Matthew Botos

An op-ed this week in the Wall Street Journal argued that The Next Sexual Revolution is better technology for freezing eggs and later pregnancies. The new plan for ambitious, career-oriented women is apparently to freeze your young eggs, throw yourself into your career, and then have a child alone at 50.

I have a tough time seeing that actually work. My younger friends who are having kids find it’s an exhausting enterprise even with two parents, and I can’t imagine it gets easier with age or while you’re trying to maintain a career and a family on your own. There’s also an important distinction between “having a child” and “raising a family”.

Overall, it seems like a lot of people have forgotten that life is a balance and its different phases have different priorities. As the author notes, compromises are possible, even in more competitive fields like medicine.

The younger generation (Gen X, Y, and the Millenials) are supposedly more focused on this balance, though the self-described passions of my online and offline dates are more split. About half are passionate about their careers, the other half their family and friends, and ostensibly starting families of their own. My own passions are still listed as travel and photography, though in practice I devote more time to looking for the right person to start that next phase of life - and a family.

Good news and bad news from the Wall Street Journal on marriage and money:

The matrimonial price tag varies by gender and age. Asked how much a potential spouse would need to have to be money-marriage material, women in their 20s said $2.5 million. The going rate fell to $1.1 million for women in their 30s, and rose again to $2.2 million for women in their 40s.

Of course, when the mercenary marriage proves disappointing, there’s always divorce. Among the women in their twenties who said they would marry for money, 71% said they expected to get divorced — the highest of any demographic. Only 27% of men in their 40s expected to divorce. Says Mr. Prince: “For these women, it’s just another step on their journey to the good life. They want to be paid what they think they’re worth and then move on.”

I’ve often wondered what you happen if I wore one of T-Shirt Hell’s mysoginistic shirts to a speed-dating event. Radars vulgar T-shirt prank answers that question and more - time to go shopping, I guess!

I stumbled across another interesting academic paper on dating and mate preferences: HurryDate: Mate preferences in action from the University of Pennsylvania. They looked at about 10,000 speed daters and report:

Our main findings are that (1) HurryDate interactions are driven primarily by generally agreed-upon mate values and less by niche-based or assortative patterns, (2) the agreed-upon mate values for both men and women derive almost exclusively from physically observable attributes like attractiveness, BMI, height, and age and are not substantially related to harder-to-observe attributes such as education, religion, sociosexuality, having children, or desiring future children, and (3) small positive assortative trends arise in the areas of race and height.

I’m a little suspect of the self-reported data they relied on, though the bell curve on some of the parameters makes sense. It’s also interesting to see where the averages fall and the differences between sexes, including that women want more kids. They also confirmed at least one stereotype, albeit in rather dry academic language:

These results indicate that, while men generally chose thinner women, previously married men and African - American men had reduced tendencies to do so.

Someone needs to send these poor grad students some Sir Mix Alot!

They also noted a interesting self-awareness:

Our results also suggest that men and women are both aware that they are in a market and know, to some degree, how to respond to market forces. Both women and men decreased their selectivity to the extent that they were less desirable and, specifically, to the extent that they had a less desirable BMI. Heavier women said yes to a relatively high proportion of potential dates, as did men who were either heavy or very thin. Men appeared to attempt to compensate somewhat for having a less attractive face, but not at all for being older or shorter.

No earth-shattering revelations; my big take away here is to wonder if my all too intensive experience with both statistics and dating would give me advance standing in their PhD program.

One of my favorite quotes about dating is “if the right person for you is one a million, how many people do you have to meet before you find them?” Well, I noticed today that I’m up to 954 “closed” matches on eHarmony after various stints, so my odds are improving Though it doesn’t say much for Dr. Neil’s 29 dimensions of compatibility that for as many dates came from his matches, only one made it to an actual relationship…

 xkcd takes an amusing look at the math of the dating pool:

Wackiest thing I’ve seen on eHarmony in a while:

The one thing Lucy is most passionate about: I’m most passoinate about horses and riding english and showing. I really want to meet a guy who also is passoinate about riding. I don’t care if they ride western. In the future, I hope to have a second home in Wellington or Ocala Florida for the winter months, were there are big horse shows.

I closed last year’s blog about turning 28 with this: “Hopefully at 29 I�ll be able to say my wisdom has climbed another minute notch.” That prophecy has been fulfilled; in the last year I’ve gained a better grasp on the realities of my life and the wisdom that comes with that. As always, it seems that everything big in my life these days comes down to dating and work.

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Talking with my brother and his friends during Birthdays in Blacksburg made me realize radio is quickly getting killed off by multiple assailants. For me, it’s an iPod full of music, for others, it’s the falling price and expanding options for satellite radio.

That said, I still do tune into regular old terrestrial radio occasionally, particularly for a bit of variety during long drives. It’s still good for discovering new, and surprisingly appropriate music.

While driving back from Virginia and idly thinking about my dating situation, I heard Fountain of Wayne’s Someone To Love, which I later tracked down using Google and iTunes. The lyrics handily explain why I seem to have so much trouble meeting people:

He calls his mom, says he's doing fine
She's got somebody on the other line
Puts Coldplay on, pours a glass of wine
Curls up with a book about organized crime

Beth McKenzie got the job of her dreams
Retouching photos for a magazine aimed at teens
It's Thursday night she should be out on the scene
But she's sitting at home watching "The King of Queens" 

Don't give out, don't give up
One of these nights you might find someone to love

And you're not the only one who's lonely

I just finished reading Freakonomics, which includes a brief section on how truthfully people represent themselves and make decisions in the online dating world. Like any good researchers, the authors cite their source, a paper that is readily available online. What Makes You Click: An Empirical Analysis of Online Dating is a fully-blown academic paper, but there are some interesting facts to be gleaned from skimming it.

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