Some On-Line Dating Tips

I have been through a couple of trips through the online dating world, one in 1995 which led to the standard goal (a longterm monogamous partnership) and one beginning in 2003 and ending who the heck knows when which may or may not lead to anything in particular. Here are some tips, written from a my perspective as a more or less typical middle-aged unattached man.

I am most familiar with Match.com — but I have also dabbled with Yahoo! Personals, EHarmony and Friendster. Match.com has the most members; EHarmony (whose slogan is "Dating For A Serious Relationship") has the strongest matchmaking methodology; Friendster is free and lots of fun (but generally speaking you can only contact friends of friends, so it's hard to break into the club unless you already know one or more well-connected members from real life.)

One extremely popular free site is PlentyOfFish.com. I learned of their existence through their ubiquitous Google AdSense/AdWords placements. I was reluctant to check them out because "free" dating sites typically either have no real members and/or are full of Russian and Chinese scammers. But it turns out that this is a real dating site full of real people. The operators make their money through "keyword arbitrage": they pay for one AdSense/AdWords click up front from someone else's site (maybe even mine) in the hopes that you will make more clicks as you browse their own site. (This is, by the way, similar to the original Match.combusiness model, although Match.com now relies on subscription fees.)

One gotcha heterosexual male members must watch out for on PlentyOfFish is that you will be unable to message women if you admit to looking for the main thing that you are looking for: if you choose the"Intimate Encounters" or "Sex" pulldowns, you will be banned by about 99% of the female members. (The PlentyOfFish database even tracks if you have EVER messaged someone looking for sex, and many women will ding you just for that.) Members of all genders should remember to click on the ads every so often to help keep the service going.

The scariest and bluntest service is AdultFriendFinder: they put out ads with slogans like "Meet real sex partners here!" I have taken the free tour. I haven't worked up the courage to venture much further. True.com is scary and blunt in a different way: its slogan is "We screen for felons and married people."

I have had some luck (and more good luck than bad luck) meeting people through the computer game Second Life. But in my case, this is of limited Real Life value since my Second Life avatars are quite different (on the outside, at least) from my Real Life self. Also if (like many men and most women) it is important for you to find someone exactly your own age who lives in exactly the same place as yourself, then Second life is problematic as a dating service: your new friends will turn out to be just about any age and live just about anyplace (or, anyplace with cheap broadband service, at any rate.) And let's not even get into the whole gender-identity issue...

Real Life dating services advertise on Second Life via devices called "HippiePays" which pay Second Life avatars a small sum of money in exchange for agreeing to be spammed by advertisers. (You do get to pick the advertisers you want to be contacted by and they are all fairly respectable.) It's not a bad deal if you don't mind a little extra spam. I have a HippiePay terminal myself, conveniently located on the Nabi sim:

Nabi (153/145/122)

1. Pictures or No Pictures? Most women are reluctant to put their pictures on the web, for a variety of reasons. (At least half of the profiles placed by women on Match.com, for example, lack photos.)

One common reason is that they are afraid someone will recognize them from real life. To some extent, this is a valid concern: local men are going to spot you at the Stop & Shop. They probably won't say anything to you, but they will try to scope you out. (This is something they would be doing even if they didn't recognize you, actually.) In most cases, they will think you look better in person than in the pictures.

Match.com's PR people claim that profiles with photos get eight times more attention than those without. This fictitious arbitrary number is understated: the real number, if you could quantify such a thing, would be at least 20. Even if you beat the 20-1 odds against you, you will be at a competitive disadvantage (especially if you further protect your privacy by not saying anything of substance about yourself in your unillustrated profile.)

If you still feel you must run a photo-less profile, you will have more luck if you take the risk of contacting the men rather than waiting to be contacted. Of course, if you happen to be a lady you may feel that this is not very "lady-like." And, whatever your gender, if you make the first move you get more of the blame if the relationship ends awkwardly.

