Grouper: Your Nonsketchy Alternative to Online Dating

Around this time last week, I had the pleasure of attending a Grouper at Ellabess in Manhattan's Nolita. Not to be confused with Groupon, Grouper is a self-described social club that involves signing up through facebook. Grouper techs match your facebook profile (interests, likes) to another Grouper applicant of the opposite sex; once matched, you receive a confirmation email and find two friends to join you on your Grouper meetup. The outcome? Three boys and three girls meet at a trendy location chosen by Grouper founders Jerry Guo, former "Good Life" columnist, and Michael Waxman, designer of the news reader Paper buff.

For 20$ a person, you and your friends have a table at an assigned venue, and the Grouper match and their friends meet you under one reservation name (first drink included!) For us, it was Lucy--no other information about either party was disclosed prior. Comparing Grouper to sites like OkCupid, this is a big difference. There is absolutely no stalking or ruminating on who you will meet up with! The experience is based solely on the actual meetup and nothing else.

In fact, Grouper is invitation-only, and Jerry Guo avows, "we don't disclose our members or the size of our club." Though he also reports there is a waiting list of "thousands" to try out the service, within two weeks of joining Grouper, I had a meetup scheduled. All three boys who met us at Ellabess were kind, interesting and attractive. Conversation flowed between leather lounges and cucumber-infused martinis; nothing felt forced or overtly sexual. As Guo emphasized in his interview with the Huffington Post, "If you got to a bar, people will talk to you, but why is it hard to meet people? It's hard to meet people that are non-sketchy." My Grouper meetup was the definition of nonsketchy.

Even more impressive, the guy matched through my facebook profile (and Guo's interpersonal finesse) held many of my interests, and was a blast to talk to. As most online-to-reality meetups go, conversation can be sticky if not forced and awkward, but I instantly felt comfortable with my Grouper match! We even relocated as a group for drinks afterward at a venue more intimate, and hope to meet up as friends later in the week. In a brief chat, Guo disclosed that this outcome is actually quite common: "something like over half the groups end up hanging out again and we've heard anecdotally of people starting to see each other (although we're not a dating site)."

Taking online dating and friendship from "pretty awkward and kind of intimidating" to accessible and relaxed, Grouper is the next step in social networking for the internet generation. Though sites like OkCupid and eHarmony remain popular, Guo says that Grouper lends improvements to the system: "you show up with your two friends, so even if the other group isn't your crowd, you're still out with your friends and can just go somewhere else. We also pick the other group--based on whether we think the two groups will have a good time together--which is a lot less work than what you have to do on a standard browse-and-message dating site, which, let's face it, is kind of just a beauty contest." So, disappointed-OkCupid-vets in NYC, forget the photoshopped, instagrammed-profile pictures, the daily quizzes on your soda drinking habits, and the constant stream of creepy messages from usernames like BitchComeRunnin. Grouper, tried and tested, is the answer. Though it currently only operates in New York City--it was founded in June 2011!--Guo hopes to expand someday to other cities like San Francisco and Boston. However, Guo explains, "for now, we're focused on making Grouper awesome in New York."

Insights on Ok Cupid

Hey, I'm Lucy, a 22 year-old, freshly-graduated, prospective sexologist and previous sex columnist from Washington University in St. Louis. In my column, 'Sextras,' I attempted to expose current sex issues in the news and media through scientific and firsthand research. Here, I will do the same but I will also review sex toys and report on current trends in social policy relating to sex--both in New York as well as elsewhere. Without further ado, here is my personal as well as researched look into Ok Cupid--one of the most popular dating sites in the New York area.

