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:
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday September 07 2016, @08:34AM
The biggest difference between old-time blind dates, and today's electronic browsing, is that you have MORE choices, and can be more selective.
I can't ever remember even once agreeing to go out on a blind date, even as a wing man for desperate buddies, let alone for mom.
Christ, that was what high school and college were all about. Getting educated was the easy part. Finding someone you still liked after you got to know them was the hard part. That and finding a way to keep gas in the car and still have money for a drinks and a movie and something to eat. Still it seemed simpler back then.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.