The Great Age Experiment: Week 1 Update

Part of an ongoing series, in which your intrepid correspondent offers herself as a guinea pig in an admittedly not-very scientific online dating experiment to determine, once and for all, whether a younger age on her profile will result in greater response to said profile.

--

Week 1 Update

In case you missed part one in this series, the deal is this: response to your correspondent's online dating profiles seems to have dramatically decreased since her debut as an internet dating ingenue a decade ago, and the ever-present question – is it age? – must be addressed.

Of course, lying about one's age is epidemic in the world of internet dating, but your correspondent has never managed to bring herself to commit such perjury... until now!

The guise of a journalist is, it turns out, incredibly liberating.

Note: Lest you fear for your correspondent's progress with men she might meet under deceptive circumstances, rest assured that the protocol is to fully disclose the experiment and its purpose in the initial reply to any promising pursuer. (And in case you're wondering, so far, nobody's bolted.)

The data are compiled in a graph below, but first, a few notes:

- The data collected from the previous 30 days on match.com, with a stated profile age of 43, are not precise, because your correspondent did not realize she was going to conduct this experiment until many emails, etc. had already been deleted. It (the aforementioned data) is included here just because, well, for the time being it's all we have to go on. And also, why not?

- Your correspondent has also included data from the responses to a profile on another well-known, if less well-respected dating site, Adult Friend Finder (or AFF – tagline: "meet real sex partners tonight!"), just because, well, it makes for some amusing data.* As a result, the Great Age Experiment has morphed into the Great Age and AFF vs. Match.com Experiment. Which makes it even less scientific than it already was, but hopefully somewhat more entertaining.

- The age that was chosen for the purposes of this experiment – 7 years younger than your correspondent's actual age – is somewhat random, but admittedly affected by the fact that your correspondent is extremely vain, and although she is usually assumed by new acquaintances to be a decade (or even more) younger than her actual years, the fact is she still wanted to be considered "young-looking for her age." (Even though anyone she might meet would know her true age before meeting her. Go figure.) It (the faux age selection) was also because your correspondent didn't want to rule out the possibility of meeting someone promising during the time frame of this experiment, and 7 years seemed about the outer limit of age difference that would attract the kind of men she might be interested in meeting. If that makes sense.

The results

So far, it appears that a 7-year age difference does, indeed, affect response rate somewhat. If we assume that the data from this week will be multiplied by approximately 4 over the course of the 30-day experiment, it would mean almost twice as many match.com emails, four times as many potential dates and flirts, and 16% more total views than the previous 30 days.

However, given that the bulk of views and emails typically occurs during the first week a new profile is online, it's unlikely that we'll see these kinds of results.

Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, the most dramatic result from the numbers is not from the age difference, but rather from how many more replies your correspondent gets on AFF than on match.com – almost 8 times as many.

Which seems to lend strength to the truism that men are very sexually-driven creatures, and are thus more likely to respond to an artful black and white photo of the unclothed female form than to a face pic, no matter how charming.

At least your correspondent likes to think this is the case, because the alternative (that your correspondent's face pic is just not very attractive) is too painful to think about.

And in any case, the quality of responses in no way matches the quantity. Out of 6 contacts on match.com (5 direct emails, and 1 wink to which your correspondent replied with an email, to which the winker in turn responded), 33% were from men who might possibly be worthy of a meeting. Not bad, really. On the other hand, only 0.026% of aff.com emails were from guys who might possibly be worthy of a meeting.

That's a lot of email to sort through. (And much of it with pics your correspondent really had no desire to see.)

Important data to keep in mind, ladies, should you be considering posting a profile on aff.com. (Which, in fact, your correspondent does actually recommend, even to prototypical Good Girls such as herself – watch for a future blog post on this topic – but not necessarily for the express purposes of finding a life partner. Um, duh.)

The other notable data point (which is not collected in the graph below), is that your correspondent is well within the age range of every match.com member who emailed this week. Age ranges ranged from 28-44 to 35-55.

Which in itself would seem to discredit the hypothesis that your correspondent's lower response rate is due to her increasing age. It could be that fewer men were searching the match.com database in the previous 30 days. Or it could be that even the men who claim to be looking for women 25-45 are actually running searches for a younger-skewed subset.

Honestly, who the hell knows.

Mostly, it's just fun to run the experiment.

Which still has another 23 days to go. Watch for another report in about a week.

Results (Age posted on profile) Time period of data collection	match.com (43) 30 days	match.com (36) 1 week	aff.com (43) 1 week
emails received	8-10(?)	5 (plus 1 more from a winker you was then sent a "thanks for the wink" email)	39
emails from guys who might possibly be worthy of a meeting	2 (One of which was from a guy who'd gone out with your correspondent a few years ago)	2	1** **(Your correspondent did receive 2 additional emails that warranted replies for the sole purpose of lively, intellectual conversation. Seriously.)
winks/flirts received	8-10(?)	8	46
favorited/hotlisted	unknown	6	53
views	418	122	1,475 (13,850 total views since 7/29/2008, though the profile has only been active less than 6 months during that time)

*Let it be stated for the record, because your correspondent is the prototypical Good Girl and would hate to think that you might get the wrong impression of her, that your correspondent originally put a profile up on AFF on a lark, and was never actually interested in "meeting real sex partners tonight," and made this abundantly clear in her profile text. Let it also be stated, for the record, that the majority of men who responded to your correspondent's very clearly-written AFF profile clearly never took the time to read it. (The latest iteration: an email from an admirer and hopeful with a detailed description of his... behavior... inspired by your correspondent's photo, complete with an attached photo of the... evidence... in front of the writer's computer screen with said photo (of your correspondent) displayed. 'Nuff said.)

© 2010, The Dating Queen. All rights reserved. Please provide link back to original post.