You know, I hadn’t really thought about this web cam business, but this following article with the survey results make good sense to me. OF COURSE, men would like video date, and OF COURSE, women would not. Men want to see, and women want to hear. And men take advantage of web cams at an astounding rate. Take a gander at chatroulette.com, totally random video chatting. I just did, to try out my thesis, and indeed, the first four hits were men, two of whom were masturbating.
Video Dating - a One Way Street?
A year ago, dating & friendship site http://www.makefriendsonline.com asked its members if they would like the option to use Webcams on the site. Male respondents were keen to give it a go but the proposal met a resounding No from MFO’s female members, 56% of whom not only did not want the option but voiced reservations about even joining a site which offered it.
One year on we see Webcam Dating in general and Video Speed Dating in particular being hyped as the latest ‘thing’ for online communities ……. makefriendsonline wondered if they’d misjudged their market. So this month the survey was repeated and the results illustrate an interesting trend, possibly not yet recognised by those more involved in the Webcam scene:
Overall, 72% of male respondents liked webcams and wanted to use them on dating sites. Sounds promising. Unfortunately however this clashes dramatically with an astounding 63% of female respondents who don’t like webcams and most certainly don’t want to use them on dating sites! Not only does this suggest men on cams might be increasingly talking to themselves, it also illustrates a marked trend with the percentage of women unwilling to use webcams increasing at a convincing rate.
The age group most open to Webcams was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the under-25s. But importantly for site owners, the current growth in online dating seems to be in the older age groups.
The increased availability of Webcam Sites was reflected in the overall results which show an additional 12% of women have tried Webcam Dating since the last survey. But of those, a massive two thirds didn’t like it and wouldn’t do it again. By comparison the Male figures remain fairly static, the majority being as willing and eager to use a webcam this year as they were last.
So the trend which was illustrated in last year’s survey is only underlined one year on: More women have tried Webcam Dating and have confirmed the previous results with a resounding majority continuing to dislike the entire experience. Men, possibly less eloquent and more visually driven, were already geared up a year ago and remain as keen as ever, but without women it’s a one way street.
Makefriendsonline MD, Martin Bysh commented ‘In a market where it is notoriously difficult to attract and retain female users, makefriendsonline is very proud and protective of it’s female membership, which at 51% is probably the best male/female ratio you’ll find anywhere. We would not want to alienate our female members by offering a feature that makes them uncomfortable and certainly not one which would actively put them off joining our site. We will therefore not be adding webcams to MFO.’
And when asked if the men would still come to his site if they can’t use their webcams, he added ‘Ultimately, men visit Dating Sites to meet women. With our large database of happy female members and countless alternative features which those ladies are happy to use, we’re confident we are meeting the fundamental requirements of all our potential customers and men will of course continue to find MFO a rewarding experience’.
Now Forbes magazine weighs in. They touch on something I hadn’t thought of: What if two people who hired out their online dating prelims bumped into each other, that is, their virtual assistants made the dates for them, without either of them knowing that they were not dealing with the actual person?
A Surprisingly Simple Way To Date: Outsource It
Joan Indiana Rigdon, 06.03.10, 4:30 PM ET
“I wouldn’t dare speak to her, I don’t have the brains. The way people speak and write nowadays makes my head hurt. I’m just an honest, simple, terrified soldier.”
With these words, French soldier Christian de Neuvillette convinces Cyrano de Bergerac to help him pitch woo at the lovely Roxanne, whom Christian fears might be an intellectual. Christian is a man of very few letters: only four that spell “fool,” as Cyrano might say. But he is smart enough to turn to a sharper wit to help him win a woman’s heart.
Now, in the world of online dating, Cyrano-style services are for rent to any fool—er, guy—with a valid credit card. Busy guys, guys who can’t write, shy guys, guys who fear online rejection, guys who haven’t dated in years or guys who just find the process leading up to the date “really repetitive” can now pay virtual impostors to get dates for them. (Women use these services too, but for now it’s overwhelmingly a guy thing.)
These services write dating profiles, fish for prospects and perform the initial online flirting required to set up a first date. The first time a guy has to deal with his date is when he meets her in person.
Freelancer writers and companies like e-Cyrano have been offering profile-writing services for years. Dating Done for You, based in Toronto, takes it one step further by offering the services of a female staff member who will role-play a date with clients over the phone, and then give feedback. Virtual Dating Assistants is one of the few who offer initial flirtation.
What kind of guy goes for this?
Let’s be kind, and imagine a man who’s logging 70 hours a week. He has time for his career, golf and Twitter, but online dating is just too time-consuming.
There’s no village matchmaker, so he hires Virtual Dating Assistants. They get to know him and craft his perfect profile. They fish, they find, they flirt. They set up a time and place to meet. They fill him in on what exactly he said during the flirtation process, so his target will be none the wiser, unless he chooses to confess. They even tell him what to wear.
But why stop there?
For an additional fee, a dating service could offer on-site assistance, perhaps in the form of a woman who arranges to dine at the next table, so she can eavesdrop on how the client is doing. She could text him real-time advice, which he could read, say, when he excuses himself to go to the men’s room.
That’s not as romantic as Cyrano whispering lines under cover of night and foliage to a beautiful woman on a balcony in late 19th-century France, but it could work.
On their FAQ, right under the question about whether virtual dating is dishonest, services that offer on-site dating operatives could explain that all this isn’t as creepy as it sounds. They are, you could say, just like the friends their clients don’t have, who are trying to help out in any way they can.
For more money, hired dating operatives could listen in on the follow-up phone call, texting advice in real time.
Eventually, someone will figure out that this is just the tip of a virtual iceberg. If an automated dating service for busy women mated with an automated service for busy men and they could enter a virtual world where people interact through 3-D avatars to date each other in virtual bars ... what a lifeless dating world it would be.
Here we go again, another piece about outsourcing everything until the first date. This article zeros in more closely on the sense of lying and trickery.
Outsourcing Online Dating: Are We Really Okay With This?
Dear God. Single men (and a few women) are now paying strangers to find suitable dates for them online. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, they don’t have the time—or the will—to do it themselves.
So add relationships to the list of things that can be outsourced, along with cleaning your condo, detailing your car and buying and delivering your groceries.
One web-based company that provides this service, Virtual Dating Assistants, employs 45 freelance writers to pen and submit a suitor’s profile. Replies go to a writer’s inbox, thereby sparing the would-be suitor the embarrassment of not getting any responses or having to wade through, ponder, perhaps respond to, any he does receive.
The writer decides whom to answer and if a woman responds favorably, a “closer” sets up time and place.
Think about this from the point of view of the woman—and there’s a good chance it’s a woman since 80 percent of Virtual Dating Assistants’ clients are men. She is charmed by the person she reads about online and more intrigued once she starts receiving emails she presumes are from him. Does she know he’s not the sincere, soulful man he seems but actually some corporate suit who can’t be bothered to put a little thought and time into deciding whom he takes to dinner? Nope.
