Match Group

Maybe you’ve heard the statistics, but if not – pay attention, and turn on your spell check. Correct grammar usage and spelling goes a long way when you’re online dating. In fact, according to recent studies by online dating site Match, bad grammar is one of the biggest turn-offs for men and women – a close second behind poor hygiene.

In other words, make sure you know the difference between "your" and "you’re" before you message a potential match.

Website Grammerly did its own collection of data regarding dating and grammar usage, and came up with some interesting findings. As it turns out, people aren’t only aware of grammar mistakes – they pay attention to the specific words you use, too. Some terms are more attractive than others when you’re writing messages or an online dating profile.

For instance, men who use the word “women” rather than “girls” in their messaging are 28% more successful at getting responses. And those who use the word “whom” correctly do even better – they are 31% more successful than those who use it incorrectly.

Men are a little easier on women overall, but there are certain phrases they don’t like. When women use the words “divorce,” “separate,” or “my ex” they receive 4% fewer messages than those who don’t. (So maybe save your dating histories for the actual date, ladies.)

Spelling can be a big deal too, at least for women. Guys – if you have just two spelling errors in your profile, you reduce your chances of a response by 14%. As for the ladies? Men just aren’t so picky – spelling errors don’t affect their chances of getting a response. (Which may explain why women make nearly twice as many spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes in their messages and profiles than men---it doesn’t seem to matter as much!)

Some other fun stats:

• According to OkCupid, women receive 17 times as many messages as men – which may explain why they can be picky, but don’t have to watch their spelling and grammar mistakes.
• Both men and women rate grammar as more important than confidence in online dating.
• Eighty-eight percent of women judge their dates’ grammar mistakes, compared to 84% who judge their dates by their level of confidence. For men, it was 75% and 69% respectively.
• Men use 21.9% more words than women do in their responses to questions                regarding their online dating profiles.
• Roughly 11% of American adults (24  million people) have used an online dating site or app

Bottom line: check your messages before you hit “send” – it could make a huge difference in your online dating success.

You know how to use Tinder. You know how to use OkCupid. The same goes for Match.com and eHarmony. But do you know what goes on behind the scenes?

Christian Rudder – co-founder and former CEO of OkCupid, Harvard alumnus and author of Dataclysm – knows the dating industry inside and out. He recently spoke at Northeastern University about finding love in the modern age, and what it takes to be a company that facilitates it. These days it's not Cupid in charge of your heart – it's math, data, algorithms, and analysis.

How does it all work? Rudder spilled his secrets to Northeastern's President Joseph Aoun. On why he was motivated to make a better dating site, Rudder said he wanted to create well-balanced relationships. The key, he believed, was versatility. A system like eHarmony's felt too rigid, while OkCupid's matching allowed for greater flexibility.

Could one word really be hurting your online dating game? Could one word make it better?

Dating app Hinge looked at 5,000 users who exchanged contact information within 24 hours of matching to determine which opening lines are most likely to get dates (and which will get you ghosted).

Using a text analysis model, they identified common phrases and words in the conversations they examined. So which words were winners and which words were losers?

The biggest flop was the word 'sorry.' Hinge users who included 'sorry' in an initial communication were a whopping 56% less likely to get a person's number. Next time you feel tempted to apologize for not responding sooner, take the “sorry not sorry” approach (just don't actually write it). You were busy and that's a good thing. Besides, not explaining yourself creates a teeny bit of intriguing mystery your date may be eager to solve.

Hinge's research also found that being vague and “wishy-washy” is a turn-off for potential dates. People who suggested dates in ambiguous timeframes like “this weekend” and “next week” were 40% less likely to score someone's digits. The more specific you can be, the better. After all, you matched with them so you must be interested in them – make it clear by arranging concrete plans, or answering with a simple yes or no.

