Matching

The incredible proliferation of niche dating sites is a popular topic these days. When we say there's something for everyone, we really mean there’s something for everyone. Whether you’re looking for a vampire, a farmer, or a sea captain (or maybe all three?), there’s a site looking to match you with your perfect partner.

By comparison, dating sites for foodies seem downright normal. Stefanie Tuder, culinary school graduate and online food writer for ABC News-“Good Morning America,” decided to take three foodie sites for a test drive (make that "a taste test") to survey the scene.

HowAboutWe

First on her list was HowAboutWe, which recently announced a partnership with Serious Eats. The sites are collaborating to get online daters offline, via activities like “tacos and a spin around the Bronx zoo" or "a crawl of the essential dumplings of Flushing." Other popular food-focused sites also have similar partnerships to connect like-minded singles. All members, regardless of which co-branded page they use to sign up, can interact with all other members in order to offer as wide a dating pool as possible.

For Tuder, that wasn’t ideal. “Rather than see other readers of Serious Eats, Eater, etc.,” she writes, “which is the reason I signed up and went to that branded landing page, I see everyone in my area on HowAboutWe. And not even only the ones who are particularly interested in food.” It’s possible to narrow down searches to people who suggest food and drink date ideas, but messaging someone requires at least an $8 monthly membership.

HiDine

HiDine stirred up some controversy when it hit the scene in November. Taking a staunchly traditional approach, only men can ask women out on a date on Hi Dine and by doing so they commit to picking up the tab. Tuder found that she received many more messages and date requests on HiDine than on the other sites she experimented with. Her two critiques include the messaging system, which she calls "pretty clunky," and the fact that women do not have the option of messaging men. All a woman can do to indicate her interest in a profile is "wink" at it.

SamePlate

“While SamePlate has the best of intentions,” Tuder writes, “it simply doesn't have enough members yet to be successful." SamePlate was founded in 2012 by a man who wanted to find a partner to eat Paleo with him. SamePlate covers the Paleo phenomenon as well as anything else a food lover could want. Members can use the free site to cross-reference search any mix of diet and food combinations, which is a pretty unbeatable feature if you consider yourself foodie.

Ultimately, Tuder concludes that foodie dating is “interesting,” but doesn’t have “strong enough of a pull to stay on full time."

People who participate in online dating may be more open to interracial relationships than those who stick solely to traditional dating, says a study published in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego analyzed the first interactions of 126,134 American OkCupid users to study the complex relationship tween online dating and race. They found, unsurprisingly, that many users tended to send messages to other users of their own race – but they also found that they were much more likely to respond to messages from users of a different racial background. The study also found that once an individual responded to a member of another race, they were even more likely to initiate conversation with other users of different ethnicities in the future.

"It's not that people's levels of prejudice are changing; people are avoiding others from a different racial background because they think those other people won't be interested," study author Kevin Lewis, a sociologist for UC San Diego, told USA Today. "Receiving an interracial contact and replying to it makes you send over twice as many new interracial messages in the short-term future than you would have otherwise."

Online daters may be chipping away at racial barriers, but that doesn't mean they've fallen completely. "Race as a dividing factor is much more important than basically any other attribute," Lewis explained. The study found that white online daters, both male and female, overwhelmingly made contact with other white users (although that's also due to the fact that there are more white people on OkCupid to choose from). Caucasian users were also the most likely to seek out people of another race. Those who identified as black, Hispanic, Indian or Asian were much more likely to stay within their own racial lane while online dating.

The only group that consistently bucked the trend was Asian women. Asian women were more likely to contact white men and other Asian men. They were also more likely to respond to white men (though it's important to note that all races were most likely to respond to white men).

Lewis calls online daters’ reluctance to reach out to users of different ethnic backgrounds "pre-emptive discrimination." Based on the way race has shaped their lives so far, they expect to experience rejection – or at least to have little in common with someone who doesn't share their heritage. But, says Lewis, the study suggests that if someone is bold enough to make the first move and overcome their fear of rejection, they are rewarded with the realization that the pool of potential partners is wider and richer than they had ever imagined.

Did you look to the most popular kids in high school when you needed dating advice? After all, they must be doing something right!

