The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating

July 7th, 2010 by Christian Rudder

Nerds. As we all know, the Internet is a great place to pretend to be someone you're not. For instance, here's me in Second Life having a great time:

Anyhow, in many online situations, self-misrepresentation is totally harmless. Like, who cares if your Halo 3 avatar is taller than you are in real life? Or if flickr thinks you're single when you're really married? But in online dating, where the whole goal is to eventually meet other people in person, creating a false impression is a whole different deal.

People do everything they can in their OkCupid profiles to make themselves seem awesome, and surely many of our users genuinely are. But it's very hard for the casual browser to tell truth from fiction. With our behind-the-scenes perspective, we're able to shed some light on some typical claims and the likely realities behind them.

Let's get started.

"I'm 6 feet tall."

REALITY: People are two inches shorter in real life.

This whole post was inspired by an amusing graph we stumbled across while trying to answer the question Do taller guys have more sex? The answer, to a degree, is yes, and I'll expand on that in a little bit. But in this case what was more interesting than the sex was the (supposed) tallness of the guys.

The male heights on OkCupid very nearly follow the expected normal distribution—except the whole thing is shifted to the right of where it should be. You can see it better when we overlay the implied best fit below (pardon the technical language):

Almost universally guys like to add a couple inches. You can also see a more subtle vanity at work: starting at roughly 5' 8", the top of the dotted curve tilts even further rightward. This means that guys as they get closer to six feet round up a bit more than usual, stretching for that coveted psychological benchmark.

When we looked into the data for women, we were surprised to see height exaggeration was just as widespread, though without the lurch towards a benchmark height:

On a somewhat humbling personal note, I just went back and looked at my own profile, and apparently I list myself at 5' 11". Really, I'm a touch under 5' 10". Hmmm.

. . .

As for whether it even makes sense for people to make such an obvious and easily disproved exaggeration, the jury is out. We've found that taller people, up to a point, have more sex:

But as far as messages go, shorter women actually seem to get more attention:

These are the average weekly unsolicited message totals by height; you can think of these as the number of times a person is "hit on" out of the blue each week on OkCupid. a 5' 4" woman gets 60 more contacts each year than a six-footerThe genders are plotted on different scales because of the eternal fact that men almost always make the first move, so women get many more unsolicited messages.

It's plain from these two charts that women six feet or taller are either less attractive to men or are considered too intimidating to message. The data also raises the interesting possibility that these tall women are much more likely to sleep with a man who does approach them. Compare the 6' 0" woman to her 5' 4" counterpart: the taller woman gets hit on about two-thirds as much, yet has had slightly more sex partners.

"I make $100,000 a year."

REALITY: People are 20% poorer than they say they are.

Apparently, an online dater's imagination is the best performing mutual fund of the last 10 years. Here's what people are saying on OkCupid, versus what their incomes should be:

Use the slider to watch as people exaggerate more as they get older. As you can see, people advertise disproportionately high salaries for themselves. Just to pick a symbolic amount, there are consistently 4× the number of people making $100K a year than there should be.

Note that in formulating the "expected" lines for each age we were very careful to adjust for OkCupid's particular demographics: we compared every individual against the average not just by age but by zip code. Here a breakdown by gender of the exaggeration rates:

A woman may earn 76 cents on the dollar for the same work as a man, but she can fabricate, like, 85 cents no problem.

As a public service, we've decided to make our income calculations available. The following widget will calculate the statistically expected income of your potential matches; you give it a gender, an age, and a zip code, and it'll spit out a salary. Then you can confront your dates about exactly how much money they probably do or don't make. Fun!

. . .

We did a little investigating as to whether a person's stated income had any real effect on his or her online dating experience. Unsurprisingly, we found that it matters a lot, particularly for men. This is a by-age messaging distribution:

These bold colors contain a subtle message: if you're a young guy and don't make much money, cool. If you're 23 or older and don't make much money, go die in a fire. It's not hard to see where the incentive to exaggerate comes from.

"Here's a recent pic."

REALITY: The more attractive the picture, the more likely it is to be out-of-date.

The above picture, for example, was over two years old when it was uploaded. How do we know? Most modern cameras append text tags to the jpgs they take. These tags, called EXIF metadata, specify things like the exposure and f-stop settings, gps information if your camera has it, and, of course, the time and date the photo was taken. This is how programs like iPhoto know when (and sometimes where) you've taken your pictures.

