Matching

A difficult aspect of online dating is the struggle to view everything with fresh eyes. For example, let’s say you want to step out of your own personal box politically, so you purposely don’t filter for your own political beliefs. But after three dates confirm all your stereotypes, it’s hard to view the next one with the same optimism. Yes, you know every person is an individual and you shouldn’t lump them all in one box... but it’s hard not to.

There are a few ways to cope with this issue. One is purely psychological: instead of viewing your profile - or even your mental list of wants and needs - as a fixed list, think of it as a work in progress, constantly evolving. So you want to be open-minded, but you really can’t bite your tongue when it comes to that political issue. Fine; maybe that’s just something you can’t compromise on at the moment. It might change in the future, but if filtering for your beliefs now gives you a greater chance of finding someone with whom you get along, that’s exactly the point of the filter. Online dating strives to make the process easier, not more difficult.

Another tactic is to attempt to mix things up, and thus avoid falling into a rut. Maybe you alternate online dating with making a sincere effort to get out and meet people the “old-fashioned way,” whether that’s through a club, church, or just approaching someone who strikes your fancy. This way, you don’t feel like you’ve limited yourself to one approach. Furthermore, the skills you gain in one can serve you well in the other - approaching people in person can make those first dates with an online match more natural, whereas getting used to sending first-contact emails can making approaching someone in person less daunting.

Another way of mixing up your routine is to try out different kinds of online dating sites. Perhaps you have a niche interest, but you’re wary of “boxing yourself in” with a niche site as the primary place you search. By trying out different sites in addition to your “main,” you can explore your niche interests and possibly even discover that you feel more comfortable in another community. Conversely, you might find that interests are less important to you than some other value - but again, you’re simply refining your priorities, not redefining them.

Doing anything long enough can feel monotonous, even dating. Taking proactive steps to combat the issue can help prevent burnout and jaded feelings and keep the process feeling fresh and fun. After all, when you do meet someone with whom you share a spark, whether through a serendipitous event or via an online site, you want to be able to appreciate and recognize it.

It’s funny: when we think about romance in our everyday lives, we tend to think in concrete terms, like, “maybe I’ll meet someone nice while I’m at this party.” When we think about online dating, we begin to fantasize: “Maybe I’ll meet my ideal image of a perfect date.”

It’s unclear why we jump to such extremes, but it probably has to do with the fact that media depictions of online dating are pretty extreme: online dates are usually either terrible or wonderful. Often, they’re absolutely awful until the protagonist meets that perfect match. One doesn’t often see a more accurate depiction: people who are perfectly nice human beings, maybe even attractive, but simply lacking that spark of chemistry.

It’s a good idea to analyze your expectations: are you falling into the beauty-or-beast trap? Falling into this trap can actually affect your dating experience. Consider: if you’re expecting everyone to be either beastly or your ideal, you don’t quite know what to do with those who fall somewhere in the middle. As such, you risk erring on either side: on the one hand, you might be so pleasantly surprised that your date is not an ogre that you agree to more dates, even though you’re ultimately not compatible. Or, even worse, you might overlook someone who does have relationship potential because you weren’t falling out of your chair at the sight of them.

In either case, you would have been better served if you had realistic expectations and confidence in knowing your own priorities. You would know to trust your gut if, ultimately, you’re not feeling that spark of a connection, even at the end of a night. Conversely, you might also be willing to open up and get past the wow-factor of a first impression. Because you’re prepared for a gray area in your dating prospects, you’re able to give the matter serious consideration, instead of trying to shoehorn your dates into Angel and Devil boxes.

You’re also more able to view your dates as real people, rather than caricatures: you’re not just adding to your collection of “terrible first date” anecdotes, or building a cutesy “how we met” tale. Real life is often far more nuanced than fiction, and being prepared for the former allows you to enjoy that distinction.

So as you take on the world of online dating, ask yourself: are you expecting either a beauty or a beast? Or are you prepared to meet real people who are far more interesting than either?

Two is hardly enough to call it a trend, but if online dating sites collaborating with relationship experts does become a thing, I am fully in support of it.

