The High Price of Aesthetics in Dating

How Sowell's wisdom applies to life and love.

"There are no solutions, only trade-offs." —Thomas Sowell

In politics and certain areas of economics, or anything that is a zero-sum game, this is the rule. For example, universal healthcare would increase access and lower healthcare costs for many Americans, but it might mean a slightly longer wait for appointments, surgeries, and/or treatments, and we would either have to raise taxes or pull money from other expenditures, like the military or social security to pay for such a system. We can make any decision we want, but every decision involves trade-offs.¹

Life: The Positive-Sum Game

The good news is that unlike political or economic matters, life is not a zero-sum game. We can all win when we can cooperate for mutual gain. If I have skills that can help a business grow, the owner gains by employing me, and I gain by earning a better salary. If you meet and fall in love with someone, both of you are made happier and more fulfilled than you were when single. And because the human experience is, or at least can be, a positive-sum game, there are always solutions. Even without the cooperation of others, we can win as individuals, provided we seek intelligent solutions. The catch is that those solutions still involve trade-offs. We can all get more of what we want, but we have to be willing to sacrifice something we think we want to get it.

The Hidden Cost of Aesthetics

Take aesthetics: we all like things to be neat, clean, pretty, fit a certain style—i.e., we want shit to look good—but there’s a high cost paid for wanting these things, because everyone has this same desire. For this reason, things that “look good” typically cost far more than their market value, and also happen to confer very little long-term benefits to the buyer. Most of us know by now, for example, that people are made more happy by gifts or purchases that involve an experience—like a concert or vacation—than those that involve acquiring a material possession, like the sexiest new flatscreen TV or retiling your bathroom. Seems cool for awhile, but after a time it’s just the new status quo.

Consider owning a mansion in the English countryside. How fucking awesome would that be? Amazing! But think about how it would be used. Most American households have between one to four people living in them. So, the owners would use four bedrooms at most, maybe three to five bathrooms, and they’d spend 80-90% of the rest of their time in the kitchen or family room. In other words, instead of paying 20M pounds for the mansion, they could have bought a large country cottage with property for 500K-1M pounds and been afforded much of the same aesthetic experience with the exact same functionality for all practical purposes. Aside from the investment value, that’s 19M paid for pure vanity in the form of aesthetics—and if you’re smart, the extra would earn far more in the market than real estate.

The problem is people pay these aesthetic costs all the time without realizing it, typically at the cost of getting less of what they want, or not getting what they want at all. Dating and romantic relationships are a classic example. Studies of dating apps show that people typically want to date someone about 25% more attractive than themselves. We certainly can’t fault people for wanting to date someone who’s attractive, fun, confident, and successful, but the “looks” side of things is mostly aesthetic, because while there’s a baseline of attraction we need to feel to get excited for sex, beyond that it’s like the mansion above: AMAZING at first and cool to show off to your friends, but otherwise irrelevant. And in my experience, just because someone is a 9 or 10 doesn’t mean she’ll be any good in bed. IYKYK.

How Men and Women Sabotage Themselves

For men, the mistake is almost always purely aesthetic: we value beauty to the exclusion of most other factors. Our equation is simple: pretty enough + SFN = keeper.² For men, not finding love means he’s not offering enough value to match his threshold for beauty. In this case he has two choices: he can lower his standards, or become a more valuable man so as to attract more beautiful women.

For women, it’s the physical look of a man combined with other qualities that drive her attraction, such as confidence, status, humor, provision (wealth), and protection (security). But in an era dominated by dating apps, there are a lot of non-physical aesthetics women are considering—factors that serve to misinform or confuse their ability to select a suitable partner by introducing contradictory or irrelevant information into their choices about who to date. Factors like a man’s age (whether too young or too old), religious or political beliefs, taste in music or media, prior relationship experience, drug or alcohol use (if controlled), and many other things women think they should value are totally irrelevant if they feel genuine attraction and connection to their partner, and the relationship benefits them in terms of happiness and lifestyle.³ Even height gets overblown—it’s certainly fair for women to want to date men taller than themselves, but it is purely aesthetic: how tall a man is only marginally affects his overall worth in the long run of a relationship, and women pass on shorter men all the time who could offer them a lifetime of love and happiness given the opportunity.⁴

