Online Dating Takes Too Long
This post is from me as a single guy about to turn 40 next week. Forget the industry insider, forget the consulting, forget the years of experience with online dating, it’s time to get my rant on.
I just spent the last two hours on Match.com. Updating my profile, changing photos, emailing people, returning winks and cleaning out my inbox and Favorites. This is what happens when you bookmark too many people, much better to email immediately, or forget about them. Pretty soon you are drowning in possibilities, and start to delete people because their pictures are too dark, or not revealing enough, or you hate that they dressed their lapdog Mr. Bumbles up like a pumpkin.
It’s absolutely true, there are something like 10% of men on dating sites and we do ALL the work. Women hardly ever email men, and dating sites are doing NOTHING to change that. Why is that? Forget human nature, let’s even up the workload here.
Winks should basically be outlawed on sites like Match. If a man winks at a women, she NEVER writes back. Take the time to send an email or get outta my inbox is the common thinking. But if a woman winks at a guy on Match, it’s all hands on deck, get out the dictionary, get witty and prepare a compliment, we have a live on on the line!
On OKCupid, winks seem to be bi-directionally accepted, interesting how it’s different on every site. OkCupid people are much more my speed, but also weirder, it’s a tradeoff.
I tried talking to a few women on PlentyOfFish, that didn’t last long. It was like talking to the wall. I am not going to perform any character assassinations but wow, talk about many millions of women I have absolutely zero in common with. It’s 2008, at least let us choose a better layout and colors.
Online dating is like using a search engine. We all just want a Google. How many search engines do you use?
I didn’t go to any more dating sites. Where am I gonna go, Yahoo!? As much as I love Y! Personals, most of the women are on Match, so why bother?
Niche sites? There isn’t a niche for me. Gays, blacks, asians and jews have it made. Me, I got nothing.
I have another 25 women to email on Match, and it’s supposed to be my day off. I need an intern or a form letter. But I can’t do that. Every email I send is painstakingly crafted in response to what the woman has written in their profile. Jesus, it’s exhausting.
God forbid she is stunning, because then you need to work overtime at catching her eye with your prose. She’s received 10 emails before yours, from men much better looking, richer and actually own property (or desperately want kids, like next week). The outlook gets pretty grim, but you give it a shot, because you never know, maybe she likes quirky renters and just doesn’t know it.
I went on two dates this weekend from OKCupid. Nice women but no chemistry. I cannot wait until people can put up videos of themselves, trying to judge someone’s personality from what they write is a pain in the ass. Anyone who writes “I’m just as comfortable in jeans..” gets deleted. If that’s all you can come up with, you have no chance with me.
Same goes if you mention trust, compassion or any one of the trigger words that mean “the last guy I dated was a jerk, you better not be.”
Yeah yeah, I know, that’s why eHarmony and compatibility testing is so good. But for me, it’s all about energy and charisma, which I find difficult to judge from most profiles.
There should be a profile field where you can tell your favorite jokes. I think that says a lot more about people than most dating sites scientifically-driven testing systems.
Matching chemistry and long-term compatibility is incredibly difficult. It’s painfully obvious that a lot of people who work in the dating industry are married. They are totally out of the loop and forget what it’s like to be single. time for some fresh, single perspectives.
Over the weekend I played Wii tennis at a house party, went to trivia night, went for a run, had two dates and saw David Sedaris at Symphony Hall. My life is full and invigorating when I step away from the keyboard. Yesterday’s date actually said I was overqualified for online dating, sigh. And yet, here I am. Maybe I’ll buy a billboard like that guy did in Australia, there has got to be an easier way.
I love it right here in Boston and don’t feel the need to go on and on about how important traveling is. We’re all going to be just as miserable after a week in Sardinia, what’s with all the “I love to travel more than anything” statements. Go look at a woman’s profile on Match and find me one that doesn’t mention traveling. Told you, practically impossible. Someone who understands this stuff, feel free to chime in.
