Women in our culture have traditionally tried to ‘marry up,” that is, find men of higher social or economic class. It makes sense from a biological point of view: These men should be better able to provide for a wife and family. The technical term is hypergamy. Men do the opposite: trade their money and power for youth and beauty. This kind of imbalance exists in cultures where there is gender inequality. But now as women are catching up and sometimes surpassing men career- and money-wise, there are fewer men for educated, successful women to marry up to. Ergo, a cultural shift: educated successful women are prudently considering men who could be seen as “less than.” The real consideration here is if the man is good husband material. Plenty of powerful, educated men are real jerks and poor husbands.
Education, income and relationships
By Stephanie Chen, CNN
May 17, 2010 9:12 a.m. EDT
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* Pew: Women made more than men in 22 percent of married couples surveyed in 2007
* “It doesn’t bother me one bit that she makes more money,” says one husband
* Expert: Relationships where women are more educated can work if values are the same
(CNN)—If dating is a numbers game, then single ladies should consider this: A Pew Research Center report this year noted a surge in women between the ages of 30 and 44 making more money than their husbands.
Women made more money than men in 22 percent of married couples surveyed in 2007, compared with 4 percent in 1970. While men make more money overall and hold more management positions, women are making greater gains.
“The supply of men has changed,” said D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center’s Social and Demographic Trends project. “The pool of college educated men isn’t growing as rapidly as it is for women.”
There is also a gender shift in the realm of education. Women represent nearly 60 percent of students holding advanced degrees in areas such as medicine, law, business and graduate programs, the U.S. Census reported in April.
Researchers have found educational attainment to be a higher priority among couples than ever. Popular online dating sites Match.com and eHarmony report that romances happen occasionally between educated, professional women and men who are less educated or have a lower salary.
Leah MacIsaac-Ruff, 45, works 11-hour-plus-days as a technology vice president at a Wall Street firm. She has a college degree. So does her husband, Doug, 43, who walks dogs for a living.
MacIsaac-Ruff may be the breadwinner, but she finds her husband’s career choice refreshing.
“If I were to marry a type-A personality and we sat on our computers side by side in the evenings, I think I’d die,” she says. “I think I’d be in a cold relationship. The last thing I want is to go home to an investment banker.”
Despite their job disparities, the couple share enjoyment of the opera and theater. When they attend her upscale corporate events, she isn’t embarrassed when people ask about her husband’s profession. Instead, people are intrigued by his dog-walking job.
“It doesn’t bother me one bit that she makes more money,” said her husband one morning as he was gearing up to walk 15 dogs. “I couldn’t be more proud of what she’s done in the business world.”
The recession has shaken some traditional gender expectations, said several marriage and family experts. About 4.7 million jobs were lost among men during the recession, according to April figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two million women lost their jobs, the report said, leaving more women to become sole supporters of their families.
Particularly among the millennial generation, people are less likely to have gripes with a woman who earns more and has more education, said Nicole Johnson, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Professional Women. Her organization represents 150,000 women, with a majority working in a white-collar profession.
“At one point, the stereotype was a man might feel inferior to a woman who is at a higher point in her career than he is,” Johnson said. “I think that’s dissipated a bit, where there aren’t these built-in expectations of who should be above.”
Educated, professional women exposed to men working lower-paying jobs growing up are more likely to date them, said Amadu Jacky Kaba, a sociology professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. “When they see a hard-working garbage collector or different kinds of lower-level jobs, then they trust them,” Kaba said.
Robin Coates, 45, of Mobile, Alabama, found starting a relationship with her boyfriend, Sam, a 39-year-old who installs floors, to be tricky. Coates works as a creative director and has a college degree. She, too, makes more money than her boyfriend, who dropped out of school in the eighth grade.
“Many years ago he said, ‘I’m not the guy for you. You need to be dating a guy with a suit and tie,’ ” she said.
Coates said they have dated for eight years and plan to get married soon.
Dating a man who makes less money or hasn’t attained as high a level of education can be difficult, said Whitney Casey, a dating expert at Match.com, the online dating site for singles. She said the differences can work if the couple has similar goals and values.
“There are benefits, too,” she said. “It can open your world and make you become a better-rounded person.”
Men are more interested in sex than women? No surprise here, but interesting research to back it up.
Even in Old Age, Men Want Sex More Than Women Do
By John Cloud Tuesday
Spring is coming, and a young man’s thoughts turn to ... you know. Apparently, old men’s thoughts turn to the same subject. According to an article to be published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal, 67% of men ages 65 to 74 said they had been sexually active in the past year, compared with just 40% of women in that age group. Everyone knows young men think constantly about sex, but many guys remain interested in sex until they are almost dead: more than one-third of men ages 75 to 85 said they had sex in the past 12 months, compared with just 17% of women in that age group.
Some of this surely has to do with Viagra, which makes it easier for older men to be interested in sex. But the disparity in sexual activity between older men and older women isn’t entirely explained by the 1998 release of the little blue pill. One set of data presented in the new paper — taken from the National Survey of Midlife Development, involving about 3,000 adults ages 25 to 74 — was collected in 1995 and 1996. That data set shows that 62% of men ages 65 to 74 reported sexual activity in the previous six months; only 36% of women in the same age group did so.
These differences matter because having a healthy sex life is strongly associated with having a healthy life, period — and also a longer life. Scientists aren’t sure about the causal relationship here. Sexually active people tend to be healthier, and healthier people tend to be sexually active. It could be that the fulfillment of sex gives you a health boost, or that being more fit makes sex better — or, more likely, it’s a little of both.
What we do know, from this new paper, is that if you are a 30-year-old male, you can be expected to have sex for 35 more years. The authors — Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau and researcher Natalia Gavrilova of the University of Chicago — call this measure your “sexually active life expectancy,” or SALE. A 30-year-old woman has a SALE of just 31 more years. (The study also finds that men and women who stay healthy and in good shape gain extra years of sexually active life in older age, compared with their peers in poorer health.) But women live about five years longer than men, so when you do the math, all this means that women go approximately twice as long without sex as men before they die.
Older women also enjoy the sex they do have far less than older men. Married women ages 57 to 64 who haven’t been divorced or widowed report having about as much sex as married men in the same age group. But while 77% of partnered men in that age group say they are interested in sex, only 36% of partnered women report the same interest. These figures suggest that a lot of older women may be having sex when they don’t really want to.
Lindau, the lead author on the paper, is cautious about drawing strong conclusions from this variance. “It may be that women are more likely to have sex for reasons other than fulfilling pleasure — or that they are more interested in giving a partner satisfaction,” she says. “Maybe they lack the agency, or maybe they feel marital duty, but our paper doesn’t provide an explanation.” (See how to prevent illness at any age.)
It’s a shortcoming in the paper that the journal itself notes: in a British Medical Journal editorial accompanying the paper, Texas A&M University professor Patricia Goodson says that while Lindau and Gavrilova’s new SALE measure might someday prove a useful tool for gauging an aging population’s medical and public-health needs as they relate to sex, it “sheds no light on the intriguing — and still poorly understood — question of why, even though they enjoy fewer years of sexually active life, many women do not perceive this as a ‘problem.’ “
Another problem the editorial doesn’t mention: the paper is based on self-reported data, and although the authors note that self-reported information about health is usually highly consistent with objective health data, reports of actual sexual activity simply cannot be objectively measured. Even so, the paper does confirm a large difference in sexual interest among older men and older women.
The reasons for the male-female sex disparity among the elderly may not be clear, but the paper shows that the problem in sex quality seems to worsen with age. Still, there is a silver lining for older women having bad or unwanted sex: men tend to die younger than women. Also, it is men’s increasing physical and health problems that are most commonly cited (by both men and women) as the reason sexual activity declines later in life.
The new paper raises more questions than it answers. When interviewed, Lindau avoids making any sweeping social commentary. Instead, she notes that as a gynecologist, she gets a lot of questions from older patients about whether their level of sexual activity is normal. “And I haven’t had the data to give these women answers,” she says. The new paper is a start.
I’m “feeling” a trend: Internet dating is going to be increasingly populated by older singles, while the younger ones will gravitate towards Facebook, Twitter, mobile and video dating. What do you think?
Online and Over 50: Dating for the Dated
Posted By: Jon Sobel
Online dating isn’t just for the young. In fact, it’s not even mostly for the young.
It might come as a shock to Twitter-happy tweens, but the Web itself is a mere youth: if it were a person, it would just be graduating high school about now. Yet, in a new twist on the old saw that youth is wasted on the young, it’s older folks who are making the best use of the Web when it comes to searching for that special someone.
According to a survey conducted in early 2006, the odds an adult 40 - 58 in a relationship met his or her partner through an online dating service were just 1 in 33.33. For those 59 and older, they stood at an even slimmer 1 in 100. But this situation appears to have changed. Match.com, one of the leading online dating services, reports that 1 in 5 of its members is 50 or older—and that demographic is the site’s fastest growing segment.
