Meh…
I almost always set a really wide band on age on dating apps. The catch is that the folks at the extremes have to be exceptional in one or more ways in order to get a positive reaction from me.
Typically it’s:
- Really young people (I’m in the middle aged dating pool) have to show some maturity — I don’t want to date a kid, and I don’t want to date someone with a daddy complex.
- Older ladies need to show some youthfulness. Some people have clearly given up in middle age in terms of taking care of themselves and doing interesting things. I’m not interested in these folks — they seem like they have one foot in the grave to me.
For reference, my dating range has been -15 to +7, so I don’t think I’m being overly narrow in my band. That said, most of my dates are in the -5 to -10 range.
I think this is the crux of the issue - we don't have absolute, binary requirements, we have weighted preferences. "He's a bit older, but then again he looks youthful. OTOH he doesn't have any hobbies. But then again we're aligned politically. Okay, I'll chance it."
A better way would be to allow you to set these weights and have a scoring system, and then you can set a numerical threshold.
That would be great, but it won't work. Too many people will answer questions incorrectly or not at all, and almost no one will be able to even use the app effectively even if the app designers implemented it. And I have no confidence the app developers would even be able to implement it properly.
At this point the best I can do for ‘my type’ is weirdos who like me.
Great observation.
I’m basically a “look at profile, send a dm if interesting, schedule a meeting if they reply” type of guy.
The first few minutes of a “coffee date” tells me more about the person than any amount of detailed profile or DMing can.
You may think 4 years is plenty wide for most people, but as a 26 year old male I really only am interested in eg 24-26 or even 25-26. There is also an “Elo”/mmr aspect where even if you are ok with dating someone 27-28, the reality of dating is that those women users will reject you at much higher rates than in 25-26, so including them in your range will lower the frequency with which you’re presented even to women that you do want to date due to lowering your “MMR”.
Agreed with other commenters that there are weighted preferences. While I may be ok seeing 22 or 23 year olds and in principle open to dating people in that range, in practice the rate of people I want to date in that range is much lower (but not 0). Same with people older than me.
I’d say including people beyond your actually revealed preferences actually indicates that you are open minded, assuming there are at least some people in that cohort that you are actually interested in, because it shows that you are willing to go through a much higher reject rate to find people who you are interested in.
It's been a long time since I've used dating apps, but when I used them, you could set any arbitrary upper and lower age boundaries. Has this changed?
* race / ethnicity / religion
* weight / body type / body measurements
* height
* income / salary / net worth / debt
The problem with spreadsheet-style filtering of humans is that in the real world that's not how you fall in love with someone. Someone can be too short, too chubby, of the "wrong" religion or political affiliation, but you still fall in love with them because of their energy, their warmth, their selflessness, their consistency, their presence and so on.
In theory more knobs = more better, but in practice I suspect it backfires by going against the grain of an authentic human mating experience. I can't imagine anything good coming out of the self-commodification and self-objectification that apps push us towards, even as someone who has more than extensive experience playing that game.
I'd love to see statistics showing how longitudinal life satisfaction compares between societies where marriages are arranged and where there is total freedom of marriage partner choice.
Right, and then you get married to them, and then after years of constant fighting, you get divorced because you just weren't compatible in the first place, and those fundamental problems never went away despite all the feel-good emotions you had.
I know that some of these apps allow for minimum height requirements. People don't like it went you suggest apps add width requirements in response.
Even if it's not explicitly a metric on the app, many people will say they have a min. height req. in their profile.
> income / salary / net worth / debt
I also seem to remember okcupid having some kind of education requirement, or heavily emphasized education.
I suppose it’s a reflection of which side of the marketplace is much harder to retain.