At the other end of the spectrum, laughter proved to be irresistable. Hinge found that conversations that used words associated with laughing – like 'haha' and the ever-present 'lol' – had a 17% higher chance of ending in an exchange of phone numbers. It's not hard to believe when you consider how many people say a sense of humor is one of the most important traits in a partner. And what would flirting be without a little witty banter?

Unsurprisingly, compliments also had a positive effect on conversations, but one type of compliment in particular stood out. When a Hinge user told another user that they have a cool name, it increased the likelihood of getting their digits by 12.5%. Destiny's Child had it right: say my name, say my name (especially if it's to talk about how awesome it is).

Of course, no amount of dating advice or studies can guarantee a a phone number (much less a date), but they can help you avoid some basic mistakes. For more information on the dating app which brought us this study you can read our review of Hinge.

With Valentine's Day come and gone and spring fast approaching, romance is still on everyone's mind. Plenty Of Fish and Amazon both decided to celebrate the most loved-up day of the year by finding the most romantic places in the United States.

POF began by processing the interests data of 5 million US singles. To determine which states and cities are the most romantic in the country, POF looked at the percentage of singles within that region who listed romantic interests on their profiles. Key phrases included “walks on the beach,” “candlelit dinners” and “cuddling by the fire” (which begs the question of whether POF found the most romantic places or just the cheesiest, but never mind).

The site found that Southeastern states are by far the least romantic in the US, with the exception of Florida. In contrast, the Northwest and pockets of the Northeast are home to some of the country's most romantic states. The top spot was claimed by Michigan with Vermont coming in at a close second.

City-wise, Portland clocked in at 34% more romantic than the national average. Seattle came in second and El Paso pulled up the rear.

Highlights from the POF analysis include:

• Single US women are on average 36% more romantic than their single male counterparts.
• Washington DC is the only state in the country where men are more romantic than women. DC women are 38% less romantic than the national average.
• Single women who live in large cities are much less romantic than their rural and suburban female counterparts.
• Michigan is the most romantic state in the country. Michigan singles are 55% more romantic than the national average.
• Single men in the state of New York are 12% more romantic than the national average.
• Single men in Michigan are 74% more romantic than the national average.
• Louisiana is the least romantic state. Singles in Louisiana are 25% less romantic than the national average.

Amazon also got in on the V-Day action with its annual list of the most romantic cities in the US. The retailer assessed cities with more than 100,000 residents per capita, ranking them based on yearly sales of items deemed romantic (like romance novels, romantic music and “sexual wellness products”).

According to Amazon's data, the South, Southwest and Pacific Northwest are the regions most alive with love. Amazon users in the Northeast aren't feeling the prick of Cupid's arrow this year. The top five most romantic cities are:

1. Alexandria, VA
2. Miami, FL
3. Knoxville, TN
4. Orlando, FL
5. Vancouver, WA

Here's hoping that, in 2017, Amazon and POF combine their powers for the romance study to end all romance studies. To find out more about the dating service which performed the study you can read our review of Plenty of Fish.

You'd think that self-confidence would be a positive trait in dating. It takes a certain amount of assurance to approach a stranger and ask them out. And dating experts around the world agree – confidence is one of the most attractive (not to mention useful) traits a person can have.

But there happens to be one group for whom that seemingly obvious insight is not true: college-age men. According to research led by Carnegie Mellon University’s Emily Yeh, young men who are overconfident see less success using OkCupid.

Yeh's findings, presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s annual meeting in San Diego, mirror some of OkCupid's own data. The site asks users to score themselves on a variety of factors, including intelligence and height. Many rate themselves as being smarter, taller, etc., than average, and not necessarily because they're consciously lying. Instead they fall victim to “illusory superiority,” a psychological phenomenon that describes people's natural tendency to believe they are better than average.

