Why does it seem so hard to find good girls to ask out? This is one of the things that has puzzled me for quite some time and I have come up with the following theory. Essentially the way the idea works out is that each person has a set of values that determines what they have to offer. Your particular mix of traits constitutes a purchasing power of sorts, that limits the type of girlfriend (or boyfriend) you can expect to have.
For simplicity, I break down these traits into three general areas: looks, mind, and personality. Looks encompasses physical appearance, hygiene, dress, and other things that factor into how the person appears. A person's Mind reflects how easily the person learns, processes complex thoughts, synthesizes new ideas, and even the person's grasp of common sense. Personality could include manners, thoughtfulness, civility, and countless other aspects of behavior. These three things are not neatly defined, and that is by design.
Each person starts out with the same amount of value - I normalize this to 100 "points" without loss of generality - to distribute into these three areas: looks, mind, and personality. This is a lot like economic theory, where we use units of happiness to measure utility. Just what one unit of utility means or how much utility someone gets from eating ice cream will never be known. But, it is convenient, so I do something similar with my attribute points. Thinking of people in attribute point scales probably comes from all the role playing games I played when I was younger, but I digress. We will not be rolling 3D6 for STR here.
Anyway, a consequence of how I have set this up is that nobody can have everything. Since there is a limited amount of value that can be divvied up between the three areas, nobody can be outstanding in every single area. I let 33 be straight average in any given category. So someone with two 33s and a 34 is really close to being unremarkable: average in just about every way. Most people will not be straight average and will have strengths and weaknesses. What is important is that for everything above average, there is something about that person below average that compensates to maintain the 100 point total. To use myself as an example, I consider myself to be of above average intelligence, but have average looks and am slightly overweight. Generally civil and polite, I can be arrogant and rude at times. So whatever above average points are going into Mind are coming at the expense of Looks and Personality. My own LMP evaluation of myself is something like 27-45-28.
We all know girls who are really beautiful, but are they also extremely nice and brilliant? Chances are they are not. Most really pretty girls i've known were either nice but not that quick witted or smart and bitchy. Likewise, it's easy to find relatively smart girls who are often described hesitatingly in the following manner: "Well, uh, she has a really nice personality." I think we all know what's being implied. The 100 Rule is in effect in all of these cases: for every strong point, there must be a weakness since each person has no more and no less than 100 points total.
What about those exceptions to the rule: The kind girls who are smart and witty and also fabulous looking... how can this be? Doesn't that violate the rule? My answer is no, there is no violation of the rule going on. If there is something right going on (intelligent, pretty, or nice), there is always something wrong. Although it appears there are no faults, rest assured they are there - you just don't know about it yet. Think "hammertime" from the movie Boomerang.
The best example I can think of is a girl I knew who seemed to be all that: very intelligent, funny, nice, and cute. The problem was that she wasn't really as nice as I thought and in fact turned out to be quite a bitch. While some people are actively trying to disguise their true nature ("fake" people) by putting on a show, other times you might just not know the person well enough. Another thing that could skew perceptions is the nature of the relationship to the subject - the person under scrutiny might behave differently toward different groups of people. Perhaps they are nice to friends but antagonistic towards family and rude to strangers. "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" kind of deal.
This is likely to be a real problem in evaluating someone accurately; it is all a function of point of view. Another problem linked to this is that your own internal "scale" on what matters for each attribute will differ from someone else's scales. Suppose two different people rated a third person as 41-35-24 and 30-44-26. Who is right? In a way, they are both right. It is always important to keep in mind that how you look at someone will be colored by your own preferences. I can see where someone might say this is where the 100 Rule can be violated. Suppose that third person has advantage A and drawback D. If you really value A and don't mind D, then wouldn't that end up better than 100?
I suppose this is a potential flaw in the idea. Personally, I haven't ever found any such exceptions. Every time I thought I found one, I turned out to be mistaken. Remember, there is always something wrong. In each case, it turned out to be something I had missed or the girl was just putting on a false front (like that one from above). There is no such thing as the perfect girl; you just have to figure out what's wrong. Just think: if there was really nothing wrong with her, why doesn't she already have a boyfriend?
Okay, so we have people evaluating themselves and others on a subjective basis - what now? Here's where it gets messy. Suppose people take stock of themselves and think "what can I realistically expect to be able to get in return?" My expectation is that people typically look for mates with similar ratings in each area. Intelligent people will gravitate to dating other intelligent people, nice people will want to go out with others who are pleasant to be around, and good looking people will only go out with other attractive people. I think it makes sense because if you look at what you have objectively, your own strengths and weaknesses should indicate what you value. By virtue of the fact that I put far more effort into developing myself mentally as opposed to physically, that should be what i'm more interested in - it's what I value for myself, so it stands to reason it's what I would value in others. Sure enough, most of my friends (this is not limited to romantic interaction, but all types of social interaction) tend to be generally good but sarcastic folks who are clever but not really athletic.
When extended to dating and romantic relationships, i'm guessing that people are looking for roughly their equivalents. I think this makes sense not only for the aforementioned revealed preference argument, but also for security reasons. We have heard the phrase "out of my league" before. What would be in my league? If I have a bundle of attributes worth B in the marketplace, what can I expect to be able to afford? The most obvious answer to this is that I should be able to buy B with B. Granted since nothing is exact people will allow for some margin of error, but the surest way to get within that margin of error is to try and hit as close to the exact same bundle as possible.
Suppose a person agrees to a relationship if and only if they determine that the value received is at least as much as the value being given in return. Then it stands to reason that the only times a relationship is go is if the value is equal on both ends or one of the parties involved incorrectly evaluates the other side's value. In that case, the relationship will be short lived, as the misinformed party (sooner or later) learns the truth and decides they are getting shafted in the deal. But we don't observe true values - we only get uncertain evaluations filtered through our own perception. This presents a problem when trying to determine if first you are getting a what you deserve, and second if the other person will believe they are getting what they deserve. If I find a girl who is similar to me and i'm not making huge mistakes, then chances are she's thinking that i'm about equivalent to her - and the equation works.
