Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets

Romantic courtship is often described as taking place in a dating market where men and women compete for mates, but the detailed structure and dynamics of dating markets have historically been difficult to quantify for lack of suitable data. In recent years, however, the advent and vigorous growth of the online dating industry has provided a rich new source of information on mate pursuit. We present an empirical analysis of heterosexual dating markets in four large U.S. cities using data from a popular, free online dating service. We show that competition for mates creates a pronounced hierarchy of desirability that correlates strongly with user demographics and is remarkably consistent across cities. We find that both men and women pursue partners who are on average about 25% more desirable than themselves by our measures and that they use different messaging strategies with partners of different desirability. We also find that the probability of receiving a response to an advance drops markedly with increasing difference in desirability between the pursuer and the pursued. Strategic behaviors can improve one’s chances of attracting a more desirable mate, although the effects are modest.

Here, we report results from a quantitative study of aspirational mate pursuit in adult heterosexual romantic relationship markets in the United States, using large-scale messaging data from a popular online dating site (see the “Data” section). We provide a crisp, operational definition of desirability that allows us to quantify the dating hierarchy and measure, for instance, how far up that hierarchy men and women can reach for partners and how reach is associated with the likelihood of getting a response. We also explore the ways in which people tailor their messaging strategies and message content based on the desirability of potential partners, and how desirability and dating strategy vary across demographic groups.

As data from online dating websites have become available, a number of studies have explored the ways in which mate choice observed online can inform the debate about matching versus competition. These studies typically focus on how specific attributes of individuals shape their browsing and messaging behavior. The results indicate that, with respect to attributes such as physical attractiveness and income, people tend to pursue the most attractive partners ( 11 , 13 , 14 ), while for other attributes, such as race/ethnicity or education, the overwhelming tendency is to seek out someone similar ( 15 , 16 ). Thus, people compete on some attributes and match on others. While these studies provide valuable insights about matching and competition on an attribute-by-attribute basis, they do not capture the overall dating hierarchy that reflects total demand for each person in the market.

However, while the two hypotheses may produce similar outcomes, they carry very different implications about the processes by which people identify and attract partners. If there is consensus about who is desirable, then it creates a hierarchy of desirability ( 11 – 13 ) such that individuals can, at least in principle, be ranked from least to most desirable, and their ranking will predict how and to what extent they are pursued by others. Historically, however, these hierarchies have been difficult to quantify. Since they reflect which partners people pursue, and not just who people end up with, one would need a way to observe unrequited overtures and requited ones to determine who people find desirable. Online dating provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to observe both requited and unrequited overtures at the scale of entire populations.

It is a common observation that marriage or dating partners strongly resemble one another in terms of age, education, physical attractiveness, attitudes, and a host of other characteristics ( 1 ). One possible explanation for this is the matching hypothesis, which suggests that men and women pursue partners who resemble themselves. This in turn implies that people differ in their opinions about what constitutes a desirable partner or at least about who is worth pursuing. At the other extreme, and more in line with biological studies of mate selection ( 2 – 4 ), lies the competition hypothesis, which assumes that there is consensus about what constitutes a desirable partner and that mate seekers, regardless of their own qualifications, pursue those partners who are universally recognized as most desirable ( 5 – 8 ). Paradoxically, this can also produce couples who resemble one another in terms of desirability, as the most desirable partners pair off with one another, followed by the next most desirable, and so on. To the extent that desirability correlates with individual attributes, the matching and competition hypotheses can, as a result, produce similar equilibrium patterns of mixing ( 5 , 9 , 10 ).

To study individual desirability, we focus on messages between users of the website in four cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle. At the simplest level, one can quantify desirability by the number of messages a user receives and specifically the number of initial messages, since it is the first contact between a pair of individuals that most reliably indicates who finds whom attractive. Figure 1 shows the distribution of this quantity separately for men and women in each of the cities. The distribution is roughly consistent across cities, and although women receive more messages than men overall, the distributions for both display a classic “long-tailed” form—most people receive a handful of messages at most, but a small fraction of the population receive far more. The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1504 messages during the period of observation, equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month.

Fig. 1 Histograms of the number of first messages received by men and women in each of our four cities.

However, desirability is not only about how many people contact you but also about who those people are. If you are contacted by people who are themselves desirable, then you are presumptively more desirable yourself. A standard measure of this reflected desirability is PageRank (17). Here, we calculate PageRank scores for the populations within each of our four cities (see the “Network analysis” section) and then rank men and women separately from least to most desirable. A scaled rank of 1 denotes the most desirable man or woman in a city by our measure, and 0 denotes the least desirable. It is important to emphasize that, while we use PageRank as an operational measure of desirability, we do not assume that users of the website themselves use PageRank, or anything like it, to identify attractive mates. In reality, a person might choose to message another based on an attractive profile picture, an interesting description, a good demographic match, an impressive income, or any of many other qualities. PageRank scores simply give us, a posteriori, a glimpse of who is desirable on aggregate, by identifying those people who receive the largest number of messages from desirable others.

