Slashdot Mirror
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.
...are the women.
Anyone who can solve that problem deserves a Nobel.
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 was approached by one of those dating services 6 years ago to 'just come in and talk'. So I used it as a chance to hone my negotiating skills and went in. I found some nice ladies that had me fill out some forms, then explain how great their service was. They told me how nice it was to have a 'nice guy' come in, by which I think they meant someone polite, considerate, and well employed. They told me that they only accept employed people without criminal backgrounds.
Then they told me it costs $3,500. I almost laughed at them and suggested that that was a little high just to meet someone. They then went through the schpeal about how they do all these checks and everything. I still said it was too much. They came down in price. Still too much.
Finally, they asked me how much I thought it was worth. I told them that I'd pay $500. At which time they concluded my interview.
I left that day with the thought that if there truly were more women than men in this service, it's only because men won't spend $3,500 to meet women because they don't need to.
Three years later I rediscovered an old high school friend and sent her a 'Hello!! How ya doing??' email with no intention of dating. We sent a few emails, started calling, flew 2,000 miles to visit several times, and got married 10 months later. And joked that we never had a real date because we already knew each other and had never dated in high school.
2 1/2 years later later we are still very happy together, have sex regularly, and enjoy being with each other. Worked better than my first marriage by a long shot.
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.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
This is a very facile thing for someone in your position to say. For many of the rest of us "experiencing life" all by itself simply means interminable years of crushing loneliness.
I have started to come to the following realization:
Happiness is guaranteed to no one. The best one can expect out of life is that you can always find some way to respect yourself and say "I did something with my life that I can look myself in the mirror and approve of." That status of self-respect is prerequisite for happiness, but it is by no means a guarantor. There is every chance that you'll just get out there and do your thing and live your life and be alone and lonely right up until the day you die.
+++ATH0
I'm in my late 20s, have done the online dating thing off and on since college, as well as asking out people in real life. If I go back and think about which were the best relationships/sex in terms of online vs offline meeting, offline meeting tended to be the best. There's just far too much useful information you get from seeing someone up close, listening them talk, watching their body language. We have lots of mental machinery dedicated to parsing that stuff, and almost none of it is activated during online dating (even pictures are no good, because they're so often old photos or outright deceptive).
...with the exception of Slashdot, of course. ;-)
So, at this point in my life, I'm trying to reduce the amount of time I spend on IM, forums, computer games, etc. and spend more time around real people in the real world. I think it happens to a lot of nerds as we get older. We look back and realize we don't have much to show for all the thousands of hours spent on inane IRC conversations, first person shooters, and forum flame wars. All that stuff is so much emptiness when you get right down to it...
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.
Luckily, two dear lady friends helped me to understand what I needed to know and I'm now very happily married.
Shit, where is that legal? I'm packing now...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"