Say she sets aside several hours in her busy schedule to get dressed and joins him at a swanky restaurant, then by the second glass of Chardonnay realizes what a jerk he is. This could happen on a traditional first date too, of course, or on a date arranged by partners online who portray themselves as better-looking and smarter than they actually are.
But misrepresentation by surrogate seems somehow worse. Colder. Harder to detect. It has a kind of “I’ve been lied to” feeling times two.
Additionally, as my son Jeff, 26 and single, points out, the third-party setup may diminish any sense of responsibility a man might feel for making a date work.
The guy “hasn’t invested anything emotionally,” Jeff says. “So I wonder if it’s then easier for him to just get out early if there’s something that doesn’t work with the person he’s dating, rather than try to work through it. If I’ve spent a lot of energy trying to get a date with a girl, I’m likely to forgive minor eccentricities in the interest of the bigger picture. But if someone just hands me a girl that I didn’t have to work for, who knows?”
In the Washington Post story, reporter Ellen McCarthy quotes a 27-year-old man named Luke who outsourced online dating to his receptionist. Otherwise, “you have to go through 10 conversations to get one date,” he said.
Imagine having to actually communicate directly with people you might be interested in. What a concept.
Another plus in Luke’s mind? He doesn’t have to watch his online advances being turned down or worse, deleted without being read.
“Emotionally, I feel a little small pain of rejection every time that happens,” he said.
Of course it can be tedious to sort through overtures from people whom you have no interest in, and rejection is never fun. But isn’t it worth preserving some sense of personal connection to the selection?
No pain, no gain, I say.
Third-party matchmaking has been around a long time. Think of the village elder, priest, rabbi, parent.
But unlike the relationship concierge, these people of the past usually knew the couple in question and, in many cases, cared deeply about the couple’s well-being. Sometimes they were paid for their matches, but often not. The concierge, on the other hand, is in it only for the money.
The whole thing makes me incredibly sad, and reminds me of a book I reviewed last year. In A Vindication of Love, Cristina Nehring wrote:
“We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked and emptied of spiritual consequence. The result is that we imagine we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.”
People are not rental units or luxury sedans or oven-ready chickens and—forgive the cliché—many times in a relationship of any consequence, it’s the little things that mean the most. I can’t help thinking that regardless of how the surrogate-arranged dates turn out, these men, and the women they take to dinner, can’t possibly be getting their money’s worth.
Here’s more discussion about outsourcing your online dating work. These comments come closer to my sense that this amounts to a form of trickery, like lying, that should not be engaged in at all. If you can’t find the time, etc., to lay the groundwork, why should you get the intimacy?
Digital Cyranos: The Strangeness of Online Dating Surrogates
By Alex Eichler
A recent Washington Post trend piece describes the rise of “online dating assistants,” writers-for-hire who correspond with singles on matchmaking sites on behalf of their (mostly male) clients. Here’s how it works: Say you want to meet someone on Match.com or eHarmony, but are too busy, or otherwise disinclined, to write a profile, sort through potential partners, and exchange e-mails. You hire an online dating assistant to do all of this for you, under your name—and once the date is set up, you go out to meet someone in real life whom you may have never actually communicated with, and who thinks they’ve been talking to you all along.
Sound odd? More than a few writers think so:
* Basically Lying, is the opinion of Jared Gordon, a blogger quoted in the Post story. “It is! It’s awful! You’re misrepresenting yourself. You’re lying about yourself,” Gordon told Ellen McCarthy, the author of the story. McCarthy goes on to note that “in Gordon’s mind, it’s tantamount to having someone else write your college term paper, or putting a picture of a more attractive stranger on your online dating profile. ‘You’re going to fall in love with someone because of their honesty,’ he says. ‘And some people might say, ‘Who has the time to write a profile?’ But if something is that important to you, you make the time to do it.’”
* Equates Dating With Shopping At Slate, Amanda Marcotte muses about the attitudes that might underlie such a practice. “Hiring someone to pretend to be you, feigning interest in looking up and chatting with women through a dating Web site, isn’t cheap, of course. The customers of this service largely seem to be privileged but busy men, which only adds to the creepy sense that they see dating as a form of shopping, and shopping as a chore that can be delegated to the help.”
* Imagine How the Other Person Feels! Jezebel’s Sadie Stein lingers on a quote from one of the men in the Post story who uses an online assistant because he feels “a little small pain of rejection” when a woman doesn’t show interest. Fair enough, says Stein—“but as a woman, I can tell you that for most of the women I know, finding out we’ve been courted by a surrogate is going to lead to a much harsher - and more personal - form of rejection.”
* Sucks the Romance Out of It Mark White of Psychology Today is skeptical about the whole idea of virtual courting. “Generally, there’s just something detached and clinical about online dating, with or without an assistant. I may be a hopeless romantic… but I still cling to the ideal of two strangers meeting each other’s gaze across a crowded room while the world melts away, a la Tony and Maria in ‘West Side Story.’ The internet can be a wonderful tool to enhance our lives and expand our social networks, but it seems to me that some things are just not the same if they aren’t done in person, and meeting the love of your life (or even of this month) would be at the top of that list.”
* Another Possible Explanation What might drive people to use assistants? National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez gets in the best zinger. “I guess if you grew up with shortcuts to winning Super Mario Brothers, it’s only natural?”
We’ve had a new wave of innovation in the online dating sphere lately: paying someone else to do your work on the dating site—Scanning for prospects, writing the first and subsequent email, even setting up dates. Without informing the recipient. The next few postings will be reprints of pieces I have found on the wire. Let me know what you think.
Online dating assistants help the lonely and busy
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Max Hartshorn has pretty much mastered online dating.
It took awhile, but the 24-year-old now knows exactly what kind of message to send to pique a woman’s interest. The Montreal research assistant will come home from work, sit down with his laptop and bang out dozens of e-mails to attractive, eligible women.
He’s never needy—always charming and a little flirtatious. He keeps his missives short and usually includes a question or a subtle challenge. He’s witty, a touch aloof and not overly complimentary.
And when he gets the woman, it’s not his heart that flutters. It’s his bank account.
Hartshorn is a hired gun, ghostwriting correspondence on behalf of single men unwilling, too busy or too inept to do it themselves. His online dating is done on commission for Virtual Dating Assistants, one of the first full-scale Internet-dating outsourcing companies. For $600, Virtual Dating Assistants guarantees clients two dates a month; the “executive service” package promises five dates a month for $1,200. [that’s PER MONTH—editor}
“I get paid for each woman who writes back positively,” explains the modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac. “It’s very analogous to sales . . . like a cold-caller or a telemarketer.”
