Modern Wisdom

#1031 - Macken Murphy - 18 Harsh Realities of Modern Dating

December 11, 2025

Key Takeaways Copied to clipboard!

  • The gold standard study on female penis size preference, using 3D models, found ideal length to be 6.3-6.4 inches and circumference 4.8-5.0 inches, which corresponds to the 95th percentile for length relative to the average erect size. 
  • Women's ideal mate preferences for male physique, as seen in the Ollie Murs transformation poll, suggest they prefer men who are not excessively lean (closer to 13-15% body fat) because extreme leanness signals mating effort over formidability or paternal investment. 
  • Despite common online discourse suggesting otherwise, research indicates that men, on average, prioritize female physical attractiveness over chastity, and both sexes show a preference for a moderate number of past sexual partners, viewing extreme virginity or very high body counts as negative personality indicators in the modern context. 
  • Women exhibit a harsher discrimination against male virgins than men do against female virgins, although both sexes show a preference for partners closer to their own average number of past partners. 
  • Past sexual behavior, specifically a higher body count, is a significant predictor of future infidelity, with infidelity rates doubling for individuals with a body count above five compared to those below five. 
  • Successful, high-status men tend to pair up with equally successful, high-status women, contradicting the meme that successful men prioritize youth and beauty over a partner's career or education. 
  • The current tension in modern dating is an unavoidable consequence of women's socioeconomic gains, forcing adaptation in mating strategies or non-pairing. 
  • Attractiveness strongly correlates with better relationship outcomes, as people tend to pair with the most attractive person who reciprocates their interest, though high attractiveness can lead to 'optionality distress' and increased mate guarding. 
  • Evolutionary psychology suggests men face greater costs and benefits in non-monogamy due to higher sociosexuality and heightened sensitivity to sexual infidelity compared to emotional infidelity, which is buttressed by fundamental reproductive asymmetries. 

