A massive new study of online dating finds that everyone dates aspirationally—and that a woman’s desirability peaks 32 years before a man’s does.
You’re at a party and you see someone cute across the room. They glance at you, maybe even smile for a second, then carry on with their conversation. You feel the room shrink, your heart rate quicken, your face go red: You’re crushing on this stranger,
hard. But then the sensible part of your brain tells you to forget it: That person’s way, way out of your league.
Wait a second, you counter: Do dating “leagues” even exist?
At this point, Elizabeth Bruch, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, crashes in to your thought process (and this news article). Yep, she says. Leagues do seem to exist. But you’re not alone in trying to escape yours: “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,” she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people “out of their league.”
In fact, most online-dating users tend to message people exactly 25 percent more desirable than they are.
Bruch would know. She’s spent the past few years studying how people make decisions and pursue partners on online-dating sites, using exclusive data from the dating sites themselves. “There’s so much folk wisdom about dating and courtship, and very little scientific evidence,” she told me recently. “My research comes out of realizing that with these large-scale data sets, we can shed light on a lot of these old dating aphorisms.”
In the new study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, Bruch and her colleagues analyzed thousands of messages exchanged on a “popular, free online-dating service” between more than 186,000 straight men and women. They looked only at four metro areas—New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle—and only at messages from January 2014.
Imagine for a second that you are one of the users whom Bruch and her colleagues studied—in fact, imagine that you are a
very desirable user. Your specific desirability rank would have been generated by two figures: whether other desirable people contacted you, and whether other desirable people responded when you contacted them. If you contacted a much less desirable person, their desirability score would rise; if they contacted you
and you replied,then your score would fall.
The team had to analyze both first messages and first replies, because, well, men usually make the first move. “A defining feature of heterosexual online dating is that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who establish the first contact—more than 80 percent of first messages are from men in our data set,” the study says. But “women reply very selectively to the messages they receive from men—their average reply rate is less than 20 percent—so women’s replies … can give us significant insight about who they are interested in.”
The team combined all that data by using
the PageRank algorithm, the same software that helps inform Google’s search results. It found that—insofar as dating “leagues” are not different tiers of hotness, but a single ascending hierarchy of desirability—then they do seem to exist in the data. But people do not seem universally locked into them—and they can occasionally find success escaping from theirs.
The key, Bruch said, is that “persistence pays off.”
“Reply rates [to the average message] are between 0 percent and 10 percent,” she told me. Her advice: People should note those extremely low reply rates and send out more greetings.
Michael Rosenfeld, a professor of sociology at Stanford who was not connected to this study, agreed that persistence was a good strategy. “The idea that persistence pays off makes sense to me, as the online-dating world has a wider choice set of potential mates to choose from,” he told me in an email. “The greater choice set pays dividends to people who are willing to be persistent in trying to find a mate.”
Of the study as a whole, he said: “I think its conclusions are robust and its methodologies are sound.”
Yet what also emerges from the data is a far more depressing idea of “leagues” than many joking friends would suppose. Across the four cities and the thousands of users, consistent patterns around age, race, and education level emerge. White men and Asian women are consistently more desired than other users, while black women rank anomalously lower.
Bruch said that race and gender often get mixed up, with a race having gendered connotations. “
Asian is coded as female, so that’s why Asian women get so much market power and Asian men get so little,” she told me. “For black men and women, it’s the opposite.”
But “what we are seeing is overwhelmingly the effect of white preferences,” she cautioned. “This is site is predominantly white, 70 percent white. If this was a site that was 20 percent white, we may see a totally different desirability hierarchy.”
“Other people have done research using data from online-dating sites, and found similar racial and gender hierarchies,” said Rosenfeld, the Stanford professor.
And Bruch emphasized that the hierarchy did not just depend on race, age, and education level: Because it is derived from user behavior, it “captures whatever traits people are responding to when they pursue partners. This will include traits like wittiness, genetic factors, or whatever else drives people to message,” she said.
Here are seven other not-entirely-happy takeaways from Bruch’s study:
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In the study, men’s desirability peaks at age 50. But women’s desirability starts high at age 18 and falls throughout their lifespan.
TRP looks borderline rational for saying it peaks at 35...
