<story><title>Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/dating-social-experiment-dawn-hawkins-1.6180147</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Mountain_Skies</author><text>Starting with being one of Match&amp;#x27;s first profiles in my area in the mid 90s through a couple of years ago, I&amp;#x27;ve given online dating a try several through various stages of life. The one constant I&amp;#x27;ve found is that paid services, even if it&amp;#x27;s just a small amount, gets rid of the tire kickers and validation seekers. When everyone has something invested into the process, everything is primed for moving forward. Paid services unfortunately have their own incentives to keep you around even after finding mutually attraction and compatibility but the free (and freemium) sites are designed to suck up your time and attention, which are monetized, instead of you paying directly.&lt;p&gt;Two other random observations about the differences between using matching sites versus people I&amp;#x27;ve met more organically: Those I&amp;#x27;ve met online are at least twice as likely taking prescription medicine for social anxiety or other mental health conditions. That difference is quite stark but otherwise personality and lifestyle differences are minimal. The other is that tall women are vastly overrepresented on dating sites. My guess is that if you&amp;#x27;re a 6&amp;#x27; tall woman who wants to not be taller than her significant other but still wants to be able to wear heels, the numbers don&amp;#x27;t work very well with more traditional dating. You have to be able to cast a wide net when 96% of men are already shorter than you are in two inch heels.&lt;p&gt;For myself, my best relationships have been those I&amp;#x27;ve met in person rather than through online dating. In most of those cases, we wouldn&amp;#x27;t have been a match if we had been using an app and running in similar social circles itself was a good filter. The best relationship from someone I met online was a woman I met on LiveJournal in an alumni area, which was somewhat of a pseudo social circle filter itself.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/dating-social-experiment-dawn-hawkins-1.6180147</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>motohagiography</author><text>$7000? Sounds like dating apps are wildly underpriced, or they are not fit for purpose. Likely a bit of both. A girlfriend of mine once used a matchmaking service for profesionals that was priced in the $10k range and the stories she told me about them all seemed to have the similar theme, where if you want a person to represent something in your life (wife, partner, husband, etc.), it&amp;#x27;s a recipe for disappointment.&lt;p&gt;Durable relationships with friends are ones that just work because you don&amp;#x27;t freight it with external meaning. That we use a noun for a &amp;quot;relationship&amp;quot; between people at all is probably the root of a lot of its difficulty. Relationships as things are intractable, whereas relating and choosing how you relate is the simplest thing in the world. It&amp;#x27;s as though we codified relating into a noun so we could trade it, which makes sense when you look at &amp;quot;being in a relationship&amp;quot; as a proxy for being property, and matchmaking services that want to sell you one.&lt;p&gt;Intimacy does require a shared perimeter of safety, trust, and exclusivity relative to that specific personal intimacy, and you need to maintain it, but reducing it to role-playing expectations just turns it into a power struggle in the guise of a game.&lt;p&gt;For a lot of people, marriage is basically a dead institution, but we still go looking for someone to &amp;quot;make&amp;quot; a marriage with, as though it&amp;#x27;s a thing you make that is abstracted from the people involved. The same can be said for family, where we relate to &amp;quot;the family&amp;quot; as our reflection against an ideal of family, instead of each  person directly.&lt;p&gt;Maybe I&amp;#x27;ve been into the stoics too much, but the simple mental rephrasing of &amp;quot;my partner,&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;the partner I have&amp;quot; changes how you relate to them, from being an extension or reflection of yourself to being an experience in your life, and it takes a lot of pressure off how you relate to them.&lt;p&gt;That last statement is a destroyer of codependent relationships, which is probably good because someone spending thousands of dollars to find someone to represent their idea of a &amp;quot;relationship,&amp;quot; in which they like their reflection in it is just going to suffer. That is, until they don&amp;#x27;t need to check a reflection to know they&amp;#x27;re good.</text></comment>