Segments

Female Penis Size Preferences
Copied to clipboard!
(00:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: The Prouse et al. study using 3D models established ideal female preferences for length at 6.3-6.4 inches and circumference at 4.8-5.0 inches.
  • Summary: Using 3D models bypasses misreporting issues inherent in written surveys regarding size perception. The preferred length (6.3-6.4 inches) is approximately the 95th percentile of the average erect penis size (5.16 inches). Women preferred sizes larger than they had personally experienced, suggesting an ideal preference divorced from common encounters.
Ideal vs. Actual Body Preferences
Copied to clipboard!
(00:06:40)
  • Key Takeaway: Ideal mate preferences, like preferred height or penis size, are often fanciful and may not align with minimum requirements or actual relationship outcomes.
  • Summary: Ideal preferences often represent an upper bound that is rarely encountered, similar to women preferring men taller than 6'2" but being flexible on the minimum. A behavioral outcome question revealed that 27% of women had broken up with a man at least partially over size, mostly due to the man being too small.
Size Extremes and Pleasure
Copied to clipboard!
(00:08:32)
  • Key Takeaway: There is likely an upper bound to preferred size due to potential pain (cervix impact), suggesting more latitude for being slightly small than being too large.
  • Summary: Pain from being hit against the cervix creates a hard threshold on the large side, unlike the small side where discomfort might be less absolute. This contrasts with height preferences, which typically show diminishing returns rather than a hard negative threshold.
Body Fat and Male Attractiveness
Copied to clipboard!
(00:14:37)
  • Key Takeaway: Women in a poll strongly preferred the ‘dad bod’ version of Ollie Murs over his extremely lean, post-transformation physique, suggesting women prefer men who are not too lean.
  • Summary: Research suggests the optimal body fat percentage for men preferred by women is around 13-14.1%, which is leaner than many gym enthusiasts assume. This preference likely signals formidability and the capacity for paternal investment rather than just aesthetic leanness.
Intrasexual Competition and Status
Copied to clipboard!
(00:25:53)
  • Key Takeaway: Male pursuit of extreme physiques (like bodybuilding) often serves as intrasexual competition for status, which can be more valuable than optimizing directly for female mate preferences.
  • Summary: Bodybuilding standards, which require difficult simultaneous mass gain and fat loss, become a status competition among men, similar to how fashion modeling can incentivize thinness beyond female preference optima. Men may value the status derived from achieving a difficult physique over the direct aesthetic appeal to women.
Male Preferences: Looks vs. Chastity
Copied to clipboard!
(00:47:37)
  • Key Takeaway: Men, on average, prioritize a woman’s physical looks over her sexual history (chastity) when assessing mate value, though both factors are considered personality cues.
  • Summary: Studies show men rate attractiveness higher than chastity, and the viral used Porsche ad reflects this intuition that looks often outweigh past sexual history for men. However, both virginity and very high body counts are often viewed negatively as they signal atypical social adjustment or potential future infidelity risk.
Female Preferences on Sexual History
Copied to clipboard!
(01:01:01)
  • Key Takeaway: Women exhibit a stronger discrimination against male virgins than men do against female virgins, though both sexes show a similar optimum preference for a low-to-moderate number of past partners.
  • Summary: The ‘ick’ factor regarding virginity is stronger for women, but their ideal preference peaks around 1-4 past partners for men, with a sharp decline occurring after the average (6 for men). This suggests women use high body counts as a cue for potential future infidelity risk.
Virginity Discrimination Nuances
Copied to clipboard!
(01:01:08)
  • Key Takeaway: Women show a stronger initial ‘ick’ factor toward male virgins than men do toward female virgins.
  • Summary: Research indicates women discriminate more harshly against male virgins initially, though both sexes show similar optimal preferences around one to four past partners. The decline in desirability for men begins noticeably after seven or eight past partners, suggesting a slightly longer acceptable tail for women before a sharp drop-off. This pattern challenges older evolutionary psychology intuitions suggesting chastity is far more important to women.
Appearance Cues and Sociosexuality
Copied to clipboard!
(01:02:56)
  • Key Takeaway: Appearance modifications like tattoos and piercings develop self-enforcing stereotypes linking them to sociosexuality.
  • Summary: In past eras, modifications like tattoos or choker necklaces carried harsher judgments as cues of sociosexuality. Once an association exists, even if initially based on a joke, social expectations reinforce the stereotype. People expecting these cues may play up to them, causing the perceived association to become empirically true over time.
Body Count and Relationship Success
Copied to clipboard!
(01:05:56)
  • Key Takeaway: Higher body counts strongly predict negative long-term relationship outcomes, including increased infidelity rates for both sexes.
  • Summary: Individuals with a body count above five have double the infidelity rate compared to those below five, a finding consistent across men and women. Past casual sex behavior predicts future casual sex behavior because it indicates enjoyment of that activity and a potential lack of commitment to monogamy. The concept of ‘getting it out of your system’ is analogous to building unhealthy habits, not extinguishing them.
Contextualizing Body Count Data
Copied to clipboard!
(01:09:09)
  • Key Takeaway: The context of past sexual partners (e.g., committed relationships vs. one-offs) is more predictive than the raw number.
  • Summary: While high body count correlates with poor outcomes, the underlying motivation matters; data does not yet confirm if early sexual exploration causally prevents future infidelity. Recent research shows people are sensitive to the recency and context of past partners, meaning five partners across five long-term relationships is viewed differently than five partners in the last month. For long-term monogamy, sowing wild oats is tentatively advised against.
Men’s Career Preferences
Copied to clipboard!
(01:18:59)
