Modern Romance (12 page)

Oddly enough, for men the most effective photos are ones with animals, followed by showing off muscles (six-packs, etc.), and then photos showing them doing something interesting. Outdoor, drinking, and travel photos were the least effective photo types.

Most intriguing to me, though, was when Rudder looked at the data of what photos led to the best conversations. Whereas “cleavage” shots of women got 49 percent more new contacts per month than average, the images that resulted in the most conversation showed people doing interesting things. Sometimes faces didn’t even need to appear. A guy giving a thumbs-up while scuba diving. A woman standing in a barren desert. A woman playing a guitar. These photos revealed something deeper about their interests or their lives and led to more meaningful interactions.

OPTIMAL PROFILE PHOTOS

So based on these data, the answers are clear: If you are a woman, take a high-angle selfie, with cleavage, while you’re underwater near some buried treasure.

If you are a guy, take a shot of yourself holding your puppy while both of you are spelunking.

MESSAGING STRATEGY

So let’s say the person is intrigued by your photos.
Now what? The messages begin.

As with text messages, there are all sorts of strategies people use when communicating on a dating site. Unlike with SMS texts, though, with these messages we actually have data on what works.

According to Rudder, the messages that get the best response rate are between forty and sixty characters. He also learned something by analyzing how long people spent on the messages. The ones that received the highest response rate took only around two minutes to compose. If you overthink it and spend too much time writing, the response rate goes down.

What about the Arpan strategy of copying and pasting? The problem with Arpan’s message is that it’s clearly a copy-and-paste message with little thought and no personal touch. What really seems to be effective is taking the time to compose a message that seems genuine and blasting it out en masse. Here’s a message that one guy blasted out to forty-two people:

I’m a smoker too. I picked it up when backpacking in may. It used to be a drinking thing but now I wake up and fuck, I want a cigarette. I sometimes wish that I worked in a Mad Men office. Have you seen the Le Corbusier exhibit at MoMA? It sounds pretty interesting. I just saw a Frank Gehry (sp?) display last week in Montreal, and how he used computer modelling to design a crazy house in Ohio.

At first glance it’s a bit random, because there are so many references to so many different interests. But when you take it all in, it’s clear that the guy was looking for a girl who smoked and was into art, and his generic message was specific enough to resonate with at least five of the women who read it, because that’s how many replied.

ALGORITHMS

What about the algorithms that are supposed to help
you find your soul mate?
They’re no doubt useful for helping online daters find their way into a pool of potentially compatible partners, and for that reason they can be useful. But even the designers who do the math that drives them acknowledge that they’re far from perfect.

In 2012 a team of five psychology professors, led by Eli Finkel at Northwestern University, published a paper in
Psychological Science in the Public Interest
arguing that no algorithm can predict in advance whether two people will make a good couple. “No compelling evidence supports matching sites’ claims that mathematical algorithms work,” they wrote. The task the sites have set out for themselves—to pick out mates who are uniquely compatible—is, they conclude, “virtually impossible.”
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Much of online dating, Finkel and company argued, is based on the faulty notion that the kind of information we can see in a profile is actually useful in determining whether that person would make a good partner. But because the kind of information that appears on a profile—occupation, income, religion, political views, favorite TV shows, etc.—is the only information we know about that person, we overvalue it. This can actually cause us to make very bad choices about whom we go on a date with.

“Encountering potential partners via online dating profiles reduces three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information,” the authors wrote, adding, “It can also cause people to make lazy, ill-advised decisions when selecting among the large array of potential partners.” Sheena Iyengar, a Columbia University professor who specializes in research on choice, put it to me another way: “People are not products,” she said bluntly. “But, essentially, when you say, ‘I want a guy that’s six foot tall and has blah, blah, blah characteristics,’ you’re treating a human being like one.”

It’s a good point, but at the same time, people doing online dating have no choice but to filter their prospects in some way, and once we accept that it’s reasonable to select for, say, location and job, who’s to say that it’s superficial to select for a doctor who lives in your area? Even if you believe Iyengar’s argument that sometimes online dating sites encourage people to treat one another like products, what choice do you have?

Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who advises Match .com, says the answer is to avoid reading too much into any given profile and to resist the temptation to start long online exchanges before a first date. As Fisher sees it, there’s only one way to determine whether you have a future with a person: meeting them face-to-face. Nothing else can give you a sense of what a person is actually like, nor whether you two will spark.

“The brain is the best algorithm,” Fisher argues. “There’s not a dating service on this planet that can do what the human brain can do in terms of finding the right person.”

This was probably the advice that resonated with me the most. I wouldn’t know how to search for the things I love about my current girlfriend. It’s not the kind of stuff you can really categorize.

When I’ve really been in love with someone, it’s not because they looked a certain way or liked a certain TV show or a certain cuisine. It’s more because when I watched a certain TV show or ate a certain cuisine with them, it was the most fun thing ever.

Why? I couldn’t type out why.

That doesn’t mean I’m skeptical of online dating; on the contrary, the research we’ve done has convinced me that millions of people have used it to find what they’re looking for, from a one-night stand to marriage and a family. But our research also convinced me that too many people spend way too much time doing the online part of online dating, not the dating part. After years of observing people’s behavior and consulting for Match.com, Fisher came away with a similar conclusion, which is why she advises online daters to keep their messaging to a minimum and to meet the person in real life as quickly as possible.

