They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums. A common observation, about both the Internet dating world and the world at large, is that there is an apparent surplus of available women, especially in their thirties and beyond, and a shortage of recommendable men. For women surveying a landscape of banished husbands or perpetual boys, the biological rationale offers little solace. Neither does the Internet. Everyone these days seems to have an online-dating story or a friend with online-dating stories.

Pervasiveness has helped to chip away at the stigma; people no longer think of online dating as a last resort for desperadoes and creeps. The success story is a standard of the genre. But anyone who has spent a lot of time dating online, and not just dabbling, has his or her share of horror stories, too.

Earlier this year, a Los Angeles filmmaker named Carole Markin sued Match. com in California state court after she was allegedly raped by a man she met on the site; he turned out to be a convicted sex offender. They suggest that all good dates may be alike but that each bad one is bad in its own way.

com to prevent it from signing up any new members until it institutes a system for background checks. A few days later, the company announced that it would start checking subscribers against the national registry of sex offenders.

To some extent, such incidents, as terrible as they are, merely reflect the frequency of such transactional hazards in the wider world. They are just awkward, or excruciating.

One woman, a forty-six-year-old divorced mother of two, likened them to airplane crashes: the trouble usually occurs during takeoff and landing—the minute you meet and the minute you leave.

If not, it becomes clear at the end of the evening, when he sticks his tongue down your throat. One woman who has dated fifty-eight men since her divorce, a few years ago, told me that she maintains a chart, both to keep the men straight and to try to discern patterns—as though there might be a unified-field theory of why men are dogs.

The dating profile, like the Facebook or Myspace profile, is a vehicle for projecting a curated and stylized version of oneself into the world. Demonstrating the ability, and the inclination, to write well is a rough equivalent to showing up in a black Mercedes. Sometimes he neglects to mention that he is a convicted felon. OK Cupid, in an analysis of its own data, has confirmed what I heard anecdotally: that men exaggerate their income by twenty per cent and their height by two inches , perhaps intuiting that women pay closer attention to these data points than to any others.

But women lie about these things, too. A date is an exercise in adjustment. It is an axiom of Internet dating that everyone allegedly has a sense of humor, even if evidence of it is infrequently on display.

Demonstrating funniness can be fraught. com—on which you rate cartoons and videos, and the algorithms match you up. com and shelaughsatmyjokes. Good writing on Internet dating sites may be rare because males know that the best way to get laid is to send messages to as many females as possible. The come-on becomes spam and gums up the works, or scares women away, which in turn can lead to a different kind of gender disparity: a room full of dudes.

As soon as you get them, you get loads of creepy guys. The online dating sites are themselves a little like online-dating-site suitors. They want you. They exaggerate their height and salary. They hide their bald spots and back fat. Each has a distinct personality and a carefully curated profile—a look, a strong side, and, to borrow from TACT , a philosophy of life values.

Nothing determines the atmosphere and experience of an Internet dating service more than the people who use it, but sometimes the sites reflect the personalities or predilections of their founders.

OK Cupid, in its profile, comes across as the witty, literate geek-hipster, the math major with the Daft Punk vinyl collection and the mumblecore screenplay in development. Dating sites have for the most part always had either a squalid or a chain-store ambience.

OK Cupid, with a breezy, facetious tone, an intuitive approach, and proprietary matching stratagems, comes close to feeling like a contemporary Internet product, and a pastime for the young. Owing to high traffic and a sprightly character, OK Cupid was also perhaps the most desirable eligible bachelor out there, until February, when it was bought, for fifty million dollars, by Match. While still in school, in the late nineties, they created a successful company called the Spark, which composed and posted online study guides along the lines of Cliffs Notes.

At the time, they experimented with a dating site called SparkMatch. To solve the chicken-egg conundrum of a dating site—to attract users, you need users—they created a handful of quizzes, chief among them the Dating Persona Test.

They also urged people to submit their own quizzes. By now, users have submitted more than forty-three thousand quizzes to the site. Essentially, OK Cupid opened a parlor-game emporium and then got down to the business of pairing off the patrons. The quizzes had no bearing on the matching, and at this point they are half-hidden on the site. They were merely bait—a pickup line, a push-up bra. There is a different question regimen for matching.

On OK Cupid, the questions are submitted by users. The questions are ranked in order of how effective they are at sorting people. And yet some questions are unpredictably predictive. One of the founders, Christian Rudder, maintains the OK Trends blog, sifting through the mountains of data and composing clever, mathematically sourced synopses of his findings.

There are now nearly two hundred and eighty thousand questions on the site; OK Cupid has collected more than eight hundred million answers. People on the site answer an average of three hundred questions. That is, people on OK Cupid who have answered yes to one are likely to have answered yes to the other. OK Cupid has also analyzed couples who have met on the site and have since left it.

The purpose of the blog is to attract attention: the findings, like the quizzes, are to lure you in. Rudder has written a lot about looks: whether or not it helps to show cleavage women or a bare midriff men —the answers were Yes, Especially as You Age, and Yes, If You Have Good Abs and Are Not a Congressman. The matching algorithms take these ratings into account and show you people who are roughly within your range of attractiveness, according to the opinions of others. The idea behind the matching algorithms, Chris Coyne told me, is to replicate the experience you have off-line.

Does she like dancing? Does she smoke pot? Is she a furry? Is she tall? On the Internet, people will ask—and answer—extremely personal questions. OK Cupid sends all your answers to its servers, which are housed on Broad Street in New York. The algorithms find the people out there whose answers best correspond to yours—how yours fit their desires and how theirs meet yours, and according to what degree of importance.

The match is expressed as a percentage. Each match search requires tens of millions of mathematical operations. To the extent that OK Cupid has any abiding faith, it is in mathematics.

And that creates a shitty situation. Some women get overwhelmed. As on Match. com, the algorithms pay attention to revealed preferences. The goal is to connect you with someone with whom you have enough in common to want to strike up an e-mail correspondence and then quickly meet in person.

OK Cupid winds up with a lot of data. This enables the researchers to conjure from their database the person you may not realize you have in mind. In no other milieu do so many people, from such a broad demographic swath, willingly answer so many intimate questions.

It is a gold mine for social scientists. In the past nine months, OK Cupid has sold its raw data redacted or made anonymous to protect the privacy of its customers to half a dozen academics.

Gregory Huber and Neil Malhotra, political scientists at Yale and Stanford, respectively, are sifting through OK Cupid data to determine how political opinions factor in to choosing social partners.

The four are Sam Yagan, the C. As they all like to say, Sam is the business, Chris is the product, Max is the tech, and Christian is the blog. Yagan, who is thirty-four, is also the face. He makes grandiose claims with a mixture of mirth and sincerity. The search for companionship is more important than the search for song lyrics. All four founders maintain profiles on OK Cupid, but they are all married, and they all met their wives the analogue way.

He commutes to New York every week, bunking in a hotel. Rudder, who is thirty-five and from Little Rock, met his wife, a public-relations executive from Long Island named Reshma Patel, twelve years ago through friends. They live in a modest apartment in Williamsburg, and often have friends over at night to play German board games. She is from Manhattan and works in the education department at the Frick Collection.

They were classmates at Harvard, but they met again a few years later outside a night club in New York. He had a drunken woman on each arm. Chris and Jennie began e-mailing each other, and eventually went out on a date. She considers herself an excellent matchmaker, with a well-tested compatibility theory of her own—that a man and a woman should look alike. They were engaged within a year. They moved into an apartment in the same building as her parents: the San Remo, on Central Park West.

Serendipity and coincidence are the photosynthesis of romance, hinting at some kind of supernatural preordination, the sense that two people are made for each other.

The Internet subverts Kismet. And yet Coyne and his wife both have a profile on the site, and the algorithms have determined that she is his No. He is her No. She struck up a correspondence with her No. For all the fun that twenty-somethings are having hooking up with their Hornivores, their Sonnets, and their Poolboys, it turns out that the fastest-growing online-dating demographic is people over fifty—a function perhaps of expanding computer literacy and diminished opportunity.

She lives outside Boston. As a single mother, in her forties, she gave up men for a while. When her son was ready to go to college, she started dating again. She was fifty-eight. Through a dating service, she met an economist, who was eight years younger than she. They lived together for a decade. And that was that. A nice guy from Vermont drove all the way down to see me. She met a mathematician who lived in Amsterdam, and flew over to meet him but discovered within minutes that he suffered from full-blown O.

They got together for coffee at Café Pamplona, in Cambridge. He was handsome, charming, and bright. He invited her to accompany him to Norway to meet the Queen. She has gone online as a man, just to survey the terrain, and estimates that in her age range women outnumber men ten to one. If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.

