Online Dating, Who Should Message First

People tend to message people who are more desirable than them, so you better hope they don’t know it

Sending the first message on a dating app is usually nerve-wracking, and you’ll feel much more foolish if the person never responds. According to current research, though, your proclivity to message first could indicate that you’re attempting to catch someone out of your league.

Others are more likely to initiate online conversations with people who are at least 25% more appealing than them, according to research published Wednesday in Science Advances. This is based on how many initial messages they received from other users and how “desirable” those users were themselves. When it comes to sending a first message, men are even more aspirational than women. However, the lady a male messages has a 21 percent chance of responding, and that figure reduces as the desirability difference expands.

The study looked at data from heterosexual users of an unnamed “popular, free online dating service” in January 2014 in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle. A 30-year-old lady in New York City was the highest-ranked person in all four locations, receiving 1504 messages during the month of observation, the equivalent of one message every 30 minutes.

The paper’s lead author, Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, told The Outline, “It’s really difficult to witness failed overtures offline.” However, she and her colleagues argue in the research that internet dating provides a “unprecedented chance” to observe how people interact with others who reject them.

The approach allowed the researchers to define desirability in terms of who is receiving the most attention and from whom, rather than relying on guesses about what people find attractive, she said. Mark Newman, a professor of physics and complex systems, and the paper’s co-author, said in a statement.

The researchers looked at message length and word usage to learn more about how people approach online dating (as well as who they approach). They discovered that people, particularly women, prefer to send longer messages to more desirable partners, though this is not always a successful way of securing a meeting. The exception to this rule occurred in Seattle, where there are two men for every woman in some regions. Men were the ones who wrote longer letters in that situation, but unlike women, they were more likely to be rewarded for it.

Women’s use of positive language increases as the “desirability” gap grows, according to Bruch and her colleagues. The converse is true for men, according to Bruch: as they communicate up the desirability ladder, males’s use of positive words drops. “It’s exactly like Negging,” she remarked, referring to the emotional manipulation technique in which a male insults a woman in an attempt to win her over. She explained, “I didn’t want it to be a good strategy.” Unfortunately, her findings were inconclusive.

In other gloomy news for women, the study revealed that women’s desirability begins to decline at the age of 18, whilst men’s desirability peaks at the age of 50. Men’s attraction to women hovers around the age of 20, whereas women’s increases with their own age, according to previous study by the dating website OkCupid.
The more educated a man was, the better, according to the study. For women, however, only a bachelor’s degree was considered “ideal.” (Age was taken into account by the researchers because women are often older whenever they begin extra research.)

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