I wouldn’t recommend online dating. Stats released by various online dating sites reveal that there are usually far more men than (active) women, the women get a couple of orders of magnitude more attention than the men do, and a significant fraction of people on these sites actually never get to meet anyone there in person. There have been some recent attempts at apps/sites aimed at solving these problems but I’m not aware of any that have been particularly successful. I’d love to be proven wrong though as my information about online dating is from 1-2 years ago.
Anecdotally, my success in the dating world went up dramatically when I started using OKCupid; to put it simply, it got me past the “is she even interested in dating, much less dating me?” hangup that I tended to have, and led to a lower fear of rejection. Basically, I no longer worried about whether the attention was undesirable, something that I had a really hard time telling from in-person interaction back then (I’ve gotten better at it; this was years ago).
Also, while it’s certainly true that there are tons of guys on such sites and women tend to get a ton of attention (mostly undesirable, as in looking for dating but gets mostly messages along the lines of “your hot lets fuck”), it’s really not that hard to stand out from the herd. It might take a while to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but online dating is a much easier (in my experience) place to try things out (with regard to getting a date) than face-to-face. Also, online dating is a really good way for less-social types of people to meet other less-social types of people.
Now, with that said, even once you start getting first dates you should expect a lot of them to not go anywhere. That’s the way the world works. Learn from them, both what your partners didn’t like and what you didn’t like. Don’t assume it’s always something you can change about yourself except by refining what you look for in a partner. Again, this might take a while to find somebody who is into you, and you’re into them, and neither of you scares away or turns off the other… but it’ll happen, and being in a relationship is a huge emotional, self-esteem, and confidence boost… even if the relationship doesn’t last.
Sure, I can explain. Bear in mind that this is all based on my personal experiences (male, atheist, mid-to-late 20s, college degree, lives in Seattle, WA, only interested in dating women) and that although I have developed it over around four years I’m not claiming I’ve found the perfect strategy so far.
First of all, filter match ratios pretty hard. Anybody below a 90% is probably not worth checking unless they checked you first, below an 80% not even then. Above that it starts being more a matter of enemy ratio; above 10% is probably not worth it, above 15% quite unlikely. 95%+ match and 5%- enemy is always worth checking out.
Next, take a quick look for dealbreakers (you do have a list of dealbreakers, right? Not things like “overweight” unless you are super opposed to that, but things like being a smoker, or “I don’t really read stuff, lol”, or being significantly religious). Many people also list their dealbreakers; make sure you aren’t on them (sometimes it’s little stuff, like having a beard or being too short; seems silly but just move on and don’t waste the time). Distance or location is common one; not all 25 mile distances (or whatever threshold you set) are created equal. Relationship type (poly/open or monogamous) can often be a dealbreaker too.
OK, she’s a good match and there’s no dealbreakers. Take a look at her profile essays. There should be a few things that jump out at you; a show you both like, a book you want to read but haven’t yet, an interesting career path, a shared love of some sport or activity, etc. If you can’t find anything like that and want to dig deeper, you can check her photos for interesting scenes or captions—some people are just bad at writing profile essays, but reveal themselves to be interesting in other ways—but in general if you don’t have at least 3 things that really stand out as interesting it’s not worth the time.
Now you’ve got a good basis for a message, you just need the form of it. I tend to start with a simple “Hello” or “Hi there!”, or possibly something a little silly like “Greetings, fellow -lover!”. Don’t talk about yourself much, except to say things like “I just got back from , and it was awesome!” or “I see you’re also a fan of , have you read ?” Aim for 2-3 paragraphs; it’s totally fine to save some of your “hey, I like …” for a subsequent message and is probably a better idea than letting the first one go on too long.
A few DOs and DON’Ts: Don’t ask to meet right away, unless she expresses an interest in that herself. Save it for at least the second message, after she shows an interest in you. Do put your (first) name at the bottom; some women will be hesitant to share their name, but there’s nothing wrong with sharing yours. Don’t talk about tricky subjects in the first message (it’s cool to indicate a general alignment with their views—say, cheer for legalized gay marriage, or whatever—but don’t go into detail on your thoughts). Do comment on / ask about specific things from her profile and make it clear you actually read it. Don’t compliment her appearance (possibly unless you can pull it off suave as fuck); that’s better saved for an in-person date. Don’t include your phone number right away, again unless she has already indicated a preference for meeting up right away (most women will want to exchange at least a couple messages first).
You can “Like” the profile or not, as you wish; I don’t think it makes a huge difference either way if she doesn’t “Like” you first. If she does (or if you tag her and she tags you back) then that’s definitely a good sign, and you should put the effort into your message. Don’t make her wait too long!
If she writes back, the optimal response will depend a lot on what she says and this comment is already super-long so I won’t try to go into that. However, one thing I’ve found: do not keep the conversation going forever in messaging/email (though moving off the site messaging and switching to email after a round trip or two is reasonable and may feel a little more personal). If she hasn’t at least dropped a hint about meeting by her third message, suggest meeting in person, possibly over some food you both like or similar (keep it casual and low-key). If she doesn’t show signs of interest in the next reply, I usually don’t pursue it much more.
