Haha, oh, it actually looks nice, but I thought about segregating family-oriented people rather than people of any specific race. Do you know if it is successful?
I could be mistaken, but wasn’t the idea that not having kids was a selfish choice mostly informed by the idea that people were responsible to parents and ancestors for continuing the family line, and also that children were perhaps the most reliable retirement plan available? That is, if you didn’t have children, then you would likely have no way to support yourself in your old age, and would then have to rely (and be a burden on) other family members or rely on charity. Nowadays, while future generations are still essential and necessary to support retirements (stock prices are dependent on the assumption that there will be future workers and consumers, too much population decline and stock prices will fall and no longer be a viable way to save for retirement), it isn’t essential for every person to have their own offspring in order to have a retirement.
The point being that it isn’t crazy or inexplicable as to why the idea of searching for a person to have children with became viewed as selfish, or as more selfish than looking for someone for companionship, love, or fun. Raising kids requires a lot of work, and looking for someone to share that work with doesn’t require or imply that you will respect or value the other parent. It’s conceivable (and I believe happens for people wealthy enough) that one person could have children and just hire nannies and tutors and coaches to ensure that there are enough people to provide enough care for a child in addition to a single parent.
I think that Tove has written about this before (getting men to invest highly in their kids), but there is also a big problem with having a kid with someone who isn’t committed to the other parent. Raising kids takes a lot of work, and if the parents aren’t committed enough to each other, how can they fairly divide up that work so that they can parent well together as a team without excessive amounts of ill feelings and conflict? If the parents can’t trust that the other genuinely values their own well being, raising kids becomes much, much more difficult and contentious.
Your description of the 19th century attempt to free the market from the constraints of society and the subsequent problems that engendered and the new social regulations that were put in place are reminiscent of Karl Polanyi and his idea of “the double movement”, Karl Polanyi engages in anthropology which is similar to the topics that you deal with, I’d recommend checking him out, reading your essay I couldn’t help but notice the comparison between your analysis and his
Maybe there's a pool of family-minded guys and gals out there who are not managing to find each other... And maybe it's big enough to sustain a sepciality dating site. Someone might as well try. But my guess is that most of those people mostly end up married already.
I think we have to face the ugliness of the situation. In a world with enough abundance, safety and personal freedom, there's just less space left for culture to herd people together. A long term partnership or marriage *can* be pretty damn great, with real companionship, and each bringing their strengths and picking up slack when the other is struggling. And sure, culture could do more to help us get there.
But what if only 20-40% have what it takes? What if a good half of the population are either too selfish to be a good partner, or are genuinely better off alone, than with the kind of partner who will have them?
The stats out there say that many young people are falling to pair up. I fear they may well be making a rational choice.
That being said, I know quite a few family-minded men who remain single. And I know about women who would like to have children but haven't met a partner. Maybe those two groups are largely incompatible. But maybe dating sites aren't actually bringing people together, because giving people morsels of hope without ever succeeding in pairing them off is more profitable.
I live in rural africa. People pop out kids regularly. There's two main factors I've observed driving this process.
Firstly, family brings status. It's WEIRD to not have children, and both men and women are highly rewarded socially for having children.
Second, people don't really seem to have an instinct to have children as such. The instinct is to have sex. In the west, acess to contraception and abortions means that the only people who actually have children are those that make a conscious decision to have them. Many of the folks who say they want children would freak out at an accidental pregnancy.
Add in divorce being a viable and normal option for the majority of people, and a large proportion of those who actually want and have children will not have a long term stable family.
I like the idea, but it's far more complicated than a dating site. Currently, virtually every incentive structure leads to delaying or not having children and a stable marriage. That said, obviously you know that and the idea a good baby step. Good work.
"The only argument in favor of regulations is that lack of regulations causes even more suffering."
I don't understand why you say that. It seems to me that if you establish, as a culture, that violence is very bad and punished, persons are not property, and sex must be consensual, why exactly lack of sexual regulation has to lead to more suffering than the other way around?
You could make the case that then with all that freedom you need incentives and societal structures to make sure that we still reproduce, but that's another issue/problem (separately solvable IMO, but again a different issue).
>>It seems to me that if you establish, as a culture, that violence is very bad and punished, persons are not property, and sex must be consensual, why exactly lack of sexual regulation has to lead to more suffering than the other way around?
Historically, lack of regulation of sexuality has caused a lot of violence. Now that this issue is more or less fixed, as you point out, regulating sexuality is considered much less important. For good reasons.
Still, I think that unhinged sexuality still causes a lot of suffering. It causes family breakdown, which obviously causes suffering, not the least in children. It causes families to not even take form, which causes loneliness, which causes a lot of suffering. In others words, I guess I disagree with you that the reproduction issue is separable from the suffering issue. I think many people suffer from not reproducing.
