Sexual Marketplace Ponzi Schemes

dating men below your league breaks the market

Recently I spoke about how women can end up with an inflated sense of their own sexual market value. Today I will speak about a way in which this can end up happening to men.

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Perhaps you’re familiar with the concept of social contagion. This term first came into mainstream awareness following an upsurge in female to male gender transitions. In several cases, one girl in a school would transition, and then immediately after, several other girls in the school began mysteriously transitioning.

Another common example is the upsurge in suicide rates among women following Marilyn Monroe’s death.

A similar dynamic has been observed in how women pick boyfriends. The evolutionary psychology literature refers to this “all the girls date the same guys” phenomenon as mate copying. It’s best described as the process in which an individual — most commonly observed in women — finds a potential partner more attractive after learning that others have already chosen or expressed interest in that person. Essentially, someone else’s selection acts as a signal of quality: if another person deemed them desirable, they must have something worth wanting.

While some similar behavior is observed in men, it is overwhelmingly more common in women. And, I think this makes a lot of sense. While men do select partners on the basis of several complex factors, raw physical attractiveness is extremely loadbearing. And, it is challenging (albeit not impossible) to fake physical attractiveness. Women, however, place a much larger amount of weight on other factors: ability to acquire resources, general competence, status, etc. These traits can actually take quite a while to evaluate. And, due to their less immediately visible nature, they are meaningfully easier to fake (generally through manipulating public perception).

Therefore, one easy shortcut women can take is to look at men’s previous partners. If he has a history of dating attractive, intelligent, and generally high sexual market value women, it generally implies that he has a corresponding position in the market. And, especially if these women dated him for a long time or are still pining after him, this communicates the strong message of: “this man has valuable traits that were good enough for me”.

I think several men are running what amounts to a sexual marketplace ponzi scheme. This is to say, the thing that maintains their value in the marketplace is that they keep on dating attractive women. However, they actually do not have the corresponding traits to keep their position afloat without this fact.

A generally attractive, kind, wealthy, and intelligent man’s position in the marketplace is rather robust to market fluctuations. If he goes into hiding for five years, he will find it reasonably easy to come out and find a partner without having a developed social network. If he falls out with a friend group, experiences a bad breakup, or otherwise has a drop in his general status and social standing—this is unlikely to lead to him being completely unable to find partners similar to the ones he’d previously had.

This is not the case for the men trapped in ponzi scheme dynamics. One significant drop in status, and they are done for. They will need to completely recalibrate their own worth in the market, and subsequently only be able to attract a very different type of partner than before.

It just takes one initial woman to inflate a man’s position in the market. Women are generally pretty good at entering relationships only with men of a similar caliber. Most will reach for the best they can get in terms of personality, looks, wealth, and all of the other desirable qualities. So, in general, if a woman believes herself to hold similar value to another woman in the market, copying her choice is a decent idea.

However, as we all know, sometimes really quite amazing women will date complete losers.

Perhaps women don’t realize the harm they are causing to other women by dating losers.

You can perhaps somehow get the message across to the other women that you do not believe in the man’s general quality. However, regardless of what you have to say, it’ll be much weaker than the message you sent through having dated him for several years. Especially true if he broke up with you on top of it. And especially true if you tried to get him back for the subsequent months or years.

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I’ve seen this exact dynamic play out in polyamorous communities. In fact, the Wikipedia page for “mate copying” has a section that talks about this phenomenon in polygamous species:

I guess at least in these polyamorous cases the women get a cool friend group out of it. However, it still seems suboptimal for a harem of women to congregate around a less desirable male than they could’ve otherwise found.

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I suppose my main takeaway points here are:

1. Consider how dating men affects their position in the sexual marketplace. Just be aware of the fact that dating someone increases their odds of dating someone equally desirable to you later on.

2. Don’t rely on social proof for your dating decisions. While it can sometimes serve as valuable information, markets are often highly exploitable. Look for men that have the qualities you actually want.