Do Atheists really get more responses to their online dating messages?

September 25th, 2009

More about the OKcupid survey…
A recent article in the Telegraph reported the results of a statistical survey conducted by free dating site OKCupid. The survey aimed to discover the makings of the perfect first online dating message, on OKcupid at least.

Unfortunately, by the time the story got around, the headline presented it in a more sensationalist way that seemed to imply, well, that saying you are an Atheist (or at least, not mentioning God) will get you more responses anywhere.

It wasn’t long before the Christian sites intervened and pointed out the fact that on many sites (and not only those specifically catering for people of particular religions), presenting yourself as an Atheist would not be quite as good. OKCupid is known as a pretty secular site and you need only look at the list of user-submitted compatibility questions to get a clear vision of topics that are of interest to its users. Questions about alternative lifestyles and life choices are as common as those about personal hygene and family values.

OKCupid themselves clarified the results of their survey and suggested Atheists may generally open with expressing their non-religious views, while Christians or other religious people may not necessarily discuss religion specifics with each other.
A good point, though I do have a guess of my own about why mentioning the word “God” in a message resulted in less people responding to such messages. Read any dating scammer messages lately? There’s a whole range of scam messages from “God fearing” folk.
As a free dating site, OKCupid is full of scammers who, undoubtedly, try to contact members with such messages on a regular basis and get ignored. The advantage this site over many other free sites is, of course, the compatibility algorithm that shows you better matches once you’ve answered a few hundred questions, but the scammers are still out there sending their messages. I do believe the large number of such messages is the reason why mentioning God in a message is seen as such a negative thing.

OKCupid is a large, popular site and there are certainly some interesting things we can learn from their survey about online interaction, but when it comes to social trends and preferences, things need to be put in perspective. Every site has a particular vibe and a particular type of people who date on there. If everywhere was exactly the same, there’d be no need for all the different dating sites out there, after all.

You can read the original article here.

Related posts:

1. Getting replies to your online dating messages
2. Online dating: How long should the first message be?
3. Rejection in online dating

Entry Filed under: Industry stuff,Misc,Online Dating News