I found the match factor to be very predictive. With an ex-boyfriend of mine, the boyfriend I found via okc and a more recent one I had 99% match, though the maximum height of the match factor is constrained by amount of questions answered and the way you answer them, so you might not get that high in the first place. 95% is really decent, I never found anyone <80% interesting enough to talk to for longer.
For the enemy thing I recommend checking the answers marked “unacceptable” that go into the factor calculation. Sometimes these come merely from interpreting a question differently.
I’m open to describing which strategies would work for me (24, female, white, European), but I am not sure how much they generalise. I rely on profile text quite heavily for getting an impression of the other person and will often send the first message. I’m informed that isn’t typical though.
Some types of messages I got:
1.) mass messages
Just “Hi” or “Hi :)” or “Hi how r u” or similar. These are very common.
I tried to talk to some of those people and the conversations tended to be extremely boring, uncreative and the people lacked raw intelligence (e.g. they would not understand irony).
2.) creepy and/or sexual (mass) messages
The usual expected “Are u into casual sex?” or similar, but also “I like your white skin”. I haven’t seen people be creepy on purpose. But my experience on the site might have been somewhat more sheltered than average.
My general observation was that > 70% of the people who send short messages appeared to lack what I would have considered baseline intelligence. Some of them are also incredibly desperate. I haven’t seen a lot of unfriendly messages and most of them could be declared my own doing, since I tended to get impatient in situations where people evidently didn’t read a single line of my profile (e.g. asking “are you single?” when this is literally in the header of your profile).
3.) profile-related comments
Not always for dating, just pointing out a single thing they liked or asking a single question. Really appreciated, might lead to talking more but in my experience these often weren’t dating-related.
4.) more elaborate (up to several paragraphs) messages
Always with reference to something I wrote on my profile. Generally friendly, intelligent people, I enjoyed the conversations (and friendships) resulting from this.
If she has a long profile text, a reference to or question about one or more of those things is strongly recommended. That’s what the thing is for—if you don’t find any of it interesting, you probably won’t find her interesting either. Writing long texts costs a lot of time, so it’s disappointing to see people just skip it.
I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on okc available, but during that time I got ~8 messages a day. I tried to answer all the longer ones, but it’s painful to turn people away and I personally understand if people don’t reply at all even to a multiple-paragraph-message. Maybe that helps with understanding the large amount of “silent rejections”. I’d recommend making a first message not longer than 2 paragraphs, so you don’t have so much sunk cost.
Personally I solved the flood of messages by asking people to send me a short message, after which I’d take a look at their profile and answer if I was interested. This was optimal for me since it reduced the guilt over not answering carefully-crafted messages and I was judging based on profile anyways.
There’s an excellent longer post somewhere on LW about how to write a good profile. Okc itself has a few interesting blog posts e.g. about the optimal length of a first message. I’m open to answering questions should that be useful.
TL;DR: Agreed on the “check the match questions, especially the ‘unacceptable’ ones” comment! The enemy rating can be a total lie.
Oh jeez, OKC match questions. I’m sometimes amazed that the site works as well as it does when the match questions (and their answers) are so terrible. Some very common problems I have with them:
1) Questions where the only possible answer is nuanced—“Would you date a person who ?” for some X that has a wide range of possible meanings—and the only possible answers are yes and no. No “maybe”, much less an “it depends”, never mind the chance to choose an answer specifying the thing it actually depends on. I just skip these, usually.
2) Questions/answers which presuppose an attitude on some subject. “If you discovered a first date was carrying condoms, would you tease them about it?” and all four possible answers indicate that this is a bad, or at best neutral, thing to do. My answer to this one is actually true—I probably wouldn’t say anything—but I’d approve and there’s no way (that is relevant to the algorithm; the “explain your answer” box is ignored for purposes of percentages) to indicate this approval.
3) Questions where, for example, there’s two acceptable answers, one unacceptable one, and one great one. Problem is, you can only specify that an answer is “acceptable” or not, and then rank how important it is that the other person’s answer is one of them. Do I mark all three that I’m OK with and say this is important, to strongly exclude the fourth, or rank it less important because two of them I’m not actually strongly in favor of are nonetheless acceptable? Or mark only the one great answer as acceptable, and then say it’s important because if you agree with me that’s great and should bump up our match percentages… or that it’s less important, because I’m excluding some options that would actually be OK?
4) Questions (or occasionally answers) where I want to give one answer based on what the question appears to be asking (if interpreted a little generously), but a more direct/literal interpretation requires a different (often opposite) answer. Do I accept the answer that I’d probably end up giving if I was asked this in person and gave the asker a chance to clarify, or do I actually answer the question as asked even though the way it’s asked is stupid and/or misleading? Am I actually being asked my view on the topic, or am I being asked whether it’s more important that a partner have good reading comprehension and basic decency/familiarity with well-known historical events and the ability to draw obvious parallels? Or maybe whether they answer things literally as asked, or are good at identifying the asker’s intent?
Not to derail this thread into a discussion of OKC’s amazingly-effective-despite-its-frequent-terribleness match question system, just pointing out that, despite my own suggestion of checking the enemy percentage, the enemy percentage can be a lot higher than is warranted. I have seen numerous cases where our answers were mutually unacceptable but, as explained in the “explain your answer” box, we actually have the same view on the topic. Sigh...
I don’t recall individual messages (it was 4 years ago). Trying to look through my messages folder, but I might have deleted some to save space. There were no longer messages I didn’t answer. Usually contact broke off after a few messages though.
