The key, Dinesh said, is to have friends who hang out in different groups in different places, and to mix up the nights so that you’re spending some time with all of them. Whether it’s in church, with volunteer groups, at office parties, or on a sports field, it’s always a place where people meet organically.
“There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in L.A. at all times,” he explained. “I think it’s fun and interesting to meet new people, and if I meet people in person, they’re more willing to open up their schedules. I am too. I’m more willing to, like, go to work super early and then be home by, like, five or six to make something happen.” He looked over to consider Arpan and then turned back to us. “And no, I’m not exhausted.” Fortunately, Arpan at this point was so slumped in his chair that it blocked his ears and he didn’t even hear this.
Dinesh had a Zen vibe to him that wasn’t matched by anyone else in the room. While the other singles assembled that morning seemed jaded and frustrated, Dinesh seemed more comfortable and at ease with dating. Was it because he avoided online dating? Or was it that those who were dating online were actually pretty bad at it?
After several lengthy conversations with experts, I would guess the latter was a significant factor.
MOST PEOPLE STINK AT ONLINE DATING
Online dating is like a second job that requires knowledge and skills that very few of us have. In fact, most of us have no clue what we’re doing. One reason is that people don’t always know what they’re looking for in a soul mate, unlike when they’re picking something easier, like laundry detergent (big ups to Tide Mountain Spring—who doesn’t want their clothes to smell like a fresh mountain spring?!).
While we may think we know what we want, we’re often wrong. According to Dan Slater’s history of online dating, Love in the Time of Algorithms, the first online dating services tried to find matches for clients based almost exclusively on what clients said they wanted. The client would usually fill out a survey indicating certain traits they were looking for in a partner. For example, if a man said he was looking for a tall, blond woman with no kids and a college degree, the company showed him everyone who fit this description. But pretty soon online dating companies realized that this wasn’t working. In 2008 Match.com hired Amarnath Thombre as its new “chief of algorithms.” Thombre set about figuring out why a lot of couples that Match.com’s algorithm said were a perfect fit often didn’t make it past the first date. When he began digging into the data, he discovered something surprising: The kind of partner people said they were looking for didn’t match up with the kind of partner they were actually interested in.
Thombre discovered this by simply analyzing the discrepancy between the characteristics people said they wanted in a romantic partner (age, religion, hair color, and the like) and the characteristics of the people whom they actually contacted on the dating site. “We began to see how frequently people break their own rules,” he told Slater. “When you watch their browsing habits—their actual behavior on the site—you see them go way outside of what they say they want.”10
When I was writing stand-up about online dating, I filled out the forms for dummy accounts on several dating sites just to get a sense of the questions and what the process was like. The person I described that I wanted to find was a little younger than me, small, with dark hair. The person I’m currently dating, whom I met through friends, is two years older, about my height—OKAY, SLIGHTLY TALLER—and blond. She wouldn’t have made it through the filters I placed in my online dating profile.
A big part of online dating is spent on this process, though—setting your filters, sorting through many profiles, and going through a mandatory “checklist” of what you think you are looking for. People take these parameters very seriously. They declare that their mate “must love dogs” or that their mate “must love the film Must Love Dogs,” which stars Diane Lane as a newly divorced woman who’s encouraged by her friend to start an online dating profile that states her dates “must love dogs.” (Shout-out to the Must Love Dogs Wikipedia page for helping me recall the plot.)
But does all the effort put into sorting profiles help?
Despite all the nuanced information that people put up on their profiles, the factor that people rely on most when preselecting a date is looks. Based on the data he has reviewed, Rudder told us that he estimates that photos drive 90 percent of the action in online dating.
PROFILE PHOTOS:
WHY YOU NEED TO GO SPELUNKING WITH A PUPPY ASAP
If 90 percent of your fate as an online dater depends on the photos you pick, this is an important decision. So what works? Rudder examined which kinds of images proved most and least successful on the dating site OkCupid, and he made some surprising discoveries.11
First let’s examine what works for women. Most women (56 percent) choose to go with a straightforward smiling pic. But the 9 percent who opt to go with a more “flirting to the camera” vibe are slightly more successful. See the examples below: