Random Ties that Bind
October 13, 2017 8:31 AM   Subscribe

Match.com went live in 1995. A new wave of dating websites, such as OKCupid, emerged in the early 2000s. And the 2012 arrival of Tinder changed dating even further. Today, more than one-third of marriages start online. Clearly, these sites have had a huge impact on dating behavior. But now the first evidence is emerging that their effect is much more profound.

Online dating may be enhancing racial integration and building stronger marriages. MIT Technology Review writes about a recent study.
posted by polywomp (56 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
I met my partner on an online dating site. When she tells that story, and people ask which one, I usually say "eBay. She was the highest bidder." We've been together for 11 years. I don't think either of us are going anywhere soon, so I expect to get another 11 if she continues to put up with my shit.

If we ever do separate, I imagine I'll be going the online route again, since I no longer have access to the traditional methods I formally used to meet women (I no longer drink, no longer do church, am not in school, and I don't have a dog to walk).

This said, I am sort of glad I missed the whole Netflix and chill thing that the later apps brought into popularity.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:39 AM on October 13, 2017 [10 favorites]


Meanwhile, research into the strength of marriage has found some evidence that married couples who meet online have lower rates of marital breakup than those who meet traditionally.
Which, I should point out, is not quite the same thing as "married couples who meet via an online dating website". I just don't know what the proportions are -- of course I myself mostly know of couples who met through fandom, because that lens dominated my online interactions for most of my time on the internet, but it would make sense for mainstream commercial dating websites to have the lion's share of this, but it seems to me that getting to know people via a dating website doesn't offer quite the same opportunities to scope out someone's whole personality as getting to know them in less narrowly focused social-media/online-community spaces?
posted by inconstant at 8:50 AM on October 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


Anecdata: I met my wife through Match.com, and we're currently at 14 years married.

It was funny--I've never done well meeting people, and I'd been on Match.com for something like 6 or 7 years at that point (I joined when they first started and was grandfathered in as a permanently free account) with only a handful of dates and one previous relationship having resulted. Still, while doing the free browse, she liked my profile enough to join specifically with the intention of contacting me...but the registration process was complicated enough that she then just went to bed before doing so.

Meanwhile, her new registration caused her to pop up on my account and I contacted her before she had the chance to log back in the next day and find me.
posted by Four Ds at 9:01 AM on October 13, 2017 [25 favorites]


Some of the prior data on race and online dating has been somewhat depressing. So this is at least hopeful.


Online dating has changed that. Today, online dating is the second most common way for heterosexual couples to meet. For homosexual couples, it is far and away the most popular.

That has significant implications. “People who meet online tend to be complete strangers,” say Ortega and Hergovich. And when people meet in this way, it sets up social links that were previously nonexistent.


I thought this part was also super interesting, as it seems like it could have implications for social class as well. I know people who've met partners from wholly different walks of life via online dating.
posted by limeonaire at 9:23 AM on October 13, 2017 [15 favorites]


I am wondering if marriages from online dating are stronger partly because of a shared trauma bond. It's rough out there, in the vast wasteland that is dating online -- I just swiped left on a profile yesterday that said, in part, "I'm just here sifting through the dog shit, looking for a diamond."

I've been called anti-Semitic slurs (OkCupid claims "retribution will be swift" when you report, but that guy is still there); have been sent dick pics; have been told I should smile more, in direct response to pictures where I am smiling but apparently not enough; I've gone out to dinner with people and have had them ask me to have sex with them within five minutes of meeting; I have been told I'm ugly, that I'm too "sexperienced" or not "sexperienced" enough, a label OkCupid applies that you cannot remove and that people seize on and mention when messaging.... I've met some very angry, very unkind, very entitled people while dating online. And the kind ones I have met, we have shared stories about dating online, and it's rough for everyone, of every gender. It's not always rough in the same way, but it's just really difficult and yes, traumatic. So I have to wonder if that doesn't help form a stronger bond in these relationships.
posted by sockermom at 9:31 AM on October 13, 2017 [25 favorites]


I met my wife through her twin sister - who I met on the internet. We stopped being friends for a bit after said sister and I broke up. Then when my wife's then-husband died, I left a message on his online memorial site and we rekindled our friendship, which turned into love and marriage.

