by a man and didn’t notice him at first. He walked past me, then turned around to talk to me and stepped into my path, blocking the way forward. He said, “Hi, I had to stop you, you look so nice”, commented on the jacket and my hair. [...]

She paused here, and I asked, “Sounds he’s just trying to hit on you. What was creepy about it?”

He was in my personal space—really close. Almost like he was about to give me a hug: his hands were up in the air, and his stance was like he was reaching out. Almost presuming that he could stop you anywhere. I wanted to back away, but didn’t want to be rude.

I was giving him one word answers and was pretty disengaged, but he just wouldn’t leave. Luckily, I wasn’t alone and there were people passing by. I made an excuse that I was meeting with some friends, and left.

I will share a few more stories in Part 2.

Behavior 1: Following

In addition to the stories above, multiple women shared experiences of men following them around before, after, or instead of hitting on them (around the venue, or into a BART station). This was the most common pattern that came up.

In some cases, this became obvious only in hindsight. In story 1, the woman realized that the man followed her into the grocery store because he didn’t buy anything, but that surfaced after he left.

When noticed, being followed triggers something visceral. Even when nothing overtly threatening happens, the experience registers as unsafe. Following is what predators do before an attack (we’ve all seen this on “Planet Earth”). It’s an instinct ingrained by millennia of evolution, and once the wire’s tripped, everything that comes after is interpreted through that lens.

The important thing to understand is that your intentions don’t matter here. You might know that you’re harmless and just trying to work up the courage to say hello. But she doesn’t. All she sees is someone who altered their path to stay near her, like a hyena would follow an antelope until she’s separated from the herd.

Avoid This

1. Do not follow behind someone who’s moving

2. Do not follow her waiting for a “better moment”

3. Do not back her into a corner or make it hard for her to leave

For example, you shouldn’t cross a street to chase after a woman you like. If you missed the moment, you missed it.

What to Do Instead

1. Start talking to a woman as soon as your paths cross

2. Put yourself into situations where you cross paths with many women, so you don’t feel tempted to chase random people into Muni stations

3. Use safe body language with people you just met

“Safe body language” here means giving her space and keeping exits clear. If you’re talking to a woman on the street, stand at an angle or walk beside her rather than blocking her path1. You’ve just met—make sure she’s comfortable with your presence. Resist the urge to present a dominant posture at this stage. Just like with bears in the Californian wilderness, if you try to look larger, she might run away.

What if She Just Didn’t Hear Me?

A common question that comes up here is: what if she just didn’t hear me? What if the only barrier to my supposedly irresistible charms is the unfortunate realities of sound transmission? Is it okay to catch up with her then?

No.

Think about what’s happening from her perspective. Either she didn’t see you because she’s super busy with something important. Or, she did notice you, decided to ignore you, and is desperately hoping that you don’t come near. In both cases, closing in makes things worse.

The real power move here is to inspire her to stop and engage with you, rather than to chase her around. You get just one “excuse me, miss!” and if that doesn’t help, move on and work on your presence and your “pitch” as well as being at the right places at the right times.

Following Like a Champ

In many cases, if you have an urge to follow a woman somewhere, it means you already lost this one. Creepy or not, move on and try better next time. Some situations, however, allow for leeway.

If someone drops an article of clothing, and you hurry to return it, that’s fine. Historically, people even used this as a flirting signal. High-society Victorian Era women used to drop handkerchiefs in front of handsome men on purpose.

There are tasteful ways to follow someone within a venue. You might notice a woman getting a drink at a bar and returning to her table. It woud be pretty stalker-ish to watch her until she is alone again; instead, wait until she is seated and come up. Yes, even if she is with friends: she feels safer this way and there is ample guidance how to do that.2

And if you’re out in the Marina and see a group of attractive women walk into a specific bar, it’s perfectly reasonable to think, “That bar might be fun tonight,” and head there too. You’re not really following them, you’re responding to signals about the environment.

Just don’t start with, “I saw you walk in and followed you here — how you doin’?”

Behavior 2: Lying

Another pattern that came up frequently was lying. Not big or dramatic lies, but small and unnecessary ones offered early, often to smooth over an awkward moment.

In Story 1, the woman noticed this almost immediately. The man complimented her outfit even though she’d just come from a workout class and was wearing sweats (elements of that were present in the story 2 as well). It didn’t feel flattering or endearing to that woman, it felt suspicious.

While she was just confused at first, the next lie about working out sealed it. Sure that could’ve been his desire to sound more impressive. But it read as an attempt to cover up his previous creepy behavior, why he followed her into the baking section. Heck, I’d be creeped out just as much!

Deception also makes you lose trust and destroy the feeling of safety really, really quick. A woman who suspects you’re a liar might rightfully question all your intentions. What other things will you be deceptive about? Your history? Your lifestyle? Are you doing to drive her to a restaurant when you pick her up (as you promised), or to a dark alley?

Again, to you this might seem silly, but she is genuinely concerned for her safety. She is worried about it for the same reason as why you are not: you are bigger and stronger.

Avoid This

1. Don’t lie to cover up or explain away creepy behavior that she called out

2. Don’t lie to sound more impressive

3. Don’t invent shared interests on the fly

If you feel tempted to lie to make yourself look better, one of two things is usually happening. Either you don’t think who you are is enough, and it’s a self-esteem issue, or you’re trying to cover up an issue that needs to be solved.

What to Do Instead

1. Learn to avoid creepy behaviors to begin with

2. Admit to your mistakes and playful misdirections when caught

3. Learn the ways to say genuine compliments and find real connection quickly

Finding ways to connect with another person and inspire them to share more is an essential skill for any networking situation when the time a person has with you is limited.

For example, consider answering “what do you do?” with “I used to work on X and Y when at a big tech firm A when I was in City N, but now I’m a full time Z at a startup B”. You just dropped 6 opportunities to connect in 10 seconds. You can do the same when getting to know each other with a romantic connection (but it deserves a separate post—let me know in the comments if you’d like to read one).

Isn’t Joking also Lying?

Not all untruths are the same. Playful exaggeration, obvious jokes, or bits that everyone’s in on are different. Actors in King Lear are not really the kings, princesses, dukes, or servants they pretend to be. But we all are in on it and enjoy watching them goof and kill each other on stage.

A friend and I used to invent fake arguments at bars and ask women to weigh in. Most often, nobody noticed or cared that we weren’t really curious if I resembled the pitcher for the Giants (I kid you not, we were into elaborate set-ups). But on the rare occasion when someone did call us out, a smile and a simple “you got us” was enough. Among other things, it meant we knew that lying is unwelcome when building connection.3

“Honestly, I walked over to the baking section because I thought you were cute”, will take you much further than petty lies.