Most people recognize that lack of sexual regulations would lead to more problem than those regulations in themselves. So they voluntarily follow norms for sexual fidelity, on top of the laws that uphold the autonomy of the individual. They do so because they recognize that free sexuality causes more suffering than pleasure.
Well, we might be underestimating the fact that economic incentives have pushed us towards loneliness in the first place, and towards very nuclear family structures (partially as a remedy to loneliness) in the second place. Reproduction is heavily discouraged in other settings both for traditional reasons and because there is no support to healthily raise children outside these small family structures.
Now with more men inequality and a smaller margin for error, women are even more selective. On top of that, in the last decade or so, we removed sexual regulation so now it has become a game of musical chairs with only a few chairs, in which the few get to form families and reproduce and gain even higher status and the most are left by themselves. Removing monogamy means sliding back towards polygamy for few men, in which everybody is miserable (see the neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck for example).
So yes it causes suffering but, the way I see it at least, it's because, since agriculture really, the whole society has been heavily transfigured and it cannot accommodate for reproduction naturally. I mean for 99% of our history, hunter gatherers did not need these heavy structures and regulations to get by. Analysis if anything seem to indicate promiscuity back then. We don't know how happy they were but that's the kind of society we evolved in and for, and we certainly reproduced.
So I wonder if insisting on regulation means adding a wrong to an entire series of previous wrongs in an attempt to make things right.
>> I mean for 99% of our history, hunter gatherers did not need these heavy structures and regulations to get by.
In the 19th century Europeans colonized an entire continent populated solely by hunter-gatherers. Their sexual regulations were extreme: In general, middle aged men, above the age of 30 to 40, monopolized all the young women, forcing young men into bachelorhood. Naturally, such a system led to constant tensions, with young women and young men trying to find ways to form relationships against the rules. Narcisse Pelletier, a 19th century French sailor who was abandoned in Australia as a young teenager and adopted by Aborigines, described the ambience as fearful: Men and women who weren't husband and wife almost always held a distance of eight meters to each other. William Buckley, another Europeans adopted by Aborigines, described their wars as terrible and mostly caused by conflicts over women.
I think the social structure of Australian Aborigines seriously reminds of Islam. I'm going to write about that at some point, it is really fascinating. But in any case, if there is any system for regulating sexuality I don't want, it is that if Australian Aborigines: It was both draconic and inefficient, since a lot of violent fighting over women and violence toward women occurred nonetheless.
I'm more thinking about waking up cultural norms against polygamy.
Ok, but wait a minute. If you look into that, apparently Aborigines were not truly exclusively hunter gatherers as they grew, harvested, and stored grain, made flour, cultivated yams, used fire-stick farming, and constructed large-scale aquaculture systems, all things that require staying and managing the territory and a more complex organizational social structure.
I am not sure we could find truly hunter gatherers cultures that really were not influenced by agriculture. I am not an anthropologist or sociologist, but as far as I know there is some evidence or at least strong indication pointing to a long promiscuous past (e.g. female copulatory vocalizations, size of testicles, shape of the penis tip, difference in male-female body size, size and content of the ejaculate that specifically defend against and attack sperm from other males).
It stands to reason that these practices should reflect a highly cooperative, community-based approach to raising children, rather than relying solely on a single nuclear family unit. This behavior is actually well documented in some closely related species, other than some tribes.
Anyway, I absolutely do not want to idealize the hunter gatherers. It might be that all considered monogamy is the best way forward for us, even though it is very rare in nature. But we don't know yet and I do think we should keep an open mind about these other possibilities too.
>>If you look into that, apparently Aborigines were not truly exclusively hunter gatherers as they grew, harvested, and stored grain, made flour, cultivated yams, used fire-stick farming, and constructed large-scale aquaculture systems, all things that require staying and managing the territory and a more complex organizational social structure.
Says who? I know there is some book that claims that some Australian Aborigines did something akin to farming after all. But on the whole, Australian Aborigines are known as socially complex hunter-gatherers. On the Torres Strait Islands, on the other hand, people were horticulturalists and there was a certain exchange between those islands and the mainland.
I think the biggest problem with polygamous systems is that they haven't been tried under peaceful, low-mortality conditions. I hold no illusions that our ancestors lived in faithful, monogamous unions. But I also hold no illusions that they abstained from vicious fighting over women and brutal violence toward women. Monogamy is not the natural state of the human race. It is a culturally made-up system with the function to mitigate the fighting that characterizes the natural state of humans. Hitherto I see no other system that has been as good at fulfilling that function. But who knows what the future will come up with.
Hey Tove, I have a reply I'd like to make in the form of a longform post, but I'm not sure you read the last post I wrote with you in mind (Re: Autism). If you're not interested feel free to ignore this
I like the idea; I’ve always thought it odd that modern people do the same thing for a summertime fling as for getting married. It’s as if the only way to buy a house was to book an Airbnb, then rent it for a few months, then try to buy it.
Just a quick note about Keeper AI and its luxury matchmaking service.
