In the first article in this series from dating.com review (The Psychologists Viewpoint) I outlined the different types of research using personal advertisements, generally printed advertisements published on the ‘lonely hearts’ pages of newspapers and magazines.
You will recall that over the last few years psychologists have collected and analyzed thousands of these personal descriptions, and have found patterns and sex differences in what people want from a partner, how people advertise themselves to a prospective partner, and how well they pick up on the sort of things the other sex is looking for. This article looks at this from the perspective of male desires and female self-descriptions; looking at what men have actually said they are looking for in a partner, and how good women are at saying the right things to attract a man. Although this is about male wants it is probably of more use to women, particularly when you are considering the sort of thing to say in the ‘in your own words’ box of your online dating profile.
Firstly we will discuss the features that men particularly seek when describing their ideal partner and how women from dating.com scam use their knowledge of this when describing themselves. Secondly we will consider how good women are at this – are there some things that women could say that would make a big difference? Finally we will consider how women can best use this information to hook the interest and get a proper look from men who are browsing through pages and pages of online profiles.
Before you read any further, pause for a moment and ask yourself what men are typically looking for in a female partner. Think of maybe four things and note them down … now read on.
What does the research say?
One of the strongest results to emerge from examining personal advertisements is the sex difference in the importance of attractiveness. Apart from age and sex, attractiveness (beauty, good looks etc.) is the most frequently described characteristic in personal advertisements written by both men and women but a whole range of studies have found that women are much more likely to describe themselves as attractive or using similar terms (handsome, beautiful, good looking etc.) than men are, and men are far more likely to say they are looking for someone from dating.com review who is attractive than women are.
This suggests that not only is men more interested in a partner’s physical attractiveness than women but those women already know and use this information. This is also backed up when you look at other physical descriptions such as hair and eye colour. Women are far more likely to mention their own hair and eye colour than men and men are far more likely to say they are looking for a ‘brown eyed brunette’ (or whatever) than women are. The other physical attribute that stands out is build or weight, often expressed as dress size. Granted there is no simple male equivalent to a woman describing herself as a ‘size 10’ (pretty slim in UK dress sizes) but there are plenty of other words (trim, slender, muscular) that could be used. Even so, men are more likely to describe the size/weight range of the person they are looking for than women, and women are more likely to describe their own size, build or weight than men.
Another important factor that emerges from the research is age. Age is almost always mentioned in advertisements written by both men and women. Usually both the age of the writer and the age range of their preferred partner from dating.com scam are specified. There is little difference in whether or not age is mentioned so it looks like it is similarly important to both sexes. However there is a difference when you start looking at the actual numbers. In general, women are looking for someone of similar age to themselves or someone who is older by a few years. It is rare to come across a woman who states she is looking for someone younger. Men are usually looking for someone of a similar age or younger, in some cases considerably younger. This suggests youth is something that is valued by men, and perhaps these ties in with ideas about what is attractive.
Apart from stating their physiological age in years, many women who are (perhaps) re-entering the dating scene a little later in life give a more subjective evaluation of their age, usually saying something that implies youth such as young at heart, youthful, or looks younger. Older men also do this but it is much more common in women’s self-descriptions and women begin to use claims of youthfulness at earlier ages than men.
Overall, then, looking at personal advertisements the biggest difference between men and women is over description of physical characteristics including attractiveness and body size or shape, and specific physical features that may be considered attractive such as eye colour and hair colour. Age ties in with this if we assume a link between youth and attractiveness. Men tend to want younger, sometimes much younger partners from dating.com review while women, particularly older women, tend to describe themselves as being youthful in outlook or directly tie this in with looks by claiming to be young looking for their age.
On a wider level, a number of researchers have remarked that when women describe themselves they tend to emphasise their male-valued, physical traits rather than the traits that they, as women, place value on. It would be easy to argue that women do this because they hold stereotypical, even prejudiced views of men but the strong evidence of a match between how women describe themselves and what men actually say they want indicates women have got it about right. It appears that when women write an advertisement or dating profile, they often do a good job of writing for a male audience and seem to have a pretty clear idea of how best to promote themselves and attract male attention.
How can we use this?
