'Hey': short messages are the best dating site strategy, study says

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man on a dating app will pursue a date with a single word: "hey." And according to a new study, that may be the best strategy for attracting a partner who is out of your league. Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman at the University of Michigan, US, studied the messaging patterns of 94,478 men and 92,457 women on a free online dating website. The users were located in New York, Boston, Chicago and Seattle, all were seeking heterosexual relationships, and their genders were self-identified. They found that women receive more messages than men, and most of the messages sent on the service go to only a small fraction of users.