If I remember correctly, one of Keeper's founders (Jake Kozloski) said that his company was copying Elon Musks top-down market entry strategy with Tesla. Tesla first built a rather expensive car, the Roadster, that only appealed to well-off enthusiasts and people who liked the feeling of being pioneers of a new technology. Tesla used that money and the lessons they learned to re-invest into the company to build cheaper cars for the masses.
This is what Keeper also does. They currently have a luxury product where people pay 50,000 Dollars, if they get married/have kids (details might differ slightly; read their FAQ for more info). The 5,000 Dollars fee per date count towards the total 50,000 Dollars.
But in a recent portrait of the company in Business Insider (https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-dating-app-keeper-raised-four-million-pitch-deck-2025-12) the article also included slides from Keeper's slide deck. In the last slide they mention two phases of product development. In Phase 1 they have a luxury product which costs 5,000 Dollars per date and 50,000 Dollars total. But in Phase 2 they aim to make their product affordable to many more people by automating the service. Paying members will then pay 250 Dollars per date and 5,000 Dollars total.
If I remember correctly, Keeper aims to enter Phase 2 in Q3 or Q4 of 2026.
5,000 Dollars total is still a lot of money. But I suspect this price will be attractive for a lot more people because then you can choose between almost never finding a good partner on dating apps (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid) or you can pay 5,000 Dollars and have a much higher chance at finding a lasting relationship with someone who meets all of your requirements in a partner.
One last thing. The last slide makes it look like only men can/have to pay for the service. That's actually a misunderstanding. If you are a women and want to get the priority treatment you get as a paying member, you can pay 50,000 Dollars to get matched much quicker.
It could be that keeper is the future of serious dating. But personally I think that this "soulmate" talk needs some competition. It seems like more and more people are realizing that a successful relationship is more about two people striving in the same direction than about two people being made for each other. Judging from the beginning of the article, Keeper is not really on that train.
It used to be that you stayed together no matter what. Copying our grandparents and great grandparents attitudes. Even if the marriage was miserable, you had built a family and you stayed together.
Socially it was enforced by a policy of mutually assured destruction. Divorced people were looked down upon. Being a single mother was an absolute misery, and still is, and for the man it was no picnic either as the state helped her fleece a third of his income or more, leaving him to try to build a new life in a slum apartment eating hotdogs and Ramen.
And of course the decline of religion has enabled greater selfishness in these areas as people chase a host of degenerate modern relationships that are absolutely selfish as OP mentioned here.
Sounds good to me. You should just build this, don’t wait for someone else. You seem smart enough to pick up coding from your writing. Get a Claude Code subscription and the AI will do most of the work for you.
Thank you for the encouragement, I'm thinking in these terms right now. I'm totally useless at coding. But I know some people who can code and I'm talking with them.
Coding skill is rapidly diminishing in importance. For real. Kevin is right. You and Anders are both more than intelligent enough to use Claude Code or Codex or any of the LLM agents to build, at a minimum, a functional prototype to (in)validate different ideas through actual use.
Anders was a decent programmer in his heyday, so I'm sure he can learn the new tricks he wants to. For me the problem above all lies in an inexplicable antipathy toward coding. It is indeed ironic, since I believe that programmers are heavily overrepresented among people who read and comment here. I just actively dislike such unintuitive ways of achieving things. It is not only coding: Although I was a decent painter, I never managed to learn to use programs like photoshop. Using a paintbrush to alter a picture feels natural, memorizing the location and function of a certain Photoshop filter doesn't feel natural at all. As long as I can get away with it, I stick to the aspects of reality that are a bit more intuitive than coding. There's a bunch of work to do there too.
I hear what you are saying, but you should still cajole Anders into setting up a coding agent in VS Code if for no other reason than to try building an application using nothing but natural language conversations. You may find it still a “bit” abstract, but I actually doubt it & even if you personally don’t want to keep going with it, I think it will radically change your ideas of both what LLMs are and where things are heading.
As you mention, just because men and women share the drive for pronatalism does not mean they share the same telose. A pronatalist conference centered around the ideas of pronatalism attracts few single women. A real women’s pronatalism conference would center around cute babies – but then few men would attend (unless they are interested in the women).
As commenters have noted, men’s pronatalism is coded as autistic. That’s because pronatalism as an ideology is somewhat autistic. It’s very math centered and futuristic. Think of the pronatalism of the Collinses and Elon Musk.
I think that to create a secular pathway to pronatalist marriages you need to create a telose for pronatalism that can be shared by men and women. I don’t know if that’s possible.
Yes, really, one of the mistakes of mainstream culture is that it expects men and women to get exactly the same things out of marriage and family. If they do it's fine, but if they do not, on average, that should be fine too, if they can find ways to cooperate.
>>I think that to create a secular pathway to pronatalist marriages you need to create a telose for pronatalism that can be shared by men and women. I don’t know if that’s possible.
