Dating Market Diagnostic Tool

Purpose

To provide a structured self-diagnostic for romantic market positioning.
Outputs:

  • Quadrant (Value × Constraints)
  • Fit score
  • Best lever (Status / Constraint / Fit)
  • Bias flags
  • Confidence level

Preamble

Before answering, define your dating pool: Who are the people you realistically meet and date (geography, culture, community, orientation)? Keep this in mind as you answer.


Section 1: Market Reality Check (General Value Axis)

  1. Initiations: In the last 6 months, how many people have initiated romantic interest in you?
    • 0–1 (almost none)
    • 2–5 (occasional)
    • 6–10 (fairly regular)
    • 10+ (frequent)
  2. Reciprocation: In the last 10 people you expressed interest in, how many reciprocated with clear interest?
    • 0–1 (almost none)
    • 2–3 (rare)
    • 4–6 (mixed, some success)
    • 7+ (often successful)
  3. Relative attention: Compared to the average person in your dating pool, how often do you get unsolicited romantic interest?
    • Much less (e.g., 1 approach per year vs. peers getting 1/month)
    • Somewhat less (half as often as peers)
    • About average
    • Somewhat more (more than peers, but not dramatically)
    • Much more (e.g., weekly, while peers get monthly)
  4. Peer comparison: Think of 3 people in your pool who are similar to you. How do their romantic outcomes compare?
    • They struggle more than me
    • About the same
    • Somewhat better
    • Much better

Section 2: Constraint Mapping (Constraint Axis)

  1. Source of prospects: What percentage of your romantic prospects come from completely new people vs. existing network?
    • 90% existing network
    • 70% existing / 30% new
    • 50/50
    • 70% new / 30% existing
    • 90% new
  2. Geographic flexibility: How far would you realistically travel to meet a partner?
    • Same neighborhood/campus (walkable only)
    • Across town (30–60 minutes)
    • Nearby city (1–2 hours)
    • Anywhere (no major limits)
  3. Barriers: If you wanted to meet 10 new potential partners this month, what would be your biggest obstacles? (select all)
    • Don’t know where to find them
    • Geographic/logistical barriers
    • Social/cultural access barriers
    • Time constraints
    • Nothing major (mostly effort)
  4. Cultural/religious limits: How much do cultural or religious norms limit your dating options?
    • Not at all
    • Somewhat
    • Significantly

Section 3: Fit Analysis (Value Resonance)

  1. Fit inversion: Think of someone with very different traits from you who does well romantically in your environment. What does that reveal about what your pool actually values? (open text)
  2. Validation sources: Where have others given you the strongest positive feedback?
  • Professional/career spaces
  • Creative/artistic communities
  • Fitness/outdoor spaces
  • Academic/intellectual settings
  • Social/party scenes
  • Online spaces
  1. Best past context: When you’ve had your best romantic experiences, what was different about that context compared to where you usually look now? (open text)

Section 4: Bias Correction (Self-Stories)

  1. Complete: “If I just ____, dating would work much better for me.” (open text)
  2. What’s the most honest explanation for why your last few romantic interests didn’t work out?
  • They weren’t that interested
  • Wrong timing/circumstances
  • We weren’t compatible
  • I wasn’t ready/available
  1. If a brutally honest friend described your romantic struggles, what would they probably say? (open text)

Section 5: Emotional Readiness & Time Dynamics

  1. How often do you avoid pursuing romantic opportunities due to anxiety, past experiences, or self-doubt?
  • Never
  • Rarely
  • Sometimes
  • Often
  1. Have your romantic opportunities changed significantly in the last 12 months? If so, why? (open text)

Scoring & Interpretation (summary)

  • Axes:
    • Q1–Q4 → Value (Low / Middle / High)
    • Q5–Q8 → Constraint (Low / Middle / High)
  • Fit Score (Q9–Q11): Strong / Moderate / Weak mismatch
  • Bias Flags (Q12–Q14): Status Delusion / Constraint Blindness / Fit Avoidance / Externalization
  • Emotional Readiness (Q15): Internal constraint overlay
  • Temporal Dynamics (Q16): Stability vs. transition marker
  • Quadrant Placement: Q1–Q4 or Middle band
  • Confidence: Clear / Likely / Ambiguous / Insufficient

Middle-Case Addendum

If your responses place you in the Middle band (neither clearly high/low value nor clearly high/low constraint):


Differentiator Probes

  1. Reference Group Check
    When you compare yourself to “average,” who exactly are you comparing to?
    • Local peers in your dating pool
    • Broader peer group (friends, coworkers)
    • Online/idealized references (apps, media)
    (This distinguishes “truly average” from “average compared to the wrong group.”)

  1. Undervaluation Signals
    In your current environment, do you notice small but consistent signals that your traits are under-recognized?
    • Yes, often (e.g., compliments not converting to interest)
    • Occasionally
    • Rarely / Never
    (This reveals whether “average” status is masking a fit mismatch.)

  1. Forced Repositioning
    If you had to shift your dating effort tomorrow into a single niche/community, where would you go?
    (open text) (This forces articulation of latent fit possibilities.)