A telemarketer who toils anonymously in pursuit of love for the lonely. Darkly romantic, no?
No. “I don’t care that much if it becomes a date or not,” Hartshorn admits. His job is “lead generation” only. Sealing the deal is up to the company’s “closers.”
And going out on actual dates? That, unfortunately, the men have to do all by themselves. And the women never need know who hooked them.
* * *
The great promise of online dating is this: You sit on the couch in pajamas, click through sparkling profiles of nearby singles, fire off a few quippy e-mails or a nonchalant “wink” and—ta-da!—a series of romantic rendezvous is instantly on the docket.
It’s love through a high-speed line, a model of amorous efficiency.
For Scott Valdez it worked, but the endeavor required just a little too much effort. He was working 70 or 80 hours a week in sales for a start-up technology company and traveling constantly. Every time he tried online dating, he met interesting women, but he found the process leading to the dates “really repetitive.” So he decided to outsource it.
“Why not just teach my secretary to do it?” he thought.
She didn’t have the time (or maybe the stomach?) to tend to his Internet love life, so Valdez hired a recent college grad who could write e-mails in English and Spanish. Soon he was going on five or six first dates a month.
“It worked for me,” he says. “And I knew so many people that could use the service.”
Last June, Valdez, now 25, founded Virtual Dating Assistants—a company that “specializes in making the dating dreams of busy individuals come true.”
Author Timothy Ferriss popularized the concept when he wrote about outsourcing his online dating accounts to teams of competing writers in his 2007 book, “The 4-Hour Work Week.”
Valdez’s Atlanta-based firm is hardly the only outfit to offer such services. Dozens of profile-writing shops such as Arlington County-based TargetLove have popped up in the past few years, and dating coaches are increasingly managing their clients’ online pursuits. Not to mention the well-intentioned friends and relatives who have taken over the process for the hapless singles in their lives.
But Valdez and his team of 45 freelance writers, including Hartshorn, do it all: write a client’s profile, pick out potential matches, send introductory e-mails and message back and forth until a date is confirmed. Then they turn over the correspondence and tell the lucky fellow where and when he’s meeting Madame X. (And it’s almost always that gender dynamic; 80 percent of the firm’s clients are men.)
Richard, a 39-year-old marketing executive who uses the service, would like to say, for the record: “It’s not like I really have a lot of problems dating people in the real world.” It’s just that he’s busy, splitting time among four cities, including Washington and Miami, and he figures it’s best to meet as many people as possible.
Online dating has worked for Richard, “but it’s all time-consuming,” so when he heard about Virtual Dating Assistants, it seemed like a convenient solution for an on-the-go guy. “Just from a cost-benefit analysis—me spending all this time on doing things that are purely almost secretarial doesn’t make any sense for me,” says Richard, who asked that his last name not be used because he doesn’t want colleagues or potential dates to know he uses the service.
After a lengthy phone interview three months ago, the company’s writers drafted a profile, let Richard tweak it and then started fishing for potential dates. Richard says they soon zeroed in on his preferences in terms of a woman’s looks, education and interests, and he feels satisfied that he’s being represented authentically in e-mails written on his behalf. (This has not been the case for everyone: Valdez described one client who came back from a date saying that “we maybe made him look a little too cool online.” From then on, prospective dates were given a heads-up that the man was shy.)
Richard doesn’t usually tell the women he dates that he didn’t write the e-mails they received. But when one woman wondered why he was constantly active on the site through which they met, he told her the truth: “Look, it’s not exactly like that—somebody’s actually doing this stuff for me.”
Ask Jared Gordon, the 30-year-old editor of A Bad Case of the Dates, a blog that collects dating horror stories, and he’ll tell you the practice is awful: “It is! It’s awful! You’re misrepresenting yourself. You’re lying about yourself.”
In Gordon’s mind, it’s tantamount to having someone else write your college term paper, or putting a picture of a more attractive stranger on your online dating profile. “You’re going to fall in love with someone because of their honesty,” he says. “And some people might say, ‘Who has the time to write a profile?’ But if something is that important to you, you make the time to do it.”
Richard knows some perceive it as callous outsourcing, but he feels he’s being represented authentically by his Virtual Dating Assistant. “These guys are really good at getting to know who you are,” he says. And he adds that the one time he confessed to using the service, his date didn’t seem to mind. “Once you have chemistry with somebody and they know you’re a genuinely good person—that’s really all that matters,” he says.
Mark Brooks, founder of Online Personals Watch, a site that tracks Internet dating trends, says this type of outsourcing is an ethically questionable form of “misrepresentation.” Still, he expects the field to grow.
Professional matchmakers often charge $5,000 or more a year and have a limited pool of matches. Online dating sites are populated with countless singles but can require more attention than some users are willing to devote. “It may look like instant gratification, like you dive into the pool and instantly come up with a fish, but it doesn’t really work like that,” Brooks says. “You’ve got to tap, tap, tap on the keyboard quite a lot to get anywhere.” (One site, OkCupid.com, found that a third of all first messages garner a response, though that doesn’t mean they are positive or that they lead to dates.)
But for many, it’s not just their time that’s at stake; it’s also their egos.
Luke Chao started having his receptionist send online dating e-mails for him after realizing that there was not enough administrative work for her at the hypnotherapy clinic he manages. It was a win-win, he thought, because “online dating is tedious—you have to send out 100 messages to get 10 responses. You have to go through 10 conversations to get one date, and that’s just the first date.” (Dianne Nubla, who writes Chao’s e-mails between her other tasks, says it’s “a good diversion” that she doesn’t mind.)
Chao, a 27-year-old Toronto resident, was soon dating one or two new women a week. In truth, he says, he has the time and writing ability for the task. But by having Nubla take over, he’s sidestepping the worst part of the process: being routinely rebuffed.
“Most women you e-mail don’t respond. Some look at your profile and don’t even read your message before deleting it,” he says. “That’s just the nature of the game—intellectually, I know that. But still, emotionally, I do feel a little small pain of rejection every time that happens.”
Sometimes these oh-so-cute things that people send on really are cute. And these are rather poignant as well. Which are your favorites?
What Love Means To 4-8 Year Olds
Money is nice. But the thing that helps keep a lot of matchmakers and internet dating workers motivated is helping people find love. What is love anyway? The question ‘What does love mean?’ was put to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds. Their answers were broader and deeper than you’d think:
‘Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.’ Karl - age 5
‘Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.’ Bobby - age 7 (Wow!)
‘Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday.’ Noelle - age 7
‘When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That’s love.’ Rebecca - age 8
‘Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.’ Chrissy - age 6
‘When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.’ Billy - age 4
‘Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired.’ Terri - age 4
‘Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.’ Danny - age 7
‘If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,’ Nikka - age 6 (we need a few million more Nikka’s on this planet)
‘Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.’ Mary Ann - age 4
‘When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.’ (what an image) Karen - age 7
A four year old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his Mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, ‘Nothing, I just helped him cry.’
