The gay dating market: when a 4.5 thinks he's in the 7's league

The lgtb dating market is broken: the 4.5 now rejects the 7

What happens when someone who considers himself a 4.5 feels entitled to reject someone who describes himself as a 7? The diagnosis is making the rounds with a name attached: inflated expectations in a market where supply and demand no longer add up. A man who describes himself as a top, 175 centimeters tall, blue eyes and "straight-looking good looks" claims that the rejections he receives always come from profiles that, in his view, rank lower: fatter, less attractive, worse looking and, he adds, "textbook NPCs."

The thesis isn't new, but the tone is. What used to be whispered in private is now written in capital letters: "because-I'm-worth-it-ism", that conviction of deserving a 190-centimeter hunk with a fat salary and a mansion in Florida without ever having finished high school. The complaint has a market logic behind it: there are four bottoms for every top, the argument goes, and tops are scarce. When supply tightens, whoever believes himself scarce raises his price. The problem arises when everyone believes themselves scarce at the same time.

The law of the jungle applied to desire

The original post doesn't ask for empathy: it asks for a scoring system. Its author grades himself —a 7— and grades everyone else, and from there builds a hierarchy in which other people's rejections are not a legitimate preference but a statistical insolence. "You're not bad at all, but I'm looking for a different type" becomes, in his reading, an act of arrogance from someone who isn't "in a position to choose."

There's something of romantic accounting in all this. If the market works, the 7 should pair with the 7 and the 4.5 with the 4.5. Reality, however, is messier: people fall in love outside their box, and reject outside it too. What the diagnosis calls unrealistic expectations may simply be that desire doesn't obey a spreadsheet.

The scarce top and the demanding bottom

The demographic argument has some substance. The ratio of four bottoms for every top —a figure the post gives without a source— would make tops a scarce good and therefore command a market price. From there to concluding that bottoms shouldn't have demands is a leap the story itself doesn't justify: scarcity doesn't imply a right of admission.

The conversation soon drifted toward other questions: whether "hetero-curious" is a new category or the same old lgtb man under another name, whether the problem is dating or culture, and even whether a rejection on a hookup app deserves sociological analysis or just an ego pill. Someone pointed out that the problem isn't the market, but the seller.

Dignity as bargaining chip

The post's closing is almost sarracena: if you're ugly, compensate with personality, style, pleasant manners, "some life in your eyes." It's reasonable advice wrapped in a contempt that ruins it. Because the same person asking for inner beauty to be valued is the one rating butts and faces to decimal places.

The paradox sums it all up: everyone wants to be chosen for who they are and, at the same time, they choose based on what they see. In that tug of war, the one who believes he's a 7 and gets an "I'm looking for a different type" isn't facing an injustice of the system. He's facing the market working against him, which is exactly what he asked the market to do to everyone else.