Reasons I could imagine for not answering:
looking at their profile, not being particularly interested, wanting to answer out of politeness but continually forgetting to (i.e. other things being more important)
hm, I remember a really nice guy I wrote back and forth with and eventually I stopped answering, partly because he had a really negative outlook on life and that made it uncomfortable to think about the content of the messages. If a first message sparked any negative feelings (maybe if it sounded very desperate?) I might have felt ughy enough about it to not answer.
It doesn’t look like that actually happened for first replies, so those are just guesses. Maybe they are reasons for other people to not reply to a first message.
Also, there are not a lot of people with match factor 95% upwards.
I tried to find some first messages that I liked, to give some better examples, but since I tended to message people first myself, there really isn’t that much.
(longer) messages I disliked:
http://i.imgur.com/I2Jkuzd.png (this one is German from a guy trying to be funny. It’s so cringey that I actually didn’t answer at all. I’m unsure about the match percentage but it was probably < 95%)
I’m not the best person to ask for examples of good first messages by guys.
I’d have liked you to phrase the first sentence as “I wouldn’t recommend online dating to men.”
I mean, I’m aware that there are 10-15% women on this site, but let’s not accidentally exclude them. Especially for nerdy/geeky/intellectual women, okcupid is in my experience a really great place. I got the impression that I was able to find people that were much more similar to me than anyone else I knew from my university environment—which lead to a few friendships and my longest relationship to date.
It’s true that my male friends’ experiences were usually less successful. It doesn’t have to be your only strategy though.
Good point. I implicitly meant I wouldn’t recommend online dating to Clarity, who I’m assuming is male. My personal experiences on OKC were also positive, but the stats released by them and other sites are not very reassuring.
Counter-anecdote. I am a hetero man and have been using OkCupid since July 2012. I have had almost 40 first dates, about 5 second dates, and 2 relationships from it in that time.
Both the median and mean age difference of the women who have gone out with me has been about 7 years younger than me, with the youngest 15 years younger and the oldest 1 year older than me. Comparison between genders is hard, especially from the inside, but I’m confident that at least a few of these women would be rated as more attractive than I am. While most of them probably weren’t as high IQ as I am, screening out people of totally incompatible intellect ahead of time is pretty easy.
I’m told that I’m lucky in that I’ve never run into anyone really crazy or unpleasant, but of ~40 first dates, only 2 have been really awkward, and none scarily so.
(Admitted other-optimizing warning: I am already in my mid-30s, possibly autism-adjacent but not actually autistic, and although my face is nothing special, I am in exceptionally good shape. On the other hand, that’s partly to compensate for being a single father, so it probably balances out somewhat. I’m also on the US east coast, which has a more favorable gender balance in the population at large than, in particular, the Bay area, where many rationalists seem to congregate..)
I wasn’t offering an anecdote. My personal experience on online dating wasn’t bad. It was actually quite good. However, I do agree it depends strongly on geographical area.
There is a huge confounding factor—looks. Most sites are hugely photo focused. So the women who look good on photos get contacted by hundreds of men. Generally most issues boil down to this.
For me narrowing my search to women without photos worked really well, and I did it on a “traditional” site (it does not necessarily mean being ugly, just shy or not wanting to be judged by looks).
Now there are even sites specialized for this such as Willow and PersonalityMatch.
I have not tried Willow—no need to, I am sold—but it sounds like really something I would use.
I can confirm that for my case—when I (female) removed my picture from Okcupid, it had the (desirable, then) effect that I didn’t get any messages whatsoever anymore, over the space of ~6 months. I might have gotten a non-zero amount if I hadn’t stated on my profile that I wasn’t looking for relationships at the time, but even with that clear statement I still got messages every once in a while during the time I had the picture up. I didn’t try experimenting with a more/less attractive picture.
I got the impression that many people just look at the profile and don’t even check the relationship status at the top of the profile.
Whether or not online dating is a good recommendation depends on whether it leads to people in the corresponding reference class having success with it.
It doesn’t depend on the raw numbers of men and women.
Interpreting the statement generously, ChristianKI probably meant “The raw gender ratio for the site as a whole doesn’t matter, only the success rate for people in your demographic (which is partially determined by the gender ratio in the relevant demographic but is not exclusively driven by it).”
For the record, a few ways that raw gender ratio may matter less than you think:
1) It doesn’t take orientation into consideration; that’s probably even (you “lose” the same percentage of women to lesbianism as you can “subtract” gay men), but then in theory the gender ratio should be balanced overall too.
2) It doesn’t take polyamory into consideration. The OP didn’t sound like he was looking for a poly relationship, but a lot of guys are fine with it and, in my experience, poly women tend to have a lot of partners (anecdotally, I know at least as many poly women as poly men, but that probably varies by demographic and may be incorrect more generally anyhow). In any case, poly allows one person to “count” as several for the purposes of such ratios.
3) It doesn’t take into consideration relative quality. The women the OP is interested in meeting are unlikely to be interested in all those barely-literate men who spam every person marked “female” on the site. They are only competition (demand) in the sense that they clog mailboxes and make it hard to punch a signal through all the noise. There doesn’t seem to be a significant corresponding category of women wasting mens’ time and mailbox capacity, so the ratio is way more even than the raw numbers suggest.
