Matching

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

If you haven't heard of TED (and what off-the-grid deserted island have you been living on, if you haven't?), TED is a global set of conferences owned by a private nonprofit foundation dedicated to showcasing "ideas worth spreading." Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Gates, countless Nobel Prize winners, and artists of all kinds.

Amy Webb, author of Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, took to the TED stage to tell the story of how she hacked online dating. After a bad date left her at a restaurant with a $1300 bill, she decided to game the online dating system by creating an algorithm of her own. Using dating sites as databases, she came up with 72 data points designed to identify her ideal partner. She prioritize the 72 points and devised a scoring system:

• 700 points and she'd send an e-mail
• 900 points and she'd go on a date
• 1500 points and she would consider a relationship

What she was attempting to quantify with serendipity. Most people take the "expect it when you least expect it" approach to love, but that wasn't enough for Amy Webb. She wanted to know the exact probability of finding her Mr. Right, and she knew her passion for data and numbers was the way to do it.

Of course, it wouldn't be a story if it was always smooth sailing. Webb began her online dating journey by copying lines from her resume and posting them into her online dating profile. I'm sure you can guess how that turned out: not well. The dating site's algorithm paired her with terrible matches that led to even worse dates. Some would give up then, but not Amy Webb.

She began collecting data points during her awful dates. She tracked things like awkward sexual remarks, bad vocabulary, and the number of times her dates attempted to high-five her. After gathering the data, she crunched the numbers and started making correlations.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was that the algorithms on online dating sites weren't actually failing. They were doing exactly what they were designed to do: take user-generated information and match it with other user-generated information. The problem with Webb was that she'd put bad information - her resume - into the algorithm in the first place. "The real problem here," she explained to her TED audience, "is that while the algorithms work just fine, you and I don't."

What was her solution? The answer will amaze you...

Related Article: Amy Webb Tells TED How She Hacked Online Dating (Part II)