Studies

Popular online dating website OKCupid recently dug into its member base and asked the question: why are men not seeking women of their equal age or older? According to their post-Valentine’s Day blog entry, the typical user on their site aged 22-30 states age preferences for female matches to be younger. Now, that was worth a deeper look by their staff and what they found might surprise you.

OKCupid’s user base peaks at about 7 million users aged 24 and drops significantly as age increases. This could simply be a factor of OKCupid having developed into an online dating site that caters to a younger crowd or that membership over age 30 decreases because people in those age brackets are in relationships/married. So herein lies the question that OKCupid set out to answer: why are older women on the site having a more difficult time matching-up than their male counterparts?

It all comes down to age preferences stated in the male user’s online dating profile, they say.

While the male to female user ratio on OKCupid stays fairly balanced across the age brackets, men consistently indicate in their user profiles that they prefer dating younger women. While they do indicate that they are open to older women, it’s with much narrower limits. For example: OKCupid’s average 31-year-old male user sets his age range preference for women as 22 to 35 – a full nine years younger but a mere 4 years older. And here’s the shocker – as male age increases, age preferences toward younger women skew even further. They give the example of their median 42-year-old male user typically looking for women up to fifteen years younger but only three years their senior.

Interestingly enough, when OKCupid flipped the coin, they found women to be much more tolerant of age ranges. Women on the site typically message those younger and older than themselves with equal frequency. They also become more open to dating older men after age 29 according to messaging practices tracked on the site.

So with the skew in view, where does that leave men and women in the quest to find a match when age enters the equation? Check out the second installment of this article: OKCupid Says Men Are Looking for Older Women and Just Don’t Know It. For more information on the dating site, check out our review of OkCupid.

One of the stumbling blocks for members of dating sites is that fact that people can be deceptive online. In "real life", people can obviously be deceptive as well, but at least the other person can read nonverbal cues to help in determining if they think that the person they are talking to is lying.

Jeffrey T. Hancock, a communications professor at Cornell University gathered hundreds of active online daters in New York City to see how far people went in lying on dating profiles. The researches downloaded the peoples profiles and compared the information with verifiable data. This included physical attributes that could be gather on the spot like, height and weight, as well as income information which they could later look up. What the research found was white lies are common. 8 in 10 people had a small fib on their profile. This include things like their height being off by an inch or so, too their weight being 10 pounds over what they specified. Major lies like someone's marital status, were found to be rare.

Women also tended to lie more about things men care about. The most common was about physical attributes. Men lied as well, but usually on things that indicated their status in life, like income or occupation.

Most of these deceptions were not intended to be malicious. People usually lied about things that they see, they may be lacking in. If they ever meet a person in real life who had read their profile, they hoped that they would be interesting enough, that the other person would over look any deceptions.

Hancock also suggests, in which I agree with him on, is

as online dating sites are woven into social networks -- where people are linked to a web of real references -- instances of exaggeration will decrease. But even then, he says, people are still likely to present a version of their best self, even if that's not quite who they are today.

For more on this story, you can read the Washington Post.

Self Magazine did an informal survey of its female readers about internet dating, casual sex and porn. It doesn't say how many people took the survey but let's take a look at some of the results anyways.

Question: Who is using an online dating site?

• Age 18 to 25 - 29%
• Age 26 to 35 - 52%
• Age 36 to 50 - 51%
• Age 51 and older - 68%

We first learned about the study to find which gender is pickier when it comes to dating in July (see Story). In an article from Live Science we learned a few more details about this speed dating study by Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick of Northwestern University.

The studies participants were 350 college students who were divided into 15 speed dating events. Each student went on 4 minute speed dates with about 12 singles of the opposite sex. After each mini date, each student would rate:

• How much self confidence they felt.
• Romantic desire for the person on the date.
• The romantic chemistry that the participant felt existed between them.
• Would you like to see this person again?

After the data was compiled from the speed dating events, it was found that the daters who rotated around the room to each participant who was sitting, that they experienced greater romantic desire and chemistry. This means the people who went from person to person were less selective than the person sitting waiting for the next date in the rotation. The study further confirmed that this fact was true for both men and women. Finkel & Eastwick concluded that it was the act of approaching, or being approached by a person, which determined who was more likely to be more selective in determining a partner.

If speed dating is of interest to you, check out our Speed Dating Services category for all dating sites that offer online and off speed dating events near you.

In Taiwan at the National Sun Yat-Sen University, a new study has found that when online daters are presented with more choices in matches, they have less of a chance in finding love. The study calls it cognitive overload, since singles made poorer decisions in partner choices, when presented with a larger list of suitors. The researchers found, the longer the list of potential partners, the less selective a person became and the less time they actually spent evaluating each dating profile.

For more on the story, read the New York Daily News.

In online dating, are more matches better? Well, according to PhysOrg.com this may not be the case. A study done recently showed that:

people tend to anticipate that they’ll feel better about “shopping for a mate” when there is a large number of options. However, in actuality, people feel equally good when faced with few as opposed to many options.

Participants in the study predicted on average that they would be most satisfied with between 20 and 50 matches. What was found, was these same participants in actuality experience similar satisfaction with just 4 matches.