The case for a pronatalist dating site

The world needs a not-for-profit dating site for cornerstone marriage

The capitalist market is a wonderful thing. I’m sitting outdoors writing this sentence, in Scandinavia in December, writing on a touchpad, dressed in layers of clothes. I can thank the capitalist market economy for my comfortable state: Competition made excellent electronics and textiles evolve.

The market is great at serving human instincts. Some such instincts are entirely uncontroversial, like the instinct to maintain an even body temperature. Other instincts are less obviously beneficial. For example, smartphones serve our instincts to seek entertainment, but as more and more people find out, uncritically following that instinct gives us empty lives.

The market gives us what we instantly, instinctually crave. That is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing when we instantly crave the right thing. A curse when our cravings go against what we value in the long term and what builds a good society.

Love is against nature

As a rule of thumb, societies and individuals should only trust the market in areas where we trust ourselves. For a century, Westerners tended to believe that love was such an area. Watching films and reading books from a century ago, it is obvious that by then, people wanted to believe in the power of romantic love. Novels like Le Grand Meaulnes (1913), about two men’s quest to locate the brides of their dreams, make a naive impression today.

When love marriage was taking the place of convenience marriage, people held high hopes. And many were disappointed. Life-long love certainly exists. It is just that many other opportunities exist too. And the market serves them all in proportion to what people feel like paying for.

Blaming the companies behind the dating market for the superficiality and seediness of dating sites is mostly unfair. Mainly, those sites are a reflection of the mating psychology of the human race. And the mating psychology of the human race is not entirely pretty.

We destroyed culture

If the main fault lies in underlying human nature rather than in Tinder’s algorithms, why are the problems manifesting themselves right now? Human nature changes only very slowly and the dating market has changed very rapidly. So why blame human nature for a very rapid course of deterioration?

Because before, we actually had a certain layer of culture that softened the effects of human mating psychology. A culture that many assertive members of my generation did our best to destroy. I was one of them.

As a young woman, I dreaded the prospect of dragging a man who actually didn’t love me through life. My favorite argument for undefined relationships was: I want to wake up every morning with someone who chooses to be with me that day. I seriously didn’t understand the idea of commitment. Relationships should only last as long as there was mutual interest, I reasoned. In particular, I despised gender roles and chivalry. I believed that if I played along and allowed men to hold up doors and take the bill for me, I would have to live with a man who merely wanted a woman. When the excitement waned, he would be free to keep looking for a better woman. I wanted a man who wanted exactly me and who would thereby be likely to continue enjoying my company also when my beauty waned.

For me personally, this attitude worked great. When I encountered a man who seemed honest enough in wanting exactly me, I knew to value him and with some time, I also came to see the point in commitment (people who won’t commit can’t invest and people who don’t invest get no life). So on a personal level, I really can’t complain. Instead, I think that my fashionable opinions were a typical example of what Rob Henderson calls a luxury belief: I ended up with a traditional marriage and a large family, while at the same time sabotaging the opportunities for other people, in particular the generation of my children, to do the same.

What I did was to demand that a romantic relationship must be genuine. That works great for the minority of people who genuinely want nothing else than investing all the romantic attention they have and ever will have in one single partner. I believe that a minority of men, probably a rather large minority, is wired more or less this way. But most men seem to be a bit more flexible. This can be seen among men who are considered unusually attractive, like entertainers and successful entrepreneurs, who can pick and choose among potential partners. A certain share of them actually stay faithful to one partner of the same age, in spite of all opportunities they have to do otherwise. But many also use the privileges of their position to change for a younger partner once in a while, or to keep multiple partners simultaneously.

This should mean that in the population as a whole, some women are lucky enough to be courted by men who will stay dedicated to them for life even if an eager harem turns up unexpectedly. But many, maybe most women, will be courted by men who are somewhat flexible and take the best option that is available to them at every given moment.

These women can’t realistically demand complete genuineness. The only thing that can give them a marriage stable enough to form a family is a bit of culturally induced fakery: Men who realize that their chance to get any woman at all is to follow norms of courtship and decency, also if they might have felt something else if they were in a position that allowed them to optimize for their own excitement.

People like me did the best to avoid those men through destroying those norms. We consciously shattered what culture we had in favor of rules we thought were closer to human nature. The thought that human nature was actually not an entirely benign force did not occur to me until many years later.

Dating is selfish

What the fashionable elite of my generation proposed was not really a change of culture. It was an abolishment of culture. The message that everyone should always do whatever they want is just that: Lack of culture. It is the way very primitive and small-scale societies tend to work: strong individuals get their way. In modern society, laws against physical violence were supposed to make this otherwise lack of culture into paradise for real. The reasoning went something like that if men could just stop raping their dates, then we would live in bliss.

