First dates are awkward. There is so much you want to know about the person across the table from you, and yet so little you can directly ask.
This post is our attempt to end the mystery. We took OkCupid's database of 275,294 match questions—probably the biggest collection of relationship concerns on earth—and the 776 million answers people have given us, and we asked:
Love, sex, a soulmate, an argument, whatever you're looking for, we'll show you the polite questions to find it. We hope they'll be useful to you in the real world.
First—define "easy to bring up"
Before we could go looking for correlations to deeper stuff, our first task was to decide which questions were even first-date appropriate. I know each person has his own opinion on what's okay to talk about with a stranger. I also know that if I had to wade through hundreds of thousands of user-submitted questions like these verbatim examples:
I would go fucking insane. The basic currency of the Internet is human ignorance, and, frankly, our database holds a strong cash position!
So, instead of judging each question's first-date appropriateness subjectively, I turned to statistics. I decided our candidates were the ones that (a) most people were comfortable discussing publicly, and (b) were mathematically likely to tell you something you couldn't just guess. I sliced OkCupid's question pool like this:
That blue rectangle is our highest-quality, least-invasive questions, and we next examined each of them for interesting correlations. (If you're interested in knowing more about the above graph, you can drop-down an explanation here, complete with an interactive scatter plot that took me forever to make.)
Now let's get right to the results. This is the shallow stuff to ask when you want to know something deep:
![](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="125" height="30"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
Okay, if you want to know...
Will my date have sex on the first date?
Ask...
- Do you like the taste of beer?
Because...
Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date.
No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they've just met. Sadly, this is the only question with a meaningful correlation for women. For men there are a few others:
| predictive question |
implied odds of first-date sex |
|
Q: In a certain light, wouldn't nuclear war be exciting?
|
'yes'⇒83% |
|
Q: Assuming you were in the position to do so, would you launch nuclear weapons under any circumstances?
|
'yes'⇒82% |
|
Q: Could you imagine yourself killing someone?
|
'yes'⇒82% |
First, I have to give guys credit for logical thinking: in the post-apocalypse, THERE ARE NO SECOND DATES.
Also, I will never look at fingerless gloves the same way again.
If you want to know...
Do my date and I have long-term potential?
Ask your date (and yourself!)...
- Do you like horror movies?
- Have you ever traveled around another country alone?
- Wouldn't it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?
Of all questions appropriate to a first date, the three listed above were the ones couples most often agreed on.
Here's how we know...
When someone deletes their OkCupid account, they have these 3 questions correlated best to a real-world relationshipthe option of giving us a reason, and if that reason is 'I met somebody on OkCupid,' they can give us their significant other's username. Many hundreds of people a day go through the trouble of doing this, so we've compiled an excellent dataset of real-world couples. Agreement on these three questions correlated best to an actual relationship.
In fact, 32% of successful couples agreed on all of them—which is 3.7× the rate of simple coincidence. These questions as a trio even out-performs OkCupid's top three user-rated match questions.
Turistas: the best date movie of all time?
If you want to know...
Do my date and I have the same politics?
Ask him or her...
- Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?
Because...
We were very surprised to find that this one question very strongly predicts a person's ideas on these divisive issues:
In each case, complexity-preferrers are 65-70% likely to give the Liberal answer. And those who prefer simplicity in others are 65-70% likely to give the Conservative one.
This correlation is for a nationwide dataset; it won't be as useful in places where one ideology is much more prevelant than the other. For example, in New York City there are lots of people who like simplicity and yet have Liberal politics.
If you want to know...
Is my date religious?
Ask...
- Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?
If your date answers 'no'—i.e. is okay with bad grammar and spelling—the odds of him or her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1.
As someone who is not himself a believer, I found it rather heartening that tolerance, even on something trivial like this, correlated with belief in God, although I should've figured out that religious people are okay with small mistakes. Next to intelligent design, what's a couple typos?
It's also nice when two completely independent datasets corroborate each other. Last summer, we analyzed the profile text of half a million user profiles, comparing religion and writing-level. For every one of the faith-based belief systems listed, the people who were the least serious wrote at the highest level.
Actually a simple “What would you like to drink?” will probably answer the question nicely.
I’m not going to touch the grammar/spelling question with a ten foot pole. I’ve known devout Episcopalians who were so pedantic that even I couldn’t hold a conversation with them, and agnostics and atheists who didn’t know the difference between “their” “there” and “they’re”. In my experience the most literate crowd tend to fall under the “Other” category.
I can see it now. Jury selection voir dire starts using okc data to filter people out.
Seriously though, great use of stats. Likes.
RE: Anonymouse
Yes. Type, for example, “sailboat” in the search box. You will be presented with “all results” and given the option to filter “tests”, “journal posts”, “forum comments”… and “questions”. Obviously you want questions.