Even if a guy does enter into an email dialog with you, he will be imagining the ugliest woman he would still be willing to sleep with. This will in many ways not be such a bad thing if he eventually gets to see you in person (unless of course you really are that ugly.) However, until he gets to see what you look like, you run the risk of losing him to someone whose picture (and/or self) he actually has seen.

The dating services advise you not to include other people in your pictures. This is good advice, especially for women. The guys who read your profile will be jealous of the other guys in the photos: it doesn't matter if they're just coworkers, or just your brothers, or just your gay male buddies, or whatever. Any sensible man already knows there are going to be other men in your life: however, there's nothing to be gained by reminding him of this fact before you even have a relationship with him. Putting kids in your photos, especially someone else's kids, is generally not a good idea. (Though not because being a single mother is a bad thing. Men like women who have kids, since moms tend to be more patient, more pragmatic, and less needy than childless women. Also, the existence of the kids proves that you will indeed, under the right circumstances, be willing to have sex.) Pets in photos are OK, as long as they don't come across as jealous or overly possessive.

In the movies, dating services pictures are always subjected to advanced Photoshop magic. In real life, the pictures are often pretty bad (blurry, unflattering, poorly lit, etc.) are rarely subjcted to any manipulation at all — aside from cropping out the ex. And even then the ex usually remains as a disembodied hand on the lady's shoulder. There are some pretty simple tricks you can use to improve your photos without cheating: it is easy to blur things, sharpen things, adjust the color balance, etc. It's not even that hard to crop your ex's hand out of the shot! (Basically you can trim the picture along all four dimensions; you can crop your ex's body on one side of the shot and then get rid of his remaining hand out by cropping the other side of the photo.)

2. What to Say? You simply need to say a little bit about what type of a person you are. Try not to use any words you don't know how to spell. And even if you do know how to spell "monogamous," don't put it in your profile: you are talking to people who don't even know if they want to meet you for a cup of coffee yet! Monogamy is a lot to ask even of someone who is in love with you: it's much too much to demand from a total stranger. Also, a man who is predisposed towards having monogamous feelings towards a stranger is likely to also be a man who holds on a little too tight.

3. What are men looking for? Men are self-centered creatures who basically want four things from women: they want someone to sleep with, someone to laugh at his jokes (even the lame ones), someone who could be a good mother to his children (even if these are only hypothetical children) and someone who will take care of him (or at least, someone who won't impede his own efforts to take care of himself.) The rest of the stuff that women care about is of limited relevance to men. (Gay men want the same things as straight men, expect of course for #3: instead, a gay man wants a guy who could be a good uncle.) The ideal woman is the 50s porno ikon Bettie Page. (It is worth noting that she was not a young bimbo: in her heyday she was already in her mid-30s, was a college graduate and had already pursued several careers.)

Ladies will find that the men who are likely to be interested in you are generally older, shorter, and less financially secure than the ideal guy you have in mind. Yeah, I am well aware that this sucks. On the other hand, men will find that the attractive women are just as likely to respond positively to them as the not-so-attractive ones. (I have three theories to explain this. The first is that attractive women have more experience with men and hence are more confident about reciprocating men's usually fumbling advances. The second is that guys make more of an effort when they think the woman is a hottie than when they think she is merely acceptable. The third is that sexual attraction actually is a sign of spiritual compatibility.)

4. What are women looking for? I don't know. If I knew, I probably wouldn't be writing this article.

5. How does the process work? Basically, you email a person for a while and then, unless one or both parties lose interest, you eventually meet them in real life. Online dating services take three main approaches. The least popular, though highest-tech approach, is the social networking model (used in Friendster) where you scope out your friend's friends. The most common is the classic dating service model (used in Match.com) where you fill out a questionnaire and then it is up to you to fossick through a huge pile of other people's answers, hoping to strike gold.

