Wieste, you are right. That is the way Oxwall works.
On the search form you select:
Gender: gender of the person you are looking for.
Looking for: gender person specified he is looking for when registering on your site.

You can always change your questions  at admin/questions/index/ .

Thanks Aliia, while I understand that that is the way Oxwall works, it's not intuitive to our members, as the admin kept getting mails that the search function was 'broken'. I am sure that in 99% of the cases, the Oxwall search indeed works like it is supposed to.

But this is a special case, when a man is searching for a woman, he is in fact asking from the database to provide him with all women who are looking for a man.

To accomplish this result I dug into the 'base_question_data' MySQL tables and found out in what string-id the sex of a person and their match_sex are stored.

Then I opened user_search.php and in the process function I switched the contents of $data["sex"] and $data["match_sex"] to match the expectations of our members.

I am well aware that this might cause compatibility issues down the road, and discourage anyone from applying such hard code fixes in code that is meant to be cross-compatible, but I'd rather curse once a year than every day...

Perhaps when the documentation starts existing on a meaningful level, I could solidify these 'hacks' into Oxwall plugins.

Wietse,  as a suggestion, I can recommend putting small "notes" near each question, to give users a better idea of what each question means.