Saturday, September 04, 2004

Kick A Man While He's Down

I've been a user of match.com for over a year now, with pretty much no success. I think I've gotten 2 or 3 dates out of it the whole time. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that I'm about as good at picking up women as fish are at breathing air.

Match.com does provide a bunch of tools to try and do better quality searches rather than just throwing loads of faces at you, but I think sometimes it backfires. I just took their Physical Attraction test, which gathers up some self-reported info about your body type, along with a little survey of who you find attractive, and isolates certain physical features and whether you find them attractive. The little report they mailed to me seemed pretty spot-on for who I like, so I started flipping through the search results and clicking on the "physical attraction" tab (and, for those of you who will quickly point out that beauty is only skin-deep, there is also a "personality" tab, which I have given up on long ago).

My problem with the physical attraction tab isn't the women it picks for me -- it's certainly not 100%, but it does a better job than throwing darts at a wall, so I'll run with that. It's that when I click on the little tab, it gives me a) how attractive they are to me, and b) how attractive I am to them, on a 1-4 scale.

The problem is, in short, my ego. Because on every one of the 20-odd tabs I've clicked on so far, the women find me "not at all" attractive (the lowest of the four). It's a little rough for someone whose dating career is, shall we say, less than entirely successful, to find that most women on the planet would rather date a peniless Mick Jagger than you.

I'm going to go stick a bag on my head. Maybe that will improve my odds.

Update:
After searching through over 40 entries (most women have not filled out the physical attraction profile, so there only 2-3 tabs per page of 10 results), I finally found one that found me "somewhat" attractive (2 out of 4). At this point I wisely called it quits and went foraging.

1 comment:

Guy said...

To be fair, the women here haven't actually said anything. They fill out an "attraction profile", do a self-eval on their features, and a program takes their input and my input and computes some sort of attraction number.

So, the "attraction" listed above is the computer's *estimated* physical attraction (and it's not very accurate, judging by numbers I'm getting). Not to mention that either its failing some basic statistical checks, or I look like Quasimodo.

Thanks for the "not Quasimodo" vote. :)