I’m really tempted to reset my profile and answer only these three questions.
“There is so much you want to know about the person across the table from you, and yet so little you can directly ask.”
…and already you have it wrong.
If one’s personality does not allow one to just openly talk about and ask about the things that interest you, then one has some work ahead of oneself in the realm of self-improvement.
There is no taboo outside of the ones we allow to be created.
You can ask anyone _ANYTHING_ if you can phrase/say/frame it well enough.
Whether you will get an honest answer(or whether that is even the point) is of course another matter entirely.
Other than that, yet another great to read, super-fun survey essay.
I <3 OKC for this.![:)](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="15" height="15"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
The tolerance thing was a nice touch. I often have a fair bit of difficulty finding ways to give a positive spin to intelligent design folks so that I’m not just relentlessly badmouthing them.
I greatly enjoy the writing style of this article…I find it to be humorously refreshing. Although, I do have to lodge my complaint about a person’s religious level being a good indicator of their intelligence. I am the most particular person I know when it comes to writing intelligently and communicating on an above-average level. However, I am a very religious person. I also know plenty of agnostic and atheist individuals that have zero concern for grammar. In fact, some of them are pretty un-intelligent.
It’s definitely a funny correlation but I wanted to remind everyone that it’s a generalization that is unkind to all parties.
@Diane – That is the VERY first thing I thought….why is everyone writing on a 9th grade level at the highest? Scary!
The relationship between religiousness and spelling/grammar makes perfect since. I would think a similar correlation would be found between the religious and those with higher education. Religious people have different life priorities and different social connections than the non-religious. To them the person and their relationship to God is paramount. Those who have dedicated time and expense to higher education have knowledge and performance as their priorities. To them proper spelling and grammar are badges of honor and accomplishment. They are part of their right of passage.
@ Cosmic_7: How can you make a valid point when you are writing in incomplete sentences?
My God likes me to work on my education so that I can be the brightest and best person possible. That’s why he put me here, not to sit around and waste away.
So if someone doesn’t drink at all. Does it mean no sex ever haha… This is ridiculous.. because I don’t drink, but I like sex, but of course I would most likely not have sex on the 1st date![:)](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="15" height="15"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
The section dealing with literacy in relations to religion is slightly upsetting. I am Christian and am in a higher education system. My grades have been outstanding compared to many of my atheist classmates. I’m an INTJ female and my IQ is around 135, so I’d like to think that I’m not necessarily unintelligent…
I understand that there are many of the poorer individuals that need to be accounted for, as they rely pretty heavily on religion because they cannot afford to chase a powerful career track or pursue higher education, but people need to understand that not every Christian is a toothless bible-thumper.
This was a funny article, though. Good job.
Statistics don’t lie but the data has a heavily US bias. Although I am a conservative in Canada, by my answers I skew very liberal in the US. Canada just has a higher level of tolerance and tends to be somewhat less polarized on issues than the US currently is. This article was very informative, I would like to see similar analysis’s excluding the US dataset to see if the truths revealed are universal or very culturally dependent.
Now I see where I have been going wrong…I was leading with “do you like the taste of roofies?” Or “do you like the smell of chloroform?”
Beer seems a much safer subject.
It is really confusing to read between the lines of a conversation to really establish whether their idealogy is simular or close to another. Establishing if this is going to be a long term relationship or not. Who is a mind reader? I am not, so do I watch for body language, the pupil of the eye response. So does a woman always keep in the back of her mind all men want is sex, reguardless of any level of conversation. There is a definite first question conversations that guarantee nothing, from trying to understand the mind of a man?????I need definites so that I will not get hurt!!!!
Enjoyable read. Statistics are fun.
I wish we could comment on the individual comments though. Note Cosmic_7′s keen observations regarding the obvious correlation between religious beliefs and spelling/grammar but uses the word “since” instead of “sense”. Are we to assume he or she is religious?
Here is my practical, oversimplified version of what I gleaned from this post.
Are you desperate enough to drink something as foul as beer? Then you probably are desperate enough to sleep with someone on your first date.
Only hang out with people that are comfortable spending time on sailboats OR have travelled to another country (preferably alone).
Simple-minded people are probably conservative. Talk to them only for entertainment out of fascination.
“…although I should’ve figured out that religious people are okay with small mistakes. Next to intelligent design, what’s a couple typos?”
People who aren’t bothered by typos are likely more religious and less intelligent. If you have the option, don’t spend time with them.
Cosmic_7 says:
February 8, 2011 at 3:39 pm
“The relationship between religiousness and spelling/grammar makes perfect since.”
hee hee.
Hm. I have never really had this problem. First dates are great. Now I just need to get one.
Your 4 questions about conservatism vs liberalism are biased. 2 of them are religion based not conservatism based. Being a conservative means having a strict and “conservative” interpretation of the Constitution. Not the bible or how it pertains to the State.
