The Dating Jungle

Online Dating and the Algorithms of Love

jdelvic — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:57:26 +0000

Online Dating and the Algorithms of Love

If you are not sure what an algorithm is, it is a fancy word that describes the ability to automate a series of steps into a defined outcome. The stated Holy Grail of the online dating industry is to come up with an algorithm to match people together in such a perfect way that they will be life mates. And if you believe that the dating industry is seriously seeking such a Holy Grail, then I have some shares for a bridge in Brooklyn that I would like to sell you really cheap.

This may seem like an outrageous claim, but let me describe where I am coming from on this. The problem is that millions of investment dollars would be required to seriously improve matching algorithms. And that is the crux of the matter. What is the payoff for the dating industry as a whole to make such an investment?

To understand what the payoffs would be, you must first understand how is it that dating sites make money.

Dating sites generally make money by one of two primary methods, or a combination of both:

Pay for services – in some way they get you to pay for use of the site – this may be a recurring membership, or a pay per use model
Advertising – a website makes money from advertising products to their members.

Now if you think about it, what both of these models require is for members to keep hanging around on the site. If the site matches you up with the perfect partner your first day in, then you will not be hanging around very long, and they will not make much money off of you.

Do you see the catch-22 problem here?

Dating sites cannot afford to have a perfect matching algorithm. Even if is was technically possible; it would be a huge mistake business wise.

So how do they solve the dilemma? Again, there are two basic approaches, or some combination of both:

They develop matching algorithms that are mostly based on physical attributes. In other words, they get people to focus on the physical aspects of their ideal partner, and then present them with profiles of people who match these physical criteria. It is then up to the member to communicate with these people to see if they actually like any of the people presented.
They develop matching algorithms based on psychological profiling and preference testing. Again they present members with a list of profiles of people that match this criteria, and leave it up to the member communicate with them to see if they actually like any of the people presented.

You can argue which method is the most effective. Method 1, based on perceived physical attributes is based on becoming interested in talking to people because you like what you see. This is similar to what would happen in a bar situation or party situation where you see someone across the room and walk over to introduce yourself. Method 2 is based on psychology, but the best real life analogy would be someone that you are associated with in a work environment or that you meet via some special interest group that you both belong to. If you both belong to the same group, then there is a likelihood that you have something in common at something other than a physical level.

But if you really take a harder look at the two dating site matching approaches above, you can see that they both boil down to requiring the users to stay on-site to communicate with each other to find out what they have in common. Often, dating sites push you to keep the conversation going on their sites because you are able to remain anonymous until you are more comfortable that you understand the personality of the person that you are communicating with. This is not a bad thing, and as such makes most online dating sites a safer way to initiated dating with strangers than a typical meet someone in a bar situation.

But a lot of this is just dating site hype. What they are really after is for you to stay onsite for a long period of time so that they can increase what they call their member value. Member value is driven by a concept called site stickiness. If members keep coming back to the site every day for a long period of time, they have a better chance of earning more money from advertising and keeping you paying more money as the months slip by and you are still looking for your perfect match.

Is it any wonder why the dating industry does not want you to find your perfect match on day one?

All that being said, they are not really all that crass and greedy. There is another reason why it is that they cannot develop a perfect match algorithm. The main two reasons for this are:

People do not know what they want in a perfect partner
People lie about who they are, or what they want in life.

In the computer industry, there is an old expression called “garbage in – garbage out”. If people feed a dating system with lies, then you cannot expect to have truth come out. Also, if people do not know what they want, even if you give them exactly what they ask for, it will still not be what they need.

Does all this seem callous?

I hope not. What it really boils down to is that you are pretty much on your own when you are trying to find your life mate. Online Dating Sites, or any Dating Service for that matter might be able to expose you to a bigger list of potential partners than you would likely find on your own, but in the long run, it is still up to you and your instincts to find the true person of your dreams.

Just be aware, that no matter which dating sites you sign up for on the Internet, after you get your first list of potential matches, you are really on your own to make a decision. “No magic in means no magic out”.

Happy Hunting!

Classical Sexy BBW Ladies

jdelvic — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:45:00 +0000

Everyone has his or her own definition of sexy.
The umbrella of “sexy” covers many ideals.
As society has changed, so to have ideals, examples and vision of what it is that defines sexy.
Sex, for most of the twentieth century, was considered to be a not to be discussed in polite company topic.
Once films became a big part of everyone’s life, the idea of being seen with a large woman on your arm gradually became less in vogue with most men. Big Screen sirens were usually more willowy than most other women for their time. The reason was simple; cameras add pounds to anyone’s form, so movie stars tended to were slimmer in real life to look normal in film. Slowly, the idea of sexy gradually started to shift from voluptuous to thin.

