If you have near-0 oxytocin production, my prediction is things like physical touch, hugs from people you care about, and cuddling with a romantic partner, would all be significantly less pleasant for you than for someone who has a more typical hormonal profile. The thing that most reliably triggers the “warm fuzzy” feeling I associate with love (which could also be described as a sensation focused in my chest that has ache-like elements) is cuddles with lots of skin-to-skin contact after sex. So what you feel, if anything, when engaging in cuddles with lots of skin-to-skin contact, would be informative here, without having to use a nasal spray.
I also note that it’s easy to think I may not be experiencing the same things others have experienced, and difficult to dispel those thoughts because people’s descriptions are often vague. I’ve stopped worrying about whether my experience is typical or atypical, and focus on whether I like it or not, and the same question gets asked of my partner
It has long been clear to me that other people get something from hugs that I don’t; I mostly find them an excellent tool for helping other people feel cared-for. I’m pretty sure I get a normal endorphin response from touch, e.g. cuddling and especially dancing, but the endorphin response is a separate thing from oxytocin; I’m unsure whether what I’m experiencing is (just endorphin) or (endorphin + oxytocin). Cuddling after sex is pleasant, but another place where it has long been clear to me that other people get something out of it that I don’t (or possibly other people get quantitatively a lot more of whatever pleasantness I feel from it).
I’ve stopped worrying about whether my experience is typical or atypical, and focus on whether I like it or not...
That is mostly what I’ve done historically, but it is strategically relevant to figure out this part of my world-model.
One big example application: when it comes to dating, there’s a pareto frontier of (kinds of relationships I could get and how valuable I’d find them) vs (how much effort it would take), and I notice that nearly all of that curve looks to me like the value is not worth the effort, across many different types of relationships. Strategically, I want to make very different choices in worlds where:
I am underestimating the value, vs
I historically “do something wrong” such that I could get a lot more value out of relationships but haven’t, vs
I am innately missing some giant chunk of relationship-value and should therefore generally expect to not get as much value from relationships as other people do, vs
I face unusual value-tradeoffs when it comes to relationships, and should therefore be specializing in a specific way in order to get a valuable-to-me relationship at reasonable effort expenditure.
That last one especially requires understanding my own values and how my values compare to others’ (to figure out likely areas of relative advantage/disadvantage) and the distribution of values of those available on the dating market.
Of course the usual approach would just be to take lots of shots on goal and see what sticks, but that makes a lot more sense for people for whom a “normal” relationship is very high value. That’s not the case for me; the EV of just trying a lot looks clearly negative across nearly the entire curve of possibilities. (I say “nearly the entire curve” because there are basically-zero-effort options.)
Of course the usual approach would just be to take lots of shots on goal and see what sticks, but that makes a lot more sense for people for whom a “normal” relationship is very high value.
Disagree. It makes sense if the relationship you want is very high value to you. The relationship you want doesn’t have to be normal. Provided the end-state is high value and each shot is cheap, it works out that you should take lots of shots. You filter for what you want in the early stages, so that each attempt is not very costly.
Now, if you want an abnormal relationship and you don’t want it that much, then yeah, go for the basically 0 effort options.
Disagree. The cost of many shots is strongly dominated by acquisition costs, not by the effort of filtering.
This is importantly different from the low-effort regime, in which putting zero effort into acquisition is the whole point. Normally for men IIUC, and certainly for me, the occasional romantic opportunity pops up organically from one’s social circle. But if one needs to cast a wider net than that, the options are basically (a) get involved in new social circles, or (b) get into the more liquid parts of the dating market, e.g. the apps, or historically bars/clubs, or singles events. Both of those options require very high investments (at least to actually get any interest from the liquid dating markets, as a guy).
Hm. I’m trying to put together several things I know into a coherent picture, and they don’t fit. This suggests that maybe the dating/sexual market in your area is very different from mine, or maybe I’m missing or misunderstanding something else important. 1) You are able to satisfy your sexual needs and then some, without any long term commitment to your sexual partners, in a “basically 0 effort regime”, from within your own social network.
2) But getting enough people in your pipeline to find a good relationship prospect would be high effort.
3) In your local area, men significantly outnumber women, which makes #2 harder.
4) It’s possible you have significant social blind spots which I would predict would make it harder for you to find sexual partners than the average person (not long ago you weren’t certain flirting was even a real thing people do).
On my mental model of how these things usually work, if you’ve got lots of willing sexual partners without much effort, that means you have lots of candidate relationship partners at the same level of effort. The Venn diagram isn’t a single circle, but there’s significant overlap.
