All over the greater diaspora, Aunties bemoan that desi children are picky. How will they ever be satisfied? How will they ever settle down and start popping out the requisite grandkids?
Aunties can sleep better at night now that SCIENCE is on the job. Examining peoples’ behavior in online dating settings (which is equivalent to looking at biodata), they’ve noticed a few clear patterns:
Men are easy – they are generally interested in hotness above all. 
Women are choosier, but it turns out their preferences are fungible. This is good news for aunties because it gives them a metric with which to translate different suitor’s attributes to a common scale, allowing them to rank apples and oranges. They can tell, for example, whether an average woman (in this study) is likely to prefer the not quite as handsome, shorter i-banker or the more gorgeous, slightly taller, high school English teacher.
What is this common scale? Money. According to these researchers, women will forgive men’s flaws if (gasp) they earn more.
Consider looks. A guy can compensate for ordinary looks with more moola, which tells us what he has to reveal in his biodata if he wants to be a playa:
Suppose you’re an ordinary-looking guy whose online picture is ranked around the median in attractiveness… And suppose you’d like to be as successful with women as a guy whose picture is ranked in the top tenth. Then you’d need to make $143,000 more than him. If your picture is ranked in the bottom tenth, you’d need to make $186,000 more than him. [Link]
Cash also acts like elevator shoes for our shorter brothers:
… a 5-foot-0 guy would need to make $325,000 more than a 6-foot-0 man to be as successful in the online dating market. [Link]
Race matters too. Generally speaking, men were more willing to date somebody of a different race than women, with the exception of Asian women who preferred White men over others. (3/4ths of Asian-white marriages have Asian women and white men [Link] )
For equal success with an Asian woman, an African-American needs no additional income; a white man needs $24,000 less than average; a Hispanic man needs $28,000 more than average. [Link]
It’s not clear whether brown women act like their other Asian counterparts – any thoughts?
Lastly, if you want to get around these sorts of hurdles, skip the biodata and move straight to cha:
… people who are terribly picky in choosing partners online will relax their standards if they spend just three or minutes talking to someone at a speed dating session. [Link]
There you go. Now that science has helped Aunties, maybe it will come up for a way for the rest of us to be able to evade them. Oh yeah, it’s called caller ID 
In case you’re interested, here is the academic paper in question
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Related posts: Speed kills (part 1), Speed kills (part 2)
sure…with some more math. most PR people cant add.
also, maybe slightly more intense hours. not sure though.
P
hey, i work in greenwich and i wear jeans to work =)
ah…but did you grow up in greenwich with wasp parents that are on the forbes 500 list and hired a nanny to hug you for them?
Hooray for i-banking! What’s with all the lack of love for i-bankers?
ahhh. sounds like you’re an i banking analyst or associate Puli…doing models all day long. financial models, that is.
you got me there.
As a mom of (adorable) boys I will make it a point to do absolutely nothing for them at all so that their expectations are not tragically dashed in later life
Your sarcasm is duly noted. Heh.
However, the point is really not your sons’ expectations. It’s your expectations of your sons’ future spouses might turn out to be. My experience is these things sort of sneak up on mothers, even as they’re completely unaware of it. My mother was determined to treat my brother’s wife exactly as she treated me. If she bought something for me, she’d make sure she bought an exact duplicate for my sister-in-law. She never ever publicly says anything even remotely uncomplimentary about her daughter-in-law. But then, every now and then, she’ll just make some totally unnecessary snide remark about her daugther-in-law that she probably would never make about me.
Mothers-in-law are basically just mothers cast into a different situation. The difference is, you can tell your mom that she’s crazy and needs to shut up. It’s really much harder to say the same sort of thing to your mother-in-law. Husbands seem not so inclined to act as conduits for this sort of information.
nah…left m+a a 4 years ago. now in derivs. got promoted past associate a pretty long while ago.
6 years into banking…
Puli, Hire me! Shruti, Hi 😉
ok. less pr in that. M&A though, now thats just like arrainging marriages.
wow….WOW…HEY NOW!!!!! pretty cool…drool
Like Johnny Stecchino said “Baby, the only woman in my life is you …. and mia madre“. I thought that was the funniest line in the movie.
btw, how did this become about mothers-in-law?
