Statistics

I picked up Persil this morning and I've been holed up in my room with him ever since, talking gently to him and trying to make him feel as comfortable as possible. He started out very sleepy, then gradually woke up and emerged from his cage; now he's beginning to seem more comfortable, though still nervous of me. It's been a few hours, and at this point I'm beginning to get a bit cabin feverish, so I think I'll head out and take a walk soon. But, in the meantime, I took the opportunity to look through my email history on Match and OkCupid and run the numbers. I came up with some interesting statistics. Here's what my OkCupid history looks like, going back to January (sorry if the table is weird, turns out it's hard to make tables in Blogger):

Men I contacted	Responses	Dates	Men who contacted me	Men I responded to	Dates
23	10	1	78	14	9

So, out of the 23 men I contacted, I only dated one! HOWEVER, that one was the Brazilian, who was arguably the most promising of all my dates; and, I'm looking forward to a second Heathen-initiated date in 2 3/4 weeks with Dreamy (though if I've learned anything from online dating, it's not to count my chickens before they're hatched, so I'll count that as a date if and when it happens). Still, I did much better on OKC just waiting for the men to contact me, filtering through them to find the good ones, and then replying. In fact, out of the 10 people who responded to my emails on OKC, half of them dropped the ball when I emailed them a second time!

It's a bit more difficult to see patterns on Match because emails get deleted automatically after 30 days, so I can only paint a picture of what's happened for me in the past month. Still, it's strikingly different:

Men I contacted	Responses	Dates	Men who contacted me	Men I responded to	Dates
9	4	2	25	3	1

I got a similar reply rate as on OkCupid, BUT the men who replied on Match followed through, and a much higher percentage resulted in a date. On the other hand, I did less well on Match with the men who contacted me.

What I take from this is that there are in fact more interesting people on OKC, but the men on Match are less flakey and POSSIBLY more open to female initiative (though I don't feel convinced of that last part; I suspect their lack of response is more due to the flakiness of OkCupidians). And, obviously, that I'm a huge nerd.

Finally, one last factoid: 100% of my OkCupid dates paid for our first date. 0% of my Match dates paid (we split the bill).

Anyone else have thoughts about this?

PS Here's my bird. He really likes hats, just like me.