You are on a date with a wonderful man/woman. He/she is speaking, but you are gazing lovingly into his/her eyes thinking how lucky you are having finally met your perfect match. Then you hear him/her say this: “And that is why I think Sarah Palin would make a great president.”
How attracted are you now?
Warning, the four minutes you will spend reading this blog post may be hazardous to your marriage.
Or so you might think.
A woman recently shared with me the secret to finding a husband. She told me to write a list of qualities that my ideal man would have and tape it to my fridge. That’s it. And while it sounds too simple to be effective, she assured me that it worked well for her. Just one week after putting her list on the fridge she opened her front door to find her ideal mate standing on her doorstep. A year later they married and are now happy as two peas in a pod.
Just as peacocks spread their tails to signal virility, men have used conspicuous consumption to signal wealth and women have used the appearance of youth to signal fertility – all in the name of attracting a mate. How though, can online daters signal genuine interest to a prospective match? By sending a rose of course.
When I moved to Halifax Nova Scotia, where I live now, I was told that people in the Maritimes were happy to set their friends up for love and romance. This was good news to me since, like many other people, I have always thought that the best way to meet someone is through friends and family. My observation is that in general there has been a marked decline in the willingness to help “find someone” for friends and, to my chagrin, living in the Maritimes for the past seven years has shown me that this is just as true here as it is everywhere else.
Try this as an exercise. Give yourself an honest score on a scale of one to ten that represents where you believe you sit in the distribution of physical appearance for your gender. So, for example, if you feel you are better looking than 70% of all men/women but not as good looking as the top 30% then you perceive yourself to be a 7. Now go onto an online dating site and do a search for people the same gender and age as yourself and take a look at the pictures of people who advertising themselves on that market. My guess is that if you look at 30 or more pictures and try to place yourself in that distribution in terms of physical appearance you will find that you had initially placed yourself much higher than you would have on this particular market.
According to new research released by the Oxford University Internet Institute last month, I really AM the only single woman not looking for love on online. Okay, perhaps that is an exaggeration but results of the international survey find that in 2009 30% of newly cohabitating couples with access to the internet met online. If that number doesn’t surprise you then maybe this will – social networking sites are gaining on online dating sites as the most popular places to find love.
OkCupid’s dating research blog has worked hard to convince readers that they should never pay for online dating. The basis of their argument is that there are just too few subscribers on fee-for-service dating sites to make it worth the lonely single’s while. I won’t argue their point on that—after all they have a flow chart, and at one point I am pretty sure they used calculus to figure out the number of subscribers (which even I think is a bit audacious). So we will let them have that point: there are fewer potential matches on fee-for-service dating sites.
When searching for a mate online, singles are more likely to initiate contact with other online singles who are more attractive than themselves. When the market clears, so to speak, individuals in couples tend to be very similar to each other in terms of attractiveness. While there are a variety of theories as to why this happens, the HotorNot.com paper we talked about on Monday tests two possible theories and finds that at this “associative mating” outcome is driven by market forces.
I have theory, it is a personal theory not quite backed up by empirical evidence, that one of the reasons so many people are single is that they are poor judges of their position on the dating market. If you read online dating profiles, you often see that people write: “I’m not willing to settle, and neither should you.” This suggests that people have estimated the quality of mate that they should be able to attract and are unwilling to “settle” for anything less.
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