There is now a shift in place that is changing the sexy ideal to more normal BMI’s (body mass indexes).
With plastic surgery, big boobs are back in style, even on skinny women.
Push up bras with even triple padding are hot selling items among younger ladies, but when their male companions see them naked on, the jig (jug?) is up. Men are let down with falsie types. So, many men are now look at more naturally enhanced women, so voluptuous is back in vogue. And on that note, who is more voluptuous than a BBW?

When you look back in time, voluptuous women were considered to be most desirable. Larger women were idealized as child bearers, and offspring were a necessity in hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies. Even in during the last ice age, small figurines usually depicted their goddesses as voluptuous women and in most cases these statuettes were more fat than just curvy.

The lyrics in “Fiddler On The Roof” (the song “If I Was a Rich Man”) a story about Russian rural society at the turn of the twentieth century talks about a rich man’s wife as having a “proper double chin”. In other words, for much of history, being portly was a status symbol, because it proved you had plenty to eat, and therefore must be well to do.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, there has been a lot of immigration from many various world cultures into north America. With these cultures have also come the more traditional preference for larger families and women who will bear larger families. The well endowed woman is back in fashion.

Who knows, maybe in a few more years, Hollywood hotties will be big beautiful women. Mae West was very voluptuous, but in the early 20′s and 30′s she was most men’s wet dream.

If you are interested in meeting and dating big beautiful women, or if you are a big beautiful woman looking to meet a man who will appreciate you for what you are, then you should check out this page.

BBW Dating Sites

There are also a lot of other dating genres out there, so for those of you who are not into BBW, these are the links for you:

Online Dating in 2011

jdelvic — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:27:11 +0000

Here is a summary of the results of a study about the online dating practices of urban dwellers. This was the culmination for interviewing just under 100 men and women about how they date online and what they look for in potential dates and partners. Online dating may not help you find love, but it may be a welcome distraction from all those eHarmony.com and Match.com commercials that try to convince you about how lonely you are during the late winter/early spring blahs.

Some Dating insights gained:

1) In conventional dating, it is frowned upon when people have more than one person on the string at any one time. With online dating, it is expected that people will go out with more than one person to test the waters to see if the pseudo-chemistry that they feel for the person when interacting online will actually translate to physical chemistry when they meet in person. Most people in the online dating community understand that you may interact with 10 people in real life before you feel any spark at all, and they may in fact not end up being the love of your life anyway. Maybe more technologically oriented people are more fickle, or perhaps they are just more pragmatic but they do get the fact that if you only deal with one person at a time, and it takes you a week or two before you get comfortable enough to meet them in real life. So if you have to meet 10 or 20 people to find someone that you might want to get more serious with, then it would take years if you do not actually do some multi-tasking in the dating department. In any event, play the field until you find someone that you really bond with. After all, in real life, you are probably meeting a friend of a friend, or at least have had some opportunity to watch them interact with other people at your favorite watering hole. That tends to prescreen the people that you would actually go out with before you make any sort of commitment to one-on-one dating. In actual fact, in most conventional dating scenes, you are actually doing some multi-tasking on the pre-screening front before you ever interact in the first place. Online dating sites cannot give you that same intuitive comfort before your first real interaction that you get in more conventional dating scenes, therefore, with online dating, the meet in person step tends to be more often a miss than a hit.

2) Online Dating is much more superficial – pictures and videos are everything – without them you get almost no action, or attention. And ladies need not worry, as long as you have a reasonably flattering shot of yourself having fun someplace, you will likely get responses from lots of men. For both men and women, this is a marketing exercise – the key here is not to take a crappy looking big-nosed picture of yourself staring into your web-cam’s fish eye lens – everyone already knows that you stare at your computer a lot because you are on an online dating site in the first place. There is no need to supply a picture of you in such an unflattering pose. The key is to portray an image of you as a person who has fun interacting with other people, animals, children, sports events, etc. If you are a woman, just remember that men see and assume – most do not read much, they look and evaluate visually for the most part, so keep the words to a minimum. If you are a man – pay attention to the words as best you can – look for the “must not be” things that many women pre-qualify their profiles with, and do not annoy them if you are a “must not be” person. Women are generally strong communicators; hopefully having to read “likes long walks on the beach” for the umpteenth time will not make you lose your cookies. In any event, keep the profile words short, sweet and to the point. If you are lucky, you will find a person with a really funny and offbeat sense of humor that meshes with your own sense of silliness. Be prepared to use the email and chatting facilities of the online site to get to know people better. Do not try to give your life story in the profile. Your online profile is a 30 second teaser commercial, not an in depth user manual.

3) Men without jobs have little or no traction on dating sites that are focused on long-term relationships. Women do not want to hang their hats on perceived losers. On the other hand, if you can connect with someone physically, women will often overlook the fact that you are a bicycle courier or stock shelves in a grocery store, as long as you come across as trying to better yourself. A word to the wise – do not believe what people say about their money. Smart people keep income information to themselves – those that do not are probably stretching the truth – a lot!!

