Thanks for reminding me of this, I had forgotten it. It's a fun problem.
The takeaway that asking is often advantageous seems correct to me, and most people should probably ask for things more than they do. I had to learn this even in platonic social life. I used to be terrified of organizing events, but I realized that people usually say yes if you go to the trouble of organizing something.
That said, I think real-life is way more complicated (I'm sure you'd agree), and there are situations where being an asker may be suboptimal all things considered!
Something I've seen a lot of women report is that asking men out often leads to men saying 'yes' because being asked out is flattering and novel for them, but they don't put in much effort because they're not super interested, and often lose interested completely fairly quickly. They wouldn't have asked her out on their own. Of course, this comes with the cost of starting to get invested in someone for weeks or months only for them to bail. Given social norms on who asks whom out, I think "if he was interested, he would" is correct most of the time for straight women, unfortunately*. Not 100% of the time, but often enough that asking out men all the time might not have enough likelihood of success to be worth the downsides.
Another downside of being an asker, not just in a dating context, is you risk exposing yourself to much more rejection. Now yes, this isn't rational to care about in spherical cow land because being explicitly rejected after asking has the same outcome as being passively rejected. But it's psychologically much more difficult to face explicit rejection after asking, and if it happens often enough it's probably not great for your mental health. And poor mental health negatively impacts your ability to achieve your goal. This is the experience of most men on the dating apps.
(I know you talked about this in point 12, but I think you underrate it honestly. I think people can become more resilient to rejection to a point, but I think most will still be hurt by it. I'm also not sure not caring about rejection as much is an autistic thing, it seems orthogonal to that to me. Neurodivergence often is paired with social anxiety in practice.)
Finally, I think a big downside of being an asker is you're always wondering if you could have done better or missed an opportunity. When you're more passive, you simply pick the best option offered to you, and then that's that. I think many people find that position more comfortable and easier to cope with.
*I think this is less true in social circles with lots of shy and/or neurodivergent nerds, where many men might nervous or unsure how to express interest, but that's not most people's circles!
Yeah, I think people will have different opinions on whether getting someone you rank higher than you “deserve” (defined here by how high they rank you) is really “winning.” I wouldn’t be shocked if more men prioritize getting one of their higher ranking choices over being the highest possible rank for their spouse and more women prioritize being a higher rank for their spouse over getting their own highest ranking. Don’t know if it’s nature or nurture but it seems to line up with the general behavior/attitudes of most people I know.
how do you avoid wondering if you could've done better by waiting for the next guy to ask you out instead of marrying the one you married? is this askee is a math wiz and just playing a secretary game then?
just because society does something a certain way, doesn't automatically turn your brain off where a girl asking you out causes a short circuit that allows you to play with her feelings for a bit, because you're feeling "flattered". That's just being an asshole and trying to get into someone's pants without effort. If girl wanted that (just sex), she'd ask for that - that does happen despite the society shaming it. so yeah, I hope next time someone asks you out, you won't short circuit and use the "golden rule" instead...
Very cool. Hadn't heard this. A new and encouraging angle on the whole "don't just take the opportunities life gives you, create your own" kind of thing.
When I was a child, I had a very small social set and constantly shifting environment. Homeschooled. Moved all the time. Not much opportunity to experiment with making friends, so I let my big sister do the hard work and tagged along. I left home and started college absolutely convinced that the worst thing in the world was rejection. If I never initiated or tried to push in or ask for friendship, nobody could ever humiliate me or call me “needy”, or be inconvenienced by me, or have to tolerate my presence when they would rather not. I didn’t rate my contribution to any hypothetical friendship very highly.
CS Lewis wrote something in The Horse and His Boy about people who were “happy to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn’t give a fig for anyone who wasn’t.” I read that and thought “I want that to be me. I really want that to be me”. Out of all the things Lewis ever wrote, that simple line has had a bigger effect on me than anything else. I started being braver and taking initiative and inviting people to do things with me, or just calling people I liked who I hadn’t spoken with in a long time. And they often seemed pleased to hear from me. Or came to game nights I hosted. Or came hiking or backpacking with me. And I gradually stopped worrying that they were just being polite. Even if they were, I thought, it wouldn’t kill them. I learned that rejection is not the worst thing in the world and can actually be pretty easy to shrug off.
I’m not the most supremely socially comfortable person in the world by any means. I still worry sometimes about how I am perceived. But the distance between who I was and who I am now is huge. And I think that’s why, when I finally fell in love with someone, I was able to just tell him. He asked me to marry him about six months later. I’m so glad I didn’t miss out on getting to be married to him.
