The Online Dating Equation: Three Key Questions Predict a Match

Monday, 23 May 2011 | by Pat's Picks

Is online dating success eluding you? What if you had a team of mathematicians in your corner, crunching statistics to find out what works and what doesn’t? The LA Times says that’s exactly what dating site OK Cupid hired six former math majors from Harvard to do. Every week, they sift through data derived from the site’s members to come up with dating tips—mathematically sound dating tips, that is.

Some tips: Ask about your potential love match’s penchant for horror movies, solo travel experience and “life on the high seas.” After some analysis, the math experts found that couples who had similar answers to these three questions had a better chance of their relationship working out: “Do you like horror movies?” “Have you ever traveled around another country alone?” and “Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?”

Also, everyone should subtract two inches from your prospective mate’s reported height and take 20 percent off the salary he or she claims to bring in. And the math squad recommends women look flirty in their online photo. Men, on the other hand, should look serious. Women of a certain age? Show some décolletage: “Women’s mate value declines with age. But they can compensate for their decline in mate value by showing their cleavage.”

Below are two example charts from the OK Cupid mathematicians. First looks at the correlation between masturbation and Twitter use. The second, a world cloud generated to describe the people who said they liked “rough sex” versus those who prefer “gentle sex.”