The wrong but interesting side of me won out after passing the bar and a social experiment was born. How much does occupation factor into considerations when people are looking at online dating sites? Aside from the tested results, hopefully I’d meet someone.
Two separate online dating profiles were created, one on yahoo which had a picture, write up, all the bells and whistles. I even had one of my married female friends look over and improve the write up to make it more appealing. As far as occupation Education/Academic Research was selected in accordance with a part time adjunct professor spot I had at the time. A separate account was created on match.com. This account had bare minimum information, name, age, location, and attorney as occupation. It didn’t have a picture for quite some time.
Initially, the inquiries were quite similar, but it turned out that one of the pictures on the yahoo account had a caption about graduating law school. Once that was removed, the results changed significantly. On yahoo, there’s 1-2 contacts initiated from others a month. On match, it’s on the order of 4-5 a week.
A couple of interesting tid-bits: When the picture and caption regarding law school on yahoo was removed the scam artists from Nigeria, and Russian girls stopped contacting me on yahoo. When the account was brought closer to the yahoo status of complete, no appreciable change in the number of contacts was generated on the match account.
This experiment turned out to be a sad commentary on the state of society….
