Further Thoughts on Dating, Smith on Polygamy, and Death
Strategies for Signaling in the Dating Market and Reflections on a Somber Anniversary
Hello Everyone,
My last essay on dating achieved the most traction of any of my Substack posts thus far, so thank you for reading and sharing.
One of my friends sent me some helpful reflections on the piece with some good insight on signalling that I thought was quite worthwhile and he kindly granted me permission to share here:
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, specifically in terms of practical steps single men can do to enter the dating market while avoiding dating apps (and, ideally, the rest of the internet lol). One challenge for a bottom 90% man is this: since women compete on promiscuity to mate up dominance hierarchies, expectations about when sex is supposed to happen have changed. The timing of sex is accelerated. If sex is a third date thing, going on a first date with a dude who isn't physically perfect is not very costly for the woman. If sex is a first date thing, then a first date is pricey.The challenge for men then is to credibly commit themselves to not asking for sex on the first date. This is a challenge because a) there is asymmetric information (presumably, if you're at a first date level of relationship, the woman cannot observe, say, the man's religious values) and b) one can't just say "I don't want to have sex on the first date," because saying that makes it seem as though he does, in fact, want to have sex, and now if possible.
Solution: Specify the nature of the date at the moment of asking, and make sure it is something from which she can easily and plausibly exit at any time. Instead of saying, "Would you go on a date with me?" say, "Can I buy you a coffee, at, say, 2PM tomorrow?" Coffee at 2 carries no expectation of continuing into sex or anything else, and accepting is very low cost for the woman, because, if she's not that into the man, she can plausibly extricate herself by 2:45 with the excuse that she must be somewhere at 3. Added bonus, the man can pull the same strategy if it turns out she is a dull conversationalist.
The trick in dating markets, as in any market where there is asymmetric information about product quality, is to figure out how to lower information costs. If your product quality is not as obviously visible as your competitor's, one obvious solution is to compete on the margin of price. The woman who would say yes to being picked up for dinner and drinks with an overcredentialed former college quarterback might not extend the same favor to the rest of us, but she might say yes to meeting for 2 o'clock coffee.
I had a high school friend who told me that her mom told her never to refuse a first date. I wouldn't extend the same advice today -- given how expectations about first dates have changed. But it got me thinking that the right kind of first date is virtually costless for a girl. Which made me much braver in asking girls out.
The other thing is men just have to be chill with rejection. But it stops stinging so much after the first couple rebuffs.
There is also a much more opportunistic strategy for men, which is the one I took, and which I highly recommend to any man who can stomach it: work at a summer camp. Female to male ratio is astronomical, and dudes who work at summer camps are on average pretty stupid. It's like being at the top of a dating app hierarchy, but for in-person flirtation, which is way more fun, and it's not even hard if you work out a bit and are funny.
I expect there would be a similar return to joining a Southern Baptist or Assemblies of God church, but, as a high churchman myself, I would not opt for that strategy. Still, our single Orthodox brethren aren't doing themselves any favors in the dating scene.
I think the reader’s point about signalling is quite spot on, and I suspect that a grad student or a bright undergrad could write up quite a good series of essays on the subject that builds upon the work already done in books like Date-Nomics.
Smith on Polygamy
As I mentioned in last week’s piece, some people, such as Rob Henderson, argue that dating dynamics are leading to a return of what is effectively polygamy, as the West Elm Calebs of the world sleep with numerous women, while many other men don’t date any women, let alone sleep with them.
Dan Klein sent along this helpful essay by Patrick Fitzsimmons at GMU that summarizes Adam Smith’s thoughts on the downsides of polygamy (I must admit I was unaware that he ever commented on it).
In brief, Fitzsimmons argues:
For Smith, monogamy has three advantages over polygamy in fostering political stability:
First, monogamy leads people to socialize and expand their social networks outside the family. Families are tight kin-networks that may present advantages in the face of despotic or irregular power. But tighter kin-networks have also proven to have a negative correlation with democratic institutions (Schulz 2022). Monogamy helps to break down barriers to interaction between non-kin members.
Second, monogamy produces orderly, intergenerational succession in prominent families; prominent and powerful families enable peaceable succession; customs of peaceable succession lead to the emergence of a nobility. Monogamy also provides a focal point for who will be the next king, elevating one potential over another. When the next king is determined ex ante, violence is less likely to break out between potential claimants.