So I guess I'm one of the people they talk about in this.
posted by mephron at 9:35 AM on October 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


Which, I should point out, is not quite the same thing as "married couples who meet via an online dating website".

as somebody who's DJed a fair number of weddings over the years, I can report that, of late, online dating sites are the #1 cause of marriage.
posted by philip-random at 9:47 AM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I love meeting people through shared interest forums that aren't dating sites. Quite a few years ago, I dated a couple of guys I met through just blogging. My daughter is engaged to a man she met through a language learning site. They were just friends interested in each other's culture for quite some time before it turned to romance.
posted by Miss Cellania at 9:48 AM on October 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


I've opted out of the dating arena now, but I remember the Bad Old Days before internet dating was a widespread thing - and while there are plenty of bad stories like Sockermom's in the online dating arena, there were plenty of bad stories and bad people in the meet-in-person era. Relying on kismet and luck to find a partner wasn't all it was cracked up to be. It could turn activities (classes, meet-ups, church groups, etc.) that weren't really about finding a potential partner but were used as one (take a class! go to church! you'll meet The One!) into a meat market/shark tank. Hoping to "meet cute" on a train or at a cafe didn't usually work. "Fake singles" abounded, just as they do online. So did jerks.

I'm really glad there is a focused way of meeting others now. You don't have to hope that your friends invited someone cute and compatible to their party. And online dating websites/apps lets you meet people you wouldn't otherwise have met. I think that is why online dating is facilitating more interracial matches - it broadens and deepens the pool of potentials.

Maybe online matches last longer because they are more optimally selected in the first place - no-one has settled because "I just won't meet anyone else in this town, might as well be him/her."
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 9:48 AM on October 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


Most of the couples we are good friends with met online. One couple met on Lavalife, one met on Palace Chat, one met on a Lion King MUD (heh!) and I met my husband on Slashdot :D

Edit to add - three these relationships have spanned 17-20 years.
posted by Calzephyr at 9:50 AM on October 13, 2017


Mrs. geek and I met online in an IRC chat room on dalnet in 2002, dated for a year and were married in 2003. Still going strong 15 years later, she's the most amazing woman I've ever met. We were both in our 40's at the time, so not your typical couple that met online, in fact at the time we were hesitant to admit to our friends that we met online.
posted by Grumpy old geek at 9:58 AM on October 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


I had a great time doing Tinder/OKC. the nature of Tinder is that, since it's tied to geography, you can get kind of an idea of the kind of people who live in certain areas. in Atlanta, near me, most all of my matches were graduate students (Emory was close-by). in not-yet-gentrified parts of town, it was a huge range of folks. in the bougie downtown areas, it was all white preppy/basic types who liked to hunt, vacation, and go to sports things

it was also most of how I found my first job in social justice (ended up becoming friends with the office manager of a non-prof org), started organizing (went on a friends-date with one of my now close friends, met her roommate who used to organize out in the Pacific Northwest, we started an anti-racist org that really took off post-Trump), got out of an unhealthy relationship, learned a thing or two about myself, gained some confidence, and met my current partner of 1+ years who I keep falling more in love with every time we get to spend more than a couple of hours with each other

I did do a lot of 'Netflix and Chill' which is fine and what healthy young adults do when they have a normal sex life and aren't ashamed of it. I also learned how to get tested and helped support the booming contraceptives industry. I also learned a lot about what I needed and wanted from a relationship, how to better give what other people need and/or want, and the best way to communicate all of that. and I also learned that racial and ethnic differences in dating is not a hard issue to navigate so long as you're willing to talk openly and honestly about it

basically: regrets about Tinder = 0, millenials killing the anti-miscegenation and sex negative culture = great, and y'all can deal with it lol
posted by runt at 10:14 AM on October 13, 2017 [41 favorites]


My wife and I just high-fived over our scientifically proven stronger marriage.
posted by TypographicalError at 10:24 AM on October 13, 2017 [12 favorites]


I wonder if this effect is even more pronounced for lgbtq people. The shot in the dark thing was PRONOUNCED before online dating, and people just kinda took what they could get. Now? We can actually look around for a relationship that's good for us, and not just good enough, if we so choose.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:24 AM on October 13, 2017 [18 favorites]


I began using dating systems in 1994, back when it was done over the telephone. Back then if you used a dating service, you were embarrassed about it and didn't admit it. Now everyone does it and freely acknowledges it. I eventually moved over the internet, which I found resulted in fewer but higher quality dates. I used the old Telepersonals, which became Lavalife, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid. I tried Match not so long ago but soon discovered that it's impossible to interact with anyone at all on there without paying for it, so I deleted my profile. I've met some triple digit number of guys but never saw anyone for more than a few months at the most, and I'm still single at 44. Many of the guys I met seemed quite decent sorts, but the fit was never quite right. Really, my only takeaway has been the anecdotes that arose out of some of the bad or bizarre experiences, as well as the fun or fascinating stories the guys would tell me about their lives. I do feel fortunate in one way that I've never once been physically or sexually assaulted by anyone I've ever dated. This is partly because I always talk to guys on the phone for at least half an hour or so before I meet them -- I know the verbal cues of abuse and have been very quick to cut off any guy who employed them. But when I see the stats on abuse and sexual assault, I know it's also luck, because when I was younger I did take risks I'd never take now, such as getting into the guy's car or going to his apartment with him on the first date.

