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[Disc] Leagues

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Conreezy
jcorozza
nearly_takuan
rj3
eselle28
The Wisp
PintsizeBro
reboundstudent
Enail
Caffeinated
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Hirundo Bos
reboot
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[Disc] Leagues - Page 3 Empty Re: [Disc] Leagues

Post by Guest Sun May 03, 2015 1:58 am

HermitTheToad wrote:If 'leagues' never existed, I wouldn't be seeing ads for "Elite Singles" dating on this very forum.

Ugh, I find that stuff creepy as hell.

HermitTheToad wrote:And yeah, it tends to be on my mind. A lot.

I hear that.

PintsizeBro wrote:One problem that occurs to me regarding leagues as a concept is that they're so nebulous. You can't predict how any specific individual will respond to you.

Which is probably a big part of why people often generalise the hell out of groups of people in order to facilitate leagues. If you remove the actual individual traits of people, groups of people become just as nebulous as the leagues applied to them.

Group A is totally out of Group B's league - all Group A is X and all Group B is Y!

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[Disc] Leagues - Page 3 Empty Re: [Disc] Leagues

Post by reboundstudent Sun May 03, 2015 4:29 pm

PintsizeBro wrote:One problem that occurs to me regarding leagues as a concept is that they're so nebulous. You can't predict how any specific individual will respond to you. You may be able to predict how many people, as a percentage of people asked out on a given night, might say yes.

You can have some sense about how each characteristic of yours affects your dating prospects, but trying to keep track of each one very quickly gets exhausting.

I don't think it's necessarily true that you can't predict how an individual would respond to you. You probably can't know it for certain. But if you're observant and have a decent level of social skills, you can probably predict with some accuracy how you and an individual would get along. If this wasn't the case, areas of study like anthropology and detective work would be useless. Humans, consciously or not, project certain things about ourselves through our body language, choice of style, and so forth.

For example, when I was more active in my faith, I frequently wore a cross necklace. Now in some cases, a cross necklace is just a meaningless fashion accessory, but you'd probably be right more often than wrong if you associate "cross necklace" with "Christian." Out at a bar, I see a cute guy. Guy has a "Proud Atheist" patch on his backpack. I can probably guess, with some accuracy, that he wouldn't respond that well to me.

This is not because people of different religious ideologies can never be good partners. Or that everyone considers religious ideology heavily when choosing a partner. It's because both of us have chosen to project our religious ideology out in the world. It's clearly important to both of us. We are not only identifying with this ideology, but publicly aligning ourselves to it. Chances are, if we care strongly enough about that ideology to do that, it's also something we consider very important in our romantic partners. Does that mean I would never date an atheist or he would never date a christian? No, I've dated only atheists. But it biases the first interaction to such a degree that it probably wouldn't be successful.

Now maybe if he was in my friend group, and got to know me, and realized my faith could work well with his atheism, that'd be different.

I think you can, most of the time, correctly gauge how someone would respond to you on first meeting.
I think that gauge does go out the window if you're frequently thrown together: work together, same social group, forced interaction.

In other words, leagues exist and are important when you don't know a person well.
When you've gotten to know someone well, leagues can be practically non-existent.
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Post by PintsizeBro Sun May 03, 2015 7:02 pm

That's why I said that you can generally know how desirable you would be to a given group, but that doesn't mean as much as you might expect when dealing with individuals (anthropologists will tell you the same thing, and detective work is not exactly a scientific discipline). We definitely project things about ourselves in our style and body language, but other people also project their assumptions on to us. To borrow your religion example, people who know my last name assume I'm Jewish. People who don't know my last name and just see my blond hair, blue eyes and polo shirt-heavy wardrobe assume I'm some sort of Protestant Christian. They're both wrong.

Let's keep your bar scenario the same, but you decided to not wear your cross necklace and your hypothetical cute atheist guy had left his backpack at home. You're both the same people, but you no longer have the visible religious markers that would cause you to immediately rule each other out. Maybe you're still not compatible, but you'd have to talk to each other to find out.

Sometimes it's just how desirable a characteristic is within the context of the group. This is an easy example, but take my height. When dating women, this is a pretty major handicap - women who want a taller partner outnumber women who don't care about height or want a shorter partner. But when dating men, it's actually an advantage - men who want a shorter partner or don't care about height outnumber men who want a taller partner.

One possible response to this situation is to give up on dating women and focus on dating men - there are very few social spaces that would allow me to effectively do both at once. That would definitely allow me to be a bit more lazy. But as you'd have it, I'm in a long-term relationship with a woman. Women as a group might prefer taller men, but this individual woman doesn't really care one way or the other about height.

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