Advice

There are plenty of places where people could potentially find the love of their life. There are bars, outdoor events, group activities, and even on a park bench as you read your favorite book. Members of the opposite sex are everywhere. They live and breathe among us. However even when surrounded by an incomprehensible number of options that pass us by every day, it can still seem impossible to find that one person that you may want to spend your life with. For a lot of people, online dating websites have become that key instrument in finding the love of their lives.

With more people pouring into websites like Match.com, Plenty Of Fish, Eharmony, Okcupid, and many others, online dating has become a more socially respectable way to find dates and potential relationships. Online dating statistics show that close to 20 million men and women join an online dating platform each month. The leading online dating website, Match.com, which launched in 1995, has over 20 million members alone. Free online dating websites like OkCupid, which launched in 2004, has over 3.5 million members, and Plenty of Fish, which launched in 2003, has over 10 million active users. As online dating continues to grow, it provides a significant option for people looking to meet the right person they might want to spend the rest of their life with. Here are some benefits of online dating.

1. More people online are taking dating seriously.

Online dating websites have accounted for one out of six marriages as of 2009. Online Dating Magazine estimates that over 280,000 marriages a year are a direct result of online dating. Certain pay sites like Match.com tend to have more people who are interested in finding a meaningful relationship. When someone pays for an online dating website there seems to be a greater likelihood that they're looking for something serious.

2. It's easier to find compatibility

Most online dating websites use compatibility tests to help their users find someone they could connect with. This is an amazing tool when some online dating websites have millions of users and profiles you might have had to browse through. Also, by having a personal description, you have the opportunity to define your interests and show others what you're into, unlike meeting someone at a bar where the only defining quality that you could measure your interest with is a person's appearance. By reading up about someone or finding out how he or she articulates themselves, you'll have an easier time gauging their personality and how it compares to your own.

3. You get to know someone before meeting them in person.

In the real world you'd have to go on a large amount of dates to find someone that even slightly comes close to your liking. You may go on a lot of these dates only to realize that you wish you got to know them better before you actually got to meet them. Dates take a lot of time, effort, and money. Going out weekly or even monthly with people you barely know can lead to a lot of wasted and disappointing evenings. When you meet someone online you could move slowly and really get to know each other. You could move from one form of communication to another. Before you actually decide that this is someone you'd like to meet in person, you could move from messaging each other online to instant messaging to talking on the phone.

4. Everyone is available.

One of the most aggravating issues with trying to meet people in the real world is that most people aren't single. An online dating website is a platform for only single men and women. You won't have to deal with falling in love with someone who's in a relationship or married. With an online dating website everyone is searching for someone new.

"If someone doesn't think you're hot, the next best thing for them to think is that you're ugly."

It's a wild claim, but it's the conclusion drawn by OkCupid's latest study, "The Mathematics Of Beauty." We reviewed the data gathered from the experiment in two previous posts (you can find them here and here), so let's get straight to everyone's most burning questions:

"What on earth is going on here? And what does it mean for me?"

The first question can be answered using game theory. We're presented with a paradox: when some men on a dating site think a woman is unattractive, other men are more likely to message her, and when some men consider a woman "cute," other men show less interest in her.

Game theory explains the paradox like this:

• A man who is interested in a woman has less competition for her affections from men who are not interested in her.
• Believing that other men are not interested the woman, the man will begin thinking "Perhaps she's feeling lonely and unappreciated because men aren't pursuing her. I have a greater chance of connecting with her because my competition is so weak."
• That man would therefore have increased incentive to send her a message, because the odds of it being received positively are higher.

• On the other hand, a woman who is universally considered "cute," but not "hot," is likely to appear more in-demand than she actually is.
• To the average man, she is attractive enough to create the impression that many other men are interested in her, too.
• Some men will decide to take their chances and send her a message anyway, but many will think that the competition is too strong and will chose to move on to someone else they think they have a better chance with.

It's difficult to make a change to your overall level of attractiveness, but this theory can be used to your advantage in other ways. The key to success, according to this study, is to create variance, a difference of opinion regarding your attractiveness. In Christian Rudder's words: "Take whatever you think some guys don't like - and play it up." Think of the Suicide Girls type - tattoos and piercings aren't for everyone, but some people love them. People with body modification know that it makes them unique, show it off, and don't are if some people don't like it. And it gets them lots of attention.

You don't have get "Mom" tattooed on your bicep or pierce your eyebrow to get dates, but the principle is the same. Browse through the profile photos of any dating site, and you'll see countless pictures that are taken to hide a trait that is supposedly undesirable or unattractive, like a angle that disguises a large nose or a cropped photo that only shows the face of an overweight person. But if the OkCupid research team is right, "we now have mathematical evidence that minimizing your 'flaws' is the opposite of what you should do." Display the mole on your face or the embarrassing tattoo you got when you were drunk with pride! The men who aren't into your look will increase your chances with those who are, and the ones who do like will fall for you even harder.

To find out more about this online dating service, you can check out our OKCupid.com review.

Kristen Bell is universally thought of as good-looking.

Megan Fox is frequently considered super hot, but is also regarded as unattractive by many.

And how do regular OkCupid users stack up against such famous competition?