Finally, there is the matchmaking model (used in Eharmony) where you are subjected to a lengthy personality test. The dating service's database server acts like an old-fashioned yenta and gives you a short list of (ostensibly, scientifically selected) prospective mates. It still up to you to decide if you want to date any given individual, and if you run through the list of prospects, the computer will draw up a new list. However, the computer will first try to make you feel guilty for not pairing off with any of the previous prospects. The most interesting aspect of this approach is that the matchmaking software, rather than the customers, decides what criteria to apply. This generally means that you are more likely to end up finding someone who might actually be interested in you.

For casual dating the first two approaches are probably better, though the third approach works better if you specifically want to find a mate as soon as possible (though there are still the traditional offline approaches to finding a mate as well.... but that's beyond the scope of this article.)

What's the ideal age to find a mate? A woman thinks a man should be exactly the same age as her. A man thinks a woman should be half his age plus 15 years. (Hence a 16-year-old boy will lust after 23-year-old girls and a 60-year-old man will lust after 45-year-old women.) This means that 30 is the ideal age to be looking for love. Unless of course, you are currently some other age, in which case whatever age you are right now is the ideal age to be looking for love!
How old should you claim to be? If you are a woman who is not sure how old she should admit to being, try claiming to be 37. One of the standard factoids which each generation of men passes on to the next is that a woman's sexual peak takes place at age 37. If you are a man who is not sure how old he should say he is, try claiming to be 34 (i.e., just old enough to meet a 37-year-old woman's minimum age requirement.) An even better thing to do is to simply give your real age.
If you're a woman who is older than maybe 25 at the most, you might wanna stop blathering on about how you're not just a booty call. Lady, at some point, no one expects you to be a virgin anymore (especially if you've already been married and/or had kids.) Not only that, men (even the virtuous ones) are looking to find women who actually enjoy having sex. Moreover, they're looking to avoid women who will ration out the nookie in the smallest possible portions at the highest possible price. It's worth noting, by the way, that men are actually rather fond of their booty calls: as you can see from the fact that all the most heartfelt rock and roll love songs are about chicks the singer loved and left behind on the road.
Women's age specs tend to filter out the guys who will be the most interested in them. If you stick to the standard plus or minus three year range, you're filtering out a lot of possible lovers. The older men are the ones who will think you are a young babe. The younger men will think you are a sophisticated older women.
Men think young babes and sophisticated old ladies are even more fascinating than the women their own age. The fascination with young girls is easily explained on simplistic biological grounds (although older women love to come up with much more complicated explanations.) Men are biologically capable of being fathers throughout their adult lives, whereas women are most fertile when they are in their 20s and can't have babies at all past some point in early middle age.
The fascination with older ladies has a more subtle explanation: a boy's earliest sexual and romantic crushes tend to be on his teachers and his friends' moms (as documented in numerous rock and roll songs.) Even during the college years, the most interesting and most self-assured women in a young man's social universe are the female professors, grad students, etc.— which makes them sexier from the guy's perspective than the girls his own age. These love-objects are typically women in their late 20s on up— and they are also a decade or more older than the boys.
Women in their 40s (and even 30s) need to bear in mind that men in their 30s and even older are going to be much more interested in marrying someone of child-bearing age. Younger guys are good for friendship and (if you are willing to admit being a sexual being yourself) sex— but getting them to marry you is going to be extremely difficult (although it does happen on occasion.) Your odds of marriage are much better with someone older than yourself, even though he has probably been married one or more times already.

Evans v. Match.com

In mid-November 2005, there was a minor furore over a rather silly-sounding lawsuit filed against Match.com by a lonely Los Angeles 30-something. The plaintiff, Matthew Evans, went on a date with a somewhat younger lady named Autumn Marzec (who is described in most news stories as "buxom" and/or "dark-haired.") There is a person by that name who has a profile and a picture on yahoo.com under the username Marzec74.

Presumably Autumn Marzec would be the woman on the right with the long hair.

