Types (Niche)

If you’ve tried out Tinder (or any dating service, for that matter) you’ve probably run across your fair share of bizarre conversations. It's a strange world out there. Sometimes the weirdness borders on amusing, but all too often it's annoying or downright creepy.

Thankfully, the Internet makes it easy to disengage from the creeps. It takes no effort whatsoever to ignore a message and hardly anything extra to block or report a user. But where's the fun in that? Why take the high road when you could take the low road, where all the fun is?

Anna Gensler, a 23-year-old artist, has a much more interesting way of dealing with the deadbeats of online dating. She began drawing nude portraits of the creeps who contacted her via Tinder, and posting the results to Instagram (NSFW, of course) alongside their offensive messages. And then, for the cherry on top, she sends the finished product back to the culprit for a final review.

Slate spoke with Gensler about her unique approach to turning harassment into art. “I feel like this gets me in trouble a lot,” she said of her inspiration for the project, “but when someone does something I think is rude, I always want to give them a taste of their own medicine. I’m an artist, and I try to use art as my weapon, even though that sounds so lame. So I thought, ‘What is something I can do to make me feel the way that they’re making me feel?’”

She settled on drawing them “sad-naked,” the most immature thing she could think of, because “their pickup lines are the most juvenile, basic things, but also still oddly offensive.” Each of her portraits is based on the guys' profile pictures, but modified to be as unflattering as possible. The subjects are all made chubbier, scrawnier, or just not particularly well-endowed.

Not satisfied with taking on the creeps of Tinder, Gensler joined OkCupid in hopes of finding new subjects worthy of her artistic intentions. She even put a blatant warning on her profile – “I’m going to draw you naked if you send me rude messages” – and a link back to the Instagram. Whether or not it deterred potential creeps is unknown, but it did intrigue a surprising number of nice guys who found the project funny and requested a portrait of their own.

And what about the guys who receive Gensler’s works of art? “There are a few approaches,” she explained. “Some of them get really angry and say a bunch of mean stuff. Some of them get a little bit offended ‘and say, “Why am I so fat? My facial hair doesn’t really look like that. My nipples are smaller than that!’ They think I didn’t do them justice. Some people just block me. But a couple of guys have actually said smart things after I sent it to them.”

MillionaireMatch.com has just surpassed the 2 million member mark and is celebrating with a new digital billboard in Times Square.

“Join the 1%: Don’t get left behind,” the ad reads. It's a slightly odd choice, given the bad rap of the 1% and the fact that the term was coined due to protests in New York City in the first place, but it also begs the question: how many MillionaireMatch.com users are actually millionaires?

Darren Shuster, North American CEO for the dating service, recently spoke with MarketWatch about the milestone and their membership. Here are a few highlights from their conversation:

On what it means to be a “certified millionaire”…

“You can become a “Diamond Member,” which shows you have $1 million in assets or a large income, a minimum of $200,000 a year. Then you can search for other Diamond Members who’ve had their income verified.”

On online dating’s notorious reputation for being full of fakes…

“MillionaireMatch has as many fakes as most dating sites. Some people are great, some people are phony, some people get a lot out of it and some people quit in a week. You have to know who is exaggerating and who’s not. Some people say they own the car and the house, but they’re leasing the car and they’re renting the house.”

On sexism…

“People say all sorts of things when it comes to love or money. Women are attracted to wealth whether the website exists or not. We’re not exactly reinventing the wheel here. I’m sure there are people who will call it sexist and call it weird, and will say things like, ‘How could you go after them for money?’ If you met someone and they both have a sense of humor and good physical condition, who would you go for? I’d go after the woman with the big bank account. Wouldn’t you?”

On the clientele who make up the MillionaireMatch userbase…

“Some of these people are making $100,000 a year. On paper, they’re a millionaires. But they’re not necessarily bringing in $40,000 a month. Women are smart and intuitive. It’s almost like crowdsourcing to weed out the phonies. They’re probably our best security.”

And finally, the big question: How many members are actually millionaires?

“That I would rather not disclose, if I can help it. Most of the men have a million dollars or more at least in assets, including their house, and have money in savings. We have a fair share of those.”