A 2009 survey of adults in the UK who had dated in the past year found that the over-55’s were the most active online daters: 1 in 1.61 (62%) of them had joined a dating site, almost three times the rate of 18 - 24-year-olds. These mature singles had an average of 8.2 Internet dates and met an average of 2.4 sexual partners online.
Aligned with this trend, a 2010 US study of newlywed couples found that those who’d met online tended to be older, and less likely to be in a first marriage, than those who’d met in a more traditional way.
One might have expected the opposite—that younger people, more comfortable with technology and the Internet, would be the more active (and successful) online daters. But young people typically have more active real-world social lives, and hence more opportunities to meet people in the flesh. Older singles, by contrast, are more likely to have children, time-consuming careers—and an understandable aversion to the loud, youth-oriented bar and club scene. And as time goes by, older people get more accustomed to using the Internet.
Perhaps the greatest dating challenges await the retired. Today’s seniors are less likely than in the past to be able to count on their grown children to take them in and care for them if and when that time comes, so many single seniors are highly motivated to find a companion. But they have relatively limited opportunities to meet eligible singles. As one retiree active in online dating put it, either you move to an assisted living community with a built-in social scene, a proposition which is often quite costly, you take up bridge, or you learn how to post your profile on the Internet.
Given these choices, surfing for love and companionship seems mighty attractive.
It’s always good to get some facts and figures about what is really going on. Here are some from the over 50 crowd, who by the way, ARE crowding the dating sites.
Dissecting the Data: Best Changes in Modern Dating Etiquette
In addition to top-line results from the more than 5,000 poll respondents in total, the data reveal some intriguing differences between male and female respondents at SeniorPeopleMeet.com. Among the findings:
—Women place the most emphasis on the ease of communication via the Internet (48%), compared to men nearly splitting their opinions between the gender equality in asking for a date (39%) and the Internet’s communication ease (36%).
—Men welcome the lack of stigma about sex far more than women do (11% for men vs. 4% for women).
—Conversely, women appreciate the decreased pressure to marry more than men do (13% for women vs. 8% for men).
—Relatively few of either gender cares much about the idea that men and women can take turns paying (4% for women vs. 6% for men).
—Among those respondents who named the gender equality in asking for a date as the best change, 49% were women and 51% were men —the only evenly divided response according to gender.
—Among those respondents who named the decreased stigma about sex as being the best change, 71% were men and just 29% were women.
—Among those respondents who named the newfound equality in paying as the best change, 57% were men and 43% were women.
—Among those respondents who named the Internet makes it easier to communicate as the best change, 62% were women and just 38% were men.
—Among those respondents who named feeling less pressure to marry as the best change, 66% were women and 34% were men.
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.”
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.
One of the great things about Internet dating has been to connect singles to the whole world of potential mates. While in many ways this makes cross-cultural and cross-ethnic pairings more likely and easier to create, the access to so many singles has also contributed to an extreme amount of pickiness. One aspect of the pickiness is racial preferences. Understandably, many people prefer a mate from their own racial background. But we are increasingly seeing cross-racial preferences that seem clearly connected to racial stereotypes. See this article below (bold my addition) for a beginning discussion about the role of race and stereotyping in dating.
Can Online Dating Include Racial Profiling?
By Camille Mendez on Feb. 22, 2010
With the innovation of new technologies, there has been a great emergence of online dating sites. But a strange aspect of these widely accepted, used and advertised sites is the racial factor.
According to studies conducted from September 2004 to May 2005 by Cynthia Feliciano, Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies, and Belinda Robnett, Associate Professor of Sociology, white men preferred Asian or Latino women instead of African-American women while white women did not prefer Asian men.
Feliciano said, “Internet dating offers a unique lens through which to understand the process of selecting a partner and how race plays into the selection. Studies point to increasingly tolerant attitudes about interracial relationships, but intermarriage rates remain relatively low.”
Most preferences are apparent in certain races more than others. While all races claim that they wouldn’t mind dating outside their race, informal factors exist that influence a person’s decision when it comes to dating, marriage, or just hooking up. The common biases include that Asian women are hypersexual, Black women are bossy, Asian men are not masculine enough, Black men are lazy, and that white women are status-oriented. What all races did seem to agree on was their preference to date a white man, a race seen superior to the others, most likely due to social status in the economy.
Recent studies by researchers at UCI’s own Yahoo! Personals dating service further points out racial preference statistics on apimovement.com: “In the UCI study, of women who expressed a racial preference (73 percent) on Yahoo!, less than 10 percent would bother to respond to overtures from men of Asian descent, particularly East Indians, somewhat behind Black and Latino men. White women in particular were particularly exclusive in racial preference. 64 percent of those with a racial preference checked whites only (93 percent excluded Asian men). In other words, nearly one out of two white women wanted to date only whites. About three out of five men expressed a racial preference. Nearly half selected Asian women, compared with 7 percent selecting Black women. Men of all races will avoid black women, and all races had a degree of racial bias in terms of dating.”
Yahoo! Personals cites the UCI case study conducted by Feliciano and Robnett and, in response, discusses some obstacles of interracial dating as well as the methods to overcome them.
1. The Traditionalists: Races who exclusively date the same races for a common cultural foundation. Resolution: Surround yourself with a diverse group of people. This opens your point of view to additional outlooks on life as well as establishing a connection with other races.
2. Stereotypes from Mass Media: The public easily absorbs over-generalized images of different ethnicities and how they interact.
Resolution: Try not to let the media influence stereotypes portrayed and instead focus on your personal opinions.
3. Offensive Family Member: Racial “jokes” add tension that makes you think twice about dating outside your own race.
Resolution: Prepare for confrontations and think of persuasive ways to respond to demand respect in your dating decision.
4. The Gazers: People who blatantly stare at interracial couples.
Resolution: Instead of assuming the attention is a bad thing, bask in it. Their opinions shouldn’t matter to you or your date.
Feliciano and Robnett have released other studies on similar subjects including “Gendered Race Exclusion among White Internet Daters” in 2009 with graduate student Golnaz Komaie.
Woweekazowee! Here is a FASCINATING article about choice and why it is harder to find a mate in a big city. And it’s got a great little video included that explains the math. Yikes.
The tyranny of dating choice We have more romantic options than ever—is it making us miserable?
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
The romantically pathetic urbanite, the one with a full dance card but an empty love life, is as familiar as Seinfeld or Carrie Bradshaw. And that sad image got a boost of validation earlier this week when Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist with the London School of Economics, explained on BigThink.com that “Dating in any large city is difficult.”
Why? It’s just simple math, you neurotic, bagel-eating, rent-overpaying person who will die alone, you. When faced with choices, humans tend to give the thumbs down to the first third of their options before making a decision. Ergo, “You have to reject the first 30% of all the people you date, and then you marry the one who is better than all the ones you’ve dated before.” And if you live in a place with a few million people, well, “The larger the pool, the more people you have to reject, more people you have to date and evaluate and then reject.”
Kanazawa isn’t the first to point out the potentially sabotaging tyranny of choice. At a packed-to-the rafters reading in New York City this winter, “Marry Him” author Lori Gottlieb spoke on the problem as well. Why go out on a second date with someone who is, as Gottlieb says, “a seven,” when there’s a city teeming with tens? She expounded on the concept in a recent Examiner.com interview: “There’s this illusion that we have so many interesting, accomplished and appealing people to choose from. People think maybe there’s something better out there.” (Subtext: There isn’t.) It’s a theory also embraced in the title-says-it-all book by Jimi Izrael, “The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find Good Black Men.”
The idea that a glut of options—the kind we city folk take for granted when we’re choosing where to get pizza tonight or where to get laid—make us unhappy first gathered steam via Barry Schwartz’s 2004 book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.” In it, Schwartz explains what anyone who’s ever wasted an evening channel surfing knows—that the sneaky suspicion that something fantastic is around the corner can keep you from enjoying what you’ve got right in front of you.
But when it comes to matters of the heart, who says this alleged “difficulty” is limited to city folk? As Gottlieb has noted, online dating is all about that veritable buffet of choices. At her reading, she mentioned how some sites, in the spirit of iTunes and Amazon, will recommend people you might like based on other profiles you checked out. Enjoy downtown banker? Check out divorced vegan! You don’t have to live in a place with a subway line to have access to those abundant options; you just need a computer and a Match.com profile. Click, click, click—it’s channel surfing, but for tail.
The notion of “maximizers,” those souls eternally unsatisfied even when it’s raining men, certainly has merit, even if it does seem to get invoked an awful lot to chastise women for being so picky. That’s not to say they don’t exist—everybody has the friend who’s quick to dismiss a guy for a misspelled e-mail or not being tall enough. (And let’s not forget the man who strings you along with an eye to upgrade, shall we?)
There are deeper questions, however, to be considered here. First, let’s get rid of the idea that playing the field is a miserable, self-defeating experience. For some, dating a thousand people before landing on that mythic one sounds nightmarish. For others, it’s pretty freaking awesome. Kissing a lot of frogs is only grim if you’re doing so in a bid to pair off for eternity. Sometimes it’s just nice to, as a friend calls it, “Frankendate” a circle of lovers without fretting that any one of them will complete you as a human being.
