Thread by @datepsych

Here are the results of a recent poll. I asked people to imagine 100 dating-age peers and tell me if at least half were attractive enough to date.

Most people don't find most people attractive.

So - how is it that most people are in relationships? 🧵

This is a result I expected. Most people don't find most people attractive.

Women are also more selective than men.

This raises a question - how is it that so many people are in relationships and married when we don't find most people physically attractive enough for a relationship?

Let's look at how this works out with something like facial attractiveness.

This chart shows what happens when people rate faces and you look at the highest/lowest ratings for each face.

Almost every face has someone who finds it unattractive and someone who finds it attractive.

True more or less equally for men and women.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16634665/

Not all of them unfortunately:

But it's mostly good news.

We get lost in the fact that there is high (mean) agreement on what an attractive face is.

Yet at the same time - there is high individual variation.

The conventional wisdom that someone out there will find you attractive is true.

And not just because you are a Good Boi with a nice personality.

Someone will legitimately like your facial appearance.

This paper didn't have a plot of all ratings (most won't) but ratings are correlated. Imagine it clustered somewhere along the line.

So yes - there is still agreement on what faces are attractive.

But it isn't absolute agreement.

And this is important - because you don't date the mean.

You date the datapoint - the individual.

In a very practical way, you only need one person to find you attractive.

Most people finding you attractive vs most people not finding you attractive is, of course, a big deal.

It will make dating harder.

Especially as time goes on and more people exit the dating pool.

Maybe that one person who liked you is already married.

And the best thing you can do to mitigate this is to not waste time while you are young - when most people are still single.

The older you get, the smaller your dating pool - for men and women.

datepsychology.com/how-have-relat…

Let's look at a less charitable interpretation of the result above:

"Most people settle, are unhappy with their relationships, and don't find their partners attractive."

Likely wrong in most cases.

People in relationships report quite high satisfaction with them.

In the most recent GSS data, about 95% of people reported being happy with their marriage.

Results here indicate very high happiness in unmarried relationships as well:

https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1605141088834035712?t=kyZF_AtYgBZM5p82jYnY0g&s=19

Also in the research literature:

People rate their own partners as being more physically attractive than others do.

And also rate their partners as more attractive than they rate themselves.

Not a small effect - more than half a standard deviation.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18405868/

Note in the chart above - women rated their partners as physically stronger as well, in addition to in better health.

These are called "positive illusions" in psychology.

But the "positive illusion" of physical attractiveness can also be explained in part by individual variation in who we see as attractive.

The "illusion" is statistical and it represents partner disagreement with the mean agreement of facial raters.

Remember this chart. If you are average, someone will still find you ugly and someone will still find you beautiful.

And in practice, in the whole population, it won't just be one person.