My Experiences Using OkCupid for Online Dating

Online dating: everyone's doing it. In fact, it seems amazing when a new couple responds to the question "How did you meet?" with a real-life answer. But until a few months ago, I had never tried it. I confess that I briefly experimented with Craigslist to get my feet wet. When I felt ready to commit to an actual online dating profile, I jumped on the OkCupid bandwagon. Here are my experiences.

Friend-Tested and Approved!

I've never thought of myself as the Match or eHarmony type. The idea of paying for an online dating profile seemed too much like an admission of defeat, especially because I'm a social person and have no trouble meeting people in real life. My real problem was that I wasn't meeting anyone I wanted to continue seeing past one or two dates. I wasn't clicking with anyone on any sort of deeper level.

As it turns out, many of the best and strongest couples I know have met through OkCupid. I thought this was nothing more than coincidence, until I started asking my friends probing questions. They told me that OkCupid worked so well for them because the site tends to attract artists, writers, academics, and other types of intelligent and creative people who think that it's fun to answer offbeat questions about themselves. People who enjoy word-play and really getting to know others gravitate toward OkCupid over other sites because it's easy to get a sense of someone before you ever start talking.

"Okay," I thought. "I'm convinced. Sign me up."

My Profile

Since I tend to be a pretty verbal person, I spent several hours answering all the possible profile questions on OkCupid. Some parts were a little tedious, like filling out the section about my favorite books, movies, music, and food. Other parts were interesting and forced me to make an honest assessment of my life and what I value, like the questions about six things I couldn't live without and the somewhat frightening "what I'm doing with my life" section.

After filling out the heart of the profile, I spent a good deal of time answering match questions. Answers to these questions get put into an algorithm that determines the matches you see and gives you a percent match for every other person on the site based on different categories like ethics and dating. I'll be honest-some of these questions were extremely difficult, and others brought back painful memories about issues that killed previous relationships. But these are good questions that should be asked.

Here's an example of what OkCupid's match questions are like. One of the questions is "Do you believe in monogamy?" To answer, you must choose "yes," "no," or "I'm not sure." Fair enough. But other questions in the monogamy category were a little stickier, like "Do you consider it cheating to open-mouth kiss someone who is not your partner?" and "Do you think it's cheating to sleep in the same bed and cuddle with someone you are attracted to who is not your partner?"

Answering these questions put me in a rare position: I got to define what kind of relationship I wanted to have before I started one. I also got to see where I might still be carrying some leftover baggage I wasn't aware of, and I got to explain my answers in comment boxes underneath the questions and engage with others about their positions. Suddenly, this wasn't just about dating. This was about being a healthy person in the world and not being afraid to say what I wanted out loud.

Quality of Messages

Perhaps because I took the time to fill out the complete profile and engage with the site, I received many messages from earnest, intelligent people who seemed compatible with me. At one point, I was getting more awesome messages than I could reasonably keep up with, which was a strange feeling (and made me feel a little guilty). Sure, I received my fair share of "winks" and one-liners of a sexual nature, but I was surprised by how real and how nice most of the people who contacted me seemed. The men of OkCupid were genuinely interested in having conversations about similarities and interests, which was refreshing and nice.

On the other hand, I will say that I had absolutely no luck reaching out and contacting other people. The men that I messaged by and large chose not to respond for reasons I'll never know. Perhaps even in the online dating world, women aren't supposed to make the first move.

Quality of Dates

Sadly, I never met anyone who translated well from online to real life. While OkCupid was great for initiating conversations, it wasn't so great at delivering people I felt romantic about. If I would have stuck with it for more than a couple of months, I'm sure I would have continued to meet nice people and perhaps one that I wanted to pursue in a dating situation.

The Result

While using OkCupid was a fun diversion and helped me clarify some of my own beliefs about dating, I ended up meeting someone the old-fashioned way. We share a lot of the same ideas about what we want from a relationship, and we have just the right balance of similarities and differences to make our conversations both fun and engaging. The odd thing is that until we got together, my boyfriend also maintained an active profile on OkCupid. We never saw each other online once, because according to the algorithm, we're not a match.

Should my current relationship work out, I would certainly use OkCupid again as a resource for meeting new people. However, I can also see how matching people too closely makes for some really boring dinner dates. It's not just our similarities that make us compatible, I've found, but also our differences that keep us interested in each other.