The game theory of stable matching is also very interesting.
On the asker side, there is no game to be played. You will never scheme yourself into a better outcome by pretending lower choices are higher, or trying to “settle” and lock down a worse choice early. This is a pleasant situation to be in, you don’t have to think.
On the askee side, there is room for gaming the system. There are many different effective ways to do this. However, one way that always works is to pretend certain matches are unacceptable, worse even than going unmatched, in other words preemptively reject them. This can cascade through the system and cause a better choice to free up for you later, although it’s quite risky.
I’m not quite sure how one can make a parable out of this, though.
I read this a few days ago and it stayed with me. I came back to find it again just to say thank you for giving my braver bits a bit more courage to go out there and ask. There’s a kind of sobering comfort in seeing the underlying rules of how these things work made visible; it makes the risks feel more intelligible, and therefore a little easier to take.
I love this framing of Gale-Shapley so much!! It also beautifully connects my undergrad CS education to my later-in-life romantic education…
My approach to coming out as bisexual was asking out the most beautiful/interesting/intelligent/charming woman I was friends with. Agency works! Especially for women dating women. We had a beautiful five-year relationship…
This was after years of mostly dating guys who pursued me and largely thinking, yes, this is fine I guess, but surely there’s more to love?
(My apologies for any exes reading the comments of this particular Substack post…)
Thanks for this great article! I might add that a “stable marriage” and all of the arrangements it represents (jobs, friendships, etc) does not necessarily mean both parties are happy, even for the asker. I think an interesting condition to add to the algorithm might be something like the askee’s first choice cannot be X ranks above their match’s rank. Because in reality nobody will be happy if their job/partner/friend is with them only because they literally cannot find anyone else, especially if this entire system is based on comparison against the group. I really enjoyed your writing thank you!
I am an old-school CS guy who was a prof once upon a time. I knew about stable matching/marriages.
AND, I have to say I love what your takeaway is. I love how you have transformed this into an essay about agency and how valuable it is. I wish I had that insight when i was younger.
I think the reason men are askers and women are askees is because women have a strong preference for dating a man for whom she is high in his preference ordering. If you're a woman and you ask a guy out, you might accidentally ask out a guy who is borderline-indifferent to you.
My view is that men have to demonstrate attractive traits when approaching women. Women want a man who can take the initiative, stay composed in a stressful situation, and not be afraid of failure. Which are exactly the traits required to successfully ask a girl out.
But the hottest guy in town, the richest guy in the country, or the most famous musician will all NOT be asking out the women. They will simply pick and choose from the many women available to them.
This is exactly the same risk that men take when they ask women out, though! What if a woman who doesn't really like you but hasn't had a date in a while just says yes because she lacks other options?
The true answer here is that it's only fun to be the asker if most people you'd ask would rank you highly. It is much more comfortable to not have to bother with the risks of being the asker. Straihht women get to get away with not being the asker because of our culture but they're much more likely to complain about their options, straight men usually have to suck it up because they'd never get to date if they don't learn to do the job, but complain because facing rejection all the time sucks.
Guys are more interested in hooking up with random women who are borderline not into them. Women want to be desired for evolutionary reasons: an indifferent man is liable to abandon you if you become pregnant.
I actually think the evopsych has very little to do with it. It's the difference in evaluation of how negative a bad experience could be.
I was once talking to a guy who joked that "sex is like pizza- even when it's bad, it's still pretty good." Many straight dudes share this opinion- when they think of "bad sex", what they're imagining is that it will be boring. "Bad sex" for straight women often means painful. Since that's the risk, of course they're more hesitant to take it.
This would seem to suggest a strategy of casting a wide net on dating apps and seeing who chooses you. But what happens when many people are doing that? For example in a hetro set up both men and women indicate interest in multiple partners. Is there an extension that looks at that mathematically?
Thanks for reminding me of this, I had forgotten it. It's a fun problem.
The takeaway that asking is often advantageous seems correct to me, and most people should probably ask for things more than they do. I had to learn this even in platonic social life. I used to be terrified of organizing events, but I realized that people usually say yes if you go to the trouble of organizing something.
That said, I think real-life is way more complicated (I'm sure you'd agree), and there are situations where being an asker may be suboptimal all things considered!
