January 30, 2012
OKCupid for the Polyamorous
Polyamory is all very nice and lovely, but not exactly something you can practice all by yourself. A recurring question in forums is: “where can I find these people?” Often, someone will recommend OKCupid, a free dating site. This was how I first heard about OKCupid (OKC), and after months of hesitation I found myself cumbersomely creating my first ever public dating profile. You see, I had never used dating sites before, and had some old-fashioned preconceptions about people who did; but I was forced to face the fact that polyamorous people are extremely thin on the ground and often closeted. They simply weren’t appearing spontaneously in my life through the usual routes of friends-of-friends or work colleagues.
I am far from a veteran on OKC, and I am sure that some of you reading this can add a lot to my advice (please do!). However, I now understand why OKC keeps being recommended over and over as a poly-friendly dating site, and I thought I would share a few tips for making the most of it.
Spell it out that you’re polyamorous
The more people do it, the easier it will be for us to find each other. Search for people who have used the words polyamory/polyamorous in their profile. Use the “match search” tool; in “advanced”, select “keywords”. You can combine searches (e.g., search for women, within 100 miles of you, with “polyamory” in their profiles).
If you tag the words “polyamory” and/or “polyamorous” in your profile, you’ll also get a direct line of access to others. Tag words by putting them between double brackets – [[polyamory]]. The word will then become a link in your profile: click on it to find others who have used the same tag.
Ensure high matches with polyamorous people by focusing on answering poly-relevant questions
First a few technicalities about how OKC works, in case you’re new to it. As expected, you’ll have a profile, including an area of free text where you present yourself in your own words, and you can upload photos. But the beauty of OKC, and what makes it truly poly-friendly, is in the questions it asks. They cover a lot of things, from hygiene habits (“how often do you shower?”), to religion (“how important is God in your life?”), to sex (“how often do you masturbate?”), to human rights (“do you agree with the death penalty?”), etc. From the answers people give, OKC calculates matching scores: the higher the score (up to 99%) the more compatible people are (for more details, see: http://www.okcupid.com/help/match-percentages).
Many of the questions in OKC are extremely poly-relevant. Some examples:
- “Is it okay for a married person to play around with someone with the permission of their spouse?”
- “Would you date someone who was currently in a relationship, knowing that you would be a secret?”
- “Would you date someone who was already in a committed relationship with someone else?”
Now consider two types of people you can find on dating sites: nice monogamous people looking for their twin souls would not play around with someone who’s married (even with the permission of their spouse), and would not date someone who is already in a relationship; dishonest players or cheaters (people just trying to get laid) may be fine with cheating and so on, but they lie about it, and so their profiles look very similar to those of nice monogamous people. This is the great advantage of internet dating from a polyamorous perspective – we tend to be quite unique in the way we answer these types of questions. Someone who admits on their dating profile that they are looking for honest open relationships is unlikely to be lying.
Now, there are thousands of questions on OKC, and most are not poly-relevant. If you answer plenty of those, it’s possible to have high matching scores with someone similar to you in, say, showering daily, liking cats, and not smoking, but who is not at all polyamorous. This is why I recommend focussing on answering poly-relevant questions. If you do, the matching scores become a real indicator of a poly-disposition, even for people who have never heard of polyamory before.
Reassuringly, all poly people I had met in person & with whom I connected well, and for whom I subsequently found an OKC profile, had very high matches with me (several had a 99% match). But keep in mind that a high score may simply mean that you agree on poly issues. You may not match at all in all other ways underpinning the great miracle of two people getting along. And it is not impossible that there are some dishonest players/cheaters out there preying on the polyamorous by telling us what we expect to hear.
So treat the matching scores simply as a tool for searching for potentially interesting people. You still need common sense, your own feel for people, and an investment in getting to know these people better.
Which brings me to my last tip:
Take it easy
I’ve been on OKC for over a year, but I haven’t still met anyone directly through the site. Maybe you’ll see it as a failure, but I am very happy with my experience there. How come?
Honestly, I don’t like the concept of dating. Meeting someone with the specific aim of “I am here to evaluate you, and to be evaluated by you, to decide if we can become potential partners” is not at all my idea of fun. Still, if I had already found nearby polys, with whom I can just go out for coffee in a low-stress-low-expectations meeting , I would have been happy to meet them (I live in a non-English speaking country, in a relatively small city; there are few locals on OKC, and no polys so far). On the other hand, travelling all the way to evaluate whether or not someone is a good potential partner sounds like a disastrous way of getting to know them.
So I am taking my time. Because here’s another advantage of being polyamorous: if you’re not desperate to find the-one-and-only, all of this internet dating activity can be very relaxed. It’s not as if the clock is ticking and you risk losing your dream date because someone else snatches him/her first: you can take the time to get to know people better, even while both of you see others. And it’s not as if people are either your soul mate or plainly uninteresting: they can become anything in-between, including occasional partners and/or friends.
I joined OKCupid to build my own poly-friendly community, and I have not been disappointed. It was where I first became sure that, yes, polyamorous people do exist, and they are perfectly normal. I found plenty of nice and friendly people, happy to connect and generous to share ideas and experiences. I got advice on relationship issues, information about meetings and events, new contacts, book and film recommendations, I have even got some guidance on DIY work. In the meantime, I have been building some nice friendships with people all over the world. I am sure I will meet some of them sooner or later, either under natural circumstances (e.g. if we happen to go to the same poly meeting) or by travelling specifically to meet them.
