General News

Did you know there's an International Kissing Day on July 6th (or World Kiss Day)? Me neither, but it sounds like a holiday I'd be happy to celebrate every year.

Zoosk.com celebrated this year's International Kissing Day with a survey and an infographic, after collecting votes from thousands of couples and singles in 9 countries. Here's what they had to say:

• French kisses are more popular in the United States than they are in France! 46% of Americans called the French kiss their favorite way to smooch, but only 21% of French snoggers said the same thing.
• The least favorite kiss in America was the air kiss, which received only 1% of the vote. The most popular way to lock lips in France, with 55% voting in favor, was a "single sensual lip kiss."
• Americans and Italians have very liberal views when it comes to public displays of affection. 95% of Americans and 90% of Italians said they're totally fine with PDA.
• Americans are also the most likely to kiss on the first date. 52% were up for a first-date smooch, while less than half of respondents in European countries said the same thing. Next came Sweden with 47%, followed by Italy (42%), Denmark (37% ), France (32%), and Germany (b%).
• Most people, wherever they reside, think bad breath is a major turn-off. Other big kissing no-no's were wet kisses, using too much tongue, a kisses that are too short.
• There's another kind of "French kissing" that's gaining popularity. And no, this kind doesn't involve tongue. Using a kiss as a greeting is now becoming a common practice outside of France. 55% of Americans say they've adopted the French tradition that 95% of French respondents say they use!
• You say goodbye, and I say hello. Which kiss is more important - the kiss "hello" or the kiss "goodbye?" According to Zoosk's survey, it depends on where you live. 64% of Americans favored the goodbye kiss, while 84% of French lovers gave precedence to the kiss "hello."
• And here's something I bet you've always wondered: What is the most romantic Hollywood screen kiss? The award went to Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling for The Notebook, a kiss they repeated at the MTV Movie Awards after winning the coveted Best Kiss honor.

Can't wait for International Kissing Day 2013!

For an up-close-and-personal look at the Zoosk infographic, click here. For more about the dating site which provided the graphic you can read our review of Zoosk.com

Now there's a headline I never thought I'd write...

Nobody likes dirty laundry. We all wish our mothers would still do our laundry for us. In fact, some of our mothers may actually still be doing laundry for us.

But now you may want to give Mom a break, because a new event is in town that promises to use your dirty laundry to find the love of your life. The Pheromone Party is a gathering of adventurous singles who spend an evening sniffing t-shirts and letting their noses lead them to the perfect mate. Sure, it sounds a little crazy, but so did online dating when it first came out.

Judith Prays created The Pheromone Party to capitalize on nature's most basic instincts. Why put the emphasis on attractive features, dancing skills, and witty conversation when you could date based on primal attraction switches? Cut out the middle man!

To score an invite to the get-together, interested singles must apply by sending a picture...of their armpit. Then participants wear a t-shirt to bed for three days in a row, without using deodorant or perfume. On the evening of the party, each shirt is placed in a Ziploc bag, assigned a number, and color-coded by gender.

Most parties involve drinks, dancing, and dj-ing, but at a Pheromone Party guests spend the evening sniffing each other's 3-day-old shirts and mulling over the scents like sommeliers tasting a new vintage. Instead of "oakey," "crisp," and "tannic," however, Pheromone Party attendees use descriptions like "hint of onion" and "strange scent of Play-Doh."

When a particular scent tickles their fancy, a photographer snaps the sniffer holding up the shirt in question and the photo is projected on a wall. If you spot your shirt on the wall, it's a clear invitation to introduce yourself to the lucky lad or lass who found your odor so appealing.

Yeah, it all sounds a little insane, but there might be some actual science to back it up. Genetic researchers have found that humans use scent to weed out genetic combinations that could result in weaker offspring, so it stands to reason that scent could also be used to pick out partners who are ideal genetic matches.

So far the parties are only held in New York and Los Angeles, but if success is anything to go by, they may be expanding soon. Judith Prays says that 12 of the 40 people invited to the first party hooked up, and that half of those hook ups turned into long-term relationships

Forget about following your heart. Now it's time to follow your nose.

