Online Dating: A Short Treatise on a Target-Rich Environment

Online dating has evolved from an esoteric practice to a social phenomenon, a cash cow, and, as more and more people turn to it, a legitimate way to find romance (if such a thing exists). Internet-based dating services pop up at over 100 per year, catering to every niche and nod that tickles peoples’ fancies along the way. Yet among a goodly amount of people the whole idea of online dating still shoulders an unpleasant stigma, conjuring images of pudgy shut-ins with no redeeming physical qualities and no social skills, because – let’s be honest, here – that’s how it all began and – let’s be more honest – in a lot of ways that’s still the case. But that isn’t the case exclusively, and it’s becoming less so with each new year and new flock of people willing to give online dating a try. My purpose in this article is to explore why and how that works.

For anyone who has deigned to try online dating, its appeals are fairly straightforward and obvious. For one thing, in the real-world world you never know if that person you’re eyeballing from across the room is single or taken, and in fact in most cases (not because of luck but as a consequence of that ultimate buzzkiller: statistics) it’s the latter. On a dating website you have only to read a person’s status. Moreover, because everyone’s there for a stated purpose, there’s no need for awkward fumbling-with-the-laces questioning. The ice, if you will, comes pre-broken.

Accessibility is another boon of online dating. Not only do you not have to squeeze a night at the bar into what for many Americans is already a hectic schedule, you don’t even have to be in the same place. I’ve pre-emptively set up dates in places where I was either moving or planning to spend a period on an archaeological project (what I do when I’m not writing), and with no more or less success than normal. I don’t care how smooth you are, you can’t astral-ly project smoothness over state lines. I personally didn't find this to be the shiningest of appeals when I tried online dating because I'm often recklessly confident and a pretty shameless flirt, i.e., I met my second-to last girlfriend standing in a crowded city bus. But for some people it's a godsend.

And then there’s what social scientists call the “Simon Effect” (after the character Simon from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies), whereby a measure of distance between a oneself and one’s audience – in the case of Golding’s Simon, this was accomplished by makeup – makes a person less inhibited. This is probably also the case with the popularity of texting; if people can’t hear your voice they can’t hear your hesitance, your nervousness, or your lisp (nor can you hear their boredom or reproach). Behind the safety glass of the internet you can really cut loose, freely admit to being a cat-lover or a pervert or a vegan or a religious fanatic or whatever, without having to meet anyone’s critical gaze. Some people are born with the ability to be wholly socially confident right out of the gate; others, like myself, possess it now but had really to work at it; and for everyone else there’s online dating.

Finally, there’s the geography of the dating game: the internet broadens one’s range. This is in direct (I should say an indirect) correlation with a person’s confidence, i.e., the more cripplingly insecure a person is the better his or her chances of meeting a potential mate online – having nowhere to go from zero but up. But even for the measurably confident it can buffer the stakes. Take me: I’ve got about a 20% success rate in the world of face-to-face dating, “success” here meaning one responds to another’s advances and at least one decent date ensues; and about a 3-7% success rate online (for reasons I’ll get into shortly). That’s about a 25% combined success rate overall if I’m hitting both avenues. The only sure-fire way for me to get more dates is to either a) take a college course in my subject, where I tend to stand out as "that motherfucker who always talks in class;" or b) lower my standards.

Naysayers will balk, of course, and rightly so. Dating profiles can at times be so informative they take away all chance of surprise. Part of the adventure of romance is getting to know somebody new. Then there’s the amount of time it often takes to “feel each other out” – without the benefit of in-person contact it can be very difficult to satisfactorily express oneself and one’s desires, particularly for those who aren’t professional writers (yep - sorry). And of course there are online dating’s biggest and most obvious problems, the participants themselves, the worst of whom summarily fit into one of three separate and discrete groups:

