How important is a man's job when it comes to dating?

No I did not say I would not answer it. I said I could not answer it. Much different. If the source of the figure and the details behind it were finally revealed from behind this secret shroud - I would absolutely engage with the question.

Again though - and once again this is not you being called a liar before you play the victim again - if a source for a statistic is not offered the only course of action available to anyone else is to treat it functionally as if the statistic was simply made up and does not actually exist.

But no you have not provided the proof you suggest. You have provided a few narratives and references to people who agree with those narratives. For example in post #260 you merely said it "makes sense" but offered no actual evidence. While in post #254 the best we could get is that the "cliches" are "well known". No one denies that I think. It's the idea the cliches are "well supported" that I would question.

So the working evidence supporting those narratives has not been offered here. Links to entertainment shows like Joe Rogan and Mythbusters are not science :) Let's deal with actual science and studies on these matters if we have any. Not media entertainment. Your links to this have been few - and the one link we have discussed most was A) barely relevant and B) did not actually support the concepts in the OP. Unfortunately when the things you have said have been dealt with you merely declare you have not bothered to read the posts (at least twice now). Which does make everything a little one sides.

Once again though there is a different here between things like factors having an influence and factors being important. You said in one post that you can sometimes "make a man more attractive" by putting him in a sports car. Well sure - who is denying that? That is exactly what I have been saying. Having money is a _ preference _ among many possible preferences. You can "make a man more attractive" in many ways not just with sports cars. For example you can "make a man more attractive" by having him in a picture among women than having him sitting alone.

That does not mean any of those preferences of factors are "important" though. It just means that given the wide set of preferences in the world if you are capable of maximising any one of them - or ideally a number of them - you are going to have more success with romantic and sexual relationships. Again - who is denying that exactly?

At this point I suspect some high % of our conversation comes down to little more than a possible difference in what we think "important" means. My opinion is that in the entire space of preferences and factors no one factor appears all that "important" in isolation at all. Modifying one might have a modicum effect on mating success but except in extreme situations (your rich men comment for example) not really significant. And the reality around us is populated with more exceptions than evidence for such generalisations. As I keep saying - and it has not really been addressed at all - the sheer number of people pairing off in every economic sphere belies the idea that wealth is all that important at all.

Appeals to evolution simply do not work solely because they "make sense" and the more we continue to undermine the processes of evolution and rise above them - the less impact they are going to have. Shouting "instinct" at it does not make it true.

But I am happy to continue the conversation until some actual evidence is produced by all means. The question of the OP is "How important is a man's job when it comes to dating" and "Does it make a difference if he's earning 30k or 150k for example?". So by all means let's answer that question. To do so I think first one needs to be clear what we mean by "important" and "difference". Are we talking about his ability to get dates at all? And to what end? To pursue sex? Romance? Marriage? Procreation? All of the above? What measure of success are we using here to differentiate?

None of this is clear and simply saying "Well look at how very rich guys get on" would be to answer the tiniest part of the question and the rest not at all. Citing a single study referencing how large changes later in the relationship might impact divorce rates - is also entirely nothing to do with the question asked. So what evidence is there left so far? Again - mythbusters the TV show - seriously? :) What are we actually claiming here and what - specifically - is the actual hard evidence (not opinion pieces or TV shows about the evidence, but the actual evidence itself) for the claim made?

Yes and I have dealt with the 50% study at this point numerous times including in posts you yourself have not bothered (by your own admission) to read - so again we are going in circles on labouring that point. And if you are not even going to read my posts - then asking what I have in them is not really going to help either is it?

The more important point however is that the study was not at all relevant to the topic of the thread. The topic of the thread is the "importance" of job and earnings of "a man" during dating. A study about divorce rates following stark changing in career of the woman (not the man) has nothing to do with any of that. It was - at best - irrelevant. And without details on who initiated the divorces and why - it tells us nothing at all!

So the evidence that this one single variable is "important" is still not forthcoming here. That study and that figure of 50% is definitely not it. Name dropping does not do it either. If you cite a specific document on the matter produced by them then that is workable. Do you have a title or citation or link I can use?

As for demanding links and citations from me - sure but for what specifically? When you make a specific claim I ask you for a specific citation (usually not getting one, but I ask anyway). If I have made a specific claim you want to know by reasoning for by all means ask! If I can offer citations I will. If I was basing it off anecdote or personal feeling I will admit that.

But so far I have not been making all that many claims. Rather I have been evaluating yours. Evaluation of a claim does not require counter claims. It never has. My feeling is that generally no one attribute is all that significantly important compared with any other attribute. And that feeling is supported by a complete lack of any evidence suggesting a stark difference between importances.

So without any reasons to think any one attribute more important than any other - I simply see no reason to believe they are. Subjectivity plays too much of a role in human relations too. Height can be incredibly important to the next person - weight to the next - sense of humor to the next.

And time and time again I point out the simple fact the undermines most of the "but it makes sense" hypotheses on the thread - which is that people of all financial levels and resource capabilities are pairing off all the time. How is something "important" therefore - if clearly relationships where it is minimal are happening just as easily and frequently as relationships where it is maximised? But no let's ignore the vast majorities of outliers to a hypothesis where we can just say "Look over here at this small cohort of rich guys and what happens to them!" :)

But as I said if we can not even have a conversation on what we even mean by "important" and you can not answer the series of questions at the end of my last post and have simply ignored them - I am not sure what progress can be made at this point. It is simply not even clear if we are talking about the same thing - or entirely past each other. And you do not seem remotely as keen as I to find out.

Sure no one has been denying money is a factor. I keep saying that???

And the fact "high earning people" end up with other "High earning people" has already been discussed too without issue. Reasons for that are not limited to money. We discussed for example how people tend to move in the same social circles as people earning in or around the same as themselves - and the social circles you move in are one of the greatest predictors of who you will end up dating/marrying. Strangely comments about CEO males marrying their secretaries are put forward as if this is all about the woman marrying up - and ignoring the selection criteria in the opposite direction too. Such as the power differential some males like in feeling they have some kind of power over a partner. Further it is quite powerfully along the lines of selection bias and confirmation bias to single out such cases. Most companies have a single CEO or not many more. Most women in the company will not be dating or marrying the CEO. One will. So once again we are moving too quickly to the outliers - the statiscal minority groups - and extrapolating backwards from there. I highlighted the confirmation bias at play there twice now. Consider this the third time I guess.

And the not scientists at the TV show "Mythbusters" can sure show that changing one thing can increase attractiveness to some. Again no one has argued against that. The issue is that other people have also shown that changing other attributes can also increase attractiveness in the same way. This is the problem with going to TV shows or "Peterson says" instead of actual studies. They don't normalise for anything outside the thing they are commenting on. They focus directly and solely on the thing they are commenting on and do not normalise or adjust. This is not science therefore, it is just confirming biases for the purposes of making a TV show.

The point being though that sure - you can change one variable and affect attractiveness. You can change other ones however too with the same effect. So only doing it with one - and not repeating the experiment with everything else - is going to leave you with false positives on the relevance of what your experiment has found. This is why they are TV entertainers and not scientists. Not that that is a bad thing per se. I mean I have cited (though unlike some I do it alongside science - not in lieu of it) the TV works of Derren Brown on occasion while making points! This is not in itself a bad thing. Recognising the limits of the value of such a citation is important though.

Which all just supports what I keep saying - that one can single out a variable and call it "important" - but without showing it is any more or less important than all the other variables too - one would essentially be saying nothing. There is no "mental gymnastics" here (just another one of your personal comments for filler) - or me denying the science. Rather it is me understanding the science but not seeing any one piece of science in isolation.

I refer back again to the link I gave to Trump above. (https://home.uchicago.edu/~hortacsu/onlinedating.pdf) which supports a lot of what we are !both! saying here. Once again - like I keep saying - it shows how you can single out income and show it to be "important" in isolation but when you feed it back into the greater data set you can find all kinds of modifiers to that because other factors are in play too. They show for example that while women do put more emphasis than men on earnings - it is just a small part of multi factor variables. They show for example that a man of certain height or attractiveness (for example) can perfectly have success in dating and so forth. But a man lower on those attributes can augment it with higher income to the same effect.

In other words as other variables are factored up - the relevance of income and it's importance factors down. And Vice Versa. So you quickly see in studies like this that everything - income included - are just single variables in a greater dataset all playing off each other and maximising or minimising one just results in the people putting different weights on the others. Which is - again - what I said from the start.

So as I suspected there actually is not a lot of disagreement here - despite your often (and unrequited I must add) standoffish attitude towards me - rather we are both putting a lot of weight on a different interpretation of the word "important" and ending up talking past each other as a result. It is important yes - just not significantly more so than the complete data set it is part of.

As I already said I too reckon it is important "to the point of instinct". Like height. Weight. Attractiveness. Facial Structure. Race. There is going to be instinctual aspects to all of it.

It again is the difference between singling out one attribute and checking how "important" it is to people - and taking them all and seeing if any are relatively more important to people.

So I have to admit I have genuinely lost sight at this point of what the locus of our disagreement even is. But it is certainly not located in pretence that anyone is not "being real" here.

Yep :) But not - seemingly - all that relatively more or less important than a multitude of other common factors. And how important one factor is tends to wax or wane depending on how good the other ones are. So looks compensate for bad income - and vice versa - for example.

But otherwise yea - that seems to be where we are at.