Anyway, I’m likely misunderstanding something important, but here’s what I was thinking when I suggested it should be possible to take lots of shorts with relatively low effort: There should be a middle ground between “putting zero effort into acquisition” and “requiring very high investments.” I was thinking of three regimes, zero, low, and high effort, as follows:
Zero effort: Take opportunities as they arise organically, but do not seek them out.
Low effort: Do some basic things that are likely to be high return for the effort, to increase your chances of a match. I had in mind clearly articulating what you want and what you offer to a partner, and that you are flexible about what you’re willing to offer, to the extent this is true. (an aside: many people have a mental model that if two people don’t want the same things out of a relationship, they’re not a match for each other, but this seems incorrect to me. What needs to match is what I want and what the other person is offering, and what they want and what I’m offering, not what I want and what they want—although us being very similar to each other in terms of what we want does simplify things. But I can increase my viable matches, all else equal and without settling for things I don’t want, by being willing to accommodate a wide variety of wants in a partner.). Then, when you’ve clearly articulated what you value in a partner and what you offer that is of value, check it with some women to see you’ve not inadvertently said something that will be misinterpreted—perhaps some of the people who are willing to have non-committed sex with you would also be well-disposed enough towards you to check your work and validate the accuracy of what you’re saying from an outside perspective? I recall you saying you didn’t have female friends who you interact with outside of a dating context, back a while ago, which is why I suggest this rather than checking with a friend. Once you’ve got a really solid articulation of what you want and what you offer, actively use your social network to find a match, rather than taking opportunities as they arise organically. Tell your friends and acquaintances to recursively tell their friends and acquaintances you’re looking, with a link to the articulation of what you’re looking for. For the more distant social connections, consider offering a bounty, or having some way to track who has put their reputation behind you being a good human who tries to give his partners a good experience. Put some effort into reminding your social connections that you’re still looking, but use word-of-mouth rather than long hours on apps.
That was a long paragraph, but really, if you hope to find a partner with specific rare characteristics without it being a matter of blind luck, you’ll have to do the work of clearly articulating what you want and what you offer, and “tell your friends you’re looking” isn’t hard.
High effort: Try every method known, put forth full effort as if finding a relationship partner is an important priority.
The missing piece is that I have a basically-100% retention rate, at least insofar as I want to. I don’t have lots of willing sexual partners; those opportunities come along at a trickle. But those who do, are consistently eager for more. That doesn’t require long term commitment on my part, it just requires them to keep wanting more.
… if you hope to find a partner with specific rare characteristics without it being a matter of blind luck, you’ll have to do the work of clearly articulating what you want and what you offer, and “tell your friends you’re looking” isn’t hard.
My friends do know that I’m looking and what I’m looking for (as far as I’ve figured that out myself); the consensus response from them is “oof, that’s tough”. Relying on friends is a fine strategy when the characteristics one wants are, say, 1-in-10 rare (bearing in mind that they’ll probably be more rare than that among single people because adverse selection), up to maybe 1-in-100. My fermi estimates say that the things I’d be willing to marry for are more like 1-in-10k at most, and probably more rare than that.
Ok, that does clarify my mistake, and I don’t have a lot to add. Except: it seems to me like the smarter someone is, the more willing they will be to trust their own judgment and ask sensible questions rather than just say “nope” if being asked to do something different than a standard relationship template. And also, the smarter someone is, the more likely they are able to manage the complications of something like nonmonogamy, or various relationship or personality quirks you might have. So, conditional on your suitable match being quite smart, the base rates of things like “will accept nonmonogamy” in the population in general won’t apply. In general, make sure you’re doing chained conditional probabilities, not multiplying your estimate of various traits in the population to get a small number. Weirdnesses correlate! :). And if your ideal partner is a genius alignment researcher or something similar, your geographic location is already doing a lot of filtering for you. But, probably you and your friends have accounted for all that and still got “oof, that’s tough” as the result, so… good luck! You seem good, and I hope things work out for you.
it is strategically relevant to figure out this part of my world-model.
One big example application: when it comes to dating, there’s a pareto frontier of (kinds of relationships I could get and how valuable I’d find them) vs (how much effort it would take), and I notice that nearly all of that curve looks to me like the value is not worth the effort
Ah, ok. My experience was similar. For the first part of my life I was quite insecure and felt that I needed to work on myself first before attempting to partner with someone. That part is probably not similar, and may not be relevant. Once I got myself in order, I found that relationships seemed like a lot of effort for not very much benefit. It seemed to me like a lot of people were chasing after sex as if masturbation was not an option (I mean, sex is better, but not that much better, to the point where it would be worth it to put a significant portion of my available time and energy towards chasing it as a sole motivator) or validation (I speculated that people who hadn’t done the work on themselves and their own emotional state that I had might feel a greater need for external validation than I do), or… something else I hadn’t identified? Anyway, I went the low-effort route. How I operationalized that was, I’d consider dating someone if they showed an interest, but wasn’t going out looking for dates. And that did lead to several multi-year relationships, which mostly confirmed my sense that in retrospect they had been more effort than they were worth.