I would count poly women having more partners than poly men as evidence in favor of gender ratios mattering. It suggests poly women are in higher demand than poly men. It’s possible poly men are less willing to be poly than poly women (therefore poly men are lower supply and poly women higher supply), but that doesn’t go too well with my prior of men generally desiring sex more than women on average.
On 3, yes, if the OP is a 10 because of his writing, or any other combination of factors, then he’ll be in high demand irregardless of the imbalance, but it’s not clear that the OP would be considered at the top of the pack by other women.
That’s not what I said. For different people there are different reasons why they don’t get into a relationship.
Dating sites provide an environment where the rules of the game are much clearer than in the normal dating world.
An intelligent person who’s good at writing but to shy to approach woman in “real life”, can actually interact with woman on a dating site. They get feedback on their actions.
I think guys on LW have a bunch of strengths that the average guy doesn’t have but they also have bunch of weaknesses. As a result it’s very useful to test different approaches to see whether another approach lines up better with one’s strengths.
A lot of women complain about very badly written messages. There are many cases where intelligent guy is going to be better than average at writing messages on dating websites but worse than average at actually asking out a women in “real life”.
The act of consciously thinking about how to present oneself in a profile is useful for a guy who never really thought about how to present himself.
Markets happen at the margin. Small imbalances between supply and demand can lead to large changes in price. Going from below average and an even gender ratio to above average and a 2:1 gender ratio makes you worse off. The bottom half of guys are pretty much removed if everyone pairs off. This means the new bottom starts at average.
Going from below average and an even gender ratio to above average and a 2:1 gender ratio makes you worse off.
What do you mean with “worse off”? That it’s easier for woman to find a date with a man on a dating website then for a man to find a date with a woman?
That’s obviously true.
On the other hand that tells us nothing about whether it’s a wise decision for a guy to sign up to a dating website. That has to compared to the other alternatives that the guy has.
I also don’t believe that “price” is a good construct to think about the dating “market”. People don’t pick life partners the way they buy cars. Paying a price would make it prostitution. That’s not the typical dating situation.
To get a romantic partner you have to successful do a “mating dance” that isn’t directly related about your value as a romantic partner. In different contexts that mating dance looks differently. Online dating makes that mating dance a bit different than the mating dance that happens when one hangs out with friends. It’s more explicit and that can help some people more than others.
By worse off I’m saying a small improvement in your new mating dance versus the old one won’t overcome a large decrease in the value of that mating dance.
Money is just a concept used to establish the relative value of two different objects. That we refuse to put a price on some things doesn’t mean those things don’t have a measurable relative value; it just usually means we’re less consistent about what that value is. For instance lives of citizens are generally valued at $10 million (and foreigners near zero) for many policy decisions. It couldn’t be, say, a billion dollars or we would eventually run out of money.
There’s an old joke. A man asks if a woman will sleep with him for $10 million. She agrees. He then asks if she’ll sleep with him for $10. She scoffs “”What do you think I am!?”. He replies “we’vs already established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price.”
By worse off I’m saying a small improvement in your new mating dance versus the old one won’t overcome a large decrease in the value of that mating dance.
It doesn’t have to equal a small improvement. It can also produce a larger improvement. The empiric fact that I know multiple guys for whom online dating produced a lot of value suggests that’s true.
. For instance lives of citizens are generally valued at $10 million (and foreigners near zero) for many policy decisions.
That’s true for some policy decisions made by bureaucrats. On the other hand it’s not true for a lot of decisions made by democratic parliaments.
There’s an old joke. A man asks if a woman will sleep with him for $10 million. She agrees. He then asks if she’ll sleep with him for $10. She scoffs “”What do you think I am!?”. He replies “we’vs already established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price.”
The fact that you can theoretically buy a woman for a price in no way implies that that’s the dynamic of the average dating interaction.
You make mistakes when you model decision making that doesn’t use price as a criteria with a straight market dynamic.
I agree that certain types of items are not readily traded for other things. It’s hard to buy time with money for instance. But if things have value then things have a price. That price can be measured in dollars normally, but it can also be measured in time or enjoyment or any of a number of other metrics. I believe I’m simply using a more general definition of price and you’re using a stricter definition so the argument is mostly semantics.
Plenty of supply and demand models don’t use money as a criteria. Switching from dollars to minutes doesn’t change the dynamic. That the model is incomplete is true. But there’s no such thing as a complete model; that’s the nature of a model.
Are you aware of the phrase “sacred values” in decision theory? Paying money a person money can make them less likely to accept an offer?
But that isn’t even everything because a mating dance is more complex than simply providing enjoyment or time or any such metric.
I believe I’m simply using a more general definition of price and you’re using a stricter definition so the argument is mostly semantics.
I think that’s unlikely true given the unattributed Churchill quote that you used.
That the model is incomplete is true. But there’s no such thing as a complete model; that’s the nature of a model.
The problem isn’t that it’s incomplete but that it’s bad because it leads to various mistakes for a person who wants to make good dating decisions.
Don’t be a hedgehog.
I’m not sure how being unable to exchange sacred values for money has anything to do with exchanges of sacred values. I’ve already explicitly stated I’m not talking about exchanges of money. I also wasn’t aware I’d quoted Churchill. If you mean the old story, Churchhill didn’t originate it.
