The Rise of Online Dating
Dating coaches often believe that attraction and relationships are like a craft. Rather than the ‘identity’ of the people who are dating, it’s more useful to think in terms of expressing their utilities: like a brand, how do they express their qualities and characteristics? The focus, then, is not so much on what their qualities and characteristics are—although this is important—but on how they deliver these qualities and aspects of themselves. Storytelling is one useful way to get at these qualities, but even stronger than stories is showing someone else through experience-based activities.
In studying these communities, I have found that ‘the work’ of coaching men to become more charismatic involves a set of practices that simultaneously open up a person’s cognitive awareness, and tune it to pick up on specific subtleties of intersubjective emotion and behavior between two people. I have also found that although it is possible to date ‘smarter’—through lifestyle choices like having thoughtful hobbies, attending events that attract people you’re interested in meeting, and sharpening one’s personal values and self-understanding—that despite one’s best intentions, love and romance require also a certain degree of serendipity and surrender to chance.
In the domain of online dating, there is a well-known contrast in user experiences: this is between systems that skew towards attraction (also known as ‘hot-or-not’) and systems that skew towards personality matching through compatibility (the search for a ‘soulmate’). Changing social morals around online dating, and the proliferation of smartphones and portable dating apps with low overhead, have at the same time opened up a huge new market of untapped singles to enter the world of online dating, at the same time as they have created a demand for diversity in user experiences for customers who may experience ‘burnout’ from a combination of spending hours every week on dating sites and experiencing less-than-fulfilling dates with matches in real life. Users are faced with a perennial dilemma: hunting for superficial matches built on physical attraction, or settling for compatibility determined by a great deal of up-front investment of time and energy for a date that isn’t always rewarding. Online dating, in other words, easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that, despite unprecedented openness and customization, does not necessarily give users the satisfactions and thrills that accord with their ideas of romance. Online dating platforms offer an unprecedented combination of chance encounters that wouldn’t normally occur in everyday life together with a high degree of tailored customization and specification to the user’s choices. Within this combination—a broad user base matched with specific user-centered matching criteria—a lost opportunity emerges in the area of matches that users don’t know that they don’t know.
For creators and marketers of online dating sites, these challenges that users experience bring to the fore some issues that limit the viability of new dating apps. One of these issues is built-in user churn: successful partnerships and matches often mean one more lost customer. Another issue is the niche aspect of dating in general—because users’ intent is most often to find a partner, there is a limited time-window in which dating is a relevant issue for users. The turn to dating through mobile apps has solved some of these issues, especially by focusing on casual dating; tapping into viral growth and word-of-mouth popularity; and by including messaging features that integrate with smartphones and make them easy to use, even addictive. The most well-known response to these challenges has been a turn to dating apps that encourage casual dating, like Tinder. Despite its phenomenal success, Tinder lowers the commitment of potential daters to meet up by relying on what Malcolm Gladwell calls ‘thin-slicing’—for example, face-shots and free-form in-app messaging. This gives users both a narrow bandwidth in which to convey personality, and a low barrier to ‘flaking’ or ‘ghosting’ on dates, all of which can lead to user frustration and feelings of burnout.
Here, an anthropologist might point out that one of the challenges is that the community of online daters is not governed by any of the other features that would define a community in a meaningful sense: there are no shared values, ethics, beliefs, and desires other than the demand for self-surveillance and self-presentation—a broadly-shared desire to achieve a lifestyle of successful dating through strategies of self-presentation. It thus becomes imperative for users to project and define their identity in ways that are often forced or artificial. Despite the shift from compatibility to attraction by encouraging ‘casual dating’, I propose to you that underlying these apps is the same perspective: that they treat users as data points who will match up based on the exchange of information. This perspective treats users as information points, items on a menu. While this is a revolution in dating that creates new opportunities, it also creates challenges around intimacy. By using anthropological insights about the broader contexts of users’ needs, we can conceptualize new dating systems and products through interventions in the design of how users actually interact on dating websites.
