Online Dating and Body Type
Monday, 9. June 2008 - 6:29 am
If you're a woman and you're dating online, what body type do you put on your profile?
As a dating consultant, I get asked this question very often. After all, most women in the U.S. have a little meat on their bones. They aren't fat, but they wouldn't be classified as "skinny" either. It makes sense that the with the average woman being 163 pounds (that's average, mind you) that women generally listed themselves as "curvy" on dating sites.
The problem? Men think "curvy" means FAT.
Hey guys? It doesn't. You're gonna have to get over this.
There's an interesting article from the Baltimore Sun's Dating Column that reinforced this issue. A woman tries to be honest by listing her body type and gets absolutely no responses from men as a result.
I usually tell women who are the average size of about 163 pounds that they should list themselves as "average." They are!
And guess what? Men, despite this Phobia of searching for a gal that's "curvy," actually prefers women with a little meat on their bones than completely skinny. Yet they'll search for "skinny" before anything else. Most of these guys, incidentally, are NOT skinny themselves. Many have beer guts and bald heads and yet turn up their nose at curvy gals. To add to this, most women think they're fatter than they actually are. They'll say they need to lost a few pounds when in fact they don't.
Maybe the solution for this is to have men actually take a look in the mirror, and women not to be so hard on themselves.
Image via Morguefile.
9. June 2008 - 1:10 pm
As a guy, I notice women who are a plus sized women attempt to seem smaller than they are. The average weight maybe 163lbs…but that’s not average sized if you’re only 5’2″ tall. I have a friend who is a size 16 and she claims she athletic on her profile. She’s not right by doing that. I’d rather see the dating sites change their classifications. Curvy doesn’t always mean fat…but you can’t have plus size women trying to downsize themselves.
That’s just my observations from the last several years with online dating.
10. June 2008 - 2:59 am
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22. June 2008 - 11:08 pm
The answer to this is simple… dating websites should ask for ‘weight’ instead of ‘body type.’ Dating sites require a ‘height,’ so why not a ‘weight?’ Height is where a lot of guys get eliminated because women want tall men (where men rarely care about a woman’s height). The big difference here is that women CAN do something about their weight, but men can do nothing about their height.
Honesty in dating, online or otherwise, is the key. If women want help in the online dating department, they should 1) put what they feel their body types are, and 2) post pictures of themselves… Not just pictures of their faces and no pictures of themselves hiding in the back of a group. 3) Contact men whom they are interested in (not wait for men to contact them) so that the men will have the opportunity to see their pictures rather than relying on the search engine pre-selects (like slender vs curvy).