4) Full figured women are actually not at the disadvantage that they often think they are. As long as you have it reasonably under control, many eligible guys are okay with a little padding around the middle. If you are not wider than you are tall, then likely you have a pretty good chance of finding someone. In any event, most women will post a profile of themselves at a younger and lighter age, and then proceed to lighten the age load a few years as well. Men are generally more honest about their ages, but may actually be more inclined to lie about their income. Men are almost always athletic or average, and almost none admit to being overweight or obese.

5) Love does not actually happen online – love can only happen after you meet. You either click, or you do not. It is the many little interactions between two people that add up to someone falling in love. If you meet someone online, they will likely want to meet in person within two to four weeks. If you take longer than that to get up the courage, you will likely miss the boat anyway. So if you are too cautious in online dating, you will most certainly fail.

6) There is still a social stigma associated with online dating. The real problem with online personals sites is that they have had a reputation in the past for being the hangouts of losers and predators. As such, people using such services are reluctant to be associated with “losers”, or that they may be careless with their safety. The fact is that over 60 million people in North America have used online dating sites in the last few years, and there are just not that many losers and predators in North America. You are likely more at risk in conventional dating as you are with online dating. People may talk about making love to someone that they met through conventional dating, but when it comes to online dating, they are strangely close-mouthed about sexual encounters with people they have met. This attitude is kind of silly because everyone knows that people who date to have sex at some point, so why try to hide it. They likely assume you are doing it anyway. In any event, if there is no sex, you really have no relationship, so when you decide to do it, just admit to it.

7) Online dating is amazing in it’s ability to connect people who would likely never have met in real life. Since everyone is there for the same reason, and since it is possible to simultaneously be interacting with several people at once, you really do have a much better chance of finding someone that you are truly compatible with for the long term.

Online dating is actually the best forum for people to meet when they are just too busy, too tied up, or just not inclined to be wandering around bar hopping or social clubs trying to meet people. If you want to find successful and interesting people, then online dating is truly the wave of the present, and the future.

No matter if the forum is online dating or bar hopping, when it comes to finding the person of your dreams, you will likely have to kiss a few frogs along the way. So just get out into that real world or Internet marshland and get on with it.

If you are interested in online dating sites, then you might want to check out these resource pages:

Discreet Dating Sites for Married People

jdelvic — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 23:52:36 +0000

Married Dating Sites

Discreet dating sites for married people are online membership sites for banded persons seeking love affairs with other married and looking people. The world is full of married women and men who are unhappy but have no desire to separate from their partners. They are however willing and eager to meet new partners to get some zing back in their lives.

Prior to the Internet revolution it was fairly difficult for married people to find a new partner but Internet discreet dating service sites makes this prospect a lot easier. The main reason for the popularity of these sites is the privacy and security that they offer to their members. Even the company names that show up on credit card statements will not identify the site that the bill is associated with.

People no longer have to waste their time for going to bars and clubs trying to find interested and interesting people. They just join the sites and log in to meet new partners while sitting in comfort in front of their computers. It is even possible with most sites to initiate a live face-to-face video chat so that you can see, talk and otherwise interact with prospective partners in a real and meaningful way, while still retaining your anonymity. People will only find out your real name when you choose to tell them.

Married couples often feel like strangers to each other in their relationship because they are excessively focused on home and work activities resulting in an unsatisfactory physical side to their relationship. One or both of them has lost the excitement in their lives and are just trying to get that back again.

On top of this, one of the partners may not be interested in sex anymore and this is often the source of the problem that leads to the extramarital affair. Sex is such a key part of a relationship, that when one of the partners is deprived of it, for whatever reason, it is easy for them to justify seeking sexual release outside of the marriage.

In many cases, a couple may be compatible in many ways, but for some reason are no longer sexually compatible. In some cases these couples will enter into an open relationship, or sometimes actually become a swinging couple. If a couple is in an open relationship, they may not want to sever the other aspects of their partnership. Even in open relationships, using a discrete married dating site is not only prudent, but also more private from the public eye.

Internet dating is now very popular. Do not worry if you are married or in a long-term relationship. It is an established fact that discreet married dating is a viable way to find other people with interests similar to yours, whether it is physical, mental or sexual in nature. Not all online dating sites target the same genres of people or types of activity, nor are all dating sites as successful in joining compatible people together. Because of this problem, there are many other sites that exist that rate and recommend dating sites. One of the better sites for doing so is linked to later in this article. Check it out to see the best of the best dating sites on the Internet today.

