Pickup techniques, for long-term or short-term relationships

I posted last week some material about Roissy, the psuedonym of a pickup artist who blogs.  He made an interesting response to a critic who lambasted him for discussing the pickup skills that allow guys to meet women, charm them, go to bed with them, then abandon them for their next conquest:

 … the skills that make a player are the same skills that help a regular man find, capture, and keep his dream girl. it’s a lifestyle and a mental state change.

I’ve had this same thought.  A guy can use these skills for either purpose: having short-term relationships with lots of women or having a long-term relationship.   But even if the guy wants a long-term relationship, I suspect he improves his chances of finding one if he uses the skills of the pickup artist.  These skills seem to capture a woman’s interest better than the plain-vanilla alternatives women hear all the time (hi, I’m so and so, what’s your name, do you come here often, etc.).

You can read all about these techniques in Neill Strauss’s book, “The Game” about his time with the legendary pickup artist who calls himself Mystery (the techniques are more fully set out in a book Mystery himself wrote).

I saw an interesting illustration of this at work a few months ago, on the Dr. Phil show of all places.  He interviewed two guys who used something very much like the Mystery Method of pickup, in which the guy and his wingman go up to a woman in a bar and try to capture her interest (without seeming like they want to capture it).  They tried it on several women from the audience.  These women responded to these techniques, even though they had just been told they were being guinea pigs for the pickup artists techniques. 

The women said afterwards that they were intrigued by what the guys were saying and would be much more interested in those guys than the other guys who hit on them.

But back to the main point of this post - if you’re a guy looking for a long-term relationship, you first have to meet women.  It makes sense to use the best method available to meet them.  I’m convinced some of the pickup artists have the best methods.  These methods have, after all, been field-tested.  The best of these pickup artists keep those techniques that work and discard those that don’t. 

http://roissy.wordpress.com/

Online dating provides a huge ego boost to attractive women

I’ve written before that online dating is heavily tilted toward attractive women.  That’s because 1) except for EHarmony, there are more men than women who are members of dating services, and 2) men everywhere are after attractive women.  A moderately attractive woman who posts her pic on Match.com or Yahoo Personals will get thousands of emails or other expressions of interest in a year. 

Here we have confirmation of this phenomenon from another source.  The following interesting discussion appears in The Guardian:

… it’s a super ego-booster. Every evening I’m on it, I have at least 30 men wanting to chat with me and meet me,” says a French senior civil servant, a single woman in her early 30s. Before contacting her, the 30 men have clicked on the “flash” icon to let her know that they find her especially attractive. Before condescending to reply, she double-checks their profile: age, picture, education, income and marital status.

She chooses them like a discerning consumer, and only replies to married men. “For the moment, I am looking for fun, not love. I do a first pre-selection, and send a standard reply to the unlucky ones out of courtesy. As for the selected few, according to their wit and their language skills … I draw a shortlist of perhaps three and agree to meet them…

It’s a simple issue of supply and demand: pre-select candidates, test sales pitch, draw a shortlist, have a face-to-face interview, hire on the spot, dismiss without notice …

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2132546,00.html

Attractive women get so much attention online that they become more and more demanding in what guys they are willing to date.  They create the infamous 463 bullet point list of characteristics they insist upon.  And the moment the guy de jour fails to meet one of those 463 points, the woman is back to her computer to bring up another crop of men who might meet her rigid specifications.

Cougars

The following interesting discussion of the cougar phenomenon is found at Roissy’s blog.  For those of you who haven’t heard of this, it’s older women going after young guys. 

… can think of quite a few girls I frequently see haunting the DC nightlife scene who’ve gone from kitten to cougar in just a few years.  Many women of DC’s socialite crowd have crossed the cougar rubicon, yet stubbornly refuse to give up their lifestyle.  When all you’ve ever known is the inside of a club, 37 varieties of martinis, and dancing on raised platforms as horny guys give you your attention fix, it’s understandable you’d find it hard to accept your demotion to has-been hottie.

…  with career-delayed marriages and perpetual dating where she is waiting around forever to find a man who will meet all 463 bullet points in her mental checklist, the clubs are beginning to fill with women who have missed the boat yet won’t admit it to themselves.

Fascinating point about women wanting to find a man who will meet all 463 bullet points in her mental checklist.  I’ve noticed the same thing myself, and it merits its own blog post.  With the huge supply of guys made available to women through online dating (and its bad-for-guys male/female ratio), most women seem to have developed huge lists of must-haves.

Read the whole thing.  It has lots more interesting commentary, complete with pictures.

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/from-kitten-to-cougar/

I don’t see anything objectionable with these older women chasing young guys.  But they shouldn’t delude themselves that they’re going to be like Demi Moore landing a 10-15 year younger Ashton Kuchter.  The good-looking 25 year old guy will gladly have sex with the 40 year old woman he meets at the club, but for a long-term relationship there are few 40 year old women he will prefer over the young hotties.

