The Dating Market Has Become a Free Market. What Happens If You Have No Leverage?

A useful starting point is Wheat Waffles’ 2022 video “40 Differences in Treatment Between a Sub5, Normie & Chad,” which has been viewed more than 1.1 million times.

The video divides men into three crude attractiveness categories and argues that each group experiences a meaningfully different dating market:

Chads — highly attractive men
Normies — ordinary-looking men
Sub-5s — clearly unattractive men

Wheat Waffles claims that, based on his own face-rating data:

9% of men are “Chads”
77% are “normies”
14% are “sub-5s”

These are not scientifically established population statistics. They come from a self-selected face-rating service, so the exact percentages should be treated skeptically.

But the model itself is interesting because it makes a stronger claim than “looks matter.”

It argues that men in these three groups experience different market regimes.

A Chad does not merely get somewhat better results.

Women sometimes approach him.

They make interactions easier.

They laugh at jokes that might not work for another man.

They find excuses to touch him.

He can supposedly use mediocre dating-app photos and still get matches.

He may obtain sex without first supplying commitment.

The video summarizes his position as:

women compete for his attention.

The normie experiences something else.

Women generally treat him neutrally at first.

He gets rejected frequently.

He needs better photos.

Social skill matters.

Fitness matters.

Shared interests matter.

“Game” matters.

Warm introductions work better than cold ones.

He may need to provide commitment before obtaining the same sexual access a much more attractive man receives easily.

The video summarizes his position as:

he competes with other men for women.

And then there is the “sub-5.”

In the video’s harshest formulation, even improvement has low returns.

Confidence may be read as arrogance.

Flirting can become creepy.

The gym is interpreted as compensation.

Dating apps produce essentially nothing.

The video claims that these men are effectively excluded from much of the market.

Its summary is:

they compete merely to participate.

Again, this is deliberately exaggerated internet language, not a scientifically demonstrated caste system.

But strip away the terminology and there is a serious underlying question:

What happens when a market maximizes individual freedom and exit, but bargaining power is distributed very unequally?

That question applies surprisingly well to both employment and dating.

And the labor market provides a useful analogy.

There are two genuinely good positions in a free labor market

Suppose you live in a country where employers can terminate workers relatively easily.

There are still two ways to feel economically secure.

The first is individual market power.

You are highly demanded.

Recruiters contact you.

Several companies would hire you.

You can negotiate compensation.

You can reject bad managers.

If your employer fires you tomorrow, it is unpleasant, but you are not terrified that you will spend the next twelve months sending out 400 applications.

Your employer has an exit option.

But so do you.

You have leverage because your outside option is strong.

The second good position is institutional protection.

Maybe you have tenure.

Maybe you work in a strongly unionized sector.

Maybe employment law makes dismissal difficult.

Maybe termination requires cause, notice, severance, arbitration, seniority rules, or collective bargaining.

You personally may not be exceptional.

But you don't need to be.

The institution gives ordinary workers bargaining power they could never obtain individually.

These are two very different forms of security:

Market security: “You can fire me. Someone else wants me.”
Institutional security: “You cannot cheaply fire me in the first place.”

Either can work.

The terrible position is having neither.

The employee with neither protection nor demand

Imagine a respectable middle-class professional.

He has a degree.

He has seven years of experience.

He is competent.

But his labor market is oversupplied.

His employer can eliminate his job next week.

And if that happens, a comparable replacement could take six to twelve months.

He applies to hundreds of positions.

Most never respond.

A few send automated rejections.

He gets several interviews.

One company puts him through five rounds and chooses somebody else.

Eventually he gets another job.

Then the whole risk resets.

What advice does this person usually receive?

learn another technical skill
become better at Excel
learn to code
get a certification
improve communication
network more
accumulate another three years of experience.

All of these things may improve employability.

But notice what they do not provide.

They do not provide structural security.

An additional certification might increase the probability of getting an interview from 4% to 6%.

That is useful.

