More conclusions about online dating

Two weeks ago I wrote a post discussing some interesting findings regarding online dating.  These findings were from a fascinating study of online dating performed by three researchers lead by Dan Ariely of MIT.  This post continues my discussion of this study’s findings.  The researchers were able to get access to Match.com’s computer records for their San Diego and Boston markets, and could tell exactly which profiles other people found interesting, sent emails to, talked with, met for a date, etc.  The idea is that these preferences revealed by people’s actions more accurately showed their true preferences than a survey or poll would.

Many of their conclusions were just what you would expect.  For example, men generally try to avoid women who are older or taller than they are, and women “have a particularly strong aversion to shorter men.” p. 27.  Also, women place almost twice as much weight on income as men. 

Also, men have a distaste for women who are more educated than they are, while women try to avoid men who are less educated than they are. p. 27.  If this trend persists it may make it more difficult to find matches.  Women now make up considerably more than 50% of college admissions. 

One intriguing part of the study is speculation that many of the similarities between couples in such areas as education, religion, and income could be attributable to the fact that the social institutions that bring people together usually group people according to these attributes.  It is therefore easier for people to meet and become couples if they match in these areas. 

Online dating, in contrast, lets people search for another person who has exactly the sort of characteristics they want.  If you want a medium-tall, slender, brunette who makes at least $50,000/year and attends Catholic Church on a weekly basis, you can easily search for one.

One of their conclusions is one that you would guess: [O]ur fate in love and marriage seems to be driven by factors such as looks, height, weight, and income, that are hard or impossible to change … (and) factors such as personality traits apparently only allow us to partly make up for deficiencies in good looks or wealth.” pp. 30-31.

So, as I discussed in a previous post regarding the findings of this study, if you want to be successful at online dating, first email a lot of other people, and then, if you’re a man, be very good-looking, tall, beefy, straight-haired, college-educated, work in a favored occupation, and make a lot of money.  If you’re a woman, be good-looking, slender, and not too tall.

The full text of their report is here:

http://designogselvfremstillelse.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/dating1.pdf

Jennifer Anniston’s High School Prom Pics

Take a look at this pic from Jennifer Anniston’s high school prom.  

She got way better looking with age.  No doubt some of you will complain that the improvement was due entirely to great makeup artists, hair stylists, and digital enhancement of her photos, but I seriously doubt her remarkable improvement can be entirely attributed to those things.

The biggest single improvement seems to be her hair, which is terrific now but styled back then in an incredibly unattractive way.  On this point, I’m always amazed at the number of women who get their hair styled in ways that conform to current fashion, but make them look unattractive.  The same can be said of clothes and shoes, but it’s doubly true for hairstyles.

Here’s a link to more pics from her prom:

http://celebglitz.com/34950/Jennifer-Aniston/jennifer-anistons-high-school-prom-pictures.aspx

More Comparison of Online Dating Services

Several days ago I blogged on comparison of online dating services, especially, discussing EHarmony in some detail.  Here is another blogger’s evaluation of how successful EHarmony is in connecting people who ultimately get married.  He believes EHarmony is much less successful than they claim.

http://meditationsonmeaning.com/2006/11/30/the-truth-about-eharmony/ 

As promised, here is another installment in this series about online dating.  Chemistry.com and Perfect Match select matches for you and notify both matches, just as EHarmony does.  So you’re relying on their selection criteria.  And of course they don’t evaluate on appearance and can’t evaluate on chemistry.  You’ll have to winnow down your matches for those things. 

Chemistry.com bases its matching in great part on a sort of Myers-Briggs personality inventory, which has been around a long time and is used by lots of people to evaluate personality and how different types get along.  I have zero idea whether this is a good basis for matching people.

Perfect Match has its own system that is a bit different than Chemistry’s.  You have to answer some practical questions that the Perfect Match people think matter a lot in relationships.  One of these areas is money.  Similarity in ideas about money may well be very important in marriages.   I understand that differences about money are one of the two most significant and common arguments married couples have (the other is sex).

All these services point out that what they are really doing is sending you people that should be good matches, under the skin.  They rely on you to pick the ones you find most attractive after that.  They say this is better than you browsing to find another person and just being bowled over by that person’s looks,  charm, etc., and not realizing that he is incompatible with you in some major ways.

Do these methods work?  I don’t think anyone knows.  Are they worth a shot?  I think so.  As I mentioned in my last post, the online services are the only place you can go to find large numbers of single people, especially after college.  I think it’s worth it to try Match.com or Yahoo Personals, the largest of the browsing services, and consider trying one of the services that match people, such as EHarmony (especially if you’re a guy, bc this is the only service that has more females than males) or Chemistry.

