Internet Dating 101: Quality Over Quantity

When deciding who to message, I tend to prefer Quality messages, over a quantity of messages. By creating quality contacts you put more control over who you communicate with. By creating a quantity of contacts, you leave it up to luck that those who might respond are actually what you’re looking for.

To me, spamming the same generic message to every profile on the entire site will result in little more than you going through the entire member base with few results to show for it. When you’re only thinking of the short term, thinking that you’ll find someone quickly and get off, you’re actually losing the benefit of being online in the first place.

On every site there is a variation in the quality of individuals. There are some really great people who have a profile, and there are some not so great people. The natural distribution of quality means that a vast majority of the member base will be merely average. For those who know what a bell curve is, it sums up the results you can expect.

By focusing on a quantity of contacts, you are more likely to get responses from those that fall within the average range. On the other hand, if you focus on finding the quality prospects, you can indirectly control who you hear back from. You can then target the upper range of the bell curve offering you more desirable contacts. Add to that the benefit of composing an original message to a quality prospect, and suddenly you increase the chances of not only a response, but a response from someone you’ll want to hear from.

To use an analogy, imagine you enter a room full of women (or men). Using the quantity theory, you approach every prospect in the room. They each can see that you’re attempting to get success with each one of them. Knowing that you’re not putting much effort, only the least desirable prospects will be interested. Using the quality theory, you approach the hottest prospect in the room first, and you end up with a supermodel.