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Showing posts with label dating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dating. Show all posts

Wednesday 16 July 2014

Ten dating mistakes that men always make

Eighteen months ago, I was a long-term singleton. I’d decided that my taste in men had become a little too stringent and restrictive (i.e. I always dated the same sort of guy and was left feeling bemused when they kept showing themselves to be scoundrels). So, I was set a challenge by my friends, in hope of changing the status quo – I was to join a dating site and I HAD TO accept every date I was asked on over the next six weeks.
A month and a half later I’d been on nearly 60 first dates (and can confirm that it is truly exhausting having to represent only the most palatable aspects of your personality over a prolonged period, I don’t know how the Duchess of Cambridge does it). I dated every type of man you could possibly think of, from every possible profession and background, ranging from 23 to 65 years old. I learned quite a lot about humanity, I like to think.
Natasha Devon in The Telegraph

I also noticed a few common dating faux pas nearly all men make. That’s not to say that aren’t totally understandable……But they’re also massive turn-offs (hence why the sixty first dates only resulted in one second date). So, here they are, my gift to you, single men of Britain:
1. Not having a plan. 
 It doesn’t matter how feminist and independent you believe your date to be, we love a man who is good at decision making. Please do not arrange to meet us at the Tube station and then say, “so, where do you fancy going?” This question fills us with dread. We spent three hours getting ready for this thing. We’ve done our bit. We just want to be taken somewhere nice, please.
Bonus points if you say something like “I was thinking about going here as I’ve heard it’s great, unless you had somewhere in mind you’d prefer?” This shows you are decisive AND flatters our feminist sensibilities. We will swoon.
2. Saying “so why is a beautiful girl like you single?”
This is a stupid question on a couple of levels. First of all it makes us think you’re the sort of bloke who believes the dating game is just one long queue of girls, all of whom are DESPERATE for a boyfriend and are standing in order of physical attractiveness, waiting for the next man to walk past. Life is not the television show Take Me Out and we don’t want to go out with a man who thinks it is. Secondly, it immediately makes us wonder why YOU’RE single, before concluding that you’re probably either a serial killer, one of those guys that has a house full of "love dolls" or secretly married.
We know you’re trying to pay us a compliment and that’s lovely, but just telling us we look nice is fine.
3. Admitting you’re nervous.
This is the sort of admission that should only ever happen in retrospect. If it’s five years hence, you’re married and you’re having all your other married friends over for dinner one evening then by all means say “you know the first time I took Sarah out I was SO nervous I had to dash to the toilet seven times in the half hour I was waiting for her to arrive”*. This will seem sweet when we know and love you. Before that, however, it’s just a bit weird.
*This example assumes that your partner is called Sarah. Toilet-based anecdotes about girls you dated who aren’t your present girlfriend/wife are almost never acceptable.
4. Acting like you don’t care.
Having said the above, behaving as though we are utterly disposable and as though this is the sort of thing you do every night isn’t very attractive either. Even if you DO go on dates with different women every night, making us feel special, unique and cherished is the cornerstone of every healthy relationship and also, more short term, the non-negotiable key to getting into our knickers. Things that will make us think you aren’t giving the date sufficient gravitas include yawning, playing with your phone* and turning up in any sort of sportswear.
5. *Playing with your phone
Put. The. Phone. Away. PLEASE.
6. Asking a question then looking really disinterested as soon as the answer comes.
Sounds really obvious, but you’d be surprised how many guys do this. It’s as though they’re actually there purely to soak up the ambience of the pub and their date’s company has been requested solely so they don’t look like a Billy No Mates. Do not ask us something, then glance lazily around (especially not at other girls in the vicinity) as soon as we open our mouths to respond. This is not how a conversation is supposed to go and however subtle you think you’re being, we always notice.
Call us demanding, but in addition to expressing a verbal interest in our lives, we expect you to stick around in the conversation long enough to hear our response.
7. Saying ‘tell me something about you no one else knows’.
Right, first of all, we are women and by our nature confessional – there’s virtually nothing that, between them, our Mum, best friend and most trusted work colleague don’t know about us. Secondly, even if there was, we’re hardly likely to share this scintillating fact with someone who was, 14 minutes ago, a complete stranger. Thirdly, this then puts us on the spot to recall something really unusual and ‘zany’ about ourselves, at which point every zany and unusual thing we have ever thought or done will immediately evaporate from our memory and there will be a cavernous, awkward silence during which we will both wish we were dead.
8. Doing the ‘mid-point date assessment’.
If there is one sentence guaranteed to kill any sort of spark it’s “so, how do you think it’s going?”. We do not wish to analyse this date halfway through it, with you, thank you. We wish to analyse it with our best girlfriends – initially via the medium of text whilst you are in the loo and then further the next evening over several glasses of Pinot Grigio.
9. Bad-mouthing other dates you have been on.
This is the dating equivalent of being the office gossip who spend their days spreading spurious personal information from desk-to-desk and then wonders why they aren’t invited to the pub at six o'clock. Your dating horror stories are fascinating and we will be enthusiastic because we really, really want to hear them. But we’ll also then immediately be on our guard, wondering if this date is a future anecdote for another date you might go on.
If you’re interested in watching in horror as someone second-guesses each word that comes out of their face in case it’s used to incriminate them at a further juncture, may I suggest instead watching Question Time.
10. Talking about your ex/Asking about her ex
Ah, the holy grail. We all know we shouldn’t do it. Every magazine article, dating manual and wise older person has warned us against this particular pitfall for as long as we can remember. Yet for some reason I was asked about my ex on approximately 80% of the dates I went on and, as a direct consequence, I actually ended up missing my ex a little bit.
To be avoided. At all costs.
And here’s some "dos":
- SMILE! - It doesn’t cost anything and it makes you look sexy.
- Insist on paying - A controversial one, this. We’re always happy to go halves or even to pay for the whole thing BUT if you absolutely insist we’ll assume you’re having deeply loving feelings towards us.
- Walk us to the station/put us in a cab/in some way show that you are bothered about what might befall us during our journey home.
- Text immediately you get in to say what a lovely night you had - Even if it’s a lie. It’s just British good manners.
Et voila. Happy dating, fellas!