More often, I tried to listen to the good friends I had that knew me so well, but OkCupid seems to go along with the theory that the most popular kids have the most to teach the rest of us, at least when it comes to dating. So, I wanted to take a look at what they were saying.

OkCupid picked four of the most popular daters on the site (male and female, gay and straight) to provide tips for singles on how to online date.

The most popular straight female is a 23 year-old woman named Lauren who gets a lot of attention from her striking pictures and tattoos that cover her arms and legs. According to a recent interview in New York Magazine, Lauren receives around three dozen emails a day; in the last seven months, she’s received five-star ratings, the highest possible rating, from nearly 8,000 men.

Lauren admits she has an advantage because she is a make-up artist and knows how to create a good photo. Plus, she knows how to work the camera to show off features because guys are most interested in visuals. “I believe in a head-to-toe shot to show what you look like,” she says. “But you don’t need to have your ass hanging out!”

She also notes her love of astronomy, explaining that she likes to show her intelligence as well as her looks, even though guys still will message women based only on pictures (as we saw with a recent OkCupid experiment with the worst profile ever created).

She got a surge of emails she got when she first joined the site by choosing “casual sex” as a relationship possibility, along with long and short term options. This opened a floodgate of lude emails from guys. “I’m not a prostitute,” she tells the magazine. “But they don’t get that.” So she removed this description from her profile.

Some of the most questionable advice came from 29 year-old James Hawver, who said that he could double for Ryan Gosling, which I’m sure if it was true he would be one of the most popular guys on the site. He likes to accept every woman as a potential match, which I admire. When he uses Tinder, he accepts all matches even before looking at them. Same with OkCupid. He wants to know that a woman is interested before he starts messaging, so he only responds to the ones who accept him back, in order to cut down on the rejection. Because this can be time-consuming, he sends out the same generic yet flirtatious email to each of them, and gets quite a few responses.

He also likes to “round out the truth,” especially when it comes to physical factors like height. He is an inch shorter than his 5’10” profile would proclaim.

What does he do with all these matches? He goes on a lot of dates, and he doesn’t seem ready to settle down anytime soon. “A lot of us want the best: the best job, the best apartment, the best significant other,” he says.

So I guess it makes sense to keep on dating. For more on this online dating service you can take a look at our Okcupid.com review

While POF has garnered a lot of attention over the years for its free online dating service and hook-up potential, its founder wants to get back to basics and is focused on the goal – finding people matches for the long-term.

POF does have an advantage over other dating sites: namely, its user base. With 70 million registered users all over the world, it can rightly call itself the largest online dating site. Three and a half million people log on to the site every day to look for matches and communicate with others. The company also estimates that over one million relationships a year begin on its website.

What does this mean for daters? For one thing, the sheer numbers POF draws from memberships means the company can determine how people date from country to country, including their cultural preferences and overall approach to dating. They’ve found that while daters in the U.K. largely embrace online dating, the rest of Europe is a bit behind. They can focus on areas of growth and potential.

POF began in Canada, but the U.S. is by far its biggest market, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil and Australia.

“People in the United Kingdom will wear turtlenecks in the photos they send,” POF founder Markus Frind told The Provence, commenting on the cultural differences of dating he’s witnessed through the POF user base. “Women are way more aggressive in Brazil. They initiate as much as men.”

POF was started in 2003 when Frind was working for another technology company, and created the dating site in his spare time. He ran the company out of his apartment for five years until it reached ten million in annual revenue. Today he employs about 75 people in a large office space in Vancouver, and since POF remains a free service for daters, most of the revenue generated is from advertising.

Though Frind won’t disclose how much revenue his private company makes, he has put aside $30 million for acquisitions and intends to keep growing. In September of last year, he bought speed dating company Fast Life, hoping to add value to his online dating service by getting into singles events.

And as for success stories? Frind met his own partner through work, not over an online dating site. But he has gathered some success stories resulting from POF matches, including a young married couple who met each other five years ago on the site.

With its popularity unwavering, POF is focusing its efforts on technology and growth. The goal according to Frind is still to help people find long-term relationships.

What if you could meet, woo, and win your fiancé in just 90 days?