I wouldn’t recommend online dating. Stats released by various online dating sites reveal that there are usually far more men than (active) women, the women get a couple of orders of magnitude more attention than the men do, and a significant fraction of people on these sites actually never get to meet anyone there in person. There have been some recent attempts at apps/sites aimed at solving these problems but I’m not aware of any that have been particularly successful. I’d love to be proven wrong though as my information about online dating is from 1-2 years ago.
Anecdotally, my success in the dating world went up dramatically when I started using OKCupid; to put it simply, it got me past the “is she even interested in dating, much less dating me?” hangup that I tended to have, and led to a lower fear of rejection. Basically, I no longer worried about whether the attention was undesirable, something that I had a really hard time telling from in-person interaction back then (I’ve gotten better at it; this was years ago).
Also, while it’s certainly true that there are tons of guys on such sites and women tend to get a ton of attention (mostly undesirable, as in looking for dating but gets mostly messages along the lines of “your hot lets fuck”), it’s really not that hard to stand out from the herd. It might take a while to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but online dating is a much easier (in my experience) place to try things out (with regard to getting a date) than face-to-face. Also, online dating is a really good way for less-social types of people to meet other less-social types of people.
Now, with that said, even once you start getting first dates you should expect a lot of them to not go anywhere. That’s the way the world works. Learn from them, both what your partners didn’t like and what you didn’t like. Don’t assume it’s always something you can change about yourself except by refining what you look for in a partner. Again, this might take a while to find somebody who is into you, and you’re into them, and neither of you scares away or turns off the other… but it’ll happen, and being in a relationship is a huge emotional, self-esteem, and confidence boost… even if the relationship doesn’t last.
What worked well for you?
Sure, I can explain. Bear in mind that this is all based on my personal experiences (male, atheist, mid-to-late 20s, college degree, lives in Seattle, WA, only interested in dating women) and that although I have developed it over around four years I’m not claiming I’ve found the perfect strategy so far.
First of all, filter match ratios pretty hard. Anybody below a 90% is probably not worth checking unless they checked you first, below an 80% not even then. Above that it starts being more a matter of enemy ratio; above 10% is probably not worth it, above 15% quite unlikely. 95%+ match and 5%- enemy is always worth checking out.
Next, take a quick look for dealbreakers (you do have a list of dealbreakers, right? Not things like “overweight” unless you are super opposed to that, but things like being a smoker, or “I don’t really read stuff, lol”, or being significantly religious). Many people also list their dealbreakers; make sure you aren’t on them (sometimes it’s little stuff, like having a beard or being too short; seems silly but just move on and don’t waste the time). Distance or location is common one; not all 25 mile distances (or whatever threshold you set) are created equal. Relationship type (poly/open or monogamous) can often be a dealbreaker too.
OK, she’s a good match and there’s no dealbreakers. Take a look at her profile essays. There should be a few things that jump out at you; a show you both like, a book you want to read but haven’t yet, an interesting career path, a shared love of some sport or activity, etc. If you can’t find anything like that and want to dig deeper, you can check her photos for interesting scenes or captions—some people are just bad at writing profile essays, but reveal themselves to be interesting in other ways—but in general if you don’t have at least 3 things that really stand out as interesting it’s not worth the time.
Now you’ve got a good basis for a message, you just need the form of it. I tend to start with a simple “Hello” or “Hi there!”, or possibly something a little silly like “Greetings, fellow -lover!”. Don’t talk about yourself much, except to say things like “I just got back from , and it was awesome!” or “I see you’re also a fan of , have you read ?” Aim for 2-3 paragraphs; it’s totally fine to save some of your “hey, I like …” for a subsequent message and is probably a better idea than letting the first one go on too long.
A few DOs and DON’Ts: Don’t ask to meet right away, unless she expresses an interest in that herself. Save it for at least the second message, after she shows an interest in you. Do put your (first) name at the bottom; some women will be hesitant to share their name, but there’s nothing wrong with sharing yours. Don’t talk about tricky subjects in the first message (it’s cool to indicate a general alignment with their views—say, cheer for legalized gay marriage, or whatever—but don’t go into detail on your thoughts). Do comment on / ask about specific things from her profile and make it clear you actually read it. Don’t compliment her appearance (possibly unless you can pull it off suave as fuck); that’s better saved for an in-person date. Don’t include your phone number right away, again unless she has already indicated a preference for meeting up right away (most women will want to exchange at least a couple messages first).
You can “Like” the profile or not, as you wish; I don’t think it makes a huge difference either way if she doesn’t “Like” you first. If she does (or if you tag her and she tags you back) then that’s definitely a good sign, and you should put the effort into your message. Don’t make her wait too long!
If she writes back, the optimal response will depend a lot on what she says and this comment is already super-long so I won’t try to go into that. However, one thing I’ve found: do not keep the conversation going forever in messaging/email (though moving off the site messaging and switching to email after a round trip or two is reasonable and may feel a little more personal). If she hasn’t at least dropped a hint about meeting by her third message, suggest meeting in person, possibly over some food you both like or similar (keep it casual and low-key). If she doesn’t show signs of interest in the next reply, I usually don’t pursue it much more.
Agreement on CBHacking’s points.
