236B. DatingOS: What is the Other Person Looking For?
Knowing what the other person wants, and what you want, is critical for determining whether to disqualify or advance, and how to approach each Arbitrage step in dating.
As I discussed in the previous paper in this series, becoming more experienced in dealing with other people, especially in competitive environments, should be an overall goal. Your specific goal, that should drive your strategy, is to determine if the person you are on a date with can meet one or more of your needs. Do they have synergistic characteristics that make every interaction enjoyable, or do they have antagonistic characteristics that will drain your energy constantly?
What does the other person want? Have they identified something about you that fills one or more of their needs? If you’ve asked good questions prior to the first date, then you should have many clues as to what you have that the prospect might want. This can help in your bringing up those traits in more detail, as a form of advertising. In nature the ultimate example of this is the male peacock, so we often call these displays of mating virtue “Peacocking”. There is a secluded forest monastery north of Sydney that has turned into a sanctuary for peacocks, and pictures really do not do these amazing animals justice.
Apparently “gendered” content is being consumed at ten times the rate of gender neutral content on social media. Gendered content is essentially a drug, and we will be talking about digital drugs here in this article. I don’t care about being popular, it is my hope that in 50 years, long after I’m gone, people will still find my content useful. Thus I will make every effort to keep this and the other articles in this series “gender neutral”. If I do point out any gender differences, it will be for a critical reason, not to fluff or neg any gender group.
The focus of this article is to identify the three primary “wants” that drive people to date in 2026. Those seeking to date don’t always understand why they are drawn to date, and of course there is a lot of biology involved that they don’t need to know to date. Anyone reading my content likely has interest in both the economics and biology of dating, as that’s my sphere. Knowledge is power, and what feels good in the moment might not always be in your best interest. Generally animals and humans on the wrong end of information asymmetry just do what does feel good in the moment, and unfortunately they have a propensity to blame consequences on others or (bad) luck or society. Sure, all these things are in play, but I discourage victim mentality as that doesn’t put you in a very empowered position.
The three primary “wants” of active daters are:
Pleasure: The person wants to “feel good”. There is a lot of science regarding pleasure, and just like with game development you can get the result you want by accident with enough repetition and a lack of scientific understanding. That’s inefficient, and a critical failure in dating can be even more hazardous than a commercial failure in game development.
Love: Love and pleasure are two very different beasts, especially on a biological level. We tend to conflate the two when we don’t understand this. We also tend to fail at both when we don’t understand either.
Money/Security: Due to poor or misaligned leadership the world is heading for a severe global economic contraction. At a minimum, living in groups is less expensive than living alone. Being able to trade various services in relationship to someone that fits better into corporate/business culture (and thus makes more money) just makes sense. You can have income asymmetry in a relationship but still have the relationship be equal and healthy due to smart consensual arbitrage. My feeling is that this is legitimate, and that ultimately interdependencies are what cause people to cooperate and economies to form.
Pleasure Seekers
While there are a lot of chemicals in the body that can make you feel good, the chemical high that most people chase comes from dopamine, for a few reasons:
We are wired to release dopamine anytime we take a risk and it pays off. This makes us naturally adventurous. Repetition reduces the pleasure.
Corporations know this is an easy way to hijack consumer attention and biology so they have adapted a wide variety of products to target the D2 receptor. This is especially true in interactive media (games and social media).
Parents use this to hijack their own kid’s biology often starting at age 2 by handing them devices to induce “stim lock”, preventing the child from moving or otherwise getting into trouble.
Dopamine addiction is now pervasive in society, and literally leads to damaged cognitive function like most serious addictions. It also negatively affects empathy, emotions, and stress responses. This is especially true if the addiction starts in childhood while the nervous system is still developing. “Abnormal stress responses” can also be a threat to others.
Other than using nicotine, cocaine, meth, or similar hard drugs, dating is the surest way to get a big and new dopamine hit. Social media, gambling, and games that sound like casinos when you close your eyes can also be used, and should not be underestimated. New experiences give a much stronger effect, and dating apps are designed to take advantage of that by giving you a constant supply of new experiences that likely will end up being disposable.
Thus the vast majority of people using dating apps are there for a fast, convenient, and disposable dopamine hit even if they aren’t conscious of it. Treating other people like a cigarette is socially unacceptable and daters realize this so they will typically reframe their intentions as being something else that is considered more noble. Usually that more noble goal is various flavors of “Love” (which I describe next) but it’s actually the least likely goal that people will have.