Here I would like to return briefly to the my ethnographic study of men’s seduction groups. In the seduction communities that I study, men learn flirting primarily in two different genres, what they refer to as ‘canned’ versus ‘natural’ game—game means flirting. In ‘canned’ game, men learn flirting by reciting scripts or routines. These routines include, first, conversational openers that are memorized and recited, like ‘who lies more, men or women?’; they also include interactional games to build rapport during the course of a conversation. By contrast with these routines or so-called ‘canned’ game, ‘natural’ game focuses on participating in social rituals that help men to become more confident in expressing themselves. This involves participating in social exercises that give men feelings of self-acceptance by pushing them out of their comfort zone to increase their confidence in situations that make them nervous, including meeting and flirting with women.
While these men may experience improved confidence and self-esteem by applying a design-thinking process to their dating lives, many of them don’t overcome their inhibitions so much as they simply push inhibition into a different area. Rather than experiencing anxiety around dating, these men may simply experience anxiety around properly applying the techniques they have learned. Putting aside for a moment the problematic morality of this behavior, my research suggests that people need resistance and ambiguity in order to develop long-lasting attraction. This is why women test (as discussed in a dating advice book for women called The Rules), and why men learn seduction routines. It’s the reason scarce goods are economically valuable; and it’s the reason that, throughout modern times, romance novels have devoted hundreds of thousands of pages and captured global audiences by discussing romances between ‘forbidden partners’: from Romeo and Juliet, to Jane Austen, to the Twilight movies about vampires and teenage girls. A male audience member at an event for creating online dating profiles—I’ll call him Ben—put it this way: quote, “I think the best way to meet someone is through way weirder places than OkCupid. I think it’s cooler to meet someone through Yahoo Questions, or… because you love their Yelp review.” As another member of the audience, Anna, replied to Ben: “Right—it’s like meeting someone at the airport. These methods [of online dating] are so loaded with intention that there’s no romance in them. When you take out that intention and you meet someone, [the effect is] like not knowing what you want and finding it anyways.” If we listen to Ben and Anna, then dating sites should be mindful of the importance of distance or estrangement as a paradoxical but integral part of intimacy in the user experience. After all, if a match is too easy, how much value and importance do we actually give it?
Online dating websites promise advanced matching for compatibility based on scientific research and engineered algorithms. While useful, this may neglect the crucial role of spontaneity in developing interpersonal attraction. Studies show that people who undertake a challenging, unexpected activity together often feel heightened feelings of attraction and intimacy for people who shared in their experience. Psychologists have found that attraction, rather than being an outcome of similarity, actually plays a causal role in assessments of similarity between romantic partners in the first place (Morry, Kito and Ortiz 2010). Moreover, while people cognitively believe that similarity with a partner is important, in practical terms they devalue similarity and prioritize other qualities—attractiveness and humor, for example—when thinking about an ideal mate (Dijkstra and Barelds 2008). Moreover, studies have shown that people often lack insight into why they like things (Nisbett & Wilson 1977). Specifically in online dating, there is a “disconnect between a priori stated preferences and in-vivo revealed preferences…” Over and above user profiles, there should be other ways for users to gauge which potential partners are more compatible with them than with other users.
As Finkel et. al. put it, “reducing three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information… [may] fail to capture those experiential aspects of social interaction that are essential to evaluating one’s compatibility with potential partners” (‘Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science’, 3). “[people] exhibited a disconnect between (a) their idiographic self-reports of the traits that they desired in a romantic partner and (b) the traits that actually predicted their romantic attraction to and relationship well-being with real-life potential partners” (Finkel et. al. ‘Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science’, 30).
Research has shown that the extraordinary amount of information that is given by someone face-to-face is given indirectly: it is shown, not stated, in things like body language, gestures, postures, vocal expression, and vocal tonality. Demonstrating the insights from these psychological studies, a number of products already exist that seek to bring some experiential features of in-person communication into online formats. Experience-based games such as ‘Virtual Reality dating simulators’ allow two people to interact with each other in 3D online worlds in order to discover more subtle points of compatibility before going on an actual date. Dating practices have been observed by anthropologists in virtual worlds ranging from Second Life to Utherverse, and even World of Warcraft. While intriguing developments, these technological solutions obviously require a lot of overhead costs; are bulky to implement; are not as inclusive as possible to a wide range of users; and, for these reasons, are not as mobile-friendly in an age in which smartphone usage saturates the consumer marketplace.