StarScream35
Well-Known Member
It's long but really good
Is online dating destroying love?
Online dating is now one of the most common ways to start a relationship. But is it fulfilling our dreams – or shattering our cherished ideal of romance?
'I'm telling you, this is Love Year Zero, the Year of True Love, the Real Thing." So writes cinderella69 (AKA Jennifer – she was born in 1969) in her blog about her online dating experiences. "You couldn't do this until now. You went on waiting and waiting for your Prince, and you still had a long wait ahead of you, because he didn't know you were waiting, poor thing. Now you're on the net, and everyone knows it. It can't fail to work. All you have to do is look."
She's right. Last millennium 72% of us met our partners at school or university, at work or in networks of family or friends. The other 28%, presumably, met the loves of their lives by tripping over them as they lay in their own filth outside a Black Country pub. Or such were mating rites in my day. The internet is revolutionary because it renders it easy for us to make contact with people we don't know and, better yet, those who don't necessarily live within the Dudley travel-to-work area/look like trolls/cite assembling Airfix models as their favourite hobby even though they're 43, etc.
According to a new survey by psychologists at the University of Rochester in the US, online dating is the second most common way of starting a relationship – after meeting through friends. It has become popular in part, says one of the report's authors, Professor Harry Reis, because other methods are widely thought of as grossly inefficient. "The internet holds great promise for helping adults form healthy and supportive romantic partnerships, and those relationships are one of the best predictors of emotional and physical health," he says.
The Guardian, for example, has had its own and very successful online dating site, Soulmates, since 2004 – more than 650,000 have registered. It can put you in touch with Guardian readers – true, that may be some people's worst nightmare, but it does mean you won't get propositioned online by someone whose leisure activities are attending English Defence League demos and you won't have to explain on a date that Marcel Proust wasn't an F1 racing driver.
Online dating offers the dream of removing the historic obstacles to true love (time, space, your dad sitting on the porch with a shotgun across his lap and an expression that says no boy is good enough for my girl). And online dating sites, which in the US are growing at 70% a year, surely make it easier than ever to meet the Prince Charming or the Fairytale Princess of your, frankly, infantile dreams. At least that's what cinderella69 believes.
But she's also wrong: it often fails to work – not least because elsewhere in cyberspace there are people like Nick, who aren't looking for love from online dating sites, but for sexual encounters as perishable and substitutable as yoghurt. In his sex blog, Nick works out that he got 77.7% of the women he has met through online dating sites into bed on the first night, and that 55% of his dates were "one-offs", three were "frigid", two were "not too great", eight "hot" and two "atomic". I know, I know: who'd have thought atomic sex was desirable rather than a trip to A&E waiting to happen? Thanks to the internet, such spreadsheets of love have replaced notches on the bedpost and can be displayed hubristically online.
But there's another problem for the lie-dream of online romantic fulfilment: in the hypermarket of desire, as in a large Tesco's breakfast cereal aisle, it's almost impossible to choose.
"When you look at their profiles, they're all the same," wails channelchris in her blog. "Charming, sporty, generous, funny, 'no mind games', good-looking, sensual ... They practically guarantee you'll be on cloud nine."
When everyone is presenting themselves as practically perfect in every way, then you're bound to worry you've signed up for a libido-frustrating yawnathon.
The foregoing sex bloggers are quoted by Sorbonne sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann in his new book Love Online, in which he reflects on what has happened to romantic relationships since the millennium. The landscape of dating has changed completely, he argues. We used to have yentas or parents to help us get married; now we have to fend for ourselves. We have more freedom and autonomy in our romantic lives than ever and some of us have used that liberty to change the goals: monogamy and marriage are no longer the aims for many of us; sex, reconfigured as a harmless leisure activity involving the maximising of pleasure and the minimising of the hassle of commitment, often is. Online dating sites have accelerated these changes, heightening the hopes for and deepening the pitfalls of sex and love.
"I've been researching love and coupledom for 30 years and now the internet has brusquely changed the rules of dating," Kaufmann tells me. "Love isn't an eternal given – it evolves with societies. And people want to know how it functions now. It's urgent to analyse it."
