A dating platform that makes finding love easier for students recently looked through its users from colleges in Florida to find out who were the pickiest when it came to dating.
Coffee Meets Bagel, an interactive website that makes dating as simple as taking a trip to Starbucks, found that female students at UF are more selective than males when it comes to dating.
The free service, which was created in 2012, introduces members to singles close to their network by using their Facebook accounts. Members are matched with someone every day at noon, and they have up to 24 hours to “like” or “pass” their match. More than 117,000 members from the top colleges in Florida — Florida State University, University of Miami, University of Central Florida, University of South Florida and UF — are using Coffee Meets Bagel.
Although University of Miami students were the pickiest, at UF, 70.9 percent of females passed their picks compared to just more than half of male users.
Alexa Ruszkai, a UF communication sciences and disorders freshman, said she is not surprised female students are picky when choosing someone to date.
“I feel like UF girls are strong, independent and smart, and I think that makes us more pickier,” Ruszkai, 18, said. “We know what we want, and we don’t want to settle for something less, and a lot of UF girls have career goals and we want to find someone that is compatible with that.”
Dawoon Kang, a co-founder of Coffee Meets Bagel, said the company likes to put out research and statistics like this because it can be exciting for the users on the site.
“We want to make fun, yet informative content for our members and all singles out there,” she said, “but also use our content to understand and improve their dating lives because let’s face it, dating can be hard sometimes.”
Elizabeth Buckley, a Gainesville clinical psychologist, said using dating websites can maximize your chances of connecting with someone, but there are some guidelines students should follow.
“Like most endeavors in life, it’s a matter of responsibility, safety and control,” she said. “This is a good time in life to begin practicing listening to your gut, if you haven’t been already. If anything sounds weird in a profile or in your email communications, it probably is.”
[A version of this story ran on page 9 on 10/16/2014]