But the worker is still living in a market where:

his employer can terminate him easily
replacement employment is difficult to obtain.

The underlying power relationship hasn't changed much.

This is why “be indispensable” is not actually the same thing as job security.

An employee can know every internal system.

His coworkers can depend on him.

Management can like him.

He can work extremely hard.

Those things reduce the probability that the company fires him.

They do not remove the company's ability to do it.

And if being fired would be catastrophic, that changes his behavior long before anyone actually fires him.

He becomes cautious.

Don't antagonize management.

Keep delivering.

Keep learning.

Stay useful.

Avoid negotiating too aggressively.

Do not become expensive.

Do not let your performance slip.

This may look like psychological insecurity.

But some of it is simply rational bargaining behavior.

If one side can terminate the relationship relatively cheaply and the other side needs twelve months to recover, they do not have equal leverage.

Now apply the same framework to dating

Modern relationships increasingly maximize individual choice.

You can date whom you want.

You can reject whom you want.

You can leave a boyfriend or girlfriend.

And modern marriage, despite legal obligations around property, children and support, generally cannot compel somebody to continue being romantically attached to you.

That is an enormous expansion of individual freedom.

But free exit has distributional consequences.

The employment market has two ways to protect a weak participant:

high market demand
or institutional protection.

Modern dating retains the first.

It has largely weakened the second.

There is no romantic labor union.

There is no collective bargaining agreement governing affection.

No government can appropriately order someone:

“You must continue loving this person.”

So at the most fundamental level, the contemporary relationship operates under something close to:

continued participation by mutual consent.

Either side can leave.

That makes the quality of your outside option extremely important.

And now the Chad/normie/sub-5 distinction starts looking less like internet slang and more like a crude theory of bargaining power.

Chad: the worker recruiters are fighting over

The Chad is analogous to the highly demanded professional.

His biggest advantage isn't merely that he gets more matches.

It is that losing one relationship does not threaten his access to the entire romantic market.

If a girlfriend leaves him:

other women are interested
he gets inbound attention
dating apps work
approaching works
casual opportunities exist
rebuilding may be relatively quick.

So his internal negotiating position is fundamentally different.

He can credibly say:

“I want this relationship, but I do not need this relationship at any cost.”

That doesn't mean he is emotionally indifferent.

A billionaire can love a company he owns.

A star employee can genuinely care about his job.

The point is that loss is survivable.

That creates optionality.

And optionality creates leverage.

The video actually captures this repeatedly.

It claims women may:

approach attractive men
initiate touch
laugh more readily
tolerate weak photos
accept casual arrangements
become frustrated when he does not text back
compete for his attention.

If even part of that is directionally true, the important implication isn't simply:

Chad gets more sex.

It's:

Chad operates on the choosing side of the market.

He is the scarce worker.

Normie: employed, but structurally insecure

The normie occupies a stranger position.

He is viable.

He can date.

He can marry.

He is not excluded.

But according to the video's model, his success depends much more on what he adds to his baseline appearance.

Fitness.

Career.

Humor.

Social competence.

Good photographs.

Style.

Confidence.

Shared interests.

Persistence.

Timing.

Commitment.

The video repeatedly contrasts the normie with the Chad this way.

The Chad can allegedly post a bad mirror selfie and still get results.

The normie needs strong photos.

The Chad can attract women largely through appearance.

The normie needs “a few other things going for him.”

The Chad may not need “game.”

The normie benefits substantially from learning it.

The Chad sometimes receives female pursuit.

The normie generally has to initiate.

This means the normie resembles the competent middle-class employee.

He can obtain the position.

But he has to compete hard for it.

And losing it may be expensive.

Suppose an ordinary man spends a year dating before finding a woman he genuinely wants.

He initiates dozens of conversations.

He goes through rejections.

He plans dates.

He develops the relationship.

Eventually they become exclusive.

Now compare their outside options.

If the relationship ends, perhaps rebuilding something comparable takes him another year.

Maybe longer.