Did I make your cry? You soppy thing. You’re definitely in the right profession. ;-)
Oh dear! Sometimes I read questions and profiles that are so wrong-headed and pathetic that I just want to shake the person! Then, when someone does respond with horrible advice, it’s just “Argh!” Here’s an example below. The letter writer asks the wrong question: You can’t make any man look beyond (ie not see) something as obvious as a wheel chair. So don’t try! And online dating is the best resource ever for people with disabilities, because you can either go on a mainline dating site like Match.com, make your disability clear, but also present your strengths well and see who responds. These folks will be pre-qualified and will know what they are getting into. An even better route is a site for people with disabilities. On those sites, a disability will not be an issue, because either the others have their own, or the able bodied people who are there are ready to take on such problems.
Ask Amy: How can she get men to look past disability?
By AMY DICKINSON
June 16, 2010
Dear Amy: I am a 50-year-old woman who has never been married. I have a disability from an auto/pedestrian accident when I was 25 (I was the pedestrian).
Before my accident, I can’t seem to remember a period of longer than six months when I wasn’t dating a man. Since my accident, relationships have been few and far between.
I’ve tried just about everything—Internet dating sites, dating groups, dating services, a dating counselor (she refused my application when she found out I was in a wheelchair) and even church (the last two guys I was attracted to asked me to introduce them to two other women whom they ended up marrying).
I’ve given up looking at this point, but I truly don’t want to live the rest of my life alone. I’m pleasant to look at, a good conversationalist and have my MBA. How can I get others to look past the obvious (the chair) and see me—the person?
I live alone, own my own house, drive a car, and am out and about almost every day of the week. I’m sure you’ll make the same suggestions I usually get when I pose this question (get involved in activities you like), but maybe, just maybe, you’ll point out something the others haven’t.
Amy says: Your frustrations are common to other middle-age singletons—and you have plenty of company. According to Census statistics released in 2007, there are more than 56 million American adults who have never been married.
What you need to do is to make the life you’d want under any circumstances—traveling, forming satisfying friendships and doing fulfilling work.
It’s healthy to want to share your life with a special person, but if you didn’t find a husband, then what?
During my 17 years of adult singlehood, I developed a plan to build a house with a friend and cohabit, “Golden Girls” style. That might not appeal to you, but it got me through many a rough and lonely patch. The only twist I’d suggest is for you to find a way to stop wishing your wheelchair was invisible to others and instead celebrate the life you’re actually living. Because you adapted so well to your disability as an adult, you might find fulfillment volunteering at your local VA hospital.
My response:
Internet dating sites have become a wonderful resource for all kinds of people who don’t fit the normal, middle of the road picture. Try a dating site specifically for people with disabilities. Google disability+“dating site” and see what you get. On a dating site for people with disabilities, your wheelchair will not be a problem, and your strengths will have a chance to shine. Kathryn Lord http://www.Find-a-Sweetheart.com
Internet dating has spawned a whole new set of rules for dating behavior. One subset is “When do you hide or take down your dating profile?” and “When do you drop your dating site memberships?” See the letter below about one such conundrum, and see the rational, common-sense adult-like response about radical commitment.
Radical commitment means closing all escape hatches
Posted by Steven Kalas
I am in a nine-month relationship. He said he would like an exclusive relationship. I agreed. Is checking an online dating site appropriate? I met this person from an online dating site. When he asked if I would be his girlfriend, I agreed but made it clear that I felt that, and he agreed, that online profiles should be removed and not used. I have done this and have no desire to go fishing, looking, checking, whatever. However, recently he told me that he still gets messages weekly from the site to “check his matches.” He even asked me if I would like to see them. He insists he doesn’t communicate and isn’t active. Yet it is OK to check the site. This happened in a relationship prior to this. In both cases, the man felt it was OK to have a “curiosity” for women and “just check the profiles” sent to them from the site. I understand that men are visual, but I explained to both of them, that there is a difference between a woman walking by while shopping and noticing her and making a conscious decision to push a button that opens up pictures of women who are looking for matches. What are the “rules” of the online dating game? What are men thinking? Or, am I overreacting, which I have been accused of on this issue. Maybe I am just too trusting.
—K.U., Las Vegas
Exclusivity and fidelity are not one decision; rather, a series of decisions. Commitment is not one moment in time; it is a developmental journey.
The easy part is the mechanical/social practice of exclusivity. We don’t date anyone else. We don’t have sex with anyone else. Voila! Looks like we’re in a committed relationship.
Well, yes, it is committed. Yet, to our surprise, there remain deeper and more radical commitments to be made.
When alone, we decide never to talk or behave anytime, anywhere, with anyone in a way we would not behave if our mate was standing right there. That’s the rule. That’s radical commitment.
We are transparent in all our relationships. We might have a more or less separate communion with someone, but never an undisclosed communion. All our friends, whatever their gender, are known to our mate and know about our mate. That’s the rule. That’s radical commitment.
We don’t seek, nurture, or avail ourselves to relationships trading “bumps” of sexual attraction and ego-boost. See, this, too, leaks energy that is rightly owed to the mate. A committed partner seeks the mate’s desire. Oh, sure, it’s enjoyable when the stranger or co-worker lets us know we are desired. And of course we will regularly enjoy noticing people we find attractive and desirable. But we don’t linger in those moments. We don’t “grow” them and depend on them. We “bump” with our mate. That’s the rule. That’s radical commitment.
We don’t nurture The Potential Relationship In The Hole. You’ve seen it: that friend or co-worker with whom you never officially have an affair; but, still, you grow a private and intimate relationship of “what if.” Oh, had we met years ago. Oh, if my mate died, etc. It’s an escape hatch from the work of radical commitment. So we close all escape hatches. That’s the rule. That’s radical commitment.
We don’t amen ourselves to friendships openly disparaging our mate or our commitment. Yes, we have friends who let us vent during difficult moments in the journey of love; but, after listening, those friends challenge us to do the work of great love. Further, we swiftly and decisively jettison anyone who, despite our clearly communicated status as a committed partner, continues to come on to us, tempt us or entice us. In the end, there is no room in great love for even the distraction of having to say “no.” That’s the rule. That’s radical commitment.
K.U., your man isn’t cheating. At least not officially. But his behavior “cheats” the potential of his relationship with you because he’s leaking psychic energy he could be using for the next step of commitment.
All of your questions will answer themselves, K.U., if you will but answer this question: What, for you, constitutes self-respect? Answer that, and you will know whether you are overreacting. You will know how deep of a commitment you deserve from a mate. You will either relax and lower your expectations. Or, you will confront him and demand more.