I don’t think this is anything new, Irrespective of race and all that kept aside (even though they play a small part) Women have always wanted to or hooked up with men who have higher Survival value. Attributes such as being the leader of men (business leaders), making more money than most men (bankers and the well off guys), the badboy types (rockstars, biker boys) all show this trait. Don’t get me wrong, looks do matter for women but they are more than willing to overlook that if you are succesful unless your 4ft bald and with bad teeth 🙂
BUT women are judged predominantly based of their Replication value. physical features such as big breasts, a good hip to waist ratio,long hair all kind of define good health and the ability to produce healthy offsprings. As food gatherers and cavemen thousands of years back, the attraction switches in men and women went off/on respectively based on these traits. We still see its affect in modern society when men do the default head turn to check out a pair of silicon mammaries knowing its still fake. So to sum it up I want to say when it comes to the mating game its kind of unfair for women because they get judged mostly by just one trait.
funny!
Puliogre, I’m in line jostling with Jeet – hire me too!
I think at least on line, a lot of grls use hight as a filter. there are girls that are 5 foor flat that wont look at you no matter who you are unless you are like 5 foor 7 in. I guess the heart wants what it wants. c’est la vie.
P
Explain how the badboy type is DHV (demonstration of high value) in an evolutionary, species-propagation sense?
Oh dear lord. Men are equally judged by one trait as well – the trait to provide. Whether that means making a #($@)#load of money, or charging down a hill with a spear, it boils down to the same idea. I’ll say the unfairness comes in post relationship, as women have been chosen as the incubators, and not the incuba-tees.
easier in real life than on line. real life grls done filter based on binary criteria. on line, the filters interface is either yes or no…
sorry. i meant “don’t filter”
that many bankers on the board? wow…
Coz someone further up made the point that non South Asian women may be avoiding dating South Asian men because of their unrealistic expectations of their partners brought about by moms who think the sun shines out of their puttar’s ****s.
do girls think its wrong for guys to be interested in heavily in a pretty girl?
I have a friend who is 5’2″ and who largely filters on height. She dates guys of any race, profession and income – including one guy who was a smuggler (this was out of the USA), but wont look at a guy under 6′ tall.
HMF, You are talking about 2 different things here: 1) Women who date/mate with guys they are attracted to 2) Women who hook up with guys to be in a relationship with because they are the provider type
Both these type of guys have high survival value, having money and being rich is not the only type of survival value, try messing with the stripper who dates the bouncer from your favorite club, he can punch a hole through your skull, protect her and that matters to her, since you seem to know the right acroynms I don’t think you require further explanation 🙂
yikes…height matters more than moral character. no love for puli…
janeofalltrades and random…………im sorry if u took my ‘gut’ remark as a slur on ur abdomen. just limit ur samosa intake to no more than 4 a day and u should be ok………….i don’t know about cedar rapids, iowa or kansas city, kansas, but in my town the hot girls are exclusive in their dealing with moneyed men. in fact they prefer he be not so good looking either; average is best. they want to keep the delineation straight: man makes the money and woman keeps it sexy. i know desi girls are a bit different: since most will only get it on once, they don’t want some fat stink-bomb. plus, thanks to our culture, they are a lot more romantic. problem is, from what i have seen i estimate maybe 8 % do not have protruding from their bellies. what i am saying is it is hard to find that bracket first of all, then when i do, i have to make it happen without the aston or even s-class they may/probably will be used to…………. i would appreciate it if the fine editorial board at sepiamutiny would invent a matrimonial site exclusively for hot american desis…….janeofalltrades and random, again, please accept my apologies.
I thought the study was interesting because it wasn’t just the supermodels they claimed acted like this, it was a general trend …
Interesting that you made the distinction that your friend is 5’2″ – as if her being shorter-than-average (in the US) means she wouldn’t be interested in tall guys? Or… should leave them for taller women? I get that all the time from my girl friends.
