How Online Dating is Changing Relationships

At Optimistic Learner, we have addressed some of the unhealthy sociological effects of our online lives, specifically in relation to social media interactions and social media skepticism.

But what about our more intimate personal lives? How has online dating changed over the last couple of decades? And what do these changes mean in terms of how we form relationships and the nature of the relationships we form?

A Brief but Busy History

The idea of the computer matchmaker can be traced back to 1959 when Stanford engineering students Jim Harvey and Phil Fialer ran the names of forty-nine men and forty-nine women through and IBM 650 for a class project titled “Happy Families Planning Services”.

There were a few similar experiments in the decades following but, not surprisingly, much of the history of online dating (or “social discovery”) sites takes place within the last twenty years.

Dan Slater documents the history of the sites and their effects in his comprehensive and well-researched book Love in the Time of Algorithms. This history presents a timeline of sites changing with technology, and how dating itself changed with the sites. There’s the grandparent site Match.com (founded way back in 1995) the concept of which provides a forum for the relationship theories of the founder of eHarmony in 2000. Plentyoffish changes the game in 2003 and, thanks to the launch of Google Adsense, provides a free large traffic site. Enter OkCupid providing both paid and unpaid services.

The start of a more unapologetic hook-up culture in online dating can be traced to the popular European site Badoo using Bluetooth technology to alert the user when a matching profile was 50 feet away. This would birth the apps Grindr (2009), Tinder (2012), and Bumble (2014).

 

So Many Choices

The digital dating landscape is teeming with a variety of ways to meet people and a variety of people to meet. But are all of these options helping or harming us with regards to romance? Olga Khazan wrote an expansive article in 2013 for The Atlantic detailing the research of Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick at Northwestern. The conclusion was that “while online dating services greatly expand the dating pool for their users, they don’t necessarily foster better relationships”, the sites, “do not always improve romantic outcomes; indeed, they sometimes undermine such outcomes”.

Part of this could be a case of having too many choices. A paper from the Association of Psychological Science found that “browsing many profiles fosters judgemental and assessment oriented evaluations that can cognitively overwhelm users”.

Choosing…

So what are these potentially overwhelmed customers looking for when browsing profiles? There are some gendered differences. A brief caution against blanket stereotypes; it is worth stating that such differences are percentages, and do not apply to everyone (Olga Khazan the writer of aforementioned Atlantic article fell more within “what men look for” when answering researchers questions). Warning in place, women tend to analyze a whole profile whereas men’s interest is based more on attractiveness. Men also tend to more actively respond, most likely because there isn’t as much profile reading going on.

Data Journalist, Jon Millward, performed an experiment where over four months identical profile content was placed on OKCupid. One with a subjectively attractive female avatar and one with an attractive male. After the four months, the female avatar maxed out “her” inbox with 528 messages. The male had 38.

According to Mentalfloss in 2012 Answer Lab conducted a study using a Tobii X1 Light Eye Tracker. Researchers tracked the eye movements of subjects reading dating profiles on Match.com and eHarmony.com. Men spent fifty percent less time reading the dating profiles and sixty-five percent more time looking at the pictures than women.

What’s interesting is that a 2008 experiment done by Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick found that while men and women tend to say they prioritize different things in their mates there was no difference in the types of mates the two sexes choose in a real-life setting. This was gauged using a speed-dating exercise.

It seems likely that gender preferences are exaggerated online in no small part because it is not a “real life setting”.

Choosing… Again

What does all this mean for commitment? Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics Dan Ariely describes online dating as “an efficient frictionless market environment”. His assertion is you can only build up a relationship when you invest in it, and such investment decreases when faced with a large pool of alternatives. “Why should I put up with this bs”, you might ask yourself about your partner’s quirks, flaws, or mistakes, “when an alternative is just a click away?”

Slater found that most people working within the online dating industry were in agreement with the findings of researchers that the rise of online dating will probably mean an overall decrease in commitment. Nic Formani the head of social media marketing at Badoo was very honest, “People always said that the need for stability would keep commitment alive. But that thinking was based on a world in which you didn’t meet that many people”.  

And there’s evidence to support this in what’s known as the “perception of diminished choice” which found that people exhibit stronger positive illusions about a partner when they believe that access to alternative partners is scarce. This is decidedly unromantic, but it could provide a more positive way of viewing a loss of commitment as a reduction in “learned helplessness” or settling.

And Finding Your Niche

What of people with very specific wants? Or, people who have a somewhat limited market IRL (in real life).  Individualized sites such as Facemate which will give you matches that look like you, MillionaireMatch which would like you to have some money in the bank, and clowndating.com which is, well, exactly what it sounds like.

In 2002 Ross Williams started working with the “white-label business model”. Think of the white unbranded label of a generic can of soup. He started the site Singles 365 then partnered it with smaller individualized markets.

The possibilities when one adds up these smaller individualized markets are limitless. LoneyStoner.com, WeWaited.com (for virgins), theuglybugball.com (for people not conventionally attractive).

One could view niche dating sites as a negative extension of the Internet’s limits within the promise of endless choice. It’s an attempt to keep the user from feeling overwhelmed. Slater very effectively states, “As the Internet grows vaster, technology is allowing us, and in some cases forcing us, to be more specific. This means John Dater can find people who are like him, and quite easily. It also means that, out of necessity, he will exclude those with qualities he may not realize he needs or enjoys”.

Such statements should be tempered with the knowledge that niche dating opens dating up for people who for reasons beyond their control may have a more select market. There is a white-label dating company called DatingFactory that has over three hundred sites for people with disabilities.

2Date4Love was founded by Laura Brashier in 2011. Stage IV cervical cancer had left her unable to have vaginal sex and she found dating very difficult after this. The process of gauging when to tell people and how to work around physical limitations was trying and often disappointing. She had spent a decade not dating before founding the site, which steadily grew users immediately.

Like much of what is done online, online dating contains pros and cons.

What Does This Mean for the future of Relationships?

The way relationships play out has changed and will continue to change as a result of online dating. The key is awareness and knowledge. Many articles have been written about the data these services provide and what said data reveals about human nature. Such studies should be read for the information they provide about our own biases. This could yield positive sociological results as could an awareness of what and why relationships are shifting and how these shifts could best suit our own needs and the needs of the larger society.

Like much of the digital world this area is evolving quickly and is being exploited for maximum revenue based on an increasingly liquid market (that whole lack of commitment thing). Rather than view the tools of technology themselves as “good” or “bad” the key is getting what we need to meet our emotional and physical needs in ways that are not harmful or exploitative. And being aware of just how easy it is to make people products in an industry capitalizing on emotions. We need to know that companies are counting on our tendency to take the path of least resistance, and we need to make assertive thoughtful choices about how much we are willing to invest in people and if we want that investment to be long term. As Ariely states,

“The moment you think in the short term horizon, the odds that you will invest in a relationship is much much lower.”

An awareness of a company’s goals and our own, ensures we are using the sites –at least- as much as the sites are using us.

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Further Readings And Resources:

1. Love in the Time of Algorithms by Dan Slater
2. A psychologists guide to online dating
3. Online dating psychology
4. The 4-month experiment
5. 11 results from studies about online dating
6. Cyberpsychology, behaviour and social networking
7. Can technology bring us true love?  by Eli Finkel