Social Experiment: The zany profile

I’d make a crappy scientist. I started my dating site “social experiment” just over two weeks ago and I’m already done with it. I haven’t even had time to sit down and write out what the whole experiment is even about and it’s over. Well to bring you up to speed let’s discuss the purpose of this experiment and then we’ll get into what little I’ve discovered.

The backstory. When my friend asked me to help out with their Match.com profile a few weeks back, I spent a little time browsing through profiles to see what love-hungry internet users were posting in an effort to find their next hookup or lifelong soul mate. And I’ve got to say, I was appalled. Seriously appalled. The dating sites I looked at gave you anywhere from 400 to maybe 1000 words for your intro and I swear nearly every user on every site must have copied and pasted the same 400 words into the space provided. With few exceptions, all the profiles I read said exactly the same thing. Apparently everybody in the world – if these profiles are anything to go by – everybody is “laid back” or “easy going.” Everybody “doesn’t take life too seriously.” Everyone has a “good sense of humor” and everyone “loves to laugh.” Everybody enjoys “partying in bars” but they also – every single one of them – enjoy “cuddling up with a movie.” And dear Lord if there wasn’t also a heavy percentage of people who used that old cliché line about “long walks on the beach.” The headlines these people came up with, the headings that are supposed to entice others to click on your profile, were equally lame and repetitious: “Nice girl seeking a friend” or “Single Guy in Philly” or simply, “Hi.” And that’s the people that actually took the time to write something. There were nearly as many people on these sites who only put in a token sentence or two which primarily consisted of the statement, “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this,” or “My friend told me about this so I figured I’d give it a shot,” or some other similar variation that doesn’t really tell us anything about the person.

Lauren and I spent time browsing through profiles, men’s and women’s, and we both agreed that it was overwhelming how generic the dating pool seems to be – again, if these profiles are anything to go by. How do serious users of sites like Friendfinder and Match.com actually pick and choose who to contact when every person you find sounds almost identical to person before? It must come down to the pictures they post. Since everyone sounds like they have essentially the same interests and personality, you might as well focus your efforts on only the hot ones. After maybe an hour of browsing through profiles, Lauren and I looked at each other and thanked God that we’d found each other. What would we do right now if we were still single in a world where online dating has become the most popular way of hooking up?

Now, I must step back for a moment and stress that I am not saying any of this to be holier-than-thou toward single people, or toward people who use dating sites. I am certainly not insinuating that marriage is the be all end of all human accomplishment, or that singledom is somehow a lamentable condition. I’m merely pointing out the fact that judging by the crop of people we browsed through on these dating sites, the modern dating world is apparently a bleak place with boring selections.

Mind you, the same was true back when I was frequenting the dating site circuit. In fact, it probably looked even bleaker back then because there was a higher percentage of people who simply didn’t put anything in their profiles. To be quite honest, any profile that had at least a full paragraph stood out from the crowd no matter what they wrote. And the thing is, what they wrote was essentially the same thing that everybody is writing these days. Namely, “I’m a laid back, easy going guy who doesn’t take life too seriously and I love to laugh.” So the climate really hasn’t worsened since I left the dating scene, it’s just that it’s more saturated with people saying the same thing. But here’s the thing, as I said in my previous post, back then all of the sites were free. It didn’t cost you a dime to post your dumb and generic profile. So I think what blows my mind more than anything is that not only are people boring and unimaginative to the point of making me physically nauseous, but they’re actually paying money to be boring and unimaginative. And paying a good amount of money too. So, like I’ve said, I have absolutely nothing against people using dating sites. I’m all for them. I used them myself back in the day and had a relative amount of luck with them. I think in this modern technological age, sites like these really are the best ways for a plugged-in and over-scheduled public to meet and hit things off. What I don’t get is why people would go through all the trouble and expense of having an online dating profile and not say something, anything to make themselves stand out from the crowd.

