Dating by numbers
I joined OKCupid recently, as one is supposed to after getting dumped. They actually have a recruiter come to your house, pound on your door, tell you to stop watching Dawson’s Creek, and ask you what you want your username to be.
True story.
It feels too early to jump into another serious relationship. It feels like a good time to develop a crush or six, though, or to start the vetting process that will eventually, possibly lead to making out and orgasms and stuff. I’m ignoring the fact that those things are how serious relationships usually start; I’ll cross those legs when I come to them.
I like OKC so far, I do. Mostly. I like taking the wacky tests. I like answering match questions. It feels like placing an order for the perfect lover, even though you know it could turn out more like a botched pizza delivery and you may end up trying to choke down a pie topped with legos and felt. I love the fact that it tells you your match percentage with people. I’m in the 90%s with many of my friends who happen to be on the site, and I find myself idly wondering about all the others. And various exes. And my dog, but not in a weird way.
All this before I have any actual experience proving that a high match percentage means anything, really. The very savvy Viola Sharqtipus once told me, however, that she really does get along better with exceptionally high OKC matches. So because of that and the clinical comfort of numbers, I’m paying attention to my percentages with people.
But on the other hand, the whole dating site thing is proving kind of annoying. I could spend stupid amounts of time just answering messages, which are mostly inane. I want to understand how I’m supposed to respond to a message that says “You seem interesting,” which is more or less what half of them say1. I’m assuming here that people are not actually intending to have a conversation about how interesting I am, but rather saying “You’re interesting; I, not so much. Say something interesting to me now so we can talk about that!” This comes off as lazy and impolite, contacting me first only to put the burden of starting any actual conversation on me.
I realize it’s not always easy to start a conversation, and maybe it’s not worth the effort if you’re opting to use the shotgun approach to contacting broads on the internet, but do you know what kind of people I want to talk to online and date and be interesting with? People who are a) interesting themselves and actually interested in me, and b) can have conversations.
I had no idea I’d feel so strongly about this, but it seems I do. In fairness, I’m more misanthropic than usual lately. It took me very little time to earn OKC’s “replies very selectively” warning label, and it doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon.
But I have found a few gripping new people to talk to, and perhaps someday meet. I even met one already, and we got along so well we’ll likely get really wacky and out there and do it again. Of course, because one of my rules for myself on the site is not to initiate contact with anyone over 25 miles away because right now I’m a little burned out on the “driving hours every week to see my paramour” relationship model, all these people live over an hour away so far. But they messaged me first and actually said stuff and asked questions and shit, and you can’t put a number on that2.
“You seem interesting.”
I. Hear. You. I get that all the time, along with “You seem smart.” REALLY? I had no idea what with the speaking four languages and working on an advanced degree. Gee, I thought just EVERYBODY did that. It’s the new trend, donchaknow. Every time it’s someone who wants to talk to me either because they think I’ll provide a free service (Sorry, no. I will not translate that tattoo into Latin for you.), or because they think I’ll impress their friends and make them look smart by proxy. It’s like objectification for your mind, and fuck that. My mind is mine.
(Also bitter from doing the dating thing, sorry.)
I mostly get ‘you’re pretty’ with very little commentary on my actual profile, mostly friend people with low match percentages, these days. I think I ran through all my 90s in the first little bit. Some are friends, some despite the numbers wound up just not being my type of people…
And I did meet my boyfriend through messaging him there, basically saying ‘We should fuck’, and that turned out to be a success. Okay, so my initial message was ‘What’s your favourite Spider Robinson novel? Mine’s Lady Slings The Booze’.
It’s better to message somebody, if you’re looking to succeed.
Also, I actually -looked- for people who were extremely selective. (The red dot, as opposed to the green or yellow. Although it’s possible that’s changed since I was last on.) Not just because of what it says about them as a person – they have standards, enough self-esteem not to feel obligated to reply to everyone, enough purpose to have something in particular they’re looking for, etc. So don’t feel like that “Selective” thing is a bad thing.
As for the match %, it’s an okay starting point, but isn’t nearly specific enough. It did a good job limiting my options to literate atheists and agnostics, but its accuracy didn’t get much better than that. (Since literate atheists are also mostly authoritarian good-of-the-community sorts, this resulted in mostly bad matches for somebody like me.)
I suggest using their advanced search feature and searching by books or interests, and then prioritizing by match %. (And/or excluding certain books and interests. Siddhartha and Lolita, for example. Or anything by James Joyce.)
Hey, come on. Who ISN’T a fan of James Joyce’s letters to Nora?
I like OKC for all the data it gives you. It’s nice to be able to read the match questions and see if the person cares about the same things that you care about. I find that I seem to want to date people with match percentages in the 80-90% range, and I’d almost rather be “just friends” with people in the 90-100% range. People with super-high match percentages are just too alike for my taste.
I’ve always wondered what constitutes a good opening message, though; I met the woman that I’ve been dating for about 3.5 months on OKC, and my first message to her said something like “You seem like an awesome person. What’s your favorite episode of TNG?”
Also, I can’t stand James Joyce.
Don’t you mean “your pretty”? :) Despite the frequent and laboured references to books, writing, literacy and intelligence in my profile, I keep getting hit up by slack-jawed yokels who use LOL instead of punctuation and think that Muslims come from that Middle Eastern country, Islam.
Eseell: The best opening messages are those that prove you actually read the recipient’s profile. A load of “ur hot”s gets boring fast, but even worse is the cut and paste job, carpet bombing every female in a 100-mile radius. And congrats on the relationship!
I get a lot of, “hi, how r u. Like your pics” in various and sundry spellings(my autocorrect actually capitalized that for me. Usually the messages were not). This is not a good way to even get me to look at a profile, by the way. My experience with people who send messages like that is that half the time they don’t have anything on their profile. They never answer match questions, and their pictures are of something other than themselves.
Unless I am feeling really bored and charitable, I only respond to people who indicate in some fashion that they actually read my profile. There are too many people out there who seem to be taking the shotgun approach, and messaging everyone under the sun. I want someone who is interested in me, rather than any female that they can get to respond.
Good luck!
“Okay, so my initial message was ‘What’s your favourite Spider Robinson novel? Mine’s Lady Slings The Booze’.”
Dayum, Bethany, your boyfriend’s instincts were right. I’d have responded in exactly the same fashion, to that line.
@Bethany Really? I always felt Joe was a pretty two dimensional character until half way through the book. . . Im personally lean ing toward ‘Night of Power’, though its brutal.