Being rejected carries with it some personal anguish (some people can't stand rejection), public humiliation elements ("Yo, she dissed you!") and also real costs (wasted time and money on going out and gifts). Lowering the probability of rejection lowers the expected costs (likelihood of being rejected times suffering of being rejected) and raises the expected benefit (likelihood of acceptance times benefit of getting the girl) of asking for a date. Thus, prior to asking a girl out, there is some selection going on where people try to figure out who is likely to accept and who is likely to reject. For those who are risk averse, they may stick to asking out girls they think are likely to agree. And by the above analysis, the most likely to agree would be the ones who they think have similar bundles of attributes (so very likely similar value).
It has been discussed how there are teenaged party girls who sometimes settle down and become soccer moms. This is a radical change of values and either is a real change in attributes or involves all kinds of fakery. There has to be a better system of signals to cut through the uncertainty of who values what. Otherwise, it's all rolling the dice. You might want that party girl and end up with a soccer mom! What kinds of signaling are available to pick out the prizes from the chaff?
One signaling device used by lots of guys and girls is clothing and belongings. There is really only one reason to buy a $65 T-Shirt - to show that you can. Expensive clothes, cars, shoes, etc. are often interpreted as a display of wealth to signal to gold digging women who are easy. This is fine for those who are looking to hit it and quit it, but it isn't the type of signaling i'm looking to use. Scantily clad women who are looking for action are of this same category of people. So if you're into that sort of freakiness, then you are informed of the availability. If you aren't into it, you are informed that you should look elsewhere.
Okay so that kind of signaling isn't for me. I'm looking for thoughtful, fairly nice with average looks. The sticking point is the Mind because that's the highest requirement. It's easy to find low rated people; it's the high ones that are harder to find. What sort of filter might work? This is why I think school and work is where people tend to find serious relationship material.
Suppose you start with 100,000 teenagers in a regional area. Half are male, half are female, so we only have to deal with the 50,000 girls. Suppose every year in high school, 5% drop out of school due to pregnancy, academics, criminal activity, whatever. So by the time high school graduation comes around, there are only 47,500 remaining. Now, if i'm looking for someone with some kind of ambition and intelligence, chances are that girl will in fact graduate from high school. If a girl got pregnant or is on drugs or has any of those kinds of problems that led to her not graduating, I don't want any part of her anyway. So this is a first screen that filters out a sizable amount. Now in undergraduate orientation, we hear the whole thing about "look to your left and look to your right and one of you won't be around" and all that garbage. But there is some truth to that because not everyone who attends college will graduate. Each year, some will leave school for various reasons - say 25% each year. So by the time we get to those who graduate (let's say 4 years), we are down to 15,030. Now then, of these remaining it is easy to eliminate half due to smoking, drinking or drugs, which are automatic disqualify for me - so down to 7,515. Of these, above average Mind is what i'm looking for, so you can eliminate at least half who will be below average; down to 3,758. Suppose one third of these are total bitches (a fair assumption I think), so we're down to 2,505.
This is roughly 3% of the total we started with. Is it any surprise I would have difficulty trying to find worthwhile and likely to accept girls to ask out? I would imagine that anyone who isn't following the "any port in a storm" criteria would have similar problems. Being able to find, much less identify who's in that 3% is quite a daunting task. However, the pool gets reduced at each successive filter, down to 15,000 who graduate with an undergrad degree. Although degrees aren't perfectly correlated to attributes, it is a helpful means of zeroing in quickly on what i'm after: 1 in 6 is a much better prospect than the 1 in 20 odds that we started with.
Well now what the heck are these economic terms doing here? They have to do with the pool of prospective people to ask out. Suppose there is a girl who is very ambitious and feels she has no time for a boyfriend. By not being interested at all in a relationship with anyone, she has removed herself from the pool of potential girls to ask out. What about a responsible girl who is looking for a nice guy and is cautious about who she'll go out with? If there is enough of this going on, then pretty soon it's hard to find nice girls who are likely to agree to go out and the pool is biased towards the not-so-serious party girls who aren't very appealing options. This is Akerlof's Lemons market at work, where in the used car market only the owners of bad cars are willing to sell. Here, the only people who are actively interested in going out are the very ones you don't want to ask out. All the people with the good product are either too cautious (and so price themselves out of the market) or expect there only to be bad buyers and so don't bother selling. Whether you're looking for nice or smart girls, this effect will tend to diminish the likelihood of finding them since they're actively avoiding the market.
I suspect that the overcautious nice girls are more numerous in the high school population while the no time ambitious ones are more numerous in the older college/working age groups. Either way, you get a shrinkage of the worthwhile girls relative to the total pool of girls and it gets that much harder to find good ones. If you reverse the analysis, this is why the cautious ones are so cautious - they don't expect there to be any good guys on the market and are rationally assuming the ones trying to mack on them are jerks only interested in sex. This will make it all the more difficult for the high value guys to convince the high value girls (provided they can locate the high value girls who are self selecting out of the market) that they are in fact high value guys. What does all of this mean? One, it's difficult to find girls worth asking out to begin with. Two, even when you can manage to somehow stumble onto one, chances are she's taken (or there's something wrong that you just aren't noticing). And third, even if she isn't taken, you have to convince her that you aren't crap like the rest of the guys in the pool.
So if there are hardly any good ones out there, they're most likely already taken anyway, and even if not they'll assume i'm a pig, then why bother? I guess that's why i'm not actively looking for a girlfriend. *shurg*
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