Studies

If I asked what you think the secret to a happy marriage is, what would you say?

Communication?

Date nights?

Spontaneity?

Thoughtfulness?

Respect?

Acceptance?

They're all good answers, but a new study suggests that the real answer might be something you weren't expecting: online dating.

Didn't see that one coming, did you? (Ok, sure, if you read the title you did...but humor me.)

The Internet has forever changed the way people communicate, work, play, create, and date. 1/3 of American couples now meet their partners online, through email, dating sites, and social networks.

In a survey study of more than 19,000 Americans who married between 2005 and 2012, 5% divorced, 2% separated, and 92% remained married. The couples observed were generally representative of the population, but a few demographics showed a particular inclination towards online dating:

• Men
• People in their 30s and 40s
• Hispanics
• People who are employed
• People with higher socioeconomic statuses

Even after accounting for the differences between subjects, the study drew two primary conclusions. The first will surprise no one: the popularity of online dating has increased across every segment of American society. The second comes as more of a shock: marriages that began online were found to be longer lasting and more satisfying for couples.

Lead author of the study John Cacioppo, a psychologist and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, explains the findings by saying dating sites may "attract people who are serious about getting married."

A sociologist, Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford University, backs up Cacioppo's findings. In his own research, he found that "couples who meet online are more likely to progress to marriage than couples who meet in other ways."

But the study is not without its critics. "It's a very impressive study," says social psychologist Eli Finkel of Northwestern University. "But it was paid for by somebody with a horse in the race and conducted by an organization that might have an incentive to tell this story."

That's right - the study was commissioned by eHarmony, which shelled out $130,000 to pay for the research. Cacioppo has also been a member of eHarmony's Scientific Advisory Board since it was created in 2007.

Is it intriguing research? Yes. But does that sound like a major conflict of interest? Absolutely.

Sure, online dating is a great way to meet a partner with high levels of compatibility and real marriage potential. But is online dating better than offline dating? Survey says: inconclusive.

It's one of the first questions you answer when joining an online dating site: What's your occupation? It's also one of the first questions you're asked when meeting someone: So what do you do for a living?

We all want to know how our dates pay the bills, and eHarmony knows why.

An eHarmony study looked into how career impacts romance, finding that what you do for a living has - no surprise here - a major impact on what you look for in a partner.

Last year a different study found that the worst careers for romance were personal finance, law enforcement, interactive technology, healthcare, publishing, mental health, optometry, education administration, fitness, aviation, journalism, business ownership, real estate, and law. The trend was clear: the more hours spent at a high-intensity job, the greater negative impact the career has on your love life.

Career addicts striving to achieve work-life balance should look for partners who have very different professions, says the new eHarmony study. Some of the most successful match-ups are:

• Self-employed women with engineers, female business executives with barbers or hair stylists, stay at home moms with dentists, and female doctors with bankers
• Unemployed men with personal trainers, male personal trainers with advertisers, male pilots with beauticians, and soldiers with female business executives

Some professions are willing to communicate with matches from all walks of life, while others are more choosy about who they chat with. The most picky daters are:

• Men who are engineers, analysts, lawyers, web developers, and bankers
• Women who are marketers, business executives, analysts, lawyers, and teachers

The most flexible daters are:

• Men who are soldiers, retired, skilled tradesmen, and students
• Women who are students, skilled tradeswomen, in the food service industry, and in retail sales

The eHarmony study also found that some job combinations are more likely to lead to a date than others. The most successful professional pairings are:

• Male and female business executives dating each other
• Male marketers with female business executives
• Male engineers with female business executives
• Policemen and firemen with female teachers

The least successful professional pairings are:

• Retired men with female administrative assistants
• Male artists with female students
• Male bankers with female administrative assistants
• Male doctors with female students

"When it comes to who's talking to who, most people are looking to talk to someone who does something different than themselves," an eHarmony spokesperson told the Daily Mail.

So I guess that's further proof that office romances aren't the way to go.

To find out more about this online matchmaking site you can check out our eHarmony.com review.

What wins out on online dating sites: job status or social status?

Where are all the sensitive men hiding?

Those are the questions answered by two new dating studies, conducted by Lovestruck.com and Chemistry.com.

Lovestruck.com's new profile verification service, called "Lovestruck Verified," has revealed a significant difference between genders in what matters to members when authenticating their dating profile. Lovestruck Verified helps combat online dating fraud by cross-checking users' profiles against the 'Big 3' social IDs: LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Lovestruck found a clear preference between genders for which types of verification were used. Male members are 36% more likely than women to verify their profiles, including their job titles, via their their LinkedIn accounts. Women, on the other hand, are 39% more likely than men to cross-check their photos, age, and relationship status against their Facebook accounts. Twitter is the least popular of the three options and shows no difference between the sexes. What does all that mean? It seems that men are more interested in verifying their job status, while women prefer to authenticate their social status.

In other online dating research, Chemistry.com ranked America's Top Ten Cities to Find a Sensitive Man in January, hoping to help single gals find a special someone around Valentine's Day. They found that the highest concentrations of sensitive men are located along the east coast, from Florida to New York, with three popular vacation destinations taking the top three spots: Pompano Beach in Florida, Roanoke in Virginia, and West Hollywood in California. Ann Arbor, Michigan, known for being a college sports town, ranked as the least likely place to find a sensitive man.

Dr. Helen Fisher, Chief Scientific Advisor to Chemistry.com, weighed in on the findings: Sensitive men, known as Builders, are traditional. They deeply value loyalty, duty, respectability and proper moral conduct. They want to do the "right" thing. Builders go way out of their way to keep their social relationships running smoothly. So they watch, listen, and gauge what they need to do to help others and they do it naturally. It's these chivalrous qualities that make a sensitive man."

Rounding out the top ten are:

1. Nashville, Tennessee
2. Buffalo, New York
3. Sarasota, Florida
4. Greenville, South Carolina
5. Wilmington, North Carolina
6. Indianapolis, Indiana
7. Staten Island, New York

For more information on one of the dating sites mentioned in this article, please read our review of Chemistry.com

"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.