Modern Romance (11 page)

So Arpan did game the system to his advantage a little, but he didn’t just standardize his initial messages; he also developed a template for his dates. When he started online dating he would often take women out to dinner, but at a certain point he decided this was a “rookie mistake.” If he didn’t hit it off with this person, he was in for the long haul, stuck in a seemingly endless dinner, so he decided to switch to drinks. He also felt that investing time in picking a fun place to go was too much effort considering that most of the dates ended up being a bust, so he narrowed his date spots to a few bars that were walking distance from his apartment.

So: just drinks, minimal effort on his part,
and
you have to travel to him. Ladies, are you getting sexually excited just reading this?!

We asked him where he took his last two dates, both of whom he found through online sites. “Volcano, five blocks away from my house.” And the other? “Lucky Strike Lanes, six blocks away from my house.” Any potential ladies that got excited about a bowling date quickly would have their dreams crushed, though. According to Arpan, “It’s actually bowling, but there’s a lounge/bar area, so I don’t do the bowling.” Ouch. Quite a bait and switch. “Hey! Let’s go bowling! Just kidding, let’s just get a drink at the lounge.”

On that note, it is fairly common knowledge that nothing gets a girl more turned on than a bowling lounge. Between watching fat guys tossing bowling balls and the dulcet tones of
The Simpsons
arcade game, I can’t imagine those encounters not ending in a marathon boning session.

“Dating is tiring, without a doubt,” Arpan told us. “It’s a lot of work. And you know, now I’m so jaded and, like, so tired of it that I don’t actually take the time anymore. I’m at the point where it’s just like, ‘Find me somebody! Make it happen!’” But as far as I could tell, his techniques were not working out.

Arpan, who at first glance comes off as a vibrant, confident guy, has been so beaten down by dating that the very mention of the topic leads him to slouch down and spin tales like a weary war veteran. The rigors of the online dating world transformed this once-excited young single man into a sad lug whose idea of a date is to not bowl at a bowling alley that he can get home from as quickly as possible.

Others in our focus groups commiserated over the fact that sorting through this new sea of options available through online dating was almost becoming a second job. The word “exhausting” came up in every discussion we had, and after hearing people’s experiences, it made sense.

All the work that went into finding even one date—reading through messages, finding a message you like, clicking the profile, sorting through the profile, and then, after all that, STILL having to engage in a series of back-and-forths to gauge rapport and then plan a real-world meet-up—was taking its toll.

Some had even reached a breaking point. Priya, twenty-seven, said she’d recently deleted her Tinder and OkCupid accounts. “It just takes too long to get to just the first date. And I feel like it’s way more effective utilizing your social groups,” she said. “It’s like I would rather put myself in those social situations than get exhausted.”

For Priya, as for so many of the online daters we met in different cities, the process had morphed from something fun and exciting into a new source of stress and dread.

Now, what about Dinesh, the other Indian guy?

Dinesh had a completely different approach to dating. “I’m not on any dating sites,” he announced to our group that morning, looking a bit perplexed by the conversation.

“What was the last first date you went on?” I asked.

“I met a girl at church and we went to a movie just recently,” he said.

The way he said it was so confident and badass. Compared with what Arpan had just said, Dinesh’s “church and a movie” sounded like “motorcycle race and some sport fucking.”

“What about the last girl before that who you met?” I continued.

“I met her at a volunteer thing,” Dinesh replied.

The guys in the room seemed mesmerized by the fantasy of dating a beautiful girl who also does heartfelt charity work.

Before that, he reported, he’d met a girl at a holiday party. “I have a bunch of really good groups of friends, kind of across L.A., so I meet tons of people.”

The key, Dinesh said, is to have friends who hang out in different groups in different places, and to mix up the nights so that you’re spending some time with all of them. Whether it’s in church, with volunteer groups, at office parties, or on a sports field, it’s always a place where people meet organically.

“There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in L.A. at all times,” he explained. “I think it’s fun and interesting to meet new people, and if I meet people in person, they’re more willing to open up their schedules. I am too. I’m more willing to, like, go to work super early and then be home by, like, five or six to make something happen.” He looked over to consider Arpan and then turned back to us. “And no, I’m not exhausted.” Fortunately, Arpan at this point was so slumped in his chair that it blocked his ears and he didn’t even hear this.