Something I've seen a lot of women report is that asking men out often leads to men saying 'yes' because being asked out is flattering and novel for them, but they don't put in much effort because they're not super interested, and often lose interested completely fairly quickly. They wouldn't have asked her out on their own. Of course, this comes with the cost of starting to get invested in someone for weeks or months only for them to bail. Given social norms on who asks whom out, I think "if he was interested, he would" is correct most of the time for straight women, unfortunately*. Not 100% of the time, but often enough that asking out men all the time might not have enough likelihood of success to be worth the downsides.
Another downside of being an asker, not just in a dating context, is you risk exposing yourself to much more rejection. Now yes, this isn't rational to care about in spherical cow land because being explicitly rejected after asking has the same outcome as being passively rejected. But it's psychologically much more difficult to face explicit rejection after asking, and if it happens often enough it's probably not great for your mental health. And poor mental health negatively impacts your ability to achieve your goal. This is the experience of most men on the dating apps.
(I know you talked about this in point 12, but I think you underrate it honestly. I think people can become more resilient to rejection to a point, but I think most will still be hurt by it. I'm also not sure not caring about rejection as much is an autistic thing, it seems orthogonal to that to me. Neurodivergence often is paired with social anxiety in practice.)
Finally, I think a big downside of being an asker is you're always wondering if you could have done better or missed an opportunity. When you're more passive, you simply pick the best option offered to you, and then that's that. I think many people find that position more comfortable and easier to cope with.
*I think this is less true in social circles with lots of shy and/or neurodivergent nerds, where many men might nervous or unsure how to express interest, but that's not most people's circles!
Yeah, I think people will have different opinions on whether getting someone you rank higher than you “deserve” (defined here by how high they rank you) is really “winning.” I wouldn’t be shocked if more men prioritize getting one of their higher ranking choices over being the highest possible rank for their spouse and more women prioritize being a higher rank for their spouse over getting their own highest ranking. Don’t know if it’s nature or nurture but it seems to line up with the general behavior/attitudes of most people I know.
how do you avoid wondering if you could've done better by waiting for the next guy to ask you out instead of marrying the one you married? is this askee is a math wiz and just playing a secretary game then?
just because society does something a certain way, doesn't automatically turn your brain off where a girl asking you out causes a short circuit that allows you to play with her feelings for a bit, because you're feeling "flattered". That's just being an asshole and trying to get into someone's pants without effort. If girl wanted that (just sex), she'd ask for that - that does happen despite the society shaming it. so yeah, I hope next time someone asks you out, you won't short circuit and use the "golden rule" instead...
Very cool. Hadn't heard this. A new and encouraging angle on the whole "don't just take the opportunities life gives you, create your own" kind of thing.
When I was a child, I had a very small social set and constantly shifting environment. Homeschooled. Moved all the time. Not much opportunity to experiment with making friends, so I let my big sister do the hard work and tagged along. I left home and started college absolutely convinced that the worst thing in the world was rejection. If I never initiated or tried to push in or ask for friendship, nobody could ever humiliate me or call me “needy”, or be inconvenienced by me, or have to tolerate my presence when they would rather not. I didn’t rate my contribution to any hypothetical friendship very highly.
CS Lewis wrote something in The Horse and His Boy about people who were “happy to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn’t give a fig for anyone who wasn’t.” I read that and thought “I want that to be me. I really want that to be me”. Out of all the things Lewis ever wrote, that simple line has had a bigger effect on me than anything else. I started being braver and taking initiative and inviting people to do things with me, or just calling people I liked who I hadn’t spoken with in a long time. And they often seemed pleased to hear from me. Or came to game nights I hosted. Or came hiking or backpacking with me. And I gradually stopped worrying that they were just being polite. Even if they were, I thought, it wouldn’t kill them. I learned that rejection is not the worst thing in the world and can actually be pretty easy to shrug off.
I’m not the most supremely socially comfortable person in the world by any means. I still worry sometimes about how I am perceived. But the distance between who I was and who I am now is huge. And I think that’s why, when I finally fell in love with someone, I was able to just tell him. He asked me to marry him about six months later. I’m so glad I didn’t miss out on getting to be married to him.
Your comment is actually having the same effect on me that the CS Lewis line had on you. Thanks for posting!
And the butterfly effect of good deeds goes on and on :) think of all the good influence you will have on those you meet :)
The best opportunities I've had in my business have come from writing friendly emails to people I genuinely wanted to work with.
This essay also made me nostalgic for my own days of having my mind blown by brilliant professors at Berkeley. 💙
About real life and not what's in the mind: first, I also loved profs at UCambridge but not to get blown.
I'm an outmoded nerd. "All work and no play" never happens. Reality is what a great associate said to me: "You can have her: she prefers WASPs!"
