
Clicking for Love – The Curious, Odious, Hilarious World of Online Dating - autarch
http://www.alfiekohn.org/uncategorized/clickingforlove/
======
newday
Having just been back in the scene this past week, this is disturbingly
accurate. I'm 41.

I'm surprised by the number of women that are still on the site from the last
time I went through this 5 years ago.

I have a large profile, with a ton of hooks for conversation, and yet the
number of girls I talk to on there either don't want to or can't be bothered
to ask a question. And unfortunately, the one that does, I have no attraction
to.

Being 41 is also problematic. There is a change that happens to a lot of the
women around this time. They seem to shift from something that is attractive,
to suddenly looking like a mom. The haircut, the face, the body. For the life
of me, I can't seem to make myself attracted to this Mom look. Which means
looking for partners much younger.

It's also been strange, you'll message a girl, and ask a question. She'll
respond with the answer, and that's it. Trying to keep that going ends up
trying to share something about myself, and then ask another question. They
answer the question again, and provide nothing to carry on the conversation. I
get the feeling that these women want to be wooed, but that happens after we
meet. At this stage, you're trying to find compatibility. You could be a dog,
you could be a gay man who poses as a woman because he likes the compliments
(read it on Reddit), a bot, etc... Interaction is the key.

Ah well, back I go.

~~~
xlm1717
Going by what you typed here, I can't help but think you might be going about
it the wrong way. When you talk about not being attracted to the people who
talk to you or are in your age range, are you going purely by looks? Maybe if
you met up with them and talked over coffee or whatever you might start to
develop attraction. It's entirely your prerogative if you want physical looks
to limit your dating pool, but just seems like an unnecessary restriction to
me.

Another plus of meeting up with potential dates is you do get to make
conversation. Having a back-and-forth Q&A won't help you get to know someone.
You get to learn facts about them, but you won't learn if this person is fun
in conversation, if they can keep up with you or you can keep up with them, if
you'll see them as an interesting conversation partner or boring, etc. I think
at the messaging stage it's about trying to establish friendliness and
familiarity, and of course of establishing basic facts about this person
(although if that person was a dog, I would most definitely want to meet the
dog!), with the goal of setting a meeting time. The face-to-face meeting is
where you try to find compatibility. The face-to-face meeting will also let
you confirm facts about their profile (bots can't meet in real life, and if a
dog was chatting with you I would most definitely want to meet them!).

~~~
newday
Lovely thought, but that's not how humans are designed. And I never hear this
from people that actually have an ugly partner. I'm 40, not 80, so sexual
attraction is an important part of selecting a mate. I don't find many women
unattractive, but 300lbs is at least 100lbs more than what I consider
attractive.

------
gamesbrainiac

      One question asks how we’d feel about being slapped hard in the face during sex
      — and the possible answers include “horrified,” “aroused,” and . . . . .
       “nostalgic.” 
      More than I want to meet the woman of my dreams, 
      I want to meet the employee who came up with that last option.
    

This quote is a keeper.

~~~
Symmetry
I seem to recall that most of the questions are user submitted.

~~~
33degrees
I don't know about most, but many are; you earn the right to create questions
after having answered enough yourself.

~~~
tedks
Certainly by numbers virtually all questions are user submitted. The first
ones you see are the okcupid-written ones. You used to be able to see who
wrote a question but after match.com bought okcupid that was quickly phased
out in favor of the very stripped-down appified UX you see now.

------
jarcane
_What triggers a flash of actual nostalgia is a memory of the days when you
met someone in the real world, perhaps at an activity that both of you enjoy,
perhaps someone who wasn’t even supposed to be your type. That person might
have caught your fancy, and the first order of business was to figure out
whether he or she was, like you, unattached._

Honestly people, you can still do this. Nothing's stopping you.

You know what my best "dating site" has actually been? Facebook events.
Whether it's something public, a meetup, or friends' parties and the like, I
meet people who know people and sometimes those people are attractive and then
I ask them if they want to go out sometime.

I have gotten more dates that way in the last 6 months than I have in the
entire history of using online dating websites. The whole experience, even in
its' ideal, is so utterly artificial, compared to just meeting someone in
person. I am on the verge of just dismissing the concept as a sham. They seem
to exist mostly as an outlet for desperate men to harass women in bulk volume.

I still glance at Tinder occasionally, and I have an OKC subscription I keep
forgetting to cancel, but in the former case it's become little more than a
mobile version of "Hot or Not" to play when I am bored (the rare response is
almost always spam), and in the latter it's more of a "well, if I hit a lull,
maybe ..." sort of a thing.

I'd much rather just meet actual humans face to face and give us both a chance
to see what we're really like in person. That's where a natural connection is
going to come from anyway.