Yes! This problem really is worth thinking about. Let's hope it is possible.
You are implying that non-mainstream societies i.e. religious societies don’t expect men and women to get exactly the same things out of marriage and family. That’s true but I’m saying it’s only because they more than compensate by creating a share telos.
I’m not saying this is absolutely necessary, but that a marriage without a shared telos is not a recipe for success.
Men more than women though, on average, from what I have seen. Differences between the genders are also exacerbated by young people being able to wall themselves off in their preferred online spaces. You'd mix with the opposite gender more before smartphones.
I feel that this proposal is too far downstream of the real problem to be an effective solution. Dating is important and is definitely in need of better options, but it is not the main stopper when comes to birth rates.
The reality is that if she has any kind of choice, no woman wants to have children until it feels safe for her to do so, and in our society that means she need an education, a job and a place to live. Sadly that is not very aligned with biology, so when she finally gets there, it is often too late.
If we want to increase the birth rates we need to make it feel (and be) safe for young women to have children while in the most fertile period of their life. Until we solve that problem everything else is likely to be ineffective bandaids.
This is why, within any given country/culture, birthrate is positively correlated with how financially secure and well-off working class non-college-educated men are in their 20's. When men are financially secure and stable and making good money in their 20's straight out or HS, women will marry and have babies with them (she may still get a job; possibly an education, but a financially secure male mate would provide insurance for any babies). The other solution is cultural change where women in their 20's in general somehow become more attracted to (more financially stable/secure) men roughly a decade or more older than them than men around their age (some are already but I'd say they're in the minority), but that seems about as tough or even tougher to pull off.
I'm not sure this is the problem in Sweden at least. Outside the largest cities, housing can be cheap, and a 20-something carpenter, electrician or mine worker could afford a good place to live. I know some who hade children in college, and they managed well, but with help from their parents. We have rather generous parental leave money. I think culture and difficulties finding a comitted partner are very important obstacles.
The reason to build a pronatalist dating site is not that it would increase birth rates. It is that it could make a number of people happier and less lonely, and maybe, just maybe, could contribute to a new, more constructive vein in Western culture.
The advantage of building and marketing a dating site is that it is actually possible to do, here and now. Raising the birth rates is a nobler purpose, but what can't be done, can't be done.
>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.
It should be "even if" in English. "Also if" in English would mean "loyal, good with children, etc." are actually negative attributes for Men to have in the dating market, not just neutral or slight positives.
>>"Also if" in English would mean "loyal, good with children, etc." are actually negative attributes for Men to have in the dating market, not just neutral or slight positives.
Yes! That is why I thought "also if" was the right expression. I think that in the dating market, being loyal, good with children and a good housekeeper is not being valued as positives. My guess is that a person marketing themselves as a loyal person who is good at taking care of children and household would fare badly on the dating market. Actually, describing oneself as a bad housekeeper seems to be in vogue. My son is currently on a dating site where people are supposed to mention a weird food combination they like. And a few days ago he mentioned a young woman who only wrote that she was bad at cooking and sought a man who could cook.
Since people actually brag over being bad at managing a household, I think that a healthy self confidence as a housekeeper is considered a slightly negative attribute on the dating market. At least it is not at all obviously positive.
In that case, I think the gal was just being honest and wanted a guy who can cook. I personally am in favor of more honesty online (you can meet potential mates outside of dating sites). If your son stated what he was looking for, he probably would find matches. He may get more gals who want to be a housewife, though.
I'm not complaining about bad cooks out there. Neither is my son. He is only disappointed at his complete lack of matches. He knows what he is looking for (someone who is interested in science and wants to start a family), and he is so far completely unsuccessful at encountering women who tick those two boxes.
Oh. Or Asia. Also, "the sciences" is a pretty broad category. Heck, even in Europe, there probably exist women interested in the sciences and starting a family. You and he could ask around science departments. Though one issue is that "starting a family" likely is far from the minds of undergrad women. Especially undergrad women in the sciences. Especially undergrad women in the sciences in Europe.
It already exists
https://whitedate.net/
Haha, oh, it actually looks nice, but I thought about segregating family-oriented people rather than people of any specific race. Do you know if it is successful?
I was a member for a while
Unfortunately it is a big sausage festival but I met lots of good christian men.
The girls who i met were good but they were not interested in relocating to Australia. Americans and europeans would have better luck
Yes, a heavy male surplus is the fundamental problem for any ideologically driven dating site project, I guess.
It is impossible to avoid because men are the hunters.
We actively go looking for wives while women just wait to be found.
I met my fiancee on a website called Eurocupid.
At the time it was called "russian cupid" and it was designed for women from the former soviet union who wanted to marry men in the west.
Naturally, it was full of ukrainian refugees.