Monday 10 February 2014

How internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match

The algorithm method: how internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match

Six million Britons are looking for their perfect partner online before Valentine's day on Friday, but their chance of success may depend on clever maths rather than charisma
Woman kissing a computer
Six million Britons visit dating sites each month. Photograph: Tom Merton/Getty Images/OJO Images RF
In the Summer of 2012, Chris McKinlay was finishing his maths dissertation at the University of California in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of late nights as he ran complex calculations through a powerful supercomputer in the early hours of the morning, when computing time was cheap. While his work hummed away, he whiled away time ononline dating sites, but he didn't have a lot of luck – until one night, when he noted a connection between the two activities.
One of his favourite sites, OkCupid, sorted people into matches using the answers to thousands of questions posed by other users on the site.
"One night it started to dawn on me the way that people answer questions on OkCupid generates a high dimensional dataset very similar to the one I was studying," says McKinlay, and it transformed his understanding of how the system worked. "It wasn't like I didn't like OkCupid before, it was fine, I just realised that there was an interesting problem there."
McKinlay started by creating fake profiles on OkCupid, and writing programs to answer questions that had also been answered by compatible users – the only way to see their answers, and thus work out how the system matched users. He managed to reduce some 20,000 other users to just seven groups, and figured he was closest to two of them. So he adjusted his real profile to match, and the messages started rolling in.
McKinlay's operation was possible because OkCupid, and so many other sites like it, are much more than just simple social networks, where people post profiles, talk to their friends, and pick up new ones through common interest. Instead, they seek to actively match up users using a range of techniques that have been developing for decades.
Every site now makes its own claims to "intelligent" or "smart" technologies underlying their service. But for McKinlay, these algorithms weren't working well enough for him, so he wrote his own. McKinlay has since written a book Optimal Cupid about his technique, while last year Amy Webb, a technology CEO herself, published Data, a Love Story documenting how she applied her working skills to the tricky business of finding a partner online.
Two people, both unsatisfied by the programmes on offer, wrote their own; but what about the rest of us, less fluent in code? Years of contested research, and moral and philosophical assumptions, have gone into creating today's internet dating sites and their matching algorithms, but are we being well served by them? The idea that technology can make difficult, even painful tasks – including looking for love – is a pervasive and seductive one, but are their matchmaking powers overstated?