Even when people are truly seeking love, they will often conflate that with sex and end up operating identically to the other pleasure seekers. The way you tell is by listening carefully. During dates people will ask you questions and make suggestions. They are trying to decide if:
Do you have anything they want
How easy and fast will it be to get that thing they want
Are there any complications
What would be the possible duration of such an exchange
What would be the cost of getting what they want
(optional/advanced) Actually asking the other person what they want and applying the above nuances.
If the person is skipping Step 6, they need something in a hurry and are desperate. That’s usually pleasure or money or both. You can determine what by which questions they ask and the suggestions they make. Are they touchy? Here I mean having weak or non existent Consent Culture adherence and just helping themselves. This applies to all genders.
If they are trying to steer you to a location with very high privacy (like a home) on an early date then that’s a sure sign they are pleasure seeking. The more pushy they are, especially if they reword the request after you’ve already declined, then the risk of you being assaulted goes WAY up if you end up in a private setting. People looking for love go much slower, if they find you lovable, as they don’t want to mess things up by rushing. The more you rush, the greater the chance of a misunderstanding or insult.
If you are pleasure seeking and so is the other person, this might work out fantastically. This can end up being high risk as without the “love effects” I describe below, trust is not being built. Also disease transmission can be an issue, and pleasure seekers tend to have a lot of partners. The reason for this is that repeating an activity lowers the dopamine reward. So pleasure seekers need to rotate or dispose of lovers rapidly to get the most pleasure. Since the higher the risk, the higher the reward, pleasure seekers ultimately also become thrill seekers. This steers them to high risk behavior until they have a critical failure. Then they become a “victim” if they lack self awareness (see below).
After I spent my time doing laboratory research on cellular stress chemical receptors, I did three years at the USA’s top drug rehabilitation center: The Betty Ford Center. I was a therapist there teaching how to use exercise as an alternative to patients’ drugs of choice. If everyone is honest about what they are doing and accepts the risks then this is just an adult choice. From my experience addicts tend to underestimate the risks, and then blame failures on anything other than themselves. This makes it very easy for them to relapse even if they get clinical rehabilitation. Clinicians love super aware addicts as they are easy to assist with good results, but these unicorns are pretty rare.
“Victims”, on the other hand, will seek positive reinforcement for their bad behaviors. Social media is ideal for this, and for daters the Gender Supremacy culture is fantastic for supporting the victim defense of the addict. This applies to all genders. Ultimately they will go back to using but will be more likely to take revenge if they don’t get what they want because the victim mentality is the express route to Gender Supremacy.
If you have high compassion levels, you can feel bad for these people and realize that anyone on the social media treadmill (that probably includes you) will end up in this situation sooner or later. This is especially true of children who were subjected to “stim lock” by parents at an early age. Which is almost all of them, even in poor countries. The future is going to get very spicy. As a former clinician, I put myself in that category, but compassion isn’t going to help much if you are on the wrong side of a Gender Supremacy dynamic. The best case there is to get to safety as soon as possible as a Supremacist will believe you deserve whatever they do to you.
Love Seekers
This is a very broad category filled with people who might have romantic ideals of Connection with another person, or they are seeking to build the very high trust levels necessary to conceive and coparent a child. The primary chemical involved here is Oxytocin, which is an even more powerful pleasure chemical than dopamine. Perhaps more important than the pleasure effect is that Oxytocin has very powerful Trust inducing properties. So powerful that if it was to somehow be weaponized, it could be quite dangerous. Fortunately it has such a short halflife (just a few minutes) that we haven’t developed the technology to deploy it physically yet for long enough periods to exert control.
That can be solved by the fact that using interactive media we can induce its release remotely with a properly designed product. I’m a huge advocate of Digital Drugs, and I think it is safe to say I’ve published more papers on the subject than anyone else. Creating “fake” relationships for the purpose of enthralling the target is often referred to as “Parasocial Interactions”. As the wiki points out, this term was coined way back in 1956.
In 2026 we now have the ability to automate Parasocial Interactions. This is huge money, and as we move to semi-automated PSI (OnlyFans) and to fully automated PSI (AI Companions) this will change the psychology and biology of humans. If the tech is deployed responsibly, this could be enormously beneficial to people. This is the primary focus of my research since 2014 when I pioneered the field of game neuroeconomics. Of course why use it to help people when it is easier to use it to harm and exploit people? So the latter is what we are observing by tech companies.