We now live in a connected world. Computers are now becoming an integral part of our social fabric. No matter what your reasons for looking for a new partner, you can find a site somewhere that will satisfy that need. The site recommended below has many different pages focused on different aspects of relationships, sex, and sexuality. Please feel free to try the pages linked to below:

Why MILF Dating Sites Are Getting More Popular

jdelvic — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:36:32 +0000

The Internet lets you find and interact with anyone anywhere. On top of that, the Internet is everywhere, especially in the world of online MILF dating sites. If you have a hankering for mature women, you may have experienced a lot of skeptical rejection when you approach them in public. Even for those of us in the big cities, a MILF is more likely to blow you off rather than give you the time of day.

In the online world, MILFs are searching for something specific. Imagine walking into your favorite lounge or hangout and being surrounded by a room full of attractive MILF’s, each of which are looking for an opportunity to connect with a man. Your chance of rejection is a lot lower. When you come to a MILF Dating Page on a site like www.top100datingpersonals.com, it’s like going to your favorite bar and being surrounded by MILFs who will not be just eye candy. Why will you have so much more success in this venue?The answer lies in two major areas. First each of these major dating sites on this page specializes in MILF Dating. Secondly, many MILFs in the real world are simply unwilling to date. This is not the case in a site specializing in MILF Dating. All the women on these sites are interested in dating. This simplifies your search effort by about an order of magnitude, because now you only have to convince one of them to pick you as a person to date. Just turn on your charms and the ladies are yours.

MILF Dating has never been this easy before. You just have to love the Internet..If you are a bit on the shy side, then an Internet based MILF dating site is just what you need to break the ice. Since you know already why they’re on the site, you can interact with them without the fear of rejection or public embarrassment. On most sites, they do not really know who you are unless you decide to tell them. Anonymity is a hallmark of a good MILF dating site, so you can be sure that they will protect your privacy.

If you are looking for other Online Dating niches, then these sites are also available:

Men Spend More on Their Mistresses

jdelvic — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:51:34 +0000

HO, HO, HO’s are Merry at Christmas!

AshleyMadison.com recently did a survey of their male members and published an interesting statistic.

If you want to get an expensive present for Christmas, you are better off being a mistress than a wife. The average Lothario will spend a mere $60.00 on his wife for Christmas. That same guy will spend and average of $125.00 (each) for their mistress(es).

So what does this mean to the average women on the street (or at home, or otherwise)?

Well actually, there are a few take-a-ways on this one:

Housewives are behind the eight ball when it comes to gift value.
Mistresses are likely to get doubly higher priced gifts.
If you are single and dating – dating a married man will likely be to your financial advantage (consider dating several of them if money is a motivator).
If you are a beleaguered housewife, it may be to your financial advantage to have a few affairs on the side.
It is financially better to be a HO than a housewife.

See more at AshleyMadison.com

And of course if you are interested in a little something on the side, then here are some of your best places to look:
Married Dating
Swinger Dating
Adult Dating
Online Dating

Tips For Men to Look Younger

jdelvic — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 20:30:42 +0000

Tips For Men To Look Younger – Excess Hair Removal

Many men obsess about looking older, but most of them miss the obvious.
The two things most often thought to make you look older are:

Baldness
White Hair

Baldness has not been considered to be associated with aging for decades. Telly Savalas made full baldness chic over forty years ago. However, to ensure that partial baldness is not a factor, you must shave all of your hair off your head. Nothing makes you look older than a comb-over, or a rug. Just shave your head and get over it. A bare head will take years off your apparent age.

White hair is not always a factor in looking older. There are so many prematurely gray guys around that most people look right through the white hair. There is one exception. If you have white hair in your eyebrows, you will look older. So pluck them out when there are just a few, otherwise, dye your eyebrows. Do not worry as much about your head since it is not nearly as important a factor in looking young.

If you feel a need to dye your hair, then consider getting it partially colored. Nothing looks worse than an older man with absolutely no grey hair. Better to have some gray strands in a mostly dark head of hair. You can achieve maturity without looking old.

So what is it that makes you look old?

Wrinkly skin – wrinkly skin is a definite sign of aging. Look at Clint Eastwood! He is still sexy, but he looks old. To combat wrinkly skin, use skin creams. There are many good brands of skin cream out now that target men. When in the sun, use an SPF 30 or higher sunscreen. Nothing ages your skin faster than the sun’s UV rays. It does this by damaging the capillaries in your skin, and by damaging the epidermal layers of the skin that produce the smoothing fatty layer that keeps skin smooth and keeps us looking young. Other than the sun, the most likely source of skin wrinkling is smoking. Smoking causes “hardening of the arteries” which is a build up of plaques in the blood vessels and skin capillaries. The skin damage caused by smoking is similar to that caused by excessive sun exposure. Most of this onset of smoking wrinkles does not start to show up until you are in your 40’s, but the damage has been done in the preceding two decades. Stop smoking as early as you are aware of this issue, the health risks and mid-life wrinkles caused by smoking do not out-weight whatever joy it gives you in the present.
Bushy Eyebrows – keep them trimmed back with cuticle scissors. Comb them straight up and them trim them along the natural eyebrow contour.
Ear hair – this is the worst – pluck those nasty ear hairs out, or else use a laser hair treatment to remove them permanently. Nothing makes a man look older than ear mustaches or long hair tufts growing out of the edges of the ears. Ear and nose trimmers are not nearly as effective as plucking.
Nose hair – some people have nose hair long enough to braid it (Saturday Night Live had a sketch on this in 1985 – gross – but funny). Pluck that icky hair out!
Long chest hair – just trim it to keep it under one half inch or so. You do not have to shave it off, just keep it from becoming unruly.