“This is one of the reasons that it’s a misnomer that they call these things ‘dating services,’” she says. “They
should
be called ‘introducing services.’ They enable you to go out and go and meet the person yourself.”

Laurie Davis, author of
Love at First Click
and an online dating consultant, advises her clients to exchange a maximum of six messages before meeting off-line. This should provide enough information to let them know whether they’d have any possible interest in dating the person. Everything after that is usually just postponing the inevitable.

“Online dating is just a vehicle to meet more people,” she says. “It’s not the place to actually date.”

For some people, mostly women, this advice wasn’t convincing. As they see it, the Internet makes connections happen too fast, and their concerns about safety make them reluctant to go out and meet someone in person before they feel like they really know them. Many of the people who spoke to us in focus groups described texting or messaging a potential partner for weeks without actually going on a date. One woman in New York City named Kim showed us an exchange she’d had with a man on OkCupid that she’d ended because he asked her out for coffee after just a few messages within a twenty-minute span.

The two were involved in some funny instant messages, and Kim commented on how awkward meeting people online can be. The guy wrote back, “I would much rather connect with you in person than this online thing because just like you I think this is ‘awkward.’”

This made Kim incredibly anxious.

“Unfortunately I don’t drink coffee,” she wrote. But then she wrote her real concern: “I actually don’t know that you’re not a serial killer.”

The guy responded quickly. “I’m not sure you’re not one either, but doesn’t that make it more exciting. I’m willing to take a risk if you are. What about hot chocolate?”

Seems like this wouldn’t be a huge deal. She’s on the dating site to meet people and date them. They’d be in a public place drinking hot chocolate. He wasn’t like, “How about we meet at that dumpster behind the Best Buy on Two Notch Road?”

But Kim was not having it. She ended it. “I don’t know. The more messages you get, the more of a good feeling you have for that person. You don’t want to go on a bad date. So if you have these messages going back and forth and you connect with each message, you like them more and the chances of it going well are higher.”

No doubt there are many women who share Kim’s perspective, and with all the creepy dudes out there who actually do harass women, I can’t really fault them. As Helen Fisher sees it, though, all these messages aren’t going to do much to assuage a person’s deep concerns. Ultimately, meeting in person is the only way to know whether something is going to work.

SWIPING:

TINDER AND BEYOND

One of the tough parts of writing a book like this is you have no clue how the landscape will change once you’re done, but as of this writing, nothing seems to be rising faster than mobile dating apps like Tinder.

Contrary to the labor-intensive user experience of traditional online dating, mobile dating apps generally operate on a much simpler and quicker scale. Right now, Tinder is by far the industry leader and has spawned imitators. For our purposes, we’ll use it as an example to describe the phenomenon in general.

Signing up for Tinder is almost instantaneous. You download the app and simply link in through your Facebook account. No questionnaires or algorithms. As soon as you sign in, Tinder uses your GPS location to find nearby users and starts showing you a seemingly endless supply of pictures of potential partners. After you glance at each photo, you swipe the picture to the right if you’re interested in the person or to the left if you’re not. You can explore the profiles more and see some very basic information, but generally the user experience involves seeing someone’s photo and swiping left or right pretty quickly depending on whether you are attracted to them. If you and another user are interested in each other, meaning you both swiped right on each other’s faces, then the app informs you that you’ve found a match and you can begin messaging each other in private within the app to arrange a date or hookup or whatever. As of October 2014, the app has more than fifty million users and the company is valued anywhere from $750 million to $1 billion.

 • • • 

Tinder was conceived in 2011 by Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, two University of Southern California undergrads who set out to create an online dating experience that didn’t feel like online dating.
Modeling their interface on a deck of cards, Rad and Mateen wanted Tinder to seem like a game, one a user could play alone or with friends. It was low stakes and easy to use, and, if you played it well, you might hook up with someone in a matter of hours—the polar opposite of a tense, emotionally draining quest for a soul mate. “Nobody joins Tinder because they’re looking for something,” Rad told
Time
.
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“They join because they want to have fun.” And because his name is Sean Rad, he probably said that quote to
Time
and then tossed on a pair of cool shades, hopped on a skateboard, and blazed on outta there.

Like Facebook, Tinder’s birthplace was college. But while Facebook began its rollout in the Ivy League, Tinder aimed for famous party schools like USC and UCLA.

Quick side note: In numerous interviews Mateen is identified as someone with a background in party planning, which is a ridiculous résumé item.

“Are you fit for the position?”

“Yes, I have a strong background in party planning. I promise you,
I can get this party started
.”

Mateen wanted to build buzz not through traditional advertising but by getting the app into the hands of “social influencers” who could spread Tinder by word of mouth. He personally tracked down and signed up the kind of people who didn’t need to date online—models, sorority girls, fraternity presidents, and the like. Mateen and Tinder’s then vice president of marketing, Whitney Wolfe, went door to door through the schools’ Greek system, preaching the gospel of smartphone hookups. After Tinder’s launch in September 2012—celebrated with a raging party at USC—the app took off and spread like wildfire across campuses. Within weeks, thousands of users had signed up, and 90 percent of them were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.