“It’s Not a Big Deal, Bro”

The opposite of the Man Who Opts Out might ask, what’s the big deal? “I just followed her a bit and was trying to just be masculine, maybe she shouldn’t be so sensitive? I know I mean well”.

I want to reiterate this. You know you mean well, but she doesn’t. When large fraction of women have experenced different forms of sexual violence in their lives (44% in [CDC 2015]), is it any surprize she would be wary of you, a random man in the street? Our instincts are given to us for a reason.

Again, it sucks that we guys have to start with distrust-by-default. Say you need to get to 10, but start with -2 instead of 0. But the entire remedy to that would be to show your good character for just 20% longer, and for your game to be just 20% better. And of course, to not act creepy.

You are not “that kind of guy”? You’re not a creep? Show it.

It Starts With Taking Responsibility

It’s worth stating this plainly: not all men are creeps. In fact, most men who worry about being creepy are worried because they don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable by accident. That’s a good thing.

At the same time, the responsibility still sits with us. It’s on us to initiate. And since we’re initiating, it’s on us to make sure the other person feels safe and respected. Intent matters morally, but people don’t get to opt out of how something feels to them just because you meant well.

Paranoid incel media presents this as a choice between opting out of talking to women altogether or getting called a creep. But it isn’t. The choice is between potentially creeping her out or accepting a higher risk of being humiliated or rejected yourself. You are choosing between her discomfort and your discomfort. If you follow a woman to the bathroom line instead of talking to her in front of her friends, you’re less likely to be mocked, but are more likely to make her uneasy.

No doubt, there are women who would shout “leave me alone, creep” in response to even the most respectful advances. This will hurt the first time you hear this, really hurt, trust me I’ve been there. But once you’re confident in your game, this will affect you less. The important part here is not the “creep” but the “leave me alone” bit. She wants to be left alone and we must respect that and act responsibly.4

The good news is that this responsibility isn’t as hard to carry as TikTok makes you believe.

What’s Next

As the stories above show, what women describe as creepy isn’t subtle flirting gone wrong or a slightly awkward opener. In fact, when the friends I interviewed brought these things up, they quickly pointed out these weren’t creepy. E.g. the friend who told Story 1, said that asking to take headphones out didn’t make her uncomfortable.

Creepy things are a small set of behaviors that reliably trigger discomfort. Once you know what they are, they’re easy to avoid. Avoiding following and deception will include working on being brave, on being quick, and on letting things go—great things that build character, I must add.

In Part 2, we’ll look at two other frequent patterns: physical overreach and lingering. These aren’t about how you approach and start building connection, but about whether you recognize when it’s time to slow down or step away.

And in Part 3, we’ll tackle the question that always comes next: “Is it still creepy if he’s hot?” followed by Part 4 on what to do when you do occasionally creep someone out.

For now, here’s an important takeaway: avoiding being creepy isn’t about suppressing your interest in the opposite sex. It’s about acting on it responsibly, with a bit of awareness.

And fortunately, that part isn’t hard.

And if you’re using online dating instead of talking to women in the streets, and struggling with getting matches, send me a DM on Instagram and I can help you out with your profile and communication strategy.

They’ve also quietly become the courtroom where romantic decisions are made. Half the women I know admit they run every potential partner through an all-female text war room. The other half mysteriously says, “You don’t talk about fight club” 🤔

Most people know that as group chats get larger, they tend to reject everyone. No matter how cool or compatible a guy is, a big enough group will always find a reason to swipe left (even Chris Hemsworth doesn’t do it for some women).

But how big is too big? Ten people is surely a lot… but is five too much?

Surprisingly, yes: five people is too much. Using mathematical models, I conclude that the optimal size of your group chat is 2-4 people (including you). The math also reveals another surprise: not having a group chat at all makes partner selection harder.

This isn’t just an online thing. When a few women go out together and are open to meeting men, they form a temporary situational “group chat”, for fun and safety, and the same rules apply.

Notably, different rules apply for men (see “What About Men?” at the end).

There are other factors in making these decisions. In this work, we exclusively focus on how group chat size affects the dating outcomes—all else being equal—and encourage the reader to critically assess the impact of their group size on their romantic success.

Read on to learn how I used my decade of experience as a Data Scientist to confirm that five people is indeed a crowd.

Why Group Chats in the First Place?

Dating requires making fast judgments about someone whose true quality you can’t observe yet. Men put on a show when they meet someone new, trying to seem as appealing as possible (often by pretending not to try at all). So women reasonably turn to their friends for help in addition to making their own judgment.

A trusted friend knows you well; she brings a different angle, catches things you miss, and reduces the risk of choosing someone incompatible. Now, when asking multiple people, these takes are tallied into a consensus but in a very specific way. If one woman dislikes something about a guy, others tend to align with that reaction, even if their initial impression was positive.

The decision ultimately rests on the person whose romantic interest is being discussed. There exists however, a tendency for this group chat consensus effect, that is supported by both anecdotal observations and research. Quoting [Graziano et al. 1993], who asked men and women to rate attractiveness of each other after receiving faked ratings that supposedly came from their peers:

Simple effects analyses indicated that women were influenced negatively, but not positively, in evaluating physically attractive male targets… Men were influenced positively, but not negatively, in evaluating physically attractive women.

Simplifying a bit, this leads us to a Bayesian model: multiple noisy observations of a hidden variable converging into a single estimate via min-pooling. Using Monte-Carlo simulations, I computed how well this approach captures the true value of the underlying men’s quality, and how the group chat size impacts this.

Key Results

To “optimize” something, we need to define an objective function. Assume you meet around 100 men when you go out. Roughly 10 of them will fall into your personal top 10% of compatibility. Your group chat’s job is to help narrow these ten down to one.

Here’s what happens when a group of N women evaluates the same men using the proposed model. This chart shows how many men remain in the eligible pool after filtering:

The results are predictable, but the actual values are striking:

• Small groups (2–4 women) reduce the pool efficiently and land close to the target of 1 out of 10 for a group of N = 4.

• Solo judgment (N = 1) doesn’t shrink the pool at all: it actually widens it, making selection harder.

• Large groups (5 or more) over-filter so aggressively that 0 out of 100 men make it through.

This yields the central finding of the model: you + 1 to 3 friends produce the best filtering accuracy, whether in a text thread or on a night out. If you are planning to meet fewer than 100 men, scale down accordingly. 3 is the maximum group for 40 men, and 2 for mere 16.

Next, let’s formalize how we model hidden quality, friend observations, and consensus decisions.