Analyzing this stuff, we found that most of the pictures on OkCupid were of recent vintage; site-wide the median photo age at upload was just 92 days. However, hotter photos were much more likely to be outdated than normal ones. Here's a comparison (the age of a picture below is how old it was when it was uploaded to our site):

As you can see, over a third of the hottest photos on the site are a year old or more. And more than twice as many hot photos are over three years old (12%) as average-looking ones (5%), which makes sense because people are more inclined to cling to the pics that make them look their best

Another useful (if somewhat unorthodox) way to take in this graph is to follow the horizontal gridlines. If you trace out from "20%", for example, you can see that 1 in 5 average-looking photos is at least a year old, meanwhile, among the hot photos, nearly 1 in 5 is at least two years old.

It also turns out that older people also upload older photos:

The upshot here is, if you see a good-looking picture of a man over 30, that photo is very likely to be out-of-date. Not to get personal again, but my own OkCupid photo shows a Burberry-dressed 27 year-old, strumming away on his guitar. Meanwhile, I turn 35 in a couple months and am writing this post in the same shorts and tee-shirt I've been wearing for a week. Time waits for no man, unless that man doesn't update his personal information.

"I'm bisexual."

REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.

OkCupid is a gay- and bi-friendly place and it's not our intention here to call into question anyone's sexual identity. But when we looked into messaging trends by sexuality, we were very surprised at what we found. People who describe themselves as bisexual overwhelmingly message either one sex or the other, not both as you might expect. Site-wide, here's how it breaks out:

This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches. You can actually see these trends in action in the chart below.

Again, this is just the data we've collected. We'd be very interested in our bisexual users' thoughts on this single-sex-messaging phenomenon, so if you'd like to weigh-in please use the comments section. Please note, everybody, that we don’t assume that bis should be “into both genders equally.” We only assume that they should be into both genders at all. The swaths of red and blue that you see in these sexuality charts represent people who message only one gender. The purple areas are people who send any messages, in whatever proportion, to both men and women.

In this chart, throughout the teens and twenties, the male bisexual population is mostly observably gay men. By the mid-thirties, it seems, most of these men are more comfortable self-identifying as gay and have left the bi population. By the end of our chart, 3 of every 4 bi males on OkCupid are observably straight. Meanwhile, the proportion of men who message both women and other men holds fairly steady.

The proportions for women are more consistent over time:

12% of women under 35 on OkCupid (and the internet in general, I'd wager) self-identify as bi. However, as you can see above, only about 1 in 4 of those women is actually into both guys and girls at the same time. I know this will come as a big letdown to the straight male browsing population: three-fourths of your fantasies are, in fact, fantasies of a fantasy. Like bi men, most bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi. The primacy of America's most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is safe.

. . .

In gathering data for this last section on sexuality, we found so much interesting stuff that we're making it the topic of our next post. We'll look at the messaging, searching, and stalking (!) patterns of gay, bi, and straight people and see what else we can learn about the sexual continuum. Until then, no lie: thanks for reading.

842 Responses to “The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating”

  1. sinsadie says:

    A couple of things:

    BISEXUALITY

    Being bisexual doesn’t mean you’re equally interested in men and women. I’m bi but lean more towards the straight side so I message men more . . . Although I have messaged some women.

    Also some bi people come here looking for one specific gender . . . I’ve seen a lot of bi women who state in their profile that they already have a bf and are looking only for a gf so naturally they wouldn’t message men.

    INCOME

    I hope the analysis was only on US members.
    I don’t earn $ so have left that field blank. Even if I converted what I earn in £s to $s it wouldn’t necessarily give an accurate picture since cost of living and inflation would need to be taken into account. Also my real terms salary is higher than my stated salary as I have extra tax-free benefits (my accommodation and transportation is paid for and I’m not taxed on it).

    Generally, the analysis is interesting but the conclusions drawn are dodgy.

  2. WriteHere says:

    As for the height thing.

    The height in my profile is an accurate 5’8″, and I have no problems dating taller women, but looking at their profiles, they’re simply not interested in me. It’s not that tall women are intimidating to me, as you guess in your post, but rather that I take them at their word when they say that they aren’t interested in someone under 6′. I’m not about to waste time pushing myself on someone who’s said in advance that they aren’t interested.

    The annoying thing about the height issue is the obvious double standard. That is, many 5’4″ women say that they’re looking for someone 6′ or higher. On the other hand, can you imagine the flack a guy would get if he specified some equally superficial physical requirement (like a C cup) in their profile?

