UPDATE: Wife Bounty is paused, as the high-reach strategy I've chosen to pursue is building a matchmaking app lol.
I'm currently offering $20,000 to whoever introduces me to my future wife (at the end, I'll explain the rules and how you can win it).
Is this cringey? Tryhard? Pathetic?
Some think so, like this "dating coach" who wrote an article "tearing me apart":
So why take this kind of public shaming? Why not just meet a girl on Bumble or at a bar like everyone else?
I do fine on the dating apps — over 8k likes on OKCupid, and as many matches on Tinder and Bumble.
Maybe it's because I'm awkward and bad with girls? A lot of guys (including that "dating coach") assume this when they tell me to "learn game, bro", "work on yourself", and "take responsibility". But actually I've studied game and pickup artistry (PUA) extensively. I'm very comfortable talking to girls.
The truth is, I'm doing it because most people's ideas about dating are very wrong (including the dating coach above). If you really want to optimize for finding a partner, it looks nothing like what's currently out there.
My wife bounty is part of an elaborate strategy I've devised, not just to find a girl, but to find the right girl.
Let me explain.
It all starts with a key insight. There are two possible outcomes for a relationship:
- Short-term fling
- Long-term commitment
And, crucially, they are mutually exclusive. You can only optimize for one at a time because they prescribe strategies that are completely antithetical to one another. Most of the pain people experience in dating comes from trying to have both.
When dating, most people have the instinct to selectively represent themselves, or even misrepresent themselves, in order to appear as attractive possible. They use the most flattering photos they have, they talk about how adventurous and exciting their life is, they avoid topics of conversation that might be controversial, and they brush all their flaws under the rug.
That's fine if you're just looking for a hookup because the costs of falsifying yourself over a short period of time are small, so they're probably worth the increased options (I'm speaking purely from a game-theoretic perspective — lying is morally bad).
PUA, for example, falls into this category.
However, if you're looking for a long-term relationship, then this is a terrible strategy. If you misrepresent yourself at all in the selection stage, you will pay for it for the remainder of the relationship. The costs of falsification are incredibly high. This is why a lot of relationships fail. Both people pretend to be someone they're not at the start, and then when they get comfortable, they slowly revert back to their true selves. Their partner perceives it as them changing, because they only ever knew the fake version.
This is virtually guaranteed, since they've filled their pool only with people who are wrong for them. If you advertise yourself as having different traits than the ones you actually have, the odds of any given person you've selected for being a good fit are going to be less than the baseline odds of a random person off the street being a good fit.
So using our outward-facing materials as a selection sieve not for breadth, but for specificity is the first of two variables we want to control in the ideal long-term strategy.
Now, you might argue that it's okay to scoop up the wrong people, as long as you get the right one in there too. Cast as wide a net as possible, then sort through and choose the best, right?
Mayyybe that could end up working out, by pure luck (it would still be suboptimal), for fairly average people. By virtue of their averageness, people who fit their combination of personality traits will be common.
But what if you're weirder, more eccentric, or more unique in any way? The person who's right for you is going to be much rarer. They might be 1 in 1000, 1 in 10,000, or even 1 in 100,000. Even if you have a new first date every night for the rest of your life, you're not even going to get close.
So this means selecting out the wrong people is almost as important as selecting in the right ones.
And this isn't even taking into consideration the possibility that the supposedly positive traits you're advertising might actually be negatives for your ideal partner. For example, you might say that you like to go out and have lots of adventures, because that's perceived as attractive, but in reality you like to spend most nights at home with a book. Your ideal partner is going to be a homebody too, and what if they don't even get scooped into your net in the first place?
What all of this means is that, if you're looking for a long-term relationship, you should be actively trying to put your worst foot forward. Your worst qualities are the most important ones to find compatibility on.
If you're going to bang your hip on the kitchen counter every single time you walk by, you want to know that before you buy the house and live in it for 30 years. I can't imagine the hell of having to try and win over my partner every day for the rest of my life.
