The Infinite Pussy Glitch: The Data Behind Dating as an Eligible Man in NYC

What's it like to date as an eligible NYC bachelor with over 2,000 likes?

What is it like to date as a desirable man in NYC?

Message from man in question

I recently encountered a man who showed me that he had 1896 pending likes from women on his Hinge profile.

Given that most men complain about the lack matches they get (with 1-5 likes per week being a common reported number), I was curious to give some color to another male experience.

At 2031 likes over 3 years, that pencils out to 13 per week. However, Hinge shows your profile to more potential matches the more you send out successful outbound likes.

With some rebalancing, during this man’s most active periods, I’d suspect the actual number of inbound likes was more like 75-150 per week if he maintained the same pickiness ratio.

I convinced him to send me his Hinge data, which I will analyze here for your voyeuristic enjoyment and education.

Who is this man?

We’ll call him Adam.

Adam is a 5’10”, 35 year old blonde Caucasian man who went to a name brand college and founded a startup.

His main profile photo is a Gatsby-esque shot of him lifting a whiskey glass while wearing a tux. He doesn’t look like Leo, but I would say the raw attractiveness level isn’t horrifically different - the majority of women would likely agree that he is above average in looks.

Over a roughly 3 year span, he paid for Hinge and never deleted any inbound likes, meaning we finally have the ability to roughly calculate his pickiness.

I was baffled at the profiles waiting in purgatory: “She’s really hot!” I exclaimed, referring to one profile of a blonde in a bikini.

“A lot of the girls that like me seem kind of basic,” he said.

When I got his dataset, I noticed that he set his racial preference to Latina (not a dealbreaker). At that point, all the 31-year-old blonde physical therapists in bikinis who never received responses made sense.

I would estimate the vast majority of women were about average or above average in appearance.

The Numbers

135 of his inbound likes resulted in matches, meaning 2031 (1896 + 135) likes in total.

This being a 3 year (36 month) run, he gets an average of at least 56 likes per month, of which he matches with roughly 3-4. I assume that likes coming from deleted profiles would disappear, so this is definitely an undercount.

Inbound Match Rate

So if you are a woman sending Adam a like, you have a 6.6% chance, at best, of matching with him on average.

From like to attempt at meeting up, the percentage drops to 1.3% (27 attempts out of 2031 inbound likes).

Honestly, this helps explain why my own outbound match rate seems quite low and match rate for roses seems even lower.

345 Matches in 3 Years

Adam came out of a long term relationship three years ago and began online dating in earnest afterwards. He took a career sabbatical in 2022 which resulted in his heaviest stint of dating.

I tried to do something a little prettier by hand drawing a dual Sankey diagram that differentiates between outbound and inbound matches.

Comments Boost Match Rate by 58%

If Adam wants to maximize his match rate, the most obvious thing from the data is to send out a comment with his like.

Likes with comments matched at 58% higher rate than likes without (25% vs 16%).

But a Comment Signifies Interest - 70% more likely to message

However, what I always wondered as a woman was how much a comment signified actual intent.

Are men who leave comments truly more motivated? Should I reject likes without comments?

The data here is pretty clear. Adam was 70% more likely to send a message (69% vs 40%) and 3x as likely to meet up with women who received comments.

• So as a man, the quickest way to boost your match rate is to leave a comment with every like.

• As a woman, the quickest way to filter out lower intent suitors is to only match with men that leave a comment.

Granted, this is just one man’s dataset, but intuitively, I think it makes sense.

It’s interesting to contrast this with my own experience with comments on Hinge. I personally didn’t see a difference in match rate with and without comment, but I think that men are probably more likely to be unswayed if they don’t find me physically attractive in the first place and I possibly also only sent comments for higher demand men.

Inbound vs outbound match messaging

He messages 85% of inbound matches but only 60% of outbound matches.

This suggests that he’s more intentional about matching with his inbound likes.. Outbound likes are more speculative, so if they do match, he’s less likely to message.

Attempts to Meetup

He tries to meet up with about 24% of matches that he messages.