We like what we like and shouldn’t be made to justify that. It’s not just the heart, but the brain and, um, other things, that want what they want.
Men under 6 feet in addition to not finding love, apparently cant become CEOs either.
As a 6’3″ tall guy I don’t discriminate, but I do think it’s funny when I can’t easily make eye contact with a woman because she’s a foot shorter than I am, yet I’m her ideal height. Then again, when you’re horizontal, you can be eye to eye with anybody, no matter what their height.
come on puli, why would you want such a phony in the first place?
This is just getting worse and worse for my self esteem. jeez. cant a guy catch a break?! a tall smuggler is better than a short normal guy? WTF?! sigh
Well, if you believe in free markets, then a smuggler is just in import-export, no?
haha
free markets are predicated on functioning laws. i dont believe stealing, smuggling, robbing and killing is the same thing as an honest days work…
ill let that chick keep her smuggler boyfriend. ill chase girls that are a bit wiser than that…
my thoughts exactly!
tamasha i am quoting you, but my comment is not targetted at you. in fact i am sort of taking it out of context to make my point.
it bothers me that almost every comment has been ridiculously superficial. not one man has said it may be a good idea to give less important to “hotness” and look for personality, while the only thing women are going to ignore looks for is loads (200k??) of money. there is a word for both of the above.
and then, we all actually want to feel high and mighty about it? “shouldn’t be made to justify that”? (again, tamasha, i use your sentence to indicate the attitude of most of us). come on, wake up. most of us are caricatures of what is wrong (me included). it is one thing to be superficial—most of us are fighting tens of thousands of years of evolution. it is an entirely different thing to gloat about it, and not try to change!
This makes more sense to me than basically anything written on this thread. Crippling Desi maternal expectations + someone who can’t effectively fight back = severely oppressed (or at least annoyed) wives.
I’ve always believed that mothers in law are basically the most important vectors for patriarchal values. I’m perfectly satisfied with eating frozen pizza and ramen every night, but I’m sure that my mother would be horrified if I continued that lifestyle after marriage. I honestly don’t think that most Desi men expect their mothers or their wives to do half the work they actually do. We’re mostly bystanders watching a war (though, admittedly, many Desi men I know COULD stand up to their mothers a little more in this situation).
I agree that mothers in law have a bad rap all over the world. But let’s keep our stereotypes organized here. Traditionally, the man has a hard time dealing with in-laws in American culture, not the woman, which would indicate to me that there are different dynamics going on (probably a fear of being an inadequate provider). I can also see how dealing with a Desi mother in law would be a much bigger issue for people who are a) not used to the, uhm, “unique” expectations of Desi mothers at all and b) certainly not used to living under a roof with one.
I don’t believe that most people actually exemplify these huge generalizations. You’re dealing with 6 billion data points, and we all know that individuals will do lots of odd, “unpredictable” things. There are rich dudes who marry women who aren’t “conventionally” pretty (let’s PLEASE leave aside the conversation about what that means). There are “hot” women who marry poor guys. I dunno, I think every generalization about what people like has to come with the “on average” caveat because there’s so much multifactoral stuff that goes into relationships.
Oh absolutely I picture myself in that position everyday. Having seen perfectly wonderful moms turn into insane MILs around me and my mother has a lot of potential to drive my brother’s future wife up the wall honestly this is something I’m sensitive to all the time. My own mother loved her MIL and thought she was wonderful and only says good things about her. Incidentally she said she always made a lot of effort to never turn out like her mother who has literally tortured my uncle’s wives. Having said that the minute you get old and age creeps up on you something happens to you. I’ve see my aunts and best friends mothers who were wonderful while I was growing up do some pretty crazy things the minute their sons get married.
This isn’t about some MIL bashing thing. I love my future MIL. She’s really wonderful, genuine, not a single conniving bone in her and truly a gem but shit I would say to my mother is something I wouldn’t in a million years be able to say to her out of respect for her and the fine balance I have to manage with her son. Having said that even something as simple as a “No” to a request comes loaded with so much guilt and baggage it adds up. Trust me it adds up. I’ve seen families who were perfectally normal fall apart after the guy got married and I hate to heap the entire blame of the falling apart on the woman marrying into the family.