He therefore has a powerful incentive to retain the relationship.

This produces advice that sounds remarkably similar to employment advice:

stay attractive
keep earning
maintain confidence
remain interesting
don't become complacent
keep dating your wife
keep improving yourself.

Again, none of this is necessarily bad advice.

The problem is what kind of advice it is.

It is the romantic equivalent of:

keep improving your professional skills so your employer continues to value you.

That lowers termination risk.

It does not eliminate structural vulnerability.

If your outside option remains poor, you are still highly exposed to unilateral exit.

Sub-5: the worker in a collapsed labor market

The video's most controversial category is the “sub-5.”

Its claim isn't merely that unattractive men have worse outcomes.

It claims their return on investment collapses.

Going to the gym has little impact.

Confidence is reinterpreted negatively.

“Game” barely works.

Dating apps produce almost no legitimate matches.

Cold approaches fail.

Warm approaches fail.

Money may buy access but not the same underlying desire.

That is an extremely strong claim, and I do not think the evidence establishes such a hard threshold.

But economically, the model is easy to understand.

Imagine someone living in a region where demand for his occupation has collapsed.

People tell him:

improve your résumé.

He does.

get another certificate.

He does.

learn another software tool.

He does.

become more confident in interviews.

He does.

But there are still 800 applicants for every decent job.

At some point, marginal improvement is no longer the obvious strategy.

The rational question becomes:

Why am I continuing to optimize inside this market?

And that leads to a very different set of options.

Self-improvement is not the same thing as structural security

This distinction matters.

If you're poorly positioned in the labor market, learning Excel may help.

But there are larger strategies:

move to another city
move to another country
change industries
enter a protected profession
retrain into a scarce occupation
leave the labor market and organize your life differently.

Dating has analogous strategies.

“Gymmaxxing” is basically human-capital investment.

So is earning more.

So is becoming more socially skilled.

These may improve your rank.

But if you're still in a market where your bargaining power remains low, they haven't changed the structure.

A man can add fifteen pounds of muscle and still have weak outside options.

A man can increase his income from $80,000 to $150,000 and still discover that highly attractive men receive spontaneous desire that money does not replicate.

There is no obvious salary where:

$X income = Chad.

And if an ordinary man needs top-one-percent income merely to approach the negotiating position an attractive man received genetically, that itself demonstrates the imbalance.

Strategy one: become genuinely scarce

The cleanest solution is obvious.

Become the romantic equivalent of a highly recruited employee.

Become sufficiently desirable that women compete for access to you.

That maximizes individual optionality.

You no longer need institutional protection because you can afford termination.

But this solution has the same problem as telling every worker:

become a world-class machine-learning engineer.

It cannot be population-wide advice.

Scarcity is relative.

Everyone cannot simultaneously occupy the top 10%.

Strategy two: move markets

This is where geography becomes much more interesting than generic self-improvement.

Suppose a man is mediocre in Toronto.

There are thousands of similar men.

His ethnicity is ordinary.

His profession is ordinary.

The sex ratio isn't favorable.

Women with his preferred characteristics receive enormous attention.

Now put exactly the same man somewhere else.

Perhaps:

his nationality is rare
his education carries more status
his income is unusually high locally
his appearance fits local preferences better
the sex ratio is more favorable
competing men are fewer.

He hasn't changed.

His relative market position has.

This is geomaxxing in its most economically coherent form.

It is exactly like moving from a city where 5,000 programmers compete for 100 openings to one where companies are desperate for programmers.

You do not need to become globally elite.

You need to become relatively scarce in your actual market.

In that sense, the objective is to become locally Chad-like.

Strategy three: reintroduce institutional protection

There is another possibility that modern dating discussions often ignore:

religious or tightly embedded communities.

Religion can function, imperfectly, like a labor institution.

Not because it legally traps anybody in marriage.

Modern personal autonomy prevents a true romantic equivalent of employment tenure.

