The five factors are yours to build. These three are the terrain you build on. They don't add to your score — they scale it, sometimes brutally. Ignoring them is how people do everything "right" and still wonder why it isn't working.
The Clock
SMV is a curve, not a constant.
Every factor is time-stamped. Looks and fertility cues are front-loaded; money, status, and prestige accrue with age. Your score isn't a fixed point — it's a trajectory, and the slope can matter as much as the height.
Contested The popular claim that men peak late and women peak early is grounded in stated age preferences and fertility cues, but routinely inflated into a cartoon expiry date. It's a soft, averaged trend — not a personal deadline.
Use it to respect timing, not to panic. The clock rewards starting now over starting "when you're finally ready."
The Market
Your score is always relative.
There is no absolute SMV. The same profile is a 6 in one city and an 8 in another, depending on the sex ratio, the age pool, and the competition around it. The market sets the exchange rate; you just hold the currency.
Mixed Operational sex ratio shifts commitment norms and bargaining power for everyone in a market (Guttentag & Secord, 1983). Online, the desirability hierarchy is steep and most people chase "up" (Bruch & Newman, 2018).
A brutal local market is data, not a verdict. Sometimes the highest-return move isn't raising your score — it's changing the market you're scored in.
The Context
The weights themselves change.
The five factors aren't weighted the same in every situation. For short-term attraction, Looks, dominance, and immediacy spike. For long-term, stability, prestige, warmth, and reliability take over. A profile tuned for one can underperform in the other.
Solid Men and women run distinct short- vs long-term mating strategies, and preferences shift accordingly (Sexual Strategies Theory — Buss & Schmitt, 1993).
Know which game you're playing. Optimizing your whole self for short-term metrics, then wondering why long-term keeps failing, is a category error.