Earlier this fall, one of America's longest-serving advice columnists, E. Jean Carroll, began a new partnership between HowAboutWe and Elle magazine. The arrangement, called Elle dating, is part of HowAboutWe's media partners program. Joining forces with a fashion magazine may not seem like the natural course of action for a dating site, but HowAboutWe believes the alliance could go a long way towards helping people who might otherwise object to finding love on the Web warm up to the idea.

Carroll's Elle column has long been an important fixture for the magazine. A membership to HowAboutWe through Elle will cost $30 per month, and for $500 an Elle reader can get a one-on-one telephone consultation with Carroll and the services of Tawkify, the small matchmaking firm she founded two years ago. Carroll hopes that her influence will bring a sense of serendipity to HowAboutWe that can be lost in other online dating services.

Are You Interested is also jumping on the expert bandwagon. AYI.com recently announced that author and relationship expert Laurel House will join the site as its resident dating coach. Laurel has appeared on numerous television shows, including E! News, Weekend TODAY, and most recently MTV, where she was the ultimate "It Girl" dating and confidence-boosting coach for an episode of the channel's MADE show. She is also the author of QuickieChick's Cheat Sheet to Life, Love, Food, Fitness, Fashion and Finance on a Less than Fabulous Budget and the upcoming book No-Games Guide to Love.

For her collaboration with AYI, House will post written and video content to the site's blog to help guide singles through the online dating experience. She will be available via AYI.com's social platforms to offer personalized dating tips to members, and will act as a face of the AYI brand in media interviews.

SNAP's Chief Executive Officer Clifford Lerner commented, "We believe Laurel's depth of experience and professional expertise is unmatched and will greatly help singles looking to connect online. She is aware of what single men and women are looking for in the online dating experience and her ability to guide them in their search for love will only better the AYI.com experience."

My favorite collaboration between an expert and a dating site remains the inimitable Dr. Helen Fisher, who serves as leading expert on the biology of love and attraction for Chemistry.com, but I'm excited to see more professionals in various dating and relationships fields lend their support to the online dating movement.

If you’ve survived your teen years, chances are you or someone you know has taken a compatibility quiz in a magazine. In junior high they were something almost mystical and sacred, especially if they included astrology. “I’m not sure I should have a crush on him - he’s a Libra, so apparently it could never work in the long run.”

Even if you were no longer in the teeny-bopper demographic, the compatibility quizzes didn’t stop there; even magazines aimed at adults promised to cut their way to the core of your relationships, real or potential, with five easy questions. And even though everyone knows these sort of quizzes are mostly arbitrary, it was tempting to find meaning in them, define yourself by them, view conversations through the lens provided by them.

Those quizzes haven’t gone away today; in fact, they’re a main feature for many online dating sites. But the question is, are those quizzes any more useful than they were for preteens? If a computer algorithm matches you with someone, is it really much better than charting your astrological signs?

Yes... and no. Matching systems can certainly find people in whom you might well be interested - people who fit the general categories that would catch your eye: age, profession, even interests. What they can’t do is tell you if you’d actually be good for one another - hence the familiar story of being “matched” with an ex. Sure, you might have been interested at some point, so the system isn’t wrong - you’re just ahead of the system.

Quizzes are another issue. Depending on the site and type of quiz, they might not have been answered with much consideration or seriousness. On the one hand, you can choose to take them with a grain of salt. On the other, sometimes an answer can reveal something about the character of the test-taker. In short, there’s probably no cause to be broken-hearted if you and your partner don’t match up perfectly. On the other hand, if a potential match has red flags all over their quiz results, it might not be a bad idea to treat them with caution.

However, there’s something else to consider: those same red flags would probably surface in conversation. After all, if someone is vile enough to be apparent via an innocent quiz, there’s no hiding it for long. Also, in person you’re dealing with real-time reactions and responses, not carefully thought-out quiz answers. So a quiz might indeed be helpful, but meeting in person is still the best way to determine your compatibility.

So the next time you encounter a compatibility quiz, give it all the weight you want - but remember it’s just to help you decide if you want to meet this person, not whether you’re in love with them. The true assessment happens on the first date.

When Aaron Schildkrout cofounded HowAboutWe.com, he had a vision for online dating, one that didn't rely on complex mathematical calculations to determine whether two people are compatible. He pictured a site where real-life dates were the focus, so users got straight to what really matters: meeting face-to-face.

