Relationships

Tinder is no doubt the latest craze of online and mobile dating. Most singles have heard of it, if they aren’t already using it. But despite the fact that Tinder requires you to sign up via your Facebook profile (which keeps out the fake profiles and supposedly keeps people honest about who they are) – hackers are finding ways to game the system for their own benefit.

A recent article by such a hacker appeared in Android Central, where the author Cage Michaels - who is happily in a relationship - enjoys just being on Tinder, flipping through photos and judging each woman's hotness. He has decided to share his strategy with the masses (“FTW” – “for the win” - as he says). To him, Tinder has nothing to do with his relationship and his “real life,” but considers it a game or a way to pass time entertainingly. He says, “I'm in a relationship. I'm happy. I just find it really entertaining to swipe through photos of real people. Some people spend all day looking at photos of cats. Personally, I'd rather look at photos of women. To each their own.”

Of course, in order to look at photos on Tinder you have to be on Tinder. This created a problem for him, because his friends (and her friends) noticed he was on the app and were wondering if he was cheating or had broken up with his girlfriend. According to him, neither was the case. Hence his dilemma – how could he Tinder without all the hassle?

Instead of setting up a fake Facebook profile (which can take some effort), he decided to outsmart Tinder’s GPS capabilities and fake the app into thinking he was visiting another city (where he had no friends or connections). This made his Tinder habit easy to maintain.

He goes step-by-step in the article, guiding people first through downloading a fake GPS app. Once you download, you can pick the city where you want to anonymously browse Tinder profiles. When you hit the “play” button within the fake GPS, you can then enable a fake GPS signal. Once you open Tinder, it will pick up the fake GPS location from your phone and use that for its search.

While this is one way of creating a fake profile on Tinder, it certainly isn’t the only way to outsmart the app. There are new apps being launched that take advantage of Tinder’s functionality by allowing people to match en masse without even looking at profiles, just to increase your odds of success.

Between these and the hackers, you might want to question whether your Tinder match is real, or just another person who’s gaming the system. 

Do you approve of sex on a first date, or would you avoid it at all costs? People typically fall into very distinctive camps in this heated debate – yes or never. Maybe you use Tinder every night, swiping right until you get lucky, or perhaps you completely reject the idea of first date sex because you want to maintain a certain level of interest from the object of your affection by playing coy.

If you’d rather wait to have sex, you’re in agreement with a majority of Americans. According to a recent study by website Dating Advice, 66% of Americans do not approve of having sex on the first date – two out of every three people.

This seems counter-intuitive to our culture. After all, dating apps like Tinder – an efficient and speedy app that connects people quickly, often for hooking up – are becoming the new norm. We are inundated with sexy images in the media, and our views as a culture have become increasingly liberal. There isn’t the stigma that used to be associated with premarital sex. So why does this attitude towards first date sex remain?

According to Gary Lewandowski Jr., the chair of psychology at Monmouth University and co-creator of ScienceofRelationships.com, most Americans say they don't approve of first date sex but, "it may not indicate how much first date sex [they] are having themselves." He adds that the views respondents express "reflect conformity to expectations that society has, rather than a reflection of how they actually feel." In other words, they think they are supposed to disapprove of it, so they do.

He may be right, but attitudes vary among the sexes. There was a huge distinction between men and women in their responses, with 82% of women agreeing that they wouldn’t have first date sex while only 48% of men said they wouldn’t.

"Women are the harshest judges of other women's behavior," said Robin Milhausen, an associate professor of human sexuality at the University of Guelph. "Many women wouldn't think it was OK for a woman to have sex on the first date, thinking this would be 'slutty behavior'. Women also are aware of the double-standard, recognizing they could be judged negatively if they had sex on the first date, making first date sex an unwise behavior for them." Men however, have more supportive attitudes about casual sex, so they are more likely to say they would have it.

1,080 people over the course of three weeks were surveyed for the study.

A recent article in XO Jane was from a female online dater with a dilemma: she can’t seem to get any responses to her online dating profile. “Online dating has made me feel more alone and rejected than ever,” she said, noting the twenty emails she sent to potential matches with zero responses.

She is mystified by the lack of responses, something that happens to men on a regular basis but a lot less often to women. It does shake your confidence when you put yourself out there and receive no feedback, but why does it become an interesting story when it happens to a woman, but is still a regular occurrence for a man?

There is a double standard with online dating. Men have to reach out far more than women, and they get far more rejections and radio silence. Perhaps there is something to learn here about giving people a chance.

The writer does admit she got messages from a few men who “weren’t her type.” While I’m sure she reached out to the men she found most attractive, I can only assume the guys on the website were doing the same. And if she isn’t going to give a chance to the guys who messaged her, then why should she expect others to give her a chance?

Dating is a numbers game when you are reaching out to people online – you have to put a good amount of effort in, and depending on the site, use its features to your advantage. For instance, if it is OkCupid, answer a lot of questions and post your own for other site users. Start a conversation. Engage with the other online daters. If it’s eHarmony, check your matches every day and complete your entire profile and questionnaire before you opt out. If you are doing Match.com, then make sure you are checking all of your matches, posting new pictures, and changing your profile description on a regular basis to engage new members.

There are so many people online dating that sometimes it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. But you have to make the effort, use the tools/features provided, and be diligent about checking your matches and reaching out to as many potential dates as possible, even if you aren’t sure about their profile. Remember, someone could be judging you for one line, like if you admit to “liking 90’s music” or are “a fan of the Muppets and cats.” So try not to apply the same judgment to others. Give everyone a chance, even if something in his profile doesn’t click with you.

