  Online dating sites have become popular platforms for people to look for
potential romantic partners. It is important to understand users' dating
preferences in order to make better recommendations on potential dates. The
message sending and replying actions of a user are strong indicators for what
he/she is looking for in a potential date and reflect the user's actual dating
preferences. We study how users' online dating behaviors correlate with various
user attributes using a large real-world dateset from a major online dating
site in China. Many of our results on user messaging behavior align with
notions in social and evolutionary psychology: males tend to look for younger
females while females put more emphasis on the socioeconomic status (e.g.,
income, education level) of a potential date. In addition, we observe that the
geographic distance between two users and the photo count of users play an
important role in their dating behaviors. Our results show that it is important
to differentiate between users' true preferences and random selection. Some
user behaviors in choosing attributes in a potential date may largely be a
result of random selection. We also find that both males and females are more
likely to reply to users whose attributes come closest to the stated
preferences of the receivers, and there is significant discrepancy between a
user's stated dating preference and his/her actual online dating behavior.
These results can provide valuable guidelines to the design of a recommendation
engine for potential dates.
