Intimate Encounters on Plenty of Fish

Like most online dating sites, plentyoffish.com, offers an option for what's referred to as "Intimate Encounters." This particular option, as with most free dating sites (CraigsList for example), is basically a booty call for a one night stand. Not that I'm particularly into this type of thing, but I have noticed that there are a number of discussions regarding the intimate encounters aspect of Plenty of Fish lately. Also, I want to make it clear before I go any further that this site isn't about getting one night stands from online dating sites, however, it's still an interesting topic in my opinion, so lets talk about it.

The first big thing that caught my eye was an article in the News of the World. The article describes a woman who is really into online dating, but not just any regular old dating. She has gone out and slept with over 200 of her online dates! Here are a few choice quotes from the article:

"On average, she beds a different man every FIVE DAYS. She’s even had sex with THREE of them in ONE DAY...

...She admits: “I can’t explain the buzz I get from meeting someone for the first time and knowing that in a couple of hours we’ll be ripping each other’s clothes off. It’s addictive."

and here's her picture:


Now here's the thing, she uses two sites for bedding men, benaughty.com and plentyoffish. Yes, there are actually women on Plenty of Fish who are simply out for a one night hook-up. This may seem unfathomable to most men who have used PlentyofFish, as most of them can barely get a response to their email messages let alone a one night stand with an attractive woman, but there is at least one woman on the site who is ready and willing.

Of course this is just one woman. She must be an outlier, correct? Well, I'm not so sure. I'm reminded of a post I wrote a few months ago about the promiscuity of women online. It talks about a recent trend of Intimate Encounters which the founder of Plenty of Fish, Markus Frind, noticed. The trend basically showed that since 2004, the number of women on the site who selected the "intimate encounter" option went from 9% of women up to 18%. Now 18% is nothing to sneeze at. To put it into perspective, at this moment there are 112,382 online, which means approximately 20 thousand of those are looking for an intimate encounter. Just a simple search within ten miles of my zip code shows 74 women online who have chose the intimate encounter option.

Now, I know what you are thinking. All the women looking for intimate encounters are likely to be ugly or have some other abnormality. The argument being that why would an attractive girl need to use an online dating site if she is just looking to "hook-up" for the night. She could simply go out to the nearest bar and wait for the men to flock to her. Again, I don't think that is the case. A quick glance at my IE search results shows a number of attractive women in the pictures.

Also, there was an excellent post by one woman on the message boards, which gave a good reason as to why women would use plentyoffish for finding intimate encounters:

"Okay first of all you don't have to be ugly to want to have to have an intimate encounter -

1. Maybe getting thrown up on or possibly killed by some random dude at the bar isn't appealing.
2. Maybe you are too busy to date but have a kicking sex drive
3. Maybe you are a person who owns their sexuality and doesn't let anyone else define what is right for you- you decide for yourself and you take it!
4. Maybe looking online gives you a chance to take as much time as you want to to get to know that person.
5. Maybe you are looking for a regular, a boy toy, a maintenance man.
6. Maybe if you have these close minded ideas about the modern women, you are too ugly for them to sleep with you!

So guess what - I've done at least one of these things and I am not ashamed to admit it. I have needs, wants and desires and I don't care if someone else doesn't agree. I am not saying its a permanent solution, I am just saying its time to cut the crap and stop making women out to be these holy beings that can't get their swerve on like guys do. You guys can't have it both ways and women need to stop bowing to such pretentious ideas, its much more liberating when you take your sexuality into your own hands and that doesn't make you a slut. Don't knock it until you try it, I embrace my sexuality as long as I do it responsibly and I highly recommend opening that "Pandora's box" to any women who hasn't."

This is just one example, but if you search through the forums even more, you will find other women who freely admit that they are just out for a hook-up.

Looking at all the evidence shown above, it does appear that the "intimate encounter" market on Plenty of Fish is active and could possibly provide results for those that are inclined to this type of online dating. Actually getting the date or rather, the encounter, is a whole other subject on it's own.

Has anyone out there ever gotten good results from the intimate encounter option? Let me know in the comments.

The Unsatisfied Women of Plenty of Fish

I've been searching around various different blogs lately trying to find different people's experiences in using PlentyofFish. Lately, I've been stumbling across some blog posts by some women who are out in the dating scene looking for potential male suitors. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of disappointment in the men on the site. And for the most part, these men are making a lot of the common mistakes that I've mentioned repeatedly on this very blog. Lets take a further look at two of these examples, shall we?


The Saving Diva

Saving Diva setup a Plenty of Fish profile and has commented that she receives many short lame messages containing such subject lines as Hi, cute pic, etc. as I've discussed in my post about sucky subject lines.

"One guy actually referred to me as "sweetpea." I haven't been responding to the majority of the messages, and I haven't received a decent message yet. Is this how all online dating sites are? If so, count me out! I need a little effort put into a message."

So far though, she has actually gone out on a number of dates with some guys she met on Plenty of Fish. However, it was apparent that not all went well; below are a few of the men's dating faux pas:

• A couple of guys ended up lying about their height and were shorter than described in their profiles
• One of these had questionable manners
• One guy lied about his age
• Another didn't look like his pictures
• and a couple of them were quite boring

So, as we can see, the selection of decent guys on the site are few and far between, though her POF date#3 seemed to be a winner despite owning a Porshe Boxster S (apparently that's a turn-off?)


Romi from The Year of the Chick

Romi had an excursion on Plenty of Fish back in October which resulted in some humorous blog posts, but she basically concluded at the end that all she found were duds. Along with Dating Diva, she also received a lot of crappy email messages:

"I find that every time I enter the site and cruise around, there are five emails waiting after only a couple of minutes. What this means of course is sifting through a lot of crap, such as: ”Hey baby”—crap, “Can I see more pictures?”—crap, “I want to make you my everything”—crap, etc, etc, etc."

I don't think she ever went on a date with anyone, but it's clear in her making fun of the ridiculous messages she got why she wouldn't or couldn't find a decent date on the site.

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So, it seems that these two women, who seem like great catches, just aren't getting the kind of quality game fish that you'd find on paid dating sites or in real life for that matter. This just goes to prove my theory that the competition between men on PlentyofFish.com is quite weak despite the incredible large quantity.

This is both good for those of us able to display interesting attractive personalities through the site but also bad because it makes it more difficult to stick out amongst the rest of the mackerels.

Also, it appears that both Saving Diva and Romi experienced the same thing I had when I set up the fake profile and received tons and tons of garbage messages with ridiculous short sited subject lines like; hi, hey, hello, etc.

Another problem that is pretty apparent to me is the lying. Now, that is something I just don't understand. When you setup a Plenty of Fish profile you have to realize that the intent is to eventually meet other people in real life. And when your first impression to that person is of being a liar then you are off to a really bad start. Chances are that there isn't going to be a second date and you basically wasted your time.

All in all, I am beginning to understand the frustrations of women on plentyoffish. It's like the guys aren't even trying. Seriously, these guys really need to start reading my blog...

Plenty of Fish Picture Experiment

Introduction

Recently I decided to test out a theory by my friends Race and Kelly on the Plenty of Fish dating site. The concept is simple. Basically it states that the more quality pictures you have visible on your online profile, the more value you display and thus the more dates you will be able to receive. For example, if you applied this concept to plentyoffish.com then it would mean that a person who displays the maximum 8 pictures in their profile is more likely to create attraction than a person who displays only one picture.

Luckily, POF comes with an easy way to measure a profile's attraction. If we can measure the attraction of a profile and we know how many pictures those same profiles display, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with some type of measure between the quantity of pictures displayed and the level of attraction.

How do we measure attraction on a Plenty of Fish profile? Simply by looking at the number times a profile has been "favorited." When someone favorites you, that is an indicator of interest or attraction. So, we can assume that profiles with a high number of favorites should be considered highly attractive individuals and profiles with a low number of favorites would be considered less attractive.

Procedure

The first step in this experiment was to gather all the data. I went through the PlentyofFish site and selected random men and women from across the country and recorded both the quantity of pictures and number of times favorited for each profile. In all, I collected data from approximately 200 sets of male profiles and 200 sets of female profiles.

I then sorted each data set (one for each gender) by the quantity of pictures displayed and took an average of the "Favorites" for each quantity group.

I then graphed the correlation between the quantity of profile pictures and the # times favorited.

Data

Click to view all data in spreadsheet format

Results

Looking at the male graph, it is pretty clear that there is a positive correlation between quantity of profile pictures and attraction. It shows that for each picture, attraction level or "favorites" will on average increase by the same amount.



The female graph, however, is a bit more crazy. There is certainly an upward trend in # times favorited but has a few erratic swings with a big dip at 5 pictures, a giant spike at 6 pictures and then dropping again at 7 and 8 pictures.



Discussion

This isn't the most scientific experiment and there is certainly several opportunities for bias to occur in the data results. A few possible flaws are as follows:

• It is possible that men and women who are perceived at being better looking may be more comfortable displaying more pictures of themselves. This would produce bias in the data as better looking people who display more pictures would naturally receive a higher number of favorites just off of looks alone.

• The range of # times favorited in the women's data is much greater than that of the men's data. Some women's profiles swing into the triple digits with the highest having over 500 favorites. These wild upswings for some women will have an impact on the average for those particular picture groups. This would explain for the big spikes in the graph.

Conclusion

There appears to be a positive correlation between number of profile pictures displayed and attraction level though certainly not proven. Also, this only applies to an average profile, as it is clear that some profiles with many pictures may still be viewed as unattractive and profiles with few pictures could be seen as highly attractive.

I've added in the original Plenty of Fish data sets above, so if there is anyone else out there with a better statistics background who'd like to take a stab at analyzing the data let me know.