    -Allen

  3. Mauro says:

    I think that people on OKC are likely a biased sample from even the people in their own ZIP code. I’d guess that OKC people are generally not married, for instance, and tech-savvy enough and uninhibited enough to go to a quality online dating site instead of exclusively bars or, gods forbid, Craigslist (though the nice part about Craigslist is that there are a lot fewer awesome people, so they stand out more). So are people lying about their height? I think probably not that much. I’d guess that the flattening effect is real but the shift to the right is mostly due to the sample. Just my guess, though.

  4. Adam says:

    I’m a short guy who’s been using OKC for over 2 years now. Its so true I even dated a girl who said she was bi in her profile but is really straight and openly admitted to saying she was Bi to get more responses and it worked. Some guys think it may get them to a 3-way but its not the truth just a fantasy. Its true that women over 23 tend to focus so much on height and income. I never lie and i get rejected but there are always those few women that only care about what';s important. Not everyone is shallow or a brown gold digger.

  5. Wendy says:

    As a bi, poly woman, I message a lot more guys than girls on OKCupid, because about 80% of the cute girls I find explicitly say that they aren’t interested in bi girls, or in poly, or they include something repellent like “no fatties.” Frankly, as a group, guys are a lot less picky.

    I could also see someone in my situation — bi, poly, with a long-term male partner — using their account to message only women, because they already have a guy in their life.

    Certainly, I’d guess that a large number of the bi guys you find messaging only men are doing that because they have an easy enough time finding female companionship without resorting to dating sites. Unlike for women, using the bi label actually makes men less attractive to a lot of potential mates, so it seems weird to suggest it’s a hedge.

  6. undersea_gal says:

    I used to go out with a guy who currently lists his height at 5’5″ on OkCupid. He’s got to be a half-inch shorter than I am (I’m 5’3″). Of course I laughed when I read through the first section. Thanks soooo much. I appreciated it.

  7. sapphire says:

    Will you do research on regions and ethnicity? Do some races get more emails, post more photos, etc. That would be interesting to see if Latino girls get more messages or tall, blonde, blue eyes get more stalkers.

    I write a lot about Swedish (nordic dating) as our patterns are different from Americans. We’re more a “sex first, date after” type. But in online dating, as we’re slightly social inept, goes much slower and usually starts with a fika instead of a dinner for an IRL meetup.

  8. Idster says:

    The glaring oversight is that you think that because people on OKCupid are taller, and have higher income than the average, they are lying. What if the OKCupid population is not a representative sample of the U.S. public as a whole? Ever consider that? OKCupid doesn’t advertise haphazardly like Match.com does–it generally gets people on word of mouth, and I’ve noticed that the people on the site are smarter than on any other site I’ve seen (which is why I tend to peruse it). I also think that the U.S. population gets taller with every generation, so the OKCupid population would be taller than the U.S. average just by virtue of its having a younger population. The other thing you failed to consider was how much of the income-response correlation was just that–correlation–and how much was causation. That is, what if people who would be making $90K a year have other attributes that cause them to be attractive to the opposite gender?

  9. Mike says:

    This is a bit off-topic… That “Send it to your friends” bar on the top of the screen is cool & all, but I would appreciate the possibility of closing it. Just a thought. Thanks!

  10. shipofools says:

    Some of my pictures are old because I feel they show who I am. I slap a date on them so that people will know they are old and not representative of what I look like now. I feel that the choice of what pictures someone chooses to post and what sort of things they are doing in those pictures can say something about who they are. I am finding that photos taken in a professional studio are real turn offs because that person is putting such a fake foot forward.

    And for the record, my height is exactly what I list, I don’t list my income, I am straight, and I have messaged both sexes (because there are interesting people on OKCupid, not just dating possibilities).

    While I don’t think your analysis is definitive and science-worthy, I do think it is an interesting take on the data. It does show general trends. Numbers can be fun to play with. I look forward to more of these posts. They are food for thought. Thank you.

  11. Matt says:

    Re: height. Could it be that OKCupid’s sample is for some reason taller than average? Perhaps a higher proportion of a taller-on-average ethnicity than the average population. Because I can’t see any reason for girls to exaggerate their height, 99%guys don’t care at all about height if the girl is between 5 and 6 feet. IMO the only clear evidence of manipulation by OKCupiders is the flat spot at the top of the guy curve.

  12. MegaZone says:

    Heh, I’ve been a member since 2004 and I’ve always answered truthfully. Of course, I am 6’6″ and I do make six-figures in my current job, and I’m 39, so I guess I am in the sweet spot according to the graphs. ;-) The only time my info has been off is when I haven’t updated in a while and my life has changed – new job, etc. My photos were getting stale, since some of them were taken back when I joined, but I did finally update those.