This was determined through messages that contained phone numbers or the word “date”, “hangout”, etc.

21% Outbound Match Ratio

His overall outbound match ratio is 21%, mine is about 23%. Given that women on average have far higher match ratios than men (for Tinder Insights, they benchmark at 2.5% for men vs 30% for women), his seems exceptional, although I don’t have any benchmarking data for men on Hinge.

Subjective Attractiveness

Adam estimates that the women presented to him in his stack is more attractive than the women that appear in his inbound likes.

How the Hinge Algo Works: Total # of outbound matches determines visibility boost, not likes sent

So this gives further clarification to how Hinge’s algorithm works.

In the article examining my own data, I found a .93 correlation between outbound likes and inbound matches.

However, I was able to further clarify this with Adam’s data.

The correlation between likes sent and inbound matches in his dataset was only 0.77.

What I found was that just sending the likes alone don’t have the best correlation - it’s the total number of matches that resulted from likes.

This is correlated at .95 with Adam’s dataset.

So if you’re looking for your profile to be surfaced to more attractive potential dates, it’s a game of the rich getting richer: the more successful outbound likes you send, the better the visibility with attractive potential partners.

So if you only have pictures of dank Reddit memes as your photos and spam the system with 10,000 likes, it won’t work.

345 Matches. 9.32 Matches Per Month

Over time, you can see Adam’s activity dwindling off (he started a more demanding job in 2024).

My Takeaways

Well, thank you Adam for sharing your data!

Some main takeaways:

The Importance of Being Someone’s “Type”

It reinforced my view that romantic rejection is often a matter of not matching a potential target’s “type”. A lot of Adam’s rejected inbound likes were clearly attractive, accomplished women, just not to his individual taste.

Intuitively, this phenomenon should be more exaggerated when either women or men have a lot of options. They have limited time and more “qualified” potential matches, so they would lean more heavily on subjective factors, sort of like how Harvard could fill its freshman class entirely with valedictorian applicants twice over. No one will ever be everyone’s cup of tea.

The action item here is to market yourself on an app as the best, authentic version of yourself. You will never fit everyone’s taste. The challenge is to appeal as strongly as possible to those that already like your type.

There will be people that are into shy, introverted people. There will be people that are into hard-charging businessmen. There will be people into sensitive, artistic types. Don’t try to appeal to some imagined, generic middle ground: the beauty of (monogamous) dating is that you’re just trying to find an audience of one.

Aesthetic Preferences in Dating

Seeing Adam’s stated racial preferences was kind of fascinating because I realized that I didn’t fall within them. It reminds me of this stupid Facebook video meme that gave advice to women to marry a man for whom they were his preferred physical type since they theorized it would lead to stronger marriages. (People in the comments cried about how people’s outsides change over time, etc. of course)

I think there’s really something to be said about this - there have been comedic skits about men on dates declaring, “I don’t date women based on looks anymore,” then cutting to the woman sitting there, deeply unimpressed.

As much as we hate the shallowness of dating and attraction, women (and I think men too!) have a deep seated need to feel physically desired by their partners. I certainly have this expectation of a serious partner, and so should any person with a healthy self-esteem.

So, when you get all upset about the shallowness of attraction, maybe think about that. How ok would you be with a partner who said, “I think you’re pleasant looking enough, but I’m really with you because I think you’re an amazing human being”?

I suspect that part of you would be uncomfortable with that.

Random assorted notes:

• As a side note, this is why I find it deeply absurd people get butthurt when someone they’re attracted to state physical preferences that don’t include them.

• It also made me think about the extreme skepticism often given to men who mostly date Asian women. If people really care to hear my hot take on this, I would be happy write an essay on it, but basically: if dating an Asian woman is about sharing similar values and matching preferred physical traits, I see no issue with it.

• These numbers helped give some color to the sometimes depressing experience as a woman on dating apps in NYC, as well as a pretty strong directive that your experience on Hinge is very much informed by your own usage patterns.

If people enjoy this, or want to volunteer their own datasets for me to analyze, please speak up! Would love to hear about what kinds of numbers other NYC men are seeing for context.