Men dating down

chamomilecloud · 2026-06-17T01:35:39+00:00

Typically those top men will partner long-term with top 5-20% women. But before he finds this woman, in theory he has the choice to fuck around with his pick of the litter.

In my own observation though, these men don’t really “go for” average or ugly women on a regular basis, unless she is upper class/in his social class or something. He just fucks in the general pool of above average to pretty women.

The men dumpster diving for uggos are average men. Those are the ones who fuck and date down.

statsfodder · 2026-06-17T04:02:50+00:00

Adding some honesty cause no one else seems to be able to...

The hotter the woman, invariably, the more work she is to get and to maintain a relationship with. As a HVM the further down you date the easier it becomes.

Fine-Double6335 · 2026-06-17T21:23:14+00:00

Men have a version of hypergamy as well; getting someone more attractive than them and/or getting lots of women. But men really don’t care about a woman’s income. And if they do, they are probably broke and need to worry about income, hence not mate material for most women.

If men were honest, they also only care about the opinions of hot, attractive women.

Everyone is trying to maximize their dating potential.

SomeSugondeseGuy · 2026-06-17T20:15:45+00:00

Everybody is making good points and I'd like to add one.

Men spend the majority of their upbringings being shamed, punished, and gaslit into ignoring every inconvenient emotion they have.

Women do not go through this at nearly the same rate.

Let's use the example of a young man who's recently come into adulthood. He will be dealing with the culture shock of no longer being a child - something to be cherished - and becoming a man - something to be avoided and treated as more hazard than human.

Male groups are just as stunted as he is, and female groups don't care.

Therapy would be a great option, but this is more complicated than it sounds. Therapy, for this man, can be summed up as "I am going to pay to have a licensed person tell me exactly what is wrong with me in excruciating detail and such will not yield dividends for months to years". And even if it does work, it likely won't offset everything. So it's not appealing in the slightest to say the least.

This leaves one option - his partner. Someone who understands him, didn't go through what he went through, and most importantly: cares.

Men need women more than women need men. And that is by design.

ImaginaryDimension74 · 2026-06-17T03:41:42+00:00

There’s good anthropological reasons why hypergamy became the norm and once a game comes to have biased rules, you can either play by those rules or choose not to play (stay single). A male nurse can’t just decide to marry a female doctor when female doctors are looking to marry equal or up.

There are of course more men who decide hypergamy isn’t in their interest, and consciously decide to stay single rather than marry down or risk the losses that can come with divorce.

With changing demographics, women’s hypergamous goals are becoming harder to achieve, leaving both men and women frustrated. Men feel women have unrealistically high standards and women, unable to marry up as much as they desire complain there’s no good men to be had.

Vaudeville_Clown · 2026-06-17T09:06:46+00:00

I think it's mainly men's priorities and desires shifting over time.

While teens, it is often the case that all boys are interested in the 2-3 girls that are generally considered "the hottest" and noone else. They are the ones with highest status and usually, best looking.

All other girls are disregarded. An overwhelming majority of these guys shooting their shot will come to regret it.

Over time, they'll consider popular/hot girls as a certain type that's unrelatable. This calcifies and eventually, they stop consider her, and women like her, as attractive.

I honestly believe there's something to the stories where exceptionally pretty women can't land an average, reliable and stable man. Doesn't matter if she tries to be nice accomodating and engage with these men. She's already written off by these men on reflex and bad memories.

This post gets too long, but there's also the matter of men wanting adoration, and if you date a woman who cannot do even half the things you can, if she's wow'ed by that, they're feeling it. In a more equal looks/social class/capabilities relationship, they do not.

Altruistic_Look_7868 · 2026-06-17T01:55:22+00:00

For control. Always has been the case.

Unique_Mind2033 · 2026-06-17T01:30:34+00:00

Go ahead :) nobody is stopping you

AikenDrumstick · 2026-06-17T14:30:12+00:00

Imagine a subreddit for people who’d been sold “magic beans” by some scam artist. To make them grow, they’re told, all you need is soil, water, and a pure heart.