Now let’s think about all the people crammed in at those Lori Gottlieb readings, the ones who say they really do want to meet the right person, but keep striking out. I didn’t go to the London School of Economics, but I’ve got a theory here: I don’t think they all mean it.
There’s huge cultural pressure to mate, to breed, to get all of one’s questions in life settled and answered—especially for women. But you know, maybe not all of these “maximizers” who are out there turning down the guy in the bow tie really want all of that. It’s easier to keep up the appearance, even to oneself, of being on a romantic quest for true love than admitting, yeah, actually, I might prefer what I already have. Being in a real relationship with a fellow flawed individual isn’t all picnics and reliable sex; it’s also challenging and fraught with annoyance. It’s not for everybody. But that doesn’t sell books.
Consider also the geography-specific personalities that factor in when considering as sticky a wicket as romance. If you live in a city, you probably enjoy variety—you’re good maximizer material. If you live in the little town where you grew up, you’re likelier to be a satisficer—to make your choices and not second-guess them much. You may also have more traditional criteria for a mate than someone who’s hobnobbing with Lady Gaga tonight. Which type has a higher probability of reaching that diamond anniversary with a high school sweetheart? You tell me.
Of course, there are plenty of city folk who sincerely do want and enjoy coupledom. And a whole raft of research on the science of happiness suggests that if that’s what you’re truly after, perpetually pecking around won’t do the job. In that regard, I actually agree with Kanazawa—and Gottlieb. Maybe, however, it’s time that when crunching the numbers, we freed ourselves from the notion that dating has to be some conveyer belt of hopeless suck, something that people who get around more are doing wrong. Giving yourself over to love shouldn’t mean lowering your standards or limiting your hopes; it just means you’ve got to be willing to quit shopping. But if there’s one thing we urbanites know, it’s that the shopping part can be pretty damn fun.
Here’s some recent research, article reprinted below—what do you think? “Couples in which the woman was more than five years older than the man were three times as likely to split up as those where both partners were the same age. And those in which the woman was more than five years older, neither partner was well-educated and one had a previous divorce, stood the least chance of surviving.” I took the fluff out (where the hearts  are) of the following long article and kept the parts that I thought interesting, what the research says about a couple’s potential for staying together.
What’s the formula for the perfect marriage?
By Dani Garavelli
IF YOU thought the secret to choosing a lover who will last a lifetime was down to chemistry, then think again. According to new research, the best way to tell if a marriage will go the distance or fall at the first hurdle is by trusting another science altogether – mathematics.
Keen to rid society of the blight of divorce, mathematicians assessed the staying power of 1,074 Swiss couples and came up with a formula for a long-lasting union. Ditching such airy-fairy notions as love, romance and sexual compatibility, they used the “linear assignment model” – a methodology used by businesses to match workers to appropriate tasks – to “optimise spousal allocation”. Yes, that means helping people end up with the best possible partner.
The results were dramatic. Having assessed the age difference, cultural and educational background and divorce history of all the couples, the academics found the marriages most likely to succeed were those in which the woman was five or more years younger than her partner, and also better educated.
Couples in which the woman was more than five years older than the man were three times as likely to split up as those where both partners were the same age. And those in which the woman was more than five years older, neither partner was well-educated and one had a previous divorce, stood the least chance of surviving.
“Being able to choose our partners in the way we do is a bit of a luxury,” says Emmanuel Fragnière, a lecturer in management science at Bath University and co-author of the report. “As recently as a few decades ago, marriages were a matter for the community. We know divorce has an economic, social and psychological cost, so why not try to improve the odds of a marriage succeeding?”
But is a mathematical approach to dating really more likely to improve the odds of a successful marriage than a sociological or psychological one? And can immutable facts such as age difference or educational background really do more to keep a relationship afloat than empathy, tolerance, compromise and a healthy sex life?
Fragnière makes no apology for looking beyond the factors usually credited with keeping love alive. “It appears that men and women ‘choose’ their mates on the basis of feelings of love, physical attraction, similarity of tastes, beliefs, attitudes, and shared values,” he says. “All of these determinants are supposed to help them be happy together. However, research has shown that the longevity of marriages or partnerships also depends on objective attributes such as differences in age, family history, and educational levels.
“We imagined what it would be like if you had a regime like in North Korea, say, and marriages could be coordinated by a central agency. After looking at the impact of age difference, and cultural and educational background, we reallocated around 68 per cent of individuals to a new couple that we posited had a higher likelihood of survival.”
It all sounds a bit Brave New World. But could it perhaps throw light on some of the great love affairs of history? If only Cathy had been just a couple of years younger, might she and Heathcliff have escaped from the gloomy Yorkshire moors and settled down to a life of domestic bliss in a town house in Kensington? If only Anne Boleyn had stuck in at school, could she have kept her head?
The notion that husbands should be older than their wives goes back centuries and spans several continents, although most cultures believe there should be a limit to the age gap. (In the West, one theory has it that the women should be no less than half her partner’s age plus seven).
The tradition probably stemmed from the expectation that a man would be able to provide for his wife and future family. “It is received wisdom that men choose younger women for evolutionary reasons, because they look like better breeders,” says Barbara Bloomfield, a counsellor with Relate and an author of books on love and dating. “But then, of course, they may trade off looks for kindness and intelligence.” Equally, received wisdom says men look for women of lower social or educational status so as not to feel threatened.
A study carried out by Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol universities in 2005 found that the likelihood of marriage increased by 35 per cent for men for each 16 point increase in IQ, whereas for women, there was a 40 per cent drop for each 16 point rise, suggesting either that men aren’t interested in clever women, or that clever women have no interest in getting married.
So why do relationships where the woman is better-educated stand the best chance of survival? “As a counsellor for 14 years, I have found that women do tend to set the emotional bar,” says Bloomfield. “They are far more likely to divorce men than the other way around, so you could hypothesis that maybe better educated women make better choices.”
Fragnière – who, it has to be said, has his tongue firmly in his cheek – accepts his research is unlikely to revolutionise dating, but wonders if it could have an application in the world of internet dating. Sites such as Match.com promise you will find someone special within six months or they will give you your money back.
At Edinburgh-based Datetheuk, for example, members have myriad options for checking out their compatibility with a potential partner. They can draw up their own profiles, look at other members’ profiles, rely on recommendations from the agency or suss out other people’s personalities by reading messages posted on public forums.
Checking the age or educational backgrounds of potential matches is no doubt part of the process – but it probably comes second to that first glance at the potential suitor’s photo.
A more obvious problem with the report is that it fails to take couples’ happiness into account. Not all long-term married couples are happy with their lot, after all. “It was not one of the criteria we included, but it might be possible to develop the model further and include some psychological criteria, and then, I suppose, happiness could be included,” says Fragnière.
If you are in a relationship, no matter how you met, your participation is needed in a new study on couples. It only takes a few minutes to fill out the online questionnaire (I took about 10 minutes, vs. what the suggested time was of 30 minutes). We need data comparing relationships that met online vs. those who did not. Either way, if you are in a relationship, go to this website and answer the questions:
http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/” title=“http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/”>http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/
Are Online Relationships More Successful than Offline Relationships?
OnlineDatingMagazine.com Launches Groundbreaking “Modern Love Study”
(September 29, 2009) Online Dating Magazine, a consumer watchdog publication for online daters, has just launched a new modern love study of the factors that determine relationship satisfaction and whether couples who meet online have the same or better quality relationship when compared to couples who meet through more traditional methods.
“We are seeing the media increasingly challenge the claims of dating websites that online matching methods produce high quality relationships for singles,” says Joe Tracy, Publisher of Online Dating Magazine. “In fact, the debate continues around the world as to whether online dating is really effective at creating successful long-term relationships. We want to see a conclusion to that debate through this study.”
The study will measure different aspects of committed, romantic relationships in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships and then determine whether relationship satisfaction and stability is different for couples who meet online compared to couples who meet using traditional methods.
“This type of study has never been conducted before, and a major goal of the research is to create the most comprehensive and valid measure of relationship quality in the academic field. Much research on compatibility is based on outdated questionnaires and theories,” said Dr. James Houran, spokesperson and feature columnist for Online Dating Magazine, who heads the team conducting the study.
According to Dr. Houran, “This project aims to bring cutting edge analysis to the question of what really defines a successful relationship, regardless of sexual orientation or how a couple meets.”
Anyone who is currently in a committed relationship or who has been in a committed relationship, is eligible to participate in the study. Participants are asked to respond to a series of questions about their current or most recent serious relationship. The basic results of the study will be released upon the study’s conclusion. The questionnaire has approximately 130 items and takes about 30 minutes to complete. It may be accessed via the link below:
http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/” title=“http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/”>http://lovestudy.yolasite.com/
One thing that is simply great about computers is their ability to count. OKCupid puts this skill to work in its analysis of what people are actually doing on their dating site. The following article is from the OK Cupid blog, and it is about optimum length for first email messages. Combine that with the earlier posting about what words to use, and you should be able to write a winner.
Online Dating Advice: Optimum Message Length
Picture this online dating scenario:
1. You see someone you like.
2. You read their profile, and wow.
3. You send them a long message.
4. You hang tight and…
5. …you never get a reply.