The war shook a lot of women out of complacency
I could be mistaken, but wasn’t the idea that not having kids was a selfish choice mostly informed by the idea that people were responsible to parents and ancestors for continuing the family line, and also that children were perhaps the most reliable retirement plan available? That is, if you didn’t have children, then you would likely have no way to support yourself in your old age, and would then have to rely (and be a burden on) other family members or rely on charity. Nowadays, while future generations are still essential and necessary to support retirements (stock prices are dependent on the assumption that there will be future workers and consumers, too much population decline and stock prices will fall and no longer be a viable way to save for retirement), it isn’t essential for every person to have their own offspring in order to have a retirement.
The point being that it isn’t crazy or inexplicable as to why the idea of searching for a person to have children with became viewed as selfish, or as more selfish than looking for someone for companionship, love, or fun. Raising kids requires a lot of work, and looking for someone to share that work with doesn’t require or imply that you will respect or value the other parent. It’s conceivable (and I believe happens for people wealthy enough) that one person could have children and just hire nannies and tutors and coaches to ensure that there are enough people to provide enough care for a child in addition to a single parent.
I think that Tove has written about this before (getting men to invest highly in their kids), but there is also a big problem with having a kid with someone who isn’t committed to the other parent. Raising kids takes a lot of work, and if the parents aren’t committed enough to each other, how can they fairly divide up that work so that they can parent well together as a team without excessive amounts of ill feelings and conflict? If the parents can’t trust that the other genuinely values their own well being, raising kids becomes much, much more difficult and contentious.
Your description of the 19th century attempt to free the market from the constraints of society and the subsequent problems that engendered and the new social regulations that were put in place are reminiscent of Karl Polanyi and his idea of “the double movement”, Karl Polanyi engages in anthropology which is similar to the topics that you deal with, I’d recommend checking him out, reading your essay I couldn’t help but notice the comparison between your analysis and his
Maybe there's a pool of family-minded guys and gals out there who are not managing to find each other... And maybe it's big enough to sustain a sepciality dating site. Someone might as well try. But my guess is that most of those people mostly end up married already.
I think we have to face the ugliness of the situation. In a world with enough abundance, safety and personal freedom, there's just less space left for culture to herd people together. A long term partnership or marriage *can* be pretty damn great, with real companionship, and each bringing their strengths and picking up slack when the other is struggling. And sure, culture could do more to help us get there.
But what if only 20-40% have what it takes? What if a good half of the population are either too selfish to be a good partner, or are genuinely better off alone, than with the kind of partner who will have them?
The stats out there say that many young people are falling to pair up. I fear they may well be making a rational choice.
>>The stats out there say that many young people are falling to pair up. I fear they may well be making a rational choice.
Unfortunately, I agree
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/most-couples-just-cant-be-happy
That being said, I know quite a few family-minded men who remain single. And I know about women who would like to have children but haven't met a partner. Maybe those two groups are largely incompatible. But maybe dating sites aren't actually bringing people together, because giving people morsels of hope without ever succeeding in pairing them off is more profitable.
Isn't this the premise of eHarmony?
Yes. Except the non-profit organization behind. Which I think would make the crucial difference.
I live in rural africa. People pop out kids regularly. There's two main factors I've observed driving this process.
Firstly, family brings status. It's WEIRD to not have children, and both men and women are highly rewarded socially for having children.
Second, people don't really seem to have an instinct to have children as such. The instinct is to have sex. In the west, acess to contraception and abortions means that the only people who actually have children are those that make a conscious decision to have them. Many of the folks who say they want children would freak out at an accidental pregnancy.
Add in divorce being a viable and normal option for the majority of people, and a large proportion of those who actually want and have children will not have a long term stable family.
I like the idea, but it's far more complicated than a dating site. Currently, virtually every incentive structure leads to delaying or not having children and a stable marriage. That said, obviously you know that and the idea a good baby step. Good work.
"The only argument in favor of regulations is that lack of regulations causes even more suffering."
I don't understand why you say that. It seems to me that if you establish, as a culture, that violence is very bad and punished, persons are not property, and sex must be consensual, why exactly lack of sexual regulation has to lead to more suffering than the other way around?
You could make the case that then with all that freedom you need incentives and societal structures to make sure that we still reproduce, but that's another issue/problem (separately solvable IMO, but again a different issue).
>>It seems to me that if you establish, as a culture, that violence is very bad and punished, persons are not property, and sex must be consensual, why exactly lack of sexual regulation has to lead to more suffering than the other way around?
Historically, lack of regulation of sexuality has caused a lot of violence. Now that this issue is more or less fixed, as you point out, regulating sexuality is considered much less important. For good reasons.
Still, I think that unhinged sexuality still causes a lot of suffering. It causes family breakdown, which obviously causes suffering, not the least in children. It causes families to not even take form, which causes loneliness, which causes a lot of suffering. In others words, I guess I disagree with you that the reproduction issue is separable from the suffering issue. I think many people suffer from not reproducing.