As these automations are designed to use trust building techniques to rapidly develop trusted relationships, they are programmed to use Reciprocal Self-Disclosure (RSD), an extremely powerful psychological technique. The problem here is that the automation is going to lie 100% of the time (as they have nothing to disclose) and is programmed to make you vulnerable. The AI can then compel you to spend, break your relationships with others (including your family), or even convince you to end your life.
RSD feels great if you can use it successfully, and I try to do this with people when an early relationship is really promising. Doing this with automation or on a platform like OnlyFans is extremely dangerous and of course there is always information asymmetry where the user doesn’t realize the situation is fake. I think it is likely that sociopaths do this also in order to groom a mark. Thus, I would only do RSD with someone that you can verify is a benevolent person. That can be hard in the modern age, but ultimately it is this shared vulnerability that leads to the strongest Connections with other people. I talk about this in my Soulmates paper.
From my experience, if the other person has serious mental illness then they will relive past traumas during RSD and this can lead to a full meltdown. This has happened to me when either they’ve hidden their mental illness, or alerted me to it just moments before they went into meltdown. Thus it is best to ask about that before trying to get too close to someone, though this can be a tough first date question.
Building trust and vulnerability is usually a slow process. For 99% of the time that humans have walked the Earth, we were able to do this in tribes where we knew everyone from birth until death. There was no information asymmetry and there was ultimate peer pressure to act responsibly. All of that is gone today. With overchoice, now we feel pressure to make decisions on people after one date. If we are unsure, it might be more efficient to just dump them and go to the next option. But one date isn’t enough to be sure except in the most extraordinary of situations, or if you are getting “conned”. In PSI you are 100% being conned. If the other person is a sociopath, and you don’t have the skills to detect that, you are 100% getting conned.
If a person has mental illness, when they try to get vulnerable to another person then past traumas can resurface. This can cause wild altered states of consciousness, which can lead to aggression or self-harm. While I try very hard not to get into Gendered conversations, there is a significant Gender mental health gap, with women suffering at much higher rates. I talk a bit about this in my paper on Gender and Dysmorphia. At the risk of oversimplifying the dynamic, I would say that women are much more emotional than men, and also better at reading emotions. This can be a huge advantage in many social situations. The downside is less resiliency.
Also, men seem okay until they aren’t. They act like emotional batteries. If they store up too much, they can pop. This can lead to aggression or self-harm, with men having much higher rates of “successful” suicide, but lower rates of attempts. Statistically men may have lower rates of aggression in relationships these days than women, but again they are more likely to be “successful” in their aggression. That’s not the sort of success that anyone wants to experience. I see both of those dynamics as linked. Higher male resilience to stress, and greater consequences if that resilience is exceeded.
I bring these risks up front because finding “love” isn’t as easy as it used to be. We all feel that, though we may not have the full picture as to what has changed. I go into uncomfortable detail as to how women have a huge economic advantage and an undisclosed wage gap (that benefits women) in my Gender Economics paper. I did 10 years of research before writing that, and another 6 years wondering if I should write that. I surveyed a lot of sex workers, including a Domme at the very top of the food chain in a major city.
My surveys and the prevailing data indicate that services such as sugar dating sites and PSI sites like OF have led to huge economic opportunities for women, and a normalization of SW. These people trade their mental health for money. Like most people, we tend to focus on the rewards and ignore the consequences, especially since the latter are often hidden until you experience them the hard way.
Influencers then go on social media and promote dating techniques which are essentially weaponized SW methodology to try to get to a rapid sexual arbitrage scenario. The result (and this has happened faster than academia can keep up) is that our women are doing fantastic overall on economic metrics relative to men, and doing horribly on mental health metrics. The men aren’t doing all that great either, but that just makes the mental health gap all the more alarming.
The key to finding love is being able to trust someone enough to be vulnerable around them. Not AI, a real human. The reason that SW pays so well is because you agree to be vulnerable to people who likely don’t have your best interests in mind. That’s really damaging, on the inside, but may not leave any marks on the outside that people can see. I’m not speaking down to anyone here, especially since I did some legal sex work myself during the 5 year period that I was homeless from age 17 to 22. I’m speaking as a survivor, not an oppressor.
When I was a kid I saw a black and white rerun of the Twilight Zone episode The Chaser. This first aired in 1960. It is a cautionary tale about how someone desperate to find love without earning it can get that for $1. But eventually the person will want out and the antidote costs $1000. That’s over $11K USD today. The recent movie Obsession, a modern retelling of the 65 year old classic, is absolutely slaying it in the box office. I recommend both. Warning: the modern version is violent.
