The 'man to admire' fantasy collides with the real dating market

The 'man to admire' fantasy collides with the real dating market

What happens when admiration is demanded in a relationship and the market doesn't supply it? A journalism assignment to profile women who delayed motherhood for career reasons hit a wall: the candidates wanted children, yes, but not with just anyone. They wanted someone 'to admire'. The phrase, turned into a slogan, sums up a tension that is no longer intimate: it is economic. Because if admiration is the selection criterion, the supply shrinks to statistical irrelevance and the price — in time, in loneliness, in offspring — skyrockets.

The diagnosis circulating in investment and analysis forums doesn't talk about love, it talks about supply and demand. The claim is that the dating market works like any other: perceived value, competition and opportunity cost. And that the narrative of romance is the packaging, not the product. Under that logic, demanding admiration is like seeking a scarce asset with a very high risk premium.

How many men are 'worthy of admiration'?

The most repeated calculation is devastating: if being admirable requires being good, honest, hardworking and also an object of admiration, the ratio shrinks to one in a hundred or one in a thousand. The question that trinc is not rhetorical: is the seeker herself up to that one-in-a-thousand standard? Because for every admirable candidate there are, according to this analysis, a thousand competitors. The conclusion drawn is uncomfortable: the problem is not a shortage of men, but the disproportion between what is asked and what is offered.

Some add another layer: it used to be enough to be 'good, honest and hardworking'. Now the bar is admiration, a subjective, volatile and hard-to-verify standard. The result is a funnel that filters out most men and, along the way, the women who apply that filter.

The 'carousel' and the karma of turning 30

The carousel metaphor keeps coming up: those who rode the promiscuity-and-fun carousel now get off late, when the restaurants in the park have already closed. The thesis is that those who got off earlier built their lives elsewhere and are no longer available. They call that 'karma', and celebrate it with a smirk. The underlying idea is that the market doesn't forgive timing: the window of choice closes and what's left is what others didn't want.

That narrative has a less brutal version: revising expectations. Looking for someone to love, with virtues and flaws, not an ideal. If you're incapable of seeing that, the warning goes, your destiny is loneliness. The warning doesn't spare anyone responsibility: it also criticizes those who settle for the first 'jerk' who comes along.

Solo insemination and the genes debate

One of the roughest points is the decision to have a child alone through artificial insemination. The argument is that it's the worst possible option: the future child's genes aren't selected, the child will never know who their father is, and the cost in time and money is enormous even for a couple. The question posed is at what point it was concluded that being alone was better than being with an average man. The implied answer is propaganda and arrogance.

No counterpoint arrives. There is no defense of that option in the material, only the observation that it is a 'surreal' idea to those who propose it. The underlying fact is that solo parenting is a statistical anomaly, not an established trend.

The 'cart pusher' and height as a proxy for status

The figure of the 'cart pusher' — the man who ends up raising someone else's children or his own after being chosen by elimination — runs through the thread with mockery. It says many women end up loving their Pepe the cart pusher or their Manolo with a beer belly after failing to land an alpha. And that hardworking men who have partners have them because they are physically attractive. Height, it is argued, is a primitive proxy for strength; in postindustrial society, the real proxy is socioeconomic status. A doctor who is 1.70 m tall does better with women than a mechanic who is 1.85 m, it is claimed.

The discussion about height has its own logic: it asks what the benefit of height is in a war (offering a bigger target) and in peacetime (paying more for clothes). The answer is that the preference is hardwired from the Paleolithic. Biological determinism blends with the economic without apparent friction.

The final warning: 'don't want what others didn't want'

The most repeated piece of advice is a variant of the adverse selection principle: if nobody wanted her before, there must be a reason. It is applied to women who reach 30 without a stable partner and extends to the men who might accept them. The phrase 'don't want what others didn't want' condenses a radical distrust of other people's relationship history.

The analysis doesn't reach a consensus at the end. Some see a crisis of female expectations; others, a simple law of supply and demand that will adjust prices over time. What nobody disputes is that the phrase 'I'm looking for someone to admire' has stopped being a personal preference and has become a market factor. And like every market factor, it has a price. The problem is that nobody wants to pay it.