Comment by derbOac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derbOac | Hacker News Reader

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.

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