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You’ll learn a ton from this great funny book,
This is a fantastic book that I found both funny and insightful. Amy walks the reader through her dating trials and tribulations while weaving in some interesting tidbits about the history of computer dating and tips for finding success in online dating.
The method that the author illustrates for the readers allow us to get the same knowledge she did while hopefully avoiding the hundreds of dreadful dates she struggled through. I found her message to be positive and empowering by telling the reader that they CAN find true love and that they don’t need to settle or lower their standards. Ultimately it was settling and lowering her standards that caused her to go out on so many dates with the wrong men. As soon as she spent the time to discern what she valued in a mate and not date anyone unless they met her standards she met her husband.
Her approach is two-pronged:
1.Figure out what you want in a mate. Amy came up with 72 desirable traits in a mate and weighted each trait by how much it mattered to her. Later this balanced scorecard approach is what allowed her to sort through any potential matches and honestly evaluate if they would be a good fit for her in the long-run. Tolstoy said “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”. Much of Amy’s “dating” troubles were caused by rushing into “it” without knowing even knowing what “it” was. Given that finding a mate is the most important decision most people will make I’m surprised that more people don’t sit down and make a physical list of their values so they can quickly determine if a new significant other is worth their time. By reading about how Amy came up with her list of traits and weighted each trait she enables all of us to develop our own ranking formulas.
2.Take an honest look at yourself and present your true self in the most flattering light. This is the part that seems to irk other reviewers here on Amazon. Just like you’d probably wash your car before taking pictures of it to sell online you should probably take fresh photos specifically for your dating profile with you wearing clothes that make you look good. It helps to have a good enough friend so that they can be bitterly honest and tell you what does or does not look good on you. For Amy this friend/brutally honest adviser was her sister who told her where to shop, what kinds of colors would flatter her, etc. I never got the impression that Amy was telling men or women to lie about themselves. From the book I took away many great tips: the types of language one should use in their profile (positive & aspirational), the level of detail (short profiles), and how to interact with people you like (Feel free to make first move, but space interactions in the beginning, and keep first interactions fairly positive and light). These tips are not Amy telling the reader to hide themself or act shallow. These are factual methods proven to improve the number of interactions on these dating sites. As Amy witnesses, the most profiles that received the most traffic, the popular girls, end up as the #1 search result for more potential mates. Once you’ve got people sending you messages it’s time to sort out the best matches for you using the rubrick you created above.
The only real complaint I have is that the cover is BRIGHT Pink. I am a guy and I think this book would appeal to males, but the cover makes it abundantly clear that the target audience is females. If they do a reprint or paperback version I think that it’d appeal to a wider audience with a more gender neutral cover.
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|Data aspect of the book is a little weak,
I work with data as part of my job and I’ve been using online dating sites off and on since 2005 so this book seemed right up my alley. After reading about it on several websites to say I was anticipating reading this book wasn’t an understatement.
Basically, Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match is the story of writer Amy Webb who, after being frustrated with her initial attempts at online dating, decides to use data to game the system, have better results, and ultimately meet the man of her dreams. It is a premise that I am sure resonates with many online daters (I know it did for me) because there is often a stark difference between the way dating sites are presented in their commercials and the reality that many online daters experience when they sign up.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure this book lived up the hype. For starters, there just wasn’t enough focus on the ‘data’ part of the story for my tastes. Given its prominence in the title and the degree to which it was referenced in the articles I read before picking up the book, I was disappointed to find it comprised less than 1/3 of the content. The rest talks about the relationship and online dating struggles that lead her to game the system in the first place, the other things she did to improve her chances (i.e. going to the gym, buying new clothes, and getting a hair cut), and her experience dating after doing her research. To me these sections weren’t as interesting or compelling to me as the data side of the story in part. I think this was partially because her storytelling wasn’t really on par with the memoirs I usually read. Some of the scenes and details she shared in the book seemed unnecessary and distracting. After she finished her data collection the book had a hard time maintaining my interest and I had to focus to keep from skimming the rest of the book.