Here's the worst online dating experience I ever had. I was on Lavalife one night and found someone in the Relationship section had returned a smile I'd sent him with the canned message, "I can't resist the fact that we are complete opposites."

This was back in the day when I could actually afford to buy some credits. I'd send free smiles pretty freely, but I tried to only use my credits on guys who seem like really good leads, so I reviewed the guy's ad again. Hmm. I was definitely getting a jerkiness vibe. But... it had been so long since I'd come across anyone I wanted to spend credits on I though, why not, and sent him a message, and jokingly asked him why he thought we were opposites.

The next day I found a returned message in my inbox that said, in its entirety, "You sound shallow and I am not. You look pyschotic [sic] and I am not."

And he'd blocked me from replying to his message.

He had only smiled at me in an effort to encourage me to waste my credits on him. I still think about what a complete shit that guy was, and now I listen to my instincts and never waste any time on guys who are giving off the jerk vibe, or in his case, the asshole siren.
posted by orange swan at 10:39 AM on October 13, 2017 [16 favorites]


Damn, I guess I need to stop trying to meet other women IRL and get back online.

I kind of loathe online dating, but those numbers don't lie.
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:48 AM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Did I miss it, or does that article not actually mention the specific percentages of interracial marriages over time? (It's on page 22 of the actual paper, though.)
posted by showbiz_liz at 10:53 AM on October 13, 2017


I met Mr. Machine on OK Cupid! We were each other's first dates on there.

In fact, he was my EH WHO CARES IF IT DOESN'T WORK DUDE DOESN'T EVEN HAVE A PHOTO OF HIS FACE ON HIS PROFILE JUST DIPPIN' MY TOES BACK INTO THE POOL date. Afterwards, I thought all first dates off that service would be effortless.

Reader, they were not. I married him.
posted by joyceanmachine at 11:05 AM on October 13, 2017 [15 favorites]


Thought I'd chuck in my own anecdata: I met my current partner of almost 4 years online. They liked some of my late-teenage/early 20's photography material on tumblr, and then we ended up commiserating about mental illness. Not exactly the most romantic story, I know.

Something that I have personally observed (once again, anecdata) in online dating is that it permits a body-commercializing, comparative market in a way that can be both isolating and crushing. Lots of folks I know use it to look for only the "10's" (their words, not mine) that they can find.

Hyper-selectivity becomes then a socioeconomic barrier, as usually the guys and gals who are seen as having the nicest profiles are affluent and/or of elevated social status. It is then a tool for people to maintain and reinforce in-group links, and avoid cross-class relationships.

It also gives people who are conventionally attractive, for whatever reasons that may be, a greater platform to cement their status while cutting out "lower value" [yet completely normative and often lovely] people. This leads to cynicism for those who lose out.

Perhaps I'm naive or stupid, but I like to think that a lot of the "settling" that occurred in the past was actually quite healthy, because it meant people weren't wasting their time holding out for eight foot tall, spade-chinned Greco-Roman statues or impossibly curvaceous star-children. This isn't some apologia for "nice guys". I really do know some very kind, intelligent women and men who have a hard time in our market-like, modern romantic and sexual culture. The system as it is now discards a lot of people.

And lastly I think that allowing people to take these social shortcuts online prevents them from actually getting out there and forming incidental social bonds in general. Social networking platforms in practice encourage a surprising amount of isolation. Most of the generational peers that I know aren't really engaged with any wider communities that they weren't already involved with in highschool.
posted by constantinescharity at 11:11 AM on October 13, 2017 [15 favorites]


My parents were introduced by a computer match system in 1968. Possibly 1967. The marriage only lasted 20 years or so; early adopters, eh.
posted by clew at 11:21 AM on October 13, 2017 [8 favorites]


I met my husband in the late 90's via the profile search function in America Online. He was looking for recommendations for DC comic book stores and I'd just done a similar search in preparation for moving there. Being nerds is what brought us together. We just celebrated out 10th wedding anniversary.
posted by Alison at 11:30 AM on October 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


I met exMrDrLith on Yahoo personals (and was actively dating through match.com as well) in 2004, so there is that. Still, he's a better caliber of ex-husband than the IRL potential dating partners I was coming across in my extremely limited, recently-moved-across-the-country singlemomhood world of that time.
posted by drlith at 11:45 AM on October 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


My wife and I met via an AOL personal ad that she posted back in 2000. She had posted a half serious/half goofy quiz that you had to answer before she'd respond and I guess that I passed that test because she wrote me back. Back then when we explained how we met, people thought it was quite the novelty that we'd found each other online.
posted by octothorpe at 11:46 AM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


My wife and I met through the late Salon/Nerve personals (which was spun out and named Spring Street Networks around the time we both signed up). During its heyday it was the personals in the sidebar of lots of sites, and it was always interesting to try to figure out what site had pulled somebody in. Anyway, we've been together for fourteen years and married for just a day shy of five (we're flying to Paris tomorrow).