That's exactly what Chris McKinlay, a Boston mathematician, did in June 2012. McKinlay was good at math, but not so good where his love life was concerned. So he did what any enterprising mathematician would do: developed complex algorithms and used robot profiles to systematically sift through thousands of profiles on OkCupid to find his perfect match.

McKinlay was working on his PhD at UCLA in June 2012 when he first joined OkCupid. After answering 350 questions from the thousands available on the site, he discovered that he only had a compatibility rating of over 90% with fewer than 100 women. Six disappointing dates later, and McKinlay realized that something needed to change. He decided to apply his data skills to his dating life.

He began by creating 12 robot profiles that answered all of the questions randomly and used them to mine the survey answers of all women on the site. Then, armed with 6 million answers from 20,000 prospective mates, he used an algorithm to analyze the women he would like to meet. He limited his search to LA or San Francisco based partners who had logged on within the last month and clustered their personalities into two types that appealed to him most: "indie" women in their mid-20s and slightly older creative-types. After creating two different profiles for himself designed to target each cluster, he then answered the top 500 survey questions for each group.

The hack worked. McKinlay suddenly found himself with a 90%-plus compatibility rating with more than 10,000 women. Because OkCupid notifies users when someone looks at their profile, McKinlay designed software that would automatically view as many profiles as possible, prompting curious matches to initiate conversation with him. He received about 20 messages per day and went on 87 dates, but just one - the 88th - was special.

28-year-old Christine Tien Wang, an artist pursuing a master's in fine arts at UCLA, caught his attention and the two hit it off. They've been together ever since, surviving through Wang's one-year art fellowship in Qatar and McKinlay's admission that he'd used rather unconventional means to meet the woman of his dreams. "I thought it was dark and cynical," Wang told Wired. "I liked it."

McKinlay maintains that he was just doing "a large-scale and machine-learning version of what everyone does on the site," and unusual though his approach may sound, it's hard to argue with success. McKinlay and Wang are now engaged, and he has written a book to help others find spouses through online dating...it doesn't get much more successful than that.

You know how speed dating works. An equal number of men and women attend an event. Each person spends a set period of time chatting to a prospective date, before half the guests rotate and everyone is introduced to a new potential partner. At the end of the night, each person indicates who they are interested in seeing again, and if there's a match, the organizers arrange an exchange of details.

But there's plenty you probably don't know about speed dating. Like the story of its origin: did you know that speed dating was invented by a Rabbi? Rabbi Yaacov Deyo, a Los Angeles resident and director Aish HaTorah (a Jewish Orthodox organization with a network of branches around the world), originally founded speed dating as a way to help Jewish singles meet and marry. In fact, SpeedDating, written as a single word, is a registered trademark of Aish HaTorah.

The first speed dating event took place at Peet's Café in Beverly Hills in late 1998, but it didn't take long for the idea to spread beyond Southern California. Within a year or so, the speed dating idea had gone viral and imitations had popped up around the country. It was a revolutionary way for busy singles to meet each other without the stigma associated with other kinds of dating agencies.

Although online dating is on the forefront of everyone's minds these days, it doesn't mean speed dating isn't worth a try. Science has a few interesting facts to keep in mind if you're looking to take the leap into speed dating:

1. First impressions really do count, and they happen fast. More than one study has concluded that most people make their choices within the first 30 seconds of meeting someone new.
2. Deeper issues, like religion, previous marriages, and smoking habits, were found to play a much smaller role than expected.
3. If you're looking to woo someone quickly, talk about your adventures abroad. Studies have found that dialogue concerning travel results in more matches than dialogue about films.
4. Don' judge a book by its cover, if you can help it. As is the case with online dating, what people say they want in an ideal mate when asked about it frequently does not match up with their subconscious preferences in practice.
5. Meeting in person has one serious leg-up on meeting online: your sense of smell. Scientific research has found that olfaction plays a major role in attraction, and that people wearing pheromones receive more matches. Try getting that through a computer screen.
6. Studies of speed dating events have generally shown more selectivity among women than among men, but more recent studies suggest that selectivity is based on which gender is seated and which is rotating. It may be that whoever is seated is more selective, regardless of sex.