Making money from The price of a woman

If the marriage market is dysfunctional it means there is a market niche waiting to be filled.

When I was reading Tove's last article about the history of dowry I was inspired by the last chapter which concluded that the marriage market and the prostitution market had been mixed up to the detriment of both. The inspiration was strong enough to spark my imagination. Here was a social problem that should have a technological solution but did not have one. 

Since I am not gifted with the ability to see my own limitations I naturally started looking for the solution myself. The fact that there are already a multitude of problem solvers, called dating apps, turning over every stone in their quest to improve dating did not deter me. Surely I would be able to see something they could not. 

The oldest of all professions?

For reasons that are unclear to me but might very well interest a Freudian psychoanalyst, my first thoughts were in the direction of improving the prostitution market. Prostitution used to be very common but is now less so. The reason for this is simple: In historical times the prostitution market was the only market for casual sex. In a sense, prostitution has been outcompeted by its free competitor: the dating market.

This is great for all the promiscuous people out there. With the tiny objection that the dating market is far from free. On the contrary, it comes with significant costs, for both men and women. There are costs in dollars and cents, for example many of the aforementioned dating apps require a fee to use. But most of all dating costs time. 

Both men and women spend significant amounts of time looking for casual sex. But men undoubtedly spend more, mostly because they compete in a smaller market. Where men used to pay for casual sex with money they are now paying with their time. 

This does not mean that women automatically get a better deal from the dating market. The few women who are only on the market for casual sex might get a better deal. But most women are not on the dating market for a fling. They are not looking for casual sex as much as for long-term relationships. These women are, in practice, paying for access to the marriage market by providing casual sex on the dating market.

The rational solution

In days past there was an insurmountable barrier between the marriage market and the prostitution market. For a good reason. Sex and reproduction were inexorably linked, at least for women, meaning that a woman could never be active on both the marriage market and the prostitution market. 

Today this is not really a problem anymore. With modern contraceptives the link between sex and reproduction is hardly more than nominal. The effect is that people can participate in the marriage market, the casual sex market and everything in between. The result is a general relation market. 

This new market is undoubtedly great for many people. But it is a market with severe limitations. The marriage market aims for perfect matches between individuals. This is tolerable when talking about marriage, but it is a very high bar to clear for a one night stand. To find someone to pair up with on the dating market you need to find someone with precisely, or almost precisely, the same market value as yourself. 

In this the market for casual sex is no different from any other barter economy. In order for an exchange to take place you need to find someone with goods that you want at exactly the right value. This was a major problem until the invention of money, which is literally value tokens, enabling goods with different values to be traded using value tokens to make up the difference. 

The barter economy of the dating market could be greatly improved by oiling the transactions with money. No longer would hook ups require a perfect match, in fact they would not require a match at all, only a corresponding monetary transaction to even out the imbalances. It would not even be hard to accomplish. A Tinder-esque app could easily add a payment layer to facilitate money transfers between users. 

Of course, this is prostitution, albeit with a modern twist. Money would predominantly be flowing from men towards women. This would benefit low-ranking men who stand no chance on the non-monetary casual sex market. But it would also benefit all the women who are now offering their wares for free on the dating market in the vain hope of finding a long-term mate. 

For any of this to happen a lot of the stigma around prostitution will need to disappear. From a rational standpoint this is a no-brainer. The task is mainly about making people rational. Modern dating has already done the heavy lifting by taking most of the magic out of sex. And without magic there is not much difference between dating and prostitution. If the dating market was perfectly transparent and perfectly efficient it would be a prostitution market. 

Back to reality

I was happy to have solved the problems with the dating market, and in only five minutes to boot, so I told Tove about my accomplishments. She was... well, to be honest, she was openly scornful, claiming that I knew absolutely nothing about neither dating nor prostitution and even less about “Tinder-esque apps”. 

Her main argument was that people are dating in order to feel good about themselves and to feel appreciated. To cynically substitute the dating market with a prostitution market would just not cut it, no matter how good it technically is, since people would no longer feel good about themselves participating in it. 

Tove also said something pragmatic. Why would the average man use the prostitution market when the same thing, casual sex, could be obtained for free on the marriage market? That is a very good question. And it points to a fundamental problem: It is the prostitution market that has infiltrated the marriage market and not the other way round.

This observation leads to the conclusion that the dating/marriage mismatch can only be solved by solving the marriage market failure. As long as the marriage market provides opportunities for casual sex it will be swamped by people looking for casual sex. The only feasible way forward is to separate the marriage market from the casual sex market and the way to do that is by making the marriage market worse, at least if you are not looking for someone to marry. 

