Is it a fatal flaw that it dies in the light? 10 truths about online dating

Are all the people on the Internet scammers? Only losers would resort to online dating? Are the photos you expose yourself to necessarily unreliable? No, the truth is not that simple.

1. Internet daters are not losers

Contrary to the stereotype of online dating, there is little evidence that it is a last resort for socially awkward weirdos.

On the contrary, studies have found that online daters are more likely to be more sociable, have higher self-esteem, and have lower levels of dating anxiety. There is no evidence that people date online because they are not able to meet people face to face. Internet dating is just a way to meet new people!

There are many motivations for people to start online dating. There is usually a triggering event, such as a breakup, but in general, people are motivated more by the social aspect than the personal reasons. People use online dating not because they are shy, but because they have moved to a new city, work too long hours, or don't have the time to meet new people.

2. Online daters lie (but only slightly)

Although 94% of people deny that their online dating profiles contain any harmless lies, psychologists suspect they are faking it.

So the researchers measured the height and weight of 80 online daters and checked their driver's licenses to confirm their true age. When they compared this data with their homepage, they found that 90% of people lied about at least one of the factors they measured, but only by small amounts. The most frequently lied about was weight, which they adjusted by an average of 5%, with daters being more honest about their age (1.5% deviation) and height (1.1% deviation). As expected, women tended to lose more weight, while men tended to gain more height.

These lies don’t count in the real world, as most harmless lies are difficult to verify from a single person. Most online daters want to eventually meet the person in person, and they know that if they lie too much, they will be exposed when they meet in person.

3. Photo fallacy

The saying “the camera never lies” is bullshit. Even without Photoshopping away your wrinkles, camera angle and lighting can easily change how attractive you appear to others. People instinctively realize this when they pick their homepage photo.

Toma and Hancock of Cornell University took photos of online daters and compared them with their profile pictures.

The results found that while less attractive people were more likely to choose the enhanced photos, the overall difference was not significant. The photos taken in the experiment were only slightly less attractive than the photos they had chosen for their online dating profiles (about 5% for women and 4% for men).

4. Your best image

What kind of profile photo can make the difference? In 2010, a dating website analyzed 7,000 photos in its database and got the following results.

Women responded more often when their eyes were looking at the camera and they looked provocative. Conversely, the least successful photos were those that had a provocative face turned away.

The best image for a man is to turn his face away and not smile. But men should avoid taking provocative photos of their faces, otherwise the chances of receiving private messages will be greatly reduced.

The researchers also looked at the photos that online daters provided and how they spent the longest time chatting online. Here are the characteristics of the photos:

Doing interesting things

With animals

In an interesting place (travel photos)

Some daters have very short online chats and their photos have the following characteristics:

In bed (related to slightly shorter dialogue)

Outdoors

Having fun with friends

Most likely to prevent communication: Drinking (correlated with shortest conversations)

(Remember, these are just correlations with conversation length; we make no guarantees of causation.)

5. Like attracts like

Even though there are many different types of online daters, people still want to date similar people.

Fiore and Donath (2005) of the MIT Media Lab studied data from 65,000 online daters and found that people's choices were largely based on whether the target was similar to themselves.

In this respect, online dating is no different than offline dating. On average, people seek out partners who are similar to themselves. There are indeed many dating sites that cater to niche groups, such as sports fans, Jews, or people with special physical conditions. (Editor’s note: If you are a geek, come to Guokr to find it…)

6. Age and education background are not a problem

To study the diversity of online dating, in 2009, Dutton et al. surveyed 2,670 online dating couples in the UK, Australia and Spain. In this sample, Internet daters were more likely to have greater age and educational differences than those who met in traditional ways.

Although opposite traits are unlikely to make people attracted to each other, the nature of online dating does encourage diversity in pairings. The author believes that online dating has changed the form of marriage by creating encounters between people who would never have met before.

7. Keep your first private message short

Getting a response online can be a hit or miss affair. Response rates were estimated by analyzing more than 500,000 initial messages sent by members in 2009. Among messages sent by men to women, the female recipients responded to only 30% of them, while the response rate for messages sent by women to men was 45%. The percentage that ultimately led to longer conversations was even lower (about 20% and 30%, respectively).

A 2008 study by Rosen et al. of the Department of Psychology at California State University showed that this one-third response rate is partly due to the fact that many online daters no longer use their accounts.

Oktrends also found that longer private messages only slightly increased response rates for men, but had no effect at all on women. So don't waste time writing long articles, just say hello and let the other person visit your homepage on their own.

8. Emotionally active people are more attractive

Referring back to the study on online dating by Rosen et al. mentioned above, they found that the stronger the emotions, the better the impression given by both men and women, such as when using words like "excited" and "wonderful."

The study also took into account the impact of self-disclosure, and while the results varied widely, overall people tend to prefer people who disclose less.

9. After screening, 51% of people will meet in person

The goal of many (but not all) Internet daters is to meet new people. One survey found that of 759 online daters, 51% went on a face-to-face date within a week to a month of receiving a response. Internet daters often view the first in-person date as the final stage of screening their potential partners - is this person really who they say they are? If so, is there chemistry between us? Only after this stage can people truly get to know each other.

10. Online dating is not shopping

Regardless of how positive researchers may be about online dating, there is no doubt that it can sometimes be unsatisfying and even annoying. In 2008, Frost et al. (2008) studied 132 online daters and found that they spent seven times more time screening other people's profiles and sending emails than they would in a real face-to-face date.

Part of the problem is that online dating encourages people to think in consumerist terms, with users "relationshopping" relationships: checking out someone's features, weighing them, and then choosing a potential partner, almost like checking off a list; people have turned relationships into a series of checkboxes.