The report, commissioned by dating website Zoosk, also found that men were more likely to have success with online dating if their profile featured a picture taken outside (with 19 per cent more messages), while women who posted outdoors pictures got 40 per cent fewer messages on average.
“I regret doing it,” says Shultz, a Dickinson grad whose cheekbones could slice an apple. “[It’s] just a more curated group of people geared towards our demographic, which is 20s and 30s and, you know, who come from a good family,” Shultz says of the ultra-exclusive dating app, which provides users with just five matches a day. “I do think the concept of exclusive, invite-only, hard-to-get-into, wait-in lines — it’s very New York,” says Bradford, 30, whose company weeds out the hoi polloi from the hoity-toity.
(The app, which is free, even boasts a concierge service that doles out dating tips and feedback.) “I think it’s a good fit for the mentality here.” Since the app launched, she has been inundated with pleas from the public.
“In my courses I get a lot of enquiries about how to know whether people are single from their online profile, and most of those enquiries come from women.
If men talk about exes, women get the impression he’s being honest and open about his relationship status now.
For Thatcher Shultz, finding the right dating app is nearly as difficult as finding the right girl.
Tinder is “awful, just a mess, a waste of time,” laments the 31-year-old CEO and founder of an online automotive business.
Suzanne, a young woman in San Francisco, met a man—call him John—on the dating site OKCupid. More notably, he indulged in the kind of profligate displays of affection which signal a definite eagerness to commit.
He sneaked Suzanne’s favorite snacks into her purse as a workday surprise and insisted early on that she keep a key to his apartment. V.—an act roughly equivalent, in today’s gallantry currency, to Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster.
One mom implored the founder by email to help her soon-to-be 37-year-old daughter who “continues to enter into relationships that have no long-term possibilities: men with children, musicians, foreigners, unemployed artists.” A 33-year-old man, and a self-professed “pedigree snob,” wrote to Bradford: “Save me from the Tinder cesspool.” A 20-something Vogue editor has had no fewer than six emails sent on her behalf (she still hasn’t been accepted).