To explore how mathematics can determine a man's reaction to a woman's appearance, the OkCupid research team found users willing to submit their photographs to scrutiny under the site's 5 star rating system. Woman A had an attractiveness rating of 3.4/5 stars, and the number of messages she receives per month is 0.8 times the site's average. Woman B had an attractiveness rating of 3.3, and the number of messages she receives per month is 2.3 times the site's average. Though their star rating is very similar, the number of responses these women receive is very different. The pattern of votes that determined their attractiveness rating is also very different: for Woman A, there was a clear consensus, while for Woman B, there was a split decision. In simple terms:

• Girls who are described as "cute" tend to be ignored by men.
• The more men as a group disagree about a woman's level of attractiveness, the more they end up liking her.
• Having some men think she is "ugly" can actually work in a woman's favor.

These are three of the surprising conclusions drawn from the latest OkTrend's study, "The Mathematics of Beauty." This time, the researchers at OkCupid focused on female attractiveness by looking beyond a woman's profile photo and "into the reaction she creates in the reptile mind of the human male." As always, the data used was gathered from the activity of actual OkCupid users, in this case 1.54 million votes, 596,000 messages, and 64,000 profiles.

It should come as no surprise that the hottest OkCupid members receive more page views and messages than less good-looking users, and it probably also isn't a surprise that men dedicate more time to the pursuit of attractiveness than women do. A beautiful woman on OkCupid receives approximately 4 times more messages than an average woman, and 25 times more messages than an unattractive woman. The OkCupid team examined a sample of 5,000 women, and sorted them based on attractiveness and the number of messages they received during the last month.

The graph, which can be found here in the original article, was adjusted to account for differences in factors like "race, location, age, profile completeness, login activity and so on," so that the only meaningful difference between the subjects plotted on the chart was their physical attractiveness. The graph revealed an extremely wide range of results, showing women with the same level of attractiveness receiving a vastly different number of messages per month.

Armed with the data, the OkCupid team set out to determine what caused the disparities they had found...and the key, it turns out, is in mathematics.

If we rate attractiveness using the classic 10-point scale, a woman who is rated a 7 could be a 7 because everyone who sees her considers her to be one. On the other hand, she could be a 7 because the majority of people consider her a 10, and a few think she is a 0. If all we know about a woman is that she's a 7, we don't know how that number was determined. Writer Christian Rudder uses actress Kristen Bell to illustrate the point: while she is certainly good-looking, she is not out-of-this-world, supermodel hot. Most people would probably rate her as "very attractive," while a smaller number of people will likely consider her "super hot" and few would say she is "unattractive." In the case of Megan Fox, however, many people are likely to rate her attractiveness as extremely high - higher than Kristen Bell's - but a significant number of people will also probably rate her attractiveness as low (lower than Kristen Bell's).

What happens when this theory is applied to real OkCupid users?

We'll find out next time.

According to BigThink.com writer Marina Adshade, the answer is YES.

In an article called "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating", OkCupid's dating research blog, OkTrends, reported in April of this year that the practice of paying for dates on other dating sites is fundamentally broken. Their main argument is that there are too few subscribers on paid dating sites, and therefore too few potential matches for each single-and-searching member. It's a point that might be valid, but there is also a counter-argument: "that if you do find a match on an online dating site, that match is more likely to commit to meet if they have paid a fee for the service."

A 2009 study published in Current Psychology called "Sunk Cost and Commitment to Dates Arranged Online" tested this theory by creating an online dating simulation in which participants "paid" a fee in order to search online for potential dates after answering a questionnaire describing their ideal match. After the search, participants were told that a match was found, but that he or she didn't have all of the qualities the participant was looking for. They were also told that a friend was interested in setting them up on a blind date with a person who was a perfect match for them. Each participant was told to choose how much time, out of an hour total, they would be willing to commit to the inferior match from the dating site, and how much time they would commit to the superior match of the blind date.

The results of the study backed up Adshade's theory. A strong correlation was observed between a participant's preference for the match from the online dating site and the amount of money they had invested in the service. Participants who paid little or no money for the match making service were significantly less likely to choose the online date over the blind date than participants who paid a higher fee. On average, the length of time women in the study choose to dedicate to a date was 13 minutes when the cost was $0, and 28 minutes when the cost was $50. Men who paid $0 were willing to commit 28 minutes to a date, while men who paid $50 were willing to commit 49 minutes.

Adshade draws two important conclusions from this research:

1. If money is used to encourage commitment, men need much less of an incentive to commit than women do.
2. Sunk cost effects tend to disappear over time, which means that if you're searching for a partner online it is advantageous to use a site that charges a monthly fee, rather than a one-time upfront fee.

So what do you think, daters? Are you more likely to find your match using a free dating site or a paid online dating service?

I am not sure what the woman from Australia was thinking, who was mentioned in this article about her being scammed from someone she met on a dating site? Let's go over the facts:

• Her husband died 11 years ago
• She has 2 teenage kids
• She never met the guy in person
• He promised her marriage and $28 million
• She sold her home and investment property for $600,000 and sent him the money to "invest"

At the moment she is warning women to avoid dating sites because of her experience. First of all, this could have happened to her with a person she met in real life, I do not see how it is the fault of online dating. She should be warning women about not sending men they just met online, money. In her story there are huge warning flags and I think the women choose to ignore them just because she was being greedy, especially when she thought she was getting $28 million out of it. I think the real victims here are her two children, she should have been thinking about them. Now I don't think anyone deserves to be scammed, she just should have thought things through.