Group Chat Theory

To model how group chats evaluate men, we start with one simple assumption:

Every man has a true, hidden “quality” score (compatibility with you personally or attractiveness) that can’t be observed directly. We assume that this score follows a logistic-normal distribution.

This quality takes time to discover in real life. But on a dating app or during a night out, you have to make a fast judgment using only superficial cues. That’s where your friends come in.

Each woman in the group chat makes her own estimation of that hidden quality. These estimates aren’t perfect — everyone has their own biases, preferences, and blind spots. Some women may underrate a genuinely great guy; others may overrate someone who looks impressive but isn’t compatible.

We assume each friend’s estimate is:

• Centered around the man’s true hidden quality

• Noisy, with errors specific to the observer

• Independent, i.e. each woman’s judgment isn’t influenced by others initially

If we were in the idealized world of effective algorithms, the group could average their impressions to achieve an unbiased estimate (see Appendix for details). But that’s not what actually happens.

In real group chats, there is a strong consensus effect: if one woman says “I don’t like him,” the others tend to move in that direction, even if their first impression was positive. This doesn’t need to be vocalized: even a mild facial expression of discomfort or dissatisfaction acts as a vote of no-confidence.

Now I have to highlight, this is just a tendency, not a hard rule. Studies such as [Graziano et al. 1993] recognize this tendency and quantify it for some compatibility bands. That study, however, did not evaluate how the size of the group of “friends” impacts the shift in ratings.

Since we are interested in isolating the dynamic of group chat size, we simplify this and model the group’s final judgment as a form of min-pooling: the group’s estimate of a man’s quality becomes the minimum of the individual ratings.

Next, we’ll quantify each of these steps formally.

Male Quality Prior

Let each man have a latent quality q ∈ [0,10]. We assume quality follows a logistic-normal distribution [wiki], scaled to the 0–10 interval. As an added bonus, logistic-normal fits the OkCupid attractiveness curve [web.archive.org] much better2.

Empirical work on attractiveness [Wittenbrink 2015] suggests a standard deviation of σ=1.2 when normalized to a 0–10 scale. We use attractiveness as a proxy for quality variance here. Here’s the distribution of the overall quality we use:

Most men fall near the middle of the quality range; 9-10s and 1-2s are rare. This is largely an effect of scaling of the original research data3 and has little effect on future modeling4.

Female Observation Model

Each woman produces a noisy estimate of the hidden true quality. “Noisy estimate” means that while she’d be likely to estimate the hidden quality correctly, there is a significant chance they’ll think their quality is lower or higher.

We assume that this is also a logistic normal distribution, with the mode in the true attractiveness. Here’s an example of quality estimation probability of an 8/10 guy:

I.e. while the most likely estimation would be 8/10, there is just 50% as much chance that this judgment will be 5.5/10 or 9.5/10.

But wait, where did I get the standard deviation for this? It’s supposed to be different from of the overall male attractiveness across the population. Here’s how: I used my own data from Photofeeler.

Estimating the Preference Variability

Photofeeler is a website that lets you post photos of yourself and get rated by other people. It can be used for social media or LinkedIn photos, but is mostly used to pick the best photos for a dating profile.

The site uses a clever aggregation algorithm since the scores given to the same photo by different women5 vary widely. Here’s how my own data varies for different photos:

I took several of my photos, and used maximum-likelihood estimation via gradient descent to fit the variance of the logistic normal to the data. The estimate provided σ_obs​≈9.1, which correspond to a standard deviation of about 1.9 on the 0-10 scale6.

Min-Pooling Aggregation Rule

In the model we use in this article, the final score is the minimum of all estimated scores. This corresponds to the assumed rule that a man is only considered viable if he clears everyone’s threshold. I do recognize it’s a simplification and is one way out of many to describe the trend.

Here is how the distribution of male scores changes across the whole population once we apply this rule across different group chat sizes:

Many of us expect that the distribution flattens and shifts downward as the number of women in the group chat increases. With more evaluators, many more men end up rated as 1–2 out of 10, even though only a small fraction of men actually fall into that range to begin with. This is the group chat’s filtering effect in action.

What’s surprizing is how fast it happens, reducing the outcomes exponentially.

I’m not saying there’s anything “wrong” with this! Everyone has their own idea of attractiveness or compatibility. Even if one group of women thinks you’re the ugliest thing since carpeted bathrooms, the love of your life who (erroneously) thinks you’re a 10/10 might be just around the corner.

More so, this doesn’t mean only giga-chads can escape the 2 out of 10 group chat jail. Nobody can, and no matter how attractive you are, a large group chat will make you look like a total reject.

Minimum Viable Group Chat Size

Before figuring out how big a group chat can get, we need to understand how small it can be while still helping you make better decisions.

Let’s see what judging men by yourself looks like in this model and how it is compared to the true (hidden) quality:

When you evaluate men entirely on your own, the estimated quality distribution becomes much wider than the true underlying distribution. Noise dominates signal. Notice how only 1/3rd of the guys who seem like an 8/10 are actually 8/10!

However, adding a second person (see the graph above with many lines), resolves this, and actually filters down.

This gives us a first practical constraint. The minimum viable group chat size is two people: you and one trusted friend.

Now, the Maximum Group Chat Size

Now let’s look at the other end of the spectrum: how big can a group chat get before it stops helping you? We need a different objective function this time.

To keep things simple, suppose you meet around 100 men over the course of a night out (or a few bars). Statistically, about 10 of them will fall into your personal top 10% of compatibility. Your group chat’s job is to help you narrow those ten down to one truly promising candidate.

Using the simulation model above, we can compute how many of those top-10% men will survive the group’s filtering for each group size N. We arrive at the graph posted at the beginning of the article:

The sweet spot jumps out: a group of 4 women reliably filters the 10 high-quality men down to 1, and a group of 3 also doing a decent job.

This breaks down rather quickly. A group of 5 becomes too strict, leaving you with roughly 1 in 200 men. A group of 6 pushes this to 1 out of 466, and by the time you reach 9 friends, to 1 out of 5600 men in the “top 10%”.

Extreme Versions of Group Chats

At the far end of the spectrum are the giant, city-wide “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” groups. With thousands of women participating, they behave like a massive group chat where every man is evaluated by an enormous number of independent observers. And naturally, everyone’s score collapses to 0.

Here’s what that looks like for just 1000 evaluators:

Even very high-quality men are overwhelmed by the probability that someone in the group rates them poorly. It’s not that these groups are “too harsh” or that women suddenly become more critical in large numbers. This is just a mathematical consequence of aggregating noisy observations using min-pooling. Nobody, not even the most eligible men, is able to escape this effect.

Final Thoughts

Before diving into the conclusion, I have to highlight two important points.

What About Men?

