11 ways to arbitrage the dating market

Date submissives. Trade height for shoulder width. Marry for money.

Over on the Works in Progress podcast we did an episode about why Europe’s economy has stagnated. Watch/listen to that or you can read Pieter’s writing on the same topic.

Also, if you’d like to ask us anything about the magazine, we’re doing an AMA. Reply to my Tweet (or this Substack) with questions.

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Last week I talked about how I think sparks are overrated. I think people lose a lot of potential matches because they’re pursuing the romance novel version of their life instead of the arranged marriage version of their life.

That raises an important question. If not romance, what should you be looking for?

For the uninitiated, arbitrage is a concept in finance and economics where you take advantage of a difference in prices between two markets. If you found that your local supermarket was selling jars of miso tasty for a few pounds less than the farmers market, and you had some free time, you could buy a bunch of miso tasty, set up a stall, and sell them for a tidy profit. That would be an arbitrage play and it happens all the time in the economy.

Dating can be thought of as a game of arbitrage. There are some markets where your value is going to be higher than others.

For example, in the British Effective Altruist scene, there are more men than women. Effective Altruists like to date other Effective Altruists, so a woman who is mid in the general market can be quite the catch in this particular sub community. The Soho Reading Sessions are apparently a great place to meet ‘The most beautiful women you’ve ever seen – and 20 of the weirdest men’, if that’s the sort of thing that appeals to you.

Similarly, you hear a lot about the phenomenon of White Male Asian Female couples. I think this happens because Asian women don’t mind dorkiness and sometimes find men from their own country to be quite sexist. The dorky white men, on the other hand, find women who don’t meet the insanely specific Asian beauty standards to be very beautiful despite their unbotoxed traps. That’s arbitrage!

You can improve your league. But you should also be thinking about opportunities for arbitrage. What are your stand out traits? Who are you more valuable to? What do you want that other people don’t care about? What do other people want that you could take or leave?

Here are my top 11 tips for dating market arbitrage.

1. Avoid sexual dominance

I am suspicious of dominant men. Aella writes about how being into BDSM is basically a sexual orientation. She’s probably right.

Despite what the Bible says, male and female sexuality aren’t perfect complements of each other. Men don’t really want to dominate women as much as women want to be dominated. When I talk to men who have a lot of sex they complain that women treat them like a handyman; asking them for a limitless supply of debauched acts. They dutifully choke, slap and restrain as commanded. It’s the ticket price of repeated admission to a lady’s boudoir.

I do know a small number of men who really do enjoy erotic violence and they aren’t the nicest people. Here are some very anonymized anecdotes about them. (Remember, gossip more and watch less TV.)

• A man who shouts at interns

• Another man who shouts at junior staff members

• A man who cheats on his wife publicly and I’ve seen him belittle her

• A man who cheated on his girlfriend and bullied her into an eating disorder and plastic surgery

• A man who dumped a perfectly nice girl to become poly

• A 24/7 sub-dom relationship that the woman, afterwards, considered to be abuse.

I think violent temperaments in the bedroom are correlated with violent temperaments in general. I think it’s fine to want a man who can competently carry out tasks and wants to give you the sex you’re looking for. But give up on the men who really want it.

2. Think of the children

You’re mostly thinking about what traits you want in a husband. You should think about what traits you want for your children.

Mostly the traits I want in my children are very similar to traits that are valuable on the dating market. You probably have similar preferences, so this isn’t super useful. Fundamentally I want my whole family to be healthy, intelligent and likable so there’s not much I can gain there.

There are traits that are more important to me in my children than they are in a partner. It’s more important to me that they are healthy, confident, curious, and driven. It’s less important to me that they be romantic, attractive, or zen.

This is yet another reason to give up on dominance. You might want a kinky husband with a high sex drive, but you would probably prefer to have vanilla children.

3. Looks

Chasing good looking men is a sign of poor time preference. If you get married in your 30s, you will spend about half of your relationship as elderly people.

This advice is the oldest in the book and yet, no one follows it. Sell looks, buy character. When you do buy looks, buy the looks that are associated with good health – like weight, skin and symmetry. Avoid looks that are just good fortune.

I guess if you really want pretty children, find someone whose features would look good with yours.

4. Height

Notorious heightcel Tom Holland and a 5ft10 woman who would never date him.

Women love tall men. Even I, as a certified short woman, had the audacity to prefer tall men.

If you’re like me, I’m guessing what you want from height is actually size. I want to feel petite and feminine and height is the easiest way to achieve this. But broad shouldered short men also do the job and the apps don’t yet let you filter on shoulder breadth (yet). Keen observers of male physiques can use this to their advantage.

They both have the same volume, but one of them gets ten times as many matches

5. Age

I talked about age a couple of posts ago but you might not have read it. Women’s preference for age is stronger than men’s preference for youth. You should date younger than you’re inclined to.

6. Money

I think young and single people underrate money and overrate status. I didn’t really care about money, except insofar as it was a proxy for status, until I was in a serious relationship thinking seriously about having a family.

Don’t date men with cool, high status jobs. Date men who earn a lot of money doing something boring. Ideally, date a man who does something that lots of women find a bit evil. Go for men in insurance, oil, finance, and logistics. Reject men in the arts.

Just Stop Oil protesting my office in 2023.

The other money arbitrage, especially when combined with the youth arbitrage, is you should look for a future rich man. I snapped up my lovely husband when he was a phd student. Other excellent husbands can be found at law school, on grad schemes, or the early stages of start ups.