Most people recognize that lack of sexual regulations would lead to more problem than those regulations in themselves. So they voluntarily follow norms for sexual fidelity, on top of the laws that uphold the autonomy of the individual. They do so because they recognize that free sexuality causes more suffering than pleasure.
Well, we might be underestimating the fact that economic incentives have pushed us towards loneliness in the first place, and towards very nuclear family structures (partially as a remedy to loneliness) in the second place. Reproduction is heavily discouraged in other settings both for traditional reasons and because there is no support to healthily raise children outside these small family structures.
Now with more men inequality and a smaller margin for error, women are even more selective. On top of that, in the last decade or so, we removed sexual regulation so now it has become a game of musical chairs with only a few chairs, in which the few get to form families and reproduce and gain even higher status and the most are left by themselves. Removing monogamy means sliding back towards polygamy for few men, in which everybody is miserable (see the neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck for example).
So yes it causes suffering but, the way I see it at least, it's because, since agriculture really, the whole society has been heavily transfigured and it cannot accommodate for reproduction naturally. I mean for 99% of our history, hunter gatherers did not need these heavy structures and regulations to get by. Analysis if anything seem to indicate promiscuity back then. We don't know how happy they were but that's the kind of society we evolved in and for, and we certainly reproduced.
So I wonder if insisting on regulation means adding a wrong to an entire series of previous wrongs in an attempt to make things right.
>> I mean for 99% of our history, hunter gatherers did not need these heavy structures and regulations to get by.
In the 19th century Europeans colonized an entire continent populated solely by hunter-gatherers. Their sexual regulations were extreme: In general, middle aged men, above the age of 30 to 40, monopolized all the young women, forcing young men into bachelorhood. Naturally, such a system led to constant tensions, with young women and young men trying to find ways to form relationships against the rules. Narcisse Pelletier, a 19th century French sailor who was abandoned in Australia as a young teenager and adopted by Aborigines, described the ambience as fearful: Men and women who weren't husband and wife almost always held a distance of eight meters to each other. William Buckley, another Europeans adopted by Aborigines, described their wars as terrible and mostly caused by conflicts over women.
I think the social structure of Australian Aborigines seriously reminds of Islam. I'm going to write about that at some point, it is really fascinating. But in any case, if there is any system for regulating sexuality I don't want, it is that if Australian Aborigines: It was both draconic and inefficient, since a lot of violent fighting over women and violence toward women occurred nonetheless.
I'm more thinking about waking up cultural norms against polygamy.
Ok, but wait a minute. If you look into that, apparently Aborigines were not truly exclusively hunter gatherers as they grew, harvested, and stored grain, made flour, cultivated yams, used fire-stick farming, and constructed large-scale aquaculture systems, all things that require staying and managing the territory and a more complex organizational social structure.
I am not sure we could find truly hunter gatherers cultures that really were not influenced by agriculture. I am not an anthropologist or sociologist, but as far as I know there is some evidence or at least strong indication pointing to a long promiscuous past (e.g. female copulatory vocalizations, size of testicles, shape of the penis tip, difference in male-female body size, size and content of the ejaculate that specifically defend against and attack sperm from other males).
It stands to reason that these practices should reflect a highly cooperative, community-based approach to raising children, rather than relying solely on a single nuclear family unit. This behavior is actually well documented in some closely related species, other than some tribes.
Anyway, I absolutely do not want to idealize the hunter gatherers. It might be that all considered monogamy is the best way forward for us, even though it is very rare in nature. But we don't know yet and I do think we should keep an open mind about these other possibilities too.
>>If you look into that, apparently Aborigines were not truly exclusively hunter gatherers as they grew, harvested, and stored grain, made flour, cultivated yams, used fire-stick farming, and constructed large-scale aquaculture systems, all things that require staying and managing the territory and a more complex organizational social structure.
Says who? I know there is some book that claims that some Australian Aborigines did something akin to farming after all. But on the whole, Australian Aborigines are known as socially complex hunter-gatherers. On the Torres Strait Islands, on the other hand, people were horticulturalists and there was a certain exchange between those islands and the mainland.
I think the biggest problem with polygamous systems is that they haven't been tried under peaceful, low-mortality conditions. I hold no illusions that our ancestors lived in faithful, monogamous unions. But I also hold no illusions that they abstained from vicious fighting over women and brutal violence toward women. Monogamy is not the natural state of the human race. It is a culturally made-up system with the function to mitigate the fighting that characterizes the natural state of humans. Hitherto I see no other system that has been as good at fulfilling that function. But who knows what the future will come up with.
Hey Tove, I have a reply I'd like to make in the form of a longform post, but I'm not sure you read the last post I wrote with you in mind (Re: Autism). If you're not interested feel free to ignore this
I'm sorry, my levels of introversion have exploded lately.
I like the idea; I’ve always thought it odd that modern people do the same thing for a summertime fling as for getting married. It’s as if the only way to buy a house was to book an Airbnb, then rent it for a few months, then try to buy it.
