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As a platform for meeting people, online dating has been growing in popularity. As the dating sites were growing, there wasn't a lot of easily available data on the people who used them to draw many conclusions from a sociological standpoint, but now that the numbers of people who use these sites is in the tens of millions, that is changing. When looking at the balance between choosing traits that make for a good relationship match verses eliminating people based upon negative attributes, aka "deal breakers", it appears people predominately employ the latter strategy.
A group of sociologists from the University of Michigan led by Elizabeth Bruch obtained data from one of the large dating sites and they looked at a randomly-selected group of people from New York City to determine what factors in their decision-making process led them to select or eliminate potential mates.
Bruch and her team divided the rules into two broad categories, "deal breakers" and "deal makers," used to exclude or include people for the next level of contact. Bruch wondered: Is mate selection like a job interview process, where the person with the best combination of positive factors wins? Or is it more like a Survivor-style reality show, where contestants are picked off one by one for a single failing?
Among the deal breakers are:
- No profile photo: Men and women were 20 times less likely to look at this profile.
- Smoker: A 10-fold drop in interest.
- Age difference: Young women (20 yo) were 10X less likely to look at a profile of a man ten years older than her, older women (45 yo) were 10% more likely to consider a man ten years older than her, and men overall preferred women younger than them.
- Height difference: Women were 10X more likely to look at a profile of a guy 17 cm (6 in) taller than her while guys were 3X more likely to look a the profile of a woman 17cm shorter than him
- Body weight: Men were less likely to view a profile of a heavy-set woman while women showed no aversion to a heavy-set guy.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 06 2016, @04:20AM
A young man is walking through a small village one day and decides to stop by a bar and have a beer. He walks into a bar, and sees a grizzled old man, crying into his beer. Curious, the young man sits down and says, "Hey old timer, why the long face?"
The old man looks at him and points out the window, "See that dock out there? I built that dock with my own two hands, plank by plank, nail by nail, but do they call me McGregor the dockbuilder? No, no."
The old man continued, "And see that ship out there? I've been fishing these waters for my village for thirty-five years! But do they call me McGregor the fisherman? No, no."
The old man continued, "And see all the crops in the farms out there? I planted and have been farming those crops for my village for nearly 45 years! But do they call me McGregor the farmer? No, no."
The old man starts to cry again, "But you screw one goat."
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 06 2016, @04:23AM
McGregor THE GOAT FUCKER!!!!!
Atleast he didn't screw a pretty, cute, young girl.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday September 06 2016, @08:00AM
Well, ich think he really screwed up. In our society you can kill the goat, defile the meat (e.g. let it go to waste instead of cooking it, thus letting the killing be in vain), you could pull part of their intestines over your cock and screw a woman (weren't the first condoms made from goat bowels?), thus having a vile beastily necrophile threesome, but you can NOT JUST SCREW A GOAT AND LET IT LIVE! That would be just disgusting!
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 06 2016, @12:37PM
Bringing it on topic, there's people who confuse dating people they met online with dating people they met in online dating forums and I bet the stats are different.
Like in the example above, the webmaster of "raisegoatsinyerbackyard.com" did not realize he was operating a dating website.