In the standard story, this is where the author goes “and then I met my current partner and everything was different, there were sunshine and rainbows and I finally understood what I had been missing, I felt something I’d never felt before, or something”. But this is real life, so it doesn’t follow that path, obviously. But, then I met my current partner, and the downsides in my other relationships basically don’t exist in this one, the benefits are significantly greater than the costs. What I had figured were properties of most people, were actually properties of dysfunctional people (which… may be most people?), and she just… didn’t have those issues. We get along great, when we have a disagreement we can talk about it like adults who are on the same team, when we need something we say so and then we each get what we need from the other. She feels like she’s high-maintenance because she occasionally struggles and I get to give her emotional support in those times, and I’m like “you do not understand what the words ‘high maintenance’ even mean, I could do this all day, it is actively pleasant to be helpful and appreciated for helping”.
Anyway, your strategic situation is different from mine because your values and personality are different from mine, but I am one data point of a person who thought that the effort required to have a relationship was generally not worth the cost, learned that with the right person this isn’t true, but didn’t have some kind of storybook epiphany or emotional conversion to a different sort of person. My advice would be, filter hard, and only invest in a relationship when it seems like it might be worth it, even if that’s rare or doesn’t ever happen. But my advice might be wrong for you.
That is indeed one of the points on the pareto curve where I’m like “yup, that would be nice, but the expected effort to get there is not enough for the payoff, for me”. Filtering hard means one has to go through a lot of candidates, and I’d need to make large changes to my life and probably invest thousands of hours in order to do that. (Bear in mind I’m in the Bay Area and my social circle is mostly rationalists; the supermajority of my current social circle is male and the whole geographical area is disproportionately male. So I’m not just facing unusually low benefits, but also unusually high costs.) Especially since that’s not a value prop I’d be willing to go monogamous and get married over, which would likely be a deal breaker for most such women.
For now, the low effort route is at least enough to get my sexual needs met and then some, even when I’m being transparent about not wanting much more than that with the women in question. (To be clear, I’m definitely not one of those guys who will kick a girl out as soon as he’s done, but I am explicit about not having any intention of climbing the relationship ladder past the lots-of-sex-and-some-fun-outings point.) That much, at least, is clearly net positive for me.
If you have near-0 oxytocin production, my prediction is things like physical touch, hugs from people you care about, and cuddling with a romantic partner, would all be significantly less pleasant for you than for someone who has a more typical hormonal profile. The thing that most reliably triggers the “warm fuzzy” feeling I associate with love (which could also be described as a sensation focused in my chest that has ache-like elements) is cuddles with lots of skin-to-skin contact after sex. So what you feel, if anything, when engaging in cuddles with lots of skin-to-skin contact, would be informative here, without having to use a nasal spray.
I also note that it’s easy to think I may not be experiencing the same things others have experienced, and difficult to dispel those thoughts because people’s descriptions are often vague. I’ve stopped worrying about whether my experience is typical or atypical, and focus on whether I like it or not, and the same question gets asked of my partner
It has long been clear to me that other people get something from hugs that I don’t; I mostly find them an excellent tool for helping other people feel cared-for. I’m pretty sure I get a normal endorphin response from touch, e.g. cuddling and especially dancing, but the endorphin response is a separate thing from oxytocin; I’m unsure whether what I’m experiencing is (just endorphin) or (endorphin + oxytocin). Cuddling after sex is pleasant, but another place where it has long been clear to me that other people get something out of it that I don’t (or possibly other people get quantitatively a lot more of whatever pleasantness I feel from it).
That is mostly what I’ve done historically, but it is strategically relevant to figure out this part of my world-model.
One big example application: when it comes to dating, there’s a pareto frontier of (kinds of relationships I could get and how valuable I’d find them) vs (how much effort it would take), and I notice that nearly all of that curve looks to me like the value is not worth the effort, across many different types of relationships. Strategically, I want to make very different choices in worlds where:
I am underestimating the value, vs
I historically “do something wrong” such that I could get a lot more value out of relationships but haven’t, vs
I am innately missing some giant chunk of relationship-value and should therefore generally expect to not get as much value from relationships as other people do, vs
I face unusual value-tradeoffs when it comes to relationships, and should therefore be specializing in a specific way in order to get a valuable-to-me relationship at reasonable effort expenditure.
