Adventures with OKCupid
[ed. note: yes, I totally abandoned this project for six months and then piped back up today because I suddenly had something to say. Maybe I’ll do that again, maybe I’ll keep posting on the regular. Who can say?]
Like most of my friends, I’ve had an OKC profile for approximately forever. I’ve used it to answer quizzes, check out the profiles of people my friends are interested in and occasionally respond to someone who sends me a particularly interesting message.
I’ve never really been active with it for its primary purpose as a dating site. Until this month.
A few weeks ago, A. and I decided we’d like to meet some new play partners, ideally together. I brushed off my OKC profile and started using the site “for real”.
So far I have no entertaining horror stories. I’ve exchanged emails with a few really nice interesting people, set up a couple of first dates and gotten one shout-out from a random dude congratulating/ thanking me for my volunteer work with my local rape crisis center. It’s been pretty great.
It’s also been fortuitous timing for me as a poly person to start engaging with OKCupid. Just this week they rolled out some big changes to the way you can talk about your relationships on the site, finally recognizing the existence of non-monogamy as a legit choice.
That seems huge to me, and I want to throw kudos to all of OKC, and in particular to Jeff L Jones who appears to have (maybe? probably?) authored these changes.
I think that’s especially important because he doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of love from his target audience. The poly mailing lists and Facebook communities where I’ve seen this discussed are kind of up in arms about it.
The major changes are two-fold. One is that where it used to give you a drop-down menu that included the option to say you were “Available”, it now says “single”, “seeing someone”, “married” or “in an open relationship”. I cheerfully and immediately toggled mine from “married” to “in an open relationship”, but I do see the complaint here: what if, as is the case, more than one of these applies to me? the phrase “in an open relationship” is also pretty couple-centric, suggesting that you’re only in one relationship but that one is open. Which doesn’t make sense if you think about it, but most people haven’t.
The other big change is that there’s a new spot in the details section where you can set a preference to be monogamous or non-monogamous and identify as “strictly” or “mostly” either of those. A. had some hilariously snarky things to say about the notion of being mostly non-monogamous, like “I’m only monogamous at parties.”
Snark aside, I basically love the four-part set of switches you can toggle to distinguish quickly between monogamy and not monogamy. I love less the “in an open relationship” status, for the reasons mentioned above. It feels like that would be a good place to put a big menu of descriptors, like Facebook recently did for gender.
But whatever I think of the details of this first attempt to make non-monogamy part of the conversation in OKC’s magical formulas, I’m glad someone there is paying attention to the poly community and choosing to do this. It makes me feel like less of an invisible alien using the site.
the whole bag of cookies! 
Is being able to lust yourself as “in an open relationship” really a change? I haven’t changed my settings in years but my recollection was that the site decided whether to show “available” or “seeing someone” based on sound other setting, maybe the checkboxes where you say what you’re looking for. I don’t remember choosing “available”.
Available was an automatic setting. Before you couldn’t choose your status, it chose for you based on your answers to some questions. Now you can choose from a short list, and “open relationship” is one of the choices (apparently the cut the “in an” part already).