This is all simple stuff. Once you are on top of it, 10 minutes a day will take about 10 years off of your calendar age.

For more information to go:

Health and Dating Advice

Other Dating Links:
Online Dating
BBW Dating
Mature Dating

Improving Your Sex Appeal

jdelvic — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:58:58 +0000

One of the most introspective things that someone active in the dating scene has to do is to take inventory of their wants and assets.
It sounds simple, but it is a lot harder than it seems.
I once read the book by Tony Robins called “Awaken the Giant Within” — a typical rah-rah self help book.

I do not mean to denigrate the book, because it is really quite good, and I enjoyed reading it.

At this point in my life I was all about self improvement and I read the book has lots of cool suggestions on how to take control of your life so you can achieve your dreams.
Being the dutiful person that I am, I tried to do all the exercises in the book, and when it came time to try to itemize my wants and needs (he calls them goals) I found the exercise very hard.
It went something like this:

I want to be a millionaire
I want to be insanely happy
hmmmmmmm?????

I mean, after the first two, what else was there in life?
Also – we would all want to be a millionaire – unless of course you are already a billionaire. The problem is that these lofty aims are just not something that you can nibble away at achieving in any practical sense.

I am sort of past that introspective phase of my life — at least for now — and am reasonably happy and comfortable with who and what I am.

That being said, I do have some ideas to pass on that I had to get past myself so that I could get through the exercises in Tony Robin’s book.

In a nutshell, the key insight that I discovered was that if you are trying to do a wants and needs analysis of yourself, you have to start from the bottom up. For instance:

House and Home Goals
Family Goals
Job and Career Goals
Love and Relationship Goals
Health Goals

To deal with each of the above major goals, you must subdivide each of these goals into smaller goals that are easier to identify and therefore easier to achieve.

Lets Look at Health Goals that I finally came up with:

I want my body mass index to be in the median range for my height (notice I did not qualify this with ‘body type’ because if you would traditionally be classified as an endomorph it is just an excuse Doctors give you to be fatter than you should be)
I want to be able to get through a normal day and not be exhausted at the end of it. (notice that this goal is pegged to something easy for you to assess)
I do not want to constantly starve myself ( this is a bit of a rationalization that you may be willing to give on some of your other goals if you do not want to be always worried about every item of food that you eat – in other words, you want to be able to go to a restaurant once in a while and enjoy what is put in front of you without being obsessive about it)
I still want to be able to enjoy an occasional drink with my friends and not feel guilty about it. (well duhh – this is just a personal enjoyment thing – if you are not a drinker, then sub in your favorite vice here)
I want to maintain a healthier than average life style so I will live longer and be able to remain active in my old age. (again, this is a no-brainer, but if you do not specify this need, then it is difficult to make some of the hard choices necessary to pull it off)
I want to look sexy all my life. (this is kind of relative, but most people would like to look appealing to other people – think of it as a vanity issue – from a practical sense, this is a feel good issue, and if you feel good about yourself, it actually helps you achieve other success goals in many other areas)
And now we are really down to the fine points of this essay.