The most common suggestion I get on my date-me page is that I could be doing X, Y, and Z to be more attractive. Of course! But I don't want to. My date-me page is me being perfectly willing to be repulsive to the average sensibility.
But won't that turn away even the right person?
No.
For the right person, just as the wrong "features" are actually flaws, your "flaws" will actually be features. For example, I have a dark sense of humor. To the wrong girl, that will be off-putting. But the right girl will find it hilarious.
Of course, I don't want to accidentally misrepresent myself in the wrong direction by making it look like I'm less attractive than I actually am. So I want to show off both my attractive and unattractive qualities, to their fullest and most extreme.
Altogether, this radical honesty solves for specificity. It means that we are filtering (and filtering hard) for only the right person. But it's also true that being specific decreases our pool size, so what happens if our pool size basically hits zero? We're radically honest and it seems no one is interested in who we genuinely are.
This is most people's biggest fear, and it's why they're driven to start fudging the truth to get more interest. But actually, it's a completely different problem.
It's one we'll address with our second key variable: reach.
Reach means how many people are seeing us — NOT how many people we're seeing. Once we have our specificity dialed in, the next thing we need to do is get exposure to the number of people that specificity demands. Even if your attractive qualities only gain the interest of 5% of people, if you end up being seen by 100,000 people, that's 5000 suitors you now have.
When you realize this, it changes the strategic landscape entirely. Suddenly, the entire name of the game is being radically honest and projecting that as far and wide as possible.
Using the apps is one way of extending your reach. But remember, reach only counts if it's likely to include the person you're looking for, and if that person is likely to actually see and evaluate you.
Both of these things eliminate Tinder for me. I don't believe my future wife will be a Tinder user, and even if she were, I don't think, simply based on how Tinder is designed, it would give her enough information to realize I'm her ideal. So Tinder is not a reach-expander, at least for me.
I considered at one point renting out billboards across the country. But even those are just okay because they're getting a nearly random sample (made non-random only by geography). A better idea would be to buy an ad slot on a podcast you think your ideal partner is likely to be a listener of. Now we're in business.
Solving the problem of reach is where all your creativity should go.
Now, if you end up getting a lot of reach, you might actually find you're getting too much interest, which again, is a bad thing. So it's best to think of it as two dials. Start by getting as much reach as possible, then turn up how much you advertise your traditionally negative qualities in order to get your total applicants back down into the single digits. Then you can invest the time to carefully date each one of them.
The wife bounty is just one of the ways I've devised of getting reach.
The rules of the bounty say that the person who introduces me to the girl I end up marrying gets $20k, and every other person involved in the chain (even if it's something as small as a retweet) gets $100. This incentivizes people to spread my date-me page far and wide.
But there's another aspect to it. It's actually designed to be cringe. If it's cringe, it makes people want to mock it, which is free publicity. I created it with the hope that a streamer or other prominent personality would make fun of it, thereby driving eyeballs. This plays to my strengths because I'm disagreeable and don't mind being made fun of. Am I worried that this will turn away the girl I'm looking for? Not at all, because the girl I'm looking for will recognize the genius of this strategy and won't give any more of a shit about public opinion than me.
In total, it's already been seen by at least 30,000 people, and I've gotten maybe 30 very high-quality submissions from it. I'm currently in the early stages of dating a few of them. We'll see where those go, but as of now, submissions are still open.
Here are the rules of the bounty:
- I will increase this number every year until I find her. The number listed above is the current bounty.
- The amount will be paid out upon our engagement or relationship that lasts at least 5 years, whichever comes first.
- I'll add 5% annual interest for the intervening time between the introduction and the cutoff, paid upfront, yearly. If we break up before the cutoff, you keep this.
- When we start dating, I'll put the money into an escrow account which will be managed by a third party according to these rules.
- I will also pay $100 to everyone involved in the causal chain before the final introducer. So if it's: her -> A -> B -> C -> me, C gets the 20k, A and B both get $100.
- Even if we get divorced, you keep the money.
You can make a submission for yourself or someone you know on my date-me page.
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