Revenge of the Nerds, Part 2

Tyler Cowen writes:

[I]n the real world, romantic competition has radically changed. Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You is the apt title of Sean Thomas’s 2006 book about Internet dating, and there really are, just as millions of men are now potential matches for each woman. But the sad truth for members of both sexes is that millions of rivals are also waiting, waiting to undercut their chances and crush their hopes before they even get close to a first date. All they will “see” is that their charming e-mail to “prettyblonde47” or “bronc0451” was never answered. The competition now is invisible, the rivals ­faceless.

Ezra Klein comments:

Used to be that you competed with folks of approximately your class and world. By being the best in your sphere -- a best that had definable characteristics, and that could thus be worked towards -- you could win the competition. Now you're competing with everyone, and all of their talents, and you have no idea which ones are relevant, and which you need to match, and which don't matter, and which you even know about. It's not that you can't compete with what you can't see, but that you can't compete with what you don't know, with what's too far outside your sphere of experience.

In the dating sphere, I think this "invisible competition" is actually a very good thing. In the old, sectioned-off world, men focused way too much on competing with and one-upping each other, and not enough on actually pleasing the women. Women basically became the reward for defeating one's fellow man. Now, hopefully, men will realize that a relationship is about a guy and a girl, not about a guy and a bunch of other guys.

And in a way, technology has once again delivered a "revenge of the nerds" - thanks to the internet, nerds can focus on romancing women one-on-one instead of comparing themselves to Johnny Football Star. So nerds win, women win, and Johnny Football Star has to rethink his competitive ways.

(The rest of Cowen's and Klein's posts, by the way, liken this dating competition to outsourcing, but the two cases seem very different to me. In the economic sphere, a worker is unsure what employers need, because companies' needs are constantly changing. What women want from a man, however, is fairly constant.)