But embedded communities can still create:

mediated introductions
family involvement
strong norms around fidelity
reputational consequences for cheating
expectations that marriage survives temporary dissatisfaction
community mediation during conflict
pressure against opportunistic exit.

That changes the relationship from a completely isolated bilateral market transaction.

There are third parties.

There are norms.

There is an institution.

The analogy isn't perfect, but it is considerably closer to:

union + professional guild + mediation mechanism

than to Tinder.

This is why simply dating someone who checks “Christian” or “Jewish” on an app is not the same thing.

The protection comes from actual embeddedness.

If neither partner participates in the institution, there is nothing to enforce the norm.

Strategy four: deliberately choose a market where you are on the strong side

There is another uncomfortable possibility.

Instead of maximizing the quality of the partner you can barely obtain, choose within a pool where you are highly demanded.

The employment analogy is straightforward.

Suppose you can barely get a $200,000 position where every employer has twenty equally qualified replacements.

Or you can take a $150,000 role in a market where five companies desperately want your skills.

The first maximizes headline compensation.

The second may maximize bargaining power.

Dating has a similar frontier.

A man can continually pursue the most attractive women who will occasionally accept him.

That may place him at the bottom of their feasible choice set.

Or he can select somewhat differently and become unusually desirable within that pool.

This doesn't mean dating someone you find unattractive.

That creates a different problem.

It means recognizing that:

maximum obtainable partner quality and maximum relationship security are not necessarily the same optimization target.

Strategy five: exit

And there is one solution both labor-market and dating discussions routinely underweight.

Stop participating.

When a region has terrible employment prospects, not everyone becomes a software engineer or emigrates.

Some people reduce career ambition.

They live with family.

They take low-paying but abundant work.

They organize life around children, parents, church, community, hobbies, or leisure.

They effectively decide:

the career market isn't where I'm going to compete for status.

There is a romantic equivalent.

If someone concludes:

courtship requires too much effort
his outside options remain weak
relationship termination would be extremely costly
he dislikes the bargaining structure
changing geography or institutions isn't attractive

then one coherent response is:

stop organizing adulthood around obtaining a relationship.

Keep friends.

Keep family.

Build a business.

Become excellent at a craft.

Travel.

Compete professionally.

Play sports.

Create things.

Mentor younger people.

Build wealth.

Develop intellectual interests.

This is not the comforting advice:

“Stop looking and love will find you.”

For an ordinary man with little inbound attention, that may simply mean nobody comes.

True exit requires accepting that possibility.

It means:

I may not have a long-term romantic relationship, and I am deliberately choosing the alternative allocation of my life anyway.

That is a real compromise.

But staying in a market where you dislike the terms is also a compromise.

Free markets maximize choice. They do not maximize security.

That is the larger point.

Liberal societies place enormous value on individual optionality.

Employers can change employees.

Employees can quit employers.

People can choose partners.

People can leave partners.

This produces freedom.

But the value of freedom depends partly on your bargaining position.

For the highly demanded worker:

freedom is leverage.

For the worker nobody else wants:

freedom mostly means the employer is free to replace him.

The same formal rule creates radically different lived experiences.

That may also be true in dating.

For the Chad:

“Either of us can leave”

can feel liberating.

He has alternatives.

For the normie:

“Either of us can leave”

may feel considerably more precarious because rebuilding the relationship could require another long cycle of rejection, courtship and search.

And for someone at the bottom of the market, the loss may feel potentially irreversible.

This suggests that much mainstream relationship advice answers the wrong question.

It asks:

How can you become a better partner so that your relationship succeeds?

That is equivalent to asking:

How can you become such a good employee that your company doesn't fire you?

Useful question.

But not the only one.

The structural questions are different:

How strong is my outside option?
Am I in the right market?
Can I enter a market where I'm relatively scarce?
Is there an institution that meaningfully protects commitment?
Am I maximizing partner quality at the expense of bargaining security?
And if I dislike all available versions of this market, should I participate at all?

Those are less romantic questions.

But they may be more honest ones.