Most of this is unsurprising and you may be thinking that you already knew this. However you now know for sure that this is not just prejudice but is backed up by scientific research. More importantly, this is knowledge you can use to improve your own profile on dating.com scam.
Although there is little you can do to change your age, attractiveness and physical features, there is plenty of scope to decide what you emphasize and the kind of language you use. I am not suggesting that you lie, particularly since the whole idea is that you will eventually meet up and overt lying about physical features would do you no good at all. Without lying it is perfectly possible to focus on your best features and try to use the kind of keywords that men are likely to pick up on.
With online dating profiles, photographs are generally a prerequisite to getting responses and given the sex differences in the importance of attractiveness, it’s probably fair to say a good quality photo showing you in your best light is particularly important for women.
Apart from this there are the ‘in your own words’ sections of your profile. If you or others consider you attractive then mention this, don’t worry about the fact that it is already in the form-like section of your profile. If you are slim then mention this. If you are not comfortable with claiming either of these then mention your most attractive features such as your beautiful eyes, lovely auburn hair, attractive personality and/or young outlook.
Notice the language I am using: it may seem trivial but adjectives like attractive, beautiful, and lovely and young will catch the attention of the men who (on average) are more interested in this sort of thing than women from dating.com review. Men are predisposed towards spotting this kind of thing and even those who claim to be more interested in personality than looks will notice these words. If you feel you can refer to yourself as young and stunningly beautiful with a great figure then do so.
If you don’t feel that confident then use more moderate language or qualify these statements (young at heart, considered beautiful by some, attractive figure) and refer to specific features like your hair and eyes. Using key words such as these and mentioning your physical features makes it more likely you will grab his attention and your profile will get more than a brief scan and then move on.
To wrap things up, this article has outlined the results of psychological research into what men say they want in a partner and how women describe themselves. This information has then been used to provide insight into the sort of language that might help a woman’s personal description catch a man’s eye.
The next article in this series, She wants and he is, turns the tables and considers what women say they want from men, how men describe themselves, and how good (or bad) men are at picking up on what women from dating.com scam are actually looking for in a partner.
The Psychology of Online Dating: The Psychologist’s Viewpoint
Psychologists interested in dating and attraction have learned a great deal by reading and examining the personal advertisements and ‘lonely hearts’ pages of local and national newspapers. Since us psychologists have benefited from the people who use these services it seems only right that some of the things we’ve found should be given back. In this series of articles I will outline some of the more practically useful findings that have come from this research and provide a summary of the results reported in academic psychology journals, written for those who probably have the greatest interest in this knowledge: the daters themselves.
There is quite a bit of material to cover so I have organized it into a series of six articles:
The Psychologist’s Viewpoint
This article gives an idea of the scope of research using personal advertisements, the way personal profiles are used in research and the kind of things psychologists can find out when they put their minds to it.
He wants and she is
This outlines research into the things that men say they are looking for in a partner from dating.com review. Alongside this we look at how women describe themselves. Combining these we can assess how accurately women understand what men want and use the right kind of language to attract a man’s interest. This one is particularly useful for the girls and should help you write something for the ‘in your own words’ bit of your profile.
She wants and he is
This article gives the opposite perspective to the previous one, looking at the things that women say they want in a partner and the way that men describe themselves. Do these match up? Have men got it right or are they missing the point completely? This one might help the boys rethink the content of their ‘own words’ parts of their dating profiles.
Like for Like or Opposites Attract?
This article summarizes the results in the previous two and uses these to outline the current psychological theories of attraction. It explains how ‘like attracts like’ and ‘opposites attract’ can both be true and how this can help you when you are first making contact with someone after reading their profile.
Blitzers, Boasters and Being Choosy
This article looks at research into general approaches to dating including the results found by researchers who experimentally placed different versions of personal advertisements and then sat back to see how many and what kind of responses they got.
Summary and Practical Uses
The final article of this series summarizes all that has gone before and places this new knowledge firmly in the context of online dating, describing how these results can be constructively used to make fewer mistakes and to improve your chances of attracting responses to your profile and getting a positive response to your first approach to someone.
Before getting into the results of the research we need to take a brief tour around the ways in which research psychologists use personal advertisements and the kinds of things they can find, so we have some idea of the sort of things that psychologists can and cannot say about personal advertisements and internet dating profiles.