"We branded ourselves as the offline dating site, as explicitly an alternative to these profile-heavy matching algorithm dating sites," he told The Washington Post. "It's about getting offline, going to the real world and getting chemistry."

It appears to be a smart approach at first glance, but since its founding in 2009, HowAboutWe has evolved to depend more on formulas, not less. As more and more users joined the site, the challenge was no longer to show them as many potential dates as possible, but to show them the right dates. In order to create an experience worth coming back for, HowAboutWe needed to get smarter.

HowAboutWe's two-person data science team created an algorithm that combines a user's profile information (like date ideas and demographics) with data gathered from that person's behavior on the site (e.g. what kind of profiles they looked at and how often).

In contrast to HowAboutWe's focus on casual dating, eHarmony believes its users are looking for long term relationships and its algorithm reflects that. eHarmony members are required to fill out a personality questionnaire with hundreds of parts developed from research of around 50,000 happily married couples. To determine compatibility, historical data is paired with analysis of users' behavior on the site and the constraints, like target age range, people place on their matches.

As expected, predicting love is no easy feat. Match.com president Amarnath Thombre says that what users claim they're looking for is often not the kind of profiles they actually view. How did Match cope with the mixed signals? "We said, 'We're going to base these things way more on actions you take. . . . If you start breaking your rules, we're going to start ignoring your rules,' " Thombre explained.

On AshleyMadison.com, the popular matchmaking site for affair-seekers, matching is driven almost entirely by an algorithm. "At least when it comes to the topic of infidelity, traditional research avenues have been kind of absent," said founder Noel Biderman. "There aren't a lot of universities out there that can give you wholesale data on how unfaithful this population or society is or what triggers this."

Can a mathematical formula ever fully replace the magic of serendipity? It seems unlikely, but if the two can work together, we stand a better chance of finding love than ever before.

For more about Aaron Schildkrout dating site you can read our review on How About We.

What do you do when you love data, but can't seem to crack the online dating code? Rewrite the code, of course.

That's exactly what Amy Webb, author of Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, did. After a bad breakup, and a series of bad dates through online dating sites, Webb decided to turn her passion for numbers and algorithms into a strategy for hacking the online dating system. "Rather than waiting for an algorithm to set me up," she told a rapt TED conference audience, "I'm going to try reverse-engineering this entire system."

She began by writing down every possible trait she was looking for in a mate. By the end she had amassed 72 different data points that covered everything from religion, to occupation, to hobbies, to children and parenting styles, to travel plans, to body type. She then prioritized the list, breaking it into a top tier and a second-tier of points and ranking them from 100 down to 91. Finally, she devised a scoring system to mathematically calculate whether or not she thought the date would be a good match for her.

At first glance, her points system appeared to be a success. She returned to online dating and found a good-looking, well spoken, and well-traveled man she thought could be the man of her dreams. There was just one problem: he didn't like her back. That's when Webb realized there was one variable, the competition, she hadn't considered. What about all the other women on online dating sites?

Webb's next step was market research. She created 10 fake male profiles in order to gather data about the women who were attracted to the kind of man she really wanted to marry. She looked at both qualitative data (the humor, the tone, the voice, the communication style) and quantitative data (average length of their profiles, how much time passed between messages). Her findings are fascinating.

"Content matters a lot," she explains. "Smart people tends to write a lot, 3000... 4000... 5000 words, about themselves." Successful online daters also tend to use nonspecific language and optimistic language, which makes their profiles feel more approachable. Timing is also very important, Webb found. "The popular women on these online sites spend an average of 23 hours in between each communication," she says. "And that's what we would normally do in the usual process of courtship."

Armed with new insight, Webb could optimize her online dating approach and create a super profile. And it worked. She is now married and has a daughter, and wrote a book to share her insider knowledge of the online dating system with the world. The question is...what does all this mean for you?

"There is an algorithm for love, it's just not the ones that we are presented with online," Webb says. "In fact, it's something that you write yourself...all you have to really do is figure out your own framework and play by your own rules."

Related Article: Amy Webb Tells TED How She Hacked Online Dating