Studies found that men also influence each other when assessing mate attractiveness. However, [Graziano et al 1993] found that the group chat effect is opposite: men respond to other men talking them up, but not down.

An example of that is my first conversation about a potential romantic partner with a male friend. He shared with me that he got invited to a “friend hang” by a classmate and he was unsure about her. Despite me also being unsure, I encouraged him to go. Our group consensus turned a “maybe” into a “yes”, and they’ve been married for 15 years now.

Today, I do have group chats with my male friends. We mostly help each other with pickup lines and, when we go out, with overcoming our fears and approach anxiety.

Sure, there are interesting dynamics related to how men behave in groups, but they are different from the min-pooling consensus. If you think men have group tendencies that get in their way romantically, please leave a comment, and it may be a subject of a further blog post.

The Most Important Estimator

My reviewers pointed out that not everyone’s opinion in a group chat has the same weight. We hold certain friends (or family members!) in higher regard than others. Some friends have biases that we are aware of and take into consideration (highlighted archetypes are “that was a long time ago, just give him a chance” friend, or a known downer).

Others highlighted that when going out with 20 people, we focus on opinions and reactions of a smaller group of friends, rather than using min-pooling across the whole group.

Modeling these effects can be left for future research. In this post, I tried to isolate the effect of the group chat size specifically, if all other variables are held constant.

Ultimately, the most important person in the group chat is you. You know yourself best, and the decision on selecting the most compatible, most high-quality person who aligns on your values, rests on you.

Conclusion

Attractiveness studies often point out that people generally agree on who’s appealing and who isn’t. Group chats rely on this idea, that multiple perspectives help uncover a man’s true quality faster than you could alone. As the group gets larger, however, the filtering goes from helpful to overwhelming. Everyone starts looking like a 2 out of 10 simply because the bar has been raised higher than any real human can clear.

There are definitely areas where men of San Francisco could step it up. But this particular dynamic isn’t something men can fix with self-work, personality, or style. It’s just a tendency in how large groups behave, and my goal was to highlight that.

The math doesn’t say group chats are bad. It says they work best when they’re small. For dating decisions, the optimal advisory board is 2–4 people, including you.

Admittedly, the answer rests on a lot of assumptions and models. However, I hear this often: a friend of mine can never meet anyone worthy when she’s out. Could the reason be that her usual group of 5-6 girlfriends is just too large?

Let me know in the comments how the group chats and girls nights out work for you! After all, when it comes to love, it’s not all about spreadsheets and graphs.

And if you’re looking to make a dating profile that will trick everyone into believing you’re a 10/10 and also a vampire, DM me on Instagram; I can help.

Acknowledgments: special thanks to A…, V…, and J… who reviewed the draft!

Appendix: Average Pooling

Instead of min-pooling, participants could have used average pooling (averaging their percieved scores). In that case, they would have arrived to an unbiased estimate if the measurement distribution was symmetric (i.e. if it was a Gaussian). In our work, the distribution is different.

Because we modeled it as logistic-normal, the side that’s closer to the middle of the population distribution is “heavier”. This is consistent with common sense: an outlier is more likely to be judged more “mid” than as even more of an outlier. I.e. a 8/10 man is much more likely to be judged a 7/10 rather than a 9/10.

As N increases, the shape of the results for any given man will resemble bell curve centered around the true attractiveness, due to the Central Limit Theorem (since the group chat is simply taking the sample mean as the answer).

However, we need to further integrate these estimates across the original true attractiveness distribution, and it again resembles the bell curve.

Instead of every man seeming like a total loser with min-pooling, everyone would seem a little bit more “average” but with some room for being notable.7

The expected number men who “clear” the group chat would also decrease (and of lower-quality men increase) with the size, but much slower and it won’t go to zero.

This section is for illustrative purposes only—there is no data that suggests that average pooling is prevalent in male or female groups.

But what if it’s not a nightmare come true? What if it’s a test?

I’ve come to believe this: what we hate most about Online Dating is a simulation of essential survival skills in the digital age. As soul-sucking as Hinge may be, it does stress-test your ability to function in the world ruled by algorithms, from crafting profiles to catching ChatGPT cheats.

With that in mind, should we treat taking a good dating photo with the same reverence as good manners on a dinner date or the ability to put on tasteful makeup? And if we did, how would our relationship with online dating—and our results—change?

A Step Back: What’s the Point of Dating?

At its core, dating is how we get to know someone we’re interested in. But it’s also a compatibility test that unearths deeper qualities or hidden disqualifiers.

We already accept that traditional dating rituals are symbolic performances of real-world virtues we seek in partners. E.g. approaching in public is a test of courage; holding a door of protectiveness (from violent door swings), paying for dinner of ability to provide. These gestures might seem outdated, but they persist because they echo instincts that identify suitable partners and keep relationships alive. We also find them cute and fun.

Yet when it comes to online dating, we dismiss it as a necessary evil, a swamp to slog through before reaching the mythical kingdom of Real Connection on the other side of the bog.

But what if the swamp is part of the kingdom? What if online dating is simply a modern continuation of the same ritual? The ability to choose photos, text with brevity and wit, and not fall for a crypto scam might be the 21st-century version of “good manners.”

Let’s look at the aspects of our digital lives that online dating is quietly testing.

Creating Online Profiles in Your Professional Life

Every skilled professional now maintains a digital identity. Freelancers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, all need to present who they are in a few words and images. The first thing that comes up in a Google search for many professionals is their LinkedIn page (which is why Joyce suggests to dual-purpose it for dating!), and it’s important to get that right.

The ability to represent yourself clearly and attractively online is not separate from “real life”—it is real life. Should we then view building an online dating profile as a mere test of this skill, and of your adaptability to the changing world?

Indeed, for most men who can’t get matches online, the reason is the quality of their presentation, rather than their actual physical attributes or personality traits.

Sure, I might be biased here. I’m good at building online profiles, and not just for dating apps. People often compliment my LinkedIn for being refreshingly warm and personal while sounding professional. That balance of authentic and intentional is the same one that works in dating. Your photos and prompts simply answer the same question: Who are you, and can you convey it in one scroll?

But your profile also needs to appear on their feed, and for that, you need to be...

Gaming the Algorithm

Hinge requires you to list your school affilliation. So I list the university where I got a certification instead of where I earned my 4-year degree.

It’s not because I’m hiding anything scandalous (not like this). I simply went to a school abroad, and when I list that, the algorithm instantly narrows my matches to women from that country. I didn’t ask for this filter but the Algorithm decides whom I get to match with.1

Don’t worry, I clear this up early in our conversation. While I probably lose a few dates over being “dishonest”, but if I don’t tweak the setting, I lose far more because the algorithm simply refuses to budge.