Rodin's the Kiss The Kiss, 1901-4, by sculptor Auguste Rodin. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

In the summer of 1965, a Harvard undergraduate named Jeff Tarr decided he was fed up with the university's limited social circle. As a maths student, Tarr had some experience of computers, and although he couldn't program them himself, he was sure they could be used to further his primary interest: meeting girls. With a friend he wrote up a personality quiz for fellow students about their "ideal date" and distributed it to colleges across Boston. Sample questions included: "Is extensive sexual activity [in] preparation for marriage, part of 'growing up?'" and "Do you believe in a God who answers prayer?" The responses flooded in, confirming Tarr's suspicion that there was great demand for such a service among the newly liberated student population. Operation Match was born.
In order to process the answers, Tarr had to rent a five-ton IBM 1401 computer for $100 an hour, and pay another classmate to program it with a special matching operation. Each questionnaire was transferred to a punch-card, fed into the machine, and out popped a list of six potential dates, complete with address, phone number and date of graduation, which was posted back to the applicant. Each of those six numbers got the original number and five others in their response: the program only matched women with their ideal man if they fitted his ideal too.
When Gene Shalit, a reporter from Look magazine, arrived to cover the emerging computer-dating scene in 1966, Operation Match claimed to have had 90,000 applications and taken $270,000 in revenue. Even at the birth of the computer revolution, the machine seemed to have an aura about it, something which made its matches more credible than a blind date or a friend's recommendation. Shalit quoted a freshman at Brown University who had dumped her boyfriend but started going out with him again when Operation Match sent her his number. "Maybe the computer knows something that I don't know," she said. Shalit imbued it with even more weight, calling it "The Great God Computer".
The computer-dating pioneers were happy to play up to the image of the omniscient machine – and were already wary of any potential stigma attached to their businesses. "Some romanticists complain that we're too commercial," Tarr told reporters. "But we're not trying to take the love out of love; we're just trying to make it more efficient. We supply everything but the spark." In turn, the perceived wisdom of the machine opened up new possibilities for competition in the nascent industry, as start-up services touted the innovative nature of their programs over others. Contact, Match's greatest rival, was founded by MIT graduate student David DeWan and ran on a Holywell 200 computer, developed in response to IBM's 1401 and operating two to three times faster. DeWan made the additional claim that Contact's questions were more sophisticated than Match's nationwide efforts, because they were restricted to elite college students. In essence, it was the first niche computer-dating service.
Over the years since Tarr first starting sending out his questionnaires, computer dating has evolved. Most importantly, it has become online dating. And with each of these developments – through the internet, home computing, broadband, smartphones, and location services – the turbulent business and the occasionally dubious science of computer-aided matching has evolved too. Online dating continues to hold up a mirror not only to the mores of society, which it both reflects, and shapes, but to our attitudes to technology itself.
The American National Academy of Sciences reported in 2013 that more than a third of people who married in the US between 2005 and 2012 met their partner online, and half of those met on dating sites. The rest met through chatrooms, online games, and elsewhere. Preliminary studies also showed that people who met online were slightly less likely to divorce and claimed to be happier in their marriages. The latest figures from online analytics company Comscore show that the UK is not far behind, with 5.7 million people visiting dating sites every month, and 49 million across Europe as a whole, or 12% of the total population. Most tellingly for the evolution of online dating is that the biggest growth demographic in 2012 was in the 55+ age range, accounting for 39% of visitors. When online dating moves not only beyond stigma, but beyond the so-called "digital divide" to embrace older web users, it might be said to have truly arrived.