I just learned that Spring Street eventually was bought for a song by the parent company of FriendFinder, which was itself acquired by Penthouse, and now I need a shower and a divorce.
posted by fedward at 12:02 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


My parents were introduced by a computer match system in 1968. Possibly 1967. The marriage only lasted 20 years or so; early adopters, eh.

Computer dating was well-enough established by 1970 to merit (if that's the right word) its own Carry On movie.

What Carry On Tinder would look like, I have no idea.
posted by Devonian at 12:08 PM on October 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Some years ago, one of my co-workers was really big on online dating, so much so that she gave out the e-mail addresses of the other singles in her department for the dating site to follow up on.

Purely out of amusement, I followed up and filled out the questionnaire on the sign-up page. Things went fine (height, weight, sexual preference, religion, smoking, etc.) until I reached a little text box that invited me to write a short paragraph on why I would be a good person to date.

That stopped me. After several minutes, I realized that I had no special qualities that would make me an acceptable partner and that there really was no reason why anyone would go out with me. Gave up the idea of dating entirely at that point.

And perhaps that is a strength of these online sites. They do invite the participate to engage in a little self-reflection and, perhaps, improve the quality of the dating pool by taking themselves out of it.
posted by SPrintF at 12:13 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Damn, I guess I need to stop trying to meet other women IRL and get back online.

I kind of loathe online dating, but those numbers don't lie.


I'm taking the reverse approach for now. I suspended my account, and am hoping for something IRL (although, yes, those numbers don't lie, and any RL thing is highly doubtful).

Having a dedicated space for dating, where it's OK to approach people for dating because that's what everyone is there for* -- that's a huge advantage when RL avenues are closing off. But the flip side of having that dedicated space is that when there's no activity either on your profile or extending from it -- there's no kidding yourself about your self-appraised worth or place in the world.

Online dating is indeed loathesome, and it's the last, best shot for a lot of us. I just need a break from online dating's negative reinforcement and steady demoralization, so I can use RL excuses to pretend that my lack of progress is due to something other than the worst fears I harbour about myself.

But hey -- those of you whom online dating worked out for? I'm glad. You found what we're all after, and good for you. There may be hope to this lousy process yet.

(*supposedly)
posted by Capt. Renault at 12:15 PM on October 13, 2017


it permits a body-commercializing, comparative market

for those who don't read profiles, sure, and those are the people you don't engage with anyway. people tend to be overwhelmed by the vast majority of just appallingly normal (ie complicit in axes of oppressions) but attractive people who, because of their ingrained prejudices, won't date them. but this is as true in a bar (why I hate bars) as it is in like a kickball league (why I hate those too) as it is in the office of early to mid-twenty somethings that I work in now (opinions reserved)

skipping past the image laden aspect of it requires due diligence and not rapidly swiping right on every profile you see but hey, if you want to date seriously, probably spend more than five minutes a day on setting up dates

there is, of course, most definitely, a classist element to it. but there's been a classist element to dating since... forever? and you certainly aren't going to find lower SES folks in your bike club or hanging out at your super bougie bar in a trendy area. same goes for racism, sexism, fat hate, etc

like anything else, online dating is a mirror of the appalling shit that makes up our society. the only thing it does differently is that it encompasses a much larger sample size than dating pools in the past, proving 1) how pervasive appalling shit is and helping 2) you to find those extremely rare diamonds in the rough who care about this shit as much as you do, faster than you could have ever had done on your own

Perhaps I'm naive or stupid, but I like to think that a lot of the "settling" that occurred in the past was actually quite healthy, because it meant people weren't wasting their time holding out for eight foot tall, spade-chinned Greco-Roman statues or impossibly curvaceous star-children.

I think settling in the past produced really terrible relationships that negatively impacted people's mental health, sprouted lots of the latent sexist language you hear (men are this way, women are this way), and this all combined to inflict trauma on the offspring of those relationships which includes passing along toxic attitudes

but that's a discussion for another time, probs

And lastly I think that allowing people to take these social shortcuts online prevents them from actually getting out there and forming incidental social bonds in general. Social networking platforms in practice encourage a surprising amount of isolation.

