Rejection Part 2 - the Online Dating Market

John Galloway Love, a 35-year-old sheep farmer in 1905, absolutely did not know what rejection meant. He might have been the most stubborn man in the whole state. When he arrived in Wyoming, his horses died from poison water. Instead of returning to his well-off parents, John walked the last hundred miles and took a Job herding other men's cattle.

On October 20, 1905, John met a beautiful young school teacher, Ethel Waxham, who moved into a ranch along the Sweetwater River. John fell madly in love with her, and he started making the long, 11-hour ride to go see her.  Ethel was a 23-year-old college graduate from a good family. She spoke four languages, wrote poetry, and before accepting the teaching job in Wyoming, she had done volunteer work in the slums of New York City. This was an educated, well-to-do woman stepping off a stage coat in nowhere.

When John approached Ethel, he would have seemed like a good prospect for a husband. He had his own flock of sheep, his own land along Muskrat Creek, had never been married, and was unfailingly polite, and he had attended college at the University of Nebraska before he had been kicked out. But Ethel had plans to leave the ranch to get her Master's degree in Colorado. So, when he proposed to her, she turned him down.

In her diary, Ethel wrote: “His face was kindly with shrewd blue twinkling eyes, but his voice was most particular and characteristic, close analysis fails to find the charm of it a little Scotch dialect, a little slow draw, a little nasal quality...” Ethel was intrigued by John, but clearly, she was not impressed.

But John never gave up. For five years, he wrote her letters while she was away getting her Master's degree, always let her know his intentions that he loved her, and he wanted to marry her. Eventually, Ethel would marry John because he was funny, quaint, but most importantly, John was unfazed by rejection, and he was always kind.

Online Dating Rejection

According to Business Insider, in 2014, Tinder got around 1 billion swipes per day compared to its matches, which were only 12 million per day. That's a rejection of 988 million every day in 2014. Sure, these rejections weren't seen by the user since it only shows up when Tinder matches you, but imagine if John Galloway Love, are lonely Shepherd from Wyoming, was never able to hear the word “no” in person. What if instead of sending all those love letters, he was ghosted by text?

We can't talk about modern rejection without addressing the three-billion-dollar elephant in the room because that's what the online dating industry has become. It's a three-billion-dollar business, and to keep people hooked on their platform, dating services like Tinder, eHarmony, and match.com have come to train you to become rejection resilient, a virtue that used to be rare. Consider this: eHarmony UK has in their official advice section a subheading called “build your resilience.” It is the ultimate marketing/sales tactic, empowering rejection.

What can we learn from John Love, the master of rejection resilience, and what myths can we bust about the dating rejection?

Myth #1: Online Dating is a Level Playing Field Because It's All on the Computer

This is the science behind Harmony and who is actually getting dates online. People started noticing pretty early on that not everyone was getting dates on eHarmony. It's not a one-to-one ratio, where half or women half are men, connecting equally. They are letting people pick their own dates, and they're swiping based, which means it's an entirely biased system. So many (men in particular) leave dating sites because they are not getting dates.

In today's market, Stanford says that 39% of hetero couples report meeting their partners online. Back in 2009, it was weird if you met somebody online (22%). According to a Medium article, “the bottom 80% of men in terms of attractiveness are competing for the top 22% of women, and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.”

Right when we talk persistence and resilience against rejection, this is where the rubber meets the road. If you're looking to date online, you really quite literally have to build a unique type of resistance to rejection.

Based on a graph made by OkCupid, how men rate women, and how women rate men over dating websites, men and women have been rating each other on looks. They say that online pornography has skewed men to devalue women that they don't think women are attractive enough because they're used to seeing porn stars. However, this OkCupid graph on how men rate women, it is a perfect bell curve. The majority of the average have very predictable and almost a mathematical system of rating, showing they are actually pretty even with their rating.

Women ratings, on the other hand, are wildly low. Women skew men all the way down and rating, so they rate almost no men as perfect 10s. There's only 2% in the 7-8 category, and it goes up the lower you go. Thus, women are skewing men at lower average, bulking most 2-3 ratings. In summary, men are apparently better at gauging the average, whereas women skew men far below the average.

Myth #2: Women Take Rejection the Hardest

There was an APA study, trying to find out how women felt while they were on dating websites. They studied 1044 women and 273 men. Quote, "Whether they're swiping left or right, male users on the popular dating app Tinder appear to have lower levels of self-esteem, and all users appear to have negative perceptions of body than those who don't use the app."