And, provided he is smart and hard working, you can take an unambitious man and turn him into a high earner. Lots of men also don’t realize they want money until they have a wife and child to spend it on.

7. Hobbies

Shared hobbies and interests aren’t that important and a curse to the people who crave them. Most hobbies and interests are incredibly gendered. In my world, the boys like playing map-based video games, talking about tech and geopolitics, and watching sports. The girls prefer organized fun, arguing about domestic policy, and reading classical literature.

Obviously, my world is hyper selected. We all like trains and Japan. But there are still clear gendered interests. If you have an interest that men really like, you should lean into it. Probably the sexiest thing you could get into is war. Men love talking about war.

But for most of us, our hobbies are niche and feminine. It’s just not that important to share them with your man. I recommend getting into explaining things. Explaining something to a smart and interested person is one of the greatest pleasures in life. It’s so pleasurable I had to ban myself from doing it on dates.

Remember! Info dumps are cute from people you love and irritating from strangers!!

I love coming home to my husband and telling him all about all the new things Samuel has taught me about urbanism. He then tells me all about AI and chemistry and we both have a richer understanding of the world.

8. Politics or ‘values’

I think shared politics/ideology/values are the most overrated thing on the market. If you’re interested in things and stuff, it can be very limiting. Any way in which you stray from the orthodoxy du jour will alienate some part of the market.

It doesn’t help that, like hobbies, politics and values are also very gendered.

I’ve changed my mind so much over time. When I was young and compassionate, I was a woke communist. But, because I have an inherent love of systems, I learned about markets and became libertarianish. Then, because I was interested in rationalism, I learned about Moloch and status games, and became a market-oriented centrist with progress characteristics.

The world will change. I will change.

I think a shared worldview can be a very unstable foundation to build a marriage on. Had I locked in a libertarianish man when I was 25, and had that been the foundation of our relationship, I think he would feel quite betrayed by the ways in which I’ve changed.

Instead, I found a person whose intellect I respect. We disagree recreationally but mostly defer to the other’s domains of expertise.

You will never agree wholeheartedly with another person on how to run your life. And if you’re thoughtful, you won’t agree with your past self about it either. I have a friend who turned her husband vegan and then started eating fish. She also became religious and much less woke.

Fortunately, they were held together by mutual esteem, not shared values.

You will have different intuitions about managing money, whether children should use screens, how often to tidy up, how to plan a holiday, whether and what to give to charities etc. Successfully building a life with other people involves learning how to navigate these incompatibilities.

My caveat here is there are some things that just won’t work.

1. Don’t date a person who thinks you’re stupid or evil.

2. Some differences in belief are fundamental to the way your lives together will be structured. Preferred levels of redistribution aren’t going to make or break your marriage but opinions on stay-at-home mothers might.

3. Don’t marry someone who has a trump card that supersedes all your values. I think this can be a source of tension in relationships where one person has religious mandates and the other person has ‘preferences’.

9. Good husbands aren’t always good boyfriends

There are some traits that are really great in boyfriends but bad in husbands. For example, it’s fun to date men who will take you on lavish dates and it’s bad to be with a spend-thrift husband.

Similarly, some people are very generous and accommodating of other people. This can be nice if you’re the person who is being accommodated but when you’re married you might be expected to do the accommodating. My dad is a very generous man. He’s incredibly generous to me but, unfortunately, he’s also very generous with other people. I remember him giving my toys away to other children!

A man with a tidy house is nice, but how much tidying do you want to do when you live together? I once dated a man who had a glass table that he wiped every day. Horrendous. I couldn’t live like that. We burned a hole in our white dining table during our housewarming party.

Cultivation, stylish outfits, and a good physique are all very nice in a boyfriend. But do you want a husband who goes to the gym all the time? Do you want him to obsess over the latest Drake’s sample sale? Do you want to be in charge of the house’s interior design or will you have to bow to his aesthetic preferences?

When you date a man, he is a stranger to you. His behavior is some indication of how he will treat his wife and it demonstrates what virtues come naturally to him, but it’s a better indication of how he treats strangers.

10. The apps

People have all kinds of hang ups about the apps. I won’t litigate those here but I will say that people who don’t use the apps are hard to meet. That means the price is less likely to reflect the market value.

If you run into an appless man, you can buy him at a discount.

Some men haven’t put much thought into their profiles. Often, I think they feel too squeamish to show their friends so they don’t get good advice. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Look for men with bad profiles but the fundamentals look promising.

11. Date your friends

The biggest tragedy of dating is that it’s really easy to weed out people for shallow and materialistic reasons. It’s really hard to find out who has a heart of gold, who treats people right, and who is going to be a really dedicated and committed life partner.

One of the great things about having friends, especially friends you’ve known for a long time, is that you know the content of their character. I have a few friends who are kind of weird, embarrassing and low status but they are really good people. Sure, they would be weird and embarrassing in a way that would embarrass you at parties but, except for that, they would make damn good husbands.

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Ultimately, you want to be in a relationship where you both value each other much more than any likely replacement. You want to find someone who values what’s special about you and wonders at how they got so damn lucky.

The main way to achieve that is through cultivating healthy thought patterns. The halo effect is real and you can use it to your advantage.

The second best way is to think about how to sell yourself. My tips here are very general because you are legion. You will have all kinds of specific traits that some other people are going to really want.

I knew what was special about me is my emotional control and lack of neediness. Most men have a slight preference for a bit of bpd but I assumed that extreme hard-headedness was also undersupplied and I leant into it.

Are you ambitious? Incredibly knowledgeable about trains? Kind of right wing? Very organized? An excellent cook? Find a way to show that off.