Remember that lesson you learned about not judging a book by its cover? Throw it out the window. The latest dating site to join the fray is all about appearances.

The site in question is FindYourFaceMate.com, a new dating service that's set to launch on July 10. Researchers studying attraction have found that facial features play an integral role in mate selection. When someone has features similar to your own, you are naturally inclined to trust them. And we all know trust is the foundation of any good relationship, right?

The idea of “facially compatible” partners isn’t a new one, though this may be the first time it’s been used so consciously. Think of all the times you’ve seen a cute couple and thought “Wow, they look so alike!” That’s the science of attraction at work.

Kerri Johnson, an assistant psychology professor at UCLA, explains that "There is evidence that general liking improves when people look like you." In romantic relationships, compatible partners tend to be of a similar level of attractiveness.

"Across dimensions, people who are similar tend to be attracted to each other," Johnson says. "'Birds of a feather flock together' characterizes most aspects of interpersonal attraction," and “There's a long-standing pattern where a person's own level of attractiveness is matched in their partner.”

Face.com is the service behind the magic of Find Your FaceMate. The Israeli company has provided Face.com technology to Facebook for nearly two years, in the form of the tag suggestion tool which helps users identify their friends in photographs, and was recently acquired by Facebook.

The same technology will be used by Find Your FaceMate. The service examines 63 points of interest on the human face to determine whether the same person is featured in multiple photos. The software examines each of the facial features and compares them with other faces in an attempt to make a positive identification. On Facebook, it’s used to recognize the same person. On Find Your FaceMate, it will be used to find singles with similar features who could be potential dates.

But the face isn’t everything, so I guess what your parents taught you about judging books is true after all. “In the beginning, it’s the face,” says Christina Bloom, founder of Find Your FaceMate. “But there are other things at play. Do you have the same values? It doesn’t mean it’s going to be a successful relationship.”

It seems like a no-brainer: the more you say "thank you" to your partner the more likely you are to stay together. But when you're in the middle of a fight or you've been together a while, it's easy to just expect things from your partner, rather than appreciating what you do for each other on a regular basis.

A new study was released from University of California, Berkley, that found couples who did appreciate each other were more likely to increase commitment to their relationships, and those who didn't were more likely to split. Researchers examined 50 couples who had been in relationships for about fifteen months, asking them to complete questionnaires nightly for about a week, documenting how appreciated they felt and how appreciative they were towards their partners.

On days where participants felt appreciated by their partners, they were more likely to express and return feelings of appreciation the following day. Also, they were less likely to have broken up nine months later, and were more committed to the relationship.

Researchers also brought participants into the lab so they could study how the couples interacted: how often they touched each other, how they spoke to each other, how engaged each was in the conversation and how often they made eye contact. They discovered that, the more understanding, validating, and caring participants were towards their partners, the more appreciated the partner felt and the happier both were in the relationship. The physical gestures - making eye contact and touching your partner - were seen as ways partners show gratitude.

"When you are appreciative and you notice the value in your partner," said researcher Amie Gordon in an interview with LiveScience, "it helps you realize what you have and makes you want to hold on to it. You have something good and you think, 'I want to keep it.'

It makes sense; when we take our significant others for granted it leads to feelings of insecurity, doubt and frustration. This can also be the cause of miscommunication, especially when couples are together for a long time. Instead of really listening to what each other says, it's sometimes easier to make assumptions which aren't correct. This is why it's so important to communicate well in any relationship, no matter how long you've been together or how well you think you know the other person.

Couples in the study ranged in age from 18 to 60, and about half of them lived together at the time of the study.

Would you pay to have your status updates highlighted on Facebook?

For online daters, this system is old news. Many online dating websites offer the option of having a profile highlighted or ranked at the top in search results in exchange for a small additional fee. But for social networking sites, this is a new approach to interacting online.

Apparently only a measly 12% of your Facebook friends actually see your status updates on average. Facebook is now toying with the idea of adding Highlight, a feature that lets users pay a few bucks to have their posts appear to more friends. Facebook is currently testing the new feature out, offering a paid version to a small percentage of its user base. A free version is also available, designed to determine if Facebookers are at all interested in the Highlight option.

It might be a nifty new way to make sure your voice is heard by more people, but let's face it - Facebook's real motivation is the money. Facebook's worth is based on its potential for earning money, not actual money it earns, and the company needs to turn that around if it's going to continue receiving funds from investors.

It's likely that Facebook will now pursue more aggressive strategies for making money, a plan that could easily backfire for a service that members are used to using for free. Although there are no known plans to charge for all use of Facebook, pay-for-popularity features - and other paid features - could be major turn offs for users who were initially drawn to the site because it's free. Younger users - which make up a huge portion of Facebook's user base - may also be resistant to the inclusion of paid features, as they're less likely to have the financial resources to pay for them.

Facebook's diplomatic statement on the matter reveals very little:

"We're constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people's interest in this method of sharing with their friends."

The Highlight feature could prove useful, but it also poses potential problems. Highlighted posts could easily compromise the relevance of the news feed, which currently uses a sorting algorithm to display posts by a user's closest friends and posts that have received a significant number of Likes and comments. Highlight could distort that, and may turn your news feed into a marketing scheme from club promoters, small businesses, and anyone else who would benefit from increased attention.

I'm going to stay skeptical for now, but perhaps Facebook will surprise me. I'll do my best to keep an open mind.

To find out more about what makes this social networking site a good place to meet singles (or not) you can read our Facebook review.

Not a day goes by that I don't mourn the loss of OkCupid's fabulous, informative, fascinating, controversial Labs posts. Ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration...but I do miss the crazy questions, bright infographics, and provocative food-for-thought they provided.

The days of those posts may be long gone, but thankfully an amateur data analyst named Jon Millward has performed an experiment that picked up where OkCupid left off. He called the project "OkCupid on Trial: A 4-month Online Dating Experiment Using 10 Fictional Singletons," and decided to test the widely-held theory that women have it easier than men in the online dating world.

Millward put the theory to the test by making ten fake profiles and observing the responses he received to each, based purely off superficial notions of "attractiveness." To choose which ten pictures would participate in the experiment, Millward polled three separate people who rated the attractiveness of the pictures by what they thought members of OkCupid were most likely to be attracted to.

It turns out they were pretty good judges. Within 24 hours of the profiles being online:

• Only 1 man received a message.
• But every woman received at least one.
• And the 2 most attractive women received 581% more messages than the other three combined.

Seven days into the experiment, Millward found the following results:

• The most-contacted woman received nearly 17 times more messages in 1 week than the most-contacted man.
• Three men received no messages at all, even though their profiles had been viewed 25 times between them.
• The women's messages outnumbered the men's 17 to 1 (largely due to the 2 most attractive women).
• The 2 men ranked most attractive received 5 fewer messages than the women who were voted 3rd and 4th most attractive.

And just in case you want to write off his results as a fluke, Millward expanded the project to England and replicated the experiment. His findings were exactly the same: the two most attractive women received 83% of all messages. The most popular woman's inbox filled at 2 months, 13 days - but it would take 2.3 years for the most popular man's inbox to max out.

If attracting attention is the goal, then yes - Millward's experiment has shown a bias in favor of women on dating sites. But that also comes with a downside: the wider selection capabilities means a signal to noise ratio that makes the selection process a nearly-insurmountable challenge.

Men on dating sites face challenges of their own, largely due to the extreme competition from other male members. The best way for men to stand out online is to write unique, intriguing messages, which Millward suggests doing by:

• Demonstrating creativity, intelligence, and humor.
• Forgoing "cut-and-paste" style messages for unique notes that show you've read her profile.
• Not being needy.

Conclusion: men may have it a little harder than women, but if all it takes to bridge that gap is write more thoughtful messages, guys don't have it so bad after all.

To find out more about the dating site mentioned you can read our OkCupid review.