The Dates of Wrath

For context, you definitely want to have a quick read over part one again. OK? Good.

There’s one last problem which will make a mockery of your peace of mind.

Problem 3: The Hottie Paradox

This is more of an issue for men, but I think it goes both ways to some extent.

I think it’s pretty established by now that in a free-for-all like okcupid, boys and girls do things differently. The majority of males are fervently pursuing, and the majority of females are desperately filtering.

The lovely graph-porn over at okcupid illustrates that boys fire off emails with a machine-gun cadence. Girls are then left to hack and splutter their way through the deluge, somehow retaining a shadow of patience in the face of overwhelming douchery. Boys spend their time copying and pasting emails; girls spend their time deleting them.

There are two practical consequences.

It’s particularly frustrating that very obviously attractive ladies are going to be basically uncontactable. A common scenario for popular girls is that they log in to a full inbox (300 messages on okcupid). If a person is both hot and righteously on top of their shit – checking every day and deleting heavily – you might get through. If they’re less organised, or busy, or anything less that a deleting machine then your missives will never be seen.

The second problem is one of patience. Those rare ladies with genius-level intellect and bikini-model construction are typically not highly motivated to put up with this level of bullshit. Sure, they will giggle and sign up, curious to dabble – because who knows, right? – but will lunge for the Delete Account link with extreme alacrity when the unstoppable torrent of shirtless SUP GURL U SMOKIN bilge spatters over their perfectly forged features.

I’ve seen the most very-conventionally-attractive girls pull their profile in a matter of days, presumably because of the unpleasant tsunami of attention. In a true Hobbesian free-for-all, the chronic assholicism of boys is crushing.

The fact is then, above a certain level of physical attractiveness, the mechanism of online dating simply breaks down. If ‘truly stunning looks’ is on your shopping list – and even if you’re a sparkling hottie yourself – you’re probably going to have to get out there and do things the old fashioned way.

Again there’s some fascinating reading on the harsh facts of face-lust over on the okcupid blog – some seriously sexy number-crunching.

This is not comforting, you do realise that

OKCupid is worst for this: with great freedom, comes great opportunity to spam. But there are more things in heaven and earth than OKC.

Oddly, it turns out that Chemistry.com – with its quaint habit of not letting you do fucking anything without five kinds of photo ID and signed permission from both your parents and grandparents – is a winner here. Chemistry doles out contact with fellow members in a miserly dripfeed. The good news: if you connect with someone smoking hot on ye olde Chemistry, the chances are excellent that not many competitors know about them.

Let’s take a sample subject: me. How many significant past relationships have begun based on different sites?

• Chemistry: three
• Match: three.
• OKC: zero.

Bear in mind this is over quite a long time – I’m not a chronic slut or relationship-ADD sufferer (discuss).

The point is: I have come alarmingly close to The One on several occasions, and those meetings were possible precisely there wasn’t a whizz-bang Web 2.0 chat-fest that allowed every Tom, Dick and Horatio to be drenching them in virtual saliva.

So with these problems – excess hope, tenuous connections, the hottie paradox – what can you do to avoid hurt?

Strategy 1: Spread your bets

Remember that the response rate for anything you send is going to be low. Over time, only for every ten or twenty people you contact will you get one reply back. Maybe. That’s the harsh reality.

Secondly, your photos and profile matter infinitely more than the actual message content.

So save yourself some trauma and resist the urge to spend hours crafting a perfect message. Chances are it will go in the bin, often for completely mundane reasons (they met someone, they haven’t logged in, their mailbox is full of dreck).

To actually maximise your chances, you just need to demonstrate that you’re paying attention, and not spraying the same form-letter to anyone with a half-decent visage.

‘Paying attention’ here means at minimum addressing them by name – remember, candychebs4u is probably not an exotic European moniker, don’t use it as one – and ideally bringing up something that you liked in their blurb.

“Check out my profile and reply if you like it – thanks,” is a good straightforward way to sign off.

At the risk of belabouring the point, I recommend having a read over OKC’s analysis of what people actually respond to in messages.

Strategy 2: DON’T MUG YOURSELF

Depending on your taste and mood you can either go for Don’t Mug Yourself:

Or the equally poignant motif, You Do It To Yourself (yes I know that’s not the name of the song):

Here’s a hurt-dodging rule for you: Think really fucking carefully before clicking the Who Viewed Me option.

Seems like a good idea right, to see those folks who clicked on you? Well think of this feature as, ‘these are the lovelies who checked you out, but were not excited enough to email’. Often that’s no problem at all – until that superhawt honey you have been building your dreams around shows up on the list (and your inbox remains resolutely empty). You can hear the snort of rejection from the other side of the internet.

There are a million reasons why you won’t get a response – as you will know from your own inbox management. So never, never take it personally. I get more emails than I can be bothered giving civil replies to, so a lot of perfectly nice people go in the bin. The system is not perfect; random and unfair things will happen.

Accept that pure luck will be a powerful factor. Resist the urge to dwell on missed opportunities.

Strategy 3: Hidden gems

So we’ve established that the system is basically broken for very-obviously-attractive people; the photogenes who have dropped off the GAP poster, or suicidegirls banner, depending on your taste.

This is where your niche lusts become important. Don’t go with the crowd. Embrace the awkward spectacle wearers. Indulge your passion for the raging ginger. Give in to your inner chubby chaser. Look harder for the hidden gems and you’re less likely to be disappointed.

