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Of Science and Choice In Online Dating
Must be summertime, as online publications turn to the contemplation of Internet dating. The NY Times's piece (registration may be required) takes a not particularly deep look at the reality behind the "science" claims of chemistry.com, eHarmony.com, and others. "The question is how much it really matters to users if the methods have any scientific basis. A friend of mine... said she looked at several dating sites and chose the ones that looked like they had 'the least riffraff.'" Technology Review focuses on studies showing that the overwhelming number of choices presented by many dating sites can be counterproductive: "...more search options lead to less selective processing by reducing users' cognitive resources, distracting them with irrelevant information, and reducing their ability to screen out inferior options." The article concludes with a look at the startup Omnidate, which offers technology for 3D virtual dating. The site has had twice as many women (by percentage) sign up as the other dating sites typically see.
Run by a couple of maths grads. Last time I looked they were using a regression analysis to match people.
The site's also free.
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I know you're joking/trolling, but there is something to arranged marriages when done properly. One of the biggest problems in marriages is the tendency for people to form them while stupid. There's a lack of objectivity that people have when making those decisions, which are often times more apparent from a parent or friend. The ability to consider things other than just hormones.
Of course it can work the other way as well, but the key is to actually care and to take the time to consider all the angles.
I was divorced in 1998 after 18 years of marriage.
After a series of "fixups" and other misguided attempts by friends and family, I tried Match.com. I did the questions accurately and honestly. My profile text made it clear I was (a) highly intelligent, (b) looking for a permanent relationship, and (c) pretty particular about who I dated.
Within 72 hours of posting, I had over 400 "matches" in a 50 mile radius of me. WHAT? I don't live in NY or LA, so the statistics were mind-boggling. I imagined there must be a secret kingdom of single, middle-aged women in that 50 miles, just waiting for yours truly to show up on Match.com. The sad reality was that well over 99% of the so-called "matches" were train wrecks, literally and figuratively. I dated 10-12 women from Match and NONE were anything close to a "keeper".
So, one night, I waded through the eHarmony process, set the radius for 150 miles, and waited. ...and waited. ....and waited. Finally, after 6-7 weeks, I got TWO matches. One was a "crossover" from Match that I actually kind of liked, but she declared we had no chemistry on the 2nd and final date. The other match and I spent some time in communicating via eHarmony and finally agreed to a real date in September of 2003.
We got engaged on the following Valentine's Day...lured her into a jewelry store that I'd enlisted to help, and surprised her with a diamond ring. Everyone applauded...it was a nice moment.
The wedding was a few months later in July, so we've just celebrated our 5th anniversary.
A couple of years ago, eHarmony tried to get us to appear in one of their commercials, but we declined.
I don't know about the "science", but we do get along really well, so I have no complaint.
I am my own gestalt.
I heard that E-harmony includes people that are no longer active on the site in your "matches". Back when I tried eharmony, I had written to a lot of people who never wrote back. I had a decent profile and am not a freak or too bad looking, (basically your average guy) so it's more likely I was just talking to a wall. The profiles I looked at indicated recent activity, but things like login times are easy to fake, especially if you have no choice but to trust what the service tells you. From what I observed, eharmony artificially inflates the count of your matches, plus they ration out only a few matches at a time to string you along for a few extra months on the service. (I had a lot up front but then only a few a week by the time I cancelled) Plus, you have no way of knowing if the matches that do respond to you are actually real people or just dummy accounts staffed by employees meant to keep you interested in the site. (the real test is if they bail out when you want to meet) The commercials you see are obviously designed to exploit lonely people in an emotionally vulnerable situation. When you sign up you have such optimism that you are going to find someone and then you get slammed hard with disappointment after a few weeks of it. The whole thing just seems really dishonest to me. Maybe I've grown cynical or just merely wiser about how these things work.
My advice is to date in the real world and get some friends to hang out with. Friends have other friends outside of your immediate circle (and out from there) and chances are the right one is in there somewhere.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Do people even know what they want from a partner?
Yeah, they do. 99.9% of women want "a good man who loves to laugh and is fun and just an ordinary guy."
