Online Dating- The Ultimate Personal Ad
By Shannon Henley
November 20, 2012
The origins of online dating can be traced back to hundreds
of years before the internet was even thought of. By the early eighteenth
century, it was popular for men to hire agencies who would place ads in
newspapers for them in order to help them find a wife. In the early twentieth
century, personal ads were found in most mainstream papers, but were not nearly
as popular as they had been in the past. Personals fell out of favor in the
1960s only to become acceptable again in the 1990s. The ads slowly made their
way onto the internet, where now whole companies operate online forums and communities
meant to bring potential couples together.
Popular dating sites today include sites for the general
population such as Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, Zoosk, and eHarmony, but
many sites are catered to specific groups of people: OurTime.com for singles
over 50 years of age, Jdate.com for Jewish singles, ChristianMingle.com,
SingleParentMeet.com, etc. A 2009 study showed that 47.5% of online dating site
users were male, while 52.5% were women. The study found that more sociable
people are more inclined to join an online dating site, and, more importantly,
found that online daters do not fit the low self-esteem, lonely, desperate
profile that is often ascribed to them. People of all shapes, sizes, races, religions,
and socio-economic backgrounds are using online dating sites today.
Different dating sites use different methods of matching
participants up with one another. Many focus on the use of questionnaires,
while some go to the extremes of comparing the DNA and hormone levels of their
participants. There is no useful way to determine which methodologies are the
most affective, because there are so many other factors involved in whether or
not an online match-up is successful. (Of course, that doesn’t stop dating
sites from competing with each other- the business of online dating sites is constantly
growing and is expected to gross $1.7 billion in the year 2013.)
I wanted to take a look at how online dating really works,
so I interviewed my friend Leah*, who signed up for OkCupid to give a mutual
friend her opinion on his profile but ended up sticking around and using the site
for several months. As a college student, Leah appreciated the affordability
(It’s free!) and accessibility of OkCupid, which she said was easy to use on a
daily basis, especially through the use of the OkCupid iPhone app. She was
matched with people by OkCupid based on questions that she answered; the more
questions she answered, the more men she would be matched with. While some
questions were free answer, others were multiple choice: for example, the
question, “Do you prefer dogs or cats?” would have the following options: “Dogs”,
“Cats”, “Both”, or “Neither”. Once Leah answered this type of question, she
could then describe the degree of importance of being matched with someone who
answered the question similarly. Through this method, OkCupid users are able to
make sure they don’t get matched with people with certain characteristics that
they find undesirable (i.e. someone who doesn’t like sports or someone who is
homophobic).
Leah would communicate with matches through messaging, and
could peruse the profiles of those matches to view their answers for any
question they had answered on the site, in order to compare which questions
they answered similarly and which they did not.
Leah ultimately had a nice experience on OkCupid. She
enjoyed having intellectual conversations with matches, and she also felt that
the whole process of answering questions on the site helped her to get to know
herself better. She loved that the site allowed her to meet people that were
studying different subjects in school or that weren’t in college. When she did
go on dates with men she met on the site, she always had fun and felt it was
sort of like going on a blind date. One complaint she had, though, was that she
actually sometimes felt she had too much in common with her matches. (On the
one hand, this means that OkCupid does a great job matching based on
similarities, on the other hand, it means that compatibility in terms of the
fact that “opposites attract” isn’t really taken into consideration.) Leah said
she could never be in a relationship with someone that was exactly like her,
and therefore could never date many of the men that she was matched up with on
the site. After a while, Leah missed the initial human interaction of meeting
someone new and realizing that she had things in common with them. She said it
was “easy to get caught up in the fact that [she] was a 92% match with someone”
instead of focusing on the connection that she had with them when she met them
in person. When asked if she would ever make an online dating profile again
some time the road, though, Leah’s answer was, “Absolutely.”
Online dating sites are the most personal form of social
media. Like other forms of social media, online dating is growing rapidly
popular and the online dating population is growing more and more diverse. Just
as so many other forms of communication were revolutionized by the invention of
the internet, the internet completely transformed the centuries-old personal ad
through making online dating possible, and thus transformed the way that many
people meet and date one another.
*Name changed for privacy
Sources:
Grohol, J. (2009). Who Uses Internet Dating?. Psych
Central. Retrieved on November 20, 2012, from
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2009/07/23/who-uses-internet-dating/
Tugend, Alina (2009).
Blinded by Science in the Online Dating Game. The New York Times. Retrieved on November 20, 2012 from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/internet/18shortcuts.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=technology
Whipps, Heather. (2009). The 300-year History of Internet
Dating. Live Science. Retrieved on
November 20, 2012 from
http://www.livescience.com/3362-300-year-history-internet-dating.html
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