Evans' allegations don't really pass the "giggle test." He alleges that Marzec told him that she was a professional "date-baiter" hired by Match.com to go on dates with guys to keep them from cancelling their subscriptions. She allegedly told Evans that she was expected to meet with as many as 100 men per month. This would be roughly 5 dates per working day. The logistical aspects of going on 100 dates per month would be daunting. And, unless she was absurdly underpaid, Match.com would have to pay her something on the order of $10,000/month (assuming $100 per trick) plus expenses. (Well, actually, that's not that huge a salary given the cost of living in L.A.— but this still doesn't seem cost-effective.)

This is a multiply pathetic story. The fact that he could only get a date if someone paid the other person to go out with him is pathetic. The fact that he thinks it's so terrible to pay someone else (even if only indirectly) for a date is also pathetic. The fact that he felt the need to announce this to the whole world is even more pathetic— but not as pathetic as the fact that he's going to the trouble to file a lawsuit.

Although the lawsuit seems laughable, there is a real problem behind it. That is the fact that male subscribers don't get very many responses. Even an ideal prospect (a tall, handsome, widowed or never-married man in his late 20s with a high-paying job which doesn't take up much of his time or energy, who always leaves the toilet seat down, who has no interest in professional sports unless he himself is an professional athlete, and whose fondest goal is to be in a monogamous relationship with his soulmate) will get ignored by most of the women he tries to contact. And I do mean "ignored"— totally ignored: merely being rejected comes as a rare treat for a male online dating customer! (Most of the women who ignore his message will be non-paying members who can't send a reply until they pay up, admittedly— but many of them will in fact be paying members.)

And, not that this matters a heckuva lot, if you looked around Match.com for women in their mid-20's who are into volleyball and who live near Los Angeles, you could have found a profile put up by someone who says her name is Autumn and who looks exactly like the younger woman in the picture shown above. It definitely looks like a real profile: it is short and not too specific and has only one photo (a good but not great one.) She says she went to USC, and indeed there evidently is a recent Marshall School of Business graduate listed in the alumni directory (not available to the non-USC public) whose first name is Autumn and whose last name echoes her Match.com handle. I will be coy and not say what the last name is. But, I will tell you that it ain't Marzec.

More info:

November 18, 2005 USA Today article
GelfMagazine blog entry
OnLine Personals Watch blog entry: a few weeks after the lawsuit, Channel 7 in Boston did a 2-minute 30-second exposé of the online dating industry on one of its newcasts. The headline was the question "IS IT A DATE AND SWITCH?!?". Nothing much was exposed. Blogger Mark Brooks served as a talking head who provided a couple of brief soundbites. His Typepad blog deals exclusively with the online dating industry.
PDF file of Evans' lawsuit. (One of those annoying PDFs which is just a sequence of bad photocopies. Sorry!) Evans' lawfirm is Arias, Ozzello & Gignac, who do a lot of class action suits. (Evans' filing does express the intention to make a class action suit out of this. I would be a member of the "National Class" of past and present Match.com subscribers.)
There are three main elements to the law suit. First, there is the allegation that Evans (like others in the National Class) was defrauded when he got "date-baited"— since his contacts with Marzec could not lead to a long-term relationship. Second, there is the claim that match.com inappropriately used Evans' and other subscribers' personal information to set up sham bait-dates. Thirdly, there is the claim that Evans (like others) was not warned that his profile would fall into a "black hole" of inaccessible profiles if he didn't update it at least once every 30 days. (This third charge is not at all true: I have seen profiles in my search results which have gone unchanged for literally years at a time. Admittedly, updated profiles do get ranked higher in search results, but stale ones are by no means hidden from view.)
December 12, 2005 USA Today article entitled "Blind dating gets back in the game". (This article, by Olivia Barker, actually doesn't directly mention the recent lawsuits. But Ms. Barker does claim, based on random anecdotal evidence, that blind dates are making a comeback because of "online dating fatigue." The big advantage of being set up by friends and relatives is supposedly that there is a certain amount of accountability to your mutual contacts, so you know the other person is who they claim to be, and you also know that the other party can't simply blow you off. As a 5-foot-6 man I was amused that one of the examples of why online dating doesn't work was the "online date [who] says he's 5-foot-10 and turns out to be more like 5-foot-6.")

