Before the rise of the internet, dating was much more local. Meaning your pool of partner selection was more or less limited to the geographical area in which you operated. 

This means that the number of men competing for the attention of a beautiful woman living in a small town was more or less limited to the number of men living and working in that particular region. 

The highest sexual market value woman (the most wanted woman) dated the highest sexual market man (the most wanted man) and if they were compatible in terms of character they sooner or later settled and created a family.

It goes the same for other people who were placed lower in the sexual market hierarchy. Besides that, a particular person was interacting with a very limited number of people at the same time so the time period dedicated to analyzing the character and value of a single potential mate was much longer than nowadays. It gave people the ability to bond and get to know each other easier. 

On top of that, human relationships were much more personal and the stigma around sexuality kept people away from carelessly having sex with every other person in that particular town.

Now let’s take a look at how online dating and social media affect dating dynamics. I will focus mainly on the issues the mentioned phenomena impose on the male dating experience. We nowadays market ourselves and connect to other people via social media platforms.

Of course, since it’s in each individual's best self-interest we present ourselves in the best way possible. Since men do the competing and approaching and women do the choosing, this results in a fairly high number of social media impressions for women.

Especially the more attractive women tend to receive an unimaginable amount of attention and options for a potential partner.

A beautiful woman from a small country town who would normally be on the radar of maybe a few hundred potential mates can now reach thousands or even millions of men. Therefore the dating market has become much more global. 

You as a man are not only competing with the men you see on the street every day but also with men who may live hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. Let’s take a look at how this affects you and your access to women. 

Normally if you are the 17th best man in terms of sexual market value in your town or city you would most probably attract a woman that is in the corresponding range in terms of female hierarchy.

But as of the present day, she might be contacted by a guy from another town you don’t stand a chance against. 

Another issue that arises with the use of social media is that we, both men and women, are bombarded on a daily basis with videos and photos of people that are more visually appealing than our current romantic partner for example.

Therefore even if we get along with our partner and we initially find him or her attractive, we tend to get the feeling of opportunity cost or fear of missing out. We get a sense that we could potentially secure a better-looking, more intelligent, charismatic, and overall higher sexual market value mate than we’re currently in a relationship with.

This is for sure a huge contributor to many unsuccessful relationships since a lot of people are more focused on potential new backup mates than on putting effort into saving their currently existing relationship.

I will now dive into online dating apps and their effect on our dating habits. I will talk about Tinder and the data will be extracted from Tinder users but we could assume the same patterns occur on other online dating platforms. Let’s take a look at how Tinder works. 

You are presented with a huge pool of potential mates, most of the cues about the person are visual, you are evaluating people as being attractive or unattractive, and for you to be able to potentially connect with a person the liking must be reciprocal.

It could be said that dating itself is very market-oriented. You have all the options next to each other so you can compare them directly. You don’t get a real sense of a person's character and compatibility with yourself.

You evaluate the person purely on their sheer raw attractiveness, mostly visual and all of them seem to be accessible to you. You won’t settle for less if you could have the best. It’s like being in a supermarket looking at prices and packages of different products.

That goes the same for both men and women. I will now present you with both female and male experiences of Tinder use. 

First women. This is an experience provided by a particular woman so it may vary between the individuals assuming different attractiveness levels but we can say with certainty that the experience is roughly the same for most members of a particular sex. 

The woman I talked to described her own experience somehow like this:“I only open the Tinder app maybe once a week mostly when I really don’t have anything else to do. I then maybe swipe a few guys and close the app for another week. I only maybe “like” one guy in a hundred swipes and practically all of them are instant matches. 

For those who don’t use Tinder, a match happens when the “liking” is reciprocal. Sometimes you may “like” a person and the match happens instantly meaning the other person already “liked” you. But sometimes it may take another week for the person to “like” you back and the match notification occurs subsequently or even never if the person doesn’t “like” you. 

So the woman I talked to told me practically every man she swiped was an instant match, meaning all of those guys already came across her profile and liked her before she liked them. She then said that out of those matches, practically 95% of men texted her and she then maybe answered to 4 or 5 of them and went on a date with 1 or 2 that passed all the filters and came out as the best possible options. 

She also said she goes on a date maybe once or on rare occasions twice per month. What should be noted here is that this particular woman was quite attractive but still the same goes for other women. They may get a few matches less but still, the overall experience is fairly similar.

Now let’s take a look at men’s experience. An average guy on Tinder might go through hundreds or even thousands of female profiles and get a fairly low number of matches. I know a lot of guys that just “like” every single female profile they come across to at least get some matches they can later contact and maybe secure a date with.

I know a guy that is actually quite good-looking. He goes to the gym, is decently built, and has an okay style. He is not neglected or ugly by any means. Guess how many matches he got in three months of Tinder activity. Exactly zero. Even though I was aware that Tinder is a ruthless game I couldn’t believe it. 

Maybe he might have had too high standards and he would get at least some matches if he would like every single woman but still, it was surprising to hear. 

You may also be familiar with videos where they created two Tinder accounts. One of which was a very attractive male and the other one was an objectively obese woman. Even though the man still got quite a few matches the woman got substantially more.

Now this disparity between male and female matches can be attributed to a few different factors.

What this causes is that a lot of women who are not aware of that fact, think that their sexual market value is higher than it actually is. At first sight, their thinking seems logical, because they have 50 “great” matches.

Therefore they completely dismiss the guys who are actually in their range and date men who are only willing to go on a few dates and have fun but not commit to an actual relationship and invest their time.

Later on, they complain that all men are trash but it is just that they date men who are not actually interested in them.Men also tend to get aroused differently than women.

Men are very visual when it comes to arousal and can feel aroused multiple times every day just by walking around the city or by scrolling through the telephone looking at pictures of beautiful women. 

Women on the other side don’t get aroused so easily. Generally they normally need to know a little more about a man rather than just seeing him shirtless.

We won’t get into that but what you could say is that women look for reasons why they should sleep with a man, while men tend to start with the predisposition that they would more or less sleep with most women but they then look for reasons why they hypothetically wouldn’t. 

Women usually don’t have this insatiable desire to spread their genetic material day in and day out but only feel so with the right person they very carefully chose.

Therefore the average woman gives away less “likes” than an average man. These facts result in an average woman getting more matches and a much better conversion rate from “likes’’ given into matches than an average man which just gets amplified when you take into account that the average man is more desperate to get more matches and will lower his standards even additionally. 

The woman on the other side, if she gets way more matches and DMs than she can possibly go out with, will naturally higher her standards. She is in no need of getting 500 “mediocre” matches in addition to 100 very “high quality.”