A reader writes,

I have a question about one of the tips you guys offered on your blog about hacking okcupid’s annoying quickmatch mailout. Thanks for the tip btw! So it just identifies the nine people who might have rated you it seems. Is there a way to find out who the actual one is who selected you without having to guess from nine profiles? Just curious. Thanks for your help!

NAME REDACTED

‘Annoying’ is right! Quickmatch is the most needlessly infuriating feature on okcupid, or indeed on any site, intended for any purpose. As our reader notes, I’ve offered some helpful tips before on how to beat the system.

What’s worse though is that Quickmunge is fundamentally broken.

What’s meant to happen is that the people who like you are carefully shuffled into your Quickmince queue. So if you go to the site and starting clicking the five-star ratings, at least one of the hotties from the magic grid should show up.

But in reality, they don’t. Hence, Quickmess is pish.

However! As ever, I am here for you.

One okcupid feature is reliable. Go into your Settings, Notifications, and make sure Mutual 4 or 5 star ratings is enabled.

In the end there’s no need to be coy about this. Use the hack I described on the email to pick out the sex-faces that you like. Then go ahead and rate them 4 or 5. Simple as that.

If they were the one who picked you, you’ll get an email confirming that everything in your life is now rainbows. Done! You will soon be ‘mutually rating’ each other until you are sore.

If it was one of the mongooses who picked you, nothing will happen (except that the object of your desire will now receive an annoying Quickmuff of their own). No harm, no foul. Go forth and rate!

OK, let’s be clear and get the bad news out of the way first. The fact is you’re dating, and that means sooner or later you’re going to get your ass hurt (doubly true for all you bears).

Despite your best efforts and before long, some uncouth whelp is going to boot you firmly in the emotional gonads, or twist your relationship nipples in a purpling rotation that Tony Hawk would envy.

There are fifteen flavours of damage out there. The thrilling brush with the psychotic; the drive-by snub; all the wee disappointments you inadvertently inflict on yourself.

The only guaranteed strategy for a pain-free existence is not to play. And where does that leave you? The only passenger on the lonely night-bus to Wanksbury.

Dating is by definition an acutely personal business. You’re judging and being judged on all levels, shallow and significant. Your hairstyle, your voice, your taste in music. Your body shape, the way you walk, your ability to kiss like an electric eel made of candyfloss.

To stand a chance of success you have to put a lot out there, make yourself available. Gamble. And the stakes are wallet-breaking: if you’re open to the long game – the R word – you’re shooting for something that could actually change the course of your life. That’s pressure.

But on the other hand… fuck it. It’s why we’re all here. Suck it up and follow some guidelines to keep any trauma to minimal levels. You’ll be cruising through this nonsense like a jizzy Fonz before you know it.

Problem 1: Hope will tear us apart

In the early stages of contact, one of your biggest problems is your own imagination.

Because of the scant information you have on new hottie X, you tend to fill in the gaps with your own invention. From the crude impression afforded by a handful of pictures and badly-sketched paragraphs, it’s all too easy to sculpt someone perfect in your mind; someone that’s going to end the game for you.

Even worse is to daydream, and project imagined futures. Like the old Newman and Baddiel sketch with the old married couple reminiscing, “And to think, if I hadn’t spoken to you at that party, we wouldn’t be here now…”

Conjuring a rainbow unicorn spunkfest is easy, based on a few fuzzy jpegs. But as fun as that is, what you’re doing is raising the emotional stakes. This is not in your interests.

So resist the temptation to get your hopes up about sugarface23. Go further: once you’ve taken the time to email them, forget about it. Put them from your mind. The truth is you have no idea what they’re like, so setting yourself up in any way is just to invite disappointment.

In practice there are no stakes until you have at least met. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON.

Problem 2: Tenuous connections

So you send out some sparkly wordbait and then – O frabjous day! – something comes back. It’s a bite! The tenuous first connection.

You should know by now that the first couple of emails are important. Many people are deeply cagey about the whole online experience, and frankly who among us can blame them.

In practice this thin, early connection you have can go wrong at any time, without any notice, and once lost will never ever come back. You’re two people balanced on opposite ends of a creaking tightrope, inching toward one another while high winds blow. One foot wrong and off you go, cheerio and goodnight.

With this balancing act, the impersonal nature of email can be torturous. If you actually care about getting a response, email is traumatic because it plays on your worst fears: even at the best of times, few people are inclined to reply immediately. There Will Be Silence.

In the intervening time – which can easily stretch for days – an exciting array of negative possibilities will become vivid in your mind, as painful as bum-cancer and as welcome as bukkake at a wedding.

If the tension is unchecked, you will return to scrutinise and agonise over every syllable, word, punctuation mark and ill-considered smiley in your missives; weighing up the chances of that particular choice pushing the delicate balance of the reader’s reaction from boner-joy into irritation, ambivalence, disgust, pity. And you know from your own experience that simply not replying at all is blissfully easy to do.

So here’s how to dodge all that: you have to NOT CARE. Recognise the traps above, catch yourself, care less. Does that sound harsh, callous, humanity-defeating? It’s not. In this harsh game of hurtball it’s basic self-preservation. Make like Bruce Lee and empty your mind. Go and read a book, think about something else.

You need to spread your excitement and hopes widely enough that when babygravy67 inevitably doesn’t reply to your messages, that doesn’t consume you.

Even if they are the only other person in the whole wide world that also loves Nepalese cheese carving.