Numbers game

As the first post-war, post-mass production generation, the baby boomers were arguably the first to invent adolescence, serial monogamy – they hold the record for the highest divorce and remarriage rate – and of course the mid-life crisis.

But now that we’re in our mid lives, we Gen Xers who turned geeks into gods have also turned dating into a numbers game. As the forty-somethings loom, and a sub-set of my peers find themselves again on the dating scene, I’m starting to suspect a few would do well from refresher courses in arithmetic and/or even dating statistics 101.

In fact if you didn’t do a higher level of maths in high school, or score at least a pass at some form of statistics at university, I’m wondering how you get a date at all.

The main problem is that no bloke in Australia who went through a school system dominated by bra burning feminist teachers is going to walk up to a woman in public and proposition her. None in their right minds are going to follow a woman home and throw pebbles at her window to serenade her or sneak into her house and leave a rose on her pillow. In fact now that romance of the bodice-ripping macho man variety is illegal, even your most outgoing souls are relegated to jumping online, or some kind of formalised arrangement where open flirting is “permitted”.

The challenge is that internet and speed dating require a totally different set of skills from the bravado required to walk up to a chick at a bar and say “hi”. To make it online you need the capacity to calculate your odds, and figure out how much you need to send in order to expect some kind of meaningful response, and the hit rate varies depending on your gender, age and what you’re after.

The statistics go something like this – for every hundred “winks”, “blinks”, “in-mails” or “hi theres” sent, the average forty-something bloke will get just 15 replies, 10 of which are a polite “thanks but no thanks”, three are slightly abrasive “my profile specifies I”m looking for someone with a property portfolio and a six pack”, and a couple of “yeah maybes”.

At the other end of the generation and gender, a 25-year-old friend signed up for a dating site – and managed to upload a partial profile before the computer crashed. Half an hour later she’d logged back in to find more than 100 messages.

So yes, it’s still the blokes doing the chasing, and it’s just as likely as ever that a proposition will be ignored, but the rejections no longer include physical violence.

And that’s not where it stops – speed dating is also a game of numbers. You spend an evening spending five minutes with 15 people, then tick yes to the ones you want to see again, when the ticks line up the dating agency swaps your details. Only you’re also told how many other people the people who ticked you ticked, so you can see who is genuinely interested and who is conducting a spray and pray campaign. There are even speed dating forums that swap tips on ways to perfect your five-minute “pitch” – meaning the most successful speed daters require both marketing and mathematics to make the cut – sheesh!

Having watched other friends go though all this internet dating malarkey has made me decide to hold on to my hubby, my maths is appalling.

Got any tips for the numerically challenged? What’s been your experience with online dating?

BRW

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