Content Analysis
Personal advertisements have been a rich source of information for social scientists investigating dating behaviours. To give an idea of the scale of this enterprise, my own research in this area is based on the analysis of nearly five thousand advertisements collected from UK local newspapers. Apart from this I have copies of more than sixty research reports published by colleagues in Brazil, Canada, Hungary, Japan, Poland, UK and USA. This adds up to about thirty thousand individual profiles that have been analyzed by psychologists, sociologists and other professional researchers. Most of this research has used printed personal ads extracted from newspapers and magazines as these are more useful to us (as explained below) but the information and insights gained can be applied to any situation where first impressions come from written descriptions, so these results are directly relevant and useful to people using internet dating sites.
Creating a profile for an internet dating site usually involves describing yourself on a whole host of listed options such as eye colour (blue, green etc.), smoking habit, attractiveness, salary etc. This information is usually entered into the site using a form. Within this form each person makes their own choices from the options available but because it is a form, everyone has to mention the same kinds of things. In a sense, the dating site has already decided what the important features are and you simply tick the correct boxes when describing yourself and describing the sort of person you want to meet.
With printed personal advertisements there is no detailed form to fill in and you can write whatever you want. The only restriction is on the number of words with an escalating charge per word up to a maximum limit. As a result these advertisements are quite short, averaging about 22 words. This is typically enough space to mention about nine things, whether these are your own attributes (age, hair and eye colour, looks) or things you are looking for in a partner (sense of humour, marital status, age range, personality, height). Given these restrictions we can reasonably expect that people mention the most important things as they see it, so the content of these advertisements tell us what characteristics the writers think are important to the other sex, and what key things they are looking for themselves. For example, a personal advertisement that says “Stunning, curvy and adventurous 22 year old blonde female is looking for a financially secure older man, ideally with own hair and teeth, who will spoil her rotten.” gives a pretty clear indication of what matters to this person and what she is offering in return.
Researchers have taken thousands of personal advertisements and analyzed them to look for general patterns. From this, they have identified some very clear differences between the kinds of things that are important to men and women when looking for a partner. They have also looked at how well the self descriptions of each sex matches the features that the other sex says they want, giving an indication of how much each sex understands about what the other sex is looking for. Results from this kind of research are discussed in the articles He wants and she is, and she wants and he is.
Apart from the specific attributes and features mentioned, there are also more general differences in how people write these descriptions. For example women tend to give more detailed information about the sort of person they are looking for than men, while men are more focused on describing themselves. Looking at a profile from this perspective tells us quite a lot about the approach people take to dating, including whether they are looking for a few high quality matches or just want as many dates as they can possibly get. This research is summarized in the article Blitzers, Boasters and Being Choosy.
Knowing how people describe themselves and the sort of thing they are looking for also allows us to look at broader questions such as whether people are looking for others who are similar to themselves or would prefer a partner who is different but, in some sense, complementary. This is discussed in the article Like for Like or Opposites Attract where we find that both are true once we understand a more basic and useful theory of attraction.
Experimental Research
Apart from examining the advertisements that real people have written in the hope of finding a partner, psychologists have occasionally become active researchers and have placed experimental personal advertisements to see how many and what type of response they get. For example, if two almost identical advertisements are placed and one receives twice as many responses as the other, this tells us that the difference between these ads (which may be as small as one word) has a big effect on the chances of attracting a date.
Some psychologists have also used this type of research to investigate the sort of things that men and women write when responding to an advertisement. This has given researchers another way to classify the different approaches to dating and to identify groups such as the ‘blitzers’ who send responses to everyone in the hope that some of them will score a hit. Results from this experimental research are presented in the article Blitzers, Boasters and Being Choosy.
This article has outlined the organization and content of this series, has introduced the ways in which psychologists approach dating research, and has indicated the sort of things they may be able to see from their viewpoint as researchers.
In the next article we move on to looking at some actual findings. He wants and she is looks at the features that women tend to emphasis when advertising themselves, the things that men are actually looking for, and whether or not women’s’ self descriptions suggest they are marketing themselves well and have an accurate insight into what men want.
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