"Tinder users report having a lower level of satisfaction with their faces and bodies and having lower levels of self-worth than the men and women who did not use Tinder." -  Jessica Struble, Ph.D. at the University of North Texas.

It is clear that men and women have different reactions to rejection, but we're going to look at two separate studies that talk about this more. So first up a study from the University of Toronto. They wanted to see how women took acceptance and rejection from men. They made up fake profiles, and women were given accepted and rejected notices from men at random, and they were picking from two men: one was the high-status male, and the other one was the low-status male. So, they would have these guys who physically looked one better than the other. When the high-status men reacted to the women, they had a high degree of what's called derogation. They derogated the men, meaning that they would get rejected and then start bad-mouthing them instead of going to the lower-status male. They rejected both and doubled down on their own standards, continuing going for high-status men.

So now we're going to the other side of the study. This is from an Australian study, The Journal of Aggressive Behavior. It tested 150 hetero men who were showed pre-recorded videos of sexualized or non-sexualized women, which was taken during a fake University dating site. They looked at women who are wearing neutral clothing who said they were not open to casual sex, and the other profile of women in attractive clothing who said they were open to casual sex. They had these men try to get a date with them. The way they did this is like the other study; either profile would randomly reject them, and then they were given a reaction test after.

They would sit at the computer, and they had to react to something on the screen, given the option to play against the women who had been on the dating profile where they could potentially lose against them. So, if they reacted quickly to whatever was on the screen, they could blast the other person with white noise. In summary, the men who were rejected by the potential sexual partners were more willing to be aggressive and punish the women with these settings. So, when they would win on this game, they would blast the sexualized women with higher amounts of noise.

Myth #3: Does Rejection by the Opposite Sex Turn Us into Killers like Elliot Rodger?

In 2014, Elliot Rodger got bitter, and he talked about how no woman wanted to sleep with him. He was basically the poster boy of the rejected male for a year. So, he went out on a shooting and stabbing spree. The incel group started out with good intentions, but it was hijacked by hate groups, hating women because they have been rejected too much. These people are not your typical rejected people of society. These aren't just men who are going out and murdering because they got rejected. These really are people who are getting hardened by their rejection. They get radicalized by joining online groups, and they use their own politicized language. They surround themselves with one answer; women are the devil for not accepting them.

Elliot Rodger killed both men and women, and he called those men “Chads,” which refers to the guys that are in that top 20% that all women are hitting on. Overall, he and these other men are not learning resilience. They're just deciding that they're tired of rejection and that it's easier if they listen to other people who are angry than it is to listen to anything that would be proactive or productive.

We don't all have to take the Elliot Rodger way out. You do not have to become angry or radicalized when you get rejected. You can learn resilience and look to yourself for improvement to become that top 20%. Or, you can get off the internet and not be a part of that 40% of men and women who find their significant other online. Go looking for it in the real world, even if it is a hard thing to.

Final Thoughts

Ethel and John get married and become ranchers. His dream for her was to have a prosperous future, lots of money. But their first winter together, they lost 8k sheep 50 cattle, and Ethel had a miscarriage. Then a year later, they rebounded a little, but got flooded. Then bankers came to look at the ruins, and they foreclosed on the property. They were homeless, and John asked Ethel why she didn't just leave him after all of this. She said she would never leave, no matter what.

They started over, working as a sheepherder. As the years passed, there were even more setbacks. They had a fire that destroyed a bunch of their ranch buildings, missed the Wyoming oil boom, lost more sheep from diseases, and had a bank fail. But they persevered, raised their kids, and watched them all go to college, becoming very successful.

Overall, we have come a long way from letter writing and long travels to score a date. Now we are dealing with billions of rejections online every day in an industry that makes you feel like you can win if you toughen up. When in reality, the matches are skewed. We're told that men shouldn't feel rejection, like our sheep farmer John Love. But the fact is that men feel this keenly, and are willing to punish the women who reject them. Likewise, women who get rejected by high-value mates are not likely to adjust their standards downward as Hollywood portrays. Instead, they're just as likely to double down their own social value, spurning both options in the process. The cycle of rejection may seem like it's designed to turn men into monsters, like Elliot Rodger. However, with persistence, we still see 40% of couples meeting online, which means just maybe, there's a little John love and Ethel Waxham in all of us.

Written by Todd Lemense presented by Joe Anthony

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Jia Jiang and the Resilience Movement Overcoming Rejection