The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony. EHarmony is the squarest of the sites, the one most overtly geared toward finding you a spouse.

It was launched, in , by Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist who had spent three decades treating and studying married couples and working out theories about what made their marriages succeed or fail. From his own research, and his review of the academic and clinical literature, he concluded that two people were more likely to stay together, and stay together happily, if they shared certain psychological traits.

As he has often said, opposites attract—and then they attack. He designed eHarmony to identify and align these shared traits, and to keep opposites away from each other. Warren was also a seminarian and a devout Christian, and eHarmony started out as a predominantly Christian site. The evangelical conservative James Dobson, through his organization Focus on the Family, had published advice books that Warren had written and provided early support and publicity for eHarmony.

As it has grown into the second-biggest fee-based dating service in the world, eHarmony has expanded and shed its more orthodox orientation, and severed its connections to Dobson. In , under pressure from a slew of class-action lawsuits, it created a separate site specifically for homosexuals. The director of the lab, and the senior director of research and development at eHarmony, is a psychologist named Gian Gonzaga.

He and his staff bring in couples and observe them as they perform various tasks. Then they come to conclusions about the human condition, which they put to use in improving their matching algorithms and, perhaps just as important, in getting out the word that they are doing so. There is a touch of Potemkin in the enterprise. One night in March, Gonzaga invited me to observe a session that was part of a five-year longitudinal study he is conducting of three hundred and one married couples.

EHarmony had solicited them on its site, in churches, and from registration lists at bridal shows. Of the three hundred and one, fifty-five had met on eHarmony. Gonzaga, an affable Philadelphian, introduced me to one of his colleagues, Heather Setrakian, who was running the study.

She was also his wife. To test their procedures, they needed a man and a woman to impersonate a married couple for multiple sessions. Gonzaga and Setrakian became the impersonators, and fell in love. The eHarmony relationship lab consists of four windowless interview rooms, each of them furnished with a couch, easy chairs, silk flowers, and semi-hidden cameras. The walls were painted beige, to better frame telltale facial expressions and physical gestures on videotape.

Down the hall was the control room, with several computer screens on which Gonzaga and Setrakian and their team of researchers observe their test subjects. Each couple came for an interview three or so months before their wedding, and then periodically afterward. They also filled out questionnaires and diaries according to a schedule. In the lab, they were asked to participate in four types of interaction, where first one spouse, and then the other, initiates a discussion.

The discussions ranged from two to ten minutes. It helps test the bond. A third interaction is conflict resolution; the husband chooses something that has been bugging him about his wife, and they spend ten minutes hashing it out. Then the wife gets her shot.

Gonzaga showed me recordings of several sessions involving some couples in the program. Their participation in the study is confidential, but they had consented to let me watch their sessions.

In the conflict-resolution segment, each spouse chooses an area of grievance from a list called the Inventory of Marital Problems, developed by psychologists in Each subject rates each category on a scale of 1 to 7, ranging from Not a Problem to Major Problem.

Apparently, this behavior did not augur well. He was a third-generation Mexican-American from the San Gabriel Valley who worked for the city of Los Angeles. She was a Mexican immigrant who worked as a family therapist. They were both heavyset and inclined toward a projection of light amusement, although hers seemed more acerbic.

He had had a mostly fruitless dating career. EHarmony selected her as a compatible partner for Leon, but he put her aside at first, because her name was too much like his.

Finally, they went through the stages of communication. Who asks that question? It bounced off the ceiling into my hands. After three years, they moved in together, and married a year later. They have a one-year-old son. I watched the tease. Typically, Gonzaga gives the subjects initials to choose from, and the couple uses them to come up with a moniker. and chose the moniker Boob Dude. Back in the control room, Gonzaga explained that their teasing had a flirtatious and sympathetic tone, which was a sign that their senses of humor were aligned and that therefore they were harmonious—tease-wise, at least.

Perhaps eHarmony had chosen well. In , in response to the success of eHarmony, Match. com began developing a new site—a longer-term-relationship operation with a scientific underpinning. Despite all this, from a business standpoint OKTrends has certainly been worth it. Mass media devoured even the noncontroversial posts from the beginning. In , the OKTrends blog served as fodder for at least half a dozen New York Times articles and blog posts.

