Matthew Botos

 xkcd takes an amusing look at the math of the dating pool:

Wackiest thing I’ve seen on eHarmony in a while:

The one thing Lucy is most passionate about: I’m most passoinate about horses and riding english and showing. I really want to meet a guy who also is passoinate about riding. I don’t care if they ride western. In the future, I hope to have a second home in Wellington or Ocala Florida for the winter months, were there are big horse shows.

I closed last year’s blog about turning 28 with this: “Hopefully at 29 I�ll be able to say my wisdom has climbed another minute notch.” That prophecy has been fulfilled; in the last year I’ve gained a better grasp on the realities of my life and the wisdom that comes with that. As always, it seems that everything big in my life these days comes down to dating and work.

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Talking with my brother and his friends during Birthdays in Blacksburg made me realize radio is quickly getting killed off by multiple assailants. For me, it’s an iPod full of music, for others, it’s the falling price and expanding options for satellite radio.

That said, I still do tune into regular old terrestrial radio occasionally, particularly for a bit of variety during long drives. It’s still good for discovering new, and surprisingly appropriate music.

While driving back from Virginia and idly thinking about my dating situation, I heard Fountain of Wayne’s Someone To Love, which I later tracked down using Google and iTunes. The lyrics handily explain why I seem to have so much trouble meeting people:

He calls his mom, says he's doing fine
She's got somebody on the other line
Puts Coldplay on, pours a glass of wine
Curls up with a book about organized crime

Beth McKenzie got the job of her dreams
Retouching photos for a magazine aimed at teens
It's Thursday night she should be out on the scene
But she's sitting at home watching "The King of Queens" 

Don't give out, don't give up
One of these nights you might find someone to love

And you're not the only one who's lonely

I just finished reading Freakonomics, which includes a brief section on how truthfully people represent themselves and make decisions in the online dating world. Like any good researchers, the authors cite their source, a paper that is readily available online. What Makes You Click: An Empirical Analysis of Online Dating is a fully-blown academic paper, but there are some interesting facts to be gleaned from skimming it.

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The trouble with engagement rings looks at the history and current view of engagement rings, going a little deeper than the usual source of the diamond industry’s shrewd marketing:

But there’s a powerful case to be made that in an age of equitable marriage the engagement ring is an outmoded commodity—starting with the obvious fact that only the woman gets one.

Indeed, in an equitable relationship, wouldn’t a man get a fancy watch or ring as a sign of commitment from his fiancee? Of course, where you could really have some interesting conversations with your mate are over the ring’s history of sexuality and ownership:

To be marriageable at the time you needed to be a virgin, but, Brinig points out, a large percentage of women lost their virginity while engaged. So some structure of commitment was necessary to assure betrothed women that men weren’t just trying to get them into bed. (Implicitly, it would seem, a woman’s virginity was worth the price of a ring, and varied according to the status of her groom-to-be.)

Finally, as to why the tradition persists:

Part of the reason could be that many young women, raised in a realm of relative equality, never think rigorously about the traditions handed down to them. And many are looking for men who will bear the burden of providing for them, while demanding equality in other ways.

This concept of selective equality has certainly been true in my experience, with a few exceptions. Plenty of women out there are still looking for a man to be a traditional provider while taking full advantage of modern equality and independence.

For as much as I ramble about eHarmony and its founder, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, I’ve yet to pick up any of the books he’s written on relationships and marriage. The story behind eHarmony goes that while promoting one of his books on how to evaluate people as marriage material, people kept asking him how to meet these people in the first place, ultimately inspiring the eHarmony site. With this in mind, I picked up a used, hardcover copy of Finding the Love of Your Life for the bargain price of 99 cents.

The book reveals the origins of many of the serious relationship themes found in eHarmony while exposing a bit more of the author’s Christian background. If you can get past that and his argument for celibacy until marriage, there is some solid advice to be had:

• Get married for the right reasons
• Figure out what’s important to you in a partner first
• Find someone you have a lot in common with or is good at compromising
• Get to know them over a good length of time before marriage

Many of the big issues and areas of compatibilities show up in eHarmony’s “29 dimensions”, and explain why their matches tend to be better than the basic physical characteristics used by Match or even OkCupid’s more sophisticated test question and personality fuzzy logic. Given the author’s degree in clinical psychology and experience as a marriage counselor, you would expect him to be able to identify the critical traits of successful matches.

In summary, the book offers solid basic advice on finding the right person to marry once you remove a few biases, and provides some useful background on what’s driving eHarmony’s matching system and philosophy.

Here’s an interesting assertion: Facebook’s growing popularity is causing a Rapid Decline of the Dating Industry. Perhaps it’s more of a pruning; graphing eHarmony and the author’s own Plenty Of Fish site over the same period doesn’t show much of a decline.

The other interesting thing that jumps out from the graph is how only eHarmony really got a noticeable post-Valentine’s day spike.

Brian jokingly asked me today if I had a spreadsheet going to evaluate the women I meet. (It was probably only half-jokingly since he knows how I love my number-crunching.) I’ve become wise enough to realize that love is more a matter of the heart than one of mathematics, but it’s been a long learning process.

In 2005, when I found myself single after a long relationship, I plunged headlong into dating and eventually began to wonder how productive it really was, leading to the inevitable spreadsheet. eHarmony sent me 249 matches over a 7 month period. I had some contact with 46 (18%), but only 4 actual dates (< 2%). On Match.com, I found 42 women over 3 months interesting enough to to contact and continued emailing 8 (19%), but none led to actual dates.

Online dating is big business, especially when you look at the monthly fees for some sites. So the frugal dater naturally wonders if it’s more cost effective than the standard benchmark of buying a woman a drink. For eHarmony, the cost per match contacted came to $0.34; for Match, $0.55. It’s a bit surprising, considering eHarmony’s costs are higher at face value; perhaps their is some truth to Dr. Neil’s claims that his 29 dimensions of compatibility produce better matches. Any of the women I’ve dated, of course, are welcome to comment on that

Dating always seems to make good movie fodder, though most stray far from reality. Here are a few favorites that were bouncing around my head this morning:

40 Year Old Virgin seems to have it all: bad advice, the bar scene, and a send up of Speed Dating. (Some of the best speed dating bits are actually in the extras.) Way too many good lines to quote, as IMDB’s list goes to show.

Nice Guys Sleep Alone is lesser known, but twists the romantic comedy to shows what happens when a too-nice Southern teacher stops being nice. The best quote from this one is easy:

Friend: You should totally hit that.
Carter: She’s my sister!
Friend: By marriage! In Kentucky they’ll arrest you for playing rap music before they arrest you for sleeping with your sister.

Other bonuses: unintentional sex ed for his class at the horse ranch, and a Netflix connection.

40 Days and 40 Nights starts off as a romantic comedy with Josh Hartnett being a guy whose life is being ruined by all the women that fall into bed with him, so he decides to completely abstain. From there it quickly turns into a cruder movie and more entertaining movie as his guy friends start a betting pool and all the women in his life try to regain the power they’ve lost. It sets the tone that the first line to come to mind is Horatio Sanz’s (of Saturday Night Live Fame) reply to his suddenly masturbation-crazed boss having done it three times before lunch: “Two more and you break my company record!”

Kevin Smith gets two honorable mentions for the following two lines:

• “Did you love every woman you slept with?” “No, some of them I downright despised.” - Chasing Amy
• “You know how when you spoon with someone and you can’t find a comfortable place to put that other arm? That was like a metaphor for our whole relationship.” - Mallrats