Researchers have determined that online dating has gone mainstream now more than ever. Which from what we can gather means that every single person you know has an online dating profile. No longer does computer dating have a scurrilous stigma attached that was once thought to be a place where only weirdos, drunkards, fetishists, and the otherwise fetid, noxious humans dwelled in hopes of mating with, becoming wedded to, or, at worst, adding other singletons to their collections. Yipes! (Not including Craigslist(lost)) Those freaks are nuts. No, now, online dating can boast that more than 25 million users around the world have taken the plunge and signed up with a dating site.
But what are they really selling? Is it really unmatched compatibility?
Not so fast. The investigating team that came up with the latest figures cautions that “matchmaking sites may foster unrealistic expectations, while boasting of allegedly “scientific” dating formulas that are misleading and unproven.” So what they’re actually saying is that all those commercials with the happy couple (wedding date listed at the bottom of the screen) is a marketing ploy just to get you to subscribe to a dating site, while touting how high their compatibility rates are with words like, “29 Dimensions of Compatibility” and we use algorithms to match people on “29 “core traits,” like social style or emotional temperament, and “vital attributes” like relationship skills.”
New research says that such claims are usually made by dating websites themselves, based on self-generated “secret” information that has never been vetted. So can you really trust eHarmony’s claims that they are responsible for 2 percent of the marriages in America, and nearly 120 weddings a day? That’s a pretty big claim.
Probably in response to some criticism, the site published statistics on their marriage rate from a place called eHarmony Labs of all places, and also discussed their divorce rate — again provided by eHarmony. After they crunched the numbers (theirs) they determined that people who’ve met on eHarmony are 66.6% less likely to get divorced than those, who, for instance, met at school and are 41.1% less likely to get divorced, or met through some other means and were 16% more likely to get divorced, or had met at the other most obvious place where people meet and get married, the bar, where they were 24% more likely to get divorced. So, eHarmony good. School, bars, and we dunno, the parking lot, grocery store, BFF hook up, work, Facebook — all bad! You also can’t include gay participants since eHarmony has come under fire for refusing to match gay couples (eHarmony says it can’t because its algorithm is based on data from heterosexuals). Yes, uh-huh sure, that’s the reason.
The data is full of commentary like this that seems a bit hard to believe, but yet coincides with their marketing.
“We also asked participants if their relationship had “lost the spark,” since a loss of chemistry can be a precursor of relationship dissatisfaction. Guess what? People who met on eHarmony were least likely to feel their relationship had gone stale compared to all other methods of meeting except church or a place of worship.”
They explain that they have no idea why this is. Perhaps eHarmony is magic. Maybe they give everyone a shot of fairy dust, or follow all participants around while wearing a curly wig, diaper, and every now and again shoot people in the ass whenever things start to take a hinky turn in their relationships. What they do say is that the “higher satisfaction observed for eHarmony couples could be the result of a selection bias among our user base, or it could be attributed to our compatibility matching process, or it could be some other reason entirely. ”
However, here’s what Eli Finkel, an associate professor of social psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. believes:
“Many of the online industry sites say that they have used science to figure out who is compatible with you. And they make a lot of money with those claims. But the reality is they have presented no evidence to back up their notion of a ‘special sauce’. And our review actually suggests that it’s almost impossible that what they claimed they’ve figured out actually works, or that there’s anything to it.”
The thing is, people are complex and their wants change and fluctuate. Finkel said to The New York Times in 2008, “They think they know what they want,” But meeting somebody who possesses the characteristics they claim are so important is much less inspiring than they would have predicted.” So some computer generated assistance may not necessarily be a bad thing as long as the expectations are realistic.
To that end, recent studies say that you will most likely date once you sign up with one of these sites. One study from Stanford University found that between 2007 and 2009, more than one in five straight couples said they had met their current mate online. Among gay couples that figure rose to more than 60 percent, but no study has reportedly found a way to boost dating odds per se.
What it surely does, however, is provide an outlet for shy or introverted people to get out there, and has become a wunderkind for young adults who are now spending longer time between school and marriage, and who also have fewer qualms about using online media to create a profile since that’s much of what social networking is.
The downside, along with wading through the fettered compatibility sea, is that people are naturally going to be more “shallow and use bad cues when making decisions, like focusing too much on how attractive someone is.” It seems, along with counting someone in, online dating is perhaps still an easy way to count a person out despite the goal. More so than if they were sitting right in front of the person and they could assess their personality on merits based on something other than their online profile. So that would also beg the question of how this factors into compatibility numbers when we still use those “animals in the wild” notions for dating i.e. the one with the prettiest plumage gets the swoon.
What the researches seem to want users to take from the popularity and growth of online dating is (1) due to our changing social norms it’s not just a place for creepoids, and (2) what it perhaps should be used for is something simple.
“What the Internet does is help people skip right to the first date. It helps people muster the courage to ask someone out,” said Jeffrey Hall, an assistant professor in communication studies at the University of Kansas.
It would seem that compatibility tests aside, the rest of getting to the next date and beyond, is on you.