OKCupid discovered earlier than most what data could tell us. But Rudder and OKTrends showed that Big Data had more to offer. With every decision we make online we leave a trace about our intentions, conscious or otherwise. When all those traces are gathered together into one central space, they form a reservoir of knowledge about who we are.

Since OKTrends was started, 25 million new people have joined OKCupid; in the five years before the blog, the site had attracted 5 million. Not a matchmaker, nor a data scientist, nor a star of a film that New York Times critic A. Scott named one of his 10 best of the year in , nor the guitarist for a beloved indie pop band. He stumbled into all of it — they were just things that happened.

They started happening when Rudder went to Harvard in First, everybody was way better than I was. Dicked around in Excel, basically. A year later he went back to Harvard, determined to change course even if he was right back where he started.

Gone were the math and physics courses, in was the English curriculum. And then by senior year it was back to math. He earned a math degree in After graduating, he followed friends to Texas, where he worked on a financial graphing tool more Excel and thought about becoming a baker. And so, tired of the searchers, Rudder went searching. He knew a guy who knew a girl who knew a startup looking for writers, so he got a job at TheSpark. com, and moved to Boston for it.

TheSpark was a kind of proto-Buzzfeed that offered lifestyle quizzes and would later grow into SparkNotes, a CliffsNotes-knockoff on the Web. Those were the posts that, many years later, would mature into OKTrends. It helped that TheSpark is also where Rudder met Sam Yagan, Chris Coyne and Max Krohn, all of whom would go on to found OKCupid with him.

A few years after Rudder left TheSpark he and a Harvard pal, Justin Rice, self-released an album as the band Bishop Allen. Immersing himself in Bishop Allen was how Rudder paid the bills while OKCupid struggled to find its audience. Rudder, the math major, satire-writer, Excel-dicker, had helped transform indie cinema. Just one of those things that happened. Rice, though, does see a throughline.

The book covers data from OKCupid, Twitter, Facebook, Google and other sites to describe how Big Data has already changed our lives, and all the changes to come. OKCupid is just how I arrived at the story. Now, Rudder argues, the story is ours to tell. Rudder started writing the book in a pre-Edward Snowden era, when the conversation about data was largely about its possibilities, not its perils.

We are who we thought we were. Now we just have the numbers to confirm it. Copyright © by Christian Rudder. Published by Crown, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Any except maybe Tinder-type sites, which pull from a Facebook account and rely heavily on profile images. Chadwick Matlin is a deputy editor at FiveThirtyEight. Data Science 4 posts Online Dating 3 OkCupid 2 Christian Rudder 1 Data-ing 1 Dataclysm 1 OKTrends 1.

I n mid-August, couples and lonely hearts packed a Brooklyn basement to hear scientists make sense of something the crowd could not: love. It was the 11th meeting of the Empiricist League, a kind of ad-hoc, small-scale TED Talks for scientists and the New Yorkers who adore them. In , Rudder started OKTrends, an in-house blog for OKCupid, as a way to attract new members to a site that was nearly out of money.

The posts covered such topics as the best camera angle for a profile picture and how people lie on their profiles — the mysteries online daters wonder about. All of a sudden, Rudder, a one-time indie actor and rock star, had transformed himself into a dating laureate for the data age.

Savvy book publishers took note. In Rudder proposed a book based on his blog, and Crown outlasted nine other publishers with a seven-figure bid. Accompanied by a slideshow, he brought up a chart 1 of how straight women rate the men on OKCupid based on their age.

The crowd lost it — groans, hoots, hollers, total, uproarious laughter. Rudder demurred. The questioner interrupted. She was looking for a clear-cut answer, a capital-T Truth. In the age of Big Data, the empirical has deciphered the intimate. R udder is now the president of OKCupid, but in , before he started OKTrends, OKCupid was close to the end. The company had enough money to last until the end of the year, but without further investment that would be it. It was a free, advertising-supported dating site trying to scrape by in a market crowded with dozens of competitors and two hegemons: eHarmony and Match.

For over a decade, online dating had been taking advantage of Big Data before Big Data was even a buzzword. The site runs the answers through some calculations to determine a match percentage for any given couple and then shows it to them. Rudder, who lives in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, is married and has never been on an online date.

He co-founded the site in , but he stayed out of the business for several years while touring with his rock band, Bishop Allen. Their idea was to start a blog that shared the kinds of interesting tidbits about OKCupid users that they were already emailing around the office. These days, this kind of data-as-PR strategy is commonplace for startups.