And here’s another interesting point from Roissy’s discussion (one that may interest Mr. Practical): “She looks Russian, which means that she will hit the wall sooner and harder than most women her age.”  Is this true? 

Speed Dating Reveals What Guys and Girls Want

I wrote a day or so ago that the best way to determine what guys or girls like in a date is not to ask them, but to look at what decisions they make.  Economists and psychologists call this revealed preference rather than stated preference. 

We recently looked at online daters’ revealed preferences as set out in a study done on Match.com users.   We now have another piece of research that reveals daters’ preferences.  Two psychologists in the Psychology Department of the University of Pennsylvania conducted an interesting piece of research on preferences of speed daters.

For those of you  not familiar with speed dating, it’s an activity in which equal numbers of men and women are recruited.  They dress up, smile, and sit down for three-minute sessions with every member of the opposite sex in attendance.  At the end of these three-minute sessions each participant gives each person he or she has met a thumbs up or thumbs down, on a dating sheet.  These sheets are compiled by the organizers of the event and if two people gave each other a thumbs up, email addresses are sent to each and they can meet.

Here is a link to the writeup for this study: http://www.psych.upenn.edu/PLEEP/pdfs/2005%20Kurzban%20&%20Weeden%20EHB.pdf

I wish I could mention some surprising findings of this study.  But I cannot.  Almost nothing of significance it reveals is unknown to the careful observer of dating behavior.

Women liked men who were tall, good-looking, fairly young, and fairly big (not necessarily fat, but with a BMI of around 25).  The overwhelming thing men were drawn to was slender women. p. 234. After that, their next strongest preferences were for attractive faces and younger women.   This should come as no surprise to observers of dating.

Another obvious finding was that the most attractive people got the most thumbs up from other speed-daters but said yes to them more often. For men, being good-looking, a bit large, and making good money caused them to be more selective. p. 236.  For women, being slender allowed them to be more selective. p. 236.   Women tended to say no more often when they were thin and the male daters were older. p. 237.  Again, nothing you couldn’t figure out on your own.

All of these findings support the market value theory of mating: people like pretty much the same qualities in a date, but they realize they can only get someone with these qualities if they themselves are high in qualities wanted by the opposite sex.  This phenomenon is expressed memorably by the scientist Stephen Pinker, “Somewhere in this world of five billion (now six billion) people there lives the best-looking, richest, smartest, funniest, kindest person who would settle for you.”

One of the findings that might surprise some of you is that women are, in general, much more selective than men.  Women gave fewer thumbs ups to men than men gave to women. 

Another is that the different sexes are willing to adjust their expectations down based on different things.  Women will lower their selectivity if they are fat, but not if they are older.  And men will lower their expectations if they have unattractive faces, but not if they are older or shorter. p. 241. 

Another settling feature is that divorced men will settle for chubby women more often than nondivorced men.

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

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.

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.

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.

Online dating: money, job, and education make a big difference

Well, money, job and education make a difference for women.  Not so much for guys. 

Last week I wrote my second installment in a series about online dating.  This series is based on material I found in an excellent research project addressing online dating.  This project looked at preferences of Match.com members in the San Diego and Boston areas.  The researchers were able to take a deep dive into Match.com’s computers in order to see what qualities men and women were attracted to, who they looked at, emailed with, etc.

If you’re interested in reading part or all of the study, it can be found here:

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

Here are some more interesting conclusions.  Keep in mind these conclusions do not hold for every person:

Guys who earn more money do considerably better than women who earn more money.  p.22

Higher levels of education increase guys’ success, but not womens’.  To the contrary, women with a post-graduate degree incur a slight penalty. p. 22.

Men’s occupations make a difference, but women’s do not.   The following jobs are associated with the most success: law (77% premium), military (49% premium), and firemen (45% premium).  p. 22.  I’m surprised that doctors don’t command a greater premium here.  And I’m guessing that investment banking, while astonishingly lucrative, is not a well-enough-known profession to be on the radar screen of most of these women.

Another interesting finding is that women seem to have a strong preference for men with equivalent education levels or slightly above.  But they seem reluctant to go for guys with a great deal more education.  Men with a masters degree received far fewer first-contact emails from women with high-school degrees.  These women would go for guys with college degrees, but less so for guys with additional education.

Interestingly, this doesn’t work in reverse.  A man with a college or graduate degree does not seem to base his choices on a woman’s education.  p. 23. I’m guessing that’s because guys are so focused on looks that they largely relegate other attributes to the back seat.

Trying to figure out why these conclusions hold is fascinating.  Figuring out the guys’ motivations seems fairly easy.  Figuring out the women’s motivations for these preferences is more difficult.  Ladies, would any of you venture a guess as to the reason behind any of these preferences?

I’ll return with another installment soon.