Once we have our desirability scores, we can use them to identify characteristics of desirable users by comparing scores against various user attributes. As shown in Fig. 2, for instance, average desirability varies with age for both men and women, although it varies more strongly for women, and the effects run in opposite directions: Older women are less desirable, while older men are more so (18, 19). For women, this pattern holds over the full range of ages on the site: The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines. In keeping with previous work, there is also a clear and consistent dependence on ethnicity (15, 20), with Asian women and white men being the most desirable potential mates by our measures across all four cities. The final panels in the figure show how desirability varies with educational level. Desirability is associated with education most strongly for men, for whom more education is always more desirable. For women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable (13); postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women. These measurements control for age, so the latter observation is not a result of women with postgraduate degrees being older (table S2).

Fig. 2 Desirability, quantified using the measures defined here, as a function of demographic variables of the user population. (Left) Desirability as a function of age for women and men. (Middle) Desirability by ethnicity. (Right) Desirability by highest educational level completed. Error bars are ±1 SE.

Men and women both reach up the desirability ladder We now turn to the central results of our study. First, we use our desirability scores to explore whether people engage in aspirational mate pursuit (that is, messaging potential partners who are more desirable than they are) and how the probability of receiving a reply varies with the difference in desirability between senders and receivers. In Fig. 3, we show statistics for messages sent and replies received as a function of “desirability gap,” the difference in desirability ranking between the senders and receivers of messages. If the least desirable man in a city were to send a message to the most desirable woman, then the desirability gap would be +1; if the most desirable man sent a message to the least desirable woman, then the gap would be −1. Fig. 3 (Top) Upper curves show probability density for women and men of the median desirability gap, the difference in desirability rank of receiver and sender of an initial contact. Both women and men tend to contact others who are ranked somewhat—but not excessively—higher than themselves. The lower curves show the probability of receiving a reply to an initial message given the desirability gap between sender and receiver. Women have higher overall probability of receiving replies, but both women and men have substantially lower probability of replies from more desirable partners. (Bottom) Lower curves show the average number of people contacted by individuals as a function of their average desirability gap. Upper curves show the interquartile range (IQR) of desirability of the people contacted, controlling for number of people contacted. Neither set of curves extends all the way to the left of the figure, because there is insufficient data to make reliable estimates in this regime. The upper curves in the top panels of Fig. 3 show the distribution of desirability gaps in our four cities. For each individual, we compute the median desirability gap over all initial messages they send and then plot the probability density of these numbers for men and women separately. The most common (modal) behavior for both men and women is to contact members of the opposite sex who on average have roughly the same ranking as themselves, suggesting that people are relatively good judges of their own place in the desirability hierarchy. The distributions about this modal value, however, are noticeably skewed to the right, meaning that a majority of both sexes tend to contact partners who are more desirable than themselves on average—and hardly any users contact partners who are significantly less desirable. The curves are remarkably consistent across all four cities, with men and women on average sending messages to potential partners who are 26 and 23% further up the rankings than themselves, respectively. A tendency for messages to go to more desirable people is to some extent implicit in the PageRank measure, which often (although not always) rates people who receive a lot of messages as desirable; however, the details of the distribution, including modal value, skewness, consistency across cities, and difference between women and men, are by no means inevitable and contain real information about partner choice and attraction. The lower set of curves in the top panels shows the probability of receiving a reply to an initial message. The curves are higher for messages sent by women than for those sent by men—women are more likely than men to receive replies—but among both women and men, the probability of a reply is a decreasing function of desirability gap, more desirable partners replying at lower rates than less desirable ones. The differences are stark: Men are more than twice as likely to receive a reply from women less desirable than themselves than from more desirable ones, and for messages sent to more desirable women, the reply rate never rises above 21%. Yet, the vast majority of men send messages to women who are more desirable than themselves on average. Messaging potential partners who are more desirable than oneself is not just an occasional act of wishful thinking; it is the norm. The bottom panels of Fig. 3 show two further statistics that shed light on the mate-seeking strategies adopted by users of the site. The upper set of curves show the variation of desirability gaps across the potential partners a person contacts, quantified by the distance between the 25th and 75th percentiles in the distribution of desirability gaps. Conditioned on the number of messages sent, men and especially women who reach higher up the desirability ladder tend to write to a less diverse set of potential matches, in terms of desirability gap. This behavior, consistent across all four cities, indicates that mate seekers, and particularly those setting their sights on the most desirable partners, do not adopt a diversified strategy to reduce the risk of being rejected, as one might, for instance, when applying to universities (21). The lower set of curves in the bottom panels shows the average number of messages sent by a woman or a man as a function of average desirability gap. Women initiate far fewer contacts than men, but both sets of curves fall off with increasing desirability gap in all four cities. One might imagine that individuals who make a habit of contacting potential partners significantly more desirable than themselves (large positive desirability gap) would also initiate more contacts overall to increase their chances of getting a reply, but they do the opposite: The number of initial contacts an individual makes falls off rapidly with increasing gap, and it is the people approaching the least desirable partners who send the largest number of messages. A possible explanation is that those who approach more desirable partners are adopting a “quality over quantity” approach, more precisely identifying people they see as an attractive match or spending more time writing personalized messages, at the expense of a smaller number of messages sent.