OK Interview

When Uni Paul was getting back into the dating game, I remember telling him that dates are like job interviews, you need to put your best face on and hope the other person wants to work with you. If that's the case, then I guess dating profiles are like resumes, except instead of finding people who are willing to lie about how awesome you are sing your praises, you open Photoshop and try to edit all the unattractive bits out but hoping that the image still looks somewhat like you.

It seems quite difficult to put together a dating site profile. You can't use clichés, because it makes you look unoriginal, but you can't sound too original either, otherwise you look like a hipster, or like Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m. You need to list interests or hobbies, lest you appear boring, but if you list things that are too niche, you risk alienating a large portion of the userbase.

Thankfully you never have to answer what your greatest weakness is, or where you see yourself in five years.

It seems that women get far more unsolicited messages from dating sites than men do. This post which details an experiment where he created 10 OKCupid profiles (5 men and 5 women of varying attractiveness). He found that the most attractive woman got 17 times more messages in a week than the most attractive man. Even the least attractive woman in the group got 11 messages after four months, which is more than the three least attractive men put together (0. 2 and 1 message). Note: they all had identical profiles, and answered those matching questions in the same way.

So you thought I was being silly when I said you should open up Photoshop, but perhaps it wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Given that the expectation still seems to lie on the men's side to make first contact, how important is a man's profile anyway? OKTrends (the OKCupid dating stats blog) found that you are far more likely to get a reply if you yourself are also attractive (seems like common sense), although there's an interesting trend in that very attractive men messaging unattractive women don't get replies very often. Perhaps those women have the same Never Been Kissed nightmare that I have where they think he's just asking her out to egg her on prom night (sorry for potato quality, OK, found the entire move in HD, but the bit I wanted to link starts here and goes for about a minute and a half - if you've never seen the movie, she gets asked to the prom by the most attractive guy in her class). *shudder* Every now and again I still have this voice in the back of my mind that MrMan5.5 is going to egg me someday, but I'm getting pretty good at telling it to shut up now.

So it seems like the two rules of dating still hold:

1. Be attractive

2. Don't be unattractive.

Well, that was supremely unhelpful.

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Today I learned that James Franco made his film debut in Never Been Kissed.