Weekly Notes #13 – Cutting through the Forms | AreYouMyPartner

Weekly Notes #13 – Cutting through the Forms

For the week ending 7th of August, and 14th of August 2011.

So this Weekly Note actually covers a fortnight instead of one week… It has indeed been busy and a domino effect is in… well, full effect!

Two weeks ago a great night of Social Climbing was enjoyed by all at North London’s The Castle. At the end of that event, exhausted participants asked what the next adventure would be… and the answer was Event 7: Go Ape.

The Go Ape adventure represented the furthest distance we’ve ever travelled for an AYMP event; it was outside London’s M25 in Bracknell. But the team spirit was there, so car pooling was quickly sorted.

Eight-five per-cent of the turnout for Go Ape were people who had attended Social Climbing. Once again we all bonded over applying our physical dexterity against demanding challenges high above the ground in tree canopies, each section ending with a very satisfying James Bond style zip-line finale.

Then a sense of Deja-vu. As before, we were sitting around tired yet elated from a physical day out when the participants echoed “So what is next?” Sky diving? White eater rafting? Camping? It seems we’ve got a core group of people developing here who want to keep raising the bar with other like-minded adventurers, and that is exactly what I’m trying to achieve here.

So, I’ll have to see what we organise next that keeps group dynamic and adventure at the heart of a meet up. More on that soon…

Something that caught my attention

After the Social Climbing event, I was taking the tube home with a participant named Simon. Simon has been to several other AYMP events and started his own blog (called Simple White Male) writing about his quest for a partner. Naturally I cannot encourage Simon enough with his endeavour – a man after my own heart, after all.

We were talking about dating site interfaces when the topic of forms and questionnaires arose. When I was single I loathed dating sites that compelled me to tick endless boxes and reply to millions of “personality” questions, only to feed an algorithm back to a robot employed to seek my matches in the data base… or indeed improve my chances to be found by others.

In my opinion, the true essence of a person (be it yourself or a potential partner) can never be fully captured by using a barrage of psychological questions and rating sliders. The most difficult thing to do is write one’s own review, let alone permit people in ivory towers a chance to map you out and match you up with their behavioural logarithms and a matrix of (self) evaluation and categorisation.

But Simon told me about a twist that can only be classified as frustrating. He was trying to join a dating site that bragged (with lots of small print) that 2% of married people met through their service. Sorry, the site positions itself a “relationship” site instead of a “dating” site. My bad.

Here’s the twist; Simon went through this site’s very long Q&A and box ticking process (it took about an hour) only to be told at the conclusion that he wasn’t the ideal candidate for the site. The question that affected the outcome; have you been previously married? He had, but being “separated” seemingly disqualified him, although for his efforts they did provide him with a FREE (Wow!) personality profile… which wasn’t even accurate. (Read all about Simon’s experience here: http://simplewhitemale.tumblr.com/post/8425710437/eharmony).

Firstly, the disqualifying question in question was an early one, so why make someone jump through an hour’s worth of hoops before rejecting them on that criteria alone? Who’s got that kind of time to waste (unless you really want a tokenistic FREE (Wow!) personality quiz?) Secondly, how many people might opt to lie about that fact just to get through a long process motivated by the amazing promise of the website?

I fully appreciate that one major advantage with online dating is that it offers members the ability to filter, search and organise “hotlists” from the online masses, but (and this is my mission here) I always ask if this is the best way to achieve that goal?

I would love to hear from both sides – if you use online dating, do you like long forms that profile you and others based on your answers? Or do you find them tedious and inaccurate? Do you get accurate matches, or bizarre lists? Lastly, do you feel wholly represented by your own personality profile?

Moreover, in an age where technology is more powerful but also simplifying and “getting out of the way” in terms of interface and user experience, are long questionnaires useful, or even still relevant?

Or would you rather use online dating to filter, organise and meet someone in real life in a group of like-minded people and get to know them through a real life, character revealing adventure?

A vous…

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