Alright, who's ready to learn some uncomfortable truths? Background: for fun I used to help friends improve their standing in dating, and now I am turning this into a side business focused on increasing men's success rates for online dating. To great effect btw.

> Matchmaking companies and theoretical perspectives on close relationships suggest that initial attraction is, to some extent, a product of two people's self-reported traits and preferences.

Right from the first sentence, I can tell the results are going to be awful.

Here's the truth: appearance is significantly more important than anything else. I mean the face, the headshot from the chest and up, the body. But mostly the face. This is for both male and female attractiveness. The rest of one's "profile", their traits and preferences, just make for conversation topics unless there's something so polar opposite that it becomes a deal-breaker. I.e. in my research these are "threshold factors" not continuous variables for correlation.

> Each participant met each opposite-sex participant attending a speed-dating event for a 4-min speed date. Random forests models predicted 4% to 18% of actor variance and 7% to 27% of partner variance; crucially, however, they were unable to predict relationship variance using any combination of traits and preferences reported before the dates.

And there are the poor results, as I expected.

We are shallow. Or so it seems. But we are actually incredibly complex processing machines. I can tell your levels of strength, aggression, trustworthiness, and intelligence fairly decently from looking at your face. I can also tell what your diet is like, how healthy you are.

Maybe not explicitly, but subconsciously. And women are amazing at this (we're better at looking at breasts and hip-to-waist ratios). Here's an interesting video getting into some of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVE6kZW88lc

So how do I literally 10x a man's results in terms of his OkCupid profile? In terms of measured message responses received, and dates achieved?

I get them in shape. I fix their diet. I cut them to <12% bodyfat while adding pounds of lean muscle. I increase their testosterone levels as much as naturally possible over a 90 day period to start (that's my basic service). And then I take proper photos -- men, don't ever use a smartphone for a headshot. Smartphones have terrible focal lengths, lengthening your faces and making you look more feminine. Since it slims the face, I suspect a lot of social media heavy women are letting themselves gain weight because in their selfie photos (taken from a slightly inclined angle, no less) they look significantly slimmer.

I don't change shit in what they write on their profiles. Because that pretty much doesn't matter. Believe me, I've experimented. But the hardcore truth is that you need to look more masculine, unless you can show through photos that you're a multimillionaire. And even that I wouldn't recommend as being your main attraction asset (but it does work).

Maybe I should release some independent studies sometime, I have some great datasets :)

Edit - nice downvotes but no rebuttals. Happy to have a discussion, these kind of things bothered me to no end as someone who wanted to bank on being a software engineer with a good personality in order to get dates.