The Biggest Myths About Dating (debunked) - #1133

What It Covers

Chris Williamson, Rob Henderson, and Steve Stewart-Williams examine dating myths across six domains: the "Chad" monopoly on female attention, sex differences in mate preferences, how women's rising incomes affect partner selection, the evolutionary psychology of "the ick," looks-maxing tradeoffs, and experimental findings from a 45-condition PNAS study on gender inequality and resource preferences.

Key Questions Answered

• •The Chad Myth: Data from 2000 onward shows roughly 18–20% of men report three or more sexual partners per year — a figure that has not changed since online dating emerged. Critically, 12–18% of women report the same. The majority of sex occurs within relationships, and the most common answer to "how many partners in the last 12 months" is one, followed by zero. The Chad narrative misreads a small, mutually promiscuous cohort as representing all male–female dynamics.
• •Looks-Maxing Signals Narcissism: Research on plastic surgery and makeup (Zia et al., China) shows attractiveness ratings rise after cosmetic enhancement, but datability scores are attenuated when observers know about the intervention. The likely mechanism is negative personality inference — vanity, self-centeredness, short-term mating orientation. For non-famous men, extensive looks-maxing protocols likely produce net-negative results in long-term partner selection, even if they generate short-term attention online.
• •Resource Preferences Shift Strategically, Not Permanently: A 45-condition experiment varying individual income and local gender economic inequality found that both men and women up-regulate mate preferences for resources when they are personally poor or when their sex is economically disadvantaged. Beauty preferences did not move. Age preferences did not move. This pattern is most consistent with behavioral ecology's strategic adjustment model rather than either evolutionary psychology's fixed-module view or social role theory's full-plasticity prediction.
• •Women's Higher Income Raises All Standards, Not Just One: High-earning women do not abandon resource preferences in partners — they intensify preferences across every dimension simultaneously, including looks, ambition, and parenting capacity. The relative ranking of resource preference may decline slightly, but the absolute preference remains. Keeper AI data shows women are 12 times more likely than men to refuse a partner who earns less, six times more likely to refuse someone less intelligent, and four times more likely to refuse someone less educated.
• •Serial Monogamy Is the Human Default: A 2026 Kinsey Institute study of over 10,000 US adults found the average person experiences passionate love 2.05 times across their lifespan. Only 42% report one or zero experiences. Combined with cross-cultural ethnographic data showing pair bonds typically dissolve after one to two children, this supports serial monogamy — not polygyny or lifelong monogamy — as the baseline human mating pattern when cultural constraints are removed.
• •Stated Preferences Become Revealed Preferences With Skin in the Game: Matchmaking platforms like Keeper AI, where users pay per date and explicitly specify partner criteria, occupy a category between traditional stated and revealed preferences. When preferences carry real financial and social cost, sex differences sharpen dramatically. This aligns with Buss and Schmitt's classification of classified ads as behavioral manifestations — the act of commissioning a search converts a preference into an action with measurable consequences.
• •Male Beautification Tracks Female Economic Independence: Men have tripled parenting effort since the 1970s and increased grooming and fitness behaviors decade-on-decade since the 1990s. The proposed mechanism: as women gained financial independence, their relative preference for provisioning decreased while preferences for co-parenting and physical attractiveness increased. Men responded behaviorally. A man's current daily grooming routine would be unrecognizable to his grandfather, and recreational weightlifting has become near-universal among Gen Z males.