Paradise never came. Simply because physical violence is not the only antisocial thing people do on the dating market. Everybody knows that dating is actually about people selfishly seeking the best partner, or partners, they can get. Making laws against physical violence is one measure to regulate the expression of that selfishness. But only one measure.

For comparison, laws against physical violence are doing wonders to the economic life of our society too. They are crucial, but they are by no means enough to make the market economy work for the public good. For that to happen, financial selfishness needs to be closely regulated. We have competition laws, marketing laws, accounting laws and a battery of environmental protection laws. That is, we have thousands of pages of laws with the sole purpose of turning people’s financial greed into the common good for the economy. The economy has more or less always been tightly regulated. In the middle ages there were guilds, laws against usury and royal monopolies. All of them were abolished in the 19th century. For a very short period, there may have been a period of an almost free market economy. But people soon discovered that it didn’t work and political forces started to regulate the economy again, but now with modern-style regulations.

Something similar has happened with sexual relationships. The old norms and regulations have been torn down one by one. We are currently in a situation that resembles the free market economy of the late 19th century. Some people, my former self sort of included, think this is great. But most people see that it isn’t working, not for everyone and not for the common good.

All major cultures have regulated the behavior of their members on the mating market. Simply because no culture has been capable of letting such selfish instincts loose without hurting the social fabric. Throughout history, regulations of the mating market have caused enormous human suffering. The only argument in favor of regulations is that lack of regulations causes even more suffering. As long as human males all indulge in their polygamous inclinations, society becomes a low-intense state of everyone’s war against everyone. Effective regulation of mating was a prerequisite for civilization to evolve in the first place.

Our civilization’s success in discouraging violence does indeed give us more freedom of choice. Since Western culture is so great at suppressing violence, it needs to suppress violence-provoking phenomena like infidelity less. Our culture has indeed reached such a level of refinement that we can let our mating instincts loose to a high degree without killing each other. But it hasn’t reached such a level of refinement that we can let our mating instincts loose without distrusting each other.

When everyone is trying to get the best deal possible for themselves without compromising with the common good, they find it difficult to agree. This is the point of modern marriage: It is a compromise to which both men and women can agree. Many get disappointed. A few get killed by a violent partner. But for the majority, marriage is an opportunity to agree with a person whose interests do not entirely align with their own. For the average person, being a good husband or wife is a compromise between the selfish mating instincts of the individual, the interests of other individuals and the common good: You get to mate, hopefully with roughly the best partner available to you. The price is that you must stop optimizing your mating strategy in your own interests.

To this day, this is the best compromise anyone has come up with. As one of the millennials who once argued for the destruction of this custom, I want to do my best to repair the damage I contributed to. If we want people to raise families together, we need to restore the culture that regulates mating selfishness.

How to buy culture?

How do you create culture? Basically you can’t, because culture grows organically, from within people’s minds. But you can support culture. And I think this is what pronatalists with resources and influence should do: Support young people who want to date in a cultured way through providing them with a platform.

This is not as radical as it sounds. All societies have not allowed young people of different sexes to interact freely. But those that have, have as a rule created comparatively safe spaces where young people could meet without having to expose themselves to the full force of the selfishness of the opposite sex. This is what our society also needs to do, if we want our civilization to continue into the future.

Before the era of internet dating, people typically met through mutual friends or family, at church, in school or at work and in restaurants and bars.

Graph from the research paper Disintermediating your friends: How online dating in the United States displaces other ways of meeting by Michael J Rosenfield, Reuben J Thomas and Sonia Hausen, 2019.

That is, people mostly met in places where certain norms were upheld. Those norms, and the norms of the meeting places and of society in general prevented most people from mating blatantly selfishly. Not that such behavior never occurred. Then as always, males sought to amuse themselves at the expense of females and females sought to maximize the attention and resources they could get from men. But there was a limit to what degree they could do so openly without violating the norms of their families, schools, workplaces, churches and peer-groups. Some violated norms nonetheless, but most people, most of the time, did not.

Our society needs more such places where norms are upheld and where people can meet without having to encounter the selfishness of the opposite sex in full force. Apparently, human nature isn’t prosocial enough for people to stay together: Enter culture.

Digging in the recycling bin

There is a lot of talk about the government paying people to have children, as if children were a consumer product like any other. Available evidence shows that this is not the case. Very expensive reforms to pay parents have little effect on fertility. Instead, money should be spent on defending the kind of culture that promotes family formation. And one such area is the dating market.

I don’t believe in the government running dating sites. Western governments are normatively minimalist to their nature. They can’t start openly advocating social norms without breaking the social contract between the people and the government.

But I believe in NGOs running non-profit dating sites. Such places are free to advocate for social norms. I think that in addition to being explicitly pro-family, such a site would need to recycle a few norms from the time when humans were actually capable of reproducing above replacement level.