I think you can use these things as a crutch but having a dating / friends pool where you didn't have to dance around politics/gender expressions/etc helped me form social networks faster and wider than I could have done if I had had to do it via other means

like with everything, experiences differ for everyone. but I do think there's potential in online dating that people refuse to see or use because they get so attached to 'finding the one' instead of seeing it as a tool to meet interesting people. both Tinder and Bumble have now openly acknowledged this latter aspect of their dating platforms by introducing 'friends only' or 'hangout' options so I know I'm not at all alone in thinking this
posted by runt at 12:35 PM on October 13, 2017 [14 favorites]


So the thing that I liked about online dating was how you could filter. Certain things aren't exactly an X for me, but too many red flags, and....

I don't mind if my partner is religious, as long as she is fine that I am not. I don't care if my partner is conservative or liberal as long as she is politically inclined and open to debate. I can't stand women (as a dating partner) that want nothing to do with politics. I want someone within a decade of my age either direction. Etc.

Online dating just makes it easy to narrow your pool much faster. You know before the first date whether or not you have similar incomes, similar family goals, etc.

This said, I had some of my worst dates ever though dating services, and I remember one, where the women walked up, took one look at me, and said, "This isn't going to work. I like guys with beards. You had a beard in your profile picture." We were meeting for coffee. I remember saying, "Well, it grows back." (or something equally inane). That was a show stopper for her, and I guess if my profile picture had been clean shaven, she could have just moved on. Irony is I almost always have a beard.

Point is, it's much easier to spot the things that are superficially important either way. Cat person? Great! Rat or lizard? Maybe, but probably not.

And you don't have to ask these things. They are right there. I don't have to ask, "Do you like to read?" only to hear the answer of, "You mean for fun? I haven't read books since high school." Or only find out, way too late, that the women loves hip-hop and polka, has two kids, is actually still married, and is in debt by $40k.

While at the same time you can see there is another person in the world that thinks Windows is the worst operating system ever invented, that investing and saving is important, that world travel is fun, and there really doesn't need to be more flavors of ice cream than chocolate.

To me it doesn't seem so much that the reason for success with marriage is due to the method, since I bet if there was another way to filter down to a similar final pool of candidates, if you could eliminate the obvious failures, and confine the election to the one that are attractive (both physically and through personality/traits), that you would see similar results.

Dating is fatiguing. If you had to audition dozens to get to the mutually agreed upon final match (since both parties are auditioning simultaneously), I am guessing you would see more "settling."
posted by cjorgensen at 12:47 PM on October 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


the asshole siren.

Now there a hell of a mental image...
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:47 PM on October 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


I did do a lot of 'Netflix and Chill' which is fine and what healthy young adults do when they have a normal sex life and aren't ashamed of it.

Hi just your daily reminder that you don't have to enjoy casual sex, or indeed any particular kind of sex, in order to be healthy or normal or unashamed.

Thanks in advance.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:01 PM on October 13, 2017 [56 favorites]


showbiz_liz: "Did I miss it, or does that article not actually mention the specific percentages of interracial marriages over time? (It's on page 22 of the actual paper, though.)"

True, and note the methodological problems:

Source: Pew Research Center analysis of 2008-2015 American Community Survey and 1980, 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses (IPUMS).

All the pre-2008 data is based purely on the decennial censuses, with an effort to guess the interracial marriage rate in the intervening years (going as far back as 1967 based purely on what people said in 1980). That graph is a little misleading when it provides a linear prediction from 1967-1995: that of course means that 1996 onwards will look like a change from what preceded them.

To my eyes though the huge increase in interracial marriages is really found in 2007 onwards -- which makes me think that this so-called increase may very well be an artifact of the change to the ACS instead of the censuses, and may have nothing to do with any actual change. But I'm no demographer (of course, neither are they).
posted by crazy with stars at 1:40 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


To me there is a significant difference between meeting in a context that happens to be online (like slashdot, or a moose phrenology blog) and meeting via a dating app. The former is more akin to meeting at an IRL book club or at a party. The latter is the same thing as old-school newspaper personals or video dating in that finding someone to date is the explicit goal.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:07 PM on October 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Hi just your daily reminder that you don't have to enjoy casual sex, or indeed any particular kind of sex, in order to be healthy or normal or unashamed.

fair and my bad :/
posted by runt at 2:15 PM on October 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


My wife and I met on OK Cupid back in 2008. I proposed going for a hike. She said she wanted to meet somewhere more public in case I turned out to be a serial killer. I said I would never chop someone up into little bits and have sex with the bits on THE FIRST DATE... there has to be a period of respect! But we started by meeting in a coffee shop anyway.
posted by Coventry at 2:49 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


It's kinda interesting to read this thread and then remember about a year ago we had that article and discussion about online dating fatigue. I think the one of the theories mentioned in last year's article was that all the people who wanted to pair up or get married mostly did just that and stopped using the apps, so whoever's left are the "last people at the party trying to go home with someone".