    I met my current partner through OKC – she messaged me July 13, 2009. :-)

  13. Stacy Passell/Ruby Destiny says:

    Dear OK Cupid:

    Sorry to be a bit late to your party, but I just noticed your blog post that cleverly starts by showing a Second Life Avatar–where the real life man posting the blog entry has chosen a female avatar–and then claims that, “…in many online situations, self-misrepresentation is totally harmless”.

    My husband and I both have collections of avatars, and while he actually had an avatar made to look like him I always enjoyed the freedom of new looks, many of which aren’t even human. Like being a tomato. With a frying pan. And since OK Cupid is obviously clueless about how people in virtual worlds meet, they’re picking on a process they completely don’t understand.

    How embarrassing that they actually think the avatar is what attracts a person to another in a virtual world! That’s so completely missing the point it’s hard to fathom. Factually, my husband dresses up as a woman occasionally just for fun. He also changes into a fabulous Speedy Gonzales, a stick figure, a box of cigarettes with legs, a skeleton, and a black cat. All of these avatars are great for a laugh. That’s the beauty of play.

    Our choices of avatar had absolutely no effect whatsoever on our ability to be honest, nor our ability to learn about each other slowly, initially through pictures, then on voice and later video calls on skype. Liars are liars. Role play is role play. Go ahead, be a woman, but it’s OK to be honest about that role play. It’s in fact, quite easy, and should be expected of you. Otherwise, you’re just being plain old deceitful, and need to consider your motivations more carefully before going after a mate. Nobody wants to be lied to, and being honest in a virtual world where you can role play whatever you want at the same time seems quite simple, really.

  14. hank says:

    Income: You don’t take into account that the general population doesn’t visit okcupid. Only people who can afford a computer + internet may visit, not those at -$20k income unless they’re still living with their mommies.
    Nice drag thing on the chart!

    Photos chart: Looks like people who take photos of themselves everyday and put it up on okcupid don’t have the time to pretty it up in photoshop.

    Bis: Need to check how many contacts these people have had. If they only visited to try out okcupid and only had one or two contacts then of course it’ll be only to one sex.

  15. gordon says:

    The height differential is interesting, albeit more or less what you’d expect. You can argue that OKCupid differs from the average population on height distribution but I think that’s a stretch. (Unless there are large ethnic differences from the population as a whole.)

    Part of the difference is simply rounding up I suspect. No one–certainly not men–are going to round down so that makes the “real” differential more like 1.5″ or so.

    It would be interesting to see what “interest curves” would look like–and how they match the OKCupid results–if you hypothesize certain behaviors and apply them to the US height distributions. These hypotheses are effectively stereotypes if you would but, in my experience, there’s a lot of validity in them: e.g. women aren’t interested in men who aren’t at least 2 inches taller than them. (This is the tall girls date tall guys, but the short girls poach the tall guys too.)

  16. Justine says:

    This is great timing for me because I *just* met up with a guy from here who not only lied about his height (said he was 5’8″, probably closer to 5’6″), he also posted – as his one photo – a picture that looked nothing like him in real life. Clearly a combination of 5+ years old photo/atypical quality. I was kind of baffled by his level of subterfuge (what, like I wasn’t going to notice?), but it’s nice to know he was just participating in a trend, ha.

    I think posting older photos is generally fine for the reasons many people gave above… I have photos on here ranging from a few days to a few years old, but they’re all pretty representative of me in my current state. As long as you look like you, it doesn’t really matter how recent the picture is.

    And for the record, it’s never occurred to me to lie about anything on here (unless I have shrunk in the past 10 years? It could happen, I guess). I mean, the people you meet are probably going to find out eventually.

  17. Pete says:

    I find the height shift funny. Because I’m an HONEST 6’0, people think that i’m 6’4 when they see me in real life, because everybody else is such a liar! They’re used to seeing guys that are 5’9 and being told that’s 6’0. ha!

    Definitely agree that weight should be added! I estimate that women would group their weights around 115lbs, when it’s actually 160ish for a 5’4 girl in America (yech!).

  18. Figjam says:

    I love it! It is like looking in the window on the most vain and self serving moments. It affirms some stereotypes and kills others. It was better than Cats, I would read it again and again!