1. Forming a family together is actually a good thing to do.

The desire to stay together and have children is not an individual inclination. It is a noble purpose. My 19-year-old son recently decided to try to enter the dating market in the purpose of finding someone else who wants to mate for life and start a family. Neither he, nor I could find a dating site where people with such preferences could find each other easily. I made some internet searches for what people who are in search of a partner for family formation are supposed to do. I was met by comments implicating that searching for someone to start a family with is to use people for one’s own selfish purposes.

What is unselfish enough then? To search for a partner to amuse oneself with? Apparently, seeking a partner to have fun with is uncontroversial, but seeking a partner for co-investment in a family is frowned upon. I can’t see why this should be a law of nature. People in most human cultures would say the opposite: The selfish option is to seek a sexual partner to amuse oneself with, the constructive option is to seek a partner to form a family with. I think it is entirely possible for people in our culture too to see things that way.

2. Value awesomeness lower and decency higher.

There are many problems with arranged marriages. But there is also one advantage: They do justice to people who are unassuming but decent. The modern Western system requires every person who wants to start a family to begin with being great fun. People who can’t impress a prospective partner with lively conversations and exciting leisure activities suffer an important disadvantage, also if they are loyal, good with children, good housekeepers, honest and so on. In order to build an everyday life together, people are supposed to begin with being extraordinary.

To a certain degree, this is rational. People who had fun together during their courtship phase are more likely to handle the trials of everyday life well compared to people who were never thrilled by each other. But this is only true to a certain extent. There is no reason to believe that family life is better with a person who excels in fun but child-unfriendly activities.

I think the rising demands for excitement are due to the deteriorating status of marriage as such. For decades, a Western cultural avantgarde has told people that there is nothing inherently good in living together heterosexually. In fact, doing so is an indication that a person lacks imagination. That way, an if you absolutely must attitude to romantic relationships has evolved. Being in a romantic relationship for the sake of it is looked down upon. The idea is more or less that if a person is not really excited by a partner, then being in a romantic relationship is not justified.

It seems that in particular, women are demanding that their partners must excite them. There is a large group of urban women in their 30s who know perfectly well how much the odds are stacked against them, but nonetheless require a partner to be of mind-blowing quality. Otherwise, they prefer to stay single.

The result is that people who are not particularly fun or interesting are being pushed out of the partner market altogether. And that is not Pareto optimal. There are indeed a number of categories of people who, in the best interest of the public, should not get married: Pathologically self-centered people, commitment-phobic people, abusive people, to mention a few. Such people should be discouraged from getting married, because the chances that they will have a happy marriage and raise a happy family are slight. Being uncharismatic or even a bit boring, on the other hand, is not a dealbreaker from having a happy marriage. So uncharismatic people should not be discouraged from getting married.

I have written about that before: Today’s norms for relationships are squeezing ordinary people out. When getting married and raising a family is no longer considered a virtue, people who have little else to contribute than ordinary decency lack a purpose in life (I wrote about that in my post Becky is Depressed).

A system where interesting but commitment-phobic people steal the attention from the less interesting but decent people is an unoptimal system. There must be norms that value decency, so people who are merely decent can skip over the colorful commitment-phobes and find each other.

3. Stop ghosting.

If someone invested considerable time and effort to get to know you, you can at least take the discomfort to tell them that you think that this will not work out. When you know, the other person deserves to know too.

4. A relationship is not supposed to serve sexual desire. It is sexual desire that should serve the relationship.

Selecting a partner on the criterion of how good they are at having sex with a brand new partner is plain stupid. I mean, girls, do you really want a man who can attain the most impressive erection with a woman he just met and take her to unexpected heights of pleasure? Of course it can be that he is extremely attracted to you. But it is much more likely that he is simply confident with new women in general. And that doesn’t make him a better husband. If you throw your clothes the first time you meet, you risk rejecting a person because they are better at having sex with a person they know and trust. And if you want to be the person who someone knows and trusts, how stupid isn’t that? There are several good reasons not to have sex with people you don’t love (heartbreak and STIs and all that). But on the dating market, the foremost argument is: If you hope to find the love of your life, then it is irrational to discriminate in favor of people who are experts at temporary liaisons. Casual sex is one sport. Marital sex is another sport. You can’t judge a person’s abilities in one sport through practicing another, vaguely similar sport.

Sexual desire should serve the relationship and not the other way round. But that requires sexual desire that can serve the relationship. That is, a person’s sexual desire can’t diverge too much from what the other person wants. People who know they are into something that most people are not into should simply inform a prospective partner of their kinks, in order to avoid wasting time. That is a better solution to the compatibility-question than testing each other practically. Because you can’t test each other the way you will be for real, when real life hits, in any case.

