Dating in the District

Street noise fills the background as Sam Yagan speaks quickly into his cellphone. He has a knack for efficiency. He is a dating catalyst, a self-proclaimed “geeky math guy.” And last February, his dating website — OKCupid — logged 1.3 million unique visitors.

So when it came time to find out how to meet people, his name topped the list of people to call.

Most Washingtonians tend to be workaholics, transplants or some combination of the two. With a general population such as that, single people are put at a disadvantage when it comes to meeting a potential mate.

“D.C. is — by far — the most active [on OKCupid] on a per capita basis,” Yagan says. “Other cities don’t even come close.”

More than 10 percent of D.C.’s population are active users on the site, according to Yagan’s data, and 75 percent of those users are younger than 35.

Whether you want to take the tech route, or a more traditional avenue, there is one basic tenet to remember: “You can’t take it too seriously,” Yagan asserts. “People get so wound up about it.”

Rather than fearing rejection, accept that volume is key: The odds that the first person you meet is going to be the one for you is low, says Yagan, who earned a degree in mathematics and economics from Harvard, and later went on to receive an MBA from Stanford business school. “Half the battle is forcing yourself to go out and meet people.”

So, where are the best places to find other love-seekers in the District?

Whether it’s grabbing a post-work libation at Off the Record bar in the Hay Adams hotel, or plugging in your laptop at Tryst in Adams Morgan, places where solo people-watching is common lifts the burden of vulnerability and makes meeting people feel less forced.

At Tryst, a hodgepodge of couches, chairs and tables are scattered for maximum comfort. Free Wi-Fi lets you work (or surf on Facebook) while you enjoy a coffee, tea, snack or alcoholic beverage. Located on the often-hectic 18th Street in Adams Morgan, Tryst is an oasis.

Tia Scagliarnini, the front-of-the-house manager, wants the bar and cafe to be a relaxing place for people that is neither home, nor work, she said.

“We aim to foster a community, and make it a place where people are approachable.”

The clientele is diverse, she added: Students writing PhDs or master’s theses, book clubs, journalists, artists and businesspeople of all stripes. Tryst also has a happy hour seven days a week and live jazz on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.

“[Tryst] can be whatever you want it to be, really,” she said. “We’re always full of people, so you never have to feel alone or shady.”

But if you crave something a little more presidential, head down the rabbit hole to the basement of the Hay Adams hotel.

Within throwing distance of the White House, caricatures of Washington’s political culture can be seen in the din. A throwback to a D.C. of yesteryear, this classic bar is a place to be “seen and not heard,” said Andrew Welch, the food and beverage director of the Hay Adams hotel.

What does that mean, exactly?

“The name of the bar speaks for itself,” Welch said. Essentially, what happens at Off the Record stays off the record.

The downtown proximity to political, business and law offices brings in some big names, and Welch aims to maintain the quality experience for which the bar is known. The environment fosters relaxing conversation — the room is equipped with a fireplace — and a great specialty cocktail list is the cherry on top.

What happens once you set your sights on a hangout?

“You have to expand your search criteria,” explains OKCupid’s Yagan, whose site uses mathematical equations to determine matches, rather than psychology — which is the basis of other dating sites.

“We changed the way dating works,” he adds. Most people, he says, limit themselves to only seeking out individuals who fit in their predetermined notion of a perfect mate: one political affiliation, age range or other trait.

“People say things like, ‘Oh, I would never date someone four years younger than me.’ Really? Probably you would.”

At places that have an ambiance and culture all their own, striking up a conversation and asking for someone’s Twitter handle is easy. And you never know what might come of it.

Scagliarnini, the manager at Tryst, said she recently set up a reservation for a man on a Saturday night — which is always a no-no, because of how busy the cafe can be. But this was a special occasion: He had met his current girlfriend at random on a particular couch — and he wanted to propose on that same piece of thrift furniture on the same night two years later.

She said yes.

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Secret Online Dating Tips Revealed

Want to know the secret of successful online dating? Try these tips by Harvard math majors.

OkTrends (blog.okcupid.com) is a blog written by the founders of OkCupid (www.okcupid.com), a free, online dating site that counts 7 million visitors each month.

Every six weeks or so, the bloggers - all former math majors from Harvard - examine the gold mine of dating data collected from their members’ online interactions. They sort and sift, crunch and correlate, catching whatever nuggets of mating wisdom fall out.

Then they post a report of their findings - and the resultant dating tips - often with pop culture references, statistical graphs and pictures of half-naked young men and women.

“It’s our version of an advice column,” Los Angeles Times quoted Sam Yagan, OkCupid’s chief executive.

“We love the fact that our own data tell us what works on a date,” Yagan added.

Even scientists analyse the tips and the results are divided.

“I’m a big fan,” Northwestern University social psychology professor Eli Finkel told Los Angeles Times, adding that the posts are ’generally insightful’.

Viren Swami, co-author of The Psychology of Physical Attraction, was less enthusiastic, saying: ’They could also potentially be very misleading and, at worst, quite far from the truth’.

According to the scientists, women were told to flirt with the camera for their profile photo. If they made what OkCupid called ’flirty-face’, they received on average 1.5 additional messages per month.

That’s because a woman’s smile is well-documented as a signal of sexual interest.

’Flirty smiles trigger what we call men’s sexual over-perception bias,’ said David M. Buss, psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of ’The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating’.

This advice is only, however, for women. Men were ordered to be aloof on camera. When they did so, they had a roughly 90 per cent success rate with their emails than otherwise.

“There is good evidence that men high in status smile less and that smiling is sometimes interpreted as a sign of submissiveness. Also, some male smiles can look like leers, so it’s good to avoid those,” Buss told the LATimes.

The data also showed that women who took their ’flirty-face’ to the next level by showing a bit of cleavage had better results - vastly better results as they got older.

According to OkCupid, an 18-year-old woman with a cleavage shot in her profile gets 24 percent more contacts per month on average than more demure 18-year-olds.

If she does it at age 32, that jumps to 79 percent more than her buttoned up peers.

“Women’s mate value declines with age,” said Satoshi Kanazawa, evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, co-author of “Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters’.

But they can compensate for their decline in mate value by showing their cleavage.’

’It’s bait,’ Dr Peter Jonason of the University of South Alabama said.

For men, the inverse is true. Male online daters should show off their six packs in their profile pictures, but only if they are young.

That’s because women in their 30s are less interested in the man’s body than whether or not he will be a good provider, clinical psychologist Marianne Brandon said.

Another tip was both to subtract two inches from the height your potential date claims to be - and 20 per cent from their salary.

For men, the experts said, this makes sense. Height suggests good health and genes; while wealth, obviously, suggests resources. ’Men deceive about their status and income in order to make themselves seem more desirable to women,’ said Dr Buss.

Women, however, may not be lying, Kanazawa argued.

If a woman is trying to get dates online, he argued, she must be having difficulty in real life. That could be because she is Amazonian - both men and women prefer that the man is taller.

They also may have a bigger paycheque than the average man - and the very average man prefers, by and large, to be the one who brings home the bacon, he said.

¿Es usted un camarero que data?