  19. jenn says:

    The notion of “bisexuality” is not necessarily that you’re interested in both men and women AT THE SAME TIME. Your understanding of self-identified bisexuals is inherently wrong. There are people who self-identify as bisexual who are, at any given time, currently interested in having only a same-sex or opposite-sex partner. Perhaps a self-identified bisexual woman only contacts men on the site because she’s decided she wants to have biological children with a man, and is looking for a potential partner. That doesn’t mean she’s not still sexually or emotionally attracted to women; it just means they don’t fit what she’s looking for at the moment. The same goes for a self-identified bisexual man who responds only to women, or only to men. The gender/sex they aren’t messaging just doesn’t fill the need. Why do we only question non-heterosexual people in their partner choices? We wouldn’t question a self-identified hetero man if he only messaged thin, blonde, 23-26 year old white women.

  20. Kanika says:

    @ Matt- The objection is towards the assessment that people who identified as bi are somehow “lying” because they’re not actively messaging both genders.

    Anyway, when I had an OK Cupid account, I interacted with more men than women and if they seemed interesting enough, I messaged them back. I actually have a greater preference for women most of the time, but finding another single bi woman in search of a relationship or a lesbian that doesn’t mind dating a bi woman on OK Cupid is pretty difficult…I am pretty sure this is probably the case for other of bi-identified OK Cupid members as well.

  21. pants says:

    Wow, I had no idea ladies looked so much at income! As a lady myself, I don’t even remember looking at income. Ever?

    I suppose that if it is something so important to you, why not filter the search like that?

    Meanwhile I will be slumming with some totally awesome dudes with values other than economic.

  22. Shirley says:

    As someone who is queer and browses accordingly, I can say that many women identify on OKC as bi but open their profile with a statement that they’re only here to find women. Identifying as bi is a way to let lesbians, who sometimes mind dating bi’s, know that they’re bi. It’s not intended for the guys. It’s just that meeting someone from the same sex is much harder in real life than finding someone from the opposite sex, so dating sites are used by bi’s more for the former. In contrast, I identify as lesbian even though I’m not exactly so to avoid receiving messages from guys.

  23. Ted says:

    While certainly there are people lying about their height on OKCupid, one needs to take into account that OKCupid users are going to be disproportionately upper-middle class with good childhood nutrition, and disproportionately younger, and the left end of the bell curve–including physically and mentally retarded people who drag down the average height in the nation, but are unlikely to be on a relatively highbrow dating site–is going to be underrepresented.

  24. Brandon says:

    The bisexual messaging disparity doesn’t surprise me. It is easy for a bisexual to fall into social situations that are mostly straight or mostly gay. Unless the bisexual has a lot of bisexual friends, chances are that they will not be going to a gay bar or activity one night and a straight one the next. Perhaps they are using OkCupid to balance that situation.

    Also, and this is obvious to me but maybe not to everybody, there are social pressures that may be pushing somebody to seek only one gender on the internet. The desire to get married and have children. Or a fear of going to gay bars and such in the real world where homophobia is all too prevalent.

    Frankly, I am very disappointed in this article’s flippant way of addressing bisexuality. It merely perpetuates the stereotypes and misconceptions that people have towards the bisexual community.

  25. mathew says:

    There’s a simple explanation for the bisexual messaging pattern thing:

    Bisexuals find it harder to find same-sex partners, so they’re more likely to resort to online dating to do so.

    Then there are all the polyamorous bisexuals who already have an opposite-sex partner, but would like a same-sex partner as well.

    Combine those two factors, and I think the messaging pattern is explained.

  26. Zoe says:

    Hahaha! I think it’s hilarious that nearly all of the topics discussed in this post do not apply to me at all. As far as height goes I’m actually less than an inch taller than I report to be. I chose “rather not say” for my income, because frankly I have no idea what it is. My pics are dated; I put them up almost immediately and regardless of their age as long as I know when they were taken that’s what they’re dated as. Honesty is key; I’m glad to know that as far as honesty goes, I go far above and beyond the average population. Thanks OkC trends for making me feel good today!

  27. Cindy says:

    I’m not actually a member, but I was given a link to your study and found it fascinating. The conclusions, however, leave a little to be desired, but you do acknowledge that you’re looking for alternate theories. Here’s one: It’s quite possible that some/many of your bisexual members are only looking for one sex on this site because they have access to/feel comfortable with pursuing the other sex in real life.

  28. Zoya says:

    Two thoughts. 1) I don’t think the out of date hot photo is lying as such, it’s just that hot photos are less likely to get deleted as time goes on.
    2) I and a lot of other bisexual OkCupid users I’ve read the profiles of, list myself as bisexual but I’m only interested in meeting women online because I already have an open relationship with a man. Most users in this situation say so on their profiles, so it’s not that they’re lying about their sexuality. In fact, many girls who list themselves as lesbians are in a similar situation (has a boyfriend, looking for women online) but they don’t want messages from men so they don’t use the bisexual label online. Conclusion: bisexuals are not liars.

