Older Women Write More
This is an OkTrends micro-post: weird, interesting, or provocative stuff that we've found in the online dating data mines.
Researching The Case For An Older Woman we looked at outgoing messages sent by women of all ages. We found that young women don’t write much in response to an initial “hello” from a man. Older women do. It’s an interesting trend that I’ve depicted with lines:
Of course, this makes sense when you think about the fact that Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck both were great writers and both eventually became very old:
 
|
I’m just kidding. That has nothing to do with anything. Anyhow, what do you guys think is behind this trend? Message length levels off in the late twenties; is it a generational thing?
I’m guessing how much they write is inversely proportional to how many messages they get. It’s probably a matter of time and how much effort they think they need to put in.
Super tangential comment, but your pictures remind me of one of my favorite pieces of Sesame Street silliness: Hiroshi’s run in with Flo Bear and Virginia the Wolf .
Is it not possible that older women get wordier initial messages? I’m pretty sure I get fewer content-light messages than do young vixens. Easier to respond expansively to messages that are themselves lengthier.
I guess you had to cut that graph off at 40 because my messages skewed the data. I take it as a personal challenge to peg the message length limit! (I’m 42)
It’s probably just a statistical anomaly. Young girls are single because they’re young. Old women are single because there’s something the matter with them. Marriage filters out the women that write the short messages because they are the most desirable. Writing long messages probably means a woman is intellectual and it’s a lot easier to date/marry a simple-minded women. That’s what I’m told by men who have tried both anyway.
I’m drawing a parallel between short messages and that whole idea that to make somebody like you, get them to talk about themselves. The short message girls probably know what they’re doing.
I believe older women write more because younger women are busier and do not have as much time on their hands.
It better fits the data to say that younger women write less.
Vesper has an easily tested point, though.
And has this been controlled for the length of the initial message? what’s the ratio of malemessage:femalereply length, over age range?