While sitting over drinks with friends and probing them about their sex lives as I often do, one thing kept coming up--how much more often two or three of them were getting laid. And all thanks to a website I'd only heard of in passing--Ok Cupid. When I imagined my 20-something, youthful friends who have no shortage of new people to meet on a dating site, one so famed for "liars" and "creeps" nonetheless, I started to laugh. Really? How much more are they getting laid through mostly anonymous dating?
One particular friend, who I will refer to as "Greg," revealed that he went from not having sex at all for an extended period of time to having sex with different girls on a weekly basis--sometimes 2 or 3 per week. Greg also revealed that the majority of women he has met not only seemed to be looking for play (instead of a long-term relationship) but were "all fucked up in some way or another." Have the young ladies floating on Manhattan resorted to the one or two drinks-and-sex situation as a result of career frenzy, or because of their previous failures maintaining serious relationships?
Either or, the trend is real. As another friend of mine, who I will refer to as "Josh," offered, "I bang 5 out of 8 chicks that I meet from this website. It's fucking easy--these girls are horny as hell." Josh, who introduced Greg to Ok Cupid, has indeed found great success in the realm of hooking up from the site.
Greg previously had been a member of Jdate but found that the self-proclaimed "leading Jewish singles network" didn't offer the right community of women to date. Greg related, "I feel like Ok Cupid is more DTF [down to fuck]: a little dirty but the right vibe." But how does one get around this dirtiness and get right to the (consensual and enjoyable) DTF? Greg had a few words of advice. I will put it into three easy rules.
1) Brand yourself when making a profile. As Greg describes, "It helps to find a specific niche of the girls you are looking for within such a big website. Tailor it your profile like a resume—you only want them to see what the image you want to portray is."
2) Once you've created an attractive profile, find girls that you are attracted to by how good they look in their WORST picture . Greg explains, "If you are putting pictures on an online dating site, you are probably using your best. You dont look like that all the time!"
3) Send simple messages to the aforementioned females. Greg says, "My messages are very straightforward, 1-2 liners. The really slutty looking girls I just send a 'hey baby whats going on?' and in my real messages I either make a joke about something in their profile, or say something short like 'how was your weekend?.' From what I understand most girls get like 20 messages a day saying stuff like 'hey baby you want my dick?' all from like 40 y/o men too. So you've gotta be simple."
With a website with the most quick and easy form of hooking up with girls you might never meet trolling bars or hopping subway cars, such rules, I found, are quite necessary for a decently pleasant experience.

But being a girl on this dating site, as Greg referenced, is another matter. To extend my research into this particular realm, I decided to create my own profile, juicy_lucy87--a (mostly) honest internet portrayal of myself that I believed might appeal to the type of guy I search for: funny, adventurous, and intellectual. To put a cherry on top, I put up two decent pictures without showing any skin to try and keep away from those myspacey guys looking for easy pieces.


my profile picture

What I got in response to my Greg-guided creation was a mash-up of messages: some with witty banter reflecting my interests (especially zombie movies and pineapple pizza); others with overly wordy descriptions of our future sexcapades. As for looks, however, photos revealed many ethnicities but few (less than 1 out of 40 I'd say) I found myself attracted to. All of the men contacting me, though, made it clear meeting up would be in pursuit of a hook-up rather than a relationship. For example, one 20-something offered, "I'll be blunt, because it seems like being vague leads to misconceptions- you seem pretty cool, and you're super cute. Would you wanna get a drink sometime and talk about zombie movies and maybe make out?" Another, much less tactfully, simply wrote, "I'd really like to eat your ass."

As one Ok Cupid member reiterated to me just now in a chat, "We're on this site to play, aren't we?" Oh and we are. But perhaps I would have found more play--if, as statistics suggest--I put myself with a guitar in my profile picture, or I appeared more liberal or nerdy! Those seem to be the main characteristics portrayed on the internet that attract potential hook-ups. Greg serves again as an example with profile pictures where he is playing guitar and an emphasis on music throughout his information. Obviously there are many strategies to increase your rate of hooking up, but few to decrease the rate of creeps.
That's why, Greg says, there are always new people on Ok Cupid. He calls it "the cycle,": "Ok Cupid has a massive amount of churn, and very smart matching system—more and more people are hearing about it yet all the 40 year-old guys creep all the girls then they leave and more join."

So good news, eligible boys: with their high turnover rate and large population of creeps, "basically if you are remotely intelligent and somewhat grounded, you should be fine finding people to date on Ok Cupid." Sex assumed, not required.