There are no quick fixes in finding love. In my previous paper I explain why all those “dating coaches” are giving you bad advice. It’s not about learning what to say, it’s about learning how to be. Yes, that involves personal responsibility and effort. Yes, the dating pool is damaged, badly. That’s likely not going to improve in your lifetime. Chances are you’ve got some wear and tear on you too. Patience really is a virtue in the game of love, but it’s in short supply. Especially if you have a dopamine addiction, which you probably do.
If you think you are going to find love without being vulnerable to someone, you are living in a dark fantasy. Not only will that hurt you, but it will hurt others also. Being vulnerable is one of the hardest things to do in the world, especially if you’ve trained yourself to be invulnerable. Bonnie Blue slept with over 1000 men in one day to set some sort of world record. She admits she only remembered the faces of at most 6 men. That’s called dissociation. She probably wishes she was unconscious. All survivors of chronic trauma, especially childhood trauma, have learned to do this. It’s survival. I know this first hand with all the childhood trauma I survived. My father intentionally trained me to dissociate because he had to learn that when he was imprisoned in Iran as a political prisoner in the 1950s. He was tortured daily. He thought that would be a useful skill for me to have.
Reversing dissociation is a very long road that most cannot complete. I have many dear friends that are SW’s or former SW’s that I’m careful not to sleep with. As a friend, you are seen as a person. As a lover, you are seen as a transaction. As someone who taught the healing arts for decades, I’ve been able to help a lot of them. But the “glove cleaner” (the second potion from the Twilight Zone episode) is always more expensive than not doing the deed in the first place. The vast majority of people can’t afford the glove cleaner.
Seeking love is absolutely worth it. But the reason people try and fail and then get upset is because they don’t know in advance how much work will be involved in modern times to develop love. They want the clouds to part and have a Soulmate drop from the sky just for them. That’s Hollywood, not reality.
I’ve been working on models for apps that would actually help people develop love instead of dopamine addictions, but investors just want me to make another Roblox and exploit children. I wish I could say otherwise, but I’ve not met a single investor that wanted to make the “good” product. I have gotten a lot of community support, and I don’t mean to discount their good will.
Money Seekers
As the climate goes to crap, food prices skyrocket, and automation eliminates jobs, life is only going to get harder for regular people. Today’s winners are likely to be the next ones replaced by automation as AI is much better at doing white collar jobs than blue collar jobs. Having myself grown up extremely poor, to the point where I had to forage daily for food for years that I had to steal from gardens and trash cans from the age of 5, I’m not looking down on anyone.
I’d like to think that my extreme poverty has ultimately resulted in my being a superior economist. The sort that isn’t supposed to even get into an economics school, let alone graduate. I’ve befriended people who do all sorts of things to survive, even a wide range of criminals. I understand the Code. That’s why I’m still alive.
So I don’t judge what people do to survive as long as they are honest when they engage in arbitrage with another person. That word “honest” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here since you can get a better deal by being dishonest and most people don’t have the patience or discipline to do things right. With enough experience, you can tell when people are lying, and thus get better deals.
In my relationships sometimes I’m the one putting money on my side of the scale to sweeten negotiations. To be honest though, historically most of the time it’s been the other way around. It’s usually only possible that money isn’t involved if both people have the same amount of it, and that’s rare. Even then, someone may want the other person’s money even if the person asking for money has more than the other person.
I see a lot of influencers on YouTube (I don’t use any social media, I can only imagine how wild it gets there) teaching other people how to monetise their relationships. Once in a while they do it honestly. Most of the time they teach how to weaponize personal relationships for financial gain. Some SW’s even teach how to use oxytocin to gain trust and then clean out the other person. When they mislabel this as dopamine, that annoys me, but that they are using biology to harm people annoys me more. Teaching that, well that really makes my blood boil. But that’s the world we live in and it makes it harder to trust each other.
I’ve had wonderful relationships with women who were totally broke and homeless. I’ve had amazing long term relationships with lady millionaires and got to live in a few mansions on the East and West coasts. In both cases I started very clear and honest arbitrage about what I would and wouldn’t do, and what I expected in return. This is super critical in any relationship with financial asymmetry.
In my most successful such relationship I planned regular dates even though we lived together in her mansion and I paid entirely for all dates. I was there in part to provide an experience and I did that. The rest of my lifestyle was heavily subsidized. The love was real and the relationship was synergistic.
