Online Dating Is Killing Your Chances Of Dating Out Of Your League

Dream of seducing a supermodel with your charming personality and fantastic sense of humor? You may be out of luck, and online dating is to blame. Recent studies suggest that dating sites and apps make it harder to land someone out of your league.

How often have you heard that “opposites attract?” How unique do you believe your preferences are? Research shows that both ideas are myths - preferences matter very little once people meet face to face, and compatible couples are more likely to be alike than different.

Studies repeatedly support the idea of “assortative mating,” which Priceonomics defines as “the hypothesis that people generally date and marry partners who are like them in terms of social class, educational background, race, personality, and, of course, attractiveness.” In other words, 10s date each other and a 2 doesn’t stand a chance with any of them.

There is, however, one important exception. The longer two people know each other before they start dating, the more likely it is that they will date despite a disparity in attractiveness. And that’s where online dating comes in. If more and more people meet on a first date, rather than as friends who evolve into something more, the mixed-attractiveness couple could go extinct.

Lucy Hunt, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, decided to investigate “how time might affect how similarly attractive couple members are to one another.” Hunt teamed up with two psychologists for a study at Northwestern. They asked 167 couples how long they’d known each other before dating, and asked another group to watch videos of the couples and rate each person’s physical attractiveness.

The team hypothesized that people who had known their partner before they began dating would break the rule of assortative mating, and that’s exactly what they found. Couples who met as dates were about equally attractive, but attractiveness was mixed among friends-first couples. Take dating algorithms into account - which facilitate assortative matching by pairing people of equal desirability - and the effect becomes exaggerated.

The same group of researchers discovered another intriguing insight from an exercise they performed with students at UT Austin. Students in small classes were asked to rate the desirability (which encompassed both physical and non-physical attributes) of their classmates at both the beginning and the end of the semester.

At the start of the semester, students generally agreed on who was hot and who was not. But by the end, many of the ratings had shifted. Students’ opinions of their classmates changed based on their interactions over the last three months and individual preferences began to peek through. What one person found attractive could be a turn-off for another - proving that, over time, personality had more of an impact on desirability than physical attractiveness.

“Perceptions of mate value change the more time that people spend together,” Lucy Hunt has said of the result, adding, “Maybe it’s the case that beauty is partially in the eye of the beholder, especially as time passes.”