A few nitpicky points:

Don't specifically mention your age in your profile text unless you are prepared to go back and update the reference each year when your birthday comes around again. It looks silly if you describe yourself as a "44-year-old single mom" when the header info says you're 46.
You will have better luck if the specs for who you want to meet are set wide enough to match someone who might actually be interested in you. Men make things harder for themselves by asking for women who are much younger than them. (She may not be too young for you, but you might be too old for her.) In addition to demanding tall rich men who live within a 20-mile radius, women tend to set very narrow age requirements. I see lots of specs like "man, age 38-42." Before you set a spec that narrow, you might want to consider these questions:
I see lots of profiles where the person talks about his or her love of travel, and then turns around and specifies that their prospective dates must live within a ridiculously short distance. 10 miles is not at all uncommon, even in a city like New York which is more than 10 miles wide. (The extreme example was a man listed as living in "Madison Square, NY" which meant he lived in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, halfway between Midtown Manhattan and the West Village. His specified radius was 3 miles— not even far enough to reach the Upper West Side! And yet he still said he loves to travel.)
It is OK to brag about your travels a little, but don't overdo it. I know you have fond memories of that pristine beach in Sri Lanka and that little trattoria in Palermo. But your next first date is probably going to be at the coffee shop at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.
Those little webcams which you mount on top of your monitor take lousy pictures, especially at low light levels. You only have a few thousand pixels to work with in the first place, and at low light levels most of the pixels are used up by noise. If you must use a webcam, for God's sake, light the shot--- preferably with warm light (i.e., incadescent bulbs, candles, sunlight, etc.) as opposed to cold light (fluorescent bulbs, the glare from the computer screen, etc.) Even with good lighting, the typical webcam angle from the top of your monitor (and about 2 or 3 feet from your forehead) does not produce flattering imagery. Try standing up and moving back so the camera can get a shot of at least the top half of your body, preferably a shot taken from below forehead level. (If need be, try standing on a stack of phonebooks or whatever to make yourself taller.) Or if you are really bold, point the webcam at your bed and sit on it (the bed, not the webcam!)
Speaking of pictures... use sexy pictures, or at least minimally appealing pictures. And only use pictures of yourself (just yourself, not anyone else!)

Must Love Dogs

A popular 2005 romantic comedy entitled Must Love Dogs dealt with online dating. I haven't seen it yet, aside from the trailer. Evidently, after numerous comic complications, Diane Lane ends up with John Cusack. This role kicked off Cusack's third decade as a romantic comedy hero. His first such role was as Daphne Zuñiga's soulmate in The Sure Thing — which came out in 1985.

The dating site in the film, PerfectMatch.com, actually exists. I have only taken the free tour of the site. All I can say is that the compatibility quiz was fun and the design of the site seemed good

PerfectMatch also makes an appearance in an more recent (and much less popular) romantic comedy: Failure to Launch, starring Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker. Once again, I have only seen the trailer.

One thing I should mention about online dating in movies is this: one of the conventions of the romantic comedy is that at least one partner's ads have been placed without his or her consent by well-meaning but meddling third parties.

In real life, virtually all legitmate ads (and even most of the scam ads) are put up by the person being advertised. In fact putting up an ad on behalf of a friend or family member is a violation of the dating site's Terms of Service — unless the site is MatchmakingMoms.com, which was featured in the 2007 film Because I Said So (featuring Diane Keaton as an overbearing 60-ish single mom with one last daughter left to marry off.) This site sounds like it was invented just for the movie, but no, it really exists.

Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.