Latest from the online dating trenches
Michael Moynihan’s new podcast recently had an interesting guest on: a 21st-century matchmaker. Those agencies still exist, and some of them are doing brisk business as people seek more dating options outside the algorithm. Amy Van Doran explains here how she and another agency employee create the profiles, sort them, do the matching, and try to anticipate what would happen beyond the first date.
A few things surprised me and perhaps they shouldn’t have: by far, what most women seek in a male partner is ‘success’ (this includes income and assets) and what most men seek in a female partner is beauty and youth. We appear not to have moved from the 19th-century novel, many of which warn the single men in possession of a good fortune that the most dazzling-looking woman is probably not the best idea (and women that fortune without virtue won’t bring happiness). I’ve been reading Middlemarch on and off last couple of months and that novel, featuring two protagonists who marry a catastrophically wrong partner at their own eager insistence and thus have their greater life plans thwarted, is also, among other things, about matching.
What I nodded to in recognition is the discussion near the end about how continental Europeans “don’t date” - or haven’t been, until recently, what with globalized dating culture spreading to wherever there’s internet service. People hang out with other people in a variety of contexts and if the two among them twig that they get along or that there’s attraction, they begin to meet separately. This means you get to ‘date’ comparatively fewer people, but that also their quality ie suitability will be greater. That is how it used to be, and I’m sure the situation is changing towards the more atomized, online dating market.
All of which reminded me to share some of the quotes from the dating bios from the apps that I’ve frequented in the last year, presented here anonymized of course. I have a parked inactive profile on two apps and this is some of what comes my way. It’s hard to write a good bio. Middle Eastern politics, astrology, Covid vaccines, hard-lining on trans self-ID, and mental health diagnoses as a badge of honour - are those likelier to match you with someone or less likely? This is also notably an almost exclusively female thing; men’s profiles don’t tend to signal allegiance either way on these topics.