You probably know this but a version of this algorithm is used for matching medical residents to training programs!
Super interesting! Do you know if that version of the algorithm is trainee-optimal, or hospital-optimal?
The game theory of stable matching is also very interesting.
On the asker side, there is no game to be played. You will never scheme yourself into a better outcome by pretending lower choices are higher, or trying to “settle” and lock down a worse choice early. This is a pleasant situation to be in, you don’t have to think.
On the askee side, there is room for gaming the system. There are many different effective ways to do this. However, one way that always works is to pretend certain matches are unacceptable, worse even than going unmatched, in other words preemptively reject them. This can cascade through the system and cause a better choice to free up for you later, although it’s quite risky.
I’m not quite sure how one can make a parable out of this, though.
There is a scene in A Beautiful Mind about game theory and matching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJS7Igvk6ZM
I read this a few days ago and it stayed with me. I came back to find it again just to say thank you for giving my braver bits a bit more courage to go out there and ask. There’s a kind of sobering comfort in seeing the underlying rules of how these things work made visible; it makes the risks feel more intelligible, and therefore a little easier to take.
This is very similar to The Match for medical students into residency
I love this framing of Gale-Shapley so much!! It also beautifully connects my undergrad CS education to my later-in-life romantic education…
My approach to coming out as bisexual was asking out the most beautiful/interesting/intelligent/charming woman I was friends with. Agency works! Especially for women dating women. We had a beautiful five-year relationship…
This was after years of mostly dating guys who pursued me and largely thinking, yes, this is fine I guess, but surely there’s more to love?
(My apologies for any exes reading the comments of this particular Substack post…)
i like this cool math
Went to read other articles you'd written and found out that this is your first one! Congrats on your early success!
Thanks for this great article! I might add that a “stable marriage” and all of the arrangements it represents (jobs, friendships, etc) does not necessarily mean both parties are happy, even for the asker. I think an interesting condition to add to the algorithm might be something like the askee’s first choice cannot be X ranks above their match’s rank. Because in reality nobody will be happy if their job/partner/friend is with them only because they literally cannot find anyone else, especially if this entire system is based on comparison against the group. I really enjoyed your writing thank you!
I am an old-school CS guy who was a prof once upon a time. I knew about stable matching/marriages.
AND, I have to say I love what your takeaway is. I love how you have transformed this into an essay about agency and how valuable it is. I wish I had that insight when i was younger.
I think the reason men are askers and women are askees is because women have a strong preference for dating a man for whom she is high in his preference ordering. If you're a woman and you ask a guy out, you might accidentally ask out a guy who is borderline-indifferent to you.
My view is that men have to demonstrate attractive traits when approaching women. Women want a man who can take the initiative, stay composed in a stressful situation, and not be afraid of failure. Which are exactly the traits required to successfully ask a girl out.
This indeed. The proof, or "green flag," of a man's fitness (roughly speaking that it) is shown in his asking.
But the hottest guy in town, the richest guy in the country, or the most famous musician will all NOT be asking out the women. They will simply pick and choose from the many women available to them.
This is exactly the same risk that men take when they ask women out, though! What if a woman who doesn't really like you but hasn't had a date in a while just says yes because she lacks other options?
The true answer here is that it's only fun to be the asker if most people you'd ask would rank you highly. It is much more comfortable to not have to bother with the risks of being the asker. Straihht women get to get away with not being the asker because of our culture but they're much more likely to complain about their options, straight men usually have to suck it up because they'd never get to date if they don't learn to do the job, but complain because facing rejection all the time sucks.
Guys are more interested in hooking up with random women who are borderline not into them. Women want to be desired for evolutionary reasons: an indifferent man is liable to abandon you if you become pregnant.
I actually think the evopsych has very little to do with it. It's the difference in evaluation of how negative a bad experience could be.
I was once talking to a guy who joked that "sex is like pizza- even when it's bad, it's still pretty good." Many straight dudes share this opinion- when they think of "bad sex", what they're imagining is that it will be boring. "Bad sex" for straight women often means painful. Since that's the risk, of course they're more hesitant to take it.
Well yeah, men and women enjoy random sex by different amounts for evolutionary reasons. Their preferences were sculpted by evolution.
Would you like to come on my podcast to discuss this? I don't have an angle or anything, I just find it interesting and funny.
This would seem to suggest a strategy of casting a wide net on dating apps and seeing who chooses you. But what happens when many people are doing that? For example in a hetro set up both men and women indicate interest in multiple partners. Is there an extension that looks at that mathematically?