First World Problems: Dating

“First world problems” are problems that only become salient when your basic physical needs are met. They’re not the worst problems; people in the third world regularly suffer from worse problems, such as malaria, malnutrition, and war, and they probably don’t think much about the sort of problems that we in the first world face.

But since you probably live in the first world, first world problems are probably important to you. Among the biggest of these is the difficulty most people have with romantic and sexual relationships. So I’m going to talk about why this problem exists, why it’s bad, and how it might be addressed.

1. The Mating Problem

If there is a God, He did not intend us for happiness. There are multiple fundamental aspects of life that are obvious recipes for pain and misery. For instance, there is the fact that all animals, to survive, must destroy other life. More broadly, there is the entropy law (the 2nd law of thermodynamics), which ensures that everything is destined for deterioration and requires a constant influx of energy to maintain.

In spite of some huge problems like that, human beings have managed to do pretty well for ourselves. Technology solves for most of our physical needs. We can cure diseases and provide plentiful, nutritious foods through technology. We haven’t yet done that for everyone, but we’re getting there.

But many of the first world problems appear to lie beyond the reach of technology, because the problem lies in our inherently incompatible desires. The mating problem is a collection of problems arising out of common human desires. (See my earlier posts, “Jerky Men and Crazy Women” and “Are Men and Women Different?”.)

1. Most men desire multiple partners. However, there are not multiple times as many women as men, nor do many men want to share their partners with other men, so men’s desires are incompatible with each other. Nor do many women want to share their partners with other women, so men’s desires are also incompatible with women’s desires.

   Note: Among societies studied by anthropologists, 15% are strictly monogamous; 85% have polygamy. 0.3% have polyandry.

2. Most men want women to be promiscuous with them, but they do not want women to be promiscuous with other men.

3. Men want to have sex a lot more often than women do. (And, again, there are not multiple times more women than men in society.)

4. Many, perhaps most people are unattractive. Unattractive people have just as strong desires for a mate as attractive people do, but people generally do not desire unattractive mates. Everyone wants to be with a highly attractive partner, but there are not enough of these. There is a particular shortage of attractive men (another way to put it: there is a shortage of female desire or feelings of attraction to typical males).

5. While in a relationship, men and women have frequent problems due to their different desires and attitudes. They often have trouble understanding each other or relating to each other; hence the famous book title, “Men are from Mars; women are from Venus”. (I assume gay couples have an easier time.)

6. To some extent, both sexes desire the sort of person who would make them unhappy. Women are often attracted to jerks (or attracted to traits that are positively correlated with jerkiness), which is an obvious recipe for unhappiness. Men, for their part, have traditionally wanted to get a woman with as few previous partners as possible, ideally a virgin. However, in a modern, free society, there are only two kinds of women who would be like this (after a certain age): (a) extremely unattractive women, and (b) women who do not like sex. Neither of these would make these men happy. Both sexes also greatly overemphasize appearance, which is not strongly correlated with ability to make a partner happy.

2. The Biggest First World Problem?

This is among the biggest of the first world problems.

a. It affects a huge number of people for a significant part of their lives. Maybe some super-attractive people are having an easy time, although I have even met super-attractive people who are still having a hard time.

b. It affects us in one of the most important areas of our lives. Nature didn’t design us for making money, or just surviving, or being physically safe. Nature selects for reproduction. To Nature, everything else is instrumental to that. And the way we reproduce is through finding a mate. That is why Nature gave us very strong desires for a partner; the inability to find one, or to find a good one, is a source of huge dissatisfaction in life.

The problem may be worsening. Increasing numbers of young people are not having sex. From 2000 to 2018, the portion of 18-24-year-old men who reported having no sex in the last year increased from 19% to 31% (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7293001/).

This is a serious problem, since as discussed previously (“Are Men and Women Different”), evolution designed men (and this is especially true of young men) for general lust. I promise you that 31% of young men are not happy to be having no sex for over a year.

For the benefit of female readers, the best way to explain it is to ask you to imagine that you wake up feeling hungry in the morning, and there’s no food. You remain hungry all day, and you go to bed hungry at night. The next day, the same thing happens. The next day, it happens again. And it’s just like that every day, all year. If this was your situation, that would be your biggest problem (unless you have malaria, or people are trying to kill you, or some crazy shit like that).

Potential for violence

Some people worry about the Young Male Syndrome, the phenomenon that young, single men are more prone to crime and violence. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40750-023-00219-w)

There is a growing online community of “incels”, involuntarily celibate men, who are generally miserable, resentful, and have a very dark view of life. One article describes the incel community as a domestic terrorism threat and cites a whopping total of 50 incel murders in the U.S. (https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/incels-americas-newest-domestic-terrorism-threat).

In fact, the threat is surprisingly low. The above article didn’t specify the time period for the 50 murders, but it appears they included at least 2015-2019. For comparison, there were 72,781 total murders in the U.S. during that period. And there are tens to hundreds of thousands of members of the incel community (plus millions more who are involuntarily celibate but not members of an online community centered on such). So my guess is that the 50 murders make for a lower murder rate than the general male population, perhaps much lower.

