A Dangerous Refuge For The Desperate And Unsavory
Here are some links, quotes, and, fine, some commentary on online dating articles which appeard in The New York Times during the month of November 2003.
David Brooks: “Online dating puts structure back into courtship. For generations Americans had certain courtship rituals. The boy would call the girl and ask her to the movies. He might come in and meet the father. After a few dates he might ask her to go steady. Sex would progress gradually from kissing to petting and beyond. ¶ But over the past few decades that structure dissolved. And human beings, who are really good at adapting, found that the Internet, of all places, imposes the restraints they need to let relationships develop gradually.”
A letter-writer in response to the above article: “Sometimes, people come to the same place from very different paths. Computer dating services will never be able to factor that magic into online dating.” Another says that it re-introduced the fine art of letter-writing to dating, which I disbelieve. It may have re-introduced printed text into the equation, but emails and IM messages are supposed to be as short as possible, while letters, which used to take some time to get from one place to another, are supposed to be as detailed as possible, to keep the recipient sufficiently informed until the next one arrives.
The last letter-writer calls bullshit on pretty much all the major points Brooks was trying to make. In a response to that criticism, another letter-writer writes: “The reason there are more single people now than ever is not that they do not want to be married but that they are not meeting people. The Internet provides a great new way to do so.”
A much longer article on online dating comes courtesy Jennifer Egan. From the final paragraph of the first page:
a fair number of people continue to feel a stigma about dating online, ranging from the waning belief that it's a dangerous refuge for the desperate and unsavory to the milder but still unappealing notion that it's a public bazaar for the sort of people who thrive on selling themselves. The shopping metaphor is apt; online dating involves browsing and choosing among a seemingly infinite array of possible mates. But those who see a transactional approach to coupling as something new and unseemly would do well to pick up a novel by Jane Austen, where characters are introduced alongside their incomes. There is nothing new about the idea of marriage as a business transaction. Serendipitous love is what's new, love borne of chance, love like what engulfed my grandparents after my grandfather, then a resident physician at a Chicago hospital emergency room, happened to remove my grandmother's appendix. Serendipitous love as a romantic ideal is a paean to cities and their dislocations, the unlikely collisions that result from thousands of strangers with discrete histories overlapping briefly in time and space. And online dating is not the opposite of this approach to love, but its radical extension; if cities erase people's histories and cram them together in space, online dating sites erase both cities and space, gathering people instead under the virtual rubric of a brand.
I'm having a hard time—although I am persevering—believing that online dating is normal. Mostly because it feels weird to be finding a mate on the Internet when I spend most of my waking non-working hours on the Internet. I still haven't been dissuaded from the notion that I'm supposed to "get out more" to meet people.
On the second page comes this quote from "Greg": “It is impossible to draw the line between my online social life and my real-world social life. 'Without online personals, there is no telling where I would be living, who I'd be hanging out with, what clothes I'd be wearing or how busy my nightlife and sex life would be (believe me, they are busy).”
On page 3: “While women are generally more comfortable approaching men online than in bars, men still tend to make the first moves, and since women with attractive pictures (Sam is 5-foot-11 with long blond hair) are usually besieged with responses -- she's had several hundred since posting her first ad last spring -- it behooves a man to think hard about his opening salvo.” Which is exactly why I haven't yet responded to an online personal ad. That's not to say that there aren't women on my "favorites" or "bookmarks" or whatever each service calls them. (Generally speaking, if "outgoing", "fun" or "outdoors-type" appear in the ad, I don't put it on my list. As if. Get over yourselves.)
If you want to fast-forward to the part about online dating and sex, page 6 is where you want to go. Page 8 features an indictment against Friendster, indictments against Friendster being rather appealing to me. Echoing Michael Barrish is the first bit of page 9, in which a spurned potential mate uses the dating service to approvingly see that the other is spending another lonely night at home.
Kate Zernike says a lot of people are just saying no: “longtime combatants in the dating wars, psychologists and those who study the lives of singles talk about increasing dating fatigue. They say more and more people are taking dating sabbaticals or declaring they will let romance happen by chance, not commerce. Once-obsessive online daters are logging off, clients of speed dating services — which offer dozens of encounters in a roomful of strangers — are slowing down.” The article introduces to me the term "Dating-Industrial Complex".
All of this blogged, it is no coincidence, on a Saturday night.