Sadly, this is a typical story. Even on a lively site like OkCupid, only about a third (32%) of first messages get any response.
Some people, however, get much better results.
In the next several posts here on OkTrends, we’ll be taking a closer look at messaging and finding some ways to improve your own message response rate. We will not be dispensing generic advice. No. We’ve done research, and we have actual numbers.
As we began to dig into OkCupid’s messaging data, the first thing we noticed was that most people’s contact attempts are way too lonnnng. Almost 16% of first messages are over 2000 characters (roughly 400 words), and the average is 743! At least in terms of using your time efficiently, your messages should be much shorter. Let’s start with this chart: [go to OKCupid’s blog to see the actual graphics]
The y-axis is reply percentage; the x-axis is message length, in characters; and the two lines are as follows. Red is the ratio of messages that get any reply. Green is the ratio of messages that get a reply that in turn gets replied to by the original sender. The idea is that this is the ultimate goal of the first message: to start a conversation with someone.
Messages sent by guys are, overall, only about half as likely to get replies as similar messages from women. But when you consider we’re including dudes who send out messages such as:
Your hot
DAm I got inch for you
and
Your people need to get out of Israel
a baseline reply rate of 22% is looking pretty darn great. (All those were actual first messages, by the way.)
Now, our graph clearly shows that in raw terms, it helps guys to write longer messages. But when we factor in the actual time it takes to compose a given message, it becomes clear that in terms of time put in vs. likelihood of starting actually having a conversation, shorter is actually better. If we imagine that people type messages at about 200 characters per minute, we get the following table: [go to OKCupid’s blog to see the actual graphics]
Of course, we shouldn’t forget that there’s a certain amount of overhead involved with contacting someone (scanning her profile for common interests, thinking of jokes to make, taking a deep breath, clicking around, and so on). If we include 5 minutes of forethought, we find that the actual ideal first message length is 200 characters, or 1 minute’s worth of typing for the average writer.
Yes, brevity is key. Something we learned building SparkNotes, in our pre-OkCupid days. If you’re the kind of person who spends a little more time reading a profile and thinking about your message, say, 10 minutes, then the optimal length goes up a few words (to 270 characters), but, still, short is better. Savor this advice, men, for there are not many things in your world that fit this paradigm.
For women, the most efficient message is even shorter.
The shortest messages get almost the best absolute response rate, and the reply rate actually goes down as messages approach extreme length. Apparently, after about 360 words (1800 characters), you start scaring people off. A message like that is the online equivalent of a face tattoo. Of your life story. Let’s generate our efficiency table for women: [go to OKCupid’s blog to see the actual graphics]
Incredibly enough, the optimal first outreach from a woman to a man is just 50 characters long! I’m willing to speculate that this graph is telling us that a guy decides whether or not to reply to a woman’s message regardless of what the message actually says, and that the first message’s true function is simply to bring her profile to his attention.
My guess is that he looks at her picture and if she’s his type, he writes back. On the one hand, such a superficial reality is depressing. On the other, over 40% of female-to-male first messages do get replied to, so, as a woman, if you’re writing to a few people who fit your basic demographic the odds are very good you’ll get a response. Anyhow, all this implies that the average woman’s time is better spent looking for the right people to write to, rather than composing detailed messages.
OK Cupid has been fooling around with some hard data that they have been combing out of their dating site. Here, they have boiled down results to some concrete rules for writing those first email. I can’t reprint the nice charts they have in the article, but you can try going to the blog website and see them there.
Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message
Ok, here’s the experiment.
We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. This is the second post of our statistical investigation into the optimal online dating message; a note about how we protected user privacy is here. Let’s go:
#1 – Be literate.
Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. Our negative correlation list is a fool’s lexicon: ur, u, wat, wont, and so on. These all make a terrible first impression. In fact, if you count hit (and we do!) the worst 6 words you can use in a first message are all stupid slang.
Language like this is such a strong deal-breaker that correctly written but otherwise workaday words like don’t and won’t have nicely above average response rates (36% and 37%, respectively).
Interesting exceptions to the “no netspeak” rule are expressions of amusement. haha (45% reply rate) and lol (41%) both turned out to be quite good for the sender. This makes a certain sense: people like a sense of humor, and you need to be casual to convey genuine laughter. hehe was also a successful word, but much less so (33%). Scientifically, this is because it’s a little evil sounding.
So, in short, it’s okay to laugh, but keep the rest of your message grammatical and punctuated.
#2 – Avoid physical compliments.
Although the data shows this advice holds true for both sexes, it’s mostly directed at guys, because they are way more likely to talk about looks. You might think that words like gorgeous, beautiful, and sexy are nice things to say to someone, but no one wants to hear them. 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. Besides, when you tell a woman she’s beautiful, chances are you’re not.
On the other hand, more general compliments seem to work well:
The word pretty is a perfect case study for our point. As an adjective, it’s a physical compliment, but as an adverb (as in, “I’m pretty good at sports.”) it’s is just another word.
When used as an adverb it actually does very well (a phenomenon we’ll examine in detail below), but as pretty’s uses become more clearly about looks, reply rates decline sharply. You’re pretty and your pretty are phrases that could go either way (physical or non-). But very pretty is almost always used to describe the way something or someone looks, and you can see how that works out.
#3 – Use an unusual greeting.
We took a close look at salutations. After all, the way you choose to start your initial message to someone is the “first impression of your first impression.” The results surprised us:
The top three most popular ways to say “hello” were all actually bad beginnings. Even the slangy holla and yo perform better, bucking the general “be literate” rule. In fact, it’s smarter to use no traditional salutation at all (which earns you the reply rate of 27%) and just dive into whatever you have to say than to start with hi. I’m not sure why this is: maybe the ubiquity of the most popular openings means people are more likely to just stop reading when they see them.
The more informal standard greetings: how’s it going, what’s up, and howdy all did very well. Maybe they set a more casual tone that people prefer, though I have to say
You had me at ‘what’s up’
doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
#4 – Don’t try to take it outside.
Obviously, all successful OkCupid relationships outgrow our in-site messaging feature. But an offer to chat or of an email address right off the bat is a sure turn off. One of the things online dating has going for it is its relative anonymity, and if you start chipping away at that too early, you’ll scare the other person off.
Also, don’t ask for or give away a cell number (10%). I thought that was a no-brainer. For the brainless among you who are doing this, my best advice is to paypal me 25 dollars and never use a computer again.
#5 – Bring up specific interests.
There are many words on the effective end of our list like zombie, band, tattoo, literature, studying, vegetarian (yes!), and metal (double yes!) that are all clearly referencing something important to the sender, the recipient, or, ideally, both. Talking about specific things that interest you or that you might have in common with someone is a time-honored way to make a connection, and we have proof here that it works. We’re presenting just a smattering: in fact every “niche” word that we have significant data on has a positive effect on messaging.
Even more effective are phrases that engage the reader’s own interests, or show you’ve read their profile:
#6 – If you’re a guy, be self-effacing.
Awkward, sorry, apologize, kinda, and probably all made male messages more successful, yet none of them except sorry affects female messages. As we mentioned before, pretty, no doubt because of its adverbial meaning of “to a fair degree; moderately” also helps male messages. A lot of real-world dating advice tells men to be more confident, but apparently hemming and hawing a little works well online.
It could be that appearing unsure makes the writer seem more vulnerable and less threatening. It could be that women like guys who write mumbly. But either way: men should be careful not to let the appearance of vulnerability become the appearance of sweaty desperation: please is on the negative list (22% reply rate), and in fact it is the only word that is actually worse for you than its netspeak equivalent (pls, 23%)!
#7 – Consider becoming an atheist.
Mentioning your religion helps you, but, paradoxically, it helps you most if you have no religion. We know that’s going to piss a lot of people off, and we’re more or less tongue-in-cheek with this advice, but it’s what the numbers say.
These are the religious terms that appeared a statistically significant number of times. Atheist actually showed up surprisingly often (342 times per 10,000 messages, second only to 552 mentions of christian and ahead of 278 for jewish and 142 for muslim).
Though very few people actually do it, invoking the sky-breaking thunderbolts of zeus does help a person get noticed (reply rate 56%), but maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise on a site that is itself named for a member of the Classical pantheon. So if you can’t bring yourself to deny the deity, consider opening yourself up to a whole wacky bunch of them. But ideally you should just disbelieve the whole thing. It can help your love life, and, besides, if there really was a god, wouldn’t first messages always get a reply?
Anyone who has spent much time on dating sites knows what a time sink Internet dating can be. Not only does working the sites take concerted effort and time, but also, the whole process can become rather addicting.
I equate it to the kind of addiction that happens with gamblers at slot machines. Slot machines pay off randomly. In behavioral terms, this is called “variable ratio schedules.” “The variable ratio schedule produces both the highest rate of responding and the greatest resistance to extinction” according to Wikipedia. This means that the individual does not know when the machine is going to pay off, but knows that it DOES pay off eventually. This kind of “payoff” gets the most response (continual play) from the individual and is the hardest kind of behavior to get rid of (extinguish).
