Online dating
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Before running out and seeing the film Valentine’s Day, I want to share what I learned while completing my study about the online dating practises of urban professionals here in Vancouver. After interviewing 40 men and women about how they date online and what they look for in potential dates and mates, I hope to shed some light on what it means when we hear people say “I’m online dating.” Online dating may not help you find love, but it may be a welcome distraction from all those eHarmony.com commercials that try to convince you about how lonely you are during this made-up-holiday season.
1. Love does not really occur online. Despite pop cultural conceptions of the lonely heart in his/her parent’s basement trolling for solely technologically-mediated, non-face-to-face interaction, online daters in Vancouver want to meet, on average, within two weeks. After a month of contact with no face-to-face meeting, you’re filed under the hermit-whodoesn’t-leave-their-house category. And believe me, that’s not good.
2. Multi-dating is allowed. While dating more than one person at a time in more “conventional” dating scenarios -dating that is mediated by “older” technologies such as the telephone, e-mail, or dance floor -can be frowned upon, online dating allows you to date up a storm in order to find out if the “e-chemistry” is for real.
3. A word about superficiality. Online dating provides an excellent window into how superficial we can be as Vancouverites. Because of the emphasis on profile pictures as part of the currency of online dating desirability, many people get filtered out of searches because they are not “perfect.” What isn’t funny about this quest for perfection is that it falls along very stereotypically gendered lines. This means, in the heterosexual context, that if you’re a guy without a job, or a woman who isn’t a “Yaletown size two,” then you may encounter rejection and sometimes even