That doesn't undercut the strength of marriage argument from the MIT article at all, and in fact I wonder if it means that somehow online dating gives a better chance for people who are good at forming strong relationships to find each other.
posted by FJT at 3:41 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


It's interesting, and I never realized this until just now: A majority of my relationships via-offline contacts were interracial, but everyone I dated from online contacts was white USian, and mostly from the midwest. It makes me wonder how much the services' match-sorting algorithms were influenced by potential partners' races (perhaps completely by accident.)
posted by Coventry at 4:17 PM on October 13, 2017


I can't be bothered to date at the moment but meeting someone online is pretty much the way to go for most trans people. If you can put your gender in your profile, no one can accuse you of being deceptive. You get a lot of garbage messages but at least they're not trying to kill you.
posted by AFABulous at 4:22 PM on October 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


I met my partner on an online dating site... We've been together for 11 years.
I met my wife through Match.com, and we're currently at 14 years married.
Mrs. geek and I met online in an IRC chat room on dalnet in 2002, dated for a year and were married in 2003.


Something something already here something not evenly distributed.
posted by acb at 4:48 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I met my partner on an online dating site... We've been together for 11 years.
I met my wife through Match.com, and we're currently at 14 years married.
Mrs. geek and I met online in an IRC chat room on dalnet in 2002, dated for a year and were married in 2003.

Something something already here something not evenly distributed.


"Not evenly distributed"? Well, yes, when I look at all these stories of people who met their partners online and my own story of never having found anything lasting and being reduced to counting my blessings over not having been raped, I do agree that something here isn't even distributed.
posted by orange swan at 5:30 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


I tried OKCupid, Bumble, Plenty of Fish, and Zoosk. My experiences were so across the board bad, I figured it was a sign I should be alone. Now I just date myself. So far so good. I think I'm the one!
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 6:25 PM on October 13, 2017 [12 favorites]


I would like to personally thank online dating for being incredibly shitty, and thusly my current girlfriend thinks I am a chubby Ryan Gosling with Tom Hanks' personality. In all seriousness, however, I get super pissed whenever I think about how awful the men on these sites treated her.
posted by Brocktoon at 6:56 PM on October 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


I wonder how the American experience compares to France, which had the Minitel system since the 80's. There were dating and chat apps, and while a lot of them were paid, a lot of people accessed them from work. In the late 80's I was successful in using it to get an irl date via the dialup usa gateway.
More recently, despite being on okcupid, craigslist and a few other forgettable ones, it was metafilter which brought me together with my partner of 4+ years.
posted by Sophont at 7:19 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


The confidence intervals of an unlimited number of user and community created questions (plus the "for fun" tests) vs. Match's secret Christian sauce gave me so much hope at one time. I thought, "Here's where scale and transparency can effect real change! If I can't trust the outlier of a polyamorous community to nail down the finest of significant differences in compatibility, then who?" But its struggle became a barometer for ad-based models combined with the still evolving and profound challenge of moderation, resulting in frickin' dic-pics (a canary in a coal mine of pervasive toxic masculinity). OKTrends frequently demonstrated its utility for both qualitative and quantitative conclusion in matters as vital as gender and race. What we want--Who we really are--Real Chicago-school stuff, sold off to its aforementioned voodoo subscription competitor for a paltry sum.

Knowledge is only sometimes power and OKCupid's shell of a potential a largely ignored cautionary tale.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 7:20 PM on October 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh god. I just joined OKCupid having not been on a date for 20 years. I don't know whether to read this or not.
posted by maxwelton at 7:38 PM on October 13, 2017


Since the overwhelming majority of all types of marriage throughout history were matched using various algorithms (calculated by kinship networks), this just seems like a reversion to the mean, albeit disintermediated. The peculiarly Western notion of relatively isolated, atomized individuals meeting and ~permanently joining through shared affiliations and consumption patterns is very historically contingent and recent.
posted by meehawl at 8:10 PM on October 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


"Not evenly distributed"?

