IN YOUR FACE, CUPID: A woman who wasn’t having much luck with her online dating efforts decided to apply some rigorous analytical techniques–and landed herself a husband! Author Amy Webb’s account of how she did it:
My profile was obviously attracting the wrong kind of man. After one particularly disastrous date—he casually dropped the fact that he was actually married—I decided to change my approach. Drawing on my background in data analysis, I set out to reverse engineer my profile. I outlined 10 male archetypes and created profiles for each of them on JDate. There was JewishDoc1000, the private-practice cardiologist who hated cruise-ship travel, and LawMan2346, an attorney who was very close to his family and a former national debate champion.
Posing as these men, I spent a month using JDate. I interacted with 96 women, cataloging how they behaved and presented themselves online and scraping data from their profiles (such as the language they used or the number of hours they waited before emailing back one of my profiles). Wanting to learn everything I could about my competition, I kept a detailed database, and I recorded which female profiles were popular…
What did I discover? Popular profiles used aspirational language (like “I want to travel” or “a big ambition of mine is…”), kept descriptions short and generic and lied about various physical characteristics (though not the ones you think). Their style was easygoing, youthful and spontaneous. I’d never once referred to myself in writing as “fun” or as a “girl.” But it was easy to see that I had been far too stuffy and professional in my presenting myself (I’d gotten lazy and cribbed from my résumé).
I learned that short profiles that express just enough information to pique someone’s interest are the ones that do best. A good cutoff point is the 500-word mark. Profiles that go on longer than that tend to be by an accomplished woman with lots of education and some kind of license (doctor, lawyer) to brag about, or by a not-so-attractive woman who seems horribly lonely and desperate to date. In my case, I’d written close to 900 words—a dissertation. That put me in the bottom 8% of all profiles I looked at. If I was blathering on that much before even meeting someone, what would I be like in person on a first date?
I assumed that daters lied about their weight. I certainly rounded down. What shocked me, though, was how many women seemed to be lying about their height. All of the 96 women I interacted with listed their height as between 5-foot-1 and 5-foot-3, even though the average height of an American woman is 5-foot-4.
And the results?
Soon after it went live, my super profile attracted more than 60 responses, many of them notably different from the ones I’d attracted before.
Among them was a response from a profile called Thevenin, an attractive, Jewish man who seemed smart and funny. His real name was Brian, and he was my last first date.
There’s a lot more there. Apparently it’s an excerpt from a book called “Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match”, due out in a couple of weeks.
ANOTHER WAY TO GET FREE STUFF FROM YOUR CREDIT CARD: If you’ve got a big purchase coming up, call your credit card companies first. Poster mojoshtudd had a good tip on Fatwallet:
I had a ~$1000 purchase to make. I just called Chase, Citi and Amex. I told them that I have a largish expense coming up and trying to decide which CC to put it on; and if they would give me a promo based on a spending requirement, it would help me decide.
A lot of the time, one of them ends up giving me something. E.g., just now, Chase and Citi said sorry but the Amex SPG rep gave me 3000 points for $1000 spend. Worked perfect for me. Since I value SPG at about 2-3x cents per point, this is an easy 6-9% cash-back for me.
Later he adds:
As always, it doesn’t hurt to ask! |
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