Online Dating

July 3, 2011 12:45 PM

They’d met in the psychology department at U.C.L.A., where Gonzaga was conducting a study on married couples. Setrakian, who had a master’s in clinical psychology, was the project coördinator. To test their procedures, they needed a man and a woman to impersonate a married couple for multiple sessions. Gonzaga and Setrakian became the impersonators, and fell in love. An article about online dating from the New Yorker.
posted by wittgenstein (18 comments total)

Rudder, for his part, has determined that Republicans have more in common with Republicans than Democrats have in common with Democrats, which led him to conclude, “The Democrats are doomed.”

I could have told him that without the mountain of data from OK Cupid. All you need is a membership at dailykos or democraticunderground.
posted by localroger at 1:58 PM on July 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'd love to get more detail on all the behavior matching and other algorithms. I love the OKCupid blog just for that reason
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:05 PM on July 3, 2011

GTW, the OP does have quite a bit of info on how the sites work and the differences in how they make matches. Quite a good article in fact.
posted by localroger at 2:15 PM on July 3, 2011

This article reminded me a lot of this article.
posted by bquarters at 2:21 PM on July 3, 2011 [2 favorites]

Oh, I know, localroger, a great article for that. But I'd love nuts and bolts and specifics and business secrets they probably wouldn't reveal. It's funny, I'm not a math person but things like this and advanced baseball stats are fascinating to me. Reduce all humans to numbers and algorithms, says I.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:24 PM on July 3, 2011

Online dating is bullshit because it relies on email and email is bullshit.
posted by Afroblanco at 2:28 PM on July 3, 2011

All you need is a membership at dailykos or democraticunderground.

...or MetaFilter.
posted by brennen at 2:30 PM on July 3, 2011

Based on the reference in this article, my wife and I took the personality inventory at chemistry.com. I was pretty impressed by its assessment of us and the kind of relationship we would be drawn to. Sadly, they seem to have deleted my account, presumably because I told the truth in the profile about just being there to try it out...
posted by Coventry at 2:33 PM on July 3, 2011

I was pretty underwhelmed by this article. I really wanted to like it, and I thought it had great potential, but it ended up as a kind of inventory that was a lot less compelling than I had hoped for. Even the anecdotes were a bit flat to me.
posted by OmieWise at 3:42 PM on July 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

I like the 1960s quiche reference:

One of TACT’s print advertisements featured a photograph of a beautiful blond woman. “Some people think Computer dating services attract only losers,” the copy read, quoting a TACT subscriber. “This loser happens to be a talented fashion illustrator for one of New York’s largest advertising agencies. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess, and like me she loves to ski. Some loser!”
posted by paduasoy at 4:22 PM on July 3, 2011

Could someone - possibly the OP - explain why "coordinator" contains an umlaut in the post?
posted by item at 4:30 PM on July 3, 2011

It's the New Yorker's house style. Always with the umlauts.
posted by wemayfreeze at 4:38 PM on July 3, 2011 [2 favorites]

wikipedia on trema, umlaut, diaeresis. Here, it denotes a diaeresis, so that the two vowels are part of two different syllables. This is the same reason you see one in naïve, for instance—without it, that word would have one syllable instead of two, and presumably be prounced like "waive".
posted by jepler at 5:44 PM on July 3, 2011 [1 favorite]

Philosophers love umlauts!
posted by wittgenstein at 5:59 PM on July 3, 2011

Do people really say "co-ordinator"? I say it, and hear it in the places I've lived, more like "core-dinator," with the two o's slurred together.

I thought the article was ok when I read it, but wished it had been written by someone with some first-hand knowledge of online dating. There's good and bad in online dating, but an old dude who has been married for 75 years and last dated when light bulbs were new might not be the exact right journalist to know what questions to ask and what aspects to probe.
posted by Forktine at 7:05 PM on July 3, 2011

I was put off because they didn't mention John Gottman's stuff at all. It seems like eharmony's methods in their "relationship lab" are rehashed versions of the stuff we were hearing about Gottman's studies with his Relationship Research Institute, from like, 1997.
posted by redsparkler at 9:01 PM on July 3, 2011

@Afroblanco

Online dating is bullshit because it relies on email and email is bullshit.


"E-mail is for geeks and pedophiles." - Cruel Intensions
posted by yoyo_nyc at 6:03 AM on July 4, 2011

Do people really say "co-ordinator"?

Yes. In Britain and (parts of) Canada, it's even spelled that way.
posted by asnider at 7:02 AM on July 4, 2011