Online Dating: A Scientific Approach To The Numbers Game
Imagine you visit an ice cream parlour and they have half a dozen flavours for you to choose from; coffee, mint choc chip, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and mango.
It’s easy to make your selection since you don’t like mint choc chip, find vanilla a little bland, avoid mango as you’re not in the mood for something new, leaving you a choice between chocolate, strawberry and coffee.
That’s a manageable number of options to choose from and now you can go with your gut instinct as to what is the perfect ice cream for you today.
Now imagine the ice cream parlour has 200 flavours and you’re even allowed to try some of the flavours before you make your decision.
You try a few flavours out, but after four or five you lose track of which one you liked best. In a bid to start cutting down the number of options, you begin excluding flavours for arbitrary reasons. Six are ruled out because you don’t like the colour, another five are excluded because you’ve never heard of them before.
Ten of the flavours have not had a single scoop taken from the tub, so you exclude these on the basis that they are not popular, unless of course they were so popular they ran out and had to be restocked, so have you just excluded the best ten flavours available?
Maybe you should reinstate them? And then your head implodes from the stress of choosing an ice-cream.
Online dating can mess you up like this sometimes. The numbers game doesn’t always work in your favour.
With the help of the Internet, singles today are looking for the best match in the whole world! Sifting through hundreds of profiles hurts your chances of finding love in two ways:
1. You will constantly be thinking that someone better is just a click away, taking your attention away from the very suitable candidates currently courting your attention.
2. To help you cut through the hundreds of options you will being excluding profiles for minor, insignificant reasons, like their choice of jumper in their profile picture, or their favorite film, thus potentially ruling out a really great match simply because they are not perfect.
By now, you may have realised that trying to find your one, true perfect match in the whole wide world, just on the basis of an online dating profile, may cause stress, anxiety and potentially madness.
That’s not to say that online dating is bad idea. Far from it. Online dating helps you make decisions about potential matches from the comfort of your own home, where you are more likely to think rationally than you would in a busy, dimly lit bar.
What you need, however, is a more scientific approach.
Instead of diving head first into a pile of profiles take the time to set your preferences carefully. Make a list of the things that really matter to you in a potential partner and use this as your guide when sifting through profiles.
And be realistic about what you are trying to achieve. Don’t look online for your one and only perfect partner, as this puts huge pressure and expectation on you both. Instead look out for people who you think have the potential to be a good match for you and are worth investing some time in.
Be calm, be realistic, and be methodical to really get the most from the opportunities online dating offers you.