  • Key Takeaway: Successful men overwhelmingly pair with successful women, contradicting the meme that men prioritize disposition over career status.
  • Summary: Data shows richer men select richer women, and more educated men select more educated women, with high-status men pairing with high-status women. The meme suggesting men prefer an ‘Applebee’s waitress’ over a corporate executive is misleading, especially when the caveat is ‘if they treat them right.’ High-status men often seek partners they can relate to intellectually, valuing shared cognitive space.
Hypergamy and Status Reversal
Copied to clipboard!
(01:46:17)
  • Key Takeaway: Economic shifts have created hyperandrous pairings where lower-earning men partner with higher-earning women, causing cultural tension.
  • Summary: The bottom 40% of men are increasingly marrying women who earn more, while the top 20% of women are marrying men who earn less than them. These status-reversed marriages are associated with worse relationship outcomes in some European data, suggesting a conflict between strategic adaptation and evolved mate preferences. Humans are adaptable, but this transition from male provisioning norms to biparental provisioning norms creates short-term cultural growing pains.
Painful Realities Acknowledged
Copied to clipboard!
(01:58:39)
  • Key Takeaway: Serious relationship issues like domestic violence and infidelity must be acknowledged without over-optimistic dismissal, despite the overall trend being a period of tension during a provisioning strategy switch.
  • Summary: The speaker acknowledges the seriousness and pain associated with domestic violence, divorce, and infidelity, cautioning against downplaying these issues with excessive optimism. This tension is framed as a necessary period while humans switch provisioning strategies due to changing socioeconomic realities for women. This transition is inevitable unless women’s economic status is suppressed or coupling ceases entirely.
Socioeconomic Shifts and Adaptation
Copied to clipboard!
(01:59:36)
  • Key Takeaway: The continuation of women’s economic gains necessitates that individuals adapt their mating expectations or face remaining unpaired, as reversing these gains is morally untenable.
  • Summary: There is no conceivable future where women’s economic gains will be halted, meaning the mating market options for successful women must adapt or they will not pair up. For top-tier women, this means accepting a lower likelihood of pairing with someone at or above their economic level, or choosing not to pair at all. This situation forces both men and women to adapt, mirroring ancestral pressures to ‘adapt or die’.
Obesity and Mating Unattractiveness
Copied to clipboard!
(02:01:46)
  • Key Takeaway: A civilization may become too unattractive for widespread coupling if obesity, the global primary source of malnutrition, significantly lowers the average mate value across the population.
  • Summary: The speaker posits that rising obesity rates, which correlate temporally with declining birth and coupling rates, might be making the population collectively less attractive as sexual objects. Gaining significant weight can negatively impact libido and physical attractiveness, potentially causing a mismatch between an individual’s internal sense of mate value and their external physical reality. The widespread availability of GLP-1 agonists may soon test this hypothesis by rapidly reducing obesity.
Marriage Rates and Quality
Copied to clipboard!
(02:04:56)
  • Key Takeaway: Declining marriage rates are partially positive, reflecting that women are no longer forced into marriage due to financial dependence, leading to higher quality marriages among those who do participate.
  • Summary: The decline in marriage rates is not inherently bad, as it correlates with fewer people entering marriages they should avoid, evidenced by falling divorce rates. The cohort of Gen Z individuals currently marrying is on track for divorce rates similar to the 1950s, indicating higher commitment among participants. The primary driver for declining rates is likely women gaining financial independence, thus avoiding marriages where they would be financial prisoners.
Attractiveness and Relationship Outcomes
Copied to clipboard!
(02:06:38)
  • Key Takeaway: Higher physical attractiveness generally confers protective factors against infidelity and leads to more desirable, committed partners, though extreme attractiveness imbalances introduce unique relationship tensions.
  • Summary: Data suggests that being more attractive is a protective factor against infidelity, as partners tend to cheat up in attractiveness, and highly attractive individuals are less likely to be the target of infidelity. However, large mate value discrepancies can cause the higher-value partner to switch to a cost-inflicting strategy (e.g., excessive mate guarding, negging). Attractive people are also more likely to be the beneficiaries of relationship provisioning, such as oral sex.
Asymmetry in Non-Monogamy Costs/Benefits
Copied to clipboard!
(02:17:20)
  • Key Takeaway: Men experience both greater benefits (sexual variety) and greater costs (jealousy over partner’s intimacy) from non-monogamy, reflecting an underlying evolutionary asymmetry regarding paternity risk.
  • Summary: Men generally have higher sociosexuality and benefit more from sexual variety in non-monogamy, but they are also more distressed by the thought of their partner’s sexual intimacy with another man. This asymmetry is rooted in evolutionary biology, where women face no risk of raising a child that is not theirs, unlike men facing the risk of cuckoldry. The worst situation arises when the desire for extra-pair mating and jealousy levels are mismatched between partners.
Rich Gay Uncle Hypothesis
Copied to clipboard!
(02:31:03)
  • Key Takeaway: The Rich Gay Uncle Hypothesis suggests homosexuality persists via kin selection, where non-reproducing gay men invest resources in siblings’ offspring, though this is poorly supported in the West but observed in Samoan Fa’afafine.
  • Summary: This hypothesis attempts to explain the heritable component of homosexuality by proposing that gay men, who often have higher incomes and are more likely to be uncles, pass on their genes indirectly by supporting their kin’s reproduction. This mechanism is analogous to the grandmother hypothesis, where stepping off the direct reproductive competition pitch benefits the overall gene pool via relatives. While observed in the Fa’afafine of Samoa, the hypothesis is not well supported when applied broadly to Western homosexual populations.