After your early to mid-twenties, the vast majority of people you know are likely to be engaged, married, or dating someone seriously. 

The only other way to meet so many singles is speed-dating.  I’ll write another post addressed to speed-dating soon.

 

 

Comparing the online dating services

I hope some of my previous posts over the last few weeks have piqued your interest in online dating.  Today I’ll explore some comparisons between the major dating services. 

These can be broken down into two major categories: 1) those that match you with other people and let each of you know about the match, and 2) those where you can browse and contact people you’re interested in.  EHarmony, Chemistry (a service owned by Match.com), and Perfect Match are examples of the first kind, and Match.com and Yahoo Personals are examples of the second kind (although I understand that Perfect Match has recently added a browsing option as well).

So which to choose?  A lot of people are members of several services.  I think this makes a lot of sense.  The cost isn’t that big an obstacle to most people, and I think the potential reward is worth the added cost.

First let me point out that EHarmony is a bit different than the other services.  First a practical matter.  The EHarmony personality inventory has hundreds of questions and will take hours to complete.  If this deters you, choose another service.  But if their methodology works, it’s a great investment of time.  After all, in the time you can spend on one bad date you can complete this inventory.

EHarmony bases its matches on theories it developed from observations of couples married for a long time.  Many people have logged on to EHarmony for the first time and been aghast at the matches they were sent.  This is because EHarmony purports to match purely on such things as personality and temperment.  Appearance, style, and similar things do not enter into their matching. 

It’s your job to select for those things.  And is it really that hard to log on, go through a few profiles and either click the delete button or the button that indicates you’re interested?   

Another interesting thing about EHarmony is that it is the only major online dating service that has more female members than male members.  This is a major attraction for guys who are tired of writing emails to girls on Match.com and Yahoo Personals and getting few replies. 

No one outside the EHarmony service actually knows if its methodology works.  They won’t divulge their methodology and they selectively release their results, which makes it impossible to evaluate.  But I suspect one thing is true about EHarmony members: if they go to all the trouble of completing the personality inventory and paying the fairly hefty fee, they’re likely to be very interested in a relationship.  They’re not likely to have created a profile on a whim.

This is not true with quite a few people who create profiles on other services.  You don’t have to pay to post a profile on Match.com or Yahoo Personals.  I’ve known quite a few women who created profiles and didn’t pay to join.  They can generally engage in very limited contact with people who contact them.  For example, on Yahoo Personals, nonmembers could use the flirty little one-liners, but couldn’t send messages.  This meant that another member might send them an email and they could reply only with a one-liner, which was not responsive to the email.  After awhile I became aware of this and sent my phone number to the nonmembers. 

This is especially annoying to guys because many women I’ve known adamantly refused to pay for a real membership.  Since they were hot women, lots of guys contacted them, but few got through.  Hmmm, this may have been a good thing, since I got through.

The major disadvantage of the systems that send you matches is volume.  You might get one match a month up to several a day.  But with the services that allow browsing, you can look at as many profiles and send as many messages as you would like.

I’ve noted a major annoyance with online dating: sending lots of emails and getting few replies.  I suspect that guys will have a far better response from the sites that send you matches rather than the sites that allow only browsing.  This is because of simple applied psychology: if an attractive woman on Match.com receives 2,000 emails a year (and I’m not making up this number), while an attractive woman on EHarmony receives 500 matches a year, only 400 of whom indicate an interest in her, she’ll be more likely to really look at those 400.  If you’re one of 2,000 emails a girl receives, your profile has to immediately show big value to the girl for her not to just delete it.

Elizabeth Wasserman wrote a good article in The Atlantic magazine about online dating.  Here’s the link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200602u/online-dating

I’ll continue this comparison of online dating services later this week.

New Jersey Courts Make Ex-husband Continue to Pay Child Support Even When He Proved He Was Not the Father

The New Jersey Courts are hard at work stealing from people under color of law.   The state’s highest court has just upheld a lower court decision forcing a man to continue paying child support after he discovered that he was not the child’s father and that his ex-wife had deceived him into thinking that he, instead of the man she was having an affair with, was the father.

And, unfortunately, this is not an isolated case.  Courts around the country have abetted this sort of fraud committed by women.  And even when people in the legislature tries to change the law, they are rebuffed.  See my account several weeks ago about the fate of a bill in the Tennessee legislature to let men who had been paying child support go into court to prove they are not the fathers and stop paying in the future. 

The New Jersey Supreme Court has upheld a lower court decision against a father who claimed that he should not have to pay child support to his ex-wife after discovering that the child was not his own. It is only the latest in a string of such cases.