So, all in all, OKCupid has been a great way of expanding my polyamorous horizons, and I greatly recommend it.
14 Responses to OKCupid for the Polyamorous
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One warning- OKCupid, it turns out, does not play fair with your status.
I spent some time chatting to a prospective date, only to have her accuse me of “wasting her time”.
It turns out that, although I set my status to “seeing someone”, because I included dating options in what I’m seeking, OKCupid hides this and flags me up as “Available”.
So you *really* need to *explicitly* include poly in your profile for (as the lawyers say) “avoidance of doubt”.
in fact it does flag people either as “single” or as “available”. and so far it’s the only datingservice i ever saw that offers a difference between those. (but including poly is a great idea though)
They must have been new to have missed the difference between single and available! I’m pretty glad they make the distinction.
It is a very good idea though, to put the details in your profile.
You can quite straightforwardly answer a question and say “this is not at all important to me”
You can. But if the other person qualified the same question as “mandatory” and you have agreed in your answers that will contribute to make you a good match. I reckon that if a question is irrelevant to me, there is no point in answering it…
The other approach here is that my personal life (e.g. how many people I choose to be involved with at any given time) isn’t the business of strangers and doesn’t go on my internet profiles.
Seriously, this is third-date kind of stuff. And, furthermore, if you tag words like ‘polyamory’ in your profile, you might happen across people from the poly community. Ugh.
Yep, absolutely: if you want to avoid people from the poly community I emphatically recommend not mentioning ‘polyamory’ in your profile
Seriously though, your point is a good one. There are two approaches for polyamorous people on OKC: either to be very explicit in your profile as a way of pre-filtering people (but losing privacy in the process); or being guarded and filtering people afterwards (but losing time).
I opted for the first one because I already follow the second strategy in my normal life. I don’t introduce myself with a “hi, I’m polyamorous”, I agree with you it’s third-date kind of stuff. But the odds of meeting polyamorous people like that seem extremely slim, both in real-life and on OKC. Given that I already have a lot of nice and interesting monogamous people in my life, I joined OKC specifically to find polyamorous people, and it helps if I spell it out.
Having said that, my profile is very guarded in identifying details, to avoid the risk of bumping into acquaintances with whom I have no interest in discussing my love and sex life.
I’ve found 3 poly partners on OKC since joining 18 months ago. One thing that I do find frustrating is that my male partner never receives messages but I do. I find it irritating that the stupid gendered rules of dating are carried over into online dating, where the majority of women sit back and wait for messages to come in and men have to do all the chasing. Can’t more women be more active agents in seeking out poly partners?
I don’t know, it just seems such a shame that the sort of awesome poly people who are throwing away gender and monogamy boundaries in their relationships often still remain in these gendered dating roles. I guess socialised behaviour is a little tricky to be rid of.
I blogged about this a little while ago (shameless plug alert)
http://dayasalion.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/online-dating-gender-norms-crystallized/
I (male) am on OKC since ages and made the same experience. I’ve never had more hits on my profile than at the time when my female partner linked my profile into hers and it amost never happens that I’m actively approached. I guess my message/reply ration is somewhere around 1/10.
Still it’s a very nice platform, found good real-life friends there
I don’t get this, I am pretty certain you can put you are Polyamorous on your profile without spelling out exact details of your relationships. I am pretty vague on all my profiles but one thing that is clear is I am Poly. I do not want to meet Monogamous people, I want to meet people who understand my lifestyle and are sympathetic to the restrictions it puts on my life.
Wrt gender roles. I have never waited to be contacted, but I can bet I send much fewer messages than the average man on there. I think it is easy when it comes to your partner to know he is so awesome that everyone should know this but from what I have experienced on many sites is, the male to female ratio is always higher, women often have enough to deal with when it comes to the inbox clutter they often get and women are more often likely to read the content of a profile than look at a picture. if they don’t entirely like what they read (be it, not into Poly or not interested in the same hobbies or just don’t like a man’s picture) they will not send a message. Don’t be so keen to chalk it up to female passivity.
Of course, all your points are valid re: volume of messages etc, which is why I did not say *all* women, but *many* women. I know several men on the poly scene and they all say that they do not receive messages from women, or do so very rarely. They have to keep sending out loads to receive even a handful of replies.
Now some of that will be due to numbers, but if you are receiving lots of messages that you can choose to reply to or ignore and that keeps you quite busy, you are probably less likely to go looking and messaging. Ditto if you know you can visit a guy’s profile and know he’ll probably message you for doing so. I think some of it is socialised passivity and some of it is laziness brought about by convenience. Meanwhile the guys have to keep searching and messaging and potentially not receiving many replies, which can get disheartening. It just seems to me that in an ideal world it’d be a little more fair.
Ain’t *that* the truth.
I changed my profile since I wrote the above. I added two things ‘please do not message me unless you are a.b and c’ and ‘please do not send me one liner messages’
Since then I received 5 one line messages from non alternative people and only one of whom wrote more than ‘Hello Sexy/Lovely/smiley’ or any other pathetic greeting which I specifically asked them not to.
It is quite clear that my profile was not even read, why on earth would you blame a woman for ignoring such?
[...] generated by the site are more likely to be into non-monogamy. I couldn’t agree more with Polytical’s assessment: I joined OKCupid to build my own poly-friendly community, and I have not been disappointed. It was [...]