Laws of Online Attraction Finally Revealed: 20% of People Less Honest Online than Offline

As a blogger you never know what subject this or that company decides to study to get some coverage from media people - and often the topics are very intriguing to make sure they will catch attention. Today my attention has been grabbed by results of a study promising to reveal the laws of online attraction.

The study promises to finally explain people what they should not do on online dating sites if they are serious about finding a partner for their real lives. The study was carried out by a UK-only dating site singles365 (the link won’t open unless you are in the UK yourself) and included interrogation of over 2 thousand singles in the country to see what they think about proper online dating behavior and the factors that will most probably turn them off in potential partners.

The online attraction laws seem to be very simple here - much simpler than when it comes to real-life dating. Basically men hoping to find their next love online should avoid demonstrating pictures with their ex girlfriends or wives, sexually explicit pictures and self penned poetry. I have not been into dating (online or offline) for quite a while now myself but I don’t think anyone in their right minds should employ the first two steps if they actually want to find someone to replace that ex. As for poetry, I honestly can’t see what’s wrong with it - after all, if it is sincere, I think you can live with some poor poetry.

Rules for women as viewed by men are somewhat different: while they should also avoid pictures of their exes, family pictures and those shots where they are younger than currently. So you see that the first thing a man still looks at when browsing a profile of a woman on a dating site is still a picture - so for women everything is probably quite easy if they manage to choose just the right photos.

But while the laws of online attraction revealed in the study are important, the most shocking fact from the study to me was actually about the level of honesty online. Here we have almost no real gender-based distinctions as both men and women tend not to be 100% honest online: in fact, 20% of both groups admitted that they are less honest online than they are in real lives. And even those people that are as honest online as they are offline (probably because they simply lie offline same as they do online) are rather suspicious as 40% of respondents expect their potential partners to be less honest online compared to a real-life meeting.

I wonder if this disturbing level of honesty online is only valid for dating sites where they naturally want to look better to attract attention of just the right partner browsing thousands of profiles. My guess is that no: people want to seem to be better than they are in reality and internet grants lots of opportunities for us to hide something behind our laptops - be it our looks in the morning without makeup or our lack of knowledge in a subject we love bragging about in discussion forums.

But still there are tons of advantages in online dating as factors like noisy eating and swearing simply don’t come into play online at all (and they are among the most serious aggravations in real-life dating). So feel free to pick your nose when browsing the next dating site looking for the perfect partner - just remember not to do that during a real date as this will be considered a crime already.

Image by decadentyouphotography used under Creative Commons.