People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science | Hacker News Reader

People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science

wired.com

26 pointsBrajeshwar11 comments

Makes complete sense to me for LTRs.

Being responsible for my own happiness is enough. Being responsible for mine AND someone else’s happiness is too difficult to sustain long term.

Step 1: Learn to fulfill your own happiness. Step 2: Find someone that can do the same.

I can intuitively get a sense that someone generates their own happiness (with a varying degree of accuracy). Though it’s highly dependent on facial cues, tonal intonation, and conversation. Until big data gets hold of this information (and I hope it never does), it probably won’t be able to be an accurate match maker.

Dating can be fun, why take the fun out of it? It’s the joy of meeting someone interesting after a bunch of bad dates that kicks your brain into gear and excites you about discovering that person. A perfect match maker might inadvertently destroy itself by taking the spice out of dating.

Reminds of that good will hunting quote, "you don't need each other to be perfect but just be perfect for each other". I think too many people have been spoiled by choice and social media, too many long laundry list of wants, too easy to give up when things get tough. A good relationship is a balancing act of loving yourself, loving the other person for who they are and not who you want them to be, and a little of them having traits that are compatible with you.

> In other words, a person who is happy outside their relationship is far more likely to be happy inside their relationship, as well.

Feels unsurprising.

Also, not sold with all the hand-wavy "machine learning" thrown into the article.

It looks like the result is consistent with: "having romantic relationships doesn't affects your happiness long term"-- null result.

There's a number of levels at which you could interpret the research in this article.

One is at face value, in terms of what the article is saying: that the things people look for in dating are not the things that bring happiness in a relationship. There's probably a lot of wisdom in what's discussed — find happiness in yourself before you look for it in a mate, what's important aren't the things you see at first glance in a potential mate, and so forth.

Another way of interpreting all of this though, is that the researchers are extremely off in the way they're approaching these topics. For instance, are people really happy in a relationship if they tell a researcher they're happy in the relationship? Is saying in a research survey that you're happy the same thing as being happy? Is it the same as predicting divorce or relationship dissolution? How would you measure relationship happiness? Is that the same as relationship functioning? Does the difference matter?

I'm not sure I want to take sides in terms of how the research is interpreted — it might be a bit of both — but I couldn't help but wonder if we're all just completely missing the boat with relationships. How people approach online dating apps isn't necessarily how people approach dating in general, and how people talk about their relationships with strangers isn't how they actually feel about them. Maybe the problems are with how online dating apps are structured?

I guess I came away from this really unsure of what to make of it. It's pitched as a message about how you should think about relationships, but I came away wondering about the dating research industry. For me it's a bit broader — I've started to wonder about reported well-being in surveys, for example, as barometers of actual societal well-being — but it applies to relationships nonetheless.

I think the big mismatch here is that romantic desirability is largely determined not by someone's subconscious assessment of their future happiness with a potential partner but rather their perception that the potential partner would help them produce successful offspring. A conventionally attractive partner might not make you happier, but they are more likely to be healthy and therefore to pass on healthy genes to your children.

But over the last 50ish years in the west, we've begun to expect more from our romantic relationships, including many different, potentially inconsistent objectives beyond just the production and raising of children. We want friendship, intimacy, meaning, happiness, etc. And romantic relationships where the production of children is not a goal, and in some cases is not even possible, are increasingly common too (eg many--but not all--LGBTQ+ relationships, child free hetero marriages, and so on).

Not that this is a bad thing, but on some level we are still monkeys driven by the need to procreate and we are following those same subconscious instincts even when they are inconsistent with our conscious desires to form long-term happy relationships.

Yeah, I think the article/study is misleading. The authors of both are making assertions that "it's hard to predict how humans pair-up" based on broad datasets.

The opinion is presented atop the data, instead of approaching it granular-ly like this:

Given a single man-woman pairing, the author analyzes the pair and provides an anecdotal/hypothetical assertion of what made the two lovebirds connect. If they are self-reportedly happy, the researcher should also makes a hypothetical assertion of what sustains the pairing. Both of these by collecting a set of observed, qualitative facts. Then categorize the connection, group the connections by type, and then make deductions.

Right now, the researcher is seeing that A and B have no similar data. This would look a lot different if approached with common sense "A's relationship makes the most sense because____" and "B's relationship makes the most sense because_______", and then draw connections from these two anecdotal observations.

What's shocking is that similarity in values don't seem to be a predictor of happiness in a relationship.

Could it be that for those in relationships with differences, if the difference were significant enough, they merely wouldn't be in a relationship at all, and wouldn't be in the sample data?

A study on relationships that doesn't acknowledge a data point of "I'm aging, lonely, and desperate, therefore this person is perfect for me" is likely flawed.

This should be the first law of relationship studies, i.e. this categorization must exist on account of being a large, uncomfortable yet prevalent truth.

One thing that wasn't mentioned is how many relationships they were in prior. That gives a basis to recognize a good thing when they have it and motivation to power through the bumps.

No paywall: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com