  29. Claire says:

    ‎”REALITY: 80% of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender…This suggests that bisexuality is often either a hedge for gay people or a label adopted by straights to appear more sexually adventurous to their (straight) matches.”

    Or not! Biphobia rears its ugly head. A person can be “truly” bisexual and still only interested in meeting one sex on OkCupid. Also, did you take into account that a person might be willing to send a message to someone of either sex, but happened to only find people they wanted to send messages to who were men, or who were women?

    “Again, this is just the data we’ve collected. We’d be very interested in our bisexual users’ thoughts on this single-sex-messaging phenomenon, so if you’d like to weigh-in please use the *comments* section. Please note, everybody, that we don’t assume that bis should be ‘into both genders equally.’ We only assume that they should be into both genders _at all._”

    And that’s where the problem lies. A person can be bisexual, i.e., attracted to men and women, without a) having necessarily sent a message to members of both sexes, and b) wanting to date members of both sexes. Maybe someone wants to date someone they can procreate with. You may simply be interested specifically in a relationship with someone of the same sex/opposite sex at this point in time. Being bisexual doesn’t mean you’re attracted to every person of your sex and every person of the opposite sex. Every human being has their preferences as to whom they desire for a mate, and for bisexuals it just so happens that these preferences happen to overlap men and women.

    Additionally, there are circumstances prevalent for bisexual men and bisexual women in dating that there aren’t for their straight or gay counterparts. Bisexual men are often assumed to be closeted gay men. Bisexual women are either supposed to be straight and trying to get attention from men who are turned on by the thought of women with women, or they’re believed to be lesbians who can’t fully accept themselves and need to masquerade as still man-loving. These erroneous beliefs prevent some people who are willing to list themselves as bi on your website from sending a message to someone they’re afraid of being attacked by. Does this prevent *every* bisexual person from doing so? No, but it still may have a notable impact on the data you’re analyzing.

  30. sarah says:

    bisexual “women” often tend to be part of a couple looking for a 3rd, which may explain why they are only messaging women.

  31. Dori says:

    as far as the height thing I actually look taller than my height because I am plus sized and as far as the bi-sexual thing, I am picky so since I am I don’t see a lot of girls or guys on here who want a real deal there may be some who do but i don’t see them so i look at the guys they seem more sincere, just less receptive to plus sized people :(

  32. Molly Ren says:

    I identify as bi. Though what I fantasize about skews more towards the male end of the spectrum, my sexual history reflects a fairly even number of male and female partners.

    As an entirely unscientific example, looking at my past sexual history I’ve primarily messaged men online and met them later, and met girls entirely offline, in bars and at parties. I have no idea why this is–do I have a more specific idea of what I want in males, and so online works better for sorting? Am I shyer about approaching men at parties than women? Or, as snorkel_lover said, is it just easier to get approached by men than women online?

  33. Dave says:

    Just to throw another wrinkle into this (fascinating post, by the way), I am a bi male who lists as straight on OkCupid. When I listed as bi, I only received messages from men. In fact, I only received profile visits from men. I live in a famously free-spirited part of the country (Cambridge, Mass), and many of the women whose profiles I visit list themselves as bi-friendly (that is, they are “looking for” men who like women, not just straight men). Yet these women don’t give bi men the time of day.

    In part, I think women are not interested in bi men because of statistics like those here. There is a widespread belief, thanks in part to reports gleefully publicized in the mainstream media, that suggest that there is no such thing as a bisexual man. Bisexual men are thought to be closeted or confused gays. No doubt this is true of some men who identify as bi, but it’s unfortunate that this meme has caught on the extent it has.

    Faced with the reality of the habits of women on OkCupid, I decided to list myself as straight. While I’d be happy to find men to have sex with, I’m more inclined to a long-term relationship (sex included) with a woman. Thus, I am pseudo-closeted for online-dating purposes.

  34. des says:

    I’m also curious about statistics on people who underestimate their income and messages to people who decline to state theirs. I met my boyfriend on OKCupid, and while we’ve since both deleted our profiles, I recall that he didn’t state his income in his. He did mention being employed in his messages, and since I have a long history of dating under- and unemployed men (they’re epidemic in my city, at all age levels), I was just happy to meet someone I could maybe go Dutch with for once. After we started dating, I realized that he was (and is) actually doing very well for himself. I wonder, how many men use this strategy to keep potential golddiggers at bay? How many well-off women understate their income to avoid intimidating guys? How does the proportion of messages to people who flat-out don’t state income at all compare to those who do?