Like my cousin just said to me yesterday…”It doesn’t matter if your inlaws live 2 miles away or 2000 miles away, they have a way of penetrating your marriage and affecting it and influencing it, there is no way around it.” For the most part (and I hate to say this because I don’t want to desi bash and I really do love my culture and would never venture out of it) this sort of baggage can be avoided and missing outside of the South Asian culture. Individual wishes, thoughts, personalities, likes, dislikes etc are respected and put ahead of the herd. Not saying it’s a positive thing but again I understand when women are gunshy and want to venture outside of something they may have experienced. It gets overbearing.
Lets face it expectations from women in our culture are far more overbearing than expectations from guys. What sort of expectations would my parents have from my husband other than treat me well and provide for me? On the other hand the expectations from his end of me…that’s a massive can of worms.
you can’t be horizontal all the time though, you wanna
spicemix it up once a whileI have a girlfriend who is not even 5′ who loves loves tall guys and wouldn’t give a adequately taller than her guy the time of day. He has to be around 6′ and I never understood it. My ex used to always say ‘I’m not shortening my gene pool by being with a short girl’ (yeah he was quite a gem) and I can’t tell you how many men have told me I was “too short” (online ofcourse). There are literally 100s of ads looking for “tall” women when the guy is like 5’8. Please I can be that height on a good day with heels! What’s this obsession with tall Indian women? When I was in India I felt like a giant compared to most of the women. Of course I’m sure that would be different if I was in the north I’m going to assume.
When I was in India I felt like a giant compared to most of the women
My mother-in-law, a very traditional Indian woman, is 5’10” tall (same as my father-in-law). She looks almost like a freak standing next to other women in India. She sometimes has to sew extra material on to her saris to make them “tall” enough for her.
For the purposes of this discussion, and the above mentioned post, it’s category 2 that’s relevant. We’ve been discussing long term relationships, much beyond simple attraction and IOIs.
Both these type of guys have high survival value, having money and being rich is not the only type of survival value, try messing with the stripper who dates the bouncer from your favorite club, he can punch a hole through your skull, protect her and that matters to her
Please, a guy so skinny that he makes the Kenyan marathon champion look like Fat Bastard, if armed with a gun, can punch many holes in the bouncer’s skull making every single one of his muscles obsolete.
That’s my point, survival characteristics change with respect to time. That’s why the he-man, bouncer characteristics have become completely outdated and hence no longer a precursor from a long standing evolutionary standpoint. The only place where they still might have some DHV characteristics, would be setting-specific…
maybe a bouncer convention, where they all discuss the best way to grow a neck, who the hell knows.
But in a large scale evolutionary sense, it’s outdated. In fact, the Badboy mentality appeals to women, for it’s unpredictability, not the ability to kick someone else’s ass.
I assume you’ve read “The Game”, and you’ll remember when Neil Strauss says “they’d run circles around those muscle heads in a starbucks” because those characteristics have ceased to be DHV.
JoAT:
What’s the margin for a guy to be “adequately taller”? And do you think she would bend it if he had mad money? How about mad skillz?
Janeofalltrades: How tall are you? You dont look short in your pictures.
My thought: I wish there were a variable for immigration status (first-gen, 1.5-gen, second-gen, third+). I don’t think their sample size would be able to make too robust judgments on the strata that interest us (i.e. Asian “Other”) without starting over but that’s the critical missing element here as far as this blog is concerned. Other than that, the usual suspects for ‘biodata’ variables are more or less there (e.g. married, divorced, wants kids, income, etc.). Ugh. Maybe some more variables on personality type would make us a bit less uncomfortable but I’m thinking the really important questions are more or less answer-able with the addition of immigrant generational status. What do you think?
No Neal(with no e), I am not speaking of the 6 billion people on earth. I am talking of comments on this thread. True, it could be people posting about others they know about, but I get a feeling a lot of people on this thread are not doing that.