The High Price We Pay for Superficial Standards

The point here is that both sexes pay a large cost for aesthetics in the game of mating and dating. Looks matter of course! But if men were to slightly relax their standards for beauty when it comes to women, and women were to drop their use of irrelevant non-physical aesthetics in their assessment of men, they would benefit individually, and everyone would benefit collectively. A good analogy is wine: there are lots of amazing wines you can buy at a $15-20 price point that will taste every bit as good, if not even better, than wines that cost more than $50. But a lot of men and women in the romantic marketplace insist on paying a higher price that confers no real value, other than the aesthetics and reputation the label carries.

And there’s a danger here…what if you never meet or connect with the sort of person who matches your aesthetic ideal? What if you pass on them? Never get a better offer? Consider the long term. What’s better, fellas: being married to a slightly less attractive woman who’s your best friend when you’re 50+, or being a lonely old man with no children or wife to care for him because he was overly concerned about dating out of his league? What’s better, ladies: being married to your soulmate who happens to be 15 years older, or watching your options on dating apps dwindle in your 30s and 40s because you’re squeamish about age gaps, as the men who are your peers discover they can date younger women?

Not a good look in either case, if one is worried about aesthetics.

Breaking Conventions: The Hudson-Belichick Example

Consider an extreme outlier: Jordan Hudson, Bill Belichick’s 24-year-old girlfriend. Bill is 73, and Hudson has taken a lot of shit and judgment from society for their age gap (so has Bill, but I’m pretty sure he’s all good). But she’s incredibly smart and has shown herself to be made of sterner stuff than her peers. If we stipulate that she feels some genuine physical attraction and connection toward Bill, her willingness to break social convention means she’ll have more advantages than nearly every other woman on the planet. Surely, she’ll have access to some of his hundreds of millions in wealth, and her notoriety gives her the ability to do anything she wants. She could start a beauty line, modeling career, podcast, write a book, become a recording artist—the world is her oyster. And, their age gap is so significant that whenever or however their relationship ends, she’ll have plenty of time to find another man to be her life partner in old age.

Seems pretty smart if you ask me, and if it’s purely a ploy, she’s lapping the girls doing OnlyFans.⁵

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There are, of course, other examples where people pay too high a price for aesthetics, or are unwilling to make other trade-offs that would allow them to get more of what they want, and I’ll discuss those in future posts.

The takeaway here is fairly obvious: we should think long and hard whether our aesthetic requirements are serving our romantic desires. But also, think about how this concept might affect other aspects of your life: work, relationships with family or friends, entertainment vs. personal or professional development. In each, are there easy sacrifices—trade-offs, as Sowell would say—that you can make to get more of what you want?

A worthy question to consider. Namaste my friends!

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1. Meaning that there is a scarcity of resources or opportunity—for someone to have more, someone else has to get less. Classic example is a pizza: the more slices I have, the fewer slices you can have. And I’m hungry bitch!

2. Snuggles, fucks, and is nice.

3. On age, remember: if the guy looked so young or old as to be unattractive, his age doesn’t matter—she’s not attracted anyway. It’s specifically in cases where she’s using the number as the determining factor. On the flipside, age doesn’t factor in for men except for it’s relationship to beauty. Men tend to prefer younger women, because younger women tend to be more beautiful, but men are more than happy to date attractive women of any age if they’re beautiful. For us, the number is irrelevant, as it should be.

4. I say this as a man who’s 6’3” and benefits greatly from the height bias, but I truly believe this is a huge mistake women make when selecting men. If he’s tall enough, evaluate other things—stop putting a number on it. Much love for my short kings out there!

5. If one wants to argue there’s no way she can truly love him and she’s just purely a gold-digger, fine, but we can’t know that—it’s just a motivated opinion. The people who believe this, want to believe this. I don’t claim to know either way—no one truly can but her and Bill—but even in the worst case that it’s all a ruse on her part, they’re both getting tremendous value out of the relationship. And I mean, what’s the socially approved alternative for her: banging idiot 25 year olds who have no money, living in broken down apartments who’s every other word is “bro”? Why is that better?