  35. CrimsonShores says:

    Wow, the message distribution based on age & income is depressing. I shouldn’t be surprised as it confirms my beliefs, but I didn’t think it would matter to that extent. However, I refuse to lie about my income or anything else on my profile.

    I don’t get the people that lie about themselves on their profiles. Do they really expect to make it past the first date with anybody?

  36. hfless says:

    For people into statistics its somewhat surprising to read the conclusions of lies, lies and more lies in this article.

    The “expected” salary is coming from averages by zipcode (and age). The average compensation in my zipcode is $79,000. There are administrative assistants at my firm that make over $100k. The discrepancies say more about the diverse population in Manhattan than lies.

    The same can be said about height. Is there a self selection bias in the people that join this site? Did they, on average, have better diets as children? The flat peak of the OK Cupid height distribution might say something about stretching to make 6’0″ but the shift to the right is more suspect. I doubt everyone is lying. I didnt.

  37. nope says:

    i’m curious about the ‘lying about income’ section and whether it takes into account people who make their money through criminal enterprises? obviously if someone is bringing in $100,000 a year of illegitimate gains, they’re not gonna be part of the demographic count of people that wealthy…

  38. guy says:

    You compare US length with OKcupid length.

    Have you considered the possibility that the average US person is slightly shorter than the worldwide average?

    for example people from the netherlands are very tall.

  39. Abel says:

    First of all, this site is not really very queer friendly. It forces you to choose amoung two genders that DO NOT always apply. One of my current partners identifies as gender neutral and it is a problem that you don’t offer them an option for how they identify.

    This site is not very trans friendly or intersexed friendly. It is also not necessarily very poly friendly as a lot of questions assume monogamous relationships and will describe “serious relationships” where they mean monogamous. (I understand that the questions are user generated, but that does make it much harder for poly people.) I would love for their to be poly categories. Or you could at least give out a poly badge for people who answer poly questions so that people looking for poly relationships could find each other. I mean, that is if you really want to be an alternative to the fucked up Christian pay sites that extort money out of people looking only for marriage (shudder).

    Anyhow, as far as bisexual people go, there are people out there who might be curious about sex with somebody who they don’t have much experience with and would be happy to entertain somebody else if they were to be messaged, but still tend to message people that they know they have a good shot at a relationship with.

    Personally, I am a cis-gendered hetero-male, but I considered putting bisexual just because I could see myself having a romantic relationship with somebody who has a penis, but I’m really just not attracted sexually to penii. But I still considered putting bisexual because I haven’t really tried having sex with somebody with a penis before and I might be willing to experiment.

    I ended up not putting bisexual because I didn’t want male-bodied people to be misled into thinking that I am experienced in this sort of relationship or would have any idea of what I was doing.

    In the end, I suppose that these are all just boundaries that happen to be sexual. I have one asexual friend who happens to be squeamish about all forms of sex and who sometimes like to snark about all of us “sexuals” being rather silly.

    He has mentioned that he has trouble identifying as gay because of his lack of desire for sex. When I contemplate this, it gives me a perspective that perhaps I’m putting too much into sexuality. I can have a relationship with somebody with a penis (Regardless of gender) and I just have to figure out what boundaries work for me with any individual.

    I still don’t see myself ever being as turned on by the sight of a penis compared to the sight of a vagina, though. And psychologically, the thought of a penis in my mouth doesn’t at all excite me, but the thought of a clitoris in my mouth excites me very much.

    So it seems that I have a genital preference, but I still consider myself to have queer politics even as a cis-gendered hetero-male. (Though, I suppose that gender-non-conforming male would be more accurate than cis-gendered anyway).

  40. irrationalpoop says:

    Hello! As someone this website would list as “bisexual,” I find the results are pretty interesting. I’m the rare bisexual male who prefers females or at least female-like, but still is quite happy to flirt with males.

    I find these trends mostly close to what plays out in real life, and am willing to bet there are more than a few women (versus men) who identify as bisexual for the fashion and not the act itself. The gay community isn’t as accepting of people who identify as pansexual or bisexual, and it’s a real shame (yes, I know there are some wonderful exceptions).

    In short, this study seems about on the ball, but it’s always sad to see affirmed what you had hoped wasn’t true.