I'm a divorced man in a small (~100,000) town and have used online dating sites off-and-on for about five years--mostly Plenty Of Fish, but also LavaLife and OkCupid. I've met two absolutely wonderful women this way--both of whom were so wonderful that after a year or three with me their careers took them off to bigger, far-distant centres, although in both cases we're still friends.
I've also met the biggest collection of flakes, losers, liars, bores and nutjobs you could possibly imagine, and I am currently ready to slap anyone whose entire self-description is, "I love to laugh, like long walks on the beach and am just looking for an ordinary guy."
Seriously, have you ever met anyone anywhere who doesn't like to laugh? It's what we laugh at that's interesting, and hardly anyone ever says what that is.
The trick for all these sites is to weed out the common things that everyone has, and to reduce people who have zero self-awareness to abject silence until they come up with sufficient self-knowledge to say something about themselves that isn't woefully banal. OkCupid's system of questions does that, although I can think of some simple improvements that would make it better.
The key thing is to focus on the concrete. There should be very nearly zero abstraction in any of the information gathered from users, and the site should then generate the abstract categories the user is assigned to based on that information.
For example, don't ask people what their "body type" is (abstract category) but what their height and weight are, how fast they can run or walk a mile, how many miles they run or walk each week, when was the last time they walked more than a mile, or biked more than a five miles, or swam more than 500 m, and so on. Then generate the abstract category for them: "couch potato", "morbidly obese", etc, rather than letting users define "athletic" or "slim" or "average" any way they want to (I've seen morbidly obese people, who have posted pictures of themselves, categorize themselves as "average".)
Mostly, these sites are selling fantasies to liars (women) and idiots (men), so doing anything that would provide more accurate information about what differentiates one person from another is counter-productive relative to their business model. The few honest, intelligent people out there have to wade through a huge amount of dross to find each other. Fortunately, that is still possible, and despite their flaws these sites remain a sensible component of anyone's search for companionship. Just be prepared to do a lot of filtering by hand.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
In the salary cheque that is.
If you ever want to get really depressed about the state of humanity, spend a little time coming up with the most egregiously sexist URL's you can imagine, and then type them into your browser.
http://www.sugardaddies.com/
I tried this one day when a friend was bitching about men treating women like whores (there was some Craigslist ad he was pissed off about, offering free rent to a woman in exchange for sex) and I wanted to prove to him that women could be just as crass. It didn't convince him (he has a naively romantic view of women) but it sure as hell depressed me, even though I know full well that not all women--or even the majority--are quite as wretched as the ones who inhabit these sites (and in fairness, the site I've linked above has at least one link to a site for gay golddiggers... it's clear that a certain fraction of humans in every imaginable category are basically sleazy.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I had a chat with someone I used to work with about arranged marriages. He was from India and was in one himself. According to him, making an arranged marriage work is, pretty much, the foundation of what makes any marriage work. Both partners have to give and take, and accept each other's faults as they are. The big difference is that while Western marriages have the option to divorce when that's no longer possible, arranged marriages are much more difficult to opt-out of. (Though one can still just knock up other women, though that makes the guy look pretty bad socially, so far as I know.)
I think Westernized marriages could learn a thing or two from arranged couples (that do it right, of course). Of course, they could benefit from lots of other things (like doing away with the notion that marriages NEED to happen), but that's a start.
I was approached by one of those dating services 6 years ago ... and went in. .... They told me how nice it was to have a 'nice guy' come in
I expect they say that to all the guys.
if there truly were more women than men in this service, it's only because ...
If they told you women out-numbered men you should have asked for an age breakdown. Any surplus of women in that type of bureaux are in the 50+ age group. Been there.
Maybe people should just stop dating and learn how to experience life and just get out and do things. My friends that try the hardest to meet someone are the ones that are the least successful at it.
But that's not what you did, is it? You sent an e-Mail from your PC (in Ma's basement? Sorry, just joking!). Just "getting out" didn't work for me either. You go out - what do you see? A street with a few drunks (male), some muggers (male) and old ladies carrying shopping. So you go in a bar and what do you see? A few old geezers (male) getting drunk, and if you are really lucky a 50 yo tart drunk already. Then what?
