modification sugarless: Why online dating hasn't lead to more marriage

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02-04-13, 08:09 PM

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The economist Marina Adshade wrote something that I've been saying for several years:

Quote:

I can?t shake this feeling that access to online dating is actually making it more difficult for men and women to find love. I know that sounds counterintuitive, especially from a market perspective, but what should have been a useful tool to encourage matching has encouraged a response that is best described as ?relationship greed?. And that effect has left many singles still searching long after they would have found a partner on a traditional dating market.

Online dating sites like to claim that they effectively help singles find love. The problem with evidence that supports that claim is that its metric is the share of married couples that met online ? that is the total number of married couples who met online divided by the total number of married couples ? as proof that online dating works.

That, however, is a skewed measure of success for online dating sites that would be best replaced with a measure that is the share of all searching singles that ultimately met a relationship partner online ? the total number of married couples who met online divided by the total number of potential married couples.

I haven?t seen any evidence of the success of online dating using the second measure and, in a period in which the rate of singlehood is increasing, we have good reason to be suspicious as to whether or not the first measure is really capturing an increase in marriage rates as the result of access to bigger markets.

... To start, let?s talk about how people behave when they are faced with a large number of choices on the dating market ? they start by limiting their available options.

Online daters are not really looking for the needle in the haystack as much as they are looking to eliminate the pieces of straw as quickly as possible to reveal the hidden needle. Eliminating available options can be extremely time consuming in a large market so they find ways to filter out unwanted matches quickly by filtering searches and scanning profiles for reasons to reject rather than for reasons to accept.

The problem with this approach that focuses on a ?must have? list of qualities is that it fails to recognize that the value of qualities a person possesses are not absolute but rather relative to other qualities.

For example, a man might want a woman who describes herself as slender and shares his avid interest in traveling and so limits his search for women who are slender and who list traveling as one of their interests. Both of these qualities might be important to him, but chances are one is more important than the other. If he had been searching for a woman using a more traditional method he might have met a woman whose passion for travel more than made up for her curvy figure and they could have formed a happy union. Because he is filtering online, however, he never has a chance to even see her profile, never mind hear about the year she spent traveling in South America.

Filtering searches might not sound like relationship greed, but it is in the sense that we want it all. The problem with this approach is that when we filter we lose out on the opportunity to find someone who actually has more of what we are looking for rather than someone who has less.

I can always tell if a man that I am on a date with has spent too much time on the online dating market. Instead of taking the opportunity to enjoy each other?s company these men seem to spend the entire date mentally checking off boxes, almost like they are conducting an interview that would allow them to complete a online dating profile for me when they get home. I don?t know when a date became more like a job interview than an opportunity to seduce the member of the opposite (or same) sex, but I am pretty sure it started with online dating.

http://bigthink.com/dollars-and-sex/...-single-part-i

I don't know how many times I too have told people that online dating is more like a job interview than a date. People who have been married a long time and consequently have been away from the dating world are almost always surprised by this, to the point of disbelief.

Marina came up with this conclusion by thinking the matter through. I came up with a similar conclusion after having hundreds of dates with American women (AW) I met online. I was astounded at how picky the AW had become. My previous dating experience was in the pre-Internet dating world, where you met the person, talked for a bit, and then asked her out or not.

Internet dating allows people to be extraordinarily selective. This has lead to the proverbial 467 bullet point checklist that guys must meet in order to proceed with a girl.

I had an experience similar to Marina's example above of someone who is seeking a partner who likes to travel. I exchanged a message with an AW I met on a dating website. Before she would even give me her phone number she sent me a message asking, "Your profile states that you like to travel. I do too. Where have you traveled in the last year on trips not for business?". I had had a promotion at work that previous year and had had to work a great deal more, so I told her this. She followed up with, "Where did you travel in the previous year, not for work?". I sent her the list of destinations and I passed that test. I still did not get her phone number because she decided that she didn't want to pursue a relationship with me because I had children.

But that was just a mild example of, let's say, a heightened selectivity. I was on a date with another AW and the subject of dating tests came up. I asked if she had any (knowing she undoubtedly did). She said she nixed the last guy she was going out with because of his answer to her question "What would you order in a Chinese restaurant?". He answered almond chicken, a staple dish of Chinese restaurants in the US. She regarded that choice as insufficiently adventurous in a culinary sense. One of her major interests in life was food. She regarded herself as a foodie, so much so that that word was part of her username on the dating site. She had no thought that she might teach this guy about her food preferences. She knew she could go back to the computer and whistle up another dozen profiles. I passed the foodie test but I failed a subsequent one.

It's important to note that neither of these AW was some gorgeous model-type. They were women in their late thirties or early forties who were somewhat attractive and not overweight.

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02-04-13, 11:23 PM

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I have had similar experiences with men all over the western world (EU & US).

It seems to me that internet dating has facilitated raising the bar to such an extent that no longer is anyone interested in anything short of star status in their intended.

Good luck with that.

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"Relationship greed" - I love that phrase. I'm not a fan of online dating sites, though I have dabbled with them in the past. I found that a lot of the men I met were serial daters, and no matter how much they liked someone they found it hard to quit looking for something better.

I think one reason the 'AW's' mentioned above had such checklists is because they were older. Why waste time on people who you know won't measure up? (I see the point, although I think they sound extreme.)

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Question the premiss , imo .
On line dating has been initially and mostly sold as an answer for finding a marriage partner .
But that is just one advantage among several that is available . Stop thinking of OLD as a "one trick pony" .
If fewer people were mesmerised by the now tarnished idea that on-line dating can find you a soulmate , they could then better take advantage of the different and varied other potential benefits .
Of course OLD is unlikely to find that perfect husband/wife . What method has ever delivered that promise with a good measure of success ?
But OLD between mature , experienced and savvy people , and using Skype over a sensible period of time , will give better results than older previous methods .
And International . And with different cultures . All imo .