And PornHub, the porn hub, recently outlined the different ways its users watch XXX content. So even just the fact of publishing some stats felt kind of transgressive. Currently it stands at 1. This was raw shareable content before Buzzfeed or Upworthy had figured out the social Web.

People, it seemed, liked reading about themselves. But Rudder is no Virginia Woolf. To make these posts, it would take Rudder weeks to sort through the data his colleagues provided. You just live in it, man. Rudder thought Facebook got a raw deal in news coverage because all Internet companies run small- and large-scale experiments to help hone their products or make sense of their data.

OKCupid then measured whether those matches were less productive i. Like how Jay-Z still sells albums? The Guardian , the BBC , and USA Today all covered the post.

The algorithm does kind of work. What if our algorithm was far worse than random? This is the only way to find this stuff out.

It got more contentious from there, which Rudder regrets. The flap has made him think hard about the value of sociological insights, and what the limits should be in the pursuit of them. Then you are actually misleading people. Despite all this, from a business standpoint OKTrends has certainly been worth it. Mass media devoured even the noncontroversial posts from the beginning. In , the OKTrends blog served as fodder for at least half a dozen New York Times articles and blog posts.

OKCupid discovered earlier than most what data could tell us. But Rudder and OKTrends showed that Big Data had more to offer. With every decision we make online we leave a trace about our intentions, conscious or otherwise. When all those traces are gathered together into one central space, they form a reservoir of knowledge about who we are. Since OKTrends was started, 25 million new people have joined OKCupid; in the five years before the blog, the site had attracted 5 million.

Not a matchmaker, nor a data scientist, nor a star of a film that New York Times critic A. Scott named one of his 10 best of the year in , nor the guitarist for a beloved indie pop band.

He stumbled into all of it — they were just things that happened. They started happening when Rudder went to Harvard in First, everybody was way better than I was. Dicked around in Excel, basically. A year later he went back to Harvard, determined to change course even if he was right back where he started.

Gone were the math and physics courses, in was the English curriculum. And then by senior year it was back to math. He earned a math degree in After graduating, he followed friends to Texas, where he worked on a financial graphing tool more Excel and thought about becoming a baker.

And so, tired of the searchers, Rudder went searching. He knew a guy who knew a girl who knew a startup looking for writers, so he got a job at TheSpark. com, and moved to Boston for it. TheSpark was a kind of proto-Buzzfeed that offered lifestyle quizzes and would later grow into SparkNotes, a CliffsNotes-knockoff on the Web. Those were the posts that, many years later, would mature into OKTrends. It helped that TheSpark is also where Rudder met Sam Yagan, Chris Coyne and Max Krohn, all of whom would go on to found OKCupid with him.

A few years after Rudder left TheSpark he and a Harvard pal, Justin Rice, self-released an album as the band Bishop Allen. Immersing himself in Bishop Allen was how Rudder paid the bills while OKCupid struggled to find its audience.

Rudder, the math major, satire-writer, Excel-dicker, had helped transform indie cinema. Just one of those things that happened. Rice, though, does see a throughline. The book covers data from OKCupid, Twitter, Facebook, Google and other sites to describe how Big Data has already changed our lives, and all the changes to come. OKCupid is just how I arrived at the story. Now, Rudder argues, the story is ours to tell. Rudder started writing the book in a pre-Edward Snowden era, when the conversation about data was largely about its possibilities, not its perils.

We are who we thought we were. Now we just have the numbers to confirm it. Copyright © by Christian Rudder. Published by Crown, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Any except maybe Tinder-type sites, which pull from a Facebook account and rely heavily on profile images.

Chadwick Matlin is a deputy editor at FiveThirtyEight. Data Science 4 posts Online Dating 3 OkCupid 2 Christian Rudder 1 Data-ing 1 Dataclysm 1 OKTrends 1. Filed under Data Science 4 posts Online Dating 3 OkCupid 2 Christian Rudder 1 Data-ing 1 Dataclysm 1 OKTrends 1.

She had a wary, melancholic air and was curled up in a chair, as though recoiling from the camera that she knew was embedded in the wall behind her husband. People, it seemed, liked reading about themselves. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. Civilization, in its various guises, had it pretty much worked out. About TED-Ed Animations TED-Ed Animations feature the words and ideas of educators brought to life by professional animators.

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