Communication

“If music be the food of love, play on,” Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night. There’s no denying the power of a good tune when it comes to seduction, but a study by Match.com has found that the words of the Bard are alluring in their own right.

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the online dating service scoured its database for mentions of the wordsmith. “For four centuries,” writes the Match blog, “Shakespeare has been regarded as the greatest writer and poet in the English language; his sonnets and plays have captured the hearts of millions.”

It turns out, they’ve also captured plenty of hearts on Match.com. Mentioning Shakespeare in your profile increases your chances of success on the site, especially if you’re male. Men who name-dropped the Elizabethan playwright were 27% more likely to receive a response from women. Maybe it’s because 30% of women on the service describe themselves as "literary."

Match also found that singles in certain cities were more likely to mention Shakespeare than others. America’s biggest fans of Billy Shakes aren’t in New York, San Francisco, or the country’s other cultural hubs. They’re not even in locations known for their Shakespeare festivals, like Ashland, Oregon. Believe it or not, the Hamlet scribe was mentioned most by Match users in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Boise, Idaho and Montgomery, Alabama followed.

For bibliophiles who aren’t obsessed with the Bard, Match compiled a list of states rated by how many of its users selected reading as an interest and listed the last book they read in their profile. The top 10 cities with literary users include Boston, Austin, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Denver and Madison came in at numbers 3 and 2, respectively. And finally, the literary crown was secured by… drum roll please... none other than Fort Collins, Colorado.

Match.com even recommended a few choice Shakespeare quotes for those who are looking to up their dating game. Their favorites are:

• “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is wing’d cupid painted blind.”
• “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”
• “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”

If your profile is in need of a spring cleaning, consider adding a bit of the Bard’s magic to spruce it up. But if you plan to take a cue from his famous romances, be sure it’s one of the comedies. We all know how Romeo and Juliet turned out.

You’ve heard that laughter is the best medicine. You know that a sense of humor is one of the most hotly sought-after traits in a partner. So what, exactly, can laughter do for you?

In honor of National Humor Month, which kicked off on April 1, mobile app Skout conducted a survey of over 3,000 users and found that when it comes to love and friendship, laughter reigns supreme.

It began with a sampling of Skouters’ profile pictures. The company found that users who share images of themselves laughing receive 404% more favorites and make 324% more connections than the average Skouter. Those are already compelling numbers, but Skout dug deeper.

Users were asked to share their experiences with humor in a variety of situations. The survey found that:

• We are our own biggest fans. Seventy-five percent of respondents think they’re funny. Of the many forms comedy can take, those with a witty sense of humor are most likely to crack themselves up.
• Laughter is a social experience. Ninety-four percent of people surveyed said they enjoy making other people laugh. People who say their style of humor is slapstick are most likely to enjoy spreading the yuks around.
• We’re drawn to the class clown. Practical jokers and people who say “bathroom humor” is their style are most likely to have more - five or more, to be precise - close friends. Those with a sarcastic or self-deprecating sense of humor are least likely to have a similarly sized group of BFFs.
• We don’t all love the other kind of clown. Charming to some, frightening to others - 30% of people surveyed said they’re afraid of clowns. The likelihood of coulrophobia increase if you have a sarcastic sense of humor.
• Chicks don’t dig chick flicks. Only 18% of women said they prefer romantic films. The winning genre was comedy, with 26% of the vote, followed by action-adventure (23%) and horror (21%). Comedy came in second for men (21%), behind action-adventure (43%).
• Comedians congregate on the coasts. New Yorkers and San Franciscans are most confident (83%) that they are funny (why so serious, Midwest?).
• Head south for humor. Houstonians are most generous with their funny quips. One hundred percent of the city’s residents surveyed said they enjoy making others laugh. Angelenos and Atlantans shared a similar joy in inspiring giggles (98%).

Skout’s findings fall right in line with other studies that have found laughter to be highly attractive to online daters. One by Zoosk found that including ‘LOL’ in a message increased response rates by 25%. Another by Match revealed that a ‘LOL’ or a ‘Haha’ boosts your odds of scoring a date by a gargantuan 255% and your chances of hitting the sack by 39%.

Time to brush up on your witty one-liners.

You know what they say about first impressions. Choose the wrong profile photo and a potential match will swipe left without ever reading the text. Open with a groan-worthy pickup line and the conversation will end before it’s even started. A new date is sizing you up in seconds, and even the smallest details count.

A recent study of speed dates and online dating profiles found that body language plays an important role in how we evaluate romantic prospects. Subjects who assumed expansive postures with open arms and stretched torsos were almost twice as likely to be rated as attractive, and much more likely to be asked out on a “real” date.

In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Tanya Vacharkulksemsuk and her colleagues examined videos of 144 speed dates from a 2007 event held at Northwestern University. Each date was paired for 4 minutes at a time, and afterward each dater reported their level of interest on a scale of one to 10 for a variety of categories. They also indicated if they would be interested in continuing to pursue any of their dates.

Each video was additionally reviewed by a team of experts who were unaware of the experiment's goals, but were trained to recognize and record behaviors linked to attraction, such as laughing, smiling, and nodding.