The game doesn’t stop there. There are guides on “Hinge Hacks”: how to craftily use boosts, how to game your ELO score by swiping left on everyone in your first day, how to “avoid the rose jail”. While it sounds nerdy and too involved, isn’t this knowing how to do it sorta useful?

Learning to navigate algorithmic systems is no longer optional. In the dystopian year of 20252, your resume, rental or a bank loan application will get scanned, sorted, and ranked by AI before a human ever sees it. You need to win this race yourself and you want to date a winner.

Speaking of AI.

Telling AI Slop Apart From Reality

Online dating has quietly become a crash course in digital discernment. A common complaint is that it’s full of AI bots and of people who hide their lack of game behind ChatGPT one-liners and their real features behind FaceApp filters.

Spotting authenticity in that noise is an essential life skill. The instincts you use to detect an AI cheat also protect you from clickbait, scams, phony reviews, corporate bot farms, and fake digital stores elsewhere.

Of course, there is another side to it. Online dating also tests your ability to use AI tools without getting caught. Writing your prompts with help from ChatGPT while keeping them authentic will help you when crafting your resume—or with your substack ;-)

Identifying and Resisting Scams

Online scammers target everyone: men and women, straight and queer, young and old. Every now and then you get a text inviting you to “invest”, or a god old, “Hi remember me, we met at dinner?”

The scammers on the apps look pretty similar. A very hot girl or a guy with model looks (and often grainy photos), who immediately “clicks” with you, invites you to WhatsApp, and shares that their hobby is “investing”3. Or they send a saucy selfie and ask for yours in return.

The apps generally do a good job at keeping them at bay: I don’t remember seeing one on Hinge in years. But they do still exist, and perhaps that’s part of the test.

So maybe it’s natural that one out of your ten matches will be a scammer for you to identify and ignore. And if you can’t walk ten feet without sending a dick pic to an online extortionist, perhaps your genes don’t need to survive past the 20th century.

Dealing With the Illusion of Choice

Singles and couples have to navigate the illusion of abundance, as if the better person is a short swipe away. This goes beyond dating and applies to the decision paralysis when picking restaurants, vacation destinations, or even friends to hang out with.

When it comes to people, it might seem unique to dating online. But look, if you can’t pick one man out of 10 on a dating site, will you be able to do it elsewhere?

Imagine you’ve been eyeing a group of fun, hot guys sitting in the corner of the bar (and ignoring you), and then some other man walks up. He’s not as cool, but he likes you enough to approach. Can you get over the illusion of abundance and give him a chance? Or will you wait fruitlessly for those other dudes and end up with nothing?

When we are in a relationship, we are bombarded with attention too. In fact, the stronger your relationship is, the more others want a piece of it. Someone will slide into your DMs, and an ex will post a bikini photo from her vacation. Can you ignore this noise and focus on a person you have an actual connection with? Online dating requires huge amounts of this restraint.

Knowing How to Get People to Show Up

When I first started using dating apps, I got ghosted three times in my first month. Not bad—except those were my only three matches.

In the last three years, though, I’ve only been ghosted once. That’s not luck. That’s learning how to get people to show up and to give up on those who won’t, quickly.

Anyone who organizes social gatherings has to deal with flakiness. These days, when people get less and less practice socializing offline [wbur.org], you have to spend half of your energy figuring out who will cancel at the last minute. Which is a big issue when you have limited time and only this many chairs at a dinner table.

Online dating tests and teaches you how to write messages that convert interest into action, how to follow up without being needy, and most importantly, how to choose people who actually follow through. Those are not just dating skills, they’re social survival skills.

Healthy Online Habits

We live in an increasingly online world. More stuff is moving online from offline, whether we like that or not. Being comfortable and knowing how to manage it without succumbing to the dopamine treadmill is an essential skill. Are you logging on to Hinge just for validation? Are you swiping past bedtime? Can you manage this without quitting?

Of course, not everything is a test of some essential life skill.

Some Things are Unique to the Apps

Among things that don’t translate well from online dating are:

1. Catfishing. Dealing with misrepresentation, especially in the looks department, seems unique to the dating apps. I’ll write an anti-catfishing guide to address it.

2. Ghosting “by default”. Online connections can simply disappear into nothing at no fault of your own. While true to a narrow slice of online professions (your job leads may), we still generally frown upon people in our life leaving us hanging or disappearing.

3. Acting too horny or rude. In the real world, you get punched in the face.

So yes, online dating does have its unique annoying peculiarities.

The Optimistic Take on the Online Swamp

More and more couples meet online than ever before (even during covid). I relate: half of the women I’ve dated, I met online. It can and does work.

But we don’t have to hate the process. Most of what we dislike about dating apps can be seen instead as tests of digital survival: presenting yourself clearly, filtering noise, committing while having options, spotting fakes, staying focused, and following through.

There are also things we may (gasp!) like about online dating. I actually do enjoy crafting witty one-liners based on someone’s profile. It’s fun even if they don’t respond, or so I keep telling myself.4

Meeting people “in real life” will always feel more romantic, but that doesn’t make online dating less real. Think of this next time you open Hinge, Tinder, Raya, or that random Instagram DM. What if you approach it with the desire to show how good you are at being a modern man or a woman, rather than with dread. Your renewed optimism might indeed change your results.

And if you’re struggling with online dating, I can help. I’ve learned these digital survival skills the slow way, and I want to make sure you don’t have to. Send me a DM on Instagram if you want feedback on your profile or want to learn how to make the apps work for you instead of against you.

The dataset I used originally was based on self-reported height. And people—men and women alike—lie about their height. A lot.

Fortunately, there’s a dataset with measured values: the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). I used the 2017–2020 sample [NHANES 17-20], which records both how tall people say they are and how tall they really are.

After fixing the previous post (it now has brand new figures and tables), I started asking new questions. When a guy says he’s “totally six feet tall,” how tall is he really? And can we decode what the other claimed heights actually mean? The answers are below, and they’re hilarious.

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Before we dive in, I promise I’ll give height a break for a bit. I’m only following up so soon because I screwed up. And because I really want to underline that you don’t have to be tall in order to be romantically successful. And if you choose to compare yourself to others, maybe you’re not “short”. Maybe you’re just honest.

So how did it affect the conclusions from my last week’s post?

Most of the Findings Didn’t Change

After updating last week’s post with the real, measured height data, almost all the results held steady. The Fair-Match height (the perfect global pairing by height) barely moved. Both sexes tend to overstate their height consistently across different buckets, so the overall matching effect stayed intact.

The real-world survey asked participants to list their own height and their matches’ height. Both could’ve been overestimated. If everyone’s exaggerating a little, the bias roughly cancels out. I’m not sure if there’s a perfect way to correct for that, but it’s worth noting.