It has taken a while to get there. Match.com, founded in 1993, was the first big player, is still the biggest worldwide, and epitomises the "online classifieds" model of internet dating. Match.com doesn't make any bold claims about who you will meet, it just promises there'll be loads of them. eHarmony, which followed in 2000, was different, promising to guide its users towards long-term relationships – not just dating, but marriage. It believed it could do this thanks to the research of its founder, Neil Clark Warren, a then 76-old psychologist and divinity lecturer from rural Iowa. His three years of research on 5,000 married couples laid the basis for a truly algorithmic approach to matching: the results of a 200-question survey of new members (the "core personality traits"), together with their communication patterns which were revealed while using the site.
Whatever you may think of eHarmony's approach – and many contest whether it is scientifically possible to generalise from married people's experiences to the behaviour of single people – they are very serious about it. Since launch, they have surveyed another 50,000 couples worldwide, according to the current vice-president of matching, Steve Carter. When they launched in the UK, they partnered with Oxford University to research 1,000 British couples "to identify any cultural distinctions between the two markets that should be represented by the compatibility algorithms". And when challenged by lawsuits for refusing to match gay and lesbian people, assumed by many to be a result of Warren's conservative Christian views (his books were previously published in partnership with the conservative pressure group, Focus on the Family), they protested that it wasn't morality, but mathematics: they simply didn't have the data to back up the promise of long-term partnership for same-sex couples. As part of a settlement in one such lawsuit, eHarmony launched Compatible Partners in 2009.
Carter says: "The Compatible Partners system is now based on models developed using data collected from long-term same-sex couples." With the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and celebrity-driven online media, have come more personalised and data-driven sites such as OkCupid, where Chris McKinlay started his operation. These services rely on the user supplying not only explicit information about what they are looking for, but a host of assumed and implicit information as well, based on their morals, values, and actions. What underlies them is a growing reliance not on stated preferences – for example, eHarmony's 200-question surveys result in a detailed profile entitled "The Book of You" – but on actual behaviour; not what people say, but what they do.
In 2007, Gavin Potter made headlines when he competed successfully in the Netflix Prize, a $1m competition run by the online movie giant to improve the recommendations its website offered members. Despite competition from teams composed of researchers from telecoms giants and top maths departments, Potter was consistently in the top 10 of the leaderboard. A retired management consultant with a degree in psychology, Potter believed he could predict more about viewers' tastes from past behaviour than from the contents of the movies they liked, and his maths worked. He was contacted by Nick Tsinonis, the founder of a small UK dating site called yesnomayb, who asked him to see if his approach, called collaborative filtering, would work on people as well as films.
Collaborative filtering works by collecting the preferences of many people, and grouping them into sets of similar users. Because there's so much data, and so many people, what exactly the thing is that these groups might have in common isn't always clear to anyone but the algorithm, but it works. The approach was so successful that Tsinonis and Potter created a new company, RecSys, which now supplies some 10 million recommendations a day to thousands of sites. RecSys adjusts its algorithm for the different requirements of each site – what Potter calls the "business rules" – so for a site such as Lovestruck.com, which is aimed at busy professionals, the business rules push the recommendations towards those with nearby offices who might want to nip out for a coffee, but the powerful underlying maths is Potter's. Likewise, while British firm Global Personals provides the infrastructure for some 12,000 niche sites around the world, letting anyone set up and run their own dating website aimed at anyone from redheads to petrolheads, all 30 million of their users are being matched by RecSys. Potter says that while they started with dating "the technology works for almost anything". RecSys is already powering the recommendations for art discovery site ArtFinder, the similar articles search on research database Nature.com, and the backend to a number of photography websites. Of particular interest to the company is a recommendation system for mental health advice site Big White Wall. Because its users come to the site looking for emotional help, but may well be unsure what exactly it is they are looking for, RecSys might be able to unearth patterns of behaviour new to both patients and doctors, just as it reveals the unspoken and possibly even unconscious proclivities of daters.
A Tinder profile on a smartphone Tinder is a new dating app on smartphones.

