No One Is Writing Me Back Now on Okcupid

The Questions

(1) About how long do you want your next relationship to last?

One night

A few months to a year

Several years

The rest of my life

(2) Say you've started seeing someone you really like. As far as you're concerned, how long will it take before you have sex?

1-2 dates

3-5 dates

6 or more dates

Only after the wedding

(3) Have you ever had a sexual encounter with someone of the same sex?

Yes, and I enjoyed myself

Yes, and I did not enjoy myself

No, and I would never

No, but I'd like to

(4) How important is religion/God in your life?

Extremely important

Somewhat important

Not very important

Not important at all

After a month of dating equally from both of his profiles, he decided he was spending too much time on the freeway reaching east-side women from the tattoo cluster. He deleted his A-group profile. His efficiency improved, but the results were the same. As summer drew to a close, he'd been on more than 55 dates, each one dutifully logged in a lab notebook. Only three had led to second dates; only one had led to a third.

Most unsuccessful daters confront self-esteem issues. For McKinlay it was worse. He had to question his calculations.

Then came the message from Christine Tien Wang, a 28-year-old artist and prison abolition activist. McKinlay had popped up in her search for 6-foot guys with blue eyes near UCLA, where she was pursuing her master's in fine arts. They were a 91 percent match.

He met her at the sculpture garden on campus. From there they walked to a college sushi joint. He felt it immediately. They talked about books, art, music. When she confessed that she'd made some tweaks to her profile before messaging him, he responded by telling her all about his love hacking. The whole story.

"I thought it was dark and cynical," she says. "I liked it."

It was first date number 88. A second date followed, then a third. After two weeks they both suspended their OkCupid accounts.

"I think that what I did is just a slightly more algorithmic, large-scale, and machine-learning-based version of what everyone does on the site," McKinlay says. Everyone tries to create an optimal profile—he just had the data to engineer one.

It's one year after their first date, and McKinlay and Tien Wang have met me at the Westwood sushi bar where their relationship began. McKinlay has his PhD; he's teaching math and is now working on a postgraduate degree in music. Tien Wang was accepted into a one-year art fellowship in Qatar. She's in California to visit McKinlay. They've been staying connected on Skype, and she has returned for a couple of visits.

At my request, McKinlay has brought his lab notebook. Tien Wang hasn't seen it before today. It's page after page of formulas and equations in McKinlay's tight handwriting, ending in a neatly ordered list of women and dates, a few terse notes about each. Tien Wang leafs through it, laughing at some of the highlights. On August 24, she notices, he took two women to the same beach on the same day. "That's horrible," she says.

To Tien Wang, McKinlay's OkCupid hacking is a funny story to tell. But all the math and coding is merely prologue to their story together. The real hacking in a relationship comes after you meet. "People are much more complicated than their profiles," she says. "So the way we met was kind of superficial, but everything that happened after is not superficial at all. It's been cultivated through a lot of work."

"It's not like, we matched and therefore we have a great relationship," McKinlay agrees. "It was just a mechanism to put us in the same room. I was able to use OkCupid to find someone."

She bristles at that. "You didn't find me. I found you," she says, touching his elbow. McKinlay pauses to think, then admits she's right.

A week later Tien Wang is back in Qatar, and the couple is on one of their daily Skype calls when McKinlay pulls out a diamond ring and holds it up to the webcam. She says yes.

They're not entirely sure when they'll get married. There's research to be done to determine the optimal wedding day.

No One Is Writing Me Back Now on Okcupid

Source: https://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/

Share this post