Some charts look cleaner now, with smoother curves and fewer weird bumps.
But the bottom line hasn’t changed: women’s height preferences remain remarkably reasonable.

How Tall Are People Really?

The [NHANES 17-20] dataset offers several ways to look at height exaggeration. Most studies (such as [Flegal et al 2020]) show it from this angle: by how much people overestimate their height based on their real height.

Men add 1 inch on average, and women add 0.5 inch. However, the variance is really high. While men add 0.5-1 inch on average, a significant chunk of guys adds two, three, or more inches.

What if we ask an inverse question. When someone claims they’re X feet tall, what is their real height?

The Hinge Height Decoder

If your match chooses to lie about their height (which only 45% of men did1), here’s what their real height probably is. I’m only listing male height because—let’s face it—guys don’t care that much about their partner’s height.

So a rule of thumb is that your 5’8’’ or taller date will be 0.5-1 inch shorter than they say. But 1 out of 10 “tallest” 6’4’’ and 6’3’’ dudes will likely be whopping 2-3 inches down.

The Bigger the Claim, the Bigger the Lie

At first glance, the data suggest that taller men exaggerate less: their reported heights sit closer to reality. Perhaps, they are confident enough already and they don’t need to lie.

But invert the question, and we find that as claimed height increases, so does the average inflation gap:

• an average man who says he’s 5’7’ only adds 0.5 inch to their real height, but

• an average man who says he’s 6’4’ tacks on whopping 1.5 inches!

The main patterns come through best on the chart below. The horizontal axis shows the claimed height, and the vertical axis shows the measured one.

Watch how these lines diverge more and more as the claimed heights grow taller.

Short Kings Don’t Cheat

The short kings deserve credit: they’re so confident they sometimes subtract a few inches for good measure. Check the lower end of the chart:

1. Sure, guys who really are 5’0’’ often claim to be 5’3’’

2. but the ones who say that they’re 5’0’’ average closer to 5’3.5’’ in reality.

It’s as if the 5-foot crowd and the 5-foot-3 crowd secretly want to trade places. Strange.

The Anatomy of a 6 Foot Man

Let’s zoom in on the most mythical creature of the modern dating ecosystem: the man who claims he’s six feet tall.

How tall is he really? Here’s a histogram of real measured heights of men who said on the NHANES survey that they’re 6’.

Whoa. According to NHANES measurements, only 14 percent of self-declared “six-footers” actually reach that height. The rest fall short (literally), and 67% of them are shorter than 5’11.5’’, making them 5’11’’ at best.

And what about the real six-footers? That’s right: most of them advertise as `6’1’’`

These figures come from an official CDC survey, so imagine how much fuzzier things get on dating apps! When a profile says “6 ft,” there’s no telling whether that means 5’11”, 5’10”, or actually 6 foot but humble.

We’ve normalized this quiet inflation to the point where everyone expects everyone else to exaggerate by an inch or two. Honesty has become suspicious. When I show up to a date as tall as I claim, people are often surprised. And when I help friends write their profiles, I seriously suggest to “round up to the next even inch” just to stay competitive.

Conclusion: What It Means For You

It’s easy to feel self-conscious about height when every chart, profile, and headline is inflated by an inch or two. Most of what we see—whether it’s societal breakdowns or people listing their own stats—is quietly overstated.

This is not to deny that dating as a short man or a taller woman is harder. It is. Just don’t let other people’s deception tank your self-esteem. Things are not as bad as they seem, and sometimes being honest just makes you stand taller.

Appendix—Extra Charts and Findings

A1. Reported vs Measured Height

Honestly this graph from the old post should have tipped me off that the data is incorrect. Here’s the self-reported heights from [CDC 2023]. Notice how there’s a “bump” in the 6ft area, that is best explained by the fact that more men wanted to be 6ft than their actual height.

Here is the correct graph from [NHANES 17-20] using measured heights. The bell curve is back

A2. Note on Data Selection

For most graphs, I used data from the three sections of the [NHANES 17-20] dataset. The main dataset is an inner join of these tables:

1. P_DEMO for gender and weighting (used WTINTPRP). I also loaded age and filtered out people younger than 20 who are still growing.

2. P_WHQ for self-reported height

3. P_BMX for real body measurements

The sample size is 4061 men and 4334 women. The survey is national, no state data was available.

P.S. How Tall Is The Author Really?

In the previous article, I mentioned that my height is 5’10’’, which was a classic self-reported number. After measuring properly, my height turned out to be 5 feet and 9.7 inches. Technically, rounding up to 5’10’’ is fair game. This is the height I’ve been using on the dating sites as well.

However, if 14% of men are 6 ft+, then it’s completely fair for the 14% of tallest women to expect partners that height.

In this article, I use mathematical models to estimate the fair dating height expectations from CDC data [NHANES 17-20]2, and I include tables so you can check if your own preferences are reasonable. Then I share the results of a survey I ran (75 respondents) to check if the real-world preferences align with these findings.

I expected the survey responses to skew taller and was ready for a fiery expose. To my shock, the answers aligned with the model—even though respondents never saw it or even knew they were being compared to the CDC data.

In other words, the women polled were quite reasonable in their height preferences. While they seemed strict, there are enough tall men out there to fulfill them. Except for two demographics: shorter women expected their partners to be taller than the model, and taller women were ok with shorter men.

The rest of the post breaks down these results, dives deeper into female expectations and what they mean for dating strategies—especially for shorter guys.

Summary of the Key Results

From the data, I found that about 15% of men in the US 3 are 6ft tall, and 15% of women are 5’6’’ tall. This leads us to the first concept, Fair-Match Height: for each N% tallest women, how tall are the N% tallest men in the state? I computed this fair pairing from the CDC data for California. (These concepts will be explained in more details later.)

In the real world, however, we meet in groups and pick our partners from a smaller available pool rather than from all men in the state. This reduces the number of potential partners and decreases the expected height. I refert to the partner height computed this way as the Real-Match Minimum. For women 5’6’’ tall, the model produced Real-Match Minimum height of 5’10’’, which is below the Fair-Match height of 6’ even.

Note that any height preference above the Fair-Match height is unsustainable—there simply aren’t enough men that tall for everyone. Similarly, preferences below the Real-Match Minimum could be tightened up.

I also ran a survey to find the real preferences. The answers tracked the Real-Match Minimum model within an inch for most women (except the taller and shorter groups). For example, 5’6’’ women set their minimum at… 5’9.5’’, half an inch below the Real-Match min height of 5’10’’!

