I wonder when country music artists are going to start singing about meeting people through online dating sites. They might already do that, but I wouldn’t know. I’m not exactly the country type, since lyrics about green tractors and cowboy chiropractors don’t appeal to me.
Nothing against country music, I just wanted a way to bring up online dating in light of Valentine’s Day.
Most people, myself included, probably viewed online dating as a silly gimmick that would blow over like retro sunglasses, Chuck Norris facts or planking.
Nevertheless –– like Uggs –– Internet dating has passed the stage of being a new sensation, whether we like it or not. Now the Internet is the second-most common method of matchmaking in the United States, trailing only introductions made by friends.
Technology and digital media control just about everything else in our lives, so relationships were bound to fall in there sooner or later. It just makes sense, too. If a computer system can hide you from everyone you aren’t compatible with, then it really speeds up the process for people who are constantly searching.
People are impatient, and it feels like a waste of time if a traditional relationship moves past the puppy-love stage and the couple turns out to be incompatible. Still, at that point they’ve often been with each other long enough that they try to salvage it at all costs.
What happens next is the people in the relationship try so hard to keep things together that it ends up falling apart faster than a Jenga tower built by gorillas.
That’s why online dating says it’s a crapshoot to base potential partners on primary qualities of attraction like sense of humor, intellect, sociability and emotional energy. Ordinarily, the crucial areas for sustainable compatibility surface after the relationship’s honeymoon stage wears off.
So, for the sake of research, I decided to investigate the two front-runners: Match.com and eHarmony.
The first step is to decide your dating criteria, where you constrain your potential partners by age, height and location. And that’s just to get started.
Once you lay down the boundaries, you set additional preferences about religion, education and body type, among other things. If you click on any of these, a super-judgmental box appears to ask you, “Is this a dealbreaker?” I assume you’re supposed to imagine that question being asked by Oprah, or Christian Bale when he uses his Batman voice.
Still, these initial parameters are only good for indicating what a person finds attractive, and we don’t need computers for that. Most people can just apply the eyeball test.
But Internet matchmaking transcends what we are capable of seeing myopically. Online dating is remarkable because it already includes the vital signs for family goals, traditions, conflict resolution and ambition — in addition to the things that make people appealing to each other.
When relationships work, it’s because the two people are on the same page, they want the same thing out of it, or they haven’t had to address anything pivotal yet.
Keep in mind that I’m saying this as if I know what I’m talking about. My own experiences make me feel like Morgan Freeman’s character in “Se7en” when he says, “Anyone who spends a significant amount of time with me finds me … disagreeable.”
Anyway, most of the time the relationships that last occur because the pair truly wants the same thing, and by the time people reach their late 20s, that mutual thing tends to be to settle down. I mean, is it so crazy that people often end up marrying whomever they “just so happen” to meet in their 30s?
Online dating sites work because they not only put people together who are compatible for the long-run, but they also pair people who want the same thing right now.
So why doesn’t everyone do it?
Because no couple wants to admit that they met online. That’s just it. But aren’t those people trading being happy for what they think would make them look desperate?
So, of course, I refused to submit my profile because I didn’t want to pollute the system. Aren’t you proud of me?