It was with that in mind that I decided to create my own profile. I figured I would post something so entirely off the wall, so completely out of line from the typical dating profile, and see what kind of response it got. So I ended up copying and pasting the text from an old humor column of mine. It tells a true story from my childhood about how my friends and I, in an effort to get back at the mean cooks in our school cafeteria, spent an entire lunch period smearing sloppy joes and blueberry cobbler all over our faces. For my headline, I used the title of the piece: “Hot Lunch Uprising.” I figured a line like that would be enough to pique people’s interest, make them say, “What the hell is this?” and click on my profile. Once they were in, my theory was that it would make them chuckle enough to at least write me a short email saying they liked what I wrote. After all, nearly every woman on this site claimed that they wanted a man who could make them laugh. Well rather than saying I could make them laugh, I just tried to make them laugh. Rather than posting a general description about the whole of my personality, I posted a story about one specific thing that hopefully gives someone an even better insight into it.

And you know what, it actually worked, though not as well as I had been hoping. Of course to be fair, it’s hard to really say how good or bad the response was since I couldn’t really respond to most of the emails I had received without paying for a membership – and in the case of Match.com, I couldn’t even read my mail without ponying up. In my first few days, I got a few emails from people on True.com, several of whom were actually quite attractive and all of whom actually had their own witty and intelligent things to say – the kind of women I likely would have tried to date had I done this as a single guy. I set up a free a three-day trial with True and emailed several of them back to let them know what I was really up to. I apparently got three emails from people on Match.com but, again, was unable to actually read them for lack of payment. I got one email from somebody on Yahoo personals who I was able to send a generic pre-written message back to with my free membership, and she was intelligent enough to write back with enough information that I could figure out how to contact her for real. Other than that though, without the ability to openly communicate, it was difficult to differentiate between emails I got from people who were legitimately interested in me, or emails from spammers and shills.

So for the amount of money and effort I actually put into this little experiment, I’m rather impressed with the results. The quantity of women contacting me may not have been as high as I’d have liked, but the quality of women was definitely noteworthy. I think if I were single and had actually gone all out, paid my money and gotten the ability to send and receive email freely, I would have done very well with this weird but apparently effective approach.

So, here’s advice from ye olde sage Brian to all those who are currently using a dating site, or are considering it. First of all, avoid True.com at all costs. I got more spam from that site than any of the others. You know the kind; pretty “ladies” who say things like, “I am liking for my one true love that you are sexy too.” So there’s that. My more important advice is this: don’t tell people about yourself in the intro to your profile. No matter how charming or witty you think you’re being, in the end all your interests, personality traits and suggestions for “the perfect date” are just going to sound like everybody else’s on the site. The better route as far as I’m concerned is to either tell a story or talk about one specific thing that interests you. Rather than saying you like hiking, tell the story of a hike you went on. Rather than saying you like to go out and party, talk about one particularly cool night when you were out. Rather than saying you have a sense of humor, actually tell a funny story. Make it random. Make it weird. Make it stand out. I think random stories tell a lot more about a person than even the best intentioned “introductions.”

So that’s my advice. If you take it and it works out for you, please let me know. I’m very curious to see how this tactic works for people who can actually benefit from it. As for me, I’m just glad I met my wife the way I did, at a wedding so she never had to read my boring and generic dating intro. Where would we be today if she had? And that’s really the end for this social experiment. I wish I had more fascinating data to share, but I frankly have neither the money nor the patience to pursue this line of thought any farther.

Social Experiment - Dating Sites

I don’t know if I would have been considered “ahead of the game” but I used to use online dating sites several years before they were the widely accepted and mostly legitimate social networking gems they are today. This was in my single L.A. days, from 1999-2000. Back then being on one of those sites was really a source of embarrassment if any of your friends found out, so you simply did not tell people that you were doing it. The general consensus at the time was that those sites were full of perverts and dirty old men looking for quick and easy sex hookups. (Make no mistake, there was that element on there, but it was very much in the minority.) I actually created entirely separate email accounts and was very guarded about my identity whenever somebody emailed me. Not out of fear of my own safety, but out of fear that some wiseass friend had found me and was trying to play a trick on me. Even though I was mildly successful at the whole online dating thing – went on a couple of dates with some nice girls and ended up meeting one of my closest and most special friends in the world – I never told anybody what I was doing until well after I had stopped with the whole thing.

