The Best Questions For A First Date

A lot of factors come into play when it comes to finding your match. And all of them are at work during that awkward first date. Physical attraction is one thing, but that's only a small piece of the puzzle. Mental and spiritual chemistry are equally important, and much harder to determine.

Picture your first date. There's so much you want to know, so many questions you want to ask, but you don't want to turn your date into a job interview. How can you figure out if you and your date have long-term potential, without asking too many questions?

OkCupid has the answer. The site used its database of match questions - and the 776 million answers users have given - to find out exactly what questions are best able to determine compatibility. "What questions," asked OkCupid, "are easy to bring up, yet correlate to the deeper, unspeakable, issues people actually care about?"

Each question had to meet this set of criteria:

• Most people had to be comfortable discussing the subject publically.
• The query and answer had to be mathematically likely to tell you something you couldn't just guess.

Good first date questions were not:

• Redundant
• Subliterate
• Too personal
• Too obvious

OkCupid analyzed 34,260 real-world couples to find the answer. When a member deletes their OkCupid account, they have the option to give the site the reason for their departure. If they choose "I met somebody on OkCupid," they can also give their significant other's username. Looking at that dataset of couples, OkCupid found that agreement on three questions correlated best to an actual relationship:

• Do you like horror movies?
• Have you ever traveled around another country alone?
• Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?

Couples who gave the same answers to those three questions were more likely to be compatible than those who answered any other trio of questions. 32% of successful couples agreed on all three of them, which is 3.7x the rate of simple coincidence. They even outperformed the site's most popular user-generated match questions:

• Is God important in your life?
• Is sex the most important part of a relationship?
• Does smoking disgust you?

Those aren't the only questions that can be used to glean important info about your date. OkCupid also discovered the best questions to ask if you want to know about your date's politics, your date's religious beliefs, and your date's feelings on first-date sex. Find them on the OkCupid blog.