Just a quick note about Keeper AI and its luxury matchmaking service.
If I remember correctly, one of Keeper's founders (Jake Kozloski) said that his company was copying Elon Musks top-down market entry strategy with Tesla. Tesla first built a rather expensive car, the Roadster, that only appealed to well-off enthusiasts and people who liked the feeling of being pioneers of a new technology. Tesla used that money and the lessons they learned to re-invest into the company to build cheaper cars for the masses.
This is what Keeper also does. They currently have a luxury product where people pay 50,000 Dollars, if they get married/have kids (details might differ slightly; read their FAQ for more info). The 5,000 Dollars fee per date count towards the total 50,000 Dollars.
But in a recent portrait of the company in Business Insider (https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-dating-app-keeper-raised-four-million-pitch-deck-2025-12) the article also included slides from Keeper's slide deck. In the last slide they mention two phases of product development. In Phase 1 they have a luxury product which costs 5,000 Dollars per date and 50,000 Dollars total. But in Phase 2 they aim to make their product affordable to many more people by automating the service. Paying members will then pay 250 Dollars per date and 5,000 Dollars total.
If I remember correctly, Keeper aims to enter Phase 2 in Q3 or Q4 of 2026.
5,000 Dollars total is still a lot of money. But I suspect this price will be attractive for a lot more people because then you can choose between almost never finding a good partner on dating apps (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OkCupid) or you can pay 5,000 Dollars and have a much higher chance at finding a lasting relationship with someone who meets all of your requirements in a partner.
One last thing. The last slide makes it look like only men can/have to pay for the service. That's actually a misunderstanding. If you are a women and want to get the priority treatment you get as a paying member, you can pay 50,000 Dollars to get matched much quicker.
It could be that keeper is the future of serious dating. But personally I think that this "soulmate" talk needs some competition. It seems like more and more people are realizing that a successful relationship is more about two people striving in the same direction than about two people being made for each other. Judging from the beginning of the article, Keeper is not really on that train.
It used to be that you stayed together no matter what. Copying our grandparents and great grandparents attitudes. Even if the marriage was miserable, you had built a family and you stayed together.
Socially it was enforced by a policy of mutually assured destruction. Divorced people were looked down upon. Being a single mother was an absolute misery, and still is, and for the man it was no picnic either as the state helped her fleece a third of his income or more, leaving him to try to build a new life in a slum apartment eating hotdogs and Ramen.
And of course the decline of religion has enabled greater selfishness in these areas as people chase a host of degenerate modern relationships that are absolutely selfish as OP mentioned here.
I like ideas and babies. Great post :)
Sounds good to me. You should just build this, don’t wait for someone else. You seem smart enough to pick up coding from your writing. Get a Claude Code subscription and the AI will do most of the work for you.
Thank you for the encouragement, I'm thinking in these terms right now. I'm totally useless at coding. But I know some people who can code and I'm talking with them.
Coding skill is rapidly diminishing in importance. For real. Kevin is right. You and Anders are both more than intelligent enough to use Claude Code or Codex or any of the LLM agents to build, at a minimum, a functional prototype to (in)validate different ideas through actual use.
Anders was a decent programmer in his heyday, so I'm sure he can learn the new tricks he wants to. For me the problem above all lies in an inexplicable antipathy toward coding. It is indeed ironic, since I believe that programmers are heavily overrepresented among people who read and comment here. I just actively dislike such unintuitive ways of achieving things. It is not only coding: Although I was a decent painter, I never managed to learn to use programs like photoshop. Using a paintbrush to alter a picture feels natural, memorizing the location and function of a certain Photoshop filter doesn't feel natural at all. As long as I can get away with it, I stick to the aspects of reality that are a bit more intuitive than coding. There's a bunch of work to do there too.
I hear what you are saying, but you should still cajole Anders into setting up a coding agent in VS Code if for no other reason than to try building an application using nothing but natural language conversations. You may find it still a “bit” abstract, but I actually doubt it & even if you personally don’t want to keep going with it, I think it will radically change your ideas of both what LLMs are and where things are heading.
I will discuss it with Child1. He's into both coding and LLMs.
I think what everyone is missing here is the punchline here: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-an-amish-paradox-by-charles
As you mention, just because men and women share the drive for pronatalism does not mean they share the same telose. A pronatalist conference centered around the ideas of pronatalism attracts few single women. A real women’s pronatalism conference would center around cute babies – but then few men would attend (unless they are interested in the women).
As commenters have noted, men’s pronatalism is coded as autistic. That’s because pronatalism as an ideology is somewhat autistic. It’s very math centered and futuristic. Think of the pronatalism of the Collinses and Elon Musk.
I think that to create a secular pathway to pronatalist marriages you need to create a telose for pronatalism that can be shared by men and women. I don’t know if that’s possible.