I found the match factor to be very predictive. With an ex-boyfriend of mine, the boyfriend I found via okc and a more recent one I had 99% match, though the maximum height of the match factor is constrained by amount of questions answered and the way you answer them, so you might not get that high in the first place. 95% is really decent, I never found anyone <80% interesting enough to talk to for longer.
For the enemy thing I recommend checking the answers marked “unacceptable” that go into the factor calculation. Sometimes these come merely from interpreting a question differently.
I’m open to describing which strategies would work for me (24, female, white, European), but I am not sure how much they generalise. I rely on profile text quite heavily for getting an impression of the other person and will often send the first message. I’m informed that isn’t typical though.
Some types of messages I got: 1.) mass messages Just “Hi” or “Hi :)” or “Hi how r u” or similar. These are very common. I tried to talk to some of those people and the conversations tended to be extremely boring, uncreative and the people lacked raw intelligence (e.g. they would not understand irony).
2.) creepy and/or sexual (mass) messages The usual expected “Are u into casual sex?” or similar, but also “I like your white skin”. I haven’t seen people be creepy on purpose. But my experience on the site might have been somewhat more sheltered than average.
[Edit: Actually looked through my old messages, found some examples. I think the second person counts as “creepy on purpose. http://i.imgur.com/3eRozU9.png and http://i.imgur.com/iAX9Id9.png ]
My general observation was that > 70% of the people who send short messages appeared to lack what I would have considered baseline intelligence. Some of them are also incredibly desperate. I haven’t seen a lot of unfriendly messages and most of them could be declared my own doing, since I tended to get impatient in situations where people evidently didn’t read a single line of my profile (e.g. asking “are you single?” when this is literally in the header of your profile).
3.) profile-related comments Not always for dating, just pointing out a single thing they liked or asking a single question. Really appreciated, might lead to talking more but in my experience these often weren’t dating-related.
4.) more elaborate (up to several paragraphs) messages Always with reference to something I wrote on my profile. Generally friendly, intelligent people, I enjoyed the conversations (and friendships) resulting from this.
If she has a long profile text, a reference to or question about one or more of those things is strongly recommended. That’s what the thing is for—if you don’t find any of it interesting, you probably won’t find her interesting either. Writing long texts costs a lot of time, so it’s disappointing to see people just skip it.
I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on okc available, but during that time I got ~8 messages a day. I tried to answer all the longer ones, but it’s painful to turn people away and I personally understand if people don’t reply at all even to a multiple-paragraph-message. Maybe that helps with understanding the large amount of “silent rejections”. I’d recommend making a first message not longer than 2 paragraphs, so you don’t have so much sunk cost.
Personally I solved the flood of messages by asking people to send me a short message, after which I’d take a look at their profile and answer if I was interested. This was optimal for me since it reduced the guilt over not answering carefully-crafted messages and I was judging based on profile anyways.
There’s an excellent longer post somewhere on LW about how to write a good profile. Okc itself has a few interesting blog posts e.g. about the optimal length of a first message. I’m open to answering questions should that be useful.
TL;DR: Agreed on the “check the match questions, especially the ‘unacceptable’ ones” comment! The enemy rating can be a total lie.
Oh jeez, OKC match questions. I’m sometimes amazed that the site works as well as it does when the match questions (and their answers) are so terrible. Some very common problems I have with them:
1) Questions where the only possible answer is nuanced—“Would you date a person who ?” for some X that has a wide range of possible meanings—and the only possible answers are yes and no. No “maybe”, much less an “it depends”, never mind the chance to choose an answer specifying the thing it actually depends on. I just skip these, usually.
2) Questions/answers which presuppose an attitude on some subject. “If you discovered a first date was carrying condoms, would you tease them about it?” and all four possible answers indicate that this is a bad, or at best neutral, thing to do. My answer to this one is actually true—I probably wouldn’t say anything—but I’d approve and there’s no way (that is relevant to the algorithm; the “explain your answer” box is ignored for purposes of percentages) to indicate this approval.
3) Questions where, for example, there’s two acceptable answers, one unacceptable one, and one great one. Problem is, you can only specify that an answer is “acceptable” or not, and then rank how important it is that the other person’s answer is one of them. Do I mark all three that I’m OK with and say this is important, to strongly exclude the fourth, or rank it less important because two of them I’m not actually strongly in favor of are nonetheless acceptable? Or mark only the one great answer as acceptable, and then say it’s important because if you agree with me that’s great and should bump up our match percentages… or that it’s less important, because I’m excluding some options that would actually be OK?
4) Questions (or occasionally answers) where I want to give one answer based on what the question appears to be asking (if interpreted a little generously), but a more direct/literal interpretation requires a different (often opposite) answer. Do I accept the answer that I’d probably end up giving if I was asked this in person and gave the asker a chance to clarify, or do I actually answer the question as asked even though the way it’s asked is stupid and/or misleading? Am I actually being asked my view on the topic, or am I being asked whether it’s more important that a partner have good reading comprehension and basic decency/familiarity with well-known historical events and the ability to draw obvious parallels? Or maybe whether they answer things literally as asked, or are good at identifying the asker’s intent?
Not to derail this thread into a discussion of OKC’s amazingly-effective-despite-its-frequent-terribleness match question system, just pointing out that, despite my own suggestion of checking the enemy percentage, the enemy percentage can be a lot higher than is warranted. I have seen numerous cases where our answers were mutually unacceptable but, as explained in the “explain your answer” box, we actually have the same view on the topic. Sigh...