~~~
noam87
Met my current very lovely girlfriend online (and many other perfectly lovely
people, some of whom are still friends).

I think the number 1 mistake people make online, which leads to disillusion,
is thinking that online dating is a replacement for meeting. I hear all the
time complaints of not being atracted to any of their matches, or that they
seem boring, etc. etc.

"Well, did you meet?" "No, he's so not my type."

How can you possibly know? Instead, understand the purpose of the online
phase, and adopt the following strategy:

1\. Match with someone who does not seem completely unappealing (some people
look a lot worse online than in person... and vice versa. To a striking
degree! -- Being charming in a chat room and sexy in a picture does not always
carry to the real world).

2\. Make sure they are not a completely insane person.

3\. Skip the Q&A. Ask to meet up for a quick lunch.

Your goal is to meet as many people as possible. Forget it's even a date.
Seriously, every day go have lunch with someone new. Worst case scenario, you
had a boring meal. Best case scenario, _you had 30-60 minutes to talk one-on-
one with someone interesting_ : now ask them out for a proper date!

To me this is far superior to trying to subtly-or-not-so-subtly hit on people
at random events, or, God forbid: a bar.

~~~
throwawaydate
I also skipped Q&A and awkward cold introductions when using dating sites. I
just straight asked them out and usually got a yes. I don't even read profiles
they're usually all BS anyway, you meet the girl and she admits everything in
it was a facade for work/school peers or judgemental family who found her
account what she was really into you discover in private.

------
cubano
As a single late 40-something, I found myself chuckling in agreement with all
the main points of this really well written article.

The online dating process, to me at least, falls somewhere between setting
myself on fire with lighter fluid and posting cat vids (well, anything really)
on Facebook.

I tried it a few years back and very quickly realized it just wasn't for me
and didn't fit my personality worth a damn.

It's a desensitizing/lonely/desperate numbers game where all incentives lie
with lining up as many "targets" as you can and hoping for hits.

The OP is right, tho...as you get older it gets harder and harder to find
potential long term mates, especially if you are a recovering addict with
felonies in your background, as I am, for every women I did meet online
immediately ran background checks.

~~~
mysterypie
> every women I did meet online immediately ran background checks

Are you serious?

Women actually run background checks on dates?

I don't know where to begin with my questions. Did you tell the women about
your background, or they just do it on everyone? What company or service does
these checks? Don't they have to get authorization from you to do a check?
Wouldn't this be expensive? Is this something typical in the country/community
where you live (and where is that)?

~~~
wtvanhest
He probably means they just googled his name. If it's an uncommon name and he
has multiple felonies, they will find him.

------
w0utert
The replies on this article, and on others I've seen about the topic of online
dating before, give me the impression that somehow everybody here only uses
the 'free' online dating services. In my experience there's a huge difference
in the efficiency of dating sites where everybody can sign up for free (even
if they need to pay up later to actually get in touch with someone), and
dating sites that only allow paying members.

When I was still dating online I've used multiple different sites, and the
experience was always perfectly aligned with the the article (which by the way
was very enjoyable to read, mostly because it was so recognizable, but also
because it's well-written and witty).

That was, until I decided to sign up for a paid-members-only online dating
site. All of a sudden all the profiles seemed so much more truthful and
realistic. Women would actually respond to my messages, if only to politely
let me know they were not interested. I would regularly receive unsolicited
messages from women, often because they liked things about my profile text,
which almost never happened on the free sites even though I used the exact
same text. Within less than a year I met my current girlfriend who I've been
with for 2 years now, and surprise: like many of the other women on that site
she's a perfectly normal person who didn't feel the need to stuff and fluff
her online profile like everyone seems to do on 'free' online dating services.

Moral of the story: there's plenty of opportunity to find someone online, if
you look in the right places. Don't expect to have a lot of success on the
free websites though, there's so much noise in the profiles on these sites
that the whole concept of writing something about yourself and sending
messages falls apart. Half of the profiles on these sites are fake or
abandoned anyway.

------
marktangotango
Finding a mate is a numbers game, pure and simple. Online dating facilitates
meeting X women in Y amount of time. One typically starts of with requirements
{a, b, c} but then as they go along they figure out that their requirements
are in reality {b, d, e, ...}. The qualities {a, c} just weren't that
important.

Source: I tried online dating off an on for years, met my wife on pof. ymmv