To find out more about this dating service you can read our review of Millionaire Match.

No dating service gets more attention than Tinder these days. We hear from a lot of uptight journalists who worry that the app encourages hook-ups, and from finance experts wondering how the app will eventually monetize, and from discouraged daters telling their Tinder horror stories.

But today let’s take a look at the lighter side of Tinder. There’s a lot going on in the mobile app’s world, and plenty of it is downright hysterical.

First, a man posed as a cupcake on Tinder and wrote about his experience for Thrillist. “If there's one thing I've learned about heterosexual women,” he writes, “it's that they like men. They enjoy their company. They even marry them, sometimes. But they love cupcakes. And if there's another thing I know, it's that single women are on Tinder. So armed with those two pieces of knowledge, I set out to create a Tinder persona that no woman could resist: a man's face drawn on a cupcake.” The results of his experiment are hilarious.

Perhaps inspired by the cupcake, another man decided to join Tinder as a golden retriever named Hero. Hero, like the cupcake before him, proved to be a very popular match. The faux canine received 206 matches – 154 from men and 52 from women – after just four fun-filled days on the app.

If hilarious and heart-warming stories of baked goods and puppies aren’t your thing, try Humanitarians of Tinder. The sarcastic Tumblr ruthlessly rolls its eyes at the single do-gooders annoyingly capitalizing on their charity work (and maybe just regular travels) around the world. Warning: with all the facepalming you’re about to do, forehead bruising is a serious possibility.

Then there’s Tinderfessions, a Twitter account that's exactly what it sounds like. This is a prime destination for awkward, funny, and sorta depressing tales of Tinder gone wrong, mixed in with happy stories of Tinder love gone oh-so-right. “Only met one guy in person. haven’t left his place since our first date. this was over a month ago. #thankstinder #keeper.” writes a user named Kels. “All my pics are with my really good-looking friend and in my bio I say I’m him. #catfish,” admits Trent. Expect to feel a lot of ups and downs as you read this feed.

If you want to skip the ups and cut straight to the downs (the comical kind, that is) head on over to Tinderlines.com, where you’ll be treated to a collection of “the best, the worst, and the funniest Tinder pick-up lines.” Prepare yourself for bad jokes, snappy comebacks, sexual innuendo, mathematical equations, song lyrics, one-sided conversations, and a whole lotta laughter.

To find out more about this dating app you can read our review of Tinder.

Olympic athlete and heartthrob Ryan Lochte has been quoted saying he’s never had a one-night stand (even while people were hot and heavy on Tinder in Olympic Village). And he’s not alone. Most Americans – 53% - claim they’ve never had a one-night stand.

A new study by Dating Advice found that while most Americans haven’t participated in this type of casual sexual encounter, men were more likely to have participated than women. Sixty-four percent of women said they’ve never had a one-nighter compared to only 41% of men in Lochte’s camp, which means that traditional gender roles when it comes to sexuality are still at play in American society.

Age was a factor in the study. Americans aged 18 to 24 had a 25 percent higher likelihood of saying they’d never had a one-night stand than those aged 25 to 34. The age difference makes sense, as there might be more life experience or opportunities for casual encounters as you get older and break away from your college relationship, opting instead for clubs and bars with other singles.

Not surprisingly, those who are married are also least likely to have had a one-night stand, with 56% saying they had never. On the other hand, only 41% of divorcees have not had one-night stands, compared to 50% of singles who have never been married.

There seems to be a distinction between straight and gay Americans, with only 32% of gay people saying they’d never had a one-night stand compared to 54% of straight people. As for race, 45% of African Americans and 47% of Latinos have admitted to never having a one-night stand compared to 74% of Asians.

It seems there isn’t much difference among income earners, with about the same percentage of people earning less than $25,000 a year saying they’ve never had a one-night stand compared to those earning $125,000 or more at 56% and 55% respectively. However, those earning in the median range from $75,000-$99,000 were the most likely to have had a one-night stand, with only 49% saying they hadn’t.

As expected, the South and Midwest are more conservative, with 54% of their residents saying they’d never had a one-night stand compared to the Northeast at 50% and the West at 51%.