  41. daretoeatapeach says:

    I’ll speak for the bi folks. I’m one of those people whose OKCupid status says bi but mostly went after men. For me personally, I go through phases. When I was dating women I pretty much only wanted to date women. Now I’m going through a men phase. I used to think that I was one or the other, queer or straight, and that I just hadn’t figured it out yet, but just when I was sure the other gender would come along and surprise me and I’d realize I was still “undecided”…hence the bi-label sticks.

    Only recently I was at San Fran’s queer pride thinking, well, been dating men for a while, maybe I don’t belong here anymore? But then there were just too many hot butch dykes that made my jaw drop and brought out my saucy flirtatious femme and I was reassured I’m still as queer as ever.

  42. Rich says:

    I’m intrigued by the yellow blocks (low response rate) for the 100K+ slots for 23- and 24-year-old men. Could this indicate a bullshit detector on the part of women? You might say you’re making 100k one year out of college, but they don’t believe you.

  43. DJ says:

    I’m 6′ 6″ and, technically, a genius in that I have genius level IQ (176 if your interested, as measured by a proffesional, for medical reasons), making me in the “High Genius” category, not that IQ is really a very good measure, just the best we have. My photo’s are recent, between 3 months and 18 months and my profile well written, properly punctuated, gramatically correct and cogent. My income is a little hard to pin down as I don’t pay tax due to the way government grants work, but it’s not very high. Other than that I’ve got damn good career prospects as I’m a proffesional research scientist.

    I always think that looks good on paper, but have also always been suspicious that people assume I’m lying as I have been contacted once in the year I’ve been on the site and had maybe 5 people reply to a contact from me (about 15%) not counting spam or nonsense, so I can’t help thinking that maybe just having the listed factors is not enough :).

  44. Doot says:

    quick rule of thumb:

    When a guy tells you he’s bi, he’s gay.
    When a girl tells you she’s bi, she’s straight.

    the end.

  45. Ben says:

    I wonder what this means for those of us who are completely 100% honest in our dating profiles? Should we be lying to even the field with those who are already lying? Can our morality ever play fair with those who fabricate?

  46. Sam says:

    Please don’t ever add a weight category. Attractiveness is not a number, but I suspect that a lot of people would use weight-height ratios as some absolute measure of whether someone is worth meeting. (@Pete’s comment does nothing to discourage this idea. Yech, yourself.)

  47. Dude says:

    I think OKC needs an “interested in” field. That way a profile would read, “STRAIGHT MALE interested in WOMEN,” or “BISEXUAL FEMALE interested in MEN OR WOMEN,” or “BISEXUAL MALE interested in WOMEN.” That really would help.

  48. Mrs P says:

    I am a bi woman. I’m attracted to women. My sexual fantasies involve women.
    I have been with many women but I tend to go out for long relationships with men.
    Why does Bi-sexuality need justifying like this?

    I haven’t even bothered putting it on OKcupid as I wouldnt want it to attract guys for the wrong reason, hoping to fufill a fantasy or something.

  49. Pepper says:

    I want to reiterate what other bisexuals have said here about messaging. I’m a bi guy but only currently looking for women online, so I only message women. The majority of bisexuals I know offline are only looking for partners of a particular gender at one time. There are various reasons for this:

    1) They have no problems finding partners of the other gender.
    2) They already have one or more partners of the other gender.
    3) Just preference reasons – like they recently dated someone of the other gender, and are looking for a change. Or they are looking for a particular trans/genderqueer gender combination.

    However, it is still very important to list oneself as bisexual, because otherwise we would be lying about our sexuality.

    To the OkCupid folks: please don’t confuse behavior and sexual identity. They are two different things. And when you write posts like this that claim that bisexuals really aren’t bisexual, you open the door for the sort of nasty hatred that we face on a regular basis – as evidenced by some of the comments here. Bi folks love your site because it is very bi-friendly. Don’t make us hate your blog by posting biphobic assertions.

  50. Sam says:

    As a bi woman (25) using OKC, I messaged both men and women, but I received a LOT more attention from the men. Since I also receive more attention from men IRL, I preferred contact from women and did consider switching to lesbian-only on my profile. And the complicated stratification between bi women and “real” lesbians is one that could fill a book, but I’ll do with seeing what you dig up for your next post.

    Also, hmm! I rarely look at income, height, weight, etc, because I usually get a good enough sense from the questions and the pictures to know whether they merit a follow-up. I have occasionally screened out people for having too much income; it’s either a lie or I fear they’ll be too materialistic. But I’m young and idealistic. It may be that income matters more once I’ve got some to lose.

    Thanks! Your blog is what got me to set up a profile. Keep them coming.