There is an extremely famous quote by William Gibson: "The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed yet." The testimony from small groups of people, over a decade ago, who were already online dating leading to marriage, demonstrates that rule of futurology. The three words at the top are so memorable that googling them produces pages and pages of references to William Gibson ... although nobody seems to be quite sure where he said them!
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:25 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


online dating causation aside: "Actual real interracial marriage shows that people are 'voting with their feet', so to speak. Or their ring fingers. Or some such metaphor." also btw...
1/...here's a thread about why I gave up Judaism.
2/I was never a very religious person, but I was raised going to Jewish services every week. I got my Bar Mitzvah and everything.
3/I never felt much of a connection to Jewish identity, but I did identify as Jewish for most of my life. Then one day it changed.
4/I was at a party a few yrs ago, talking to a girl. Possibly thinking I was going to ask her out, she mentioned "I don't date Jewish guys."
5/I laughed out loud, thinking "Haha, bigot!" But then she explained.
6/She had been in love with a Jewish guy. Lived with him for years. Then he broke up with her because she wouldn't convert to Judaism.
7/She wanted to marry him even if he didn't convert to Christianity. But for him (and his family!), religion was a dealbreaker.
8/That horrified me. I guess I just have a very strong belief that personal relationships should trump club memberships.
9/I asked my Baby Boomer aunt and uncle about this. They agreed with the man's decision to break up with his girlfriend!! WTF, I thought.
10/Though I had stopped attending services years before, that day I stopped calling myself Jewish.
11/My desire to define myself by membership in an exclusive club like that is precisely zero.
12/And though they wouldn't put it as strongly, I think a lot of my generation feels the same way.
13/As for my aunt and uncle, shortly after that conversation their son married a Christian woman (and neither one converted). :-)
14/I think this trend is not limited to Judaism. It's an overall thing in America.
15/It's not just Judaism's exclusiveness that's turning people off, I think. Christianity too. Islam too.
16/Everyone talks about how young Americans care more and more about identity. But I submit that this is because we want to INTEGRATE.
17/I think young Americans want to give up those old exclusive clubs. We want a pluralistic society where everyone mingles with everyone
18/I think young people's reach for identity is not a desire to re-segregate, but a way to maintain some "roots" in a pluralistic society.
19/I think this is a good thing. And if God disagrees, He can set up a Twitter account and debate me. (end)
posted by kliuless at 8:45 PM on October 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


TFA: “The change in the population composition in the U.S. cannot explain the huge increase in intermarriage that we observe,” say Ortega and Hergovich. That leaves online dating as the main driver of this change.

Well it's not this one other thing, so it must be the thing we're writing about. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by russm at 9:08 PM on October 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


And you don't have to ask these things. They are right there. I don't have to ask, "Do you like to read?" only to hear the answer of, "You mean for fun? I haven't read books since high school." Or only find out, way too late, that the women loves hip-hop and polka, has two kids, is actually still married, and is in debt by $40k.

but... people can lie on websites and in questionnaires. and they do, about anything they may feel is undesirable. they can also not mention any personal details that are not a stranger's business, which shows great discretion and is one of the things I use to filter out people who:

You know before the first date whether or not you have similar incomes

list their incomes on a personal profile. men who think they are there to purchase rather than attract a woman are not for me. likewise, people who are an overflowing fountain of disclosure. because until I know someone very well, many of their faults and embarrassments and historical misdeeds are not my business. and I like for a man to have a clear idea of how well we know each other. which, at the profile-reading stage, is not at all.

the only thing a profile infallibly discloses is what someone sounds like -- in writing, which may not be the same way they sound in talking but is equally real -- and what they think is interesting. which is what decides if someone is worth dating or not, which is why I still mess around with these awful internet places, even though they are terrible.

(my favorite thing about the assumption of dishonesty on online dating sites is the sheer number of men who are so concerned with proving everything they claim is true that they show you their thorax just to demonstrate that they have one. see, they seem to say, even when I have a shirt on there's NOT just a void full of howling wind and darkness between my collar and my belt loops! there's a sternum and all sorts of other things! it is useless to tell them I have never refused to meet a man simply because he did not prove and document that he had a complete thorax. they cannot hear it and they won't respond to it. lots of typical dating site behavior is very upsetting but this characteristic manly insecurity is nothing but charming. even if I do not think it is much of a conversation starter.)
posted by queenofbithynia at 9:22 PM on October 13, 2017 [12 favorites]


I can't be bothered to date at the moment but meeting someone online is pretty much the way to go for most trans people. If you can put your gender in your profile, no one can accuse you of being deceptive. You get a lot of garbage messages but at least they're not trying to kill you.

Minus the murdering thing, this is also true for most of the ace-spec people I know, since the deception accusations often hit us too. The outliers tend to be people who have access to a local offline community which is definitely not true of everyone. (And of course there's a lot of crossover between trans and ace spec communities, too.)