This is exactly the way Internet dating works, though the sites are not programmed to behave that way, while slot machines are. Dating sites “pay off” indirectly, when someone contacts you or responds to your invitation. But you never know when it is going to happen, or with whom. All the ingredients for a budding addicition.
Now addiction specialists are getting into the act: treatment for Internet addictions. Treatment for dating site addicts cannot be far behind.
Internet Addicts Get First U.S. Treatment Clinic
Hardcore Internet junkies now have their very own version of the Betty Ford clinic.
The Heavensfield Retreat Center, located in Fall City, Wash., claims to be the first U.S in-patient center to treat Internet, video game and texting addictions. Enrollment in the clinic’s 45-day Internet addiction recovery program, called reStart, costs roughly $14,500.
The program is designed to wean patients off the Internet by combining traditional talk therapy with social skills training, such as lessons in conversation techniques and dating. Patients also feed goats, raise chickens and do home-maintenance work as a way of getting reoriented with the offline world.
The clinic’s first patient is a 19-year-old boy from Iowa who admitted to being hooked on the online game World of Warcraft.
While it may seem like an extreme (not to mention pricey) way to get unplugged, Stuart Fischoff, a psychologist and Senior Editor at the Journal of Media Psychology, believes the rehab approach can be helpful.
“For patients in clinical settings, exposing them to friendly animals has had very positive effects,” said Fischoff, who is not affiliated with the new clinic. “The purpose here is to get the patient to experience gratification from something that doesn’t require an Internet connection. So giving the patient someone who needs them, appreciates them and doesn’t judge them allows them to reach out to the flesh-and-blood world.”
Is Web addiction real?
The program’s Web site cites research that suggests “anywhere from 6 and 10 percent of the online population is dependent on one or more aspects of cyber technology and the Internet.”
However, the emerging notion of “Internet addiction” remains controversial. The term has yet to be recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a disorder and is not listed in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). But some experts have lobbied for its inclusion in the manual’s upcoming revision, due out in 2012.
Ronald W. Pies, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Tufts University, said much of the debate hinges on whether Internet abuse is a distinct disorder or merely a symptom of deeper psychological problems.
“There are often underlying or co-occurring psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety, depression or a disturbance in interpersonal relationships, all of which may explain the person’s internet problems,” Pies told LiveScience. “The question is, do we need another ‘disorder’ in our DSM, if the manifestations of Internet addiction can already be accounted for by well-described and better-validated conditions?”
Though very little research on Internet addiction exists, one notable study conducted by Stanford University researchers found that more than one out of eight Americans displayed signs of “problematic Internet use,” such as having difficulty staying away from the Internet for several days at a time. But the study’s authors admitted that the results were “too premature” to warrant a medical diagnosis. The conclusions were based on a telephone survey of 2,513 adults in 2006.
As of now, “there has not yet been sufficient investigation of the question using well-defined criteria for Internet addiction,” Pies said.
Fischoff doesn’t view the Internet itself to be “addictive,” but rather “it’s the various things people can do online such as gambling, porn or gaming, that are addictive.”
“The Web is simply a very good delivery system for activities that are potentially addictive,” Fischoff said in a telephone interview.
Will it work?
Meanwhile, Internet addiction treatment is not a new concept.
In China, there are roughly 400 Internet addiction clinics, where some patients have been reportedly subjected to shock therapy. On Aug. 2, a 15-year-old Chinese boy was beaten to death less than a day after his parents checked him into one of the Internet addiction boot camps, according to news reports.
Although he finds the treatment methods outlined on reStart’s web site to be based on sound psychotherapeutic principles, Fischoff doesn’t expect rehab alone to have a long-lasting effect.
“I don’t think rehab will be a cure-all for anybody, whether it’s a drug addiction, gambling or the Internet,” he said. “You can modify people’s behavior in a particular environment, but if they have not developed the proper social skills, they’ll retreat back into their old ways once they get back out into the real world.”
“The hope here is that what is introduced to the patient would at least get them on the path toward expanding other parts of their life,” Fischoff added.
More from the research front, this time on the significance of smiles vs. no smiles in predicting divorce. And why it is good to look for photos with smiles…
Life in thin slices
From The Economist print edition
An ancient smile may predict a modern divorce
A GRIM expression in a yearbook photo or family snapshot could mean more than just a passing bad mood. It could also signal that the subject is more likely to get divorced than someone with a big smile for the camera. Matthew Hertenstein and his colleagues at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana asked old boys and girls of the university to answer questions about their current sexual relationships and whether they had ever been divorced. The team then looked up pictures of their volunteers in the university’s yearbooks and graded the degree of their smiles. The less a person smiled, it turned out, the more likely he or she was to have been divorced over the course of a lifetime.
This research is a dramatic example of how “thin slices” of information can predict important aspects of people’s personalities. In past studies, researchers have shown that with very limited information—less than half a minute of interaction, the viewing of a video clip or just a look at a photograph—people can make accurate predictions about others’ sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, teaching ability and personality.
Dr Hertenstein was following up research which had shown that the women who smiled most in their college photos were most likely to be married by the age of 27, among other things. He wanted to see if the same held, over the longer term, for divorce. His study, to be published in Motivation & Emotion, looked at three groups. The first, of 306 people, came from alumni of the psychology department. The second group, of 349, was recruited from general alumni. The third, of 55 people, was recruited from the town. (In the last case, people were asked to send in photos of themselves, but were not told that the study was about smiling.) The researchers rated the photos of the subjects on a scale of two to ten. They also asked their volunteers various questions, including whether they had ever been divorced.
The relationship between smiling and divorce also held up among townspeople, even though many sent photographs of themselves as children. Facial expression predicted divorce even when the smile or frown was on a ten-year-old’s face. A photograph that records a split second from a lifetime is a very thin slice indeed. How could it predict a divorce decades in the future?
The researchers suggest that the smiles are accurate indicators of personality. The results should not be overstretched. The never-divorced had their smiles rated on average at 5.9, 5.9 and 5.2 out of 10 in each of the three groups, while the divorced scored 5, 5.3 and 4.4. That is not a huge difference, but it is statistically significant. On the other hand, comparing only the lowest-scoring people with the highest-scoring, the least-smiling were three times more likely than the biggest smilers to divorce.
Until the findings are replicated it is probably too early to choose a spouse based on a facial expression in a photo. On the other hand, it would not hurt to smile for the camera yourself.
I love it when I see research come out about Internet dating. Here’s an article below that cites research that refutes the common belief that Internet dating is for losers. Read why, see my underlines for what I think is particularly significant:
Who Uses Internet Dating?
By John M Grohol PsyD
Who Uses Internet Dating?Ever wonder who uses Internet dating services like Match.com and eHarmony.com? The answer may surprise you. I think, “Well, gee, everybody uses them!” But that’s not the case. There’s a particular psychological profile that researchers have discovered of users of Internet dating services.
The researchers (Kim et al., 2009) surveyed 3,345 people in the U.S., of which 1,588 (47.5 %) were men and 1,757 (52.5 %) were women. Ages ranged from 19 to 89 with a mean of 48 years old. They gathered their data using a number of standardized questionnaires and psychological measures.
The researchers found that people who are more “sociable are more likely to use Internet dating services than are those who are less sociable. This finding challenges the stereotypical profiling of Internet daters as being just lonely and socially anxious people.”
Indeed, that finding confirms the idea that Internet dating is firmly in the mainstream now. While that may have not been the case 10 years ago, times have changed and using the Internet as a means of finding a prospective partner is no longer thought of as unusual. The researchers finding in this regard is not unique — previous research has come to the same conclusion, so it’s considered a robust research finding. For people who are already sociable, using the Internet as a dating method is just one more tool at their disposal.
But not all sociable folks consider the use of Internet dating. If you have high self-esteem and consider romantic relationships to be an important part of your life, you’re more likely to use Internet dating. If you have low self-esteem and consider romantic relationships not to be an important part of your life, you’re also more likely to use Internet dating.
So the researchers found that if you have low self-esteem and put some value on to your romantic relationships, you’re actually less likely to use Internet dating.
The researchers explain the findings this way:
If the success of romantic relationships is the domain of self worth, one may try to increase the prospect of success and avoid failure in romantic relationships. In the context of Internet dating, when sociable people consider romantic relationships to be an important domain for self-worth, those with high self-esteem will be more likely than those with low self esteem to use Internet dating services.
The reason is that when sociable people consider romantic relationships to be an important domain for self-worth, those with high self-esteem will find it comfortable to present themselves to a multitude of anonymous people, whereas those with low self-esteem will be more likely to experience a higher level of stress just thinking about disclosing and promoting themselves on the Internet. Less confident individuals may not want their negative self-views publicized or viewed by others.
To reduce such negative feelings and protect their self-worth, those with low self-esteem will adopt avoidance strategies and distance themselves from Internet dating services.
Makes sense. High self-esteem folks feel like they have little to lose by trying Internet dating. Low self-esteem folks have more to lose, since more of their own self-value is tied up in the process — unless they say, “Ah, yeah, it’s nice to have a partner, but whatever. I’m also just fine without one.”