Have there been people with Match>=95% where you didn’t reply to their messages? If so, what were the prime reasons?
I don’t recall individual messages (it was 4 years ago). Trying to look through my messages folder, but I might have deleted some to save space. There were no longer messages I didn’t answer. Usually contact broke off after a few messages though.
Reasons I could imagine for not answering:
looking at their profile, not being particularly interested, wanting to answer out of politeness but continually forgetting to (i.e. other things being more important)
hm, I remember a really nice guy I wrote back and forth with and eventually I stopped answering, partly because he had a really negative outlook on life and that made it uncomfortable to think about the content of the messages. If a first message sparked any negative feelings (maybe if it sounded very desperate?) I might have felt ughy enough about it to not answer.
It doesn’t look like that actually happened for first replies, so those are just guesses. Maybe they are reasons for other people to not reply to a first message.
Also, there are not a lot of people with match factor 95% upwards.
I tried to find some first messages that I liked, to give some better examples, but since I tended to message people first myself, there really isn’t that much.
Messages I responded positively to: http://i.imgur.com/HPYo0Eg.png http://i.imgur.com/HPYo0Eg.png http://i.imgur.com/3vXiZqj.png (German)
(longer) messages I disliked: http://i.imgur.com/I2Jkuzd.png (this one is German from a guy trying to be funny. It’s so cringey that I actually didn’t answer at all. I’m unsure about the match percentage but it was probably < 95%)
I’m not the best person to ask for examples of good first messages by guys.
I’d have liked you to phrase the first sentence as “I wouldn’t recommend online dating to men.”
I mean, I’m aware that there are 10-15% women on this site, but let’s not accidentally exclude them. Especially for nerdy/geeky/intellectual women, okcupid is in my experience a really great place. I got the impression that I was able to find people that were much more similar to me than anyone else I knew from my university environment—which lead to a few friendships and my longest relationship to date.
It’s true that my male friends’ experiences were usually less successful. It doesn’t have to be your only strategy though.
Good point. I implicitly meant I wouldn’t recommend online dating to Clarity, who I’m assuming is male. My personal experiences on OKC were also positive, but the stats released by them and other sites are not very reassuring.
Counter-anecdote. I am a hetero man and have been using OkCupid since July 2012. I have had almost 40 first dates, about 5 second dates, and 2 relationships from it in that time.
Both the median and mean age difference of the women who have gone out with me has been about 7 years younger than me, with the youngest 15 years younger and the oldest 1 year older than me. Comparison between genders is hard, especially from the inside, but I’m confident that at least a few of these women would be rated as more attractive than I am. While most of them probably weren’t as high IQ as I am, screening out people of totally incompatible intellect ahead of time is pretty easy.
I’m told that I’m lucky in that I’ve never run into anyone really crazy or unpleasant, but of ~40 first dates, only 2 have been really awkward, and none scarily so.
(Admitted other-optimizing warning: I am already in my mid-30s, possibly autism-adjacent but not actually autistic, and although my face is nothing special, I am in exceptionally good shape. On the other hand, that’s partly to compensate for being a single father, so it probably balances out somewhat. I’m also on the US east coast, which has a more favorable gender balance in the population at large than, in particular, the Bay area, where many rationalists seem to congregate..)
I wasn’t offering an anecdote. My personal experience on online dating wasn’t bad. It was actually quite good. However, I do agree it depends strongly on geographical area.
There is a huge confounding factor—looks. Most sites are hugely photo focused. So the women who look good on photos get contacted by hundreds of men. Generally most issues boil down to this.
For me narrowing my search to women without photos worked really well, and I did it on a “traditional” site (it does not necessarily mean being ugly, just shy or not wanting to be judged by looks).
Now there are even sites specialized for this such as Willow and PersonalityMatch.
I have not tried Willow—no need to, I am sold—but it sounds like really something I would use.
I can confirm that for my case—when I (female) removed my picture from Okcupid, it had the (desirable, then) effect that I didn’t get any messages whatsoever anymore, over the space of ~6 months. I might have gotten a non-zero amount if I hadn’t stated on my profile that I wasn’t looking for relationships at the time, but even with that clear statement I still got messages every once in a while during the time I had the picture up. I didn’t try experimenting with a more/less attractive picture.
I got the impression that many people just look at the profile and don’t even check the relationship status at the top of the profile.
Whether or not online dating is a good recommendation depends on whether it leads to people in the corresponding reference class having success with it.
It doesn’t depend on the raw numbers of men and women.
I’m sure you’re familiar with supply and demand. Can you expand on why you think it doesn’t apply to relationships?
Interpreting the statement generously, ChristianKI probably meant “The raw gender ratio for the site as a whole doesn’t matter, only the success rate for people in your demographic (which is partially determined by the gender ratio in the relevant demographic but is not exclusively driven by it).”
For the record, a few ways that raw gender ratio may matter less than you think:
1) It doesn’t take orientation into consideration; that’s probably even (you “lose” the same percentage of women to lesbianism as you can “subtract” gay men), but then in theory the gender ratio should be balanced overall too.