Then imagine a typical thread in r/magicbeans, where these gullible morons hotly debate what actually constitutes a pure heart. They all have strong opinions - about pure hearts, yes, but also best fertilizers, optimal watering techniques, etc - even though not a single one of them has been able to make their magic beans grow.

You could try to point out to them that what they’ve actually been sold is a plastic bag full of Skittles, but they won’t listen. Maybe it’s sunk cost fallacy, but they just can’t give up their belief in those magic beans, and post after post is full of authoritative nonsense as they argue and posture about why their beans aren’t growing.

That’s what this thread looks like. When you argue about hypergamy and “top 5%” actually mean, you’d might as well be writing a screed on what makes a pure heart. That nonsense is NEVER going to make sense, because it’s impossible to know what a pure heart is, and ultimately the problem is your belief in those magic beans.

Big_Psychology_3 · 2026-06-17T01:34:10+00:00

Great question. It’s because men date up too. But the criteria is different by gender, so we often don’t realize that men are dating up too.

Top men look for top characteristics in women, it could be for example hourglass shape. Similarly top women look for top characteristics in men, it could be for example v-shape torso.

Here these two examples happen to focus on physical appearance, but there are many more dimensions in which people try to date up. Seems like physical appearance is important because it indicates deeper parental fitness. For example, hourglass shape can indicate at a glance the potential for a mother to breastfeed a newborn, even during food scarcity. For example, v-shaped torso can indicate at a glance the potential for a father to provide during pregnancy, even in unfriendly spaces. These are evolutionary theories, not facts, take it as guesses or conjecture.

Spicy_take · 2026-06-17T02:46:17+00:00

Because our criteria is different. If I date a hot barista that treats me well, from my pov, I’m dating up. From her pov, she’s dating up because I’m tall, hopefully good looking to har, and financially stable.

Regular-Badger8064 · 2026-06-17T01:50:07+00:00

Because they aren’t dating down, they’re dating up. These top 20-5% dudes are all getting with women that are much more physically attractive than themselves. Men just love to play dumb and act like they’re all dating down because finances are involved as if men don’t prioritize physical attractiveness heavily over everything else when choosing their partners.

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Drop_and_post · 2026-06-17T14:20:12+00:00

Millions of young men want to play in the NBA, few will be selected and the rest will live vicariously through the NBA players, it's the same way women approach relationships. They want a top guy, if they can't get or keep a top guy many live in unsatisfied relationships with average men or stay single.

S0mnariumx · 2026-06-17T20:32:01+00:00

I think it's a perception thing. Other men think he's dating down but the women he dates probably have other characteristics that make up for their "flaws"

I'd rather be with someone who makes my life easier.

Comfortable_Fix_1601 · 2026-06-17T23:43:35+00:00

Male reproductive strategy is to impregnate as many women as possible, so they are naturally drawn to quantity over quality

Fine-Double6335 · 2026-06-19T04:29:31+00:00

Yeah, tell that to Jeff Benzos. You think he gave a damn about Lauren Sanchez’s income? Rupert Murdoch left his wife for a nobody, Wendi Deng who was 38 years younger than him.
You think either of them cared about their income? Nope.

MarioWilson122 · 2026-06-19T08:43:24+00:00

Because even if you accept hypergamy as real, it doesn't automatically mean men and women are optimizing for the exact same things.

A common RP argument is that men are generally more willing to date across income, status, education, and career differences if a woman is attractive and pleasant to be around. Women, on average, are often argued to place more weight on status, ambition, resources, and social standing than men do.

So under that framework, a top-tier man doesn't necessarily need a top-tier woman in every category. He may be perfectly happy dating a woman who is lower status or lower income if she checks the boxes he personally cares about.

