Well naturally a love theory called the Flaw-O-Matic would originate from New York. Ronald Perelman gets all the hotties he can handle…there’s obviously some complicated yet brutal math going on behind the false eyelashes and toupees.

They found that a 5-foot-8 man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6-footer if he made more money — precisely $146,000 a year more. For a 5-foot-2 man, the number was $277,000…

Customers of online dating services typically end up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they study online. But something very different happens at a speed-dating event. The average participant makes a match with at least 1 in 10 of the people they meet; some studies have found the average is 2 or 3 out of 10. Women are still pickier than men, and in some speed-dating experiments they still prefer affluent, well-educated men, but the preference is less strong — and in some other studies they don’t discriminate at all by income or social status.

What happens to speed daters’ Flaw-O-Matics? The people at these events realize that there aren’t an infinite number of possibilities. If they want to get anything out of the evening, they have to settle for less than perfection. They also can’t help noticing that they have competition, and that their ideal partner just might prefer someone else.

Well imagine that! Almost like in real life (oops, sorry, TMI, do not adjust your blogs, I’ll just go back to listening to Nine Inch Nails, nothing to see here).

Also, here’s a related Mister Science podcast on the Science of Speed Dating, including whether or not to choose a porn name for your tag or play it straight, so to speak.

So, distilled, the deal is that speed dating is far more likely to result in a date or three than Internet dating, even if you’re short or poor. The article doesn’t talk about the women much because, I suppose, that would be contentious what with the “there are no ugly women, only lazy ones” quotations and The Swan and the ever-popular Sex and the City myth that with fabulous hair and a good stylist even Secretariat could pull a man.

The true secret is towards the end of the article; it turns out being generally genial is probably the key to my problem in this department. Seems people don’t want to date people who are friendly to everyone; they want to feel that you’re being nice to them as an exception to your normal routine, which presumably includes blasting members of the opposite sex with the deadly laser beams from your eyes, cracking them across the face with your taloned hand and kneeing them in the groin by way of hello. Okay, so back to standard greeting procedures for me then.

The New York dating scene; it’s a jungle out there! Or at least downtown Tokyo, circa  1954.

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