Then again, no one is shocked at the thought of users lying on dating sites to attract more suitors. It's basic survival. Instead, Yeh decided to take things further and study how overconfidence relates to success on OkCupid. She asked participants to rate their level of self-confidence, then compared their answers to their “success” on the site (defined as things like length of conversation and frequency of first contacts). She focused her research on two age groups: 18-22 and 45-55.

Yeh's initial findings were not surprising. Individuals with higher self-reported confidence also initiated more conversations, regardless of gender or age group. But when it came to receiving messages, the results began to vary. The older age group and younger women received more messages if they considered themselves highly confident. “The more confident you are, the more messages you get,” Yeh told New York magazine.

Younger men, on the other hand, had the opposite experience. “The more modest the male is, the more messages they receive,” Yeh said. Young men who reported less confidence in the initial survey were also less likely to develop a first message into an extended conversation.

What could explain Yeh's findings? She suggests that “it could mean, perhaps as you get older, you start to have more concrete measures of how confident you are.” As you mature, you have a greater number of real achievements under your belt and with those achievements comes both a clearer sense of what you can accomplish and a stronger belief in yourself.

Younger daters may feel confident, but not yet have much to back that confidence up. Either that means they're making missteps they wouldn't make if they were more cautious, or their false bravado is clear to potential dates who are turned off by it. Either way, the end message is clear: college guys need to give the overconfidence a rest if they want to score.

There’s no doubt that Tinder has changed online dating. Instead of checking profiles on our laptops in the privacy of our homes, Tinder has turned swiping and judging potential dates into a game that people share openly. In fact, it’s become an addiction for some. Even when they meet a date they like, that they want to keep swiping and seeing who else is out there.

In fact, having so many choices has turned us into dating “robots,” according to one essay in The New Inquiry. That is, on Tinder, people mindlessly swipe. Perhaps they message a few people, or arrange to go out on a few dates, but the intention when using Tinder is not to focus on building a relationship, but on swiping. In fact, they argue that being on Tinder is promoting the idea of being “chill” and conveying to your dates that you have no expectations with a date leading to anything (even if you do).

In fact, being “chill” is such a prominent part of dating app culture, that people have essentially taught themselves that their feelings should be removed from the equation, in order to be open to even more opportunities. More is better, right? Online daters have become “emotionally disassociated,” as the authors of “Tinderization of Feeling” argue, simply because it’s so emotionally draining to look at so many photos, have so many options – because what happens if you make the wrong choice? What happens if you emotionally invest in a date only to have them reject you?

Today, rejection seems almost intolerable, though rejection historically has been a natural part of dating. But if you make the date feel more casual – i.e. a “hang” or just meeting someone for 20 minutes before you start swiping again – there's no real rejection. You will always be looking for the next, better option, instead of having regret over not dating someone. Because….what if there’s someone better?

The authors of The New Inquiry article argue the problem all comes down to having too many choices. They say: “Living with a sense of overwhelming choice means exerting an insane amount of emotional energy in making the most banal decisions.” People can barely make a decision about what to watch on Netflix, there are so many options…it’s no different with dating. So with Tinder, the swiping becomes a game, because we don’t leave any room for more complexity and the intricacies involved with getting to know someone and developing true feeling for them – we don’t know how to deal with a potential date beyond the yes/no initial factor.

So, swipe, message, meet, maybe sleep with, then move on becomes the norm.

But you can choose differently. You can have control over how you want to date by taking more time and getting to know your dates. By rejecting the yes/no one-second response time of Tinder in favor of a more considered approach. What if you took your time, and invested emotionally in the potential of one of your dates? What if you took a risk?

Love doesn't just happen without effort, without risk. If you want to keep swiping and dating, you'll probably end up in a series of unfulfilling, emotionless flings. But if you put yourself out there? The rewards and risks are much greater. But isn't that the point of love?

There is a better and more effective way to date. You just have to be willing to get past all the swiping and figure it out in person, on a real date. You have to be willing to risk rejection - real rejection - as well as love.

For more about this dating app, please read our review of Tinder.