~~~
bitwize
"Love -- bah! Just a boy meeting a girl under the right conditions. So, we're
_arranging_ the conditions."

\--The King, _Cinderella_ (1950 film).

------
scardine
It is a numbers game and the problem with dining is that you can only make one
try per night.

Try the old school method: take ballroom dancing classes.

Ballroom dancing is not only funny, it is a very clever algorithm to select a
long term partner, and one of the best features is that you can try 40
partners per night.

I used to be that guy that sits in the corner drinking all night: "dancing is
not for me". Can't believe how much time I wasted.

~~~
jazzyk
This. Also, try yoga...

~~~
saddestcatever
I would disagree. Most attendees of yoga, at least as I've seen in Boston,
treat it similarly to a gym. It's a "come in, do yoga, resume rest of day"
attitude that doesn't cater well towards conversation or interaction. I'd be
curious to know if others have had any different experiences.

------
fijal
I wonder if it's just me or does the complaint concerns mostly oc cupid, which
is very data obsessed. For example Tinder, a far more successful online dating
tool seems to be much much simpler in purpose and not suffering from those
problems.

In other words - I think it's specific to data obsessed nerds take on online
dating and not the problem with online dating at all :-)

~~~
EGreg
I don't think Tinder is very effective. Most guys swipe right on everyone,
meaning girls make the first choice, then guys select from those that they
mutually matched with, to start a conversation. That's the summary.

Still, it's like the first iteration of the Stable Marriage algorithm :)

~~~
danneu
What makes it effective or not is if it's actually producing dates.

Makes sense for a guy to swipe right on most women. Being selected by the
woman is the swipe that matters. Not much different than the real world. Same
economy.

------
tedks
Every time I see an article like this on hacker news it reminds me of how
disconnected and out of touch the userbase on this site is. I know so many
people my age who claim to use hacker news, but I almost never see comments
that seem to be from anyone under 30 or even 40.

It really hammers home how startups and entrepreneurship is rapidly becoming a
game only the mega-rich can play, and which virtually all millenials are
excluded from.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
You can participate in startups by joining one. Certainly no requirement to be
'mega-rich'. I'm not understanding this notion at all.

~~~
tedks
There are opportunity costs to even joining a startup (the possibility for
your job not to exist in a few months, the need to relocate to SF as opposed
to a more affordable place or even taking a job near you) that dissuade people
who aren't already independently wealthy or otherwise financially privileged
(for example, being a Harvard alum with rich parents who can bail you out if
necessary).

Starting a startup as a working-class person with the requisite technology
skills? Good fucking luck.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Huh. I've done nothing else but join startups my entire career. Not been
without a job for more than a month or two in 20 years. The first time I
_ever_ got laid off was after Dell bought our startup. So no safety in huge
corporations either!

I think the risks are overstated. A startup job is... a job. Like any other.

------
noir_lord
Used okcupid last year, went on 3 dates in the first two weeks, ended up
seeing one of them for 3 months, lovely woman but just not a long term fit so
no regrets.

Not used it since while it was fun I'm just not at a point where I want
another long term relationship.

I seemed to get quite a few messages from women which is very strange since
I'm on the "a face only a mother could love" side of the attractiveness curve
- (hell the profile picture was me on a bike when I was 40lbs overweight, I
actually look better now than then - also got told that, 2 of them said I
should use a better more recent pic). I was brutally honest on my profile
which all 3 dates said they liked, I'm also finding it a _lot_ easier to meet
women in real life as well, I dumped a load of weight last year and got back
into the same shape I was in in my early twenties and I think that combined
with the confidence that comes with age (I'm mid thirties) has had a dramatic
effect.

Also the less I look the more women I seem to end up going on dates with, not
sure how that works either.

