Do you remember the good ol’ days?
The days when you saw a pretty girl, walked up to her and tried your best to not look stupid. Well, lucky (or not so lucky) for you those days have been replaced.
Today’s version of dating is less “The Five-Year Engagement” and more “50 First Dates.”
Online Dating is becoming the new standard for singles looking for relationships. Fifty-nine percent of internet users believe online dating is a good way to meet people and 53 percent of users believe online dating allows people to find a better match, according to Pew Research Center.
Ultimately, online dating offers three services: access, communication, and matching according to researchers in an article published by the Association for Psychological Science .
Access allows you, the user, to jump into the pool and swim with the proverbial single fishes.
Communication give the users a direct line of communication with each other and matching takes users profiles, and matches them with other like-minded people.
So where does online dating fail? Well, it’s a “50 First Dates” conundrum.
Before online dating, access was limited.
If you were a single person, your ability to meet new people and potential find a match was mostly luck.
You just happen to be at the bar as the other person, or you just happen to have a mutual friend who introduced you. With online dating, that luck has been thrown out the window.
According to Pew Research Center, 22 percent of 25-34 year olds are online daters. In 2014 there are some 400,000 OKCupid users in New York City alone.
This may sound great for the average single person, but sometimes too many options can be just too many.
Since we’re all about the fishing metaphors lets use another one: Finding one person to connect with on a deep level on an online dating website is like staring into the ocean looking for a dolphin.
Are the dolphins there? Yes.
Are you going to see one? Most likely not.
Communication is a key to any relationship and dating websites make communicating easy, while also making it irrelevant.
Online websites make it easy to message someone you’re interested in getting to know, as every user has an email-like function.
The ability in being able to communicate with a potential partner over the Internet holds about as much water as a fishing net, which is to say none.
Ninety-three percent of daily communication is nonverbal, according to UCLA Professor Dr. Albert Mehrabian.
This means that the majority of peoples communications are done by tone of voice or body language, two distinct characteristics that you can’t express through online communication.
Then there is the biggest lie about online dating – the matching process.
Almost every dating website uses some sort of algorithm to match yourself with other like-minded people. What they don’t tell you is that it’s utter rubbish.
“Part of the problem is that matching sites build their mathematical algorithms around principles—typically similarity but also complementarity—that are much less important to relationship well-being than has long been assumed,” according to The Association of Psychological Science’s study.
The idea that you could put a person’s personality, their quirks and pet peeves, mash them up and spit out a number is frankly, absurd.
What this comes down to is thus: Online dating is a great way to meet new people, to connect on a shallow level and potentially go on a date with.
But when you’re swimming in a sea of fishes, what is the point of marrying one.