They get you better matches.
A Match Question consists of:
- The question. Pretty self-explanatory.
- The answers you’ll accept. What you’d like your matches to say.
- The question’s importance. How strongly do you feel about it?
- An explanation. If you think your response needs explaining, tell your side of the story.
If you come across a lame, ambiguous, offensive question—or you just don’t want it to affect matching—just hit the “Skip” button. We won’t be upset.
You could also answer it and mark the importance as “Irrelevant.” That way, we’ll know your stance on the topic when finding matches for others, but we won’t consider the question when we find matches for you.
Don’t over-use the “Irrelevant” flag. If you do, we won’t know the type of people you want to meet. It’s hard to match up someone who seemingly doesn’t care about anything! On the other hand, the more questions you find “Important,” the better your matches will be.
By default, your answers to Match Questions are public. Potential matches can compare their match answers with yours, and you can compare your answers with theirs.
When you answer a question, you may choose to answer it privately. If you do, you can’t compare your private answers with a potential match’s answers.
We heartily encourage you to answer all questions publicly!
Changing Your Previous Answers
If you’d like to change a specific answer, delete all your questions, or answer a question that you previously skipped, go to the Questions tab on your profile.
Be careful though. If you re-answer a question, you won’t be able to answer that question again for another 24 hours.
If you completely want to start over and answer all questions anew, you can click the “Clear all my questions” button on the right-hand side of the page. This is permanent. Ye be warned.
Are you thinking of answering questions just to increase your match score? Well, you’ve got some nerve, bub.
You could increase your average match score by picking answers that you think the average person wants to hear. But as a result, your matches won’t be very interested in you, and chances are you won’t be very into them. It’s much better to be honest.
Look at it this way: OkCupid’s matching effectively sorts people by how much you’d like them, and vice versa. Lying doesn’t introduce you to better people; it screws the order up.
By answering honestly, you’ll find people who really like you best for who you are. Cheesy, but true.
Questions in a test—like these tests—aren’t match questions, and they don't affect your match percentages around the site. Phew!
Your Matches’ Questions
Comparing Your Answers
If you look at someone’s profile, and you both have publicly answered at least one question, you’ll see a tab that says “The Two Of Us.”
(If you’re not a great match with that person, you might see “Y’all Have Issues” instead.)
Regardless of its label, the tab allows you to compare your answers with your match’s answers.
If both your answers match, and you both like each others answers, the text will appear black. If the person you’re looking at didn’t give an answer you were looking for, their answer will appear in pink. Likewise, if you gave an answer the other person doesn’t like, your answer will appear in pink.
If you answered a question privately that your potential match answered publicly, you won’t be able to see their answer. You can click “Go public” to make your answer public and reveal her response.
Answering A Match’s Questions
If someone answered a question that you haven’t, you can answer that question on their profile’s Questions tab. Just click the green “Answer” button, and the question form will appear. After answering the question, you can compare your answer to theirs!
About Match Questions
Why do you need to answer so many questions before you can submit your own? We really don’t want repeats, and we’d like you to get a good idea of what’s already been asked.
We automatically do some magic to show you our best questions first. We rank a question by a (surprisingly subtle) combination of how important it has been tagged, and how diverse the answers are.
For example, “Have you ever murdered someone?” is a bad question: everyone would rank it as important, but almost everyone has the exact same answer (No!). Our system realizes that it’s not a very useful question for bringing people together.
We also track “genre” and “raciness” for each question. Some people don’t want to hear racy questions, and we try to figure that out and stop asking. Genre is used to make sure you get different types of questions.
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