The data she gathered also wasn’t quite as eye opening as I expected. Many of the articles I’d read about the book prior to picking it up divulged almost entirely the big lessons from the book. Basically, I felt like if you read a lot of the coverage of the book you already got most of the meat of the story. Not to mention what she learned seemed surprisingly basic given the lengths that she went to in creating fake profiles and monitoring the interactions. Much of the advice she gives, i.e. the importance of attractive pictures that show you in your best light and convey that you are an approachable and easy going person, is available elsewhere on the internet, including the advice sections of the dating sites themselves. I don’t doubt that a lot of this information was helpful in 2005 as much less was written about online dating then, but in 2013 it comes off as a little basic. This is especially true when you compare this book to OkTrends, the blog for OkCupid. While that blog hasn’t been updated (at least at the time of this review) since 2011 and I do find their analysis a bit flawed at times, it is still much more in-depth and eye opening. Basically I could see her advice being useful to someone who is just starting out in online dating or who might be clueless about how to write a profile, but if you are a more seasoned online dater there is a good chance you’re doing a lot of what she writes about already. The one tip that I do think is less written about elsewhere is her suggestion that you turn your wants into a detailed, tiered rating system. If you’re someone who historically has dated men who don’t match up to what you really need, I could see this being a helpful exercise.
I also think she greatly oversimplifies what it takes to be a successful online dater. In a CBS News interview she was quoted as saying, “I want those folks to know that it’s just a matter of taking more control of their situations. Online dating sites can work very well, as long as you know how to really use them.” Personally, to me this seems like a gross oversimplification and I could see a lot of online daters feeling disappointed if they believed this to be true. In her book, after implementing her system Webb goes on just one additional date and finds her husband. But I’m not 100% that even if people followed her advice to a “T” they would have the same results, especially since the dating site landscape and how they display users has changed since Webb’s experience on JDate. I think if she had wanted this book to be more of a how-to than a memoir she would have had to include more experiences (especially men’s) beyond her own.
Overall, I found myself really disappointed in this book. Reading the coverage ahead of time it seemed like it a book that would be hard for me not to love, but it just didn’t live up to my expectations…
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|Trite, superficial, and shallow! A real drag,
I find it truly shocking that this book has received so much press, and can only attribute this phenomenon to the author’s professional background and media savvy, because it is so insipid that it doesn’t even hold up as an airplane read. As other reviewers have pointed out, there is no real “data” nor any pattern of constructive analysis presented in these pages, despite the fact that Webb contrives that device as the primary hook. In fact, this self-serving memoir tells the tale of a character who, having failed to salvage a clearly doomed romance (because they had “such a great beginning”), attempts to find a new mate online, begins cyber-stalking a bunch of women on JDate to figure out what makes them appealing (creepy), and drafts an exhaustive list of criteria for her ‘perfect match’- a 72 point list so superficial that if the author were male, she would draw comparisons to another author of her caliber, Tucker Max.
In order to find a meaningful connection with a life partner, she employs the tactics of a sociopath. Even in a digital world, Webb’s calculated, embittered, hyper-cerebral attempt at creating an attractive online persona is strikingly disingenuous. If you are a cyborg with no basic understanding of what makes humans vaguely appealing to other humans, you may glean a few dating tips from this book!
To the gentleman who slid her the check at the end of the meal on one of her ‘disastrous’ dates: I totally get it. If I had to sit through a meal with this boring, entitled blowhard, who undoubtedly spouted off about herself and her professional qualifications through the course of the entire meal- I would expect a free dinner too. (I sort of feel like she owes me a free dinner for my time spent reading this drivel).
This book sets feminism back 50 years and belongs in the flash-in-the-pan bargain bin next to that mid-nineties affectation, “The Rules”, where it will no doubt end up after Webb’s ride of self-promotion meets its natural end.
Unfortunately books like this do sell, because they provide the perfect vapid slush to fill space on venues like “The View”. For a good critical review, which provides some insight into the author, click here: […]
To summarize, I didn’t like the book! The pearl of wisdom that can be found in it, however, is the basic precept that if you want something, you should ask for it and expect it. This tidbit of wisdom would have been better served up as a facebook meme rather than an a droning full-length memoir.
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