I’m not talking about policing people’s sexual behavior here. I’m talking about recycling the idea that being physically intimate with a person is not a compulsory part of dating. Surprisingly many people seem to presuppose that dating is about being as physically intimate as possible as quickly as possible with a prospective partner. I recently read a Swedish book¹ about a woman in her early 30s who described her many failures on the dating market. What struck me as most strange was the author’s apparent belief that she had to have sex on the first or second date with every man she dated. And she wasn’t even that much into sex. That is an example of a cultural failure that pronatalists should work on counteracting.

How to achieve a dating site that upholds these norms? Anders has proposed a fancy technical solution and I don’t disagree. But in principle I think that the most important thing is to restore some norms in order to cushion the glaring selfishness of dating. Just because dating is, and should be, fundamentally selfish, it needs to be done a bit gracefully.

Men like ideas, women like babies

There is a reason why I think that a pronatalist dating site could actually work: it would run the chance of getting a roughly equal number of male and female members. The reason is simple: abstract ideas of all kinds tend to disproportionately attract males. The idea of having a baby tends to disproportionately attract females.

The Economist reported from NatalCon in Texas last April that there were many more single men than women sporting the yellow wristbands indicating availability for family formation. Pronatalist venues do have to make an effort to attract women. But it shouldn’t be impossible. In particular not these days, when people who honestly intend to raise two children are actually on the pronatalist side. I think that in order to attract women, it is crucial to point out that above all, the problem of the dating market lies in male commitmentphobia. In reality, this might only be half of the truth: The cities are filled with career-focused women who are waiting for a hyper-exciting man to turn up. But telling women to lower their standards, even a little, will not attract any numbers of women. The really important point of a pro-commitment dating site is that men and women who are high-quality for real can get their fair share of attention, instead of being outcompeted by superficially attractive but untrustworthy people.

The power of civic spirit

How would it be possible to uphold these norms between strangers on the Internet? Most of the answer is: Civic spirit. When people pay a not insignificant sum every month to join a commercial dating site, they naturally expect value for their money. In particular since mainstream culture has propagated for decades that in the world of dating, greed is good. If a dating site is instead covered in a glow of civic spirit, people who are in possession of such a thing will disproportionately self-select to be there. Surely some moderation and anti-spam and anti-scam policing is needed. Clever design features that encourage people who intend to invest in a relationship are definitely good to have.

But fundamentally, being pro-community makes a huge difference. The main argument for a non-commercial pro-family dating site is that people should not enter a dating site only asking What can the dating market do for me? But also, What can I do for the dating market?

In theory, people should be prepared to pay large sums for the prospect of getting married to the right person. In practice, there are several problems with that. One is that dating is an extreme high-risk business. Sure, people would pay really large sums if they were convinced that a dating service would couple them optimally and that no cheaper option was available. But people can never be sure about that. And then it is better to save the money for a house for one’s future family. Meanwhile, people can always tell when they are having fun. And people in general are prepared to pay to have fun. So commercial dating sites will mostly focus on entertaining their users in real time. To the detriment of their usefulness as platforms for people who want to mate for life.

Even more importantly, money distorts incentives. Luxury dating site Keeper indeed tries to mate people for life without much fun. Its problems are instead the price level (5000 dollars for a date, 50 000 dollars if the date leads to marriage) and pricing policy. The policy says that paying members can date both paying and unpaying members, but unpaying members can only date paying members. Translated into reality, Keeper is a dating site where women who want a man rich enough to splash out money can register for free. Those women are disproportionately likely to adapt their dating site personas into what they believe that rich men want. This doesn’t always work badly. But fundamentally, Keeper’s pricing policy is only ideal for a subcategory of people: Those who would like to enter an income-unequal marriage.

From a pronatalist point of view, dating should not be dependent on making it on the labor market first. That is the capstone view of family life: Buy a family when you have achieved the rest. Pronatalists instead need to rely on a cornerstone view of family. This is in itself a problem with mainstream dating sites: The question do you want children? catches both people who think that a family would be a nice capstone and who think that family is a cornerstone for life. Those two categories of people don’t make great couples. People who believe in cornerstone family values need their own space.

I do not in any way predict that a pronatalist dating site would be an immediate hyper-success. Such a site is only likely to grow with the pronatalist movement. But isn’t the pronatalist movement actually growing quite fast? Right while commercial dating sites are losing users and inspiring hopelessness and inertia on the dating market, pronatalist ideas are winning ground. This is an opportunity to take.

If even dogs can date prosocially, then people certainly can. Image from Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, 1955.

1. Halva Malmö består av killar som dumpat mig by Amanda Romare, 2021, the book behind the Netflix series Diary of a Ditched Girl