Men to Avoid in Online Dating: Part 2

One of the depressing things about OK Cupid is the map that must’ve been underwritten by U-Haul. If you’re not familiar with the list of cities with the largest number of potential members, chances are your dating site of choice has given you some reason to believe the grass is greener in another city, whether it’s your highest match on record, conveniently located on the other side of the country, or a sneak peek at singles in other cities.

You’ve spent six months dining out on a bunch of someone elses’ dimes, and you’ve convinced yourself that the problem isn’t you, it’s the District of Columbia.

There just aren’t any good guys here. They’re all too focused on their careers/underpaid/still interning/overpaid, and you’ve had enough!

So when PhillyCheeseSteak29 messages you to tell you he comes to DC once a month on business, you think, “Finally, a change of scenery!”

Here a long-distance relationship, as seen by men: you wake up and have to call her. No sex. You get to work and have to deal with three e-mails detailing how you two are “growing apart.” No sex. You spend $500 on a plane ticket to visit her, and, while you’re there, you drop another 5 hundo on meals, etc. Sex, at most, three times.

It’s no wonder this guy’s on the hunt for a relationship that spans multiple zip codes.

No matter what his excuse is, he’s not looking for a relationship if he’s looking outside his metropolitan area.

Men to Avoid in Online Dating: Part 1

            

            The first few weeks of online dating usually pass by in a blur.

You can’t even respond to your e-mails because you’re too busy checking out who’s viewed your profiles, taking mind-numbingly pointless (but somewhat addictive) quizzes, and figuring out the proper response to a wink (answer: ignore it).

But after a while, the pool of eligible partners starts looking smaller and smaller, and you’ve rated so many people in your city that your Quickmatch comes up empty.

As desperation starts to set in, your standards embark on a nosedive that begins so subtly you don’t even realize it’s happening.

And this is when you become the perfect target for the two biggest wastes of time at the virtual singles bar: married men, and people who live in other cities.

In approximately one out of two marriages in the U.S., boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy and girl live happily ever after.

The other half 1) deicide it’s not working, 2) split up, and 3) meet new people.

There’s nothing wrong with a person who failed at marriage the first (or second or third) time around. There is something wrong when said person decides that step three should come before step one or step two.

Divorce isn’t a regular breakup. When your boyfriend tells you he wants to see other people, he never has to say the word “asset.” When your husband delivers  the same message, you suddenly have to divide up things you never even realized you only half  “owned” (cars, houses, friends, family members, pets, health insurance).

We’re going to skip over the “emotionally available” bullshit that some women use to justify or oppose the practice of dating married men. You should be thinking about your emotions, not his, and regardless of whether or not his “feelings” are ready for another roll in the hay, yours aren’t.

Let’s start with the obvious. This guy is ready to cheat on his supposed life partner, and regardless of what you think of marriage as an institution, he took commitment one step farther than he had to when he said, “I do.” When you’re dating a guy, you might agree not to see other people, but you haven’t entered into a legally binding agreement that basically only says that you won’t see other people. So if he’s ready to screw monogamy with this woman, what makes you think it’ll be any different with you?

Then there’s the fact that he’s still married (or separated, or anything other than legally divorced). If he really wanted out of this marriage, he’d be out, and he’d be too busy sorting out the legal implications or building a new life to sign up for a free trial on Match.com. If he’s still living with his wife, or attending couples therapy, or even keeping the marital status in name only, he hasn’t made up his mind, and don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll be the deciding factor.

People go crawling back to former partners after they see what else is out there. No one buys his ex a take-me-back diamond when he’s rediscovering the joys of keeping the seat up, drinking milk out of the carton, and brining home a different woman every night of the week. It’s after he tries to settle down with a new woman that he realizes how much he misses the way his ex-wife made the bed each morning.

Long story short: when you date a married men, you’re entering into a messy, emotionally turbulent situation that has a lot of potential for pain with only the slimmest glimmer of hope for payoff. You don’t have to be a gambler to figure out that the odds aren’t in your favor, and you’d be better off waiting for a better split.

Friday News Roundup: The OkCupid Blog

Apparently, OkCupid, the free dating site whose (lack of) price tag somehow makes it seem sketchy, has a blog.

And it’s actually pretty good. Unfortunately, most of their posts have to do with maximizing results on online dating, and they spend a lot of time building charts and graphs (which seems like the perfect job for a hopelessly romantic statistician) whose value and relevance we have to question.

But it does make for an interesting read.

Today, we want to highlight two posts in particular.

The first is a dissertation on the role your profile picture plays in your success (or lack thereof) in online dating.

A quasistatistical study of OkCupid users reveals that everything Match.com ever told us is wrong!

Showing your face in your profile picture? Don’t do it!

Posting a “MySpace” shot (i.e., a picture you took by holding a crappy Webcam over your head and pouting up at the camera)? You’ll get more messages!

Guys—have a six pack that rivals The Situation’s? Show it off!

While all of these profile picture faux pas might attract more attention, the lovestruck statisticians don’t really have a way of measuring which types of people who contact these brooding meatheads.

And so the only really useable information this post provides is their take on girls showing cleavage. The economists who dropped out of grad school to fall in love found that women who show cleavage get more messages that lead to extended correspondence (i.e., not just one message that says, “Nice tits”) than women who don’t.

But you have to take the rest of the data with a grain of salt.

Yes, the MySpace girls might get more messages than the English majors who use more “normal” headshots, but the guys who contact the MySpacers might be equally emo, unemployed 17-year-olds—not the type of guys the English majors would necessarily want to meet.

Then again, the girls who post MySpace pictures are probably pretty compatible with the guys who post shirtless pictures. So maybe the lesson is, it’s just easier to find dates if you’re the kind of girl who makes a kissy face in her profile picture.

The other finding worth noting is that people who post pictures of themselves doing something interesting tend to get more messages than the people who post a neck-up version of the best photo ever taken of them.

When we look at someone’s profile picture, we expect the photo to be at least 10 percent more attractive than the person is in real life. After all, inordinately hot photos attract the most attention, right?

But after a guy’s first month on an online dating sight, he’s going to know that if she looks too good to be true, she probably is.

And you don’t want to start competing for guys on looks alone. So post a photo of yourself doing something you love. Or post a quirky photo. It’ll probably take you farther than that bikini shot from the summer you had Mono.