It's been exactly 7 months since I signed up to the online dating website match.com. During that period I contacted 11 girls who I felt I had quite a bit in common with. Of those 11, 2 replied, 9 ignored me and the 2 that replied ignored me on the next message.
I haven't really been too serious about dating until this summer and I wouldn't even consider it that serious (Yes I'm a hypocrite).
After a similar experience with two girls, whom I got their numbers from local bars, I began to wonder what life might be like if I were attractive?
Building My Fake Profile
Before building my fake profile, I decided to do an inventory of girls between 22 and 32 in an 80 mile radius around my region. Check out my data source for more on this. What I discovered from this data is what the "average" girl is like in my area:
Average Girl
- Smokes: No
- Drinks: Social Drinker
- Religion: Catholic/Christian-Other
- Has Kids: No
- Wants Kids : Definitely
- Marital Status: Never Married
- Exercise: 1-2 or 3-4 times per week
- Age: 25
- Education: Some college, associate degree or bachelors degree
- View my data
My Test Profile
With this data in hand, I created a male with all of these attributes:
- Smokes: No
- Drinks: Social Drinker
- Religion: Christian-Other
- Has Kids: No
- Wants Kids : Definitely
- Marital Status: Never Married
- Exercise: 3-4 times per week
- Age: 27
- Education: bachelors degree
Picking a Profile Picture
I just discovered that one of the most important things on an online dating site is the profile picture. When I was creating my fake profile, my most important criteria was finding a series of pictures of an attractive male model, especially if some of the pictures are lower in quality and probably not done using a professional camera.
After scouring through modelmayhem.com search results (and being subjected to more pictures of shirtless guys than a guy should ever have to see in a lifetime) I found my guy.
Included with the picture to the right were numerous low quality, non-professional photos available for me to use. Excellent!
After running my main profile picture through Photoshop to degrade its quality and not make it look so professional, I was ready to move on to registering!
Final Result
Click on the image below to view the profile in its entirety.
The Results?
After creating the profile, match.com gave me some grief and rejected the username I had chose. I forgot about the profile for another couple weeks and then a few days ago I decided to check on its status and I was able to get it approved.
Again, I forgot about the profile for a couple of days and decided to check it again recently. I WAS STUNNED.
The fake profile had exceeded my own personal profile in every measurable statistic in a mere 4 days to my profile's 212 days. Based on those numbers, the profile I had created was 53 times better than my own.
By The Numbers
Out of single guy boredom, I decided to do a quick comparison of the two profiles. The first set of data below is a 4 day to 212 day comparison of the two profiles (essentially their lifetime). The purpose of this data is to show how the fake profile exceeded my own in a matter of 4 days.
The second set of data shows an apples-to-apples comparison of the profiles by using a weekly average.
My Profile (212 days) |
Fake Profile (4 days) |
|
|---|---|---|
| Messages from Girls | 1 message | 9 messages |
| Girls Messaged | 11 messages | 0 messages |
| Girls Winked At Me | 3 winks | 16 winks |
| Girls Favorited Me | 1 favorite | 1 favorite |
| Profile Views | 184 views | 214 views |
| Desirability of Match.com profiles (per week) | ||
|
My Profile (per week) |
Fake Profile (per week) |
|
| Messages from Girls | 0.03 messages per week | 15.75 messages per week |
| Girls Winked At Me | 0.10 winks per week | 28.00 winks per week |
| Girls Favorited Me | 0.03 favorites per week | 1.75 favorites per week |
| Profile Views | 6.08 views per week | 374.00 views per week |
Graphs!
From this data I created two nice looking graphs to illustrate how far away from attractive I am. The disparity is pretty obvious.
And here is a graph showing profile views per day of the two profiles. Again the disparity is pretty obvious.
Messaging Girls
I've had a heck of a time getting girls to read and reply to my messages on match.com. I only had 1 girl message me the entire 212 days and only 2/11 reply to my first message. With my fake profile, I had 9 girls messaged me within a mere 4 days. Two girls I replied to and one replied back within 15 minutes and the other the next day. It's obvious the girls are much more engaged with my fake profile than my real profile.
Lessons Learned
I was absolutely shocked by the disparity between the two profiles! I mean sure, the fake profile was probably close to the "perfect profile" but I don't feel like I'm the elephant man. I certainly don't feel 53 times uglier/less worthy than the fake profile, but that's what the numbers bare.
I used to think that girls just didn't like interacting with guys much on dating sites, but I've now completely eliminated that theory. I also used to think that my profile picture wasn't all that important and that my profile information could make up for a less than perfect picture. Wrong! In my fake profile, I wrote nothing about myself and yet girls were grasping for straws trying to make conversation with me.
Finally, I learned that despite what we're told about girls (and their apparent priority of personality over appearance) girls care more about looks and are just as shallow as their male counterparts.