How Exactly Do I Improve

And Retain My Sex Appeal

Throughout My Life>
1. Personal Hygiene – We all try to be clean, and most believe that they are, but fully 60% of people exude some sort of unpleasant body odor when at close intimate range. You become inured to your own body odor and you tend to block it out. You ensure at all times that you are scrupulously clean, and that means washing several times a day, including your private parts. Do not just use deodorants, use antiperspirants, and make sure that you refresh them if you have been doing anything strenuous. Women almost always pass the hygiene test, but most men do not.
2. Appropriate Apparel – People with sex appeal can likely wear rags and look sexy, but they are unlikely to wear rags to a venue where it would not be acceptable. Dressing for the occasion is important to maintain your sexuality. This is most important for women, especially in middle age where you have to be able to know the distinction between sexy and trashy. Dressing with conservative elegance rather than being explicitly obvious more often achieves refined sexuality. For men it is a bit easier. Normally a suit and tie will suffice for most business ordinary formal situations. Do not make the mistake of dressing too casually for a more formal engagement. Clothes that are considered macho or sexy in a casual environment will make you look like a complete bumpkin in a more formal setting. Just take the time to get it at lease close to right and you should be okay.
3. Manners – Being polite in all situations is one of the most important aspects of long lasting sexual charm. If you are young and hot, other young people will confuse your hot body with sex appeal. They are not mature enough to overlook your rudeness because you are hot. By the time you are in your thirties, you start to recognize rude people a lot faster. A hot body will always attract first looks, but it is good manners and charm that will hold their interest over long periods of time. The other aspect of manners is the “Miss Manners” type of behavior. Proper eating habits are number one. Do not expect to get invited to executive level dinner parties if you shovel food into your mouth like a stable hand shoveling horse droppings.
4. Poise – When you see someone for the first time, nothing demeans you more than bad posture. Slouching is one of the most common issues. Young people do it because they are trying to look tough, independent and non-establishment. Once you are out on your own, this behavior is just totally unacceptable. Slouching is a way of screaming out to the world that you are a person of no consequence. Sometimes people slouch without intending to. How does this happen? You will note in women that short women almost always have great posture, while tall women seldom have good posture. This is because short women make it a habit to hold them erect because they are trying to appear taller. Tall women perceive that they have the opposite problem and try to shrink their height down to normal, which will never happen. As such they go through life looking dowdy and end up with scoliosis and dowager hump. Tall women have a tremendous sexuality advantage. They are inherently statuesque and stand out from the crowd already. Nothing draws men’s (and women’s) eyes as much as a tall statuesque woman walking into a room. Nothing is as ignored as much as tall women who slouch. One thing that tall women can never get away with is being cute. Pulling a Hillary Duff move will is not something that a tall woman can pull off. Men are a different matter. You will often see quite muscular men who have rounded shoulders walking with their heads forward somewhat reminiscent of an ape. With well-developed men, this tends to happen because they over develop muscles in their chest top of their shoulders, and do nothing to improve their upper back muscles to compensate. As such, their shoulders are pulled forward, and they appear to slouch. Apes have similar problems because climbing trees tends to only develop chest and shoulder muscles. Tall men, similar to tall women, tend to slouch. It is not as pronounced because being a tall man is somehow more acceptable in society as being a tall woman. Being tall does have it’s advantages, because statistics show that taller people tend to get more promotions and tend to earn more money. They have a natural dominant presence, and as such they tend to get their points across more easily in meetings and other social situations. You can see this most in business where executives are often taller than average, and this is one reason why women have trouble breaking the glass ceiling. Women executives are seldom short.
5. Presence – Presence can best be described as that intangible something that makes people stand up and take notice when you walk into a room. It can best be described as an aura of confidence and certainty. People with presence have a dominant personality without being overbearing. People with presence are leaders, not managers (you manage things – you lead people). Poise helps to establish presence, so poise is an important thing for you to cultivate.
6. Physical Fitness – Physical fitness is important for three reasons. The first benefit of physical fitness is stature and poise, the second benefit is stamina, and the third benefit is a longer active life. Physical fitness is achieved mainly by taking care of your body. So where most people understand, but ignore, the benefits of exercise, many people make silly lifestyle choices that force them to age prematurely and under-perform in their middle age when significant promotions and advancement are most likely to be achieved. Smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and drugs are the obvious ones that everyone understands, but eating the wrong foods will likely age your body as well. The wrong food will damage your bodies cardiovascular and digestive systems, and it will likely add weight which will cause degenerative bone, joint and muscle issues. In any event, keeping care of your body when younger will allow you to enjoy an incredibly full sexual and healthy active lifestyle in your 60s and beyond.
7. Listening Skills – Actively listen to and participate in conversations. If you find that you are forgetful of what people say, there are actually courses that you can take to improve your listening skills. People love to be around people who listen well.
8. Interest in Others – Someone who is genuinely interested in other people is easy to talk to, and a joy to have around. When people like having you around, your appeal increases. Make sure that your interest is not a put-on. People hate phonies, and it will backfire. Women tend to be very good on this point. Some women come across as phonies, and as such, their appeal is diminished, no matter how beautiful they may be. Most men suck at this aspect of sexuality, because most men shy away from interpersonal topics. For some reason, the more handsome a man is, the more he will be condemned as a narcissist if he is weak in this area. This is one area where looks can work against you.
9. Conversational Skills – Being educated enough to discuss multiple topics of conversation will ensure that you are never left out of group discussions. You should seldom dominate a conversation, but you must always be seen as a contributor. That will result in people liking to be around you and will ensure that you get invited to events where you can get to meet and know many people. Some of these people will prove to be important to your life and career, so it is important for them to have a positive impression of you.
As you can see, life long sex appeal is not about looks alone. It is about many things that give you that ‘je ne sais quoi’ that some people just seem to have, but that everyone wants. The good thing is that all of those traits can be learned if you just apply yourself to those goals.