Dinesh had a Zen vibe to him that wasn’t matched by anyone else in the room. While the other singles assembled that morning seemed jaded and frustrated, Dinesh seemed more comfortable and at ease with dating. Was it because he avoided online dating? Or was it that those who were dating online were actually pretty bad at it?

After several lengthy conversations with experts, I would guess the latter was a significant factor.

MOST PEOPLE STINK AT ONLINE DATING

Online dating is like a second job that requires knowledge and skills that very few of us have.
In fact, most of us have no clue what we’re doing. One reason is that people don’t always know what they’re looking for in a soul mate, unlike when they’re picking something easier, like laundry detergent (big ups to Tide Mountain Spring—who doesn’t want their clothes to smell like a fresh mountain spring?!).

While we may think we know what we want, we’re often wrong. According to Dan Slater’s history of online dating,
Love in the Time of Algorithms
, the first online dating services tried to find matches for clients based almost exclusively on what clients said they wanted. The client would usually fill out a survey indicating certain traits they were looking for in a partner. For example, if a man said he was looking for a tall, blond woman with no kids and a college degree, the company showed him everyone who fit this description. But pretty soon online dating companies realized that this wasn’t working. In 2008 Match.com hired Amarnath Thombre as its new “chief of algorithms.” Thombre set about figuring out why a lot of couples that Match.com’s algorithm said were a perfect fit often didn’t make it past the first date. When he began digging into the data, he discovered something surprising: The kind of partner people said they were looking for didn’t match up with the kind of partner they were actually interested in.

Thombre discovered this by simply analyzing the discrepancy between the characteristics people said they wanted in a romantic partner (age, religion, hair color, and the like) and the characteristics of the people whom they actually contacted on the dating site. “We began to see how frequently people break their own rules,” he told Slater. “When you watch their browsing habits—their actual behavior on the site—you see them go way outside of what they say they want.”
10

When I was writing stand-up about online dating
,
I filled out the forms for dummy accounts on several dating sites just to get a sense of the questions and what the process was like. The person I described that I wanted to find was a little younger than me, small, with dark hair. The person I’m currently dating, whom I met through friends, is two years older, about my height—OKAY, SLIGHTLY TALLER—and blond. She wouldn’t have made it through the filters I placed in my online dating profile.

A big part of online dating is spent on this process, though—setting your filters, sorting through many profiles, and going through a mandatory “checklist” of what you think you are looking for. People take these parameters very seriously. They declare that their mate “must love dogs” or that their mate “must love the film
Must Love Dogs
,” which stars Diane Lane as a newly divorced woman who’s encouraged by her friend to start an online dating profile that states her dates “must love dogs.” (Shout-out to the
Must Love Dogs
Wikipedia page for helping me recall the plot.)

But does all the effort put into sorting profiles help?

Despite all the nuanced information that people put up on their profiles, the factor that people rely on most when preselecting a date is looks. Based on the data he has reviewed, Rudder told us that he estimates that photos drive 90 percent of the action in online dating.

PROFILE PHOTOS:

WHY YOU NEED TO GO SPELUNKING WITH A PUPPY ASAP

If 90 percent of your fate as an online dater depends on the photos you pick, this is an important decision.
So what works? Rudder examined which kinds of images proved most and least successful on the dating site OkCupid, and he made some surprising discoveries.
11

First let’s examine what works for women. Most women (56 percent) choose to go with a straightforward smiling pic. But the 9 percent who opt to go with a more “flirting to the camera” vibe are slightly more successful. See the examples below:

Now, those results are not very surprising, but what’s weird is that men actually fare better when they are
not
smiling and are looking
away
from the camera. Whereas women did worse when they didn’t make eye contact, for guys, looking away was much more effective. This seems really counterintuitive. These are good photos? What are they looking at?

The second thing Rudder discovered is that, for women, the most effective photo angle is a straightforward “selfie,” shot down from a high angle with a slightly coy look.

When scanning through profiles, we saw a trend of people picking certain templates for their photos—hanging with friends drinking, outdoors near a mountain, etc. Rudder’s data shows that for women, the high-angle selfie is by far the most effective. Second is in bed, followed by outdoor and travel photos. At the lower end, the ones that are least effective are women drinking alcohol or posing with an animal.