[nostrademons]

You're familiar with the Stable Marriage Algorithm, right? The math doesn't bear you out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem

It's been proven that the algorithm is optimal for the initiators of proposals, i.e. men in contemporary Western culture, although women can hack this by asking guys out themselves.

The confusion is because you've artificially restricted the universe to a subset of its true size. Women's pool of mates to select from isn't 20 times larger than men, because men have already done a round of selection in deciding who to message. You don't actually message every single girl you see on OKCupid, do you? If you're fat or ugly as a woman, you're basically screwed (or rather, not screwed) in the mating game, because you become invisible to most men.

That's why I tell girls on the OKCupid Reddit that messaging guys can only help them. Once in a blue moon (as in once every month or two), I get an unsolicited message on OKC. A majority of the time, I don't reply. The thing is, I would never have messaged these girls to begin with, while occasionally I'll take a chance on a first date if their personality seems interesting, so they've only helped themselves.

It's also worth remembering that there are subsequent rounds of selection too. If women receive (on average) 20x more messages than men, it must mean that men send (on average) 20x more messages than women, since each message has exactly one sender and recipient. They're only going to end up with one girlfriend. So if those girls respond to their favorite guys, many of them will be culled out after the first date, third date, whenever. I've been on I think 16 first dates off OKCupid. I asked only about 3 of them out for a second date. Some (several?) of the remaining 13 probably were not interested in me anyway, but that's still a sizeable number of girls who did not get who they want.

[dalore]

Problem is that the stable marriage problem assumes that the number of women and men are the same which is clearly not the case for online dating. So yes the women's pool is larger by the fact there are more men on the site. Some of your assumptions are faulty. Just because a woman receives 20x more messages then men, doesn't mean men are sending 20x more messages. Say there are 5x more men on the site to begin with, then they are only sending 4x more messages.

I agree with your theory that women messaging men doesn't hurt but helps their chances.

[yummyfajitas]

You are misinterpreting the stable marriage problem. Among other things, the stable marriage algorithm guarantees that at each discrete time instant, each man and each woman is engaged to someone.

Reality doesn't have this constraint.

[roel_v]

No, but rounding gender distribution off to 50/50 and assuming that polygamists are a rounding error, there are an equal amount of male and female singles. Or did I miss your point?

[yummyfajitas]

You did.

In a real life discrete time instant (e.g., an evening at the bar), most women will choose to go home alone rather than accept a second best partner. In the stable marriage algorithm, not a single woman will.

I.e., the stable marriage algorithm is a poor model for reality.

[roel_v]

But the case at hand wasn't talking about a time span that short, either. When you look at it in the long run, I'd say that both men and women have an equal likelihood of selecting a mate who is not the optimum for all qualities they look for. (i.e., to use less Greenspan-eque language, that I think that both men and woman will in the end "settle" for someone if they can't find someone who they'd consider "perfect" rather than remain alone).

However, come to think of it, I guess a prerequisite would be that there are an equal amount of men and women in the pool; which I think is so, I seem to remember from one of the okcupid analysis posts that the majority of profiles are male. Then again, on the whole, there are roughly the same amount of both, so I'm not so sure about your statement that "the stable marriage algorithm is a poor model for reality"; maybe for dating sites, but on the whole?

[klipt]

> I seem to remember from one of the okcupid analysis posts that the majority of profiles are male.

This is a significant factor. If you run a stable marriage algorithm with 400 men and 200 women:

Men less attractive than the median will remain ummatched.

A 50th percentile man will be matched to a 0th percentile woman.

A 60th percentile man will be matched to a 20th percentile woman.

A 70th percentile man will be matched to a 40th percentile woman.

An 80th percentile man will be matched to a 60th percentile woman.

A 90th percentile man will be matched to an 80th percentile woman.

In other words, all men below the 100th percentile will end up dating way below their "league".

[jsnk]

Stable marriage problem doesn't say anything about how receiving more message is actually a bad thing and hurts the chance. Or you'd have to show me how receiving 20 messages is same as receiving 1 message.

[jboggan]

I strongly disagree. The men that I know that successfully use OKCupid do not have just one girlfriend.