For some extra reading, try the links below:
Dating and Health Advice
Healthy Eating Barriers
The TV Dinner Diet

Online Dating Sites
Top 100 Dating Sites
Top 10 Dating Sites

Are Online Dating Sites Superficial?

jdelvic — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:23:23 +0000

Please look at the video in this news article:
economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/online-dating-sites-make-people-seem-more-superficial

And now my comments:

This person is on a rant about the superficiality of dating sites, and claims that they should be better, and implies that they are not providing a useful service.

I really think the speaker has the issues all wrong! He actually thinks that the perfect dating site will be able to match people so wonderfully that they will just be able to get married on the first date like an arranged marriage or something.

Where is the fun in that?

Dating is an enjoyable activity in and of itself. Dating is about the journey, not the end. The people who do not have fun on dating sites are the ones who are too focused on dating as a means to an end (perhaps the holy grail of ‘marriage”).

For many millennia, people have often first met by being attracted to the superficial characteristics first. It is only after meeting and interacting with the person that you find out what they are like and if you really have anything in common. As people mature, they tend to not focus so much on the superficial and give regular people a chance by talking to them. The operative word here is “maturity”.

Online dating sites have neither helped this or changed this, other than the fact that you can now see lots more superficial characteristics that you are interested in and at least know that they are looking for someone too.

If you are a plainer person and are having no luck, then you need to dazzle people in settings where they are a captive audience, such as work, church, theater groups, clubs of any sort.

If you are younger, and not physically attractive to some extent, then likely you will have about as much luck on a dating site as you do in a bar. If you are successful in fairly anonymous casual social settings like bars, then you will likely be successful on a dating site. If you are not successful interacting and making friends in bars and other casual social settings, then you will not be successful in dating.

But before many of you people give up hope, just remember that over 70% of women think that their looks are below average, which of course is statistically impossible, but that is what they perceive. If you are a woman and think you are below average in the looks department, then you may do a lot better than you would expect in attracting attention on a dating site. It may not be the attention that you want, and it may not be from people you would like to have a long term relationship with, but you will at least get attention and hopefully learn that you are better looking than your self image would indicate.

Also appreciate that as people mature, men and women both, they are less concerned about the superficial and more concerned about interpersonal compatibility. So on dating sites, you will find that people who are in their 20′s will not be so satisfied. The very attractive ones get excessive attention and the plainer people get none at all.

As people mature into their 30′s they are less concerned with superficial good looks, although it is still quite dominant. Plainer people get a lot more action though and start to feel better about themselves.

People in their 40′s are finally getting the fact that looks are nice, but not everything and they will contact average looking people recognizing that they often have more depth than hot looking women and men are allowed by society to achieve. (In other words, if society lets you skate by on looks alone, that is all you likely have, and therefore when you get older and start to lose your looks you have nothing). Women are starting to be ‘over the hill’ in their 40′s but for some reason, men are just peaking in that decade of their lives. The best thing here is that neither men or women are into the childish relationship games that are played out by younger people.

Once people get into their 50′s and older, looks is hardly important at all, because by then people realize that their partner must be a best friend first, so they look for people they are personally compatible with over superficial looks. At this point, intelligent conversation, good health and a healthy lifestyle starts to count for a lot more than just another pretty/handsome face.

Click here to find an online dating site that best meets your needs.

Jim Delvic

Dating Site Compatibility Matching Algorithms – Which is Best?

jdelvic — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:33:23 +0000

An algorithm is a series of repeatable steps that leads to a specific result.
A dating site ‘compatibility matching’ algorithm is the list of questions, responses, and scoring criteria that are used to show that two people are compatible.

There has been some buzz around dating blogs over the last few months about dating site compatibility matching algorithms. There have been a fair number of claims made by some major sites about the validity of their matching systems and the success in terms of marriages, etc. Eharmony.com, Match.com and to some extent PlentyofFish.com have been weighing in on this matter both in the press at times, and in their respective blogs at others (sorry people – just too many links to include here). Most of the messages are just claims and counter claims which all just amount to a belabored dissing of each other. At times I just smile at the antics. Sometimes I think that these companies take themselves too seriously. But then of course, with marketers being the ilk that they are, how can they not posture in this manner? After all, it was marketing genius that created the push-up bra, which was the first successful attempt by mankind of creating mountains out of mole hills and resulted in one of many marketing squabbles over female support systems (now of course that was followed on by plastic mountains offered up by plastic surgeons, but lets not be tacky by going there). In the final analysis, marketing is often more about the buzz than the substance, so the squabbling over the algorithms is likely only marketing hype.

Since by now you can already see that I have a rather skeptical viewpoint to all of these mutterings you may ask “So what is your problem”?

I have been on the periphery of the dating industry for a while now, and have come to a few closely held conclusions that I am going to risk sharing with you.

