The #1 Way To Secure More Online Dates
The prettier you are in your profile pictures, the more messages you'll get.
pics five/ Shutterstock Talk about tough love: one survey shows that how much attention an online dater gets is all about how he/she looks in her profile picture.
That's kind of the point of online dating though, and what makes it so superficial. You are literally swiping and liking based solely on what someone looks like.
OKCupid posted a pretty thorough blog on their site analyzing — literally, with graphs and charts— who gets the most messages on their dating site and why.
We're sure the idealistic creators hoped to find that Kierkegaard-reading folks who volunteer at the local animal shelter (despite their mediocre looks) are the most popular. Alas, it was the traditionally hot hotties who get the most messages. Color us shocked.
The author of the post provided us with examples of high scorers (long-haired, doe-eyed women and stoic, sharp-jawed men) and a few examples of the mediocre (people who quite honestly looked barely a notch or two below the "best-looking"). Well, that's reassuring, that we barely have a chance in the real world and the online world.
Kittenish-looking ladies with full inboxes aside, one of the most interesting revelations was that female online daters tend to be more conservative and men more liberal in their beauty standards. Women are known to be the pickier sex, and well, men would date a trash can if it was pretty enough and had long enough hair.
One of the charts documented how a sample of men and women rated each other on a scale from one to five. One being hideous and five being gorgeous.
The arc looked pretty traditional for men. A smaller amount of uglies, a pretty generous portion for mediocres, and narrowed slit for the drop-dead. Women, on the other hand, found 80 percent (80 percent!) of the men on OKCupid as below average in looks. Time to go and look lost in a Home Depot ladies, at least we'll know he's handy.
Even more curious, women message the mediocre-to-below-average guys more than the Ken dolls. Fellas (but of course) troll away crafting witty e-mails to the ladies on the 5-end of the scale. Regardless of where the men themselves fall aesthetically, mind you. Oh, biology! Looks like men will never stop being the same.
The bottom line? Sexy, pouty ladies are likely to wake up to a mess of "Hey how are you" messages. The site reports that hot women get 28 times the messages of uglier gals, whereas a macho man gets 11 times the messages of an average Joe, who would have thought? I guess there's a way to play the dating game right after all.
Melissa Noble is a freelance writer and blogger who writes about love, relationships, and trending news stories.