Quite a few people here seem to be concerned that the highest-level writers on here average a ninth-grade writing level. Don’t worry. This problem occurs because it’s just not necessary to use more complicated vocabulary and sentence structure than that on a dating site.
^_^ Every one of the example questions brings up the exact opposite result for me, but I’m resigned to being a statistical outlier. Now to check how my girlfriend answered those three questions… (not to mention how I answered them. It’s been a while).
There is no way that removing the subliterate only took away about a seventh of the results. No way.
my big hang up is, contrary to what you say, are grammatically poor and useless. Th questions are painfully superficial.
an example:
a conversation between another member and I
-you said “no” to “if a partner cheated, would you forgive them?”
-you would? I couldn’t take them back!
-the question was “would you forgive them, not will you take them back”
It’s a bad question. It hasn’t been qualified and there are too many like this…
is a guy/girl who sleeps with 100 people a bad person?
bad person. what is a bad person? I’d like to have more faith but I don’t…
I love the writing of this article along with the careful dissection of statistics in correlation to the hidden reasoning behind the questions. Everything makes sense and it’s a great way to avoid beating around the bush without being blatantly forward. These questions will soon be put to the test by me![:)](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="15" height="15"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
If I want to know if someone is religious I just ask them. Surely the same can be said for some of the other questions?
Usually on a first “date” either myself or the other person asks the same three consecutive questions usually with the same response:
1.) Do you drink? (yes = good)
2.) Do you smoke? (no = good)
3.) Are you religious? (no = good)
Is it not better to be open and upfront with each other from the get go? Assuming that the way person answers one question implies an answer to the other does not make for a solid foundation, just ask the question you want to know the answer to?!
This is literally retarded. Everyone is different…. If someone is secure enough in themselves and their personality, they have no reason to be awkward or nervous on the first date.
As someone stated already, statistics are quite fun. As an atheist, I find it funny how every study with correlations between religion and intelligence always finds the nonbelievers at the higher end of the spectrum. Its quite nice to see the stats here on OKCupid concur with other major studies.
Heres another:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224132655.htm
I’m a Divinity student who is annoyed by grammatical mistakes and spelling errors; however, I make them too, so I hope am at least as gracious with others as I am with myself. And as someone in a Divinity faculty at a world-class research university, I’m not shocked at the perception that education/knowledge and faith dance poorly together. I do not find my education and my faith fundamentally in conflict, though, and I am not a Christian fundamentalist.
Okay people, listen. Just because you don’t conform to what the stat analysis shows, DOESN’T MAKE IT INVALID.
Even on their most co-related, it’s 2:1. That means that for every three people, one won’t fit. So it doesn’t matter than you’re an atheist who cares about grammar, or a non-beer drinker who puts out. That’s consisten with their analysis – unless you’re actually 100,000,000 people. (ps: you’re not.)
I’ve slept with about 40 women in my life–15 on the first date and 10 on the second.
I’m male and the only beer I’ll drink is lambic. Otherwise I hate the taste of beer.
I prefer a mixture of simple and complex people in my life.
I’m liberal.
Spelling and grammar mistakes drive me crazy.
I’m agnostic and somewhat serious about it.
Seems to ring true for the most part…
This can’t be true. I’m a devout Christian and very, very smart so my personal experience wholly refutes this data.
Absolutely spot on for me. I despise beer and wouldn’t dream of having sex for the first couple of dates. Unless of course I had known them as friends for a period of time prior to the dates, then it would probably happen sooner, still not on the first though. I’m an atheist and quite serious about it, bad grammar/spelling is the bane of my existence… well not exactly but it does piss me off! Very interesting I must say
Is Angel-Thane the only one here who can read? A few Christians with degrees and an IQ of over 100 doesn’t prove the statistics wrong, nor does the fact that a few beer drinking readers hope to be getting it on on the first date prove it right.
Hey, I’m pretty sure those Trappist monks wouldn’t even be going on a first date, much less have sex. Yet I’m pretty sure many of them like the taste of beer. And on average they would probably score decently in both spelling and IQ tests. But they’re a minority…
There’s an interesting correlation between OKC religion or race and literacy or capacity to exist in our complex, diverse society without trying to oppress others, and last year’s Pew Forums study of religious and cultural facts underlying 1st Amendment issues linked to the PBS Religion in America documentary. While OKC’s large pool enables more refinement of many details, Pew’s survey followed random sample methodology, professionally documented as to details, and scaled some percentage levels not practical with OKC questions.