That last one especially requires understanding my own values and how my values compare to others’ (to figure out likely areas of relative advantage/disadvantage) and the distribution of values of those available on the dating market.
Of course the usual approach would just be to take lots of shots on goal and see what sticks, but that makes a lot more sense for people for whom a “normal” relationship is very high value. That’s not the case for me; the EV of just trying a lot looks clearly negative across nearly the entire curve of possibilities. (I say “nearly the entire curve” because there are basically-zero-effort options.)
Disagree. It makes sense if the relationship you want is very high value to you. The relationship you want doesn’t have to be normal. Provided the end-state is high value and each shot is cheap, it works out that you should take lots of shots. You filter for what you want in the early stages, so that each attempt is not very costly.
Now, if you want an abnormal relationship and you don’t want it that much, then yeah, go for the basically 0 effort options.
Disagree. The cost of many shots is strongly dominated by acquisition costs, not by the effort of filtering.
This is importantly different from the low-effort regime, in which putting zero effort into acquisition is the whole point. Normally for men IIUC, and certainly for me, the occasional romantic opportunity pops up organically from one’s social circle. But if one needs to cast a wider net than that, the options are basically (a) get involved in new social circles, or (b) get into the more liquid parts of the dating market, e.g. the apps, or historically bars/clubs, or singles events. Both of those options require very high investments (at least to actually get any interest from the liquid dating markets, as a guy).
Hm. I’m trying to put together several things I know into a coherent picture, and they don’t fit. This suggests that maybe the dating/sexual market in your area is very different from mine, or maybe I’m missing or misunderstanding something else important.
1) You are able to satisfy your sexual needs and then some, without any long term commitment to your sexual partners, in a “basically 0 effort regime”, from within your own social network.
2) But getting enough people in your pipeline to find a good relationship prospect would be high effort.
3) In your local area, men significantly outnumber women, which makes #2 harder.
4) It’s possible you have significant social blind spots which I would predict would make it harder for you to find sexual partners than the average person (not long ago you weren’t certain flirting was even a real thing people do).
On my mental model of how these things usually work, if you’ve got lots of willing sexual partners without much effort, that means you have lots of candidate relationship partners at the same level of effort. The Venn diagram isn’t a single circle, but there’s significant overlap.
Anyway, I’m likely misunderstanding something important, but here’s what I was thinking when I suggested it should be possible to take lots of shorts with relatively low effort: There should be a middle ground between “putting zero effort into acquisition” and “requiring very high investments.” I was thinking of three regimes, zero, low, and high effort, as follows:
Zero effort: Take opportunities as they arise organically, but do not seek them out.
Low effort: Do some basic things that are likely to be high return for the effort, to increase your chances of a match. I had in mind clearly articulating what you want and what you offer to a partner, and that you are flexible about what you’re willing to offer, to the extent this is true. (an aside: many people have a mental model that if two people don’t want the same things out of a relationship, they’re not a match for each other, but this seems incorrect to me. What needs to match is what I want and what the other person is offering, and what they want and what I’m offering, not what I want and what they want—although us being very similar to each other in terms of what we want does simplify things. But I can increase my viable matches, all else equal and without settling for things I don’t want, by being willing to accommodate a wide variety of wants in a partner.). Then, when you’ve clearly articulated what you value in a partner and what you offer that is of value, check it with some women to see you’ve not inadvertently said something that will be misinterpreted—perhaps some of the people who are willing to have non-committed sex with you would also be well-disposed enough towards you to check your work and validate the accuracy of what you’re saying from an outside perspective? I recall you saying you didn’t have female friends who you interact with outside of a dating context, back a while ago, which is why I suggest this rather than checking with a friend. Once you’ve got a really solid articulation of what you want and what you offer, actively use your social network to find a match, rather than taking opportunities as they arise organically. Tell your friends and acquaintances to recursively tell their friends and acquaintances you’re looking, with a link to the articulation of what you’re looking for. For the more distant social connections, consider offering a bounty, or having some way to track who has put their reputation behind you being a good human who tries to give his partners a good experience. Put some effort into reminding your social connections that you’re still looking, but use word-of-mouth rather than long hours on apps.
That was a long paragraph, but really, if you hope to find a partner with specific rare characteristics without it being a matter of blind luck, you’ll have to do the work of clearly articulating what you want and what you offer, and “tell your friends you’re looking” isn’t hard.
High effort: Try every method known, put forth full effort as if finding a relationship partner is an important priority.