Or you will leave.
Looks like the next must-have tool for singles is the iPhone or iPad. If you don’t have one, look at how others are using theirs to aid their social life and plan dates.
Forget the Sex Apps - Users Turn To iPhone For Dating, Health
by Mark Walsh
With Apple clearing out all those sex-themed apps from the App Store, it makes you wonder what else people are doing with their iPhones. According to a new study by Greystripe, plotting romance and staying healthy are two of the more popular activities. The mobile ad network found that more than half (51%) of iPhone and iPod touch users turn to the devices to help plan a date, and 39% for health-related inquiries.
When it comes to hitting the town, 43% said map applications like Google Maps were the most helpful when planning a date, with 13% citing review apps like Yelp and 12% using banking apps. Among iPhone and iPod users who are not in an exclusive relationship, 16% turn to social networking apps such as Facebook to hook up. But apps specifically geared to dating aren’t so hot—only 2% use speed dating or online dating apps.
The iPhone is also emerging as a popular health tool. Among people who said they use their phone for health-related purposes, 48% use it to search for outdoor activities, 36% to search for doctors, 35% to look for pharmacies, and 23% to find hospitals.
Looking at health-related apps, Greystripe found fitness programs were the favorites—with 40% downloading them, followed by diet apps, at 28%, and medical apps, 27%. Between the two Apple devices, iPhone owners are 16% more likely to use their phones for health-related inquiries than iPod users. That makes sense since iPhone owners tend to skew older than iPod users, 45% of whom are under the age of 25.
iPhone users are also 17% more likely to be involved in household purchasing decisions than the iPod crowd and to be higher income-earners, according to Greystripe. Its findings were based on survey data from network users in the fourth quarter of 2009. The company serves ads in more than 2,000 applications across the iPhone/iPod and Android, Nokia and Java-based phones.
Lots of good information and research is coming out about how we chose what we chose. This of course is important for us, because choice is all about what Internet dating is about. Has more choice been better? For the most part, yes. But for some, more choice is not necessarily good. It is confusing, and/or may lead to increasing pickiness. See this article below for more information on chosing.
Too Many Choices: A Problem That Can Paralyze
By ALINA TUGEND
TAKE my younger son to an ice cream parlor or restaurant if you really want to torture him. He has to make a choice, and that’s one thing he hates. Would chocolate chip or coffee chunk ice cream be better? The cheeseburger or the turkey wrap? His fear, he says, is that whatever he selects, the other option would have been better.
Gabriel is not alone in his agony. Although it has long been the common wisdom in our country that there is no such thing as too many choices, as psychologists and economists study the issue, they are concluding that an overload of options may actually paralyze people or push them into decisions that are against their own best interest.
There is a famous jam study (famous, at least, among those who research choice), that is often used to bolster this point. Sheena Iyengar, a professor of business at Columbia University and the author of “The Art of Choosing,” (Twelve) to be published next month, conducted the study in 1995.
In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.
Here’s the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.
That study “raised the hypothesis that the presence of choice might be appealing as a theory,” Professor Iyengar said last year, “but in reality, people might find more and more choice to actually be debilitating.”
Over the years, versions of the jam study have been conducted using all sorts of subjects, like chocolate and speed dating.
But Benjamin Scheibehenne, a research scientist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, said it might be too simple to conclude that too many choices are bad, just as it is wrong to assume that more choices are always better. It can depend on what information we’re being given as we make those choices, the type of expertise we have to rely on and how much importance we ascribe to each choice.
Mr. Scheibehenne recently co-wrote an analysis, to be published in October in The Journal of Consumer Research, examining dozens of studies about choices. One problem, he said, is separating the concept of choice overload from information overload.
In other words, he said, how much are people affected by the number of choices and “how much from the lack of information or any prior understanding of the options?”
I know this from experience. A while back, I spent a great deal of time trying to decide which company should provide our Internet, phone and television cable service. I was looking at only two alternatives, but the options — cost, length of contract, present and future discounts, quality of service — made the decision inordinately difficult.
This was not only because I wanted to get the best deal, but because the information from the companies was overly complicated and vague. I suspected that both companies were less interested in my welfare than in getting my money — and I didn’t want to be a sucker. This was a problem partly of choice overload — too many options — but also of poor information.
Research also shows that an excess of choices often leads us to be less, not more, satisfied once we actually decide. There’s often that nagging feeling we could have done better.
Understanding how we choose could guide employers and policy makers in helping us make better decisions. For example, most of us know that it’s a wise decision to save in a 401(k). But studies have shown that if more fund options are offered, fewer people participate. And the highest participation rates are among those employees who are automatically enrolled in their company’s 401(k)’s unless they actively choose not to.
This is a case where offering a default option of opting in, rather than opting out (as many have suggested with organ donations as well) doesn’t take away choice but guides us to make better ones, according to Richard H. Thaler, an economics professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, and Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at Chicago’s law school, who are the authors of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” (Yale University Press, 2008). Making choices can be most difficult in the area of health. While we don’t want to go back to the days when doctors unilaterally determined what was best, there may be ways of changing policy so that families are not forced to make unbearable choices.
Professor Iyengar and some colleagues compared how American and French families coped after making the heart-wrenching decision to withdraw life-sustaining treatment from an infant. In the United States, parents must make the decision to end the treatment, while in France, the doctors decide, unless explicitly challenged by the parents.
This contrast in the “choosing experience,” she wrote, made a difference in how the families later coped with their decisions.
French families weren’t as angry or confused about what had happened, and focused much less on how things might have been or should have been than the American parents.
It is important to note that no one is suggesting that parents be kept out of the loop in such a crucial matter. Rather, the choice, as Professor Iyengar said, was between “informed choosers” and “informed nonchoosers.”
Since, fortunately, most of our decisions are less weighty, one way to tackle the choice problem is to become more comfortable with the idea of “good enough,” said Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of “The Paradox of Choice” (Ecco, 2003).
Seeking the perfect choice, even in big decisions like colleges, “is a recipe for misery,” Professor Schwartz said.
This concept may even extend to, yes, marriage. Lori Gottlieb is the author of “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” (Dutton Adult, 2010). Too many women — her book focused on women — “think I have to pick just the right one. Instead of wondering, ‘Am I happy?’ they wonder, ‘Is this the best I can do?’ ”
And even though we now have the capacity, via the Internet, to research choices endlessly, it doesn’t mean we should. When looking, for example, for a new camera or a hotel, Professor Schwartz said, limit yourself to three Web sites. As Mr. Scheibehenne said: “It is not clear that more choice gives you more freedom. It could decrease our freedom if we spend so much time trying to make choices.”
Sheesh. A big problem for habitual texters is the ready availability of their cell phones to dash off whatever occurs to them. Not good, for the most part. As one of my friends said about Twitter, “I really don’t care about your having a cup of coffee.” See this app below designed to protect people from their dumbness.