Third, monogamy creates focal points. For Smith, focal points were crucial in order for people to rise in force against a foreign or domestic oppressor. If the people have no focal individuals who stands above the rest, no leaders, they are unable to band together and form a significant counter to the oppressor and his affiliates. The advantages of monogamous succession and focal points relate to Smith’s ideas on the legitimacy of children.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
We are living in some seemingly unprecedented times when it comes to unemployed single men and social stability. As I mentioned in the essay, there are roughly 7 million unemployed prime working age men. In any other point in history that would be a cause for panic and alarm, as such men are the prime population for disorder and rebellion etc. However, we don’t really see that at all. It is possible that the combination of video games, Netflix and similar services, and the widespread availability of pornography have de-fanged this population. If so, this is good from a social stability standpoint, but not good at all when it comes to these men’s own well being. I suspect that this will actually continue to get worse as technology continues to develop and people are further able to check out of reality with VR headsets etc.
Some Thoughts on Death from Tolkien
Yesterday was the third anniversary of my paternal grandfather’s passing in 2020. As some of you may know, I dropped out of grad school in 2019 in large part because he was sick, and then diagnosed with colon cancer and I became his caretaker. I was and am very close to my paternal grandparents, who have basically been a second set of parents to me. I have lived with them the majority of my life, at this point. To say that the year (almost to the day, in fact) between my grandfather’s diagnosis and his passing was immensely hard would be an understatement, and I still am dealing with some of the mental and physical health consequences that came from it.
But as hard as it was for me, it was even more difficult for my grandfather, who had to endure a year of great discomfort and chemo, in the end for it to not have been successful. To be fair, there was some hope at the beginning, when the treatment seemed to be working, and for a very longtime he thought that he would get better and be able to continue life as before. My grandmother has said, and I agree, that my grandfather would not have gone through everything he did if he knew he would pass away a year later.
This makes me think of Amish life expectancy. Amish life expectancy was higher than average until relatively recently. Their life expectancy has not declined, but rather everyone else’s has surpassed theirs, which has stayed the same. It is believed that this can be attributed to the Amish eschewing drastic end of life procedures that drag out painful living for a little bit longer.
I have thought a lot about death the past few years, which caring for a dying person will incline one to do, and I have found a great deal of comfort in not only my Christian faith, but the way that faith is conveyed in the work of JRR Tolkien.
In Tolkien’s mythology, men, in contrast to elves, are mortal. This is called the Gift of Ilúvatar, though men often see it as a curse rather than as a gift, and a great deal of trouble comes about when men try to do desperate things to avoid receiving this gift. In contrast, the Elves eventually come to envy this gift, because they are bound to the fallen world until its end.
I am not planning to die anytime soon, but when the time comes I hope to be able to accept the gift of death with dignity, rather than desperation. This is undoubtedly a foreign idea to our culture today, that prefers to ignore death for the most part and when it does think of it, to view it much like the Numenoreans, who view it as a curse. We can see this in the techno-utopian movements that seek to hack human biology to achieve immortality. One of the leaders of this movement, James Strole, admits that since his grandmother died when he was a child he has sought to defeat death.
If one views death as the gate to oblivion, then it makes sense that one would be desperate to avoid entering that gate for as long as possible. However, I, like Tolkien do not view it that way. This life is but a pilgrimage and prologue to the rest of eternity. We are called to live this life well and to exercise stewardship over it, but it is just one stop on our journey.
While it is formed from mixing two different parts of the story together and is not in the books in this form, the Lord of the Rings trilogy did an excellent job of capturing Tolkien’s view in a conversation between Gandalf and Pippin during the siege of Minas Tirith. Pippin states “I didn’t think it would end this way.” To which Gandalf replies “End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take.”
Unfortunate, it is a journey that our society has generally failed to prepare people for. Even churches have generally failed at this, with most ignoring the bulk of Christian history and the emphasis on the intermediary state between death and eternity (aka Abraham’s bosom among other things). We can see this manifested in things like the lack of prayers for the dead, and the lack of asking those who have passed onto the next part of the journey, the Church Triumphant and the Church Expectant, from praying for those of us still here on Earth, the Church Militant.
My Anglo-Catholic parish still maintains this important practice, and on All Soul’s Day, All Saint’s Day, and All Saint’s Sunday we pray for those who have departed and ask them to pray for us. This includes praying by name for every member of the parish (which was founded in 1851) whose death we have a record of. I can say that having not grown up with that tradition, it is a source of great comfort and helpful reflection.
This is all not to say that the death of those we love is not sad. Indeed, even Jesus wept for his friend Lazarus, even though he would raise him from the dead. Grief is a good and natural part of life in this tragic world of ours. But ultimately, it is mourning at one’s departure on a long and distant journey, not the end.
“All things pass away, and so will we.”