Last year, a friend informed me that he had obtained some degree of success in meeting members of the opposite sex, using an internet ‘dating’ site. I therefore resolved that this might be an avenue worth pursuing, since the idea of having matches selected, and presented to me, in the comfort of my home, seemed rather appealing.

He had cautioned me that many of the members were rather too desirous to enter into matrimony, or to obtain children, but that this did not represent the bulk of the membership, and that there were a number of extremely nice people to be found.

I was rather shocked by the excessive subscription fees that these sites charge, and the devious way that they’re hidden in the small print, clarifying that it’s only free to sign up, but anything else needs a subscription. This is clearly something that only benefits the site owners, building a user base, and is quite irritating to the users of the service, especially as the sites rely on the members to do all the searching and contacting. So, what does one get over and above simply going to a bar or some other social function, and meeting people there? It seems to be a case of - the price of a few drinks, versus several hundred pounds in membership fees - and then still having to put in effort to meet people. If I was minded to spend that sort of money, I’m sure it would be better invested buying membership of some exclusive nightclub, or similar venue.

However, various people had pointed me to a certain fish related internet site, pointing out that the service claimed to be free. And, although the service doesn’t charge your credit card, it’s actually covered in AdTurds, rather poorly laid out and remarkably slow, so I can’t really say that was a particularly fun experience.

I suspect that the word ‘free’ tends to attract every man and his dog. So, unfortunately, the service seems to be little more than a web based version of soc.singles instead of being a place to meet people for romance. During my time there, someone had planned to organise a party for members (which, all criticism aside, seemed like an excellent idea) unfortunately, they picked a bar chain with a reputation for poorly behaved customers, in rather a dodgy area of London. I pointed this much out to the organiser, who seemed rather more interested in making a reputation for themselves with their ‘fan base’, than accepting help from outsiders.

The result was that one of the attendees ended up getting attacked by someone (who, I should add, was unconnected with either the event or the website). I then made the mistake of reminded the people concerned that they could have done better, and even made some suggestions of better quality places, in less rough areas.

The reward for my effort was that my account disappeared without explanation, and after creating another, so that I could enquire as to what had happened to the first account, that account mysteriously vanished too, and the same result with a third account. I later discovered that the ‘party organiser’ had spent a long while brown-nosing one of the high ups in the management structure, and could thus recommend who they felt was desirable to have on the service (or not).

I am therefore unconvinced that internet dating has any advantage over meeting people in the real world. The main fault as far as I can see is that when one is presented with a bunch of statistics and a list of interests, there is no room for any personal flair, and so the whole effect becomes rather like looking at someone’s curriculum vitae.

Anyone that has experience hiring people will know that very often people are nothing like their CV’s. Some people exaggerate or lie about their experiences and qualifications, while some people just don’t present themselves as well as they could on paper, but in real life they really stand out. Hence in relationship terms, the internet dating sites are completely unable to match real life experience.

Anyway, of more interest to me was the fact that after signing up with the paid-for site, they insisted upon sending me much of their client base’s anthropometric data; presumably to try to lure me to pay their excessive fees.

Now, many people had told me anecdotally, that men tended to be rather more flexible in their criteria for finding a match on internet dating sites, whereas women tended to establish absolute limits. Thus, a man would consider meeting a woman a little older, younger, taller or shorter etc. than he’d specified if he felt she had other redeeming characteristics, whereas a woman would tend take the view that once the criteria are set, they can’t be changed for any reason.

With this information in mind, I was able to tabulate the data sent to me, compute some values, compare aspects of the information with data from a health study, and thus establish whether or not (on balance) the information people had submitted to the website was accurate. The summary results make interesting reading.

As you can see from the table above, every woman wanted a man at least one year older than herself, and there were considerable differences amongst all the other sought after variables. Especially interesting is the range of height variances, clearly some women weren’t fussy about height, but a significant proportion wanted a man at least a few cm taller than themselves.

Continuing, I was able to use data from a recent NHS health survey to compare with my results, and establish whether women tended to be accurate about the information they submitted about them selves. The NHS survey gave mean heights for 16-24 year old women as 163.1cm, and 25-34 year old women as 162.8cm. Since these results are very close, and the 16-24 year olds were on average taller than the 25-34 year olds, I felt that the data would not be skewed, if I took the average value for my comparison.

Data from my summary results shows a mean height of 166.15cm and a modal height of 170.00cm, which both seem significantly taller than the NHS data, but it might be possible that my sample size wasn’t big enough. Luckily, the NHS data included Standard error data, so I was able to conduct a t-test with my data (t = 20.98).

Based on my sample size, the results, using the information I tallied have a <1% chance of occurring at random, so women submitting height data to the internet dating site were either measuring their height with their shoes on, or simply exaggerating. Unfortunately, no data on weight was sent to me, so I was unable to conduct further analysis to see if there was a tendency towards over-quoting of height and under-quoting of weight, as one might expect to find if people were attempting to give a statistically better impression of their

The analysis and testing I was able to conduct with this data was limited, but I can see potential with a much larger and expanded dataset to determine the optimum age range that people of various ages should be trying to meet in order to maximize their chances of arranging some romantic activity. Furthermore, additional data would be extremely useful to test the theory that people have a tendency to submit flattering data to the internet dating websites; and the extent to which they over or under exaggerate.

Should anybody reading this have access to such data (made anonymous, of course) then I should be delighted to hear from you.

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Posted by Jonathan in Analysis, Reviews