Upon examining the videos, a pattern began to emerge. “Within milliseconds, we can pick up a suite of information about a person,” says Vacharkulksemsuk, “with social dominance and hierarchical standing being one of those things.” In the case of romantic entanglements, the same posture appeared over and over again in individuals who were rated as highly attractive.

“In general, we see an enlargement of the amount of space that a person is occupying, in contrast to contractive postures with arms and legs held close to the torso,” explains Vacharkulksemsuk. Open body language signals that you are relaxed, friendly, confident, and trustworthy - all qualities that are typically considered desirable in a partner.

When we meet people in real life, we don’t see them as static. Their body language constantly evolves over the course of an encounter, and our evaluations evolve along with it. Now that online dating is commonplace, we’re often forced to judge based on a fixed image - and not only that, but given the speed at which many singles flip through profiles, we also have to make those judgments more rapidly.

There’s plenty of room for error in that system, and Vacharkulksemsuk notes that determining all the factors involved in those snap judgments won’t be easy, but this study is a step in that direction. Now that you know the importance of this particular body language clue, you can consider it when choosing your next profile photo.

Is the perfect partner dall, dark, and handsome? Is he a leather jacket-wearing bad boy? Maybe she’s an effortlessly beautiful model, or a geeky gamer girl.

The real answer, of course, goes much deeper than that. A perfect partner should be judged not by their looks, but by their actions. EliteSingles polled 10,000 members from around the world about how they would like their future partner to act in a relationship. Some of the results may surprise you.

Participants were asked to agree or disagree with a series of statements about the behavior they expect from their partners. According to the survey, the top five things singles would like their ideal partner to do are:

1. Share his/her concerns with me: 91%
2. Include me in his/her plans for the future: 86%
3. Accompany me to a family member’s birthday party: 84%
4. Give me freedom to have time (hobbies, interests, etc.) for myself: 83%
5. Find the time to talk to me every day: 80%

The study also delved into things EliteSingles members didn’t expect their future partners to do. Men and women gave mostly the same answers, but they expressed a significant difference in the way they expected their partners to show affection. Only 2% of women wished for their partners to show affection through sex, while men were averse to being shown affection by receiving compliments. Only 3% of men said they expect praise from their partners.

Other key differences between Mars and Venus focused on household chores and fashion choices. Fifty-nine percent of women said expect their partners to do housework, compared to 38% of men. What men were more interested in was lingerie - 62% of men said they would like to be surprised with sexy underwear, compared to just 26% of women.

As silly as some of these stats may sound, and as easy as you may think it is to write them off, expectations are essential to relationships. Standards are necessary and healthy, as long as you don’t saddle a partner with an excessive number of expectations or expectations that are unreasonable.

EliteSingles psychologist Salama Marine offers this caution:

“The problem is when you feel obligated to fulfill your partner’s expectations: when you start to feel limited in your decisions or not free anymore to do what you want; or when your needs are completely forgotten to only respond to your partner’s expectations. If this is the case, then it’s a sign that there is a problem in the relationship.”

If you find yourself in that situation, there’s only one solution: communication. Discuss your expectations with your partner clearly and openly, and be sure to listen to them in return. "Good communication will allow you to negotiate and compromise,” says Marine.

For more information on this dating service please read our Elite Singles review.

Most of us have heard the term “six degrees of separation,” made famous first by the sociology study in the 1960’s, and later in the nineties through references to Kevin Bacon’s prolific acting career. The theory was born: we are all only “six degrees of separation” from him, or anyone else, on the planet.

Now, Facebook is concluding we could be even more connected to each other – by as little as 3.5 degrees.

What this means is that that when you are connected to all the people you know, and they are connected to all the people they know, and so on, you are inevitably linked – through your own network of friends, and friends of friends - to such notable figures as the President of the United States, a Kardashian, football star Tom Brady, or Senator Marco Rubio. That’s right, we’re all only six people removed from everyone else on the planet.

Recently, the numbers were studied again – this time by Facebook, using its own platform. The company found that despite the fact that over the last twenty years or so the population of the planet has increased – we are now closer to each other than ever before. We are all, on average, only three and a half degrees of separation from anyone else on the planet, thanks in large part to the role social media plays in our lives.

Think of it this way: If you have 100 friends, and each of your friends has 100 friends, that's already 10,000 friends of friends to whom you are connected.

In the United States, people are even more closely connected to each other – by an average of 3.46 degrees. At least among those who have Facebook accounts, which totals about 1.59 billion according to Facebook. And Pew Research Center’s report last year shows that about 72% of US adults are active online.

More people are signing up for the Facebook platform every day, which means the numbers are dynamic and makes the connections even closer. For instance, in 2011, researchers at Cornell, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and Facebook analyzed the average across 721 million people using the site then, and found that the degree of connection between people was 3.74. Now, with twice as many people using Facebook, we've grown more interconnected, thus shortening the distance between any two people in the world.

One problem with Facebook’s figures is that in real life, the majority of people only consider a portion of their Facebook friends as “real” friends. The typical Facebook user has 155 friends, but only describes 50 of them as friends in real life, according to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center. Thirty-five percent of people have Facebook friends they've never met in person.

What does this mean? For one, social media and the Internet have drawn us all closer to each other – in a way. Maybe we aren’t any closer to each other in terms of real life interactions, but in a virtual world, we find connection.

Found if this social network makes a good dating service substitute, read our Facebook review.

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.