So next you spend a few months swatting up on photography/literature/archery/whatever, enough to join a club. But find the only females in it are some 50+yo wives of the old male fogies who form most of the membership.
So then you spend $500 to attend evening classes on Italian/Art/History but find any women are 40+ and happily married.
So then you go to a singles bar or dance hall. Getting warmer, because at least you can (frustratingly) see some pretty girls, but any I approached told me to f#*k off because any such girl can recognise a geek at 1000 yards. Or think they can.
So that's why I joined a dating club. I have a background of good qualifications, good job, and naval officer training. But I quickly found that trying to match characteristics on paper was a waste of time - girls I met "similar" to me hated me. So, running out of "equivalent" girls in the club lists to contact I started contacting any that just met basic criteria of under my own age (24 then) and under my own height. I then in particular started meeting poorer, "working class" girls.
WOW!! That was different! Because working class girls do not have the qualifications and maybe not the brains, they tend to play their sexuality more. I might be wrong but it seems to me that they need bigger bra cup sizes too. In fact, one of the first I met, and dated for 6 months, had actually been a Bunny Girl in the London Playboy club (but left on her 1st day!). To think I had expected to find only prunes! Some of these girls seemed flattered to have a boyfriend "out of their league", who had a good job and who treated them as a "proper lady". That's something which the ones who told me to f#*k off at the dance hall never gave themselves the chance to find out.
But seriously, what I found was that many of these poorer girls, whom I would never have been matched with by computer criteria, were quite intelligent but had lacked opportunity. Some I just "clicked" with, for no obvious reason, being very different people in fact.
The best strategy for success is deliberately to meet as many as possible without worrying about any but basic criteria, until you find the one you really hit it off with. As I did.
Of course, I'm also always rather put off by the whole "psychological problems don't exist" meme. What's up with that? Sorry, but no, they DO; not everyone who thinks they've got Asperger's or whatever actually does, but that doesn't mean NOONE does. And if you do, well, of course you can stick your head in the sand and pretend that your problems aren't real and that they'll go away if you just wish them away, but to believe that that'll work out is painfully naive.
Psychological problems definitely exist, but they're often used as an excuse not to do something (or anything). They're used as a reason to hide from the real world, to not get a job, etc.
I once knew a guy who was severely spastic. He sat in a heavy motorised wheelchair, could hardly talk, he was as disabled as you can be without being paralised. Whatever your problems are, I bet you they are way, way smaller than this guy's problems. Yet he went out a lot. He went to concerts, including ones that involved camping for a couple of days. He went on his own by train to concerts in other cities, and for some reason, this guy often ended up with a girl on his lap. It was a complete mystery to me how a spastic guy with unkempt hair hanging sideways in a wheelchair, can get a girl while I, tall, not too bad looking, couldn't.
I think the answer is confidence. What does he have to be confident about? No idea, but despite his complete disability, he did have a job. He may not be able to move, but he can think. He's good with computers, and computers are an easy way for him to communicate with people. So instead of simply sitting on the disability pay that he's more entitled to than anyone else I've ever met, he got a job as a programmer (with an employer who was willing to deal with the problems of having a severely disabled employee). He may not type very fast, but solving complex problems requires more thinking than typing, and he's good at that.
If that guy can hold a job, then Asperger's is not an excuse for being unemployed. Lots of nerds with Asperger's have very productive, well paying jobs. Sure, it may be harder to find one that suits you, but if you search hard enough, you'll find something. But an "I can't work" mentality isn't going to help you. Employers, like women, are looking for someone who's confident. In this case, someone who's confident that he can work.
(Eventually the department he worked at was dismantled, and you don't want to know how hard it is to get social security money when you lose a job while being severely disabled. You can't get unemployment money because you're disabled. The service in charge of new disabilities won't pay you because it's a pre-existing condition, and the service for young disableds won't pay you because you've had a job, which means it can't have been a pre-existing condition.)