Hypergamy, Competition, Value Added Dating

It’s a rough dating market out there, based on where you live and what you consider your dating target.  In the past few years, I’ve fielded hundreds of questions (on top of maybe thousands of rants) from males and females, gay, straight and bi, white and black and Asian and Hispanic, about how much they hate dating, and how difficult it is.  When I’ve plotted out their age, sex, sexual preference, and location, I’ve quickly discovered that there are significant elements within the dating market that many people do no actively consider when they put themselves out there (either actively seeking, or passively inviting others to date them).

For straight men, it’s important to take the necessary information that is out in their dating market and decipher it so they can maximize their potential girlfriends’ qualities for themselves, while minimizing the frustrations that go along with any competitive task.  If a burger joint tries to open up on a strip with 20 other burger joints, they have to make themselves have the best value for the customers in that specific area.  Maybe the burger joint needs to have the cheapest burgers, or the most flavorful, or the prettiest front design, or the fastest service.  Whatever it is, taking aim at the competition and surpassing them in the way the market wants is a key element.

I live in Chicago.  I primarily date in Chicago, although I’ve never been adverse to long distance relationships as long as they don’t take over my life here in my home town.  But I’m also lucky as a straight man living in Chicago because the elements of competition are in my favor, by a long shot.

In 2007, National Geographic published a study about the composition of single people across the country.  Here’s a map of that well distributed research:

If you review the major towns, you can see an imbalance in how many single males there are versus how many single females there are. This is an important statistic as a generalization, but without breaking it down by age or sexual preference (or even body type or height or other factors of attraction), it’s not exactly perfect. Still, it can be a path to opening one’s eyes to some realities about dating that aren’t just small matters: if you don’t consider your dating market (competition of other straight males, supply of available straight females), you’re missing out on some data that other males ignore. When you want to succeed at a task, the more data you have, the better you can outfit yourself with the tools needed for success.

I’m going to use Chicago as an example in this article, because it is the city I’ve investigated the most for business relationships, platonic friendships, and physical intimacies.  My motivation has always been: this is the town I love and enjoy, this is the town that I find compatibility with.  But there are many facets of Chicago that have attracted me to it, and if it wasn’t able to fulfill me in many ways, I would gladly move.

The first thing to look at is hypergamy: to non-sociologists and anthropologists, it’s easy to call this “gold digging.”  Hypergamy means wanting to “marry up” or “date up” where your mate is higher on society’s totem pole than you.  To generalize completely, females tend to look for strong charactered men with financial stability; males tend to look for very attractive and fit women who are healthy and can bear children.  It’s not 100% defined as such, but it’s a solid generalization for me to explain the issues involved with hypergamy and society and dating.

Chicago has a few things that other urban markets in the Midwest don’t: we have a very active artistic community of painters and actors, theaters and dance troupes, music venues and even movie production houses.  While I have no hard and solid facts to back it up, I meet significantly more females who are in the creative arts industries than I do males.  Most of the females I meet have come from as far away as Ohio, Minnesota and Arkansas to try to find work in a creative arts field.  This is an important piece of information, even if it isn’t backed by hard science.

Chicago also has a huge commerce market: financial analysts, stock brokers, floor traders, insurance salesmen, pharmaceutical executives, meat and dairy distribution and processing.  These industries tend to pay fairly well, so the amount of wealthy males is higher than Milwaukee or Indianapolis or St. Louis (all urban areas).  Hypergamy can include (and often does, it seems), a desire for a woman to find a man who can support her.  Knowing that there is a higher number of financially solid men in Chicago likely attracts females from afar to compete for those men, subconsciously and consciously.

The end result is that Chicago has plenty of available females, and very few available males.  When you break down the available males into their social ranking groups of chickens, hawks and vultures, you have yet another difficult competitive problem for females: if 5% of the available males in Chicago are hawks, and the ratio of single females to single males is 2:1, you’re talking about a ratio of available females to available hawks at 40:1.  In my dating research, I can almost guarantee this number is closer to reality than not.  It means dating, for males, is easy as can be, and we don’t have to take bad attitudes from girls because the supply and demand curves fall in our favor.

When females in Chicago complain to me about the lack of available males, the answer is obvious: they want hawks, but usually end up with chickens or vultures.  Worse, because there are so many chickens and vultures around, the females don’t realize that they have to up their competitive nature to get at the hawks.  Without becoming more competitive, they will always attract the weak chickens or promiscuous vultures, neither group which has any particular standards for what they want in a woman.

So the cycle repeats itself: the oversupplied group of straight females don’t pay attention to the very low supply of available straight hawks, instead allowing themselves to be pursued temporarily by a vulture or frustratingly by a weak chicken.  Instead of upping their competitiveness (dressing nicer, living a more solid life, getting in better shape, presenting themselves in a way that would attract a solid hawk), they just accept their frustration and never venture out of the chicken and vulture nests.

I used to have sympathy, pity.  I don’t anymore.  Even when women I date are also dating a chicken or a vulture, I don’t get in the way, I rarely try to give them any advice until they ask — it’s a tough market for females, even tougher for immature or unhealthy or social outcast females.  Don’t open a burger joint on a street with 50 others if you can’t compete.  Don’t think you can find an amazing man unless you’re willing to do better than the 39 other females who are chasing the same guy in your town.

But that’s Chicago — plenty of females, very few males, even fewer hawks.  What about San Francisco where the tables are turned?  Even in this case, it doesn’t matter.  Let’s say that the tables were turned in excess: 4 available males for every 1 available female.  I have no actual data to back this up, so I’m throwing it in the females’ favor.  Even with a 4:1 ratio, once you take out the chickens and vultures, you’re left with 5% of the males being hawks, real men.  Now that 4:1 ratio falls again to 1:5.  For every 1 solid, date-worthy and confident hawk, there are 5 females.  While it may not be a 40:1 “even beggars can be choosers” market, 5:1 isn’t bad.  It still means that guys, even in the most competitive dating market in the country, have no reason to be single, and even less reason to be dating someone who does not meet your needs or fulfill you.

In Chicago, I’ve been on plenty of first dates.  First dates are fun, but they’re only about one thing: testing the boundaries of chemistry, while also seeing if the female I asked out is really a woman, or if she’s just an unstable girl.  Knowing that other options exist if this one doesn’t meet my standards allows me to not fall head-over-heels for someone who only wants to bring pain to my life.  Yet I still see plenty of guy friends of mine accepting someone less than amazing — I see female friends of mine continue to go out with obvious vultures or chickens.

What’s the reason for this?  The people on both sides are not considering the dating market.  It’s irrelevant to them, they think they can mold anyone they go out with to their standards, rather than looking for incompatibilities first, and then trying to find where they’re compatible in terms of what needs they’re missing from other (intimate and non-intimate) relationships.

It’s a losing battle in business to try to get into an industry without doing your research, without reviewing the competition, without considering supply and demand issues.  Dating is no different, dating is a market, it’s an economy, and if you want to maximize your profit (“happiness, needs fulfilled, reduced stress and frustrations”) you have to do everything you can to compete within your market, or move to a market where you can succeed better.

For me, I will continue to make sure all of my needs are fulfilled by finding ways to increase my value to the supply of females I would date.  This is why I set standards for how I act and how I treat people: to continuously adapt my failures into successes, and to hone my successes as sharply as possible.

Agree or disagree?  Have thoughts?  I appreciate your comments, criticisms and questions below.

Related posts:

1. Alpha, Beta and Omega Males: WRONG.