Online dating service: Encyclopedia II - Online dating service - Factors in online dating experience

Online dating service - Factors in online dating experience

Online dating sites operate by the same paradigms that govern all relationships, though factors specific to the nature of online communications may affect the experience.

Positive factors include:

• Dating sites allow members to meet more people than they would without such sites.
• People can easily browse other members’ profiles before deciding to communicate.
• Members can communicate anonymously and with reduced fear or social awkwardness.
• The effect of geography is mitigated and members can meet people of distant locations.
• Dating sites that offer free or moderately priced services allow users to meet other singles in a convenient, inexpensive way.
• Members can determine if there is any chemistry before pursuing the relationship in real life.

Negative factors include:

• Members may misrepresent themselves, including their marital/relationship status, age, gender, physical attributes or socio-economic status.
• Some members may join the site solely to view content and are not potential matches.
• Men often outnumber women. On many sites, any one subscriber can contact another - but in practice, men usually send the first email. Therefore, women are overwhelmed with responses (many from 'bad apples' and 'players') while men are left sending several emails, often never to hear back from women who can be more selective given the wider choice of men.
• Some dating sites may not remove 'expired' profiles, or else may be very slow to remove them, thereby falsely inflating the apparent number of potential dates.
• Despite modern advances/opportunities in transportation and telecommunication --particularly, of greatest importance, email-- human psychology and behavior still give rise to issues which may pose barriers to relationship success when the two partners are separated by obstacles other than logistic ones, namely, a lack of interpersonal communication and stress, among others.
• As Andrea Orr's Meeting, Mating, and Cheating notes, "The guy who was perfect in every way, except that he was 5'8" tall, could find himself out of the running just because his ideal mate had listed 5'9" as her cutoff height."
• Looks are exaggerated as users respond primarily to photos
• Email and chat is far less efficient than face-to-face communication
• Men pay for most of the contacts since dating culture requires them to make the first move and dating sites require users to pay for the first contacts. Since women can reply for free men are likely to spend a lot of money sending email while receiving few responses.
• There is no social network and thus no method to identify or deter "players" who are interested only in sex or expensive dates. One player can prey on many users more efficiently online than in real life.
• People spend excessive time updating their profiles instead of getting a life.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Factors in online dating experience", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki