OK CUPID

JRGREENE and I had an interesting discussion about gender and compatibility. Now singles ladies, and single men (I suppose), I want to open the topic up to race, gender, and comptability. There is an interesting website run by OKCupid, called OKTRENDS that tracks the messaging behavior of their users. This makes for an interesting sample to think about how people choose a partner. Lots and lots of great data, pick and choose your favorite and lets talk about them. Mine are:

If you take a look at this series and the interval as men age, it's pretty obvious that men prefer women younger to them, and seem to be ok with women a few years older. But its pretty halarious the youngest possible match for old men is ~30years!

But if we look at women, they seem to be pretty reasonable--but they skew a bit older, but aleast the interval says relatively uniform as they age.

And of course, there is beauty. Which is to say that this chart maps women's overall attractiveness over time.

And it seems like, atleast for women, if you're hot, you stay hot. Now, that means a few things that are interesting to me--overall your attractiveness doesn't change despite your age. If you are in the top quantile of good looking women, you stay there --even compared to women in the same quantile of a younger age! The author says that this sample is taken from responses of available single women positing that your avg 35 year old is probably married and therefore has stopped optimizing her looks. I don't know about that. I would actually be interested to see how a representative sample of married and unmarried women would fare.

Let me know your thoughts, America. I know its taboo to rate people, and I've shied away from it, but I guess in this medium, where you do it annonymously from the comfort of your own home, makes me feel better about it, especially when you get frank results.