Data, A Love Story
How I Cracked the Online Dating Code to Meet My Match
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4.2 • 38 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Amy Webb found her true love after a search that's both charmingly romantic and relentlessly data-driven. Anyone who uses online dating sites must read her funny, fascinating book.”—Gretchen Rubin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project
After yet another disastrous date, Amy Webb was preparing to cancel her JDate membership when epiphany struck: her standards weren’t too high, she just wasn’t approaching the process the right way. Using her gift for data strategy, she found which keywords were digital-man magnets, analyzed photos, and then adjusted her (female) profile to make the most of that intel. Then began the deluge—dozens of men who actually met her own stringent requirements wanted to meet her. Among them: her future husband, now the father of her child.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful, funny journey through online dating, Webb, a compulsively organized journalist and digital strategist, tries to find the perfect man by putting herself in his shoes. After the end of a relationship, Webb develops a 1,500-point ranking system for her ideal partner, but she can't seem to find him. In an elaborate masquerade, she creates a fake JDate profile as a man to discover what kind of woman seduces Mr. Right. Webb's advice for dating both on and offline is insightful (and data-driven), and her descriptions of meddling family members, bad dates, and worse profiles are hilarious and familiar to anyone who's tried dating online. Some story elements feel slightly misplaced and glossed over her mother's illness is a confusing plot thread, and there are too many details about George Michael. While some of her best advice is stashed in an appendix, her tips for creating and managing an online dating profile are trenchant. The story of her own experiment is funny, brutally honest, and inspirational even to the most hopeless dater.
Customer Reviews
Great Read :-)
Really enjoyed the book.
Cute but lacking substance.
Despite the title, the book is more about story than data. I'm glad things worked out well for the author, but the dating advice isn't anything exceptional. ("Be cheerful, appealing, and as inoffensive as possible" basically.)
Folks looking for dating advice can learn more - for free - by perusing the posts on OkCupid's blog. That's some actual math-nerd data-crunching.
To be fair, readers more in the market for a rom-com story arc, where the heroine overcomes adversity and bags her dream guy - which she appears to have done - may react more positively than I did.