[allenbrunson]

personally, i would never use a dating site built by a guy who uses terms like “body count.” you cannot expect to have a decent relationship with someone if you are dehumanizing them from the start.

i can understand people’s frustrations with dating. the stakes could not be any higher. if you fail, it is way too easy to take the wrong lessons. i personally failed at this for decades before i figured it out.

a few years ago, i married the most wonderful woman in the world. and yes, i found her on a dating site. (one of dozens i tried over the years.) in my case at least, i made it a lot harder for myself than i had to. based on the comments i see here, i think that applies to a lot of you guys.

hacker news comments are not a great venue for this topic. if any of you find ypurself similarly frustrated, i am willing to try to help. you can find out how to contact me by following the links in my profile.

[dauertewigkeit]

There is really nothing wrong with thinking about your partner's "body count". It's just taboo, because like literally every other mating metric we use, it is trying to assess the value of another human being. But is "body count" more offensive than "height" or "weight", or "college degree"? All are saying the same thing, "if you aren't at least X, you're not worth enough for me to give you a chance". And now you can retort, "but body count shouldn't matter at all, because...". Well you can literally try to protest against every other mating metric as well. I don't see the difference. Why is it valid for a person to say, "I don't find him attractive because his eyes are 2mm too far apart". But invalid to say, "I don't find him attractive, because he's been too promiscuous in the past". Both are valid and people crying about it should get over themselves. As far as mating metrics go it is far from the most unjust.

[allenbrunson]

“body count” is not really offensive, more like irrelevant. it makes about as much sense to take that into account as how many people someone has ever talked to. i can’t attribute “body count” to anything but prudishness.

this is exactly the sort of thing i was talking about, with so many people having the wrong ideas about dating. which i am not going to discuss any further in this site’s comments, truly the worst possible venue for it.

[wiseowise]

> personally, i would never use a dating site built by a guy who uses terms like “body count.” you cannot expect to have a decent relationship with someone if you are dehumanizing them from the start.

So selecting people by appearance is not dehumanizing, but by “body count” is?