The case involves a 10-year-old girl and a divorced couple in Hunterdon County New Jersey. The father submitted evidence that paternity tests showed that his ex-wife had misled him and that she had conceived the child with another man. He wanted to compel the disclosure of the true father and to end his child support payments. Yet, in the lower court decision, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Stephen Rubin ruled that such changes would not be in the child’s best interest …

 

Hat tip: http://jonathanturley.org/2008/01/26/new-jersey-court-order-man-to-pay-child-support-even-if-he-is-not-true-father/

 

The people who set this child support apparat on the country often justify its injustices by parroting the line, “men have to support their children”.  But this incident, and many similar ones, prove this line is a lie.  The men in these incidents were proven not to have fathered these children.  The law is just a means to steal money from them and distribute it to the women who have defrauded them, often for years.

A Few More Thoughts On Online Dating

Her is another installment in my series on online dating.  First, why do people do it?  Efficiency.  You can contact way more single people spending two hours on dating sites than you can by going to a bar to meet them.  Plus, you can drill down to get someone with characteristics that are closer to what you would like. 

Female friends of mine complain that 1) online dating takes a lot of time, and 2) they meet a lot of undesireables.  As to the first objection, every kind of dating/meeting people takes a lot of time.  If you have very little time available go to a speed dating event.  But these events aren’t as common, outside the very biggest cities. 

As for the second objection, meeting a lot of undesireable guys, my friends have a point.  If they’re at a bar they see the guys and can just give the undesireable ones the cold shoulder, but some manage to slip through online.  They might lie about their height or articulateness.   Or their less-than-stellar grooming might not come through in their online pic. 

But the women can just set up brief “coffee meetings” to evaluate the guys.  I blogged several days about about these meetings and how much they resembled job interviews.

And in any event, the drawbacks of online dating are vastly outweighed by its benefits.   There is no other place where you can inspect so many people, and drill down for exactly what you want.  If the woman wants a 6′2″ guy with an athletic build, brown hair, blue eyes, and who works in a particular field, and who makes above a certain threshold of income, she can search and turn some of these guys up in minutes.

My next installment on online dating will come next week.

The US government should never have prosecuted Deborah Jeane Palfrey

The US goverment undertook a three-year investigation and prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, no doubt costing millions of taxpayer dollars.  She was the Washington, DC madam who was convicted of setting up sex for men in the DC area, including one Senator and several high government officials. 

She was convicted, not of prostitution, because that is a state crime rather than a federal crime, but of financial reporting and various other violations.  Facing years in prison, she committed suicide.

Even in ordinary circumstances, it seems odd that the federal government would devote its supposedly scarce crime-fighting resources into a massive investigation of this woman who hooked up escorts with guys who were willing to pay for sex.  But for the past seven years I’m told that the federal government has been going full-tilt to investigate people who are keen to explode bombs in our crowded cities, killing thousands of us at a time.

Given these other, and vastly higher, priorities for federal investigative resources, it bogles my mind that so much federal time and money was spent investigating and prosecuting this woman for arranging consensual sex for money.

I’m positive my conclusions on this matter are not shared by the following groups: bluenose prudes, hard-core law and order types whose mantra is “it’s a crime, prosecute it, end of story”, and most wives (who have a strong interest in being their husbands’ sole outlet for sex, and don’t mind one bit if any government agency expends vast resources to keep it that way).

Some of you will no doubt say prostitution is a crime.  If you want that changed, go to the legislature.  But that’s not the point.  The point is the federal government shouldn’t be expending these vast resources to punish what is really a minor violation of state laws.

And another thing that should worry those few of us left who worry about the increasing power of the federal government, the strict financial reporting requirements faced by banks and credit card issuers, and the draconian new laws, have made it much easier for a powerful federal government to prosecute people. 

This is pretty much how Elliot Spitzer, until recently Governor of New York, was caught. 

I wouldn’t mind these reporting requirements and laws as much if they were reserved for use against those people who seem likely to kill lots of us, i.e., terrorists.  But the government has demonstrated that when it gets powers such as these, it will use them indiscriminately.    

Boobonomics

Here is a good description of how agents create value for their clients’ nude pics.  It’s written by Janice Turner of the Times online:

A friend who spends his life negotiating with the agents of glamour models explained to me the principles of “boobonomics”. Let’s assume a pretty girl, who has been snapped in her bikini for a local newspaper, seeks a big-time career. Her agent phones a men’s magazine and proposes for a given sum, say £3,000 [ed: that's $5,800 USD or 3,800 Euros], that she pose in lingerie.