The heavy price of marriage

In theory it is very simple. The marriage market would be much better if it only contained people who are actually looking for marriage, or at least long-term relationships. This should be rather easy to do in practice too. Since people looking for long-term relationships are prepared to spend much more time and resources on finding a match than people only looking for a short-term hook up, you could easily make a dating app only for long-term relationships by making it so clunky and ugly that only the most dedicated users would stand it for any time.

I suspect that this is already being done by dating apps through monetary means. The more long-term relationships you are looking for, the more you are willing to spend. But this is a clumsy way of doing it. Serious daters are obviously willing to spend quite a lot on a service that lets them hook up with numerous partners. All systems based on money also have the inherent handicap that money is worth different things to different people. The average fee will seem trifling to someone very rich and punitive to someone very poor.

In this sense, time is much more equal than money. A good marriage dating app should force users to spend time on the app in order to show their dedication. Such a set-up would discourage all users only looking to score easy short-term liaisons. For those actually in the market for a life-long relation a few hours or tens of hours proving their mettle should be nothing.

At the same time it would be a waste, not to mention a competitive handicap, to force users to spend time on meaningless tasks. Ideally, users should be forced to spend time in a way that aids them in their overarching goal, which is to find a suitable mate, but without enabling the casual daters to shortcut the system and throw out invitations for immediate trysts to all and sundry.

Everyone on a marriage dating market is interested in one thing, namely other people (of the correct gender). However, just letting people talk to each other like in the normal world will not cut it since the long-termists will be overwhelmed by interest from short-termists. The trick then is to let people interact but force them to interact for so long that those with only a short-term interest give up and move on. I think this can be done.

Since free communication is out of the question you have to let people interact with each other using other means. There are probably many ways to achieve this but I am thinking along the lines of letting people play games with each other without actually talking. I do not know exactly how these games should be constructed but ideally they should reveal different character traits in the participants.

A very simple game would be a conversation where you could not actually converse yourself, but only press buttons with pre-chosen questions and replies. This would probably make for some awkward conversations but it would enable some sort of human interaction while still making it impossible for the casual sex seekers to score a quick exit.

The system could be viewed as an inverted pyramid. When you enter it at the bottom you have very few options. As you move up the pyramid, and show your dedication, you get more and more alternatives and meet more and more people until at the top where you are completely free to interact with the other users. The difference compared to traditional dating apps will be that at the top you will only have serious contenders for a long-term relationship. And for everyone at the top there will be copious amounts of personal data assembled as they moved up the pyramid, facilitating the matching for all involved.

In love with AI

An impersonal and gamified dating app might do the trick of sorting out only those interested in long-term relationships. Might. Technology has opened the door to an even better solution. A solution that can give everyone everything all at once. Naturally, I am talking about AI.

Most people using dating apps are there to talk to other people. And while AI has its limitations it is actually good at talking to people. If users of dating apps want someone to talk to, let them talk to the AI.

People on dating apps want to find other people, not another computer. But the AI is not the goal, it is a means towards the goal. Instead of the elaborate hurdles I set out in the previous chapter it should be possible to just let the AI do the sorting. Register on a dating app, start talking to the AI. Instead of sending hundreds of similar messages in the hope of a single reply, like many men on dating apps reputedly do, or sifting through hundreds of similar messages in search of a single gem, like many women on dating apps reputedly do, everyone could just talk to the AI and explain what they are looking for.

Of course, people, especially male people looking for casual sex, will try to fool the AI into giving them quick access to willing females. The AI could do this, forcing a great number of men to compete for a minuscule number of women looking for casual sex. But it could also ration access to females looking for long-term relationships, forcing the men to talk about emotions with the AI for hours and hours until they have proved themselves worthy of being transferred to a real woman. By which time the AI will also have so much data about the hopeful man that it is almost guaranteed to make a decent match.

In fact, AI seems perfect for the job of matching up humans. Both long-term and short-term dating is, at its core, a matter of statistics. You need to find the best match from an incredibly large dataset using an incredible number of attributes. AIs, being masters of statistics, are perfectly suited for this task. A dating app should also be a prime environment for an AI. If some sort of system can be designed where the app gets reliable information of which matches continue into relationships and marriages the AI has excellent opportunities to refine its algorithms perpetually.

Romantically inclined people will undoubtedly find this depressing. Where is the passion in an AI-assisted match? Maybe this is where the real problem is. If people are hardwired to look for attraction, and if media in general and dating apps in particular are set up to provide attraction, then maybe our attraction-based instincts are over-stimulated making us unable to find anything at all.

Humans, at least modern Western humans, are famous for not using their brains when looking for a romantic partner. This is a pity for individuals and society alike. The aim should be to put the brain to work in dating. And if our own brains are unable or unwilling for the task we should be very grateful if AI will contribute some of their brain power.