The upshot is that Internet dating is no longer the domain of the desperate nor those with low self-esteem (if it ever was).
The New York Times has a related article about the science (or lack thereof) behind the sites that claim such science helps you make better choices about dating. I think the science of such sites is ultimately of limited value, since no amount of data is going to predict whether two people will experience that indefinable quality of a “spark” on a first date. Without that, there will be no relationship.
Technology Review also weighed in this past week about the overwhelming number of choices of online dating and the research that has shown the more choices we have, the harder it can be sometimes to make a decision (”cognitive overload”). That’s why the sites try their best to offer you a way to limit the results displayed, but ultimately can fail in paring things down enough to make a difference to your brain.
Reference:
Kim, M., Kwon, K-N & Lee, M. (2009). Psychological Characteristics of Internet Dating Service Users: The Effect of Self-Esteem, Involvement, and Sociability on the Use of Internet Dating Services. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12(4). DOI: 10.1089=cpb.2008.0296.
Barry Schwartz wrote “The Paradox of Choice,” about how more choice is not necessarily better. Bush’s Medicare drug plan is a good example: Way too much “choice” simply leads to confusion, and then poor choices. Here’s an article below which highlights one of the downsides of Internet dating: Wading through too many possibilities, and then managing to make a good choice.
Too much of a good thing? Study finds online daters choose wrong people due to ‘cognitive overload’
BY Amy Eisinger
Having too many choices can cause people to make poor decisions, according to a study that focused on online daters as an example.
Turns out, too much of a good thing can be too much to handle.
According to a new scientific study, giving people too many choices can backfire. Users of online dating Web sites actually experience a “cognitive overload” and make poorer decisions as a result, reports Technology Review.
The study, conducted by researchers at the National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan, presented subjects with varying numbers of search results to their online love requests. And it turned out, a higher number of results meant less luck with love. Subjects made less careful partner choices when presented with a long list of potential suitors.
One of the researchers referred to this conundrum as a “double-edged sword,” since people often turn to online dating in order to get a large selection, but then spend less time evaluating each person. More search options, the researchers said, leads to “less selective processing” and distracts users’ cognitive resources with “irrelevant information,” and therefore reduces their ability “to screen out inferior options.” In other words, faced with too many choices, people went for quantity over quality—and made a poor decision.
Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School who co-authored a similar study, said this type of brain overload can be common on dating Web sites. Having tons of options can raise expectations of potential matches to an impossible level, meaning ladies might spend hours searching for a Prince Charming that isn’t on the list.
Other researchers pointed out that this type of infinite-choice mental meltdown extends beyond just dating Web sites. For simple information, one scientist at Michigan State University noted, search engines like Google work relatively well at getting the most relevant Web sites to the top of the page. (Have you ever clicked to page 2 of your search results? Most people don’t.)
But when it comes to more subjective queries, like, say, the best spot for a holiday retreat, results are often more ambiguous, leading users to make a rushed choice due to an overwhelming number of options.
Yet there is hope—at least in the online dating world. A new start-up company, called Omnidate (http://www.omnidate.com), offers users the chance to interact with 3-D avatars in a virtual world, revealing information about themselves that may only come out through conversation.
“As people chat, their characters respond naturally, providing a realistic dating experience,” said Omnidate’s president Igor Kotlyar. At least for women, the idea seems to be catching on: women currently make up 60% of the site’s registration.
Here’s a little piece about turning 100—seems that centenarians are on the computers, too, and using technology to stay in touch with family and friends. Have you seen any 100 year olds on dating sites? Just a matter of time. My mother’s new husband (they’ve been married a little over three years now) turns 90 on September 11. Here they are on their wedding day. Mom and George did not meet online, but they both did know a good thing when they saw it. And I have to admit that I gave advice.
100-Year-Olds Using Latest Technology to Stay Connected to Family, Friends, Current Events, According to Third Annual Poll
MINNEAPOLIS, Jul 29, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE)—The third annual Evercare 100@100 Survey(TM) released today finds that the keys to longevity are staying connected to family, friends and current events. The poll of 100 centenarians shifts conventional stereotypes on aging by revealing that some of the oldest Americans are using the latest technologies to keep up and stay close - talking on cell phones, sending emails, “Googling” lost acquaintances, surfing Wikipedia and even online dating.
—Love 2.0: As many Centenarians as Baby Boomers (3 percent) say they have dated someone they met on an online dating site.
These numbers speak for themselves. Internet dating is THE way to find love, particularly if you are over 45.
LOOKING FOR TRUE LOVE..GO ON INTERNET
Single men and women are more likely to find true love on the internet than at work or at a party - especially if they are over 45. A poll of 10,000 married couples in 2006/2007 found 19 per cent met online compared with 17 per cent who got together at work and 17 per cent who paired up through pals. Of these, 31 per cent aged 45 to 54 met online, against 18 per cent of 20 to 44-year-olds. Galen Buckwalter of online matchmaker eHarmony, California, said: “Wanting to get married and not going online will soon be seen as equivalent to trying to find an address by driving around randomly - rather than using a map.” In contrast a similar poll of 5,000 couples who married between September 2004 and August 2005 found that 14 per cent met online, compared with 20 per cent at work and 17 per cent through friends.
I love it when I see research results tied directly to the needs of singles. Here’s some out of Great Britain on screen names and their relative appeal. Take note, those of you who have yet to sign up on a dating site: Often the screen name you start with is the one you are stuck with, so put some thought in before you sign up.
Finding true online love lies just in your screen name
London, Apr 4 : It’s all in the name, it seems, if you’re hunting for love on the Internet. A new research has suggested that while dating online, people should take care of what screen name they use, in order to maximize their digital appeal.
According to the study, playful and flirtatious names such as ‘fun2bwith’ or ‘i’msweet’ were ranked top by both men and women daters as those they would most like to contact.
Physical descriptors such as ‘cutie’ or ‘blueeyes’ were close behind.
“These names suggest an outgoing or fun nature, or clarify the user’s positive physical appearance,” Times Online quoted Dr Monica Whitty, a lecturer in cyber-psychology at Nottingham Trent University and co-author of the paper, as saying.
These types of screen names may go some way to making up for the major drawback with Internet dating - not being able to see for sure what people look like.
However she advised female lonely hearts to avoid screen names, which attempt to be classy, or show how clever they are.
According to the study, male daters would less likely to contact screen names such as ‘wellread’ or ‘welleducated’, although the research found that women were more drawn to names that suggested men were cultured.
“Less flirtatious names may be more appealing to women because they are wary of men who might be using the site to find one-night stands rather than long-term relationships,” said Whitty.
Straightforward or plain names such as ‘smith24’ or ‘justme’ were also considered less appealing.
But bottom of the heap for both men and women came names denoting wealth such as ‘wealthyandwise’, ‘lovemyporsche’ or ‘entrepreneur’.
“This was a very surprising finding. We believe wealthy-sounding names fared poorly because showing off about one’s wealth from the outset might reflect a superficial personality or deceit,” said Whitty.
The finding will be presented at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference in Dublin.
I always recommend that singles pick a big, established, well-trafficked dating site, one that charges a fee. And of course, if you join, you should pay. Here’s a report that backs up some of my rationale—that people who join and pay a fee are more serious and see others posting on the site as more serious too. Underlining below is mine.
The typical online dater is serious, says report
People who date on the internet tend to be serious about the endeavour, a new report asserts.
According to eMarketer, those who use paid-for subscription services to meet prospective romantic mates are doing so because they want to find a specific sort of person who takes the venture as seriously as they do.
Citing comScore figures that reveal 97 million people visited matchmaking websites in December of last year, representing a ten per cent year-on-year fall, the report comments that a specific demographic is drawn to such resources.
“Online dating site users are looking for a pool of other people who are serious about dating, and pay for access to that pool,” the publication notes.
Meanwhile, an International Herald-Tribune article is cited in which the chief executive of Match.com, Thomas Enraght-Moony, describes internet dating as “highly underpenetrated”.
Hitwise has reported that the term ‘Valentine’s poems’ was the most popular search phrase containing the word Valentine in February 2007.
Yesterday’s New York Times had a great article about Internet dating, specifically sites that do the matching for you, like eHarmony and Chemistry.com What was REALLY juicy was the companion article and the comments attached. Wanted: Single or Married Adult with Online Matchmaking Story asks for stories from couples who met online, and WOW! Did folks write in or what? You know how I love love stories, so I’ll copy off a bunch here. And I’ll put up “Wanted: Single or Married Adult with Online Matchmaking Story” in another post as well.
Here’s the first article below:
January 29, 2008
Findings
By JOHN TIERNEY
PASADENA, Calif. — The two students in Southern California had just been introduced during an experiment to test their “interpersonal chemistry.” The man, a graduate student, dutifully asked the undergraduate woman what her major was.
“Spanish and sociology,” she said.
“Interesting,” he said. ‘‘I was a sociology major. What are you going to do with that?”
“You are just full of questions.”
“It’s true.”
