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This year marks the 30th anniversary of online romance, sort of. The first couple to meet online and subsequently marry were brought together by an early incarnation of the web—the Computer Science Network (CSNET)—in 1983. Three decades later, internet dating is now the second most common way of starting a relationship, after meeting through friends. The industry takes in an estimated £2.5bn worldwide each year, and Brits are the most enthusiastic online daters in Europe: last year over 9m of us logged on to find a partner.
My own online dating story goes like this. Several years ago I broke up with someone. Soon after, my friend Alice created a profile for me on a dating website. For months, the experience only fortified my misery. Since when did the whole world start talking in football clichés? When did “chilling out with the Sunday papers” become a hobby?
A couple of months in, I went on a date. His profile didn’t say anything too platitudinous. He liked David Lynch and his brother had Arsenal season tickets. He lived 10 minutes away, so it was only one hour of my life I’d be losing. Five years later we’re married and expecting our first child.
Amid the acres of writing on the online dating “revolution,” two camps have emerged. Enthusiasts say that dating sites have freed people (particularly women) to make choices rather than just settle; that they’ve made matchmaking more efficient, more democratic, more egalitarian. Detractors highlight the dehumanising effects of online dating and point to tabloid tales of serial daters who’ve conned vulnerable, lonely women. Andrew G Marshall, a relationship therapist and author of The Single Trap: the two-step guide to escaping it and finding lasting love (Bloomsbury), argues that dating sites not only make lying easier—they actually encourage people to be more cavalier with others’ feelings.
So has this so-called revolution made romance more efficient and more transparent, or the opposite? The first thing to note is that online dating profiles are just digital versions of personal ads, and these have been around for hundreds of years; the oldest surviving record is dated 19th July, 1695.
Francesca Beauman’s Shapely Ankle Preferr’d: a history of the lonely hearts advertisement (Vintage) documents hundreds of the lonely hearts ads placed over the centuries, from the florid to the frank: “A young man wants a wife with two or three hundred pounds; or the money will do without the wife” (1789). Beauman’s work puts today’s claims and counter-claims for online dating into context. Tabloid interest may have been piqued in 2012 by the story of Oluwamayowa Ajayi, a London-based Nigerian gospel singer who was jailed for six and a half years for swindling four American women he met on Match.com out of £120,000. But that was nothing compared to the frenzied attention generated by the case of William Corden back in 1828, who murdered his first wife and then took up with a second via a lonely hearts placement.
Online dating is just a digital extension of what we’ve done for centuries. Take dishonesty. The latest research from the dating site OK Cupid suggests that, on average, men exaggerate their income by 20 per cent, their height by two inches, and that the older the person, the more dated the photographs on their profile. And that 80 per cent of self-identified bisexuals are only interested in one gender.
But dating sites hardly have a monopoly on polishing the facts. How different is buttering up your Match.com profile to varnishing your CV, or getting creative on LinkedIn—giving yourself the title of managing director of your own company to cover the amount of time you’ve spent unemployed? And who posts truly “honest” pictures of themselves on their Facebook profiles?
And dating websites are getting wiser to our attempts to bend the truth. Match.com, the market leader in the US and Britain, links up customers not just by their stated tastes and interests, but by crunching data to calculate people’s “revealed preferences.” In other words, they try to work out the difference between what people say they want, and what their answers to a set of questions—be it their romantic history, food preferences, political views—reveal about what they really want.
If not hard science, OK Cupid’s trends blog—another leader in this sort of data mining—is full of fun extrapolations. Who, for example, would have guessed that the question “Do you like the taste of beer?” is more predictive than any other question of whether a woman is willing to have sex on a first date? Or that the answer to the question “Do you like horror movies?” will best forecast how long a relationship is likely to last. Wondering if someone’s religious but finding it awkward to broach? Ask them if spelling and grammar mistakes annoy them. If the answer’s no, the odds of them being at least moderately religious are slightly better than 2:1.
As dating sites have become more sophisticated and their memberships have ballooned, they’ve been criticised for creating a tyranny of choice. If the thought constantly plagues online daters that something better might be easily in reach, it follows that many people won’t stop trying to find it. MySingleFriend boasts 200,000 active users a month, with a core membership of 25-38 year olds. “We appeal to a young professional demographic,” their press person explained to me. “According to Hitwise data, the profiles of the top visitors to MySingleFriend are 064- Bright Young Things and O63- Urban Cool.” Why settle for the person in front of you when you could be dating a 25-year old “Urban Cool”?
It’s akin, says Marshall, to “always wondering if you can get a better holiday at a lower price.” This not only encourages indecision and missed opportunities, he argues, it’s disastrous for developing relationship skills. If at the first problem you face, there’s an easy opt out and plenty more potential dates waiting within the click of a button, how willing are you to compromise, to try, to develop the skills needed to build relationships?
But of all the critiques of online dating, there is one that really sticks: that it can reinforce loneliness, rather than vanquishing it. “I hate dates, they’re like a job interview,” one friend confessed. Internet dates only amplify this feeling. Not because they’re “unnatural,” but because there’s extra honesty: no pretence that this meeting is anything other than an interview where what you say, do and look like gets quickly judged. And that’s if you make it as far as a date. Sometimes just the experience of interacting online can be off-putting enough. “Everyone just seemed so banal,” one novelist friend despaired. “It made me so sad to think that all the people you see on the street and the tube every day, who you hope might potentially be interesting, are actually just as boring as you fear... I think it’s a real mistake to even hope for a second that it’s going to make you less lonely.”
My friend also conceded another basic truth, too easily forgotten. No matter how detailed the profile or sophisticated the matching algorithm, there’s no predictor for physical attraction. And until the data crunchers have cracked that one, there will have been no real revolution.
