1. Women are more likely to get responses than guys. For a guy who writes a woman on OKCupid without any previous flirtation, he has a 25% chance of getting a reply from her. But for women who are cold-writing a guy — there’s a 40% chance she will get a reply.
2. Women’s perception of men’s attractiveness may be more warped than men’s perception of women’s appearance. With the rise of pornography, plastic surgery and airbrushing, many people wonder — do guys know what real women look like anymore? The answer appears to be yes. When Rudder showed us a graph of the ratings men give to women on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 5 through OKCupid, there’s a normal distribution with fewer women falling at the 1 and 5 extremes and the grand majority getting ratings in the middle. However, when women rate men on a scale of 1 to 5 on attractiveness through the site, the graph skews sharply towards the lower end. Women overall rate many men as a 1, and shockingly few as a 4 or 5. Jokes Rudder, “A 3.8 for a guy is basically Hollywood material.”
3. Still, men tend to email the most attractive women. While guys can clearly appreciate women in the center of the attractiveness spectrum,  that doesn’t mean they don’t aim for the top. Men of all levels of attractiveness tend to send the most emails to the few women rated across the board as a 5.
4. Message length doesn’t appear to matter. Rudder was sure that longer messages would up a person’s chances of getting a response from the object of their affection. But it’s not true. Whether a message is the length of a tweet or the length of a novella doesn’t seem to matter in terms of chances for a reply. The numbers listed in item #1 hold tight — men have a 25% chance of getting a response and women have a 40% chance.
5. If you don’t hear back quickly, you probably won’t. Rudder took a look at the length of time elapsed before a person replies to a message and how it corresponds to the likelihood that they will respond. In a fascinating twist, half of all replies are sent by the seven-hour mark. There’s a big drop-off from there in the chances of a reply. “Seven hours is the half-life of your hopes and dreams,” joked Rudder.
6. Not all replies turn into dates. Getting a reply on OKCupid is half the battle — but it isn’t everything. There’s only about a 30% chance that a reply will turn into an actual conversation — a correspondence that lasts for three exchanges or longer.
7. Despite the startling statistics, people do fall in love through the site. Every day, about 500 people disable their OKCupid profiles for a very specific reason: they met someone through the site that they’re embarking on a relationship with.

What have your online dating experiences been like? Which of these facts surprises you the most?

Helen Fisher: The brain in love

Inspired by Helen Fisher’s classic TED Talk, “The brain in love,” we invited three speakers with big ideas on relationships, sex and family to our New York office for a TED@250 salon, part of a program to tackle timely topics. Love was certainly in the air.

After a screening of the incredibly sweet office-romance film “Post-It Love,” Christian Rudder stepped to the stage. The co-founder and editorial director of OKCupid, Rudder set out to parse some of the data pouring into the site at all times from its users. For example, Rudder shared that when a man on the site writes a woman without any previous interaction, he has a 25% chance of getting a response from her. Meanwhile, women cold-writing men through the site have a 40% chance of a reply. Rudder shared another interesting tidbit — that half of responses are sent to a message are sent with seven hours. As Rudder put it to a big laugh, “Seven hours is basically the half-life of your hopes and dreams.”

But Rudder shared an inspiring bit of news. Every day, 500 people deactivate their OKCupid profiles because they met someone through the site. “All it takes is one,” says Rudder. This sentiment was echoed in the ahhhh-worthy Google video, “Parisian Love,” which tells a moving love story via search.

Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible and the new book The Secrets of Happy Families, stepped up next to share the surprising thing that has revolutionized his family life: agile programming. A method of software development, agile breaks down large projects into small, do-able bits — allowing people throughout the process to give feedback as they go. Agile was developed in opposition to the “waterfall method,” where people in charge determine the flow of the project and people inside the process have no input.

Applying this to a family means creating detailed daily checklists. “You can’t underestimate the power of making a checkmark,” says Feiler. “It works in offices and it works with kids.” Agile in the home also involves having weekly meetings to talk about what went well over the course of seven days and what needs improvement. And Feiler reveals a surprising fact about his twin 8-year-olds: that they’re able to pick their own punishments and they generally give themselves harsher ones than their parents would have picked.

Finally, we heard from Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, who spoke about keeping passion in long-term relationships now that human beings “live twice as long” as we used to. Perel nailed the basic challenge of modern relationships — that, on the one hand, they must satisfy our deep-seated need for security, dependability and permanence while at the same time meeting our equally strong need for adventure, mystery and the unexpected.

“Can we want what we already have?” Perel asked. The answer is yes. But because Perel sees desire as the space between the self and the other, she reveals that this can be achieved in some counter-intuitive ways — in part by being more selfish and savoring moments of absence. Her thoughts were truly surprising and inspiring.

Stay tuned for these great talks on TED.com and the TED Blog in the upcoming weeks. And a special thanks to Built It Green, who donated the wood for the beautiful backdrop you see in these images.

Photos by Cloe Shasha

Everyone loves a good quote. They challenge us. They change us. They make us think and make us laugh. They are — in their most compressed and contagious form — ideas. So today, we’re launching TED Quotes, a new initiative that collects memorable quotes from TEDTalks, groups them by category, and makes them as easy to share as our talks themselves.

To celebrate our Valentine’s Day launch, we offer you these heart-fluttering favorites:

“A world without love is a deadly place.” — Helen Fisher

“[You need] eight hugs a day. You’ll be happier and the world will be a better place.” — Paul Zak

“People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It’s one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.” — Helen Fisher

“My wife could turn to me and she may say, ‘Why do you love me?’ And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, ‘Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors.’” — Robin Ince

Designed to make TEDTalks even more accessible, digestible and shareable, the TED Quotes section of TED.com serves as a resource for both discovering new TEDTalks and finding culturally relevant quotes for any purpose, from a boardroom pitch to a wedding toast. We’ve sorted hundreds of the best quotes into TED-like topics, from technology, entertainment and design, to collaboration, DNA, and, yes, love.

But this isn’t just about a greeting-card quips. In today’s social-media driven world, quotes have a new power: They’ve emerged as one of the most widely shared content forms online. So with this initiative, we’re now treating individual quotes within TEDTalks as shareable media objects.

When you share a quote, you’re linked back to a page that allows you to either watch the full talk, or jump straight to the moment the quote was uttered. Viewers can then, if so inspired, re-share the same quote on Twitter, Facebook, email and other channels. By making the ideas within a talk even more findable and shareable, we hope to spread ideas even farther …

Explore ted.com/quotes >>