“My passion has always been Spanish, the language, the culture. I love traveling and knowing new cultures and places.”
Bogart and Bacall it was not. But Gian Gonzaga, a social psychologist, could see possibilities for this couple as he watched their recorded chat on a television screen.
They were nodding and smiling in unison, and the woman stroked her hair and briefly licked her lips — positive signs of chemistry that would be duly recorded in this experiment at the new eHarmony Labs here. By comparing these results with the couple’s answers to hundreds of other questions, the researchers hoped to draw closer to a new and extremely lucrative grail — making the right match.
Once upon a time, finding a mate was considered too important to be entrusted to people under the influence of raging hormones. Their parents, sometimes assisted by astrologers and matchmakers, supervised courtship until customs changed in the West because of what was called the Romeo and Juliet revolution. Grown-ups, leave the kids alone.
But now some social scientists have rediscovered the appeal of adult supervision — provided the adults have doctorates and vast caches of psychometric data. Online matchmaking has become a boom industry as rival scientists test their algorithms for finding love.
The leading yenta is eHarmony, which pioneered the don’t-try-this-yourself approach eight years ago by refusing to let its online customers browse for their own dates. It requires them to answer a 258-question personality test and then picks potential partners. The company estimates, based on a national Harris survey it commissioned, that its matchmaking was responsible for about 2 percent of the marriages in America last year, nearly 120 weddings a day.
Another company, Perfectmatch.com, is using an algorithm designed by Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington at Seattle. Match.com, which became the largest online dating service by letting people find their own partners, set up a new matchmaking service, Chemistry.com, using an algorithm created by Helen E. Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers who has studied the neural chemistry of people in love.
As the matchmakers compete for customers — and denigrate each other’s methodology — the battle has intrigued academic researchers who study the mating game. On the one hand, they are skeptical, because the algorithms and the results have not been published for peer review. But they also realize that these online companies give scientists a remarkable opportunity to gather enormous amounts of data and test their theories in the field. EHarmony says more than 19 million people have filled out its questionnaire.
Its algorithm was developed a decade ago by Galen Buckwalter, a psychologist who had previously been a research professor at the University of Southern California. Drawing on previous evidence that personality similarities predict happiness in a relationship, he administered hundreds of personality questions to 5,000 married couples and correlated the answers with the couples’ marital happiness, as measured by an existing instrument called the dyadic adjustment scale.
The result was an algorithm that is supposed to match people on 29 “core traits,” like social style or emotional temperament, and “vital attributes” like relationship skills. (For details: nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
“We’re not looking for clones, but our models emphasize similarities in personality and in values,” Dr. Buckwalter said. “It’s fairly common that differences can initially be appealing, but they’re not so cute after two years. If you have someone who’s Type A and real hard charging, put them with someone else like that. It’s just much easier for people to relate if they don’t have to negotiate all these differences.”
Does this method actually work? In theory, thanks to its millions of customers and their fees (up to $60 a month), eHarmony has the data and resources to conduct cutting-edge research. It has an advisory board of prominent social scientists and a new laboratory with researchers lured from academia like Dr. Gonzaga, who previously worked at a marriage-research lab at U.C.L.A.
So far, except for a presentation at a psychologists’ conference, the company has not produced much scientific evidence that its system works. It has started a longitudinal study comparing eHarmony couples with a control group, and Dr. Buckwalter says it is committed to publishing peer-reviewed research, but not the details of its algorithm. That secrecy may be a smart business move, but it makes eHarmony a target for scientific critics, not to mention its rivals.
In the battle of the matchmakers, Chemistry.com has been running commercials faulting eHarmony for refusing to match gay couples (eHarmony says it can’t because its algorithm is based on data from heterosexuals), and eHarmony asked the Better Business Bureau to stop Chemistry.com from claiming its algorithm had been scientifically validated. The bureau concurred that there was not enough evidence, and Chemistry.com agreed to stop advertising that Dr. Fisher’s method was based on “the latest science of attraction.”
Dr. Fisher now says the ruling against her last year made sense because her algorithm at that time was still a work in progress as she correlated sociological and psychological measures, as well as indicators linked to chemical systems in the brain. But now, she said, she has the evidence from Chemistry.com users to validate the method, and she plans to publish it along with the details of the algorithm.
“I believe in transparency,” she said, taking a dig at eHarmony. “I want to share my data so that I will get peer review.”
Until outside scientists have a good look at the numbers, no one can know how effective any of these algorithms are, but one thing is already clear. People aren’t so good at picking their own mates online. Researchers who studied online dating found that the customers typically ended up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they studied, and that those dates often ended up being huge letdowns. The people make up impossible shopping lists for what they want in a partner, says Eli Finkel, a psychologist who studies dating at Northwestern University’s Relationships Lab.
“They think they know what they want,” Dr. Finkel said. “But meeting somebody who possesses the characteristics they claim are so important is much less inspiring than they would have predicted.”
The new matchmakers may or may not have the right formula. But their computers at least know better than to give you what you want.
This article below from Reuters describes some really ho-hum research. And with only 25 subjects??? Come on!
However, some common mistakes that women make are illustrated inadvertently. For instance, “But they still wanted the man to make the first move and expected him pick up the tab.” And “Complaints include a preponderance of men who are looking for much younger women, as well as men who misrepresent their looks, interests or marital status, or who show little interest in moving the relationship offline, she said.”
Well, yeah. Why should Internet dating be that much different from the real world in those respects? What needs to change is both women’s and men’s poor attitudes. If you behave the same as always (waiting for men to make the first move, let’s say) or expect the same as always (men—and women—are going to misrepresent themselves, look for younger women or wealthy men), that’s what you will find. People tend to find what they are looking for: Surprise!
I like the image of Internet dating sites as being the world’s biggest singles’ bar: Where else are you going to find so many singles who are looking all in one place? But what is different is: The absence of alcohol, the safety of your own home, and more freedom for women to take the initiative.
Don’t make the same mistake these women seem to: If the match isn’t there, thank heaven or cyberspace for telling you so quickly and move on. Do not lose sleep over the one who is not right.
Online dating brings hope, frustration - survey
Fri Dec 28, 2007 10:02pm IST
By Natalie Armstrong
TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - Online dating renews women’s hope in love and sex, but can be just as disappointing as the real-life dating scene, according to new Canadian research.
Susan Frohlick, an anthropology professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, says the women she surveyed gained a sense of empowerment from their online dating experiences.
But they still wanted the man to make the first move and expected him pick up the tab.
“Women are finding it as a useful tool to enter into the dating world, they find that it’s safe, they find that they can be a little more bold than they would in face-to-face relationships,” Frohlick said of her survey, which looks at how women over 30 view online dating.
“But, at the same time, they are experiencing frustration because it does seem that the Internet in many ways is just the same old bar scene.”
Complaints include a preponderance of men who are looking for much younger women, as well as men who misrepresent their looks, interests or marital status, or who show little interest in moving the relationship offline, she said.
“There’s not much of a difference between the virtual world and the real world,” said Linda, 33, a Toronto professional who has used an online dating site on and off, three or four times for a few months each time.
“It’s sad and equally as frustrating.”
Linda says she knows it can work out, noting that a friend met her husband after spending more than two years on different Web sites, but she admits she’s given up on the game.
“At least when you’re in the bar, you know what they look like,” she said, citing examples of meeting bald men whose profile pictures displayed a full head of hair.
“A lot more successful, attractive women are using these tools—I don’t think the men match up.”
Lori Miller, a singles and dating expert for http://www.lavalife.com in Toronto, says dating via the Web can mimic the bar scene. But it also gives women the chance to approach and meet dozens of men while knowing a little something about them beforehand.
“You’re literally thrown into the largest singles bar,” she said. “It is a lot of work, it is the luck of the draw just like being in that coffee shop and meeting the one.”
Frohlick’s small survey, to be completed in April, is questioning up to 25 Canadian women about their online dating habits. She hopes it will become a pilot for a far larger survey of women across North America.
LOVE ME, LOVE MY PET. Heavy petting prevents singles from finding love.
• Nearly half of Britain’s singles now own a pet – 6.1 million people
• Singles spend £5.6 billion each year pampering their pets
• Owning a pet can reduce your chances of finding love by as much as 40%
• One in four men wouldn’t date a woman with two or more cats
• A third of women won’t date a man who shares his pillow with a pet
• If push came to shove 25% of singles would choose their pet over a new partner
• Nearly two thirds of singles say they really love their pet and think of him/her as a member of the family
According to new research from PARSHIP, the UK’s largest serious online dating service, more singles than ever before are turning to pets for companionship. Nearly half (47%) of Britain’s 13 million singles now own a pet, spending an average of £928 and dedicating 21 days a year to their animal’s wellbeing and upkeep. However, PARSHIP advises that single pet-owners could be putting romance at serious risk: owning a pet could reduce your chances of finding love by as much as 40%.
Treating pets as children (12% of respondents), sharing your bed with your pet (33%), over-indulging your pooch with the latest designer accessories (40%), or simply owning two cats or more (23%) – these were just some of the factors that influenced other singles against dating a pet-owner. What’s more, if push came to shove 25% of singles would favour their pet over a new partner.
