Cheating The Dating Game

Tinder and co have changed dating forever by gaming romance. But can you optimise your chances of winning by outsourcing them? For people too busy to swipe right themselves, there’s a new generation of cyber-cupids to help them hook up, break up and everything in between – from polishing profiles, to messaging potential dates. It may be efficient, but isn’t it, well, cheating?

- Eleanor Halls

On Scott Valdez’s personal desktop are hundreds of excel spreadsheets, each one meticulously documenting and ranking every single online message he has sent to women of romantic interest since his first year of university. In total, it’s 15 years worth of messages.

To look at him, Valdez, 34, is unremarkable: he’s 177m, with broad shoulders, dark brown eyes, dark hair combed off his not-unsizeable forehead and a slightly goofy smile that evinces confidence and geniality in equal measure. He has a degree and is partial to a V-neck (navy blue), a game of poker and a can of beer. He is, in some ways, your stock bro. But in other ways he’s very much not.

When Facebook launched in 2004, while Valdez was starting his first year of university, he used the social network’s filtering tool to identify all the women who attended his university and sent out a handful of messages using five different “templates”. (This was in the days before Facebook had an “other” message inbox, which filters out messages from strangers.) Valdez then ranked each woman’s response type and response rate to the five message types, and recorded them in a notebook.

Valdez continued his approach on dating site Plenty Of Fish, which had launched the year before, in 2003. The only issue was that, after graduation, he started working 12-hour days as a sales and marketing manager at a local translation service and no longer had the time to update his record. He was making good money and, since he had an office assistant, he figured, why couldn’t he have a dating assistant? He put an advert on Craigslist.