Crowd-source your dating decisions

Her: You’ve read his Match.com profile at least 10 times. He’s an urban professional seeking the same. He’s 6 feet tall (yeah, right!), enjoys the outdoors, chillin’ at home with a good movie, and spending time with friends and family. Sound familiar?

Him: You’ve checked her out on Facebook and she seems promising. She’s a traffic-stopping blonde whose looks are rivaled only by a killer bod. She prefers jeans and flip-flops to trendy clothes, would rather slum it at the neighborhood pub than a fancy club, is low maintenance (yeah, right!) and outgoing, loves giving massages, and digs your fave brew. Is she the real deal or too good to be true?

It’s pretty hard to figure out what someone is really like from those scripted responses to basic questions on dating and social networking sites. And let’s face it, not everyone is totally honest in their online profile. While sites that match singles based on assessment results may help a bit, many people would rather watch paint dry than spend an afternoon filling out a 20-page personality test on chemistry.com or eharmony.

So, what’s a singleton to do? Crowd-source, of course! We crowd-source just about every other decision we make in life, so why not our romantic ones? The collective wisdom that comes from others familiar with your new love interest far exceeds the opinion of any “date coach” (seemingly all the rage these days) or computer that matches you based on some fancy statistical algorithm.

People’s behavior is simply too complex to predict with a high degree of accuracy. Not to mention the interaction effect - even harder to predict - that occurs when two unique people join forces as a couple. As a psychologist and statistician, I assure you this is true. But, I also know that one of the best predictors of future behavior is past behavior, so daters’ best hopes of finding their ideal match is to learn from others’ relationship experiences with the person that has piqued their interest.