In this post, I will share my opinion, which I leave open to debate. In addition to that, I'd be curious to see what formulations people have of the 80/20 rule. Let's start off by establishing a few things.

  1. Not everyone agrees on the same form of the 80/20 rule. One common claim is that it only applies to OLD/hookups, but that doesn't stop someone from applying a similar line of reasoning towards dating in real life.

  2. Here I'd like to define two formulations of the 80/20 rule. One which I'll call the unified 80/20 rule (unified 80/20), the other which I'll call the varied 80/20 rule (varied 80/20). The former argues that the 20% is a widely agreed upon pool of men by women in a society. That is to say, one woman's 20% will not differ much from another's. On the other hand, if one takes varied 80/20 to be true, one still believes that a woman finds only 20% of men very attractive, but that 20% differs more widely from woman to woman.

As for what I think.

  1. In the OLD/hookup world, unified 80/20 applies.

Argument for (1): When people are looking for short term, casual relationships, physical attractiveness will be of disproportionate importance relative to other aspects (that are normally significant) like character, personality, etc. Therefore, because women are often given the option to choose between a wide array of men, they will likely choose those that they find the most attractive (i.e. the 20%). And, within a society (or culture), there is a somewhat standardized conception of what makes a physically attractive person (or in this case, man).

  1. In the real life/LTR world, varied 80/20 applies.

Argument for (2): Here, rather than necessarily proving that (2) is true, I'd like to prove that denying (2) is a harder claim to hold. There's two main ways to approach disagreeing with (2). First, there's the blue pill argument, which will take a form along the lines of "Women find more than 20% of the male population attractive (for a LTR)." I think it's extremely hard to argue that women aren't selective, whether that be for sex or romantic relationships. I doubt many people would even claim this, so I'll move on to the other counterargument.

Another counterargument might simply claim that unified 80/20 also applies to LTR's. For redpillers, this might take the form that 80% of the women chase after the "high-value" 20% of men. Obviously, not all of them can date those 20%, so eventually, they settle for someone they aren't wholly attracted to. I also think this is a hard argument to defend. If you take this conception to be true, then ~20% of the women (in the 80%) get with a similar amount (~20%) of men. So, for a whopping 60% of total women, of those women who are in relationships with men, they aren't attracted to their man? This seems like an incredibly strong claim to me, that is almost certainly false. There are definitely traits that women may agree on when looking for a partner. Intelligence, emotional maturity, stability, etc. But, these are all things that are largely within someone's control to achieve. And, I don't believe that only 20% of the male population are viable relationship partners for 80% of the women.

TLDR: I do think it is true that women are selective when finding a long term partner. However, a woman's ideal long term partner will tend to differ a lot more from another woman's ideal compared to the ideal hookup partner.