Yes, really, one of the mistakes of mainstream culture is that it expects men and women to get exactly the same things out of marriage and family. If they do it's fine, but if they do not, on average, that should be fine too, if they can find ways to cooperate.
>>I think that to create a secular pathway to pronatalist marriages you need to create a telose for pronatalism that can be shared by men and women. I don’t know if that’s possible.
Yes! This problem really is worth thinking about. Let's hope it is possible.
You are implying that non-mainstream societies i.e. religious societies don’t expect men and women to get exactly the same things out of marriage and family. That’s true but I’m saying it’s only because they more than compensate by creating a share telos.
I’m not saying this is absolutely necessary, but that a marriage without a shared telos is not a recipe for success.
Think family trees. I think both men and women are drawn to the idea of building powerful, beautiful and important legacies.
Interesting.
I think nationalism can help.
Nationalism has a bad name these days, for good reason.
But a nationalism focused on pride of one's own heritage, not hatred of the outer group, can potentially be a great motivator.
Men more than women though, on average, from what I have seen. Differences between the genders are also exacerbated by young people being able to wall themselves off in their preferred online spaces. You'd mix with the opposite gender more before smartphones.
This is a really good idea. And even better, it has already been tried and tested.
I feel that this proposal is too far downstream of the real problem to be an effective solution. Dating is important and is definitely in need of better options, but it is not the main stopper when comes to birth rates.
The reality is that if she has any kind of choice, no woman wants to have children until it feels safe for her to do so, and in our society that means she need an education, a job and a place to live. Sadly that is not very aligned with biology, so when she finally gets there, it is often too late.
If we want to increase the birth rates we need to make it feel (and be) safe for young women to have children while in the most fertile period of their life. Until we solve that problem everything else is likely to be ineffective bandaids.
This is why, within any given country/culture, birthrate is positively correlated with how financially secure and well-off working class non-college-educated men are in their 20's. When men are financially secure and stable and making good money in their 20's straight out or HS, women will marry and have babies with them (she may still get a job; possibly an education, but a financially secure male mate would provide insurance for any babies). The other solution is cultural change where women in their 20's in general somehow become more attracted to (more financially stable/secure) men roughly a decade or more older than them than men around their age (some are already but I'd say they're in the minority), but that seems about as tough or even tougher to pull off.
I'm not sure this is the problem in Sweden at least. Outside the largest cities, housing can be cheap, and a 20-something carpenter, electrician or mine worker could afford a good place to live. I know some who hade children in college, and they managed well, but with help from their parents. We have rather generous parental leave money. I think culture and difficulties finding a comitted partner are very important obstacles.
The reason to build a pronatalist dating site is not that it would increase birth rates. It is that it could make a number of people happier and less lonely, and maybe, just maybe, could contribute to a new, more constructive vein in Western culture.
The advantage of building and marketing a dating site is that it is actually possible to do, here and now. Raising the birth rates is a nobler purpose, but what can't be done, can't be done.
>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.
Maybe you meant "even if"?
I found "even if" a bit strong in the context. I might be wrong.
It should be "even if" in English. "Also if" in English would mean "loyal, good with children, etc." are actually negative attributes for Men to have in the dating market, not just neutral or slight positives.
>>"Also if" in English would mean "loyal, good with children, etc." are actually negative attributes for Men to have in the dating market, not just neutral or slight positives.
Yes! That is why I thought "also if" was the right expression. I think that in the dating market, being loyal, good with children and a good housekeeper is not being valued as positives. My guess is that a person marketing themselves as a loyal person who is good at taking care of children and household would fare badly on the dating market. Actually, describing oneself as a bad housekeeper seems to be in vogue. My son is currently on a dating site where people are supposed to mention a weird food combination they like. And a few days ago he mentioned a young woman who only wrote that she was bad at cooking and sought a man who could cook.
Since people actually brag over being bad at managing a household, I think that a healthy self confidence as a housekeeper is considered a slightly negative attribute on the dating market. At least it is not at all obviously positive.
In that case, I think the gal was just being honest and wanted a guy who can cook. I personally am in favor of more honesty online (you can meet potential mates outside of dating sites). If your son stated what he was looking for, he probably would find matches. He may get more gals who want to be a housewife, though.
I'm not complaining about bad cooks out there. Neither is my son. He is only disappointed at his complete lack of matches. He knows what he is looking for (someone who is interested in science and wants to start a family), and he is so far completely unsuccessful at encountering women who tick those two boxes.
Oh. Or Asia. Also, "the sciences" is a pretty broad category. Heck, even in Europe, there probably exist women interested in the sciences and starting a family. You and he could ask around science departments. Though one issue is that "starting a family" likely is far from the minds of undergrad women. Especially undergrad women in the sciences. Especially undergrad women in the sciences in Europe.
Ah, that's sad. Is he open to looking in the Americas? He may have more success here.
To me, "also if" doesn't quite make sense.
"Although they might be loyal..." could be another way of saying it.