Table 1 summarizes the key results. For each female height group, this shows the Fair-Match Height, the Real-Match Minimum Height, the Min Desired Male Height (average of the survey responses), and the “Bonus”: by how much the Desired Height is larger than the Real-Match Height (negative means smaller)

Don’t worry, we’ll break it down.

Is there a “Perfect Height”?

Yes, almost everyone would like someone who’s 6’7’’. My poll found that there’s basically no such thing as “too tall” for most women4. If 6’7’’ men grew on trees, most women would pick one.

Here’s the problem: the chances for a man to be 6’7’’ are 1 out of 150, and we can’t all date the same dude.

But that is the only guy a 6'5’’ woman could date if she insisted on dating taller.

So let’s make this fair. Pair the tallest woman with the tallest man. Then the second-tallest woman with the second-tallest man. Keep going until everyone’s matched. Now, we can finally ask the main question: what is the height of the match for every woman?

Introducing, the “Fair-Match Height”

The CDC runs a demographic survey [NHANES 17-20] with the data we need for this simulation: match the tallest people with each other and repeat. With a bit of help from Claude Code, I wrote the software and computed the “Fair-Match Height” for every height bracket.

The following table lists the heights as well as what percentage of people are that height or taller. By construction, this number is the same for both men and women.

Here’s how to read it: find your height in the corresponding column, and the fair partner height will be in the same row. For example, for a woman who’s 5’6’’, the “fair-match height” is 6 ft even. This is the tallest partner you can hope to find reliably. If you are dating someone taller than the fair-match height, then some other woman is dating someone shorter than that.

“Fair-Match Height” is not “Minimum Height”!

The Fair Matching requires the entire state of California to get into one room and figure the perfect pairing based on height.

What actually happens: instead of a giant, open, and global matching market, we meet in small random groups. A few people “go out,” some pair off, rinse and repeat.

To model this, I simulated many rounds where people are matched fairly but within small pools rather than across the entire population. Let’s assume that within these small groups, the suitors use the fair-matching logic descrribed above5, consciously or not.

Introducing, the “Real-Match Minimum”

The simulation repeatedly matched random groups of 20 women with random groups of 20 men, preserving realistic competition. Then I removed the bottom 5% of outliers and called the height of the shortest match the “Real-Match Minimum”.

After matching 100 million virtual people6 with each other, we arrive at the following:

Across most heights, the realistic minimum is only slightly below the average fair match, except that it falls off at the edges of the distribution (men of unusual heights are harder to find).

Not bad, huh? It seems all men across all demographics have a solid chance, don’t we?

Don’t Women Still Only Want 6 ft Tall Men?

Ok, sure there’s CDC data and models, but the real preferences might be different. We’ve all read this:

A survey from Bumble found that 60% of women indicate that they are looking for a man over 6 feet tall in their search filters [source]

Some surveys even name 80% but these quotes are misleading. They only consider women who set height filters but most women don’t set them on dating apps. We can derive this from public data: height filter is a paid feature, and only 5% of users pay for Bumble [source]. Besides, Bumble itself says that the data posted above is “inaccurate” [WSJ reports].

So we need better data. CDC doesn’t ask, “how tall must a man hitting on you be before you consider him?”

It was time to take matters into my own hands: I asked my friends to fill out a Google Form. Luckily, I have a lot of friends.

Female Preferences are Surprisingly Reasonable

75 women filled out the survey, and they turned out to be surprisingly… reasonable. There was no “6 feet or nothing” cutoff. The survey asked the participants to list their own height, and then posed two questions:

Imagine a handsome stranger approaches you in a social setting. How tall does he have to be for you to accept his advances?

and

How tall is too tall, though?7

Let’s focus on the minimum height requirements (the “how tall is too tall” question is explored in the appendix). We are considering men whom you don’t know so he can’t yet make up for his height with his personality or wallet. The averaged survey answers are in the “Average Desired Height (Survey)” column below:

The 4th column shows the difference between the surveyed preferences and the model:

• If the number is positive, women wanted someone a bit taller than the model suggested.

• If it’s negative, they were fine with someone slightly shorter.

Most preferences are within an inch of the modeled height.

The chart makes this even clearer. The pink solid line shows the survey answers, and the green dashed line shows the model’s minimum predictions, and the blue line is the Fair-Match Height.

For example, women who are 5’6” said they wouldn’t go below about 5’9.4” on average. The model suggested that most of those women would end up with someone above 5’10”, and that the perfectly fair match would be around 6’0”.

I’ll admit something: I expected different results. I assumed this would turn into the usual “look how unfair women are” story. Instead, the answers were shockingly, almost boringly reasonable across the board — except…

Shorter Women Aim Higher Than You’d Expect

One unexpected finding was this: shorter women tend to prefer men who are taller than what the model suggests is fair. And in many cases, they go taller than what their taller friends prefer!

You can see it in the chart too. Around heights like 5’4” and 5’3”, the preference line curves back upward instead of continuing to drop. A 5’0” woman will often name a taller “minimum acceptable” height than a woman who is 5’2”!

While this could be a fluke in the data (only 9 shorter women were surveyed), anecdotally, conversations and survey comments back up this finding. If you have a theory, feel free to share it in the comments.

UPDATE: I found one potential explanation rooted in mere geometry. See here:

The takeaway for shorter men: aiming for shorter women isn’t the best strategy. Their stated preferences don’t reduce with their height the way you’d expect.

Taller Women Have Relaxed Preferences

In the survey, the tallest women (5’10” and above) reported the most relaxed preferences. Many said they’d be open to dating someone their height or even a bit shorter.

The model shows they don’t need to make that compromise—there are plenty of tall men available to them.

Why might this be? One theory is that their dating pool feels smaller, so they stay flexible to keep options open. Another is the perception that very tall men are less likely to settle down so chasing them might feel pointless (in fact, research suggests the opposite: taller men marry earlier [Weitzman 2014]). Let me know in the comments your theories but the data is clear: they’re simply less rigid about their lower bound.

A takeaway for guys in the 5’9”–6’0” range: don’t be afraid to pursue a taller woman. They seem to be the least concerned about their partner being very tall.

How can they even tell?

Wait a second, you might ask. How can a 5-foot woman tell 5 foot 9 from the whopping 6 feet? Is there a ruler in her pocket, or is she just happy to see a tall guy?

A few of the surveyed friends told me, it’s by comparing the height of men they meet to the height of someone they know, like their dad or brother.

(I must note that these methods of estimating height rely on these men being honest about their height, which, we learned, they often are not.)

One friend used a different instrument at her disposal: muscle tension. She measured height by “the angle at which you have to tilt your head to look at them”.

“But Height Doesn’t Matter!”