The missing piece is that I have a basically-100% retention rate, at least insofar as I want to. I don’t have lots of willing sexual partners; those opportunities come along at a trickle. But those who do, are consistently eager for more. That doesn’t require long term commitment on my part, it just requires them to keep wanting more.
My friends do know that I’m looking and what I’m looking for (as far as I’ve figured that out myself); the consensus response from them is “oof, that’s tough”. Relying on friends is a fine strategy when the characteristics one wants are, say, 1-in-10 rare (bearing in mind that they’ll probably be more rare than that among single people because adverse selection), up to maybe 1-in-100. My fermi estimates say that the things I’d be willing to marry for are more like 1-in-10k at most, and probably more rare than that.
Ok, that does clarify my mistake, and I don’t have a lot to add. Except: it seems to me like the smarter someone is, the more willing they will be to trust their own judgment and ask sensible questions rather than just say “nope” if being asked to do something different than a standard relationship template. And also, the smarter someone is, the more likely they are able to manage the complications of something like nonmonogamy, or various relationship or personality quirks you might have. So, conditional on your suitable match being quite smart, the base rates of things like “will accept nonmonogamy” in the population in general won’t apply. In general, make sure you’re doing chained conditional probabilities, not multiplying your estimate of various traits in the population to get a small number. Weirdnesses correlate! :). And if your ideal partner is a genius alignment researcher or something similar, your geographic location is already doing a lot of filtering for you. But, probably you and your friends have accounted for all that and still got “oof, that’s tough” as the result, so… good luck! You seem good, and I hope things work out for you.
Ah, ok. My experience was similar. For the first part of my life I was quite insecure and felt that I needed to work on myself first before attempting to partner with someone. That part is probably not similar, and may not be relevant. Once I got myself in order, I found that relationships seemed like a lot of effort for not very much benefit. It seemed to me like a lot of people were chasing after sex as if masturbation was not an option (I mean, sex is better, but not that much better, to the point where it would be worth it to put a significant portion of my available time and energy towards chasing it as a sole motivator) or validation (I speculated that people who hadn’t done the work on themselves and their own emotional state that I had might feel a greater need for external validation than I do), or… something else I hadn’t identified? Anyway, I went the low-effort route. How I operationalized that was, I’d consider dating someone if they showed an interest, but wasn’t going out looking for dates. And that did lead to several multi-year relationships, which mostly confirmed my sense that in retrospect they had been more effort than they were worth.
In the standard story, this is where the author goes “and then I met my current partner and everything was different, there were sunshine and rainbows and I finally understood what I had been missing, I felt something I’d never felt before, or something”. But this is real life, so it doesn’t follow that path, obviously. But, then I met my current partner, and the downsides in my other relationships basically don’t exist in this one, the benefits are significantly greater than the costs. What I had figured were properties of most people, were actually properties of dysfunctional people (which… may be most people?), and she just… didn’t have those issues. We get along great, when we have a disagreement we can talk about it like adults who are on the same team, when we need something we say so and then we each get what we need from the other. She feels like she’s high-maintenance because she occasionally struggles and I get to give her emotional support in those times, and I’m like “you do not understand what the words ‘high maintenance’ even mean, I could do this all day, it is actively pleasant to be helpful and appreciated for helping”.
Anyway, your strategic situation is different from mine because your values and personality are different from mine, but I am one data point of a person who thought that the effort required to have a relationship was generally not worth the cost, learned that with the right person this isn’t true, but didn’t have some kind of storybook epiphany or emotional conversion to a different sort of person. My advice would be, filter hard, and only invest in a relationship when it seems like it might be worth it, even if that’s rare or doesn’t ever happen. But my advice might be wrong for you.
That is indeed one of the points on the pareto curve where I’m like “yup, that would be nice, but the expected effort to get there is not enough for the payoff, for me”. Filtering hard means one has to go through a lot of candidates, and I’d need to make large changes to my life and probably invest thousands of hours in order to do that. (Bear in mind I’m in the Bay Area and my social circle is mostly rationalists; the supermajority of my current social circle is male and the whole geographical area is disproportionately male. So I’m not just facing unusually low benefits, but also unusually high costs.) Especially since that’s not a value prop I’d be willing to go monogamous and get married over, which would likely be a deal breaker for most such women.
For now, the low effort route is at least enough to get my sexual needs met and then some, even when I’m being transparent about not wanting much more than that with the women in question. (To be clear, I’m definitely not one of those guys who will kick a girl out as soon as he’s done, but I am explicit about not having any intention of climbing the relationship ladder past the lots-of-sex-and-some-fun-outings point.) That much, at least, is clearly net positive for me.