~~~
onion2k
_Also the less I look the more women I seem to end up going on dates with, not
sure how that works either._

People who are "actively looking" often come across as really creepy. When you
stop doing that you're a lot more likely to get a date.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Not sure if "creepy" is the right word. I like to interpret it as women having
a natural defense against being hit on. When you don't look like you're
searching for a date, they tend to lower barriers, and by the time they start
feeling attracted to you it's too late for them to raise those shields back.
:).

------
MilnerRoute
There was a TED talk where a woman tried to crack the algorithm for a dating
site - and succeeded. She tried things like creating fake profiles to identify
popularity-provoking words (like "fun"), and eventually succeeded in creating
the site's #1 most popular site, drawing thousands of responses.

    
    
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wG_sAdP0U

------
boriselec
Ask HN: Who is single?

~~~
omegaham
I... don't see HN as being a decent dating service. My guess is that the
demographics align to the average engineering / CS program, which does not
bode well for the vast majority of people trying to get a date.

Of course, for the women among us, the Georgia Tech mantra applies - the odds
are good, but the goods are odd.

(Currently taken, with a girlfriend who says "Yes dear" when I start talking
about anything computer-related. I sometimes wonder if the reason that our
relationship endures is that I'm good at killing spiders)

~~~
magic_beans
I am an attractive woman who spends at least 3 hours a day on HN. I'm sure my
soul mate is on here somewhere.

~~~
zeveb
So, how _you_ doin'?

 _grin_

------
sarciszewski
I'd love to say that things are any more pleasant for gay people, but I dare
say it's the worst of both worlds: Most of the messages you receive are poorly
written, by guys looking for a one-night hook-up rather than to start any sort
of meaningful relationship (like the women endure in this story). At the same
time, because most of the guys in the world are attracted to women, the
potential dating pool is tiny (like the men endure in this story).

Or maybe I'm just doing it wrong. I'm 26 and never even been on a date, so
that could be it too.

------
IvyMike
> Could it be age? Well, maybe for you it could, but in my case I frankly
> don’t see how. I am, after all, still in my prime as a “40-something” — a
> label I’d argue is perfectly valid, in much the same way that 3:35 could be
> described as “a little after two o’clock.”

I get that this is a joke, but to give the full context, he's 58 years old.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_Kohn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfie_Kohn)

------
throwawaydate
For an interesting time try foreign social media, for example I go on Russian
facebook and see who is in my area here in Vancouver, Canada. It revealed
dozens of single late 20s students doing graduate degrees which is my age
range so I simply ask them out with nothing on my profile but a picture. I
also used another site (topface? badoo? can't remember) and it was stocked
with foreign students too. I'm still dating a girl I met off VK last year.

------
Paul_S
It's even worse than job-hunting and equally time-consuming.

~~~
bshimmin
Imagine if matchmakers existed on the same scale and employed the same tactics
as IT recruiters! A terrifying thought.

~~~
exabrial
Hi there, I see you have experience with crazy women. I have an opening right
now that sounds like a great fit!

~~~
binxbolling
More like...

Hi there, saw your profile online and was very impressed. I see you're looking
for brunettes in their thirties in Metro Boston. I have a blonde in St. Louis
who is just a bit over 50 but who I think would be PERFECT for you. Call me
ASAP.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This is actually real - see adds on porn sites and in your spam folder. Also,
whoever sends/shows those ads has probably "saw your profile" just as likely
as the IT recruiters do.

------
EGreg
People just have to designa better dating site that's not just a database with
a sniper rifle, or a swipe-til-you-drop bonanza.

~~~
cschmidt
But you can't get funding for that...

[http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-
dating/](http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/)

~~~
EGreg
Yeah, I saw that in the past.

I also wrote an article in 2008: "Why do dating sites charge?"

