Getting hot sex, romance, keeping sex hot, making love work: even if we believe honesty is the “best policy” I’ve noticed that it seems like we seldom practice what we preach. It’s usually with good intent, but still… I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to why people feel they need to lie, both in relationships and while flirting (during the “pick up”). I’ve observed that it’s just ingrained in the way we express our sexual/romantic relationships in a variety of ways. I mean, look at this recent post about love in the age of the pick-up artist and the comments it generated. So interesting. The recent OkTrends post is The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating and is utterly fascinating, showing what people lie about — and how it “works.”
OkCupid has access to people’s true info in their data: here’s where they get down and dirty, and compare the biggest falsifications users make while trying to hook up or attract a mate. This post includes the reality about profile photos, how many messages men get based on income (and what average over-reporting of income is), and an interesting data point showing that 80% of people who claim bisexuality are only interested in one gender. Snip:
Nerds. As we all know, the Internet is a great place to pretend to be someone you’re not.
(…) Anyhow, in many online situations, self-misrepresentation is totally harmless. Like, who cares if your Halo 3 avatar is taller than you are in real life? Or if flickr thinks you’re single when you’re really married? But in online dating, where the whole goal is to eventually meet other people in person, creating a false impression is a whole different deal.
People do everything they can in their OkCupid profiles to make themselves seem awesome, and surely many of our users genuinely are. But it’s very hard for the casual browser to tell truth from fiction. With our behind-the-scenes perspective, we’re able to shed some light on some typical claims and the likely realities behind them. (…read more, blog.okcupid.com)
Image from this gallery.
I think Kit and PHB have it. Seems to me that there’s a huge space on the Kinsey Scale that’s not precisely 0, 3 or 6, and the flaw is that OkTrends is trying to use “bisexual” to mean something that their users probably aren’t meaning.
I don’t rate the OKCupid survey as being relevant.
Most of the bi-people on OKC are in a mixed-sex relationship looking to get a little same-sex action. So it is not very surprising that they look for a particular sex 80% of the time.
It is only sex folks, it does not necessarily have to be an identity-politics thing, or about sexual attraction for that matter. If someone calls themselves bi, they are saying they enjoy sex with both sexes, not that they consider them interchangeable.
Judging people by their behavior on online dating sites is particularly silly as there are pretty good reasons for people to guard their behavior.
The problem with equating this with ‘lying’ is that it doesn’t really look at why people are looking for a particular person. For example, there are a lot of people who are on OKCupid that define as ‘bisexual’ because that’s what they are, but are only actively seeking one gender for any number of reasons, the most common being that they already have one or more lovers of the other gender in their lives and are looking for some genital variety. The hurry to say that bis are ‘lying’ as opposed to just fluidly sexual for any number of reasons is perplexing to me.