I met both my partners online. One I've known since 2009 and the other I met in 2010, but we didn't actually wind up in a relationship until 2011. It's great, but--god, resolving the fucking distance problems is a nightmare! It can be so expensive in basically every dimension you can think of to immigrate, especially if you're youngish with zero familial support (not uncommon for queer folks).

I was recently chatting to a nonbinary gay-ish transmasc friend halfway across the country who I don't think I'd ever have even met if not for online fandom, listening to him worry about whether he'd ever be able to find a relationship again because where the hell would he find people who were into him and willing to respect his gender and you know, compatible on a human level? (Bonus points, too, because my poor friend was worrying about this while at a conference for LGBTQ people in their field based on their experiences there.) And it's not like I had any answers beyond, like, be willing to uproot your entire life if it comes to it and move literally worldwide for a shot at a Good Relationship. And is that even remotely responsible advice, given the possibility of bad relationships and the cost of decimating your local support network for a significant other?

My best advice for finding a relationship that works for you is basically finding a way to meet a lot of compatible people and socialize with them until you find a human you like, but that's so, so much harder to do for queer people--and especially trans people--than for cis straight people. I'm frankly kind of in awe at the choices and opportunities that cis straight people have available to them, both good decisions and bad. Sure, that's got to be overwhelming on the one hand, sifting through the choice fatigue and all, but it can really sting when I'm trying to encourage trans* spec and queer friends who would really like a relationship and who have no idea where to find one that doing this is possible.

(And then you run into the issue where you do get into a relationship and half your friends look at you, teary eyed, and say "you just confirmed it was possible" which is a metric shit ton of pressure on existing relationships.)

Thank fuck for the Internet, that's really all I can say. There's a lot of problems, don't get me wrong--but it makes it so much easier to find the rare and hidden people who might actually like you for who and what they are than might otherwise be the case. I literally cannot imagine believing that I could meet a partner on the street or at work or in a bar that wasn't specifically designed for, at the very least, people with identities sort of close to mine. There's never been a time when LGBTQ people didn't have to do some work to search each other out, and the Internet makes that so much easier than might otherwise have been the case.
posted by sciatrix at 6:46 AM on October 14, 2017 [8 favorites]


I'm married now, we met at a party of a mutual friend like has probably been happening for a while; but I will say that I really enjoyed online dating, for years, because you could write letters and flirt and just meet new people in a really intense way very quickly.

I think many times, just the idea that there were a lot of people out in the world that were easily communicated with snapped me out of a lonely spell.

That said, there have been many articles about the death of bath houses and singles bars, and that does seem sad, because 'third' places like those are so necessary for building solidarity across a community, it's difficult to know what aspects of socialization we are losing.
posted by eustatic at 12:37 PM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think the one of the theories mentioned in last year's article was that all the people who wanted to pair up or get married mostly did just that and stopped using the apps, so whoever's left are the "last people at the party trying to go home with someone".

That just...doesn't really make sense to me, as a theory? It sort of assumes that every single person who wanted or will ever want a relationship joined dating apps the moment they became popular and that people only ever leave the dating pool, not join it. There will always be and there always have been single people who want a relationship.
posted by armadillo1224 at 1:12 PM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Something that I have personally observed (once again, anecdata) in online dating is that it permits a body-commercializing, comparative market in a way that can be both isolating and crushing.

This is absolutely true for gay men and I'd prefer to meet someone in person because I'm not that photogenic. My personality is my selling point but every app and site puts your photo up front. I'm not above being shallow, either, so I'd prefer to get to know someone organically who I might not necessarily consider if I were just looking at a photo. But like eustatic notes, many meeting places are gone, especially for gay men and lesbians, and I don't like taking my chances out in the wild.
posted by AFABulous at 1:18 PM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


There will always be and there always have been single people who want a relationship.

Of course, but the ones that stay longer are usually going to be the ones that have a harder time finding/staying in relationships. Pharm had a better way of explaining it in the last thread than I do.
posted by FJT at 2:07 PM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


I had an internet boyfriend when I was 12 in 1994 and tried every single goddamn site after that, almost continuously, until 2007. I met my husband on Craigslist of all places, not an actual dating site. I had a personal ad with the headline "Are you worth a damn?" in which I detailed the horrendous dates I had gone on, and he responded to ask if I was exaggerating. I told him no, it was all true. We met for beers and now we are on our second house and 3rd &4th dogs, 3000 miles away from where we met. We used to be ashamed of this story but now it's just plain good.
posted by masquesoporfavor at 6:59 PM on October 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


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