The study surveyed 1,080 respondents over the course of three weeks, balancing responses by age, gender, income, race, sexuality and other factors in order to accurately represent the U.S. population.

Facebook has been in the online dating game for a while, albeit subtly. Many popular mobile dating apps use your Facebook networks to help you meet new singles, or at the very least, verify you are who you say you are. For instance, Tinder sets up your account using information from Facebook, even though it is GPS-based matching. So it only makes sense that Facebook would cut to the chase and see if they could get people to interact directly through their site instead of through third-party apps.

Turns out, Facebook is doing this by making user profiles more interactive.

The “relationship status” option of each user’s Facebook profile has always sparked a little bit of controversy becasue people use it to hurt their beloved as well as to share information with friends. After all, how many people announce their status over Facebook before actually talking to their boyfriend/ girlfriend, and how many use it as a weapon to pick a fight? Sometimes “it’s complicated” can bring about a barrage of questions that you don’t want to answer.

So it’s no wonder the new “ask” feature on Facebook makes many people feel even more uncomfortable. Ask allows you to ask another person what their relationship status is if they have chosen not to include it in their profile.

If you’re one of those Facebook users that prefers to keep this information to yourself, you are given the option of sending the “asker” a message or letting them know from the usual drop-down box choices whether you’re single, in a relationship, separated, in a domestic partnership, etc.

While this might seem to some a good way to strike up a conversation with someone who interests you on Facebook, it might seem to others to feel a little bit creepy. If you decide to ask someone about her relationship status, you must also explain why, which can be humbling. A little pop-up box displays when you click the “ask” button so that you can explain yourself.

In addition to asking about someone’s relationship status, you can also ask him about where he lives, what his job is, and other basic profile information.

The upside of all of this prying? Users have to be friends on Facebook before they can use the “ask” feature, so you can’t approach a total stranger. Also, there is no anonymity – the person being asked will see that it is you who is asking (along with your profile).

So maybe it’s better to take an old-school approach: just send the object of your affection a Facebook message, asking her out on a date.

To find out how to use this site to find dates you can read our Facebook review.

Do you have an iPhone or Android phone? Chances are, you didn’t purchase one or the other by chance: you had a definite preference.

Are You Interested, a dating app for singles, decided to test out its own user base and how their dating preferences correlated to the type of phone they used. We know that things like ethnicity, income, and height play a major role in how much success a dater has online. But could your phone have an influence too, considering how much time, money and effort we put into them? In some cases, yes.

AYI found that iOS users were contacted 17% more often than Android users. Turns out, those who prefer Apple products are more desirable dates. I looked into Cupidtino, the dating site dedicated to lovers of all products Apple, to see some profiles of the most desirable users, but found that it is now defunct. I guess more options are better, even for those dedicated to Apple lovers.

Android users seem to be the ones doing the pursuing, while Apple users tend to wait to be contacted. According to the study, Android users were 12% more likely than iOS users to contact someone on AYI.

The dating app company was able to examine 20 million interactions between their users, pulling from a portion of the 2.4 million mobile downloads of the app. Since other online daters can’t see what phone the other person has, AYI looked at what type of dater owned which type of phone. Interestingly, both groups skewed male, but Android users tend to be slightly older, with 42% between 45 and 60 compared to only 29% of iPhone users. Sixty-seven percent of iPhone users were under 45.

In addition, income seems to be a factor. Android users were 30% more likely to make under $60,000 than those with iPhones. Also, 83% of singles making over $150,000 owned an iOS device.

Marital status is another factor, with Android users being 20% more likely than iOS users to be divorced. Another interesting finding from the study: iOS users tend to drink 50% more often and take drugs twice as often as the Android users. On the flip side, they were also 18% more likely to work out every day compared to Android users.

In terms of education, iOS users were twice as likely to have a Master’s degree and 55% more likely to have a Bachelor’s degree. A whopping 72% of Android users had not completed college.

AYI studied profile information from 13,690 of its mobile app users in the United States for the study. For more information on this dating site please read our review of Are You Interested.