OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment

What's missing from a lot of discussions is simple supply and demand. I was on OKCupid for a few weeks and paid the $10 for the creepy stalker upgrade. Out of curiosity I started comparing male and female profiles in my city.

In Perth, Australia, for profiles above a 90% match to mine, there were 8 male profiles for every female profile.

For profiles averaging five stars, there were 8.5 male profiles for every female profile.

Supply and demand means that the females on the site can really hold out for more. I suspect that this means that the distribution of actual dating activity will be wildly uneven -- the 1% or 2% of males who are really very attractive will clean up almost the entire female pool's attention. And the 50% of females who are above average will have their pick of the top 25% of the male pool.

Perth is not necessarily a good sample, as this town already has a lopsided male:female ratio. But every city I looked at had the same phenomenon. If I turned attractiveness up to maximum and only went to high matches, males always greatly outnumbered females.

I've given consideration to setting up a dating website in a niche market, but that particular niche market will have an even more lopsided male-centric demographic. I've been seriously wondering about just letting men and women know up front what the current ratios are. The theory being that it will deter some men and encourage some women. Alternatively I might try bar tactics: men pay at the door, women drink for free. Again to deter male users and encourage female users.

Basically it is men who are using these sites, not women. And until someone cracks the code on that, it's going to be a fairly one-sided experience.

Most men stop contacting the most attractive female profiles because they never hear back.

Some men are great at hacking the system and ignoring a woman's physical attractiveness, thus scoring really desirable mates. Others instead implicitly follow the rules of thumb that psychology discovered a while ago, according to which an attractive person is much more likely to be with another attractive person.

I think this is a myth. I wish years ago someone had told me all I needed to do was walk up to someone I found attractive and say "Hi, my name's Tom, how're you?" The day I started doing so, my dating life was revolutionised.

Actually, this applies to most situations: parties; conferences; seeing a new face at work.

With exception of special cases (maybe alpha males or older women), women on the average have is so much easier when it comes to finding their partner.

Again, I disagree; just like hiring someone, how do you sort through the cruft to find the jewel in X number of applications? I'm not talking about seeking perfection, just someone whose quirks - and we all have them - you can tolerate enough to enjoy a successful relationship.