People are more interesting than a profile, and they deserve a chance, just like you. So expand your options, keep an open mind, be diligent about sending out messages - and watch your own responses increase.

There are few sources I trust to dish out genuinely good dating data, but Christian Rudder is at the top of the list. As one of the founders of OkCupid and the genius behind the OkTrends blog, Rudder has been granted an inside look at dating habits that no one can beat.

Recently, he turned that insider access into an article for The Guardian that exposes a few of the online dating secrets he’s learned over the years.

Did someone just talk about exposing secrets? Yep, it was me. Get hyped.

In case you missed it, head back to Part I for the first round of reveals from Rudder. If you’re all caught up, read on for the last 4 secrets to be spilled:

1. The British are really into Haribo and kebabs. Ok, that’s not exactly what Rudder said, but it’s close. Rudder compared Britain’s OkCupid profiles to those from the rest of the English-speaking world, and pulled out the words that are (at least according to his algorithms) most British.
   • The 30 words people in the UK use most when talking about themselves are: Newcastle, Bristol, wot, wasters, Camden, Brighton, tw*t, Portsmouth, Biffy, Clyro, trousers, trainers, Glasgow, feeder, Plymouth, consultancy, bloke, moaning, Haribo, kebab, nan, Ibiza, Essex, lecturer, Stereophonics, bolognese, Yorkshire, housemate, bugger, and sh*te.
2. Beauty is an exponential quantity on OkCupid. As attractiveness goes up, so does the number of messages received each week. It seems like basic logic, but Rudder takes it further. The data forms an exponential function - “That is,” he writes, “it obeys the same maths seismologists use to measure the energy released by earthquakes: beauty operates on a Richter scale. In terms of its effect, there is little noticeable difference between, say, a 1.0 and 2.0 – these cause tremors that vary only in degree of imperceptibility. But at the high end, a small difference has cataclysmic impact. A 9.0 is intense, but a 10.0 can rupture the world.”
3. Even when looking for a job, women are treated like they’re looking for a date. Rudder examined interview requests on ShiftGig and plotted the data against the attractiveness of the applicants. The male curve is linear, but the female curve is once again exponential - meaning that a man’s looks has no effect on his prospects, but a woman’s looks most certainly do.
4. The best questions to ask on a first date are probably not what you’re expecting. Two of OkCupid’s match questions stand out as being remarkably predictive of compatibility: “Do you like scary movies?” and “Have you ever traveled alone to another country?” In approximately ¾ of long-term couples who met on the site, both people answered those questions the same way - a much higher rate than expected. “In fact,” Rudder concludes, “successful couples agree on scary movies – either they both like them or they both hate them – about as often as they agree on the existence of God.”

Wondering if you should try online dating? Before you craft your profile, a new study by Michigan State University and Stanford found that people who met online weren’t as likely to stay together for the long-haul as those couples who met offline.

As it turns out, online dating sites who have been touting their matching success rates may not be telling the whole story. Many couples have successfully gotten together thanks to online dating, but that doesn’t mean they have lasted. The separation and divorce rates for folks who paired up online was much higher than for those who met their partners offline in more traditional ways.

According to the report, 8% of married couples who met their spouses online reported to have ended their marriage in separation or divorce, compared to approximately 2% of married couples who met their spouses offline. And compared to 23% couples who had met offline, 32% of couples who had met online had broken up in the following year of the survey.

Sometimes it seems like there are more people claiming to be experts on dating than there are actual people dating.

(Do I fit into that category? Don’t answer that. Let me retain my illusions of usefulness.)

Most of them are probably hacks making things up or regurgitating tired advice they read in Cosmo, but a few - a special few - are genuine experts who deserve their guru status. And few fit that description better than Christian Rudder, the data whiz behind OkCupid’s legendary OkTrends blog and recent author of a piece in The Guardian.

“I have led OkCupid’s analytics team since 2009, and my job is to make sense of the data our users create,” Rudder writes. “As people bring technology deeper and deeper into their lives, it can show us profound and ridiculous things about who we are as human beings.”

Anyone else loving the sound of “profound and ridiculous” as much as I am? I have to know: what exactly does OkCupid know that we normal folks don’t? Rudder was kind enough to offer a few examples:

1. Women have a sensible approach to ageing. You wouldn’t know it from watching The Real Housewives, but apparently women are actually pretty down-to-earth about the ageing process. At least where choosing a partner is concerned. On the whole, at every stage of her life, a woman prefers a man who is roughly as old as she is. On the other hand…
2. Men get older, but they don’t really grow up. It sounds like a tired stereotype, but in this case it seems to be true. Whether men are in their 20s, 30s, 40s - or even at 50 - they strongly prefer women in their early 20s. 20 and 21 are the most favored ages, though a few men are willing to go as high as 23 or 24. Yikes.
3. White people are really obsessed with their hair. After looking at 3.2 billion words of profile text, Rudder found that the top five phrases for white men and women include multiple references to their hair (plus prog-rock and outdoor activities). For other large racial and ethnic groups on OkCupid, hair is rarely a topic of discussion. For example:

• Black men: dreads, Jill Scott, Haitian, soca, neo soul
• Latino men: Colombian, salsa merengue, cumbia, una, merengue bachata
• Asian men: tall for an Asian, Asians, Taiwanese, Taiwan, Cantonese

For more dating secrets from OkCupid's resident data expert, stay tuned for Part II and check out Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking).