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The Mary Poppins Guide to Husband Hunting
How Amy Webb Gamed Online Dating — and Won!
Writer and data cruncher Amy Webb was fed up with dating the many Mr. Wrongs that JDate and other dating apps kept matching her with.
“You’re not casting a wide enough net,” her friends and family insisted.
But after one particularly abysmal date, Webb concluded that the real reason dating sites were sending her so many liars and losers was that she wasn’t being picky enough.
The Dream Date, Quantified
So Webb sat down, drink in hand, and listed every single quality she wanted her future husband to have. The result of this brainstorming session was a collection of 72 items, from big things — he had to be smart, funny and debt-free — to subtler qualities like musical taste (yes to 1920s Jazz, no to the soundtrack from “Cats!”) And height (Five foot ten — six foot two.)
She also wanted to avoid certain annoying habits, which lead to criteria like: “No high-fiving allowed.”
Webb’s dream date couldn’t mock her for loving the music of George Michaels. Or be bad at Trivia. And he’d better loathe chain restaurants.
In the book she wrote about her data-driven data adventure, Data, a Love Story, Webb dubbed this her “Mary Poppins Husband List,” after the scene in the Disney movie in which the children draft an ad in song that describes their ideal nanny, with items like: “Never be cross or cruel/Never give us Castor oil or gruel.”
“None of the men JDate, Match or eHarmony had introduced me to,” Webb writes, “resembled anything like the man I’d just created with this list.”
Even so, she decided not to settle for less.
But how to find him?
Yay, Cleavage!
First Webb decided to check out the competition. She went online, disguised as her dream date. She posted a number of slightly varying profiles of her ideal tall, smart, debt-free, Arby’s-shunning, jazz-loving dude, then evaluated the women who turned up to try to win his heart.
Then, noting their overall popularity scores, Webb studied the profiles and…
