Ah yes, it has been a while since I’ve gone over the dating site OK Cupid, a site of which I’m a member. Remembering what Groucho Marx said:
“I don’t want to belong to any dating site that will accept people like me as a member.”
I think about why I’m even there. Thus far, I haven’t even met any fellow sloth-lovers. But I’m not terribly worried; I’m not fully accepted anyway. According to an advanced algorithm, I’m not even attractive enough to get a special email message telling me how I’m too sexy for my shirt. Oh well, their loss. I’m great.
This installment of their stab at snarky blog humor is a bit better than their usual flaccid attempt at humor. Parts of this elicited a response from me besides pity for the pathetic person trying to get laughs. Some of the questions they explored really went ‘in depth’ into the real meat and potatoes of why people date.
First they explored the question of: Do they have a drug problem? Honestly, that’s a big one. Call me a traditionalist, but having someone who does cocaine off of a toilet seat is usually a turn off. Personally, I’ve been lucky enough where those addicted to drugs told me on the first date. I’m not talking about minor drugs; they tend to be heavy things. Having someone tell you in the first ten minutes of the date ‘Heroin isn’t so bad’ is surprisingly a good thing. You kind of know where the date is going to go from there, and will involve lengthy discussions about how they want to live with the Crust Punks in abandoned buildings. Man, they pay way less rent than I do those lucky dogs.
Defining the importance of some of these questions takes up a lot of time. Personally, I would’ve avoided using verbatim questions. If you’re trying to attract people to use your website, it isn’t a good idea to show off glaring misspellings about cannibalism, dildos, and employment.
But they have a graphic which explains all their big ideas about dating. The blue box, the saddest box you’ll ever do, represents those questions innocent questions which lead to more interesting, meaningful results. Here’s the part where OK Cupid subtly suggests “Hey, maybe you might want to get in on this, maybe answering a few of our 18,000 questions”.
Important Questions to ask your ‘potential’ significant other
“Do you like the taste of beer? Yes” equals “Will I have sex on my first date?”
If you’re on OK Cupid for hookups, I guess that’s cool. Personally, I haven’t had such things happen yet. Though I will say, the people on OK Cupid tend to be really nice people, better than such sites as “PlentlyOfFish” which I think is ultra-creepy. So this is a fairly important question to a vast majority of twenty and thirty-somethings looking for their artistic other (OK Cupid does cater to a certain level of artsy-ness. Just saying)
Some other questions which predict the likelihood of having sex on the first date (Yes answer only)
“In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting” (83% chance, those are better odds than an actual nuclear war happening)
“Could you imagine yourself killing someone?” (82% chance, maybe this has to do with that vague emotion known as ‘passion’. It proves they are passionate I guess, though I’m a bit worried about the dating world now)
“Assuming you were in the position to do so, would you launch nuclear weapons under any circumstances?” (82% chance again. I guess radiation really turns people on).
Next Question:
Do my date and I have long-term potential? Equals the following three questions:
“Do you like horror movies?” Personally I’m not a horror buff.
“Have you ever traveled to another country alone?” Actually, I like this question a lot. Traveling with other people gets very annoying, I enjoy traveling alone. When you’re traveling with someone else, there’s all that compromise which is a pain.
“Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” I want to do this once I become a successful human being. Right now I’m a sloth. As much as a sloth can ‘work on’ something, I’m working on it.
For their politics question, I guess that doesn’t apply in New York. New York has a wide variety of people with similar political beliefs, from liberal liberal, moderate liberal, conservative liberal, liberal moderate, and the most far right one, moderate moderate. I’m not sure if Republicans live in New York, or, if they do, they keep an extremely low profile and have secret handshakes to discover one another.
I found their “Is my date religious?” question interesting. Spelling and grammar mistakes apparently are more acceptable by religious types. ‘Next to intelligent design, what’s a couple of typos’ is how OK Cupid phrased it. Bits and pieces like that are what motivate me to want to write for one of these sites. That’s a little weak, not going to lie. Despite that, seeing the writing and reading levels of various religions was somewhat interesting.
Overall, I like the site. Unlike most sites, they do have a specific niche group of artsy types, which basically equal my type. I’ve met some seriously cool people on there. There’s even a website dedicated to OK Cupid, called “Ok Cupid Letters that never got responses” that I covered in a previous post. I’m happy to report Jon Roren’s back at it, and welcome him back into the blogging fold.
Maybe we’ll all find our special someone. I hope for that. I wish you all luck on this and hope you find that someone willing to sleep for inordinately long periods of time with you, hanging upside in the trees and catching the breeze.