Slashdot Mirror
A Quantitative Analysis of Online Dating
imjustatomato writes "Never before has something so human and primitive as dating been reducible to such discrete values. A study analyzes the data of an online dating service. When do you like someone like yourself? Among online dating members, "marital status" and "wants children" are the two most influential characteristics to match. Other interesting findings are: men initiate 73.3% of messages, but their initiations are 17.9% less likely to be reciprocated; 78.2% of messages are never responded to."
Why not link to TFA? Here is a more direct link to the research. I wonder why we got linked from the summary to another summary. Maybe because the summary is new today but the research is 2 years old.
Anyhow, none of the numbers seem all that surprising, except that 55% of active members are women (63% of all members were men).
For what it's worth (and I imagine it's worth a lot to slashdot readers), my experiences with online dating have always been best with okcupid. It is free, novel (fun matching tests), and its participants always seem, to me, to be more appealing than those of eharmony, match.com, and all the other paysites.
I just married one of the woman I met on match.com in 2003, though the path to getting here was exhausting. I had 13 first dates where either I was interested but she wasn't or she was interested but I wasn't. By the time my wife searched for me and sent me an email, I was very tired of the whole thing and about ready to throw in the towel. But it looked like I would have an interesting conversation with this one last woman, so I went to the coffee shop and had an amazing night.
Too many women (and probably men) are putting up unrealistically flattering photos, which means an unpleasant suprise in person. My wife unintentionally put up fairly unflattering photos and when I saw her in person, I had to check the room again, as I was so pleasantly suprised. I told her that her photos didn't do her justice and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Just remember that dating websites only kinda solve one part of the problem. They get you introductions to people you would never otherwise meet. If they're honest on their profile, you also get some early answers to important questions, but there are no guarantees there. You're still going to have to go through all of the work of really seeing if the relationship makes sense and then putting in the work to build that relationship into something significant, with all of the joys and difficulties that will bring.
As for the income thing, match equates "don't want to answer" with "less than $25k/year". My wife didn't want to date the unemployed and put "at least $25k/year" as a filter and only saw me because I had recently made my income visible. So my wife wasn't being a gold-digger, but wouldn't have seen me if I hadn't put my income out there. Match.com's decision-making on this question is particularly questionable.
Regards,
Ross