What Studies Say About Online Dating In 2015

Another year, another crop of studies trying to solve the problems of online dating. Maybe I shouldn't get so into them, but I can't help it. If science can help us get even a little bit closer to finding love, I'm all for it. The end of 2014 and beginning of 2015 predictably brought on a slew of new research with some interesting insights to share.

One study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found something that's unlikely to surprise you: men who post more selfies to social media sites are more narcissistic.

The research uncovered a connection between a penchant for posting selfies and four personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and self-objectification. Narcissism and psychopathy were both linked to the number of selfies posted, while narcissism and self-objectification appeared to influence the tendency for men to edit photos of themselves online.

Another set of data, this time released by online dating app The Grade, examined dating habits in New York City's five boroughs. The Grade uses a Tinder-like interface that lets users like or skip over profiles. The app kept track of what percentage of profiles were liked and what percentage were skipped in NYC.

According to The Grade's findings, users in The Bronx are the least popular while users in Manhattan are the most popular. Profiles in the Bronx were also more likely than any others in the city to receive messages containing “inappropriate content or slang.” After Manhattan, the most desirable borough was Queens, followed by Brooklyn and then Staten Island.

Finally, a Match.com study identified 2014's top online-dating profile words, hobbies and phrases. The annual Year in Review report for 2014 had several intriguing tidbits:

• The most common term used in profiles is: Travel, with 1,005,346 instances of use
• The most common phrase used in profiles is: Down to earth, which 232,348 Match users consider themselves to be
• The most popular words used in profiles are: Zumba first and foremost, followed by electrician, selfie, welcoming, warmhearted, crochet, quickest, cosmetology, ladies and sewing
• Everyone's favorite movie is: Frozen, which 5,501 people's dubbed the best flick of 2014
• And the one thing you're sick of that isn't going anywhere in 2015 is: Hashtags, which reached such a peak last year that one person used 44 of them in his Match.com profile

So, armed with all this info, what can we predict about 2015? Possibly fewer selfies from men, even more hashtags on online dating profiles, a rise in interest in Zumba classes, and more people trying to move to Manhattan despite its cramped living quarters and astronomical rent prices.