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I started it with three friends. We were all mathematically minded, and the site succeeded in large part because we applied that mindset to dating. Playing with the numbers helps us run our site.
But as people bring technology deeper and deeper into their lives, it can show us profound and ridiculous things about who we are as human beings. Here are just a few examples. Reading from the top, we see that 20 and year-old women prefer year-old guys; year-old women like men who are 24, and so on down through the years to women at 50, who we see rate year-olds the highest.
Look more closely, though, and there are two transitions, which coincide with big birthdays. The first is at 30, where the trend of male ages dips below parity, never to cross back. The data is saying that until 30, a woman prefers slightly older guys; afterwards, she likes them slightly younger. Wooderson, the character played by Matthew McConaughey in the film Dazed and Confused, apparently spoke for all men when he said: They stay the same age.
Here are the top five phrases for white men and white women:.
Ween a prog-rock band and mudding where you drive a car or four-wheeler through For comparison, here are the words for a few other large groups on OkCupid:. These are the words people in the UK disproportionately use in talking about themselves.
Every dating site has to have a way to measure how good-looking its users are. Unfortunately, despite our efforts, people still gravitate to the best-looking people. Here are messages received each week, versus beauty:. The sharp increase at the right smashes down the rest of the curve, so its true nature is a bit obscured, but from the lowest percentile up, this is roughly an exponential function.
Compared with black, white and Latino men, Asian men receive fewer matches and messages from women on the dating site. Asian Dating with EliteSingles: successful online dating Asian singles, both men and women, are increasingly choosing dating sites to meet the right people, .
That is, it obeys the same maths seismologists use to measure the energy released by earthquakes: So, when we see Asian men and black women having a harder time, part of it has to do with beauty standards and part of it has to do with the ways people are socialized to imagine how Asian men or black women behave inside and outside of relationships. This exclusion of Asian men is a particularly visible problem in the gay community. Asian women have historically been deemed more sexual but also are viewed as being more demure and feminine.
So, they become idealized due to being considered very sexual but also very feminine. Alternatively, black women are viewed as hypersexual because of things like the legacy of chattel slavery, which also suggested that black women are more masculine and animalistic than other women. In a recent feature article in the Walrus, lawyer Hadiya Roderique detailed her challenges dating as a woman of colour. As Roderique alluded, there are incredibly complex social reasons behind racial preferences and stereotyping in dating.
Are you the product of a racist society? Sofi Papamarko is the founder of Friend of a Friend Matchmaking.
Reach her at facebook. Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.