If Facebook is Making us Lonelier, are Dating Sites Doing the Same?

After reading the article posted by Professor Jenkins (Is Facebook Making Us Lonely), I couldn’t help but wonder if Dating sites are doing the same thing, or at the very least making it harder for those who use these websites to date in real life.

Dating sites have created a culture where you submit your information (assuming you were not lying on the questionnaire or to yourself) and wait for some mysterious algorithm to give you a list of potentially compatible mates. It has expanded our need for instant gratification; users assume that within a matter of weeks they will find their soul mate based on what a computer generated matching system has told them. It’s my belief that dating sites in all that they do have made people less date-able, just as some would argue Facebook has made us lonelier. With these dating sites you have the luxury to assume that you and your interested partner have some things in common, you won’t have a boring or awkward first date because your personalities are bound to match (and more than likely you have been in communication via emails or phone calls before you actually meet in person), you aren’t supposed to be nervous about the first major fight because your core values will most likely be the same. Now say after one, maybe two, or even three to five times of ‘dating’ different people on this website I would assume you have found your life partner (if the success rates the dating sites claim are correct). Now think about where we have traditionally found our spouses usually in the same social circle, through a friend, at work or school, or maybe even in our neighborhood or church. Traditionally dating required that you socially extend yourself in the search of a partner, now with dating sites you don’t have to do that, and without that need for social interaction to find a partner one would think that the lack of these meaningful relationships and interactions would make us lonelier.

In her article “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely” Stephen Marchie writes “our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy….[Facebook] enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society.” I would argue that dating sites do the same thing, especially if you do most of your communication via technology (emails, phone calls, skype, etc.) while dating and during the time that you ‘fall in love.’ This sort of communication saves you from the embarrassing moments of tripping in front of your partner, spilling something down the front of your blouse, having something stuck in your teeth, those awkward moments of silence, but I would also argue that it hinders your opportunity to truly get to know your partner. It’s during those awkward times that you eventually form a unique bond and get to know your partners quirks that make them such a unique person and essentially your other half.

For all the services dating sites provide, I fear that they are doing just as many disservices.

Sherry Turkle, in her 2011 book, Alone Together: wrote “the ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.” While Turkle was mainly referring to social media websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) I feel that her quote can be applied to dating sites as well.

I found a scholarly article that supports my personal beliefs to an extent, and for my next blog I will more than likely further examine this article "The Impact of Emotionality and Self-Disclosure on Online Dating Versus Traditional Dating".