The implications of this could be serious, considering Britain’s singles own 1.24 million cats, 1.18 million dogs, 624,000 fish, 436,800 hamsters, rats and gerbils, 187,200 birds, 124,000 horses, donkeys and pigs, 64,000 snakes, and 120,000 exotic animals as pets – which includes spiders and insects. That’s a lot of two-, four-, six- and eight-legged creatures edging their way between Britain’s singles and their potential happiness with another human being.
• The puss on the pillow reduces your chances of finding love by a third
In conjunction with YouGov, and covering 2,000 singles, PARSHIP conducted a wide-ranging study exploring singles’ relationships with their pets. A third of singles say they wouldn’t date someone who shares their bed with their pet, (29% of men/36% of women), 23% are turned off by owners of two or more cats (26% of men/21% of women), and 22% are repelled by owners of snakes (18% of men/26% of women) and spiders 40% (33% of men/48% of women). 40% wouldn’t date people who overindulge their pets by spending £100 or more a week on animal upkeep (44% of men/37% of women), while going as far as treating a pet as a member of your family will alienate you from 13% of men or 11% of women; on the other hand, NOT doing so will alienate you from 11% of men or 12% of women
• The animal attraction
So what’s driving this animal love affair? Nearly two thirds (58%) say they love their pet and think of him/her as a member of the family, compared to just 27% who love their pet as an animal, but not as a surrogate human. In fact, singles love their pets so much that in some instances they would put their pet’s feelings above their own.
• Pets over partners
Sometimes they will even put their pet’s feelings above their lover’s. One quarter (25%) of men and women say that if their live-in partner developed an allergic reaction to their pet, under no circumstances would they put their boyfriend or girlfriend before the animal: Mr or Ms Right would just have to find somewhere else to live. More encouragingly, 15% of men and 22% of women said they’d visit a top Harley Street specialist – no matter what it cost – in the hope of finding an effective treatment for the allergy, while 32% of men and 19% of women said they’d find a loving new home for the problem-causing pet.
Dr Victoria Lukats, psychiatrist and PARSHIP’s dating and relationship expert commented:
“People invest a lot in their pets emotionally, but whilst some singles may see their pets as surrogate partners or children, this research shows that these people are in the small minority. Rather than the stereotype of a spinster with several cats, the reality is that many singles simply enjoy owning a pet but they would probably put their human relationships first.”
“Provided the balance is there and pet owners don’t avoid socialising or dating and that they maintain a healthy attitude to their pet then it shouldn’t interfere with their love life. But perhaps single pet owners would be wise to take note of this research: if there’s seems to be potential for a long-term relationship developing then it might be best not to boast about how much you indulge your pet and avoid making harsh statements about how your pet comes first, especially on the first few dates.”
• Is it time to put the cat out?
25% of singles wouldn’t date someone with two or more cats. In most cases this is attributable to an allergy, with 26% of adults suffering from sneezes and discomfort when close to a feline. There are very few treatments available to counter the allergic reaction. However, there’s good news for the 40% of singles who wouldn’t date someone who owned a pet spider: Even a single session of real-life exposure based therapy can be effective for up to 90% of phobic individuals. (Ost, Brandberg and Alm, 1997, Ost, Salkovskis and Helstrom, 1991)), so you really could learn to love your partner’s little (or not so little) eight-legged friend ….
PARSHIP is Europe’s largest and most successful serious online matchmaking service, with over 2.4 million members, PARSHIP draws its strength from its unique psychometric compatibility test and a methodology which ensures that its members are only matched with people who are genuinely right for them.
Dr Victoria Lukats, explains how the test works:
“The factors that make two people a good romantic match are highly complex. Common interests such as a love of animals can help but the importance of complimentary personality traits in determining the long-term success of a relationship cannot be underestimated.”
“PARSHIP uses a unique psychometric test to match members with similar and complimentary characteristics. Many people believe that opposites attract, whereas others believe that similar personalities are compatible with one another. In fact, both these points of view can be valid, as research conducted over many years by leading psychologists has demonstrated. “
“For example, if an individual highly values domesticity or has a high need for emotional intimacy, then he or she would be well matched with a partner with similar values.”
“For other characteristics, differing scores on the test can be acceptable, even desirable, although wildly opposing scores could spell disaster. A member who is extremely assertive in their communication style would not be well matched with someone who was similarly assertive as this could lead to a major clash of personalities. Likewise, an individual who is slightly shy might be drawn out of themselves by someone who is slightly more outgoing, whereas a complete introvert is less likely to be successfully matched with someone who is the complete opposite.”
In addition to matching members through their personality profiles, members can also choose to specify what they are looking in a potential partner including age, height, location, whether they prefer a non-smoker and whether a potential partner has a pet.
Overall the PARSHIP test has been shown to be an accurate reflection of an individual’s personality and furthermore it has proven to be a highly successful method to help people find the love of their life.
For Further information or case studies please contact Penny Conway on 020 7014 4046, 07775 992350 or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
The research was conducted by YouGov between 30th June and 4th July 2007 questioned 2,353 adults over the age of 18 and by PARSHIP questioning 200,000 singles from its UK database.
About Dr Victoria Lukats (http://www.drlukats.com)
Dr Victoria Lukats, MBBS MRCPsych MSc is a psychiatrist, agony aunt and dating and relationship expert. As well as working as a relationship and dating expert for PARSHIP Dr Lukats is a Specialist Registrar in Psychiatry at Sussex Partnership NHS Trust in Brighton
References:
Ost LG, Salkovskis P M and Hellstrom K (1991) One-session therapist directed exposure vs. self-exposure in the treatment of spider phobia. Behaviour Therapy. 22: 407-422
Ost L G, Brandberg M and Alm T (1997) One versus five sessions of exposure in the treatment of flying phobia. Behaviour research and Therapy. 35: 987-996
I love it as research comes out about online dating, especially when it supports what I have been saying all along. Researchers in Melbourne, Australia, have been looking at online dating and report in below. I have underlined what I think is particularly significant and supports what I have been writing and saying.
Online dating: truth or dare
[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 1, No. 7 11 - 25 June 2007 ]
By Katherine Smith
So-called ‘Gen X’ online daters tend to be well-paid, professional people who are ‘highly instrumental’ and organised in their mission to meet the one special person with whom they can establish an intimate real-world relationship, according to a University of Melbourne study.
Sociologists Dr Millsom Henry-Waring and Dr Jo Barraket found online daters pursue a means to an end. Evidence suggests they fill out truthful in dating profiles because if they later meet the other person any ‘enhancements’ will be obvious.
Dr Henry-Waring says her investigation into the sociology of on-line dating stems from a longstanding academic interest in the social implications of technology and, in particular, how technologies ‘mediate intimacy’.
“One of the main characteristics of online dating is the speed at which a relationship conducted largely by email can become intense. Many daters interviewed during the project described a relationship that moved quickly to intimacy and an easy, rapid revelation of personal information.
“But what may seem like chemistry by email and SMS is often not proved by a physical meeting, which can be disappointing.
“One media report recounted someone establishing a promising online relationship only to feel devastated when a meeting showed her new friend to be an ex-partner, in whom she was definitely no longer interested.”
Intimacy and personal connection rely heavily on visual cues, tone of voice and body language, says Dr Henry-Waring. “Communication through language matters, but not as much as we think. Similarly a set of highly matched personal preferences, characteristics or likes and dislikes doesn’t always lead to a connection.
“Most users of online dating quickly learn there is a danger in over-filtering potential dates and that highly specified profiles don’t attract people with whom they can eventually ‘click’. It seems people need a fairly broad catchment from which to successfully choose a partner.”
She says the study found that despite increased opportunities to meet partners from ‘outside the square’ being facilitated by digital technology, singles still select potential partners according to more conventional norms. Crossing cultural, racial, class and other social boundaries were not as common as the opportunities suggest.
Findings showed people engaged in online dating spent quite a lot of time online, searching sites and responding to emails. They were also familiar with technologies such as Blackberries, I-pods and PDAs and were comfortable engaging in relationships mediated through technology.
Fewer stigmas now exist about meeting people online than even a few years ago, according to Dr Henry-Waring, and she expects this shift to continue.
“The way of telling ‘the story of how we met’ to family or friends will change over time, and people will feel more relaxed about revealing their online meetings.”
Yet to be seriously addressed in the area of online relationships are some of the “unintended consequences” of establishing networks and intimate relationships online.
Dr Henry-Waring says relationships may become more disposable when one is able to ‘shop’ for the perfect partner.
“This raises some interesting questions about trust and fidelity. The decision about when to take your profile offline can be difficult. When you have met someone and established an intimate relationship, there comes a point when you have to decide you are no longer ‘looking’. Commitment can be conflicted by feelings that you will miss the buzz of meeting new people, or that someone better may be out there.”
The most successful online daters, it seems, are honest from the outset, open minded about people, and strive to establish genuine trust in relationships. In the digital age, old-fashioned, truthful straightforwardness still seems to be the key to successful relationships.
|