Back in Harvard in 1966, Jeff Tarr dreamed of a future version of his Operation Match programme which would operate in real time and real space. He envisioned installing hundreds of typewriters all over campus, each one linked to a central "mother computer". Anyone typing their requirements into such a device would receive "in seconds" the name of a compatible match who was also free that night. Recently, Tarr's vision has started to become a reality with a new generation of dating services, driven by the smartphone.
Suddenly, we don't need the smart algorithms any more, we just want to know who is nearby. But even these new services sit atop a mountain of data; less like Facebook, and a lot more like Google.
Tinder, founded in Los Angeles in 2012, is the fastest-growing dating app on mobile phones but its founders don't like calling it that. According to co-founder and chief marketing officer Justin Mateen, Tinder is "not an online dating app, it's a social network and discovery tool".
He also believes that Tinder's core mechanic, where users swipe through Facebook snapshots of potential matches in the traditional "Hot or Not" format, is not simple, but more sophisticated: "It's the dynamic of the pursuer and the pursued, that's just how humans interact." Tinder, however, is much less interested in the science of matching up couples than its predecessors. When asked what they have learned about people from the data they have gathered, Mateen says the thing he is most looking forward to seeing is "the number of matches that a user needs over a period of time before they're addicted to the product" – a precursor of Tinder's expansion into other areas of ecommerce and business relationships.
Tinder's plans are the logical extension of the fact that the web has really turned out to be a universal dating medium, whatever it says on the surface. There are plenty of sites out there deploying the tactics and metrics of dating sites without actually using the D-word. Whether it's explicit – such as Tastebuds.fm, which matches up "concert buddies" based on their Spotify music tastes – or subtle, the lessons of dating research have been learned by every "social" site on the web. Nearly every Silicon Valley startup video features two photogenic young people being brought together, whatever the product, and the same matching algorithms are at work whether you're looking for love, a jobbing plumber, or a stock photograph.
Over at UCLA, Chris McKinlay's strategy seems to have paid off. After gathering his data and optimising his profile, he started receiving 10-12 unsolicited messages every day: an unheard of figure online, where the preponderance of creeps tends to put most women on the defensive. He went on 87 dates, mostly just a coffee, which "were really wonderful for the most part". The women he met shared his interests, were "really intelligent, creative, funny" and there was almost always some attraction. But on the 88th date, something deeper clicked. A year later, he proposed.
Online dating has always been in part about the allure and convenience of the technology, but it has mostly been about just wanting to find "the one". The success of recommendation systems ,which are just as applicable to products as people, says much about the ability of computers to predict the more fundamental attractions that would have got McKinlay there sooner – his algorithms improved his ability to get dates, but not much on the likelihood of them progressing further.
In the end, the development of online dating tells us more about our relationship with networked technology than with each other: from "the Great God Computer", to a profusion of data that threatens to overwhelm us, to the point where it is integrated, seamlessly and almost invisibly, with every aspect of our daily lives.

