Dan Ariely on why online dating is so unsatisfying

If you have attitude that you're not going to make any changes to yourself in order to land women, than you're not going to land women. And why should women want to date you if your not willing to make the step?

Women don't want direct and straightforward. They want charm, mystery, excitement. For one trite example, When I'm commenting on some nerdy web forum, and my girlfriend asks me what I'm doing, I don't say, "I'm chatting on a web forum." I say, "I'm engaging in correspondence" and paint the air of some sophisticated 19th century aristocrat. Or I say, "the same thing I do every night, sweetie, try and take over the world". When you can learn to dress up the mundane aspects of life with fun and charm, you'll find women enjoy being around you a lot more.

I used to think "game" was just something for cad's and those who wanted only numbers and notches. But even the most cultured, educated, women wants to be charmed, she wants that psychologically dominant rogue to game her. If you want a great, long term affectionate companion, you need to develop both the personal rapport and shared interests, but also the romantic game/charm that makes her tingle for you.

Bingo. You nailed it, and I can say that is the mindset you need.

I'm the same height. Similar build (actually a bit thinner). Yet younger. Friends say I'm anything but unattractive, yet the reality is I've always been single.

I took a crack at things a few months ago and rather than be straightforward, I use Hugh Gallagher's "Essay 3A" as inspiration for my profile. The entire thing was nothing short of a farce. I couldn't of taken it any less seriously aside from the fact that it was genuinely funny.

I received eighteen first contacts within the first week. This is nothing new. Usually I get annoyed, put up something ridiculous, and in come the results. Or if I do contact someone, I write something incredibly brief or incredibly goofy and then start to get replies.

Did any of them pan out this time? No. Ultimately it resulted in three different dates all of which went bad enough to turn me off of dating for another year. However my point is women don't care for straight-forwardness. At all.

That being said, if you are in the Boston area and are interested in getting back into classical singing and opera I can probably help out.

>without much I can do to change this.

Dude, you're fit. Many, many women will be down with this. If you're not extremely ugly, it's behavioral so this just means it's time for introspection.

You don't have to play the game, you have to avoid obviously offensive things, contact a lot of people and be VERY selective about who you waste your time on. You could spend your whole life trying to chat up 18-22 yo 8-10 looks girls or with lots of correspondence to someone you don't really like, that doesn't mean it's a solid idea (or that you are doing this, just an example)

This is a very accurate observation. I remember reading a news article, "So You Think You Can Cancel Me?" ~ http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/10/2815250.htm this year making the same claim.

"... Rock Eisteddfod didn't just provide emasculated nerds with an alternative to the Jock Eisteddfod that is competitive sport. It meant for a few blissful hours each week, we had the girls to ourselves. Girls who would dance. In tights. To a soundtrack of Jamiroquai. ..."

And keep away from specialized dating sites. Go with Facebook or any other kind of communication platform that are not invented exclusively for dating. People are just much more natural there. With some practise you can fairly easy figure out if there's a date potential just by looking at a profile.

Everyone wants something different, and there really is a strong 'right place at the right time' component. A woman who would have rejected you last night might be receptive tonight, etc..

This works, if you just want to get laid. My experience with on line dating was that you needed to differentiate yourself through better writing (and through writing personalized to the profile) and to lower your standards some. (let's be real here. the 'selection pressure' on line is even stronger than real life. You're competing against a hoard of lonely men, all of whom can lie about their stats. So unless you are lying (which really doesn't work to well once you meet) you aren't going to be able to compete on statistics.

But really, I think when looking for a 'real relationship' most of the 'pick up spots' are disproportionately loaded with people who are unable or unwilling to sustain a long-term relationship. I mean, that's fine if you are just looking to get laid; but I don't think it's a great filter to use when looking for a relationship.

I ask because I read an article recently pointing out the economics of paid dating sites, and how it leads nearly every male to have the experience you described.

Couldn't find the link again but I think it went something like this: people sign up for the "free" offer, and their profile goes up. But they can't respond until they pay. So you ping a few people, and in a lot of cases don't get a response because they haven't paid yet (but the site doesn't tell you that). Then you ping a few more. As time passes and you broaden your scope, you're no longer sending carefully crafted, personal messages, you're using a shotgun approach. (Or at least, most guys are.)

Meanwhile, the women aren't initiating usually, they're letting the guys come to them. Since the guys are all shotgunning, the women are getting flooded. If they're even reading all their messages, they clicking through fast looking for any excuse to reject each one and move on to the next.

So, online, just getting into their sphere of awareness by viewing their profile can help elicit a wink (and using a call-to-action in your profile): http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/match-whos-viewed-me/

When you do finally send a message, it's best to keep it short, specific, and include ONE question: http://www.onlinedatingmatchmaker.com/match-messages/

I think this is the way to go, big sites attract lots of strange people. Also, from what I have heard, paying sites have better clientele than the free sites, which makes sense, but I have not been game to actually pay for it.

People are far too picky, and reject far too many people they would otherwise get along with famously in real life - I've noticed this pattern in myself also. Profiles suck at describing people, not to mention their compatibility with you - yet they have this air of authority and legitimacy about them.

If we had a decent matchmaking service that wasn't just a complete crapshoot (i.e., high-scoring matches are actually good matches), I'd say a blind-date system may in fact work better than what we've got now - get people out there and interacting in real life as opposed to a terminal with a bunch of droll readouts of vital statistics.

On a paid online dating site (for eg: match.com), you know that the people are there because they really are looking for a relationship (and that they care enough to pony up ridiculous money for the site). You get a sense of a person by various things that they say about themselves, and you only initiate conversations with ones that you'd be interested in. Though much of the Ariely discrediting is with the search attributes, those open-ended questions offer a peek into how the person views himself/herself. If you move beyond the superficiality, there is definitely a good chance there. I've been on a dates with people I met online, and I do feel that there was better chemistry on these dates rather than the offline ones.

Ariely says at one point during the interview: "I mean, imagine that you basically had to drive six hours, three hours each way to have coffee with somebody, and, you know, coffee usually ends up with just coffee."

This analogy is false, because even if the average is six hours, you're free to allocate them however you want. One hour a day for a week, half an hour on your lunch break here, a couple hours on your laptop while watching TV there, etc. If surfing some profiles and exchanging some e-mails is considered the equivalent of driving from New York to Boston to go on a date, that's absurd.

It beats wasting 5 hours surfing the web looking for dates.

It could be true in this case though due to the nonlinear utility of money. This guy's a professor of computer science at Duke so he's presumably making good money, maybe $150K? The difference between making $150K and $190K is pretty unimportant, like an extra inch in height, whereas the difference between making $40K and $80K is important, like an extra (I dunno) five inches in height.

For this particular guy, he could probably increase his attractiveness by an equal amount by spending fifty bucks on a decent haircut.

FTA: "Women, on the other hand, prefer men who are taller than themselves, and they have a particularly strong aversion to shorter men. For example, our estimates imply that compared to a man who is five inches taller than a woman and earns $ 50,000 per year, a man who is five inches shorter than a woman would need to earn slightly more than half a million dollars per year to make up for his shortcoming."

Another way to look at it is height has a certain level of importance and how much money you make almost doesn't matter at all. In other words, it takes so much money to make up for the height difference because almost no one actually cares about the money.