Is online dating destroying love?
Online dating is now one of the most common ways to start a relationship. But is it fulfilling our dreams – or shattering our cherished ideal of romance?
'I'm telling you, this is Love Year Zero, the Year of True Love, the Real Thing." So writes cinderella69 (AKA Jennifer – she was born in 1969) in her blog about her online dating experiences. "You couldn't do this until now. You went on waiting and waiting for your Prince, and you still had a long wait ahead of you, because he didn't know you were waiting, poor thing. Now you're on the net, and everyone knows it. It can't fail to work. All you have to do is look."
She's right. Last millennium 72% of us met our partners at school or university, at work or in networks of family or friends. The other 28%, presumably, met the loves of their lives by tripping over them as they lay in their own filth outside a Black Country pub. Or such were mating rites in my day. The internet is revolutionary because it renders it easy for us to make contact with people we don't know and, better yet, those who don't necessarily live within the Dudley travel-to-work area/look like trolls/cite assembling Airfix models as their favourite hobby even though they're 43, etc.
According to a new survey by psychologists at the University of Rochester in the US, online dating is the second most common way of starting a relationship – after meeting through friends. It has become popular in part, says one of the report's authors, Professor Harry Reis, because other methods are widely thought of as grossly inefficient. "The internet holds great promise for helping adults form healthy and supportive romantic partnerships, and those relationships are one of the best predictors of emotional and physical health," he says.
The Guardian, for example, has had its own and very successful online dating site, Soulmates, since 2004 – more than 650,000 have registered. It can put you in touch with Guardian readers – true, that may be some people's worst nightmare, but it does mean you won't get propositioned online by someone whose leisure activities are attending English Defence League demos and you won't have to explain on a date that Marcel Proust wasn't an F1 racing driver.
Online dating offers the dream of removing the historic obstacles to true love (time, space, your dad sitting on the porch with a shotgun across his lap and an expression that says no boy is good enough for my girl). And online dating sites, which in the US are growing at 70% a year, surely make it easier than ever to meet the Prince Charming or the Fairytale Princess of your, frankly, infantile dreams. At least that's what cinderella69 believes.
But she's also wrong: it often fails to work – not least because elsewhere in cyberspace there are people like Nick, who aren't looking for love from online dating sites, but for sexual encounters as perishable and substitutable as yoghurt. In his sex blog, Nick works out that he got 77.7% of the women he has met through online dating sites into bed on the first night, and that 55% of his dates were "one-offs", three were "frigid", two were "not too great", eight "hot" and two "atomic". I know, I know: who'd have thought atomic sex was desirable rather than a trip to A&E waiting to happen? Thanks to the internet, such spreadsheets of love have replaced notches on the bedpost and can be displayed hubristically online.
But there's another problem for the lie-dream of online romantic fulfilment: in the hypermarket of desire, as in a large Tesco's breakfast cereal aisle, it's almost impossible to choose.
"When you look at their profiles, they're all the same," wails channelchris in her blog. "Charming, sporty, generous, funny, 'no mind games', good-looking, sensual ... They practically guarantee you'll be on cloud nine."
When everyone is presenting themselves as practically perfect in every way, then you're bound to worry you've signed up for a libido-frustrating yawnathon.
The foregoing sex bloggers are quoted by Sorbonne sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann in his new book Love Online, in which he reflects on what has happened to romantic relationships since the millennium. The landscape of dating has changed completely, he argues. We used to have yentas or parents to help us get married; now we have to fend for ourselves. We have more freedom and autonomy in our romantic lives than ever and some of us have used that liberty to change the goals: monogamy and marriage are no longer the aims for many of us; sex, reconfigured as a harmless leisure activity involving the maximising of pleasure and the minimising of the hassle of commitment, often is. Online dating sites have accelerated these changes, heightening the hopes for and deepening the pitfalls of sex and love.
"I've been researching love and coupledom for 30 years and now the internet has brusquely changed the rules of dating," Kaufmann tells me. "Love isn't an eternal given – it evolves with societies. And people want to know how it functions now. It's urgent to analyse it."