1.      Liars – that is, people who lie about their weight, age, and/or other physical attributes. Beyond the obvious “you don’t look anything like your pictures” that resounds in the online dating world like a tolling bell, I have an especially ugly tale of this sort to tell. When I was 22 I checked out Yahoo’s fledging Personals service (probably my first mistake) and immediately hit it off with a cute, heavily-tattoed 21 year-old – or so her ID said – skate punk I'll call Hailey, although Pinnochiette The Whore would work just as well. Everything was fun and exciting for about a month, until one day we were in the mall for some reason when we ran into some pimply-faced teenager at the food court. Hailey showed him her newest tattoo, an enormous piece on her upper back, and he exclaimed, “Wow Hailey, I can’t believe you’ve got so many tattoos already and you’re only 16!” So watch out for that.

2.      Liars – that is, people who misrepresent their personalities or character traits. This is more common than you’d think, even more so than people misrepresenting their looks, and it has to do with our magnificent culture and its tendency to teach people that “putting your best foot forward” means “making up a bunch of fake shit about yourself as if you were bait on a hook.” I can’t think of how I could limit myself to just one specific example of this, so I’ll provide a broad one: while attempting to find dates online I’ve gone on dates with something like 30 women who described themselves as “adventurous,” exactly one of whom owned so much as a pair of boots. One of them called herself "athletic" and was in fact obese, like morbidly obese; she's athletic in that she's "going to the gym every day trying to get in shape." I can only imagine it’s just as bad with guys.

3.      Liars – that is, people who lie about their non-physical, non-psychological facets, the most common of which are men or women who lie about their relationship status. Nobody likes to be someone’s “other” man or woman (well, okay, some people do, but they prefer to know it), and it’s murderously infuriating to find out that a potential lover is actually married and trolling for an affair. I’ve never had this happen to me, personally, but it has happened to a few of my female friends and they were insensed. Luckily, because all things on the internet tend to move ahead apace, there is a handy workaround for this last one that works about 25% of the time (which is enough): grab a few photos and plug them into Google’s Image Search. If those same images appear on a social networking site, it’ll pop up. Incidentally, this is also a handy way to see if a potential date has gained 50 pounds since that photo was taken, and/or is or isn’t really a billionaire astronaut with an Olympic medal in sex.

Of course, honesty in its own right doesn’t always count for much if it’s poorly packaged and presented, and because of the aforementioned Simon Effect of online dating you see that rather a lot. One woman who contacted me had this as the opening line of her dating profile:

First off, I am a heavier person, and if you’re so shallow that you can’t see past that then don’t even bother contacting me!

Ignoring the obvious (e.g., that is isn’t a case of “see” so much as “feel,” and that anyone who couldn’t see that she was overweight hadn’t bothered to look at her photos), this is an upfront assertion of prejudice. How does not being attracted to overweight people make someone shallow? Being curvaceous or slightly overweight is one thing, but this woman was positively rotund and that isn’t a matter of shallowness – it’s a serious health risk. Had she instead opened with “I know I’m overweight but I’m working on it” or “I know I’m overweight but I’m totally okay with myself” – that is, had she spun the argument around so that it celebrated her rather than made her seem judgmental – then... well... more likely someone else would have been willing to date her. Someone not me. 

And it isn’t just women; I knew a guy in Oregon who pulled a similar stunt. His line was this:

I am a no-nonsense badass looking to get the most out of life. I’m not interested in censoring myself or dividing my time between my passions and some chick. Hit me up if you want to come along for the ride!

He thought it made him come across as a tough guy. It didn’t. It made him come across as the last person in the world any sane-minded woman would want to date.

Anyway, the bottom line is that dating – every form of dating – is a numbers game. You will never meet all of the single people in a given region, city, or even neighborhood, and if you’re serious about wanting to find romance you do well to bolster your chances by broadening your range to include online venues. Online dating sites are, after all, places where people go for almost no other reason; they represent what ecologists would call a “target-rich environment.” Sure, there are risks, but they’re mostly - mostly - harmless and usually easy to evade. Besides, if you aren’t willing to take a few risks then your love life is probably doomed already.