2) It doesn’t take polyamory into consideration. The OP didn’t sound like he was looking for a poly relationship, but a lot of guys are fine with it and, in my experience, poly women tend to have a lot of partners (anecdotally, I know at least as many poly women as poly men, but that probably varies by demographic and may be incorrect more generally anyhow). In any case, poly allows one person to “count” as several for the purposes of such ratios.
3) It doesn’t take into consideration relative quality. The women the OP is interested in meeting are unlikely to be interested in all those barely-literate men who spam every person marked “female” on the site. They are only competition (demand) in the sense that they clog mailboxes and make it hard to punch a signal through all the noise. There doesn’t seem to be a significant corresponding category of women wasting mens’ time and mailbox capacity, so the ratio is way more even than the raw numbers suggest.
I would count poly women having more partners than poly men as evidence in favor of gender ratios mattering. It suggests poly women are in higher demand than poly men. It’s possible poly men are less willing to be poly than poly women (therefore poly men are lower supply and poly women higher supply), but that doesn’t go too well with my prior of men generally desiring sex more than women on average.
On 3, yes, if the OP is a 10 because of his writing, or any other combination of factors, then he’ll be in high demand irregardless of the imbalance, but it’s not clear that the OP would be considered at the top of the pack by other women.
That’s not what I said. For different people there are different reasons why they don’t get into a relationship. Dating sites provide an environment where the rules of the game are much clearer than in the normal dating world.
An intelligent person who’s good at writing but to shy to approach woman in “real life”, can actually interact with woman on a dating site. They get feedback on their actions.
I think guys on LW have a bunch of strengths that the average guy doesn’t have but they also have bunch of weaknesses. As a result it’s very useful to test different approaches to see whether another approach lines up better with one’s strengths.
A lot of women complain about very badly written messages. There are many cases where intelligent guy is going to be better than average at writing messages on dating websites but worse than average at actually asking out a women in “real life”.
The act of consciously thinking about how to present oneself in a profile is useful for a guy who never really thought about how to present himself.
Markets happen at the margin. Small imbalances between supply and demand can lead to large changes in price. Going from below average and an even gender ratio to above average and a 2:1 gender ratio makes you worse off. The bottom half of guys are pretty much removed if everyone pairs off. This means the new bottom starts at average.
What do you mean with “worse off”? That it’s easier for woman to find a date with a man on a dating website then for a man to find a date with a woman? That’s obviously true.
On the other hand that tells us nothing about whether it’s a wise decision for a guy to sign up to a dating website. That has to compared to the other alternatives that the guy has.
I also don’t believe that “price” is a good construct to think about the dating “market”. People don’t pick life partners the way they buy cars. Paying a price would make it prostitution.
That’s not the typical dating situation.
To get a romantic partner you have to successful do a “mating dance” that isn’t directly related about your value as a romantic partner. In different contexts that mating dance looks differently. Online dating makes that mating dance a bit different than the mating dance that happens when one hangs out with friends. It’s more explicit and that can help some people more than others.
By worse off I’m saying a small improvement in your new mating dance versus the old one won’t overcome a large decrease in the value of that mating dance.
Money is just a concept used to establish the relative value of two different objects. That we refuse to put a price on some things doesn’t mean those things don’t have a measurable relative value; it just usually means we’re less consistent about what that value is. For instance lives of citizens are generally valued at $10 million (and foreigners near zero) for many policy decisions. It couldn’t be, say, a billion dollars or we would eventually run out of money.
There’s an old joke. A man asks if a woman will sleep with him for $10 million. She agrees. He then asks if she’ll sleep with him for $10. She scoffs “”What do you think I am!?”. He replies “we’vs already established what you are; now we’re just haggling over the price.”
It doesn’t have to equal a small improvement. It can also produce a larger improvement. The empiric fact that I know multiple guys for whom online dating produced a lot of value suggests that’s true.
That’s true for some policy decisions made by bureaucrats. On the other hand it’s not true for a lot of decisions made by democratic parliaments.
The fact that you can theoretically buy a woman for a price in no way implies that that’s the dynamic of the average dating interaction.
You make mistakes when you model decision making that doesn’t use price as a criteria with a straight market dynamic.
In regards to price and modeling:
I agree that certain types of items are not readily traded for other things. It’s hard to buy time with money for instance. But if things have value then things have a price. That price can be measured in dollars normally, but it can also be measured in time or enjoyment or any of a number of other metrics. I believe I’m simply using a more general definition of price and you’re using a stricter definition so the argument is mostly semantics.
Plenty of supply and demand models don’t use money as a criteria. Switching from dollars to minutes doesn’t change the dynamic. That the model is incomplete is true. But there’s no such thing as a complete model; that’s the nature of a model.
Are you aware of the phrase “sacred values” in decision theory? Paying money a person money can make them less likely to accept an offer?
But that isn’t even everything because a mating dance is more complex than simply providing enjoyment or time or any such metric.
I think that’s unlikely true given the unattributed Churchill quote that you used.
The problem isn’t that it’s incomplete but that it’s bad because it leads to various mistakes for a person who wants to make good dating decisions. Don’t be a hedgehog.
I’m not sure how being unable to exchange sacred values for money has anything to do with exchanges of sacred values. I’ve already explicitly stated I’m not talking about exchanges of money. I also wasn’t aware I’d quoted Churchill. If you mean the old story, Churchhill didn’t originate it.