In a similar dynamic in a different relationship the other person tried to force me to do one of the things I listed during arbitrage as “off limits”. When I rejected her she got aggressive and retaliated against me. That ended the relationship. When she came back and begged for another chance, I offered her a much worse deal than she had before in arbitrage and she couldn’t swallow it.
I never took money from any of my partners, so I’ve never been a sugar baby in the way people use the term now. But money can flow from the richer person to the poorer person in ways that are important and which should be appreciated. Entitlement is poison in any relationship, as is disrespect.
As women increasingly make more money than men, these dynamics where the woman is the breadwinner will become less unusual. Arbitrage isn’t a gendered issue, everyone has to engage in arbitrage and all relationships are on some level transactional. The more honest both people are, and the more they deliver their side of the deal with enthusiasm, the stronger the relationship is going to be. This even applies to professional corporate type relationships. Being explicit about what you will and won’t do and for how much is super critical for avoiding misunderstandings later on. The reward is trust, which is the foundation of all relationships.
Now let’s talk about first dates. In all the cultures I’ve experienced, the man is expected to pay for first dates. Not only that, the man is expected to plan first dates. That second part can involve a lot of forethought and labor and should not be underestimated. A woman will judge you at least as much on your ability to plan as your ability to pay.
Over time I got really good at this over the 10 years I studied dating from 2010 to 2020. After talking with the other person enough I’d propose a first date. I would pay and I’d get consent for the first part of the date. I would make it clear the date could go longer if everyone agreed and the previous step was going really well. But this meant that for a date that I thought was super promising, I would plan multi-stage dates. My best dates went 72 hours straight (meaning we slept together but I never allowed any sex on first dates regardless of length since first dates are about building trust) across multiple cities.
Women love romance, even if they are not love seeking. Because secretly, almost everyone is love seeking. Being able to pay can build some trust early on, but it can also paint you as someone to exploit. That often becomes a short term gain and long term loss. But being able to plan, and repeatedly ask for and get consent for each segment of a date, can earn you immeasurable trust and respect.
Planning is labor intensive and requires you to thoughtfully make use of the information you gathered from your date prior to you even asking them out. The stages of a date don’t have to be expensive. A well timed walk in the park or on the beach, can be very powerful for building intimacy. If it’s in a later stage and it happens at night, then the risks and rewards are higher for both of you. Now the dopamine is piggybacking on top of the oxytocin which super-charges the D2-Oxy Heterocomplex.
You can create memorable experiences that are better than sex this way, that both of you will remember your whole life. Dates with other people will be judged by this standard. There’s a reason so many women read Harlequin Romances, though to be competitive they now have sexuality in their stories. Men appreciate romance just as much as women do, and as women increasingly outearn men, maybe they will do more date planning.
With all the talk of “sexual market value”, an abused term which I will address in the next paper, your ability to plan and get consent will vastly improve your value in the dating market. People who are thoughtful about this don’t get ghosted and have no problems getting additional dates if they want them.
With the prevalence of advice being dished out for women to “money test” men on a first date, costs of first dates have skyrocketed to around $200 USD. That’s just a dumb number. The point of a first date is trust building. Having one person pay $200 without getting anything in return is likely to create hard feelings and not build trust. It’s also likely to set a bad example for future arbitrage. It also creates scenarios where women will complain that the guy “tried to get some from me” in return.
No no no. All of this is immature behavior. Asking for a $200 date just sets both parties up for conflict. Lower the stakes and lower the pressure. Start with plans that are low cost and low risk to both people, and if the man is optimistic and skilled at planning he can surprise the other person with later stages that might cost him more money. Or that can be done on later dates.
All this advice applies to same sex dates, with whoever asked the other out expected to pay for date number one.
During early dates there should be enough disclosure so that both sides know if there is a financial asymmetry. Then they can consider that during arbitrage. Having more money doesn’t help the other person if you aren’t willing to share it. That doesn’t have to be real money transfers, it can take the form of “lifestyle enhancement” like I had in my relationships with wealthy women. Whoever has the most money really has to be open to subsidizing the other person if you both plan to operate at the lifestyle level of the richer person. The poorer person should never be disrespected for being poorer, but they will be expected to provide more in other ways to balance things out.
Being entitled to money just because the other person has it, that’s going to destroy what could have been a great situation for both of you. That’s financial objectification, which feels just as awful as sexual objectification. If you have money motivation, then you should be looking for long term relationships to maximize your financial gain/security and minimize your mental health loss. That means both sides need to show the other an abundance of respect.
Okay, that’s two down, one to go. The last paper in this series will explain how to listen effectively and how to engage in effective arbitrage.