You might think that incels would be more prone to sexual violence, but there’s no indication of this. In surveys, incels are much less open to sexual violence than the general population of men. 20-30% of men report at least some willingness to commit rape if they could get away with it, compared to only 13% of incels. (https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2023/07/Whyisnttheremoreincelviolence.pdf) One hypothesis is that incels are generally more passive than average, which could explain both why they haven’t found a mate and why they are less prone to violence.

Suicidality

So the threat of external violence is overblown. But the threat of self-harm is not. The mating problem (the difficulty of finding mates) is part of the suicide problem, especially for men. Among males in general, suicide rates are four times higher than among women. Suicide rates in the U.S. have increased 30% in the last 20 years, with about 47,000 people killing themselves per year. This is much more than the number of homicides.

Aside: You might ask: Why especially men? There are equal numbers of men and women, so if men are having trouble finding partners, then women must be having about as much trouble. (Unless we have a lot of polygyny in our society.) The answer, I believe, is that for men, finding a partner is a more urgent felt need. It’s not like the desire for a good career (a long-term concern, which you can spend years working on and still feel ok); it’s more like the desire to eat when you’re hungry.

I am not just guessing at the celibacy-suicide link. In one poll, 67% of incels reported seriously considering suicide (https://www.adl.org/resources/article/online-poll-results-provide-new-insights-incel-community), compared to a rate of just 4% for the general population (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/ss/ss7101a1.htm).

Previous work has shown a strong inverse relationship between reproductive prospects and suicidal ideation. For young men (age 18-30), lack of sex in the last month was the single strongest predictor of suicidality. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0162309595000550)

For those who might be inclined to pooh-pooh the “sex shortage” problem, this should be something of a wake up call. To be clear, the problem is not just that tens of thousands of people are killing themselves each year. The problem is that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, are so miserable that the idea of killing themselves doesn’t sound unreasonable. Only a fraction of these people will actually kill themselves, but the suicidal ideation is just an indicator of how much suffering there is. Not being able to find a partner is not a trivial problem, like having too much dip for your chips; it is a life-ruining problem.

Why is the incel problem underestimated?

There is relatively little attention paid to the problem of involuntary celibacy in our society, and most discussion of the incel problem treats it purely as a problem of some bad men who have bad ideas and who might cause harm to others. (They’re misogynists! They’re terrorists!)

I think this is partly because our society still has taboos around sex that prevent us from acknowledging that a shortage of sex is actually a serious problem; partly because neither women nor men care about the pain of unattractive men (these men are basically invisible); and partly because people who have romantic success either never knew or have forgotten the pain of not having it, and those people dominate our public conversations.

3. Solutions

A certain amount of unhappiness appears to be built into the structure of human desires. Nevertheless, how could the mating problem be mitigated? Some ideas:

1. Does pornography help single people cope? I doubt it. This is sort of like suggesting that, to mitigate world hunger, we should give hungry people pictures of food. The hungry people might spend time looking at the pictures instead of trying to find real food, but I don’t think this would make them happy. And of course, pornography does little for women.

2. Prostitution: This should of course be legalized. However, this wouldn’t be of interest to most women, and it isn’t a great solution even for men, since men need to develop real relationships with people who actually want to have sex with them.

3. Robot partners: These are probably coming, and they will probably ease some of the suffering of single people. With AI, these robots will not just provide sex; they’ll also provide pseudo-relationships, for both male and female users.

   Problem: These robot partners may supplant real (conscious, human) partners. This may prevent people from learning how to, or being motivated to, develop real relationships, which will keep people in a second-best state. It would also exacerbate the problem of declining fertility, which may be a complete disaster for our society.

   Optimistically, perhaps robot partners could help people by giving them practice in interacting with the opposite sex in a low-stakes situation (because the other “party” isn’t actually conscious). Perhaps the robots could provide feedback which would help people improve their interaction skills. That’s possible, but to be honest, the “supplanting real relationships” option seems more likely to actually occur.

4. Attractiveness: We need more attractive people. Technology can help with that.

   1. Weight-loss drugs can help people be more attractive as well as healthier. We should make them available over the counter.

   2. We can develop food additives that make food delicious without being fattening.

   3. Perhaps we can develop easy ways of becoming healthy without having to do tedious or unpleasant exercises. What if there was a pill you could take to get jacked?

   4. Perhaps the world should follow South Korea’s lead in using cosmetic surgery to make everyone more beautiful.

   5. Perhaps we will use genetic engineering to create generations who are born attractive. Perhaps we could make it so that virtually all men are taller than virtually all women, we could engineer out social anxiety, etc.

5. Perhaps we can change our own desires, either through drugs or through genetic engineering, so that our desires wouldn’t be so incompatible. E.g., maybe we could engineer less jealous people, men with lower sex drive, and women with higher sex drive, so that they would match each other.

   1. We can also try developing cultural norms with the same effect. But I sense that we’ve already done about as much in that direction as we can.

Other ideas? Comment below.