Tuesday 3 September 2013

40 Days of Dating: would you go out with an old friend?


The experiment carried out by two single New Yorkers suggests one course of action for those struggling with relationships
Couple walking in a wood
‘40 Days speaks to the many of us who have that friend in our lives who could have become a lover but things never quite worked out.' Photograph: Gen Nishino/Getty
Trying to find a significant other while living in a fast-paced city is a notoriously difficult process, especially as you try to balance all the other things you're expected to do as a young adult (find enough money to survive, carve out a career, etc). It's a struggle to get into the habit of dating, and even tougher to turn those dates into meaningful relationships.
We've read about many ways to deal with this problem, and have friends and family who fit into every category: singles in their mid- to late-30s, people in Skype-sustained long-distance relationships, serial internet dating players.
But on 20 March this year two New York-based designers, Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman, tried something new.
The pair had been friends for years and, on discovering they were single at the same time, decided to date each other for 40 days purely as an experiment.
There was a set of strict rules: they would see each other every day, visit a relationship counsellor once a week, and they would be totally exclusive. Every evening they would separately complete a questionnaire to document their feelings.
The 40 days came to an end on 28 April, but it was only in July that they started publishing the answers on their blog, 40 Days of Dating – capturing the attention of readers worldwide. Walsh and Goodman now have a combined Twitter fan base of more than 40,000, a Vimeo page with hundreds of thousands of views, and have signed up toHollywood talent agency to handle the onslaught of film offers they've received for their story.
So what is the magic that has made 40 Days become a viral hit? The main aspect that people appear to be attracted to is the "what if" scenario. It speaks to the many of us who have that friend in our lives who could have become a lover but things never quite worked out. Often that is for a very good reason, but for many people it's just a matter of bad timing. I overheard a group of women discussing the blog on the London underground, and they took great pleasure in exploring which of their platonic pals would qualify for "upgrading", as they called it. David Nicholls's novel, One Day, revolved around a similar concept: that person you've known for years who, if you just took the time to think about it, could potentially be your soul mate.
Walsh says some of her favourite feedback has come from readers inspired to make a move on a special someone who had been stuck in the "friend zone". Prior familiarity definitely caused issues for Walsh and Goodman during the first couple of weeks, as both parties struggled to adjust to a new attitude of togetherness.
At first, it looked unlikely they would fall for each other and both seemed to adopt a rather academic stance. They found it difficult to see each other in a romantic way, and the topic of sex was a real issue from the very start. With friends urging them to consummate their relationship in order to prove it as real, plus their combined tendency to overthink everything, it blew up into such a big deal that it basically became a barrier.
However, as they spent more time together and work through each other's issues, we could watch them get closer, they opened up, and suddenly it seemed all too possible that their foundation of friendship would provide a solid structure on which to build a relationship. Readers were thrilled when they revealed on day 24-25 that they had finally done the deed. It certainly was a turning point for the pair, although the emphasis has definitely been on the emotional rather than the physical. The blog paused at day 36 and resumes today. The same question haunts every fan's mind: are they still together? Did they fall in love?
All too often I've been given the advice that finding the one is effortless, and "you just know". After five years in my own, sometimes turbulent, relationship, I couldn't disagree more. I like the fact that 40 Days promotes taking the reins and being decisive: if you embrace compromise, and dedicate enough time and energy to getting to know your other half, learning what's important to them and sharing your own dreams and opinions honestly, then you have a real chance of creating something wonderful.
40 Days seems to propose a solution to the chronic loneliness of the young city dweller. It's never too late to redefine your connection with somebody. And given the blog's impact, it seems certain that many people will now be plucking up the courage to reach out to that one person they've always been curious about.

Wednesday 23 January 2013

Cambridge is top university for 'sugar daddy dating'



More than 150 female students at Cambridge University signed up for "sugar daddy dating" to help pay their tuition fees last year, according to an online dating website.

Suger daddy dating: 168 female students at Cambridge University signed up for
Suger daddy dating: 168 female students at Cambridge University signed up for "sugar daddy dating" last year. Photo: Juice Images
More female students at Cambridge University signed up for "sugar daddy dating" than at any other British university last year, according to an online dating website.
Some 168 Cambridge students joined SeekingArrangement.com – a controversial US-based internet dating website which matches attractive young women with wealthy, usually older men – last year. Eight of the other top 20 universities using the website were based in London.
SeekingArrangement.com is frequented by male business executives on an average income of £170,000 per year. Women who sign up can agree to exchange their time and affection for lavish dates, expensive shopping trips and, in some cases, regular cash allowances.
The website – which specifically targets university students by offering a free premium membership to users with a university email address – also reported a 58 per cent increase in all university students enrolling in 2012.
The current academic year is the first in which undergraduates can be charged up to a maximum £9000 in annual tuition fees. According to the website, the average female university student using the website receives £5000 per month from their "benefactors" to "cover the cost of tuition, books and living expenses". 
“College should be an opportunity to expand the mind and experience new things," said Brandon Wade, CEO and founder of SeekingArrangement.com. "Unfortunately, because of the of recent tuition hikes, the college experience has become greatly unbalanced.”
He added: “While some may argue that these women are just using men for their own personal gain, I believe that they are proactive in pursuing a higher education.”
Although a survey conducted last year by the website found approximately 80 per cent of all relationships conducted through SeekingArrangement.com involve sex, Wade has rejected criticism that the nature of the site could be interpreted as a form of prostitution.
Speaking last year, he said “sugar babies” – young women using the website – were “intelligent and goal-oriented ladies, while sugar daddies are respectful gentlemen.”
He wrote on his website: “Because the relationship between a sugar daddy and a sugar baby is romantic in nature, most sugar relationships will likely involve 'sex' ... And because a sugar daddy is expected to be the generous gentleman, 'money' will always be spent on the sugar baby. I don’t see anything wrong (or illegal) with that!"
University students now comprise 44 per cent of the site's worldwide membership.