The most common knee-jerk response when I sent out the survey was, “but height doesn’t matter!”

That usually lasted about five seconds, right up until the follow-up question, “So, would you date someone shorter than you?” Then it started to get real. “Okay, not that short… same height at least. Unless he’s small-built, then taller”.

Only 3 out of 75 surveyed women chose the “height doesn’t matter” option on the survey. This lines up with every shorter guy’s experience: height matters, and a lot.

Outside the World of “Tall, Handsome Men”

An Instagram ad for a dating service features a woman struggling to find a date. Until she joins the app, comes to their event, and “immediately hits it off” with a “tall, handsome man”.

That phrasing isn’t accidental. When a woman brags about her romantic success, “tall” will be among the first adjectives she’d use.

And what if he isn’t? In the words of one of the survey respondents:

I generally feel less attracted to men closer to my height, but I’ve met v attractive men who are “shorter” (5’8) who have a lot to offer - great career, lots of confidence, amazing physique, etc. so it just depends8

Short men know that well. When you’re short, you don’t start on equal footing. You’re expected to do more just to be seen the same. Confidence, success, presence become requirements rather than advantages, in professional life and in dating alike.

Meanwhile, I still get asked about that 6’6’’ friend from my birthday party six months ago. Women who don’t even remember his name or face—let alone anything about his confidence or career—still ask me if he’s single9. He is not. He is dating a woman who’s 5’3’’.

So let’s not pretend that the height doesn’t matter. It does, and 96% of respondents admit as much. But the data also show that the degree to which it matters does leave a lot of room for a lot of guys. You don’t necessarily need a leg lengthening surgery; perhaps, learning to be more charming will just do the trick.

Conclusion

Many women who were generous with their time to fill the form (thank you!) mentioned that height is not a strict cutoff. As one participant puts it,

the lower “cutoff” is more of an ambiguous range based on lots of other context (not just physical like handsomeness, but more things like charm and comfort) rather than a threshold

While height is a major component of attraction, it’s not the only one. And even if it was “binary”, both the model and the survey show there’s still plenty of room for a lot of men.

It’s also possible that I tend to be friends with especially reasonable and generous people who don’t see the world as black and white. If that’s the case, I highly recommend surrounding yourself with people like that. Especially if you’re worried your future partner might focus on something superficial.

Either way, the data is clear: the bar on male height is, well, not that high. Pun intended.

Appendix: Extra Charts and Findings

The CDC dataset and the survey provide other insights.

A1: Height distribution in the US

Here’s the distribution of real heights of all men and women in the US.

A2: Average Height by State

[CDC 2023] contains state data, which we can use to ballpark height differences despite that they are self-reported. Across states and territories, average heights are nearly the same. The only “outliers” are the island states, which, inexplicably, includes Rhode Island.

The real average height of a dude across the US is about 5’9’’, but [CDC 2023] gives us 5’10’’, consistently with 1 inch overestimation.

A3: How tall is “too tall”?

My survey also asked women about “How tall is too tall”? Turns out, there is no such thing. The results are provided on the graph below. I also mapped the average fair height for context.

The “max height” of an eligible man doesn’t correlate with the height of the woman at all. The linear regression line (not pictured) is almost flat, which means shorter and taller women alike would go for the tallest men (top 1.5% of distribution). Contrast this to the minimal height preference, which increases as the height of the respondent increased.

A4: Comparison with other studies

There are other studies on height preference; how does this one stack?

In [Stulp et al 2012], the authors paint a very different picture on the partner height preferences. They report that the desired partner height correlates with the person’s height:

An individual’s height correlated significantly and positively with preferred partner height in both men (r = .47; p < .001; N = 188) and women (r = .54; p < .001; N = 461): taller men and women preferred taller partners than shorter men and women

The cause of concern here are the reported r-values. r=0.47 is pretty weak. Compare this with the data in my study, where the correlation between the surveyed female height and the desired height was r=0.70 (a stronger value). Yet, we still observed curvilinear effects at the low and high ranges of the height values.

I’d be very curious to see the raw data the authors collected and checking if a similar pattern could be observed.

Another issue could be the demographics: while my survey was aimed at primarily women in their late 20s and early 30s, whilie [Stulp et al 2012] polled college students.

A5: How tall is the author?

The author is proudly 5’10’’, taller than ~60% of men in the area.

But not everyone feels that way—especially when it comes to dating. The complaints are endless. It got so bad that we made a “Tech And The City” parody. And surely, we’ve all heard, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

I disagree. The goods are fine. And I have data to prove it.

The Dating Optimism Paradigm

Dating in 2025 seems to be hard for everyone. My friends—and your friends—complain they can’t find a partner, get ghosted, men won’t commit, women are flaky, techies are so immature, no one serious is left, etc. Meanwhile, I regularly meet and date incredible people—online, offline, through hobbies, work, and random events. And I’m not the only one. Some of my friends have the same experience, finding dating less draining, less daunting, and more promising.

What sets us apart? Optimism.

We believe that success is possible, so we engage with energy instead of dread. Even after tough setbacks, we pick ourselves up and try it again.

Besides, when was the last time someone was attracted to a downer?

Because Optimism Works!

The positive effects of optimism on relationship success are well documented. [Srivastava et al., 2006] reports, as described here, that

[After 1 year of dating,] about 75 percent of couples with optimistic men were still together, while [only] 54 percent of couples with nonoptimistic men were still dating.

This applies to early stages of dating as well: optimism is an important component of what makes it successful, too. [Psychology Today 2024] links optimism to “taking initiative”, “expressing affection”, and “resilience”—important traits of dating at the early stages too.

Psychologists approve. Try optimism yourself. Ask your therapist if it’s right for you.

Restoring Optimism, One Graph at a Time

Optimism doesn’t come from nowhere. Built on a solid foundation of inner work, it comes from experience, evidence, and rejecting myths that make us feel doomed before we start. Confidence is already hard to cultivate, but it’s especially difficult when online culture keeps shouting that everything is hopeless.

This publication aims to dismantle those myths with data, insight, and perspective. While these results might apply elsewhere, I’ll be focusing on dating in San Francisco and the US.

San Francisco is a city with tremendous assets. It is a magnet for smart people and investment capital, has a vibrant and diverse food scene, a transit system that mostly works, relatively low crime, and international fame that draws people from all around the world. It’s a shame that we haven’t yet figured out how to make each other happy romantically.

But if we believe in ourselves, we can do it.

Optimism begets the desire to invest in the future. It wasn’t always easy for me and my friends: we did the work, used coaching and therapy, and kept putting ourselves out there. You are far more likely to work on improving your looks, your wit, and your social skills when you believe the effort will pay off.

And I’ll show you that it will.

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