This is part three of a seven part series on using OKCupid for the non-monogamous and others seeking polyamory or open relationships. It is cowritten with Molly Rene. This week: Answering Match Questions.
Table of Contents
- Introduction / What Is OKCupid?
- Writing a Dating Profile
- Answering Match Questions
- Finding People on OKCupid
- Meeting People on OKCupid
- Extra Features of OKCupid
- Conclusion: Finding Polyamorous Love
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OKCupid is a unique dating site because OKCupid is all about the questions. With thousands of questions submitted and voted on by its users, you can easily spend days of idle time answering them. Based on your answers, OKCupid will decide how you match to individuals, but also the user base as a whole. In addition to each pairings’ percentage match, there is also a profile tab which shows how the user compares to the average — for example, whether the site thinks you are more or less kinky than most. To answer more questions, just go to the Matches menu at the top of the site and choose Improve Matches.
Each question comes with two to four possible answers. In addition to giving your own answer, you are also given the opportunity to select how you’d like your imaginary perfect match to answer. You can also select how important the question is to you — from irrelevant, meaning you don’t care at all how other people answer, all the way up to mandatory. Finally, with each question you are given the opportunity to make your answers public or keep them private — private answers are invisible to other users, but are still used when calculating matches.
Mandatory is a bit of a misnomer — OKCupid can tell these questions are very important to you, but it will still try to match you up with people who disagree about these questions. However, if you mark all polyamory-related questions as mandatory, it will make a significant difference in the ease of finding others. You’ll also have your own important, hot-button topics — like Dangerous Lilly, it is mandatory for my dates to know what wherefore means.
There are a lot of just plain stupid questions, and almost all questions can be skipped if you don’t like them. There are probably a couple dozen questions directly relating to open relationships, and many more which address important topics about sex and dating. You can also choose to comment on your answers, which may help clarify polyamory or personal quirks. Make sure you put some thought into your answers — there may be things about yourself which are undesirable in a match, or vice versa.
There are two schools of thought when it comes to OKCupid questions — one is that you should answer as many as possible to give the software a better chance of matching you to other people. For some people, answering match questions can be a fun time waster. Other people feel it is better to save time by just answering the really important questions, based on studying the answers of people they know or are attracted too (we’ll get more into other people’s answers later). As of this writing, I have answered 3,532 questions. Whatever approach you take, if you make the effort to answer the poly-specific questions, it will be easier to find polyamorous people and easier for them to find you.
Molly says:
Unlike Kit, I have not answered 3,532 questions. I’ve answered 100. I tend to skip questions that I don’t feel are important. I also tend to over-analyze questions and skip them when I feel the answers don’t accurately reflect how I feel.
Copyright © 2011 Molly Rene and Kit O’Connell. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
This license applies ONLY to this guide, not to other parts of this site unless otherwise noted.
Now that you’ve answered questions and filled out a profile, come back next week to learn how to meet people on OKCupid!
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