Interpretation Layer

  • True Middle: If Q1 = “local peers,” Q2 = “rarely undervalued,” Q3 = vague → diagnosis = genuinely average; strategy = incremental self-improvement or gradual pool expansion.
  • Masked Fit Mismatch: If Q1 = “online/idealized reference,” Q2 = “often undervalued,” Q3 = clear niche → diagnosis = fit lever dominant; strategy = reposition into niche where traits weigh more heavily.

Brief Comments on Consensual Hostility

“Once consent becomes the only value by which an individual can assess sex to be good or bad and justify their assessment to their partner or anyone else, all that’s left of seduction is contract negotiation fueled by whatever mix of horniness and loneliness brought the two parties together.


There’s an alternative. As Srinivasan herself suggested, to treat any romantic partner like your oldest friend. Fine attunement to your partner’s wants and needs, a willingness to place them at least on par with your own, and giving your partner the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the same. Since your partner doesn’t want their consent violated that part is a given, but it’s not the main focus or a sufficient condition.”

-Jake, “Consensual Hostility.” putanumonit.com. October 11, 2021

Not much to add here beyond two points:

  1. Transaction model: A transaction model for relationships is the model of psychopaths, sociopaths and others with Cluster B personality disorders. Framing everything around consent frames every interaction as a transaction.
  2. Love is a Blank Check: “[M]ake a commitment to put someone else before ourselves over the long haul, over a life, without any guarantees that it’ll work out well, and a virtual certainty, that, for some period, it’ll be a bad bargain. Love is what transforms a bad bargain into a good one, where you give someone a blank check, the ability to ask for and get more than you have, and by some miracle, at the moment it is needed, you find there is enough in the bank to cover it, money you never knew you had.”

The mystery of love is it transcends transactions. If it’s a transaction, it isn’t love.

Happy People Tend to Stay That Way

* “[X], were you satisfied with your life before you met [Y]?”

* “[X], were you free from depression before you met [Y]?”

* “[X], did you have a positive affect before you met [Y]?”

Researchers have found that people who answered “yes” to questions such as these are significantly more likely to report being happy in their romantic relationship. In other words, a person who is happy outside their relationship is far more likely to be happy inside their relationship, as well…

…If I had to sum up, in one sentence, the most important finding in the field of relationship science, thanks to these Big Data studies, it would be something like this (call it the First Law of Love): In the dating market, people compete ferociously for mates with qualities that do not increase one’s chances of romantic happiness.

-Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, “People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science.” Wired. May 10, 2022.

The net on this is that the qualities that people tend to look for in selecting mates are not the qualities that lead to happiness. But, the argument presented here is ultimately a bad one. Just because some approach is bad, does not make its opposite good.

If I had to sum up the lesson of this article, it is that people that are happy in their lives tend to also be happy in their relationships. If you want to be happy in a relationship, perhaps the secret is to be happy outside of one and look for someone who is also happy in their lives before they met you.

Kinky Labor Supply and the Attention Tax — Kortina

“As an example, consider how this increased competition plays out in online dating platforms. On Tinder, the top 20% of men are competing for the top 78% of women. Why? It’s a matter of the breadth of selection. Offline, due to the constraints of physical space and time, any given woman would have a finite set of potential partners to choose from. Online, the selection is much more vast and most women only “like” the most attractive men. The Gini coefficient for the “Tinder economy” is 0.58, which means that it has higher inequality than 95% the world’s national economies – in other words, it’s pretty grim if you’re a man in the bottom 80%.”

—Andrew Kortina and Namrata Patel. “Labor Supply and the Attention Tax.” kortina.nyc. October 13, 2018.

Strikes me as pretty grim for the bottom 80% of women too. Dissatisfied because of “settling” for a man of equal attractiveness, competing on qualities such as sexual availability or submissiveness, and other generally undesirable outcomes.

A Keltner List for Relationships

“Consider each question and answer truthfully with a simple yes or no response:

  1. Does your partner make you a better person, and do you do the same for them?
  2. Are you and your partner both comfortable with sharing feelings, relying on each other, being close, and able to avoid worrying about the other person leaving?
  3. Do you and your partner accept each other for who you are, without trying to change each other?
  4. When disagreements arise, do you and your partner communicate respectfully and without contempt or negativity?
  5. Do you and your partner share decision-making, power and influence in the relationship?
  6. Is your partner your best friend, and are you theirs?
  7. Do you and your partner think more in terms of “we” and “us,” rather than “you” and “I”?
  8. Would you and your partner trust each other with the passwords to social media and bank accounts?
  9. Do you and your partner have good opinions of each other – without having an overinflated positive view?
  10. Do your close friends, as well as your partner’s, think you have a great relationship that will stand the test of time?
  11. Is your relationship free of red flags like cheating, jealousy and controlling behavior?
  12. Do you and your partner share the same values when it comes to politics, religion, the importance of marriage, the desire to have kids (or not) and how to parent?
  13. Are you and your partner willing to sacrifice your own needs, desires and goals for each other (without being a doormat)?
  14. Do you and your partner both have agreeable and emotionally stable personalities?
  15. Are you and your partner sexually compatible?

h/t The Conversation.