man struck up a conversation with me in the airport and admitted he had just gotten off the phone with his 30-y.o. daughter, during which she complained about dating, and he “really just wanted to ask a woman around her age if it was really that bad or if she was being dramatic”

@mlstrat My women friends keep repeatedly dating asshole losers and the wondering why they turn out to be assholes, at no point are they changing their dating preferences

@LeFeverSax @mlstrat Yeah I don’t like to frame it this combatively, but for everyone who is single, I try to guide them toward an understanding that people who are great partner material and people who are the most immediately appealing are seldom the same, and the value is in bridging that gap.

@LeFeverSax @mlstrat Fwiw I like Shawn Smith’s writing on this. This is his book for women on men but his mirror image book for men on women helped me a lot at a certain point amazon.com/Practical-Guid…

@LeFeverSax @mlstrat (Also a stats nerd point: this is a great case of “collider bias” aka “Berkson’s paradox” - people who are both great partner material and immediately appealing tend to pair off young and stay paired off. So conditioning on singledom, these qualities are negatively correlated.)