It’s depressing to read a great profile and see a pretty face, only to find out they are friends of those Wasilla Mavericks.
I take everyone for coffee now. No more first date $100 dinners. I want dating sites to take out more of the guesswork, but they just can’t be trusted, yet.
Scenario: You call someone up, talk to them for a bit, then realizing it not working? What is the protocol for hanging up and not taking things to the next level? Calling E-Cyrano!
Sometimes I think we rely to heaving on online dating. I need to get back to basics. I live down the street from the oldest bar in America. I am going there tonight and I’m going to walk up to women I don’t know and initiate conversations and I’m not coming home until I get a phone number. It’s going to be a long night.
Why eHarmony Should Be More Like Google
A while back Fernando Ardenghi took issue with my statement “eHarmony is innovating, continuously updating the site and matching algorithm.” Fernando argues that as it updates its matching algorithm, eHarmony should recalculate compatibility between prospectives mates in its entire big database. He seems to be saying that dating sites won’t re-index their databases in order to take advantage of improved matching capabilities.
All of a sudden it hit me. Dating site compatibility assessment systems need to be more like Google.
Think about the Google web index, which is updated every so often to improve search results. When Google publishes a new index, people who are negatively affected in the organic search results tend to get upset. If you’re a company spending thousands of dollars a month in SEO fees to show up on the first page of Google’s search results and all of a sudden you’re on page six, you’re going to understandably freak out.
I like to think of eHarmony as being somewhat like Google, in that they are very secretive about their matching system, it evolves over time, and for a certain number of singles, works well. The main difference is that we know a lot more about Google’s indexing systems than we do eHarmony.
eHarmony is slowly becoming more transparent though a series of blogs and the eHarmony Labs. (although the labs blog hasn’t been updated in a month.) I for one would like to see them talk more about the matching system. How does it work, how has it evolved, what are they learning and how is that knowledge fed back into the matching system? Part of the beauty of eHarmony is that they do most of the work, but still, I’d like to know what my $50 is doing for me each month. I’m all for protecting intellectual property, but part of me thinks increased transparency into the matching process would actually be more helpful.
The marketing people at eHarmony are grinning right now, they know it’s all about ad spend. As long as more people visit and become paying members, the “better” the service becomes. If there are more members, more people will get married, regardless if the matching system improves or not.
And pretty soon, They’ll have to answer to the SEC and then it’s all about preserving shareholder value. That’s when eHarmony jumps the shark. They’re really in a difficult place right now if you think about it. Visitors are basically flat from a year ago and I assume they are spending even more money on marketing.
If they go on this acquisition spree that everyone is talking about, are they going to buy a site for the traffic, the revenue or the cross-sell, like Match promoting Chemistry (but not the other way around?)
What happens if/when eHarmony tweaks their matching system? Do people that are potential matches get disconnected? Is there a feedback loop in place where someone says, “whoa, we just lost 134,000 matches based on that last algorithm change.” Are the matches at eHarmony improving over time, staying the same, or getting worse? How can we measure improvement? I don’t want to rely on an increase in marriages per day, it’s not nuanced enough to use as a realistic measurement.
Dr. Houran and others talk a lot about the science of matching, but it really comes down to math when you’re talking about matching millions of members. What is that threshold for “connect them they are a great match” and being right on the line between a match and not? My online dating neurosis occurs when I think about the women that I’m not connecting with because my dating services are not putting them in front of me for some reason or another. Shudder. This is the stuff that drives me crazy, the potential for missed matches. My personal example on Match is when I say I want kids, and I see a million women, but if I say I’m not sure about kids, the dating pool dries up considerably. How many of those women that say they want two kids are just saying that and would be fine without kids? I meet a TON of women in that situation.
I would love to hear from someone at eHarmony who is allowed enough leeway to talk about how they run these amazingly complex matching systems, fascinating stuff.
