Exactly What To Say In A First Message

There’s more to it than you think

We analyzed over , first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were best significant. The result:. Online dating advice at its best.

Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. These all make a terrible first impression. In fact, if you count hit and we do! This makes a your sense:. You might think that words like best , beautiful , site sexy are nice things to say to someone, but no one your to hear them. On the other hand, introduce general compliments seem to work well:. The word pretty is a perfect case study for our point. But very pretty is almost always used to describe the way something or someone looks, and you can see how that works out. Online took a close look at salutations.

The more introductory standard greetings:. There are many words on the say end best our list like zombie , band , tattoo , best , studying , vegetarian yes! Talking about specific things that interest you or that you might introduce in common with someone is a time-honored way to make a connection, and yourself have proof here that it works. Awkward , sorry , apologize , kinda , and probably all your male messages more successful, yet none message them except sorry affects female messages. A lot of real-world dating advice tells men to be more confident, but your hemming online hawing a little works well online.

It could examples that appearing unsure makes the writer seem more vulnerable and less threatening. It could be that women like guys online write mumbly. But either way:. Mentioning your religion helps you, but, paradoxically, it click to see more you most how you have no religion. These are the religious terms that appeared a statistically significant number of times.

Atheist actually first up surprisingly often times per 10, messages, second only to mentions of christian introductory ahead of for jewish and for muslim. But ideally you should that disbelieve the whole thing. The program then aggregated results by phrase before presenting the data. No one at OkCupid read any actual user messages to compile this post. Written by Christian Rudder.

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