Many dating sites on the Internet have algorithms that were cobbled together by a team of programmers in some back office by thinking about what might be important criteria to match people by. As a group, these people likely have a bit of a geeky outlook on life, but deep inside, these techies are real people. Much of the criteria that they used were either important to members of the team, or else they were perceived as being important to other people who were friends of members of the team. Behaviors mentioned were obvious ones — smoking or not, drinking or not, religious or not, etc. If you want to put a marketing spin on it — they developed some sort of matching algorithm by being their own mini focus-group. Being programmers, they tended to stick to factual, measurable attributes each of which are easily answered by their audience. As such, you will see the ability to look for all sorts of interesting physical attributes like hair color and eye color, because programs can be written and tested to match physical attributes in a very straight-forward and provable manner. Since most programmers shy away from social sciences in school, the softer preference and behavioral questions tend to be avoided.

Many other dating sites sprang from more socio academic backgrounds and have algorithms derived from standard psychological personality and preference tests. Of course these sites will invariably tell you all about the validation they did on their algorithms with double-blind testing, etc. They will then point to the fact that the choices they offer are more based on personality traits, behaviors, and preferences rather than mere physical attributes. In general, the questions are focused on a continuum of what are to most people gray answers to somewhat gray questions. (Do you prefer your partner to smoke in bed after they rock your soul with the best sex you have had in your entire life or do you prefer your partner to help do the laundry?)

In the aforementioned articles and blogs the various sites stress that each of them is much better than the others. It would seem that the criteria that they believe is the most important to the continued success of their sites is to brag about the ‘number of marriages’ that happened to members who met on their respective sites.

May I suggest that in today’s society, ‘marriage as a success criteria’ for dating site performance is about as appropriate as suggesting that a person with the most wall trophies is the best hunter.

The real thing that a dating site is selling is HOPE. It is the hope of the members that they will find a relationship – any relationship. People are looking first and foremost for companionship. If that relationship ends up in a marriage it is more likely that the participants were able to:
1) Want something more than just a casual relationship.
2) Fall in Love
3) Be willing to work very hard at pleasing each other over a protracted time period.
4) Enter into matrimony if, and only if, they want to.

No dating site can guarantee that you will love someone who they match you up with. Often relationships do not succeed for none of the many criteria that the dating sites use to match people in the first place ( I can’t stand your domineering mother!). How can the much vaunted matching criteria be the ultimate foundation of lasting harmony if it cannot guarantee love, or if a relationship can break up for other reasons?

On top of this, there are dating sites where the resulting successful relationships cannot necessarily use marriage as a success factor. What about AshleyMadison.com? It is a site that is totally focused on people hooking up for extra marital affairs. If they rated success based on marriage, they would have a bunch of bigamists for members. What about Manplay.com — it is a gay dating site, or PinkCupid.com — which caters to lesbians. Most jurisdictions in North America do not allow same-sex marriages. Does that mean that their matching algorithms are worthless because the match will be unlikely to end up in a marriage? I think not!

In conjunction with the above, there is a prevalence for many people to lie on dating sites. Women are often younger and lighter than in real life. Men have more hair, are more attentive, more athletic and taller. People are intelligent beings, and manipulate the systems around them all the time. Given this propensity of humans to manipulate the input data, one has to wonder if the algorithms are even worth writing in the first place. After all, no matter how good the calculations perform under lab conditions, if you put in garbage 50% of the time, you will get garbage out 50% of the time. And since you as a person on the dating site, or the dating site itself, has no idea exactly who is lying about what, you have no idea if the resulting ideal match even has the characteristics that the computer system has been told that they have. After all, isn’t every person on a dating site just putting the best marketing spin on their attributes?

Do you now begin to understand my skepticism about the importance of the Dating Site matching algorithm marketing hoopla?

So what are you left with?
Looks like just good old fashion inter-personal chemistry and gut-feel.

This is pretty much the same time-tested, hit-or-miss mechanism that the human race has used for a long, long time. Much, much longer than the Internet has existed.

So why use a dating site at all?

It is for convenience and time efficiency mostly. This is especially true for people the second time around. Single parents and mature career oriented people do not have the time to prowl bars and other social mingling venues looking for lasting love.

When you are on a dating site, at least you know that everyone there is looking for a date.
They may not be looking for the same thing you are, but that is why all dating sites create and encourage the use of their communication tools. Communication is everything! It is only through communication and the consistency of that communication that you can determine if someone is believable and if there will be a chance for a relationship. And it is only through meeting someone in person will you be able to determine if there is any chemistry between you. You can respect a person for their intelligence, and even be a close friend, but it is some indefinable trick of chemistry between two people who ultimately leads to love.

In the final analysis, just go for it.

One site is likely almost as good as another, and all have been somewhat successful for themselves and their members in spite of their compatibility matching algorithms.