Unfortunately, both point to a need to change US standards for majority if we’re to demand people competent to oversee government as our agents, as voters, jurors, and shaping children. Pew found black evangelicals ranked lowest, and then Hispanics, Catholics, and Protestants, the latter averaging only 50% correct answers. Only Mormons, Jews, atheists, and post-grad degree holders averaged passing scores, and the latter two of those only high “D” grades. Taking the Pew sample questions informally, only Unitarian-Universalists scored on average over 80%, not surprising if one considers their average education is between 1 and 2 post-grad degrees, andthat UU “Principles” require one to be religiously literate enough to tackle finding personal answers to complex tough questions. It might be interesting to see more questions that consider why OKC attracts a range of fairly bright UU’s, relative to the literacy, complex reality, and other issues studied.
Were a competency test not perverted by political corruption to replace an age bright line defining legal majority, we’d likely see a 90% drop in severe child abuse cases, but only 2 percent of humans ever qualify for inclusion as adults, entitled to rights that also anticipate capacity to be responsible both in and for society. That paradox is present already, except in a different form of graduating 6th grade and lower literacy kids as if adults from public schools, and then pretending they’re capable of adult demands in this complex society.
It might be amusing if not a common pathology for a few self described high IQ Christians to claim their existence proves the statistical work of quite bright Harvard math grads on OKC data wrong. One could suggest that illustrates instead an obsessive-compulsive delusion pattern for those not coping well with complex issues of that actual reality, as well as a need for us to consider the concepts of Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences”. The fact that a few deviant data points are expected in a demographic distribution also shows the lack of critical thinking common in our society, and why it’s so difficult to discuss more complex “barbell” rather than “Bell” race and IQ or sexuality distribution issues. It hardly proves individual case causation or predictive capacity, but denial of complex distributions is fitting to OKC’s findings on its suggested religiosity indicator of simplicity. There’s an outside chance OKC founders, with their academic credentials, might have seen a treatise by a black Yale law professor who was also a theologian back in the 1990′s, that posited an extensive theory about how it was in fact personality development or lack thereof, and seeking simplicity by those not developing coping skills for complex reality, that drives some to compulsively seek simplistic “one right way” rigid dogma driven theology, far more than any actual interest or belief in the related theology.
Hey, OKC, why play into the dating paradigm for sex? That’s almost like those old saw “sex before marriage” questions, that implicitly promote a prejudicial fraud that the two are related. I’ve had good long term relationships with zero dates before sex, and not paid attention to warning flags dating for months before sex. There are more ways than ever now to communicate and interact via media with different traits as to what thought, perception, and feeling patterns are drawn out or minimized, in person or long distance, that don’t rely on traditional dating rituals. OKC could study who’s really looking primarily for sex, versus what criteria others apply in deciding. It’s hard to reduce that to text, but for me there has to be some level of trust and respect, but moreso a sense of connection, spiritually and as an elusive to define “interesting person”, without strong danger flags of major personality type clashes or mental health issues. I view sex as part of strong, healthy connection to a partner as a whole person. That doesn’t follow a date counter pattern.
As a fairly serious religious person (somewhere in between “very serious” and “somewhat serious”) I’m extremely disheartened by that last statistic. We are our own worst enemy, most of the time. Come on, people! Use your heads!
Since you’re ‘very, very smart’ then you should understand how statistics work. One exception (or even many) to a statistic doesn’t ‘wholly refute the data’, it would just make you an “outlier”, or put you in the upper quartile of the group.
Judging from all the comments here from people that don’t understand statistics, I fear that too many people are going to go on a date and ask their date “Do you like the taste of beer?” and the date will say “yes” and then the person will say “Ok, let’s go get a room.” …and it won’t go well and they will think okcupid is stupid.
“This can’t be true. I’m a devout Christian and very, very smart so my personal experience wholly refutes this data.”
Typical ‘I’m right, and everyone else is wrong’ thought process of any other christian. Once again denying science and test results. You’re just made because you know it’s true.
Some people are posting responses saying things like “But I don’t do these things!” Remember that you are one person, and the people that you know are just a few more people. You are nothing compared to the overall amount of users polled for this sort of thing. You may be an outlier, sure, but overall, the statistics tell all.
This is the funniest thing I have read in a long long time. Facts and figures, charts and graphs to show the data…with the most amazingly ridiculous conclusions but guess what? I think I believe it, will probably even try some of the questions out myself. “Crazy but true”. You hear that alot, so…Next you should do a study on top ten questions you can ask to spot a crazy chick. LOL
no one has commented on this – or can someone please explain this:
“Do my date and I have long-term potential? Ask your date (and yourself!)…
» Do you like horror movies?
» Have you ever traveled around another country alone?
» Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?”
BECAUSE I would HATE to do any of the three listed: (Horror movies give me nightmares, what’s the point of traveling alone (its expensive & you have no one to share the memories with), and I get sea sick . SO DOES THIS MEAN I HAVE NO LONG-TERM POTENTIAL with most American Men? Seriously, why do these couples like to do the above three things? Am I missing something?