There's also a numbers problem. If the top 10% of men only dated the top 10% of women, everyone would pair off neatly. In reality, high-status men often have more options than high-status women because many women are willing to date across and up, while many men are willing to date across and down.

That's one reason RP spaces often argue that female hypergamy and male selectivity don't operate the same way. Men and women may both be selective, but they're frequently selecting for different traits. That's why you sometimes see successful men dating women who are nowhere near them in income or status, while the reverse is much less common.

JollyBowler2510 · 2026-06-25T19:59:06+00:00

They do tend to settle down with top tier women, but men somewhat value how many women they can bag before that, for whatever reason. I've never understood it myself.

Ok-Ninja-8165 · 2026-06-17T06:00:28+00:00

Because why not. Why should you limit yourself with 20% if you can have 100%?

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-06-17T03:45:13+00:00

Hypergamy theory needs better fine tuning. TRP was right to ask if there were any evolved psychological instincts behind the prevalence of classic 'income/status' hypergamy given that a lot of more modern factors didn't exist in the prime evolutionary period. But many in the manosphere got stupid about things and started asserting women date up in some holistic sense of human value--who can do that kind of math? Or that basic gender polarity (height, size, etc.) was hypergamy.

Women do date up overall in relative mate value RANK, as in if you ranked all women among women by mate value and all men among men, most women would be dating a higher ranked guy. Now, as to whether their raw mate values are more evenly matched, that is hard to say. It is conceptually easier to rank someone within their gender by mate value than to compare cross gender mate value. But this kind of dating up in mate value rank is not necessarily core hypergamy and is the result of many factors, including greater male variability. At the lower ends of the SMP there just are more men who are totally undateable in absolute, objective terms.

It is also true that as you get to the top of the SMP, top ranked women cannot actually date up by rank since they are at the ceiling. But even with the caveats around comparing raw mate value cross gender, top men likely have higher raw mate value than top women and so are dating down in mate value. Plus, given that humans of both genders have a threshold system for mate evaluation in many ways, if different, then as you get higher in the SMP most people are way past a lot of key thresholds. There is less marginal value for improving in looks, wealth, etc. Idiosyncratic compatibility starts to matter more.

Cute_Contribution480 · 2026-06-17T06:30:25+00:00

Men date down when they want variety and sex. They date up for commitment.

Formal_Strike_9878 · 2026-06-17T02:31:51+00:00

The way I understand it as most women are looking for the top 20-5%. Important to conceptualize that this is a small percent of the male population that most women want to date.

You then have 80-95 percent of men, the vast majority of men who are shut out, and they have no choice but to date the women who then think they are “settling” for good men.

AreOut · 2026-06-17T07:33:47+00:00

because a lot of men value peace/loyalty/chastity over looks, the whole problem with dating is that women expect men to treat them better because of their money and status and men expecting women to treat them better because they are peaceful and loyal

Melodic_Structure928 · 2026-06-17T04:22:42+00:00

why would men date down? If we say women are attracted to the top 20-5%, why would the male 20-5% not date the female 20-5% and instead go for all of them?

well in many such cases the men in question just want easy sex, however there also the point that men genuinely like more members of the opposite sex then the other way around, so there’s that as well.

ta06012022 · 2026-06-17T04:00:45+00:00

And if men do consistently date down, that should result in a surplus of attractive single women. If 99th percentile men are all with 80th percentile women and women only date up, then the 80-99th percentile of women should all be single.

chobolicious88 · 2026-06-17T11:28:05+00:00

Because women select better genes, and men choose stability and regular sex.

Basically mans priority is to be nutting regularly into women, without drama - so he can focus on life and society. Men build systems essentially, women build children

Title	Men dating down
Author	Unfair_Chemistry6177
Upvotes	12
Comments	109
Date	June 16, 2026 9:08 PM UTC (1 month ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/1u7q7wo/men_dating_down/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/men-dating-down.1582984 https://theredarchive.com/post/1582984

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