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Do you really think she won’t notice you’re really 5’6″? Or that since your last photo was taken you’ve gotten much older/uglier/fatter?
The free, online dating site OkCupid studied the profiles of its 1.51 million active users to come up with the big fat lies daters tell in their profiles.
For instance, the more attractive the photo, the more likely it is to be out of date. In fact, over a third of the “hottest” photos on the site are a year or more old. As for height, people are actually about two inches shorter than they claim to be. This particularly applies to guys who are close to six feet tall. The closer they are the more likely they are to stretch for that “coveted psychological benchmark.” On the contrary, shorter women receive more unsolicited messages from men. On average, a 5’4″ woman gets 60 more messages a year than a woman who is six feet tall. And, it’s not just physical. Daters also lie about their income level — people are 20% poorer than they say they are.
If you are on an online dating site isn’t the goal to actually meet people, in person, and go on dates? Perhaps the liars hope that once their date meets them they will be won over by their personality and forget the rest. Because we Americans aren’t superficial at all, right? Now that’s not to say I would get up and leave right away if I showed up at a restaurant and my date was significantly shorter than he claimed — a girls gotta eat.
Before you chide me for wanting free meals, use the blog’s “Patented OkCupid Income Revelator Machine” to calculate the likely income of a would-be suitor. Enter 26 (years old), female and the zip code 10021 (midtown New York City) you find out the most likely income is $41,680. Keep all else the same, but change the gender to male and the most likely income is $73,170. Unsurprisingly then, OkTrends next graphic shows a man who makes around 100K gets far more messages than the poor dude who makes 20-40K.