These days it’s kind of different. While people may not be announcing it to the world that they’re looking for love on the internet, for the most part they aren’t ashamed to admit to it. Online dating these days is kind of like voting for George W. Bush. Some people will admit to it proudly while others will do it sheepishly and with a long explanation.

I started down this train of thought last Friday night when a friend of mine was asking for help composing their profile for Match.com. Curious, I went over to the site and a couple others to look around and see what has changed since my last foray into the personals scene. All I have to say is, “Wow!” It’s obvious that what used to be a closely-guarded subculture has become quite legitimized. I mean, you can tell just from the plethora of dating site ads you see on just about every website out there. But when you click over, you realize that the trend has become so legitimate that the sites are actually charging for their services… and charging substantially for them. Pretty much every legit site I looked up charges anywhere from twenty to almost seventy dollars per month depending on the type of membership you have. Oh sure they say you can sign up for free, but if you actually want to be able to do anything beyond posting a profile, you have to pony up.

I can still remember when the dating sites were free. And I mean free free. Free to sign up. Free to view profiles. Free to post pictures. Free to communicate back and forth. FREE. I honestly don’t even remember what sites I used back then. They’re probably all gone now. I think MSN had a site as well as Yahoo and I had profiles on them. And they were both free. I think the dating sections were merely extensions of their regular email service. They didn’t have all the bells and whistles of today’s sites with 40-point personality compatibility comparisons and whatnot. You put in basic info like body-type, religion, height, and zip code, wrote a few paragraphs about yourself and posted a couple of pictures. But really, having looked at all those bells and whistles on the dating sites today, I can’t imagine ever using them, much less why they’ve caused the prices to skyrocket from nothing to obscene.

Actually, I did use a pay site one time. And it’s one that’s still around today. Friendfinder.com. In fact, looking at them now, they don’t seem like their prices have gone up that much. I think back in my day, a single month “silver” membership was something like fifteen bucks and then it went down from there depending on how long you signed up. Today a one-month silver membership is only twenty-two dollars – and it’s less than ten dollars a month if you sign up for a whole year. But I never paid for my time at Friendfinder. Even with a free bare bones membership you could accomplish a thing or two. Sure they limited you to the number of profiles you could look at in a single day and I think you were also limited to a single email per day. But that just meant you had to be judicious about who you clicked on and who you sent mail to. You managed your bookmarks carefully so you could send out your daily token email to your selected ladies and then you kept the rest in store for future days. And you made sure to frontload that lone daily email with all essential information. You gave them your email address and anything else they could use to contact you off the Friendfinder site.

Well those days are over. You can’t send any messages anymore from any site, as near as I can tell, if you ain’t paying. The reason I know this is because I’ve decided to conduct a little “social experiment.” I’ve posted a free profile on several dating sites. I’ll get into the specifics of the experiment in future blogs, but here’s what I’ve learned in the first 72 hours or so. To reiterate… if you don’t want to pay, sure you can spend your time creating a profile, and paying members might even be able to send you mail, but you will not be able to contact them back without coughing up the cash to do it. True.com will allow you a free three-day trial that allows you to send email, but you can’t actually send any contact information. Email addresses, websites, even the word “Google” gets caught and filtered so that all communication has to take place via the site… and once your trial ends, so does the communication. Match.com on the other hand doesn’t even give you that much. Within a half-hour of my profile being approved I received notification at my regular email address that I had a message waiting for me. But in order to read it, I had to sign up for a six-month membership (which costs over $120). Just to read the message. Oh, I also couldn’t even see who had sent me the message without paying. Now, can anybody else smell the scam all over this one? You know I would have signed up, paid my money and clicked on my email only to find out it was probably either a welcome message from Match.com or else a shill profile from some non-existent person designed to pique my interest so I would pay the membership fee.

Wow. It was a simpler time back then when people merely thought you were an online pervert. Certainly a less-expensive time. Anyway, over the next few… days… weeks… however long until I get bored with it, I’ll be filling you all in on this little “social experiment” I’m conducting on these dating sites. And just so you know, yes my wife is fully aware of what I’m doing. I’m showing her everything I post, every email I receive and every one I (attempt to) send out.

In my next blog (that pertains to this experiment) I’ll lay out my plan and why I thought it would be an interesting idea.