Young people want good-looking mates; their parents want them to have mates from the same social class

Three psychologists in The Netherlands just published the results of a study on how young people’s preferences differed from their parents’ preferences on finding mates.   The work, recently published in the Review of General Psychology, involved interviewing Dutch, American, and Kurdish young people and parents. 

Not surprisingly, the young people wanted attractive mates while their parents mainly wanted the kids to have mates from similar social classes and groups: 

… young people invariably considered the potential mate’s attractiveness the most important quality, whereas parents uniformly paid more attention to the suitors’ social background or group affiliation…

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2008/may/15/checking-mates/?living

There’s no great surprise in these findings.  It has been thoroughly proven that people who are dating and picking partners, both male and female, almost always want good-looking partners.  For a review of the evidence for this proposition, see almost any of my posts on online dating and speed dating.

 

 

Tips about women

Tad Safran’s interesting discussion in The London Times of what he learned about women from interacting with his two-year-old niece (I removed some of the less interesting things):

As a single man in my mid-thirties, I’ve spent 20 years trying to understand women, with mixed results. It wasn’t until six months ago, however, that I was given a clear insight into how the female mind works.

…

1 Ignore them

1If I come into a room and bounce up to Lou-Lou like a clown, trying to amuse and entertain, she blanks me completely. It’s as if I don’t exist. If I walk straight past her, however, I guarantee she will call out my name and want to play with me.

2 Bribe them

Gifts work. Preferably something noisy or sparkly. With Lou-Lou, that means stuffed animals that sing or sequined hair grips. With grown women, I suppose that equates to, say, cars and jewellery.

3 Compliment them

I’ve mistakenly always held that compliments are like diamonds: valuable only for their scarcity. Flood the market and they lose all value. Not so. Lou-Lou poos in her nappy, everyone cheers – as if she just came up with a workable solution to world hunger – and she beams like a lighthouse. The same works with grown women, although, of course, only the general principle applies rather than the specific example given here. (I learnt this one the hard way.)

4 Listen to them

I’ve spent my life trying to preempt what women want. I needn’t have bothered. If I just pay attention, Lou-Lou will tell me exactly what she wants: eat, dance, doll, jump, run, sing, play, read. Then all I have to do is organise it. How much simpler my life would have been if I had listened and acted accordingly.

5 Apologise

It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter if you don’t even know what you’ve done. I might have slighted Lou-Lou by putting the wrong doll in the pram. What seems to you or me like a minor infraction is, to her, on a par with genocide. The best policy is to throw yourself on her mercy and beg forgiveness. But you must sound sincere. You don’t have to be sincere, just sound sincere. This is so elementary, yet how many men ignore this advice?

… 

7 Don’t tell them what to do

The best way to guarantee that she doesn’t do what I want is by telling her to do it. The clever thing is to make it seem like her idea – and make it seem fun. One of my proudest moments was convincing Lou-Lou that watching the rugby World Cup final would be more fun than playing in the sandpit.

…

9 Don’t argue

There’s simply no point. You will never win, and if you do win, it will be a hollow victory because of the mood she’ll be in for a long time afterwards. Quite frankly, who needs the aggro? This leads to my final and most important point:

10 Don’t make them cry

There is nothing more distressing than watching Lou-Lou’s enormous, innocent brown eyes overflow with tears, while her mouth becomes a gaping, drooling, mournful air-raid siren that pierces through to the core of my heart. I’m utterly defenceless when she cries. And there’s no known antidote. Food? Monkey impressions? A pony? Stabbing myself in the eye with a chopstick? I will agree to anything to stop her crying

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article3736523.ece

Anyone who has been in a relationship for more than a few weeks will realize the truth of a lot of this.  It reminds me of advice a long-time married guy gave to a guy on the eve of his wedding: learn how to apologize; you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life.

Note: to any female readers who are incensed by this post and want to post an angry reply, you’ll get more people reading your angry reply if you click on the link to the Times article above and post your reply there.

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.

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.

Palimony for a girlfriend a guy didn’t even live with?

You’re all no doubt familiar with the concept of alimony.  For those readers outside the US and Western Europe, alimony consists of regular monthly payments to one’s ex-wife, usually for a period of years (while divorce courts can make women make alimony payments to their ex-husbands, it’s rare).  

A clever divorce lawyer in California invented the concept of “palimony” when a woman came to him to try to get money from her long-time live-in boyfriend, the actor Lee Marvin.  Mr. Marvin did not get married to his girlfriend, possibly because he was aware of the huge financial hit he would take in divorce court.  After they broke up, the girlfriend, Michelle Triola, sued Marvin to obtain half of his assets. 

Although the California Supreme Court did not give her half of Marvin’s assets, it decided that it could treat unmarried couples like married couples in certain circumstances, thus inventing the concept of palimony.   And, as often happens, a terrible concept established in California finds its way to other states.  The following article contains a discussion of a New Jersey lawyer who is trying to get the state Supreme Court to agree that palimony can be awarded even to an ex-girlfriend who never lived with the target:

Through the rise of palimony law, courts in New Jersey have laid out a bright line against its being awarded in cases where a couple did not live together. Now, however, the state’s high court is being urged to overturn that rule and open the door to claims for compensation by a broader class of romantic partners (Michael Booth, “N.J. High Court Hears Pitch for Palimony Sans Cohabitation”, New Jersey Law Journal, Jan. 23).

Hat tip: http://www.overlawyered.com/2008/02/palimony-without-cohabitation.html

The New Jersey courts have previously held that they would award palimony only if the unmarried man and woman lived together as a couple.    I’d like to think the New Jersey Supreme Court would reject this absurd extension of a disgusting legal concept, but I’ll wait for the court’s decision.  Ultimately, if state courts get packed with judges who fully buy into the redistributionist mindset embodied by the palimony concept, we will see even more of this nonsense.

For years people advised guys not to get married if they were worried about possibly paying alimony.  That advice is no longer so good, at least in the states whose courts have enacted palimony.  In those states guys were advised to maintain separate residences from their girlfriends.  If palimony is extended, a guy might become a fat financial target when he has a long-term sexual relationship with a woman.

I love one of the arguments used by this woman’s lawyer.  She said  the girlfriend “was drawn into economic dependency.”  That means this guy paid for her upkeep for years, so of course under the alimony/palimony concept he has to keep on paying for years to come.

And women wonder why guys won’t commit.  Why would you commit when doing so is potentially so financially ruinous.

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.

Will Massachusetts make it a crime to lie to get sex?

If this bill becomes a law in Massachusetts, it might be a crime to inflate your income on your online dating profile.  If you put your income in the “over $150,000″ category when actually make 125,000, a woman searches for guys who make over 150,000, the two of you meet, date, have sex, and she eventually discovers you make less than 150,000, will she be able to get the District Attorney to send you to prison for life?

Cheating on One’s Lover = Future Felony in Massachusetts?

That’s what would happen under a proposed statute that’s being promoted by Massachusetts state representative Peter Koutoujian…

I suspect that this isn’t the goal of the drafters, but that’s what the language would call for, when (as I’m pretty sure happens quite often) the cheater has sex afterwards with the regular lover without disclosing the cheating. Here’s what the proposed law says:

Whoever has sexual intercourse or unnatural sexual intercourse with a person having obtained that person’s consent by the use of fraud, concealment or artifice, and who thereby intentionally deceived such person so that a reasonable person would not have consented but for the deception, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for life or any term of years. As used in this statute, ‘fraud’ or ‘artifice’ shall not be construed to mean a promise of future consideration.

hat tip: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_05_04-2008_05_10.shtml#1210012100