If she’s a hit with the readers, her agent will then suggest that for a greater sum, say £5,000 [ed: that's $9,700 USD or 6,300 Euros], she will pose topless, but with her nipples concealed by her cupped fingers (“hand bra”). Subsequently her fee will rise for each coy permutation: “hair bra” or “girl-on-girl bra” (two models face to face shielding each other’s breasts). Eventually, once this dance of the seven thongs has been exhausted and readers are believed to be slavering with anticipation, the agent will propose that for a huge sum say £50,000 [ed: $97,000 USD or 63,000 Euros] the girl will finally reveal all.

But the harshest principle of boobonomics is that after this shoot, the value of the girl’s assets which is what they are in a technical, business sense collapses. From this point she will only receive £20K for full topless, a sum she only recently received for showing far less. Her product life cycle is reaching an end. Now, however, agents have a new strategy for reviving the brand, rather as when Kit Kat launched peanut or orange-flavoured variants. He proposes that his client have a breast enlargement: would the magazine be interested in the first pictures, you know, when the scars have healed? The going rate for new knockers will never match her initial “reveal”, but raises her value momentarily to, say, £35,000. Jordan, the Milton Friedman of boobonomics, has amassed a great fortune increasing her breast size by increments in three operations.

 

Hat tip: http://arandomwalk.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html

I had never heard the term “hand bra”. 

As a bonus, the article alerted me to a website I have never heard of: Assess My Breasts.  It’s sort of like the “are you hot or not” website, only for topless pics.  Women send in topless pics and people rate them.

Good-looking women bring in more money soliciting for donations

I’ve blogged before on how important appearance is.  I regularly encounter research that shows appearance is important even in activities in which most people don’t think it is important.  Here’s today’s installment of this idea:

In a narrow but very compelling piece of research, John List argued that if you are trying to solicit donations door-to-door, the single best thing you can do to get large donations is to be an attractive blond woman.

Hat tip: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/how-pure-is-your-altruism/#more-2615

It always amazes me that so many people strong resist the notion that appearance plays such a powerful role in so many activities.  They will accept the idea that appearance plays a big role in dating (although even here many people underestimate the impact of good looks), but will stoutly resist the idea that good looks has an impact in other areas.

Sales and marketing people are, on average, way more attractive than accountants or engineers.  That can’t be accidental.  They’re hired at least partly based on appearance.  Pharmaceutical sales reps are a famous example of this.  The vast majority of them are in the top 5% of attractiveness. 

In coming weeks I’ll write about other examples of appearance playing a big role in areas in which most people wouldn’t think so. 

Online Dating Is Like Applying For A Job

Some time ago it occurred to me that online dating was very much like applying for a job.  You create a profile in an attempt to sell yourself.  Your profile is like your resume.  You proofread your profile to make absolutely sure it conveys the best impression possible and contains no misspellings or typos.  Potential dates, like potential employers, will discard it if it contains any errors.

The next step is sending an email to potential dates.  You look at their profile and write an email that you hope will catch their interest and cause them to read your profile.  This email serves the same purpose as a cover letter that goes with your resume.  Your goal in writing the cover letter is to catch the employer’s interest and make him read  your resume.

Your next goal is to get a return email.  If things go well with the potential match, you will get to talk by phone.  This is like a telephone interview for a job.  It enables the interviewer to decide whether he wants to bring you in for a face-to-face interview.  In some cases potential dates insert a further level of review: the extended instant message interview.  This enables them to dispense with some people without expending the time for an actual meeting.

If this goes well, you get the all-important meeting with the date.  This is usually a half hour at the coffee shop.  At this meeting, which is very much like a job interview, you need to sell  yourself and convince the person that you are a good candidate, deserving of further consideration. 

You might get a second date, an evening date at a restaurant.  This corresponds to a call-back interview for a job.  This gives you another chance to demonstrate your suitability.  But instead of the experience, skills, and aptitude you need to show an potential employer, you must show your date a much broader array of things to convince her you are suitable.  She already knows from your profile your height, income, race, hair color, religion, smoking and drinking habits, and lots of other information about you. But now you must show her that you want the same things in life that she does, that you are compatible, that you have the level of ambition she considers suitable, etc.  Plus, you have to excite her. 

At this point about the only thing the job interview has that the dating process lacks is a list of references.  And I don’t think the day is too far off when women will want guys to submit a list of three references from girls you have previously dated. 

This process concludes by your getting the job (date) or not.  And even here there are similarities in letting you know the decision.  The polite employer will send you a letter indicating he is not hiring you.   Of course, lots of employers just don’t bother with this step.  Similarly, some dates send you a cordial email saying they don’t think the two of you are a good match.  But most just don’t pick up the phone when you call and don’t return your call.

And there’s another way that online dating is like applying for a job.  It takes a long time and it’s a great deal of work.  In fact, several job search experts tell us that looking for a job is like a part-time job itself.