However, despite the undeniable success that the numbers above represent, the research I’ve done and read makes it clear that the new dating technology has created its own new set of problems. To get a real sense of the world of online dating, we had to look beyond the numbers. So we set out to try to understand the real-life experiences people were having as online daters.
One of the most enlightening ways we found to learn about online dating was when, in a move that I still can’t believe we were able to pull off, Eric and I hooked up a computer to a projector and asked young singles to log on to their accounts to show us what it was really like to be an online dater. They showed us their inboxes and what they would generally do upon logging in.
The first time we did this, at a live show in Los Angeles, an attractive woman pulled up her OkCupid account and let me project it onto a large screen that everyone in the house could see. She was receiving fifty new messages a day and her inbox was clogged with literally hundreds of unread solicitations. As she scrolled and scrolled through message after message, the guys in the audience looked on in horror. They couldn’t believe the sheer volume of it all. The woman said she felt bad that a lot of the messages would probably just be deleted because she would never have time to respond to them all. The men in the audience collectively let out a pained groan. Throughout all our interviews, this was a consistent finding: In online dating women get a ton more attention than men.
In his book Dataclysm, OkCupid founder Christian Rudder illustrates this stark difference in attention with the following graph of user data from OkCupid. This is a chart of messages received per day plotted against attractiveness based on user ratings.
Even a guy at the highest end of attractiveness barely receives the number of messages almost all women get.
But that doesn’t mean that men end up in the online equivalent of standing alone in the corner of the bar. Online there are no lonely corners. Everywhere is filled with people looking to connect.
A guy who may have had very little luck in the bar scene can have an inbox filled with messages. The number of messages may not be as high relative to that of the most attractive women on the sites, but relative to the attention they’d get in more traditional social environments, it’s huge.
Basically, every bozo can now be a stud.
Take Derek, a regular user of OkCupid who lives in New York. What I’m about to say is going to sound very mean, but Derek is a pretty boring white guy. Medium height, thinning brown hair, nicely dressed and personable, but nothing immediately magnetic or charming. He isn’t unattractive, but he wouldn’t necessarily turn heads if he walked into a bar or party.
At our focus group on online dating in Manhattan, Derek got on OkCupid and let us watch as he went through his options. These were women whom OkCupid had selected as potential matches for him based on his profile and the site’s algorithm. The first woman he clicked on was very beautiful, with a witty profile page, a good job, and lots of shared interests, including a love of sports. After looking it over for a minute or so, Derek said: “Well, she looks okay. I’m just gonna keep looking for a while.”
I asked what was wrong, and he replied, “She likes the Red Sox.”
I was completely shocked. I couldn’t believe how quickly he just moved on. Imagine the Derek of twenty years ago, finding out that this beautiful, charming woman wanted to date him. If she was at a bar and smiled at him, Derek of 1993 would have melted. He wouldn’t have walked up and said, “Oh, wait, you like the Red Sox?! No thank you!” and put his hand in her face and turned away. But Derek of 2013 just clicked an X on a Web browser tab and deleted her without thinking twice, like a J.Crew sweatshirt that didn’t live up to his expectations upon seeing a larger picture.
Derek didn’t go for the next one either, despite the fact that the woman was comparably attractive. For ten or fifteen minutes Derek flipped his way around the site without showing even a hint of enthusiasm for any of the numerous extremely compelling women who were there looking for romance, until finally he settled on one and typed out a simple message, leaving the others to die in his browser history.