...about internet dating.
A popular internet dating company uses the slogan, “It’s OK to look” on their television ads. These ads seem to come around more often during Valentine’s Day or Christmas or New Years or when your little sister gets engaged and you begin to feel a little bit self conscious about the fact that you’ll not only be going to the wedding alone, but also that, for as much as your family knows, your last relationship was with your high school sweetheart who ended up being homosexual. So when the perfect storm of conditions met, and I was looking for bachelorette party games, and one of them involved dating website profiles, and the commercial came on in the background, and I was on my second glass of wine and reflecting on how I would subsequently be forced to answer the inevitable relationship questions at the reception, I thought, “Why not!?” and logged on just to look.
Turns out, without signing up for a user profile, all you really can do is look, and you can’t look at very much. You don’t get very much information about the few teaser people you’re looking at, and you certainly aren’t allowed to message them or let them know you’re interested in any way. That all comes with time, and user profiles, and money. But it’s OK to look, so I browsed what was there, partly because I was scouting out the possibilities for this bachelorette party game, but partly because I was curious. As long as I was venturing down the wormhole, I might as well look around for a minute. And when I realized I wasn’t really going to see anything worthwhile without actually setting a profile up for myself, I went ahead and did it.
I hadn’t really understood or thought through what would happen after my profile was out there. I wasn’t paying for the service, so while I could see more people and get more information about them, I still couldn’t message or contact them in anyway. I didn’t really want to anyway. I was having ridiculous fun just looking at people. It was like window shopping for something you had no intention of pursuing. I probably looked through 100 men that first night. I clicked on people that looked extremely attractive. I clicked on people that I never would have given a second look on the street. I was overwhelmed by the volume of people on the sight, but looking at them in the comfort and safety of my own home was completely non-threatening. Besides, I wasn’t looking for real. It was just a way to kill an evening. Eventually I finished my wine, shutdown my computer, and went to bed.
The thing I didn’t realize about putting my profile out there that once I was signed up, I became instantly visible to everyone else. And while I wasn’t paying for the service and therefore wasn’t sending out any messages, people who were paying could message, and did message, me. I woke up the next morning to five messages in my inbox. One problem, I couldn’t tell who’d sent them. I could see who’d looked at my profile. I could see who liked my pictures. I could see who winked at me. But I had no idea who had sent the messages. I was curious, but I was not sold on online dating. I wasn’t planning on doing this for real. It was a hypothetical and superficial night of browsing cute guy’s personal information. That said, I didn’t delete my profile.
As a result, the messages continued to pile in, and with each new one that cropped up, the more my curiosity nagged. In the cleverest marketing ploy of all time, the website offered me a ‘free peek’ at one of the messages in my inbox. I took the bait, just because, after all, it’s OK to look. If they were trying to hook me, however, they failed. The message I got to look at was from a man whose profile I wouldn’t have given a second look to. He was over 10 years my senior, unemployed, and severly obese. To add insult to injury, his message didn’t use punctuation or capital letters. I was unimpressed and confident that online dating wasn’t for me. But I still didn’t delete my profile.
The messages continued to stack up. Another week went by, and my grand total was 28. The higher that number climbed, the more I wondered who else might be waiting for a response. It wasn’t that I hadn’t found interesting and dateable people during my browsing. In fact, I’d even found one or two that I had thought I might have messaged if I had the capacity to do so. One night driving a friend back to her apartment, I asked for her opinion about online dating. She was noncommital, but not phased by it either. I confessed what I had been doing and how many messages I had let pile up. Stunned, she demanded to see my profile and the men I had looked at that first night. I logged in and paged through some of my favorites.
“You have to do this for real!” she exclaimed. “Just because. You at least have to try it. If not for you, do it for me! I’m so curious!”
I wasn’t sure.
“I’m not sure I want to pay for this,” I admitted. “It was just for fun.”
“I’m not sure I want to pay for this,” I admitted. “It was just for fun.”
“But don’t you at least want to know?” she asked.
“Maybe. I guess. I don’t know.”
“I think you should think about it, like really think about it!” She was positively giddy at the thought.
“Ok sure,” I said, not convinced that I’d give it any more thought than I already had. But sometimes friends have other plans, and a week later when my birthday came around, she handed me a card whispering that I should open it when I was away from the rest of my friends and ready to think seriously about things. I opened it at home that night wondering what would have been such a big deal that the rest of our friends couldn’t see. Inside the card I saw what the fuss would have been about, she was paying for my first three months of internet dating.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am an internet dating success story, and my now husband and I could be the next “It’s OK to look” commercial couple. Before the blessed day when we met and I could finally delete my online account however, I had to learn a lot about mass market matchmaking. Lesson one was the hardest to adjust to, and that was just how much of meat market such websites actually are. Whereas social media sites will tell you when your friends are online or when someone likes your photo, dating sites will tell you anytime someone looks at your profile. At first this feels flattering, like 250 people looked at me today. But then you start to think about it. 250 people looked at me today, and judged my personality, and judged my looks, and formed an opinion about me, and I only got two winks, four likes, and one message, which means the other 243 decided, for an unknown reason, I wasn’t for them. It wasn’t quite as bad as being rejected 243 times outright, but it did put 28 messages in a little clearer perspective. Without a context in which to frame that number, it felt like a lot. Once I signed in for real and saw that my page had been viewed 800 times, suddenly a 3% response rate didn’t feel so good.
The second thing I learned was that it took time and effort to sort through profiles, craft a good message if I so chose, and respond to the messages I had received. Fortunately there are filters for these kind of things, and the process gets a little more efficient if you screen people through any ‘red flag’ filters that remove them from you list before you waste you time. Even so, each day they sent me 20 new matches, and if I spent even two minutes looking through each profile, and another minute or two writing a message I was easily up to almost an hour a day of actively searching out people to date. It seemed artificial and more than a little stilted. Not to mention, the return ratio on sent messages is very low, so most of the scouting and writing time ended up for naught.
On top of everything else, I eventually came to learn that I was also working against the dating algorithm itself. I didn’t actually notice this trend myself. Because I am that much of a nerd, I read about it in an online dating strategy book, which laid out the reality of what was happening like this: The site had my money, and what they wanted for me, more than finding the love of my life, was to have another three months worth of subscription fees. Thus, while they were technically matching me with people I was compatible with, there was a timing and strategy to the way they released their results. The first few days I was on, I saw people I was 95-100% compatible with. That eventually trickled down closer to 80-85%. After another couple weeks, the numbers bumped back up to 95%. It would have been one thing if these users were brand new to the site, but some of them had been on for months. The algorithm would have found them immediately upon running my profile through the system. The strategy for the company was to release matches on a timeline that kept me interested in the people on the site but not fully satisfied with my prospects. The closer we got to my subscription needing renewal, the more compatible my matches would become until they would throw a 100% at me just about the time I had to decide whether to send them more money or not.
Thus my love hate relationship with my internet dating profile started. On the one hand, I had committed to three months of trying it out and seeing what was out there. On the other hand, I felt like a commodity putting themselves out there for inspection, approval or denial. The messages kept coming. People kept digitally winking at me. My page view counter hit quadruple digits. My self esteem waffled between feeling desirable and feeling looked over. And so began the strangest three months of my social life to date.
Happy Trails,
No comments:
Post a Comment