TigerText: An iPhone App for Cheating Spouses?
By Belinda Luscombe
Tiger Woods, if you’re reading this, remember that you’ve been through what mothers call a “valuable learning experience” and you’re probably a “better man for it” and so on. Having said that, an iPhone app that launched on Feb. 25 could totally have saved your hide.
Called, coincidentally enough, TigerText, it allows users to set a time limit for a sent text to hang around after it has been read. When that life span has been exceeded, the message will disappear, say the developers, from the recipient’s phone, the sender’s phone and any servers. The message cannot be forwarded anywhere, stored anywhere or sold to any tabloid for an undisclosed sum. (See a brief history of the Tiger Woods scandal.)
It works like this: when, say, a prominent politician sends his mistress an iPhone message via TigerText, the mistress will be prompted to install the app. When she has done so, she can read the message, but she can’t keep it. In fact, the message is never actually sent to her phone; it’s stored on TigerText’s servers. After the politician’s specified time span has elapsed — anywhere from one minute to five days — the message ceases to exist. There’s even a “delete on read” setting, which counts down from 60 after a message is opened and erases its text at zero. (See the top iPhone applications.)
For those who need an even more comprehensive way to cover their tracks, the “delete history” option will wipe away any evidence of a given phone call. No telltale suspicious numbers, no chance of getting caught out by the old “press redial” routine. (Comment on this story.)
While the implications for philanderers — and spies — are obvious, the app was not actually developed for them, says TigerText founder Jeffrey Evans, a former recruiter and headhunter, and not, at least on the basis of one interview, a particularly paranoid guy. The name was in place before the Tiger Woods texting scandal, he claims, and the company decided to stick with it. Evans’ real concern is about privacy. “People text like they talk,” he says. “And some of the things they say, taken out of context, can come back to haunt them.” (See the 18 best Android apps.)
He points out that the European Union ruled in 2006 that phone and Internet providers were required to keep all cell-phone and e-mail data for a certain period of time. “That just seems wrong and an invasion of privacy,” he says. “We have not caught on to the implications of all these conversations being kept for so long.” While he acknowledges that the app might also be a boon to teens who are in the habit of sexting, drunk texting or “running off at the thumb,” he thinks lawyers and their clients and business executives involved in complicated deals will be even more interested.
Obviously there are times when you just shouldn’t hit “send”; at its most basic level, TigerTexting is like paying $2.50 a month for stupidity insurance. But let’s face it: who among us has never needed a do-over?
Well. of course one should not dump their spouse or partner by texting. The ultimate brushoff, really. Email is slightly better, a handwritten note better still. But nothing conveys humanity in a very tough situation like delivering the news in person. See the article below for thoughts on how technology is effecting modern relationships, and the ending of them.
It’s the 21st century way: Wooed, romanced, betrayed and dumped by text
By Annie Brown
WHEN Cheryl Cole dumped Ashley she did it by text and then announced it on Twitter - a truly modern way to say “its ovr”.
No more throwing the wedding band in his face and storming out when a succinct text message will do the trick.
It was appropriate that Cheryl should dump Ashley by text. It was one of his preferred methods of playing away, using SMS to send saucy messages and pictures of him in his pants to potential bits on the side.
Texts, Facebook, cyber dating, sex sites, chat rooms and email are the way many of us are now wooed, romanced, betrayed and ultimately dumped.
The goodbye text or email is the Dear John letter of the 21st century. A recent survey found two-thirds of people would cast off their other half by text while more a third have been frozen out by email.
Cheryl reportedly texted the Chelsea footballer to end the three-and-a-half year marriage with the words: “You’ve lied and lied. You disgust me. I’ll see you around.”
Her statement, released on Twitter was unemotional. It simply said: “Cheryl Cole is separating from her husband Ashley Cole.”
No one would argue that Cheryl didn’t deserve to boot Ashley out of her life by the most ruthless means available.
But relationship expert Hillie Marshall believes it’s a harsh way to end a romance.
She said: “I think it is very cruel. It is very cold and unfeeling.
“People should have the courage to tell someone to their face that it is over, not that I think Cheryl just dumped Ashley by text.
“A lot went on behind the scenes before it got to that stage so he knew it was on the cards.”
It may be less emotional in some ways but it still hurts to be dumped by text or email.
Unlikely as it seems, the phenomenon was first made famous by 1980s singer Phil Collins, who finished his marriage to Jill Tavelman by fax - so last century.
It caused outrage in 1999 for its callousness. Now all the celebs are doing it.
Real Madrid footballer Cristiano Ronaldo told Spanish model Nereida Gallardo that their seven-month relationship was over with a text message.
She said: “I was upset by the way he finished the relationship, which to me seems 100 per cent cowardly.”
John Mayer sent Jennifer Aniston a text to call time on their romance, as did Britney Spears to hubby Kevin Federline.
Sam Ronson did the same to actress Lindsay Lohan, while American singer Kid Rock dumped model Jill Gulseth by text in 2006 after three months together.
Keeping it all virtual, the broken-hearted can even seek solace on the hundreds of websites for text dump victims.
Gone are the days of a good mate to share a bottle of wine and mop up the tears. Now there are chatrooms where strangers can offer up their tales of woe and consolation.
In one chatroom we looked at, a few dozen anonymous people were able to give instant consolation to a woman told her five-year engagement was off.
Text is all part of the same virtual world relationships are now conducted in.
We argue by text and email, we say I love you the same way and we end it all in abbreviations and cyber space.
However, Hillie said relationships are part of a virtual revolution that’s having a negative impact on human interaction.
And she fears the problem is only going to get worse.
By the time today’s youngsters reach puberty, they will have spent 10,000 hours online.
In South Korea, where the web is even more pervasive than here, the government have established computer addiction clinics for youngsters who spend up to 18 hours a day surfing the net.
Hillie said: “Younger people are becoming more and more insular, there is no social interaction, just sitting in front of a screen all day.
“People are getting to know each other by email or text but it isn’t very real. It is not the same as being face-to-face. There is time to think about what you are going to say, the real you isn’t really there.”
More than five million people in Britain are now searching for love online - and many are cheating exactly the same way.
The web, Twitter, chat and SMS are an easy way to strike up a secret relationship behind a partner’s back.
When Vernon Kay wanted to contact Page Three model Rhian Sugden, he asked to follow her on Twitter. Then came the filthy texts.
When he actually met her, he hardly had a word to say.
Online dating agencies for married men and women are now a multi-million pound business - and they are available in their thousands.
Internet sites like Illicit Encounters do exactly what they say on the tin.
The Western Isles and Dumfries and Galloway were two of the most active for love cheats on the web.
In some parts of Britain, one divorce in five is being triggered by people catching their partners cheating online through social networking sites.
Facebook has more than 350 million users worldwide and there are millions more on sites such as Bebo, Friends Reunited and MySpace. All are being cited in divorce cases.
Of course, the trendy way to start an affair is also risky.
Businesses have sprung up to catch cheaters having online affairs and geeks have produced lots of gadgets to spy on a philandering partner’s computer.
Putting everything in writing, as Ashley Cole discovered to his peril, makes infidelity impossible to deny.
OKCupid.com has been doing a great service to online dating by mining and analyzing its copious data.
OkCupid scores by teaching Matt Feb 15
4 comments Latest by Artur spychalski
You’re an online dating site. You’re going up against much bigger competitors, like Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony. You could spend big bucks on advertising and marketing. But what you’ve tried in those areas didn’t really work.
But what if you start promoting by teaching? You’ve got a treasure trove of data. What if you take a Freakonomics-esque approach to all that info and use it to answer questions and reveal surprising twists?
That’s exactly what dating site OkCupid has done at its blog with posts like The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures, How Your Race Affects The Messages You Get, and Exactly What To Say In A First Message.
By turning its by-product (all that data) into something useful, OkCupid is getting on more and more radars. That post debunking the conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups, according to the company.
This article explains more:
The blog, which OkCupid started in October, has helped get the company’s name out on other blogs and social networks…Since OkCupid started its blog, the number of active site members has grown by roughly 10 percent, to 1.1 million, according to the company.
“We’ve been up for six years,” Mr. Yagan said. “We’ve only had the blog for six months. It’s a big deal for us.”
Great lesson there. What has your business taught you that’s interesting, noteworthy, or surprising? Share it with the world and get people talking.
OKCupid.com was started by a bunch of Harvard mathematicians, and it shows. How could any math geek resist the data that OKCupid users input on the site every second? I keep watch over OKCupid’s blog for data supported advice to help online daters. You should, too. The New York Times noticed. See this article below forf how and what OKCupid is doing.
Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data
By JENNA WORTHAM
If you’re a man, don’t smile in your profile picture, and don’t look into the camera. If you’re a woman, skip photos that focus on your physical assets and pick one that shows you vacationing in Brazil or strumming a guitar.
Those are some of the insights that OkCupid, a free dating site based in New York, has gleaned by using statistical tools to analyze how the mating game plays out on its site.
OkCupid publishes the entertaining and potentially useful results of its number-crunching on a blog that has recently turned into a big source of publicity for the company, pulling in new members.
“We’re not psychologists,” said Sam Yagan, chief executive of the company. “We’re math guys.”
Mr. Yagan and three other Harvard mathematicians founded OkCupid in 2004. In its fight against much bigger competitors like Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony, it has tried a number of marketing techniques, often with little success. But the blog, which OkCupid started in October, has helped get the company’s name out on other blogs and social networks. A post last month that set out to debunk conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups, according to the company.
For that analysis, the company catalogued the photos on more than 7,000 user profiles and looked at how many responses those users received from others. It found, among other things, that it didn’t matter whether people showed their faces, as long as the photos were intriguing enough to start a conversation.
“If you want worthwhile messages in your in-box, the value of being conversation-worthy, as opposed to merely sexy, cannot be overstated,” wrote Christian Rudder, another OkCupid founder, in the post.
Last fall Mr. Rudder looked at the first messages sent by users to would-be mates on the site, and which ones were most likely to get a response. His analysis found that messages with words like “fascinating” and “cool” had a better success rate than those with “beautiful” or “cutie.”
“As we all know, people normally like compliments, but when they’re used as pick-up lines, before you’ve even met in person, they inevitably feel… ew,” he wrote.
There are benefits to the company’s data-baring tactics. Since OkCupid started its blog, the number of active site members has grown by roughly 10 percent, to 1.1 million, according to the company.
“We’ve been up for six years,” Mr. Yagan said. “We’ve only had the blog for six months. It’s a big deal for us.”
OkCupid, which generates revenue from advertising and premium memberships, says it is profitable. The research firm comScore says the site had 735,000 unique visitors in January, up from 538,000 a year ago. Mr. Yagan said comScore was significantly undercounting the site’s traffic.
The blog reports could help to build trust and add legitimacy to the site’s matchmaking approach, said Andy Beal, an online marketing expert and co-author of “Radically Transparent.”
“There is an underlying psychological benefit to publishing statistics that resonate with your target audience,” Mr. Beal said. “People will start to think that this is a site where others like them are hanging out, and they should join it instead of one of its competitors.”
To find matches, OkCupid members answer questions, most of which are generated and submitted by users, that range from pedestrian to risqué. The answers are weighted and analyzed by several sets of algorithms to calculate percentages of compatibility with other users.
In contrast to the more opaque approach taken by most dating sites, a special area of OkCupid uses detailed graphs and charts to walk users through the matching process.
“If we can be completely transparent and help demystify dating with data, maybe you will trust us to help find you a match,” Mr. Yagan said.
Greg Waldorf, chief executive of eHarmony, which says it has more than 20 million registered users, was dismissive of the marketing power of OkCupid’s blog reports.
“In general, I can understand why people are looking for any general direction or indication on how to exist in the online dating world,” Mr. Waldorf said. “But people come to us for our matchmaking skills. They don’t want to worry about whether someone didn’t start up a conversation with them because they didn’t tilt a camera at a certain angle for their profile picture.”
The early stigmas surrounding online dating are slowly being worn away as more people create and maintain a presence on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, where sharing personal information and pictures is commonplace.
OkCupid, whose users tend to be under 35, even resembles a social network. Members can surf through the profiles of potential matches and send messages or flirtatious digital winks to one another. The site also has quirky quizzes for members to determine which character on “Lost” they resemble and what kind of dating personality they have.
Suzanne White Montiel, 36, a blogger living in San Francisco, said the breezy tone of OkCupid was a refreshing alternative to mainstream online dating sites.
“I don’t want to waste my time answering a thousand questions so I can find my perfect someone,” Ms. Montiel said. “I’m not into that. I don’t want the father of my children. I just want someone who can carry a conversation and is interesting.”
But Terry Ip, a 23-year-old psychology student living in Queens, New York, said he preferred the approach of eHarmony and other dating sites over OkCupid’s user-generated questions. And he said that after reading a blog post on OkCupid’s site about how race affected messaging habits, he slowed down his use of the site.
“It’s kind of disappointing and says a lot about their user pool,” he said. “If you’re a white male, you’ve got it made. If you aren’t, you don’t. It’s very discouraging.”
Mr. Yagan said that shedding light on what the data revealed — whether or not it was flattering — was part of the company’s open approach.
“We’re not saying what we’ve found is good or bad,” Mr. Yagan said. “But it’s a dating phenomenon, and we’re just trying to capture it.”
Some good points here from the Atlantic Monthly that adds another perspective to problems black women and other minorities face when dating online:
The Black Damsel In Dating Distress
There are worlds, and there are worlds
—Cornelius Eady
There’s been a lot of talk over the past few months over the dating prospects for black women. Besides the occasional dip, I’ve tried to stay clear as I think this is the kind of conversation where there’s a lot of condemnation and very little exploration. One instance of claimed exploration is this study done back in October by the dating site OKCupid in which they mined their data to see how race and gender affected your chances at the site.
There’s a lot of data and conclusions up there, but for our purposes, I want to focus on the conclusions about black women:
Black women write back the most. Whether it’s due to talkativeness, loneliness, or a sense of plain decency, black women are by far the most likely to respond to a first contact attempt. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and, overall, black women reply about a quarter more often that other women.
Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.
At the Times’ Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres looked at the data and offered his observations:
Men (including African-American men) write back to African-American women at about a 20% lower rate. This result is somewhat reminiscent of the famous resume study done by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, which found that employers who place want ads were less likely to respond to resumes from people with African-American sounding names.
But in some ways the OkCupid result is even more depressing than the racial disparities found in employment. It seems that OkCupid doesn’t match couples where the match would be inconsistent with an explicit racial preference of a user. So these racial disparities persist even after excluding users who have stated an explicit racial preference…
Ayres finds this depressing, and laments that black women have “an uphill battle.” TIME uses the study, and others of online dating sites, and concludes that black women “will be disproportionately snubbed by men of all races.”
Look, I deeply suspect that, on a national level, there are an unfortunate number of people who think black women are less attractive then women of other races. The remnants of white supremacy are not just economic, they are cultural. I also think that’s less true today then it was twenty years ago.
But that said, I think that people passing this data around need to be really careful about using this study to draw inferences about the dating world of black women. One significant problem is that, as any black person will tell you, when black folks date online they don’t go to OKcupid. They go to blacksingles. They go to soulsingles. Or if they’re truly high post, they go to EliteNoire. (Dig the sensuous piano riffs and candelabra.)
Black people who are going to a site like OKcupid are generally black people who, with some exceptions, are open to interracial dating. But the same isn’t true of white people on OKcupid.
So the game is rigged—on OKcupid you have many white men who have no interest in dating black women, but very few black men with no interest in dating white women.
That’s because all the black men who don’t want to date white women are on the African American Dating Network or Blacksinglesconnection. There simply is no real white corollary.
Stormfront excluded, there aren’t many “WhiteSingles” websites or “EliteIvory” dating sites. There is no Caucasian Dating Network, because the broader world is the Caucasian Dating Network. OKCupid is the Caucasian Dating Network. (Note that there is Jdate, though.)
This has other implications for white people. OKCupid reports a relatively high rate of white people who don’t want to date interracially. It looks shocking when you compare it to black people on the site. But it’s also an unfair comparison because, again, most of the black people opposed to interracial dating aren’t on OKCupid.
I don’t write this to be dismissive of the struggles black women face on the dating scene, or all women, for that matter. But these tales of black female woe are becoming grating, not because black women don’t have their share of struggle, but because of the lack of agency runs that through them all, this sense that black women, are there to be acted upon, to wait by the phone. There’s almost an objectifying quality to the whole discussion. We’ve been here before. And, evidently, we’ve learned nothing.
To continue our discussion of race and dating (see blog posting for May 29), here’s an article from Time magazine that discusses the subject more, using data generated by OKCupid.
Seeking My Race-Based Valentine Online
By Jenée Desmond-Harris
This Valentine’s Day, more of us than ever will be looking for love online. And if recent studies are any guide, relatively few women on mainstream dating sites will bother to respond to overtures from men of Asian descent. Likewise, black women will be disproportionately snubbed by men of all races. Yes, even though America has been flirting intensely with a postracial label for some time, color blindness is not upheld as an ideal in the realm of online romance. On some sites, it’s not even an option.
Chemistry.com requires users to identify their ethnicity; like eHarmony, it considers members’ racial preferences when suggesting matches. Match.com lets users filter their searches by race. The site’s profiles include space to indicate interest (or lack thereof) in various racial and ethnic groups. But after Jennifer House, a black woman in Los Angeles, perused one too many profiles only to find the guys had checked off every box except African American, she changed her strategy. “Now I look at that section first so as not to get my hopes up,” she says.
Racial preferences — or, as some call them, biases — are easier to observe on these sites than in offline settings. Behind computer screens and cutely coded user names, people clearly communicate things about race that few would ever say aloud in a bar.
For example, a study published last year in Social Science Research examined 1,558 profiles that white daters living in or near big U.S. cities placed on Yahoo! Personals, which, much like Match, lists 10 racial and ethnic groups users can select as preferred dates. Among the women, 73% stated a preference. Of these, 64% selected whites only, while fewer than 10% included East Indians, Middle Easterners, Asians or blacks.
The story is a little different for the men, 59% of whom stated a racial preference. Of these, nearly half selected Asians, but fewer than 7% did for black women. Why? One theory offered by the study’s lead author, Cynthia Feliciano, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, is that men’s choices are influenced by the media’s portrayal of Asian women as being hypersexual and black women as being bossy.
The people running OkCupid.com have a less nuanced explanation. In October, the free dating site, 80% of whose members choose to input their race, studied the messaging patterns of more than a million users and concluded on its official blog that “racism is alive and well.” (See the 50 best websites of 2009.)
After attempting to control for attractiveness (using something OkCupid calls a picture-rating utility) and compatibility (on the basis of answers to questions covering everything from spirituality to dental hygiene), the study found that black women garnered the fewest responses of any female group. White women responded at much higher rates to white men than to men of color. Asian women’s and Latinas’ response rates showed even stronger preferences for white men. (The site’s latest eye-opening study determined which types of profile pictures elicit the most responses. To all the single ladies: the older you are, the more cleavage you should show.)
But do racial preferences amount to racism? Or is overlooking an entire ethnicity as innocuous as filtering out redheads or people under a certain height? “Just because you take race into consideration in your dating preferences and are aware of race doesn’t make you racist,” says Dr. Nicole Coleman, a psychology professor at the University of Houston. Minorities who prefer to date within their own race or ethnicity — and who look for potential mates on niche sites like BlackPeopleMeet.com and Amor.com — would probably agree with her.
Even for those who hate the idea of racial preferences, such stipulations can be a useful barometer for finding a person with shared values. Says Bostonian Karen Schoneman: “I tend to have a negative reaction toward a man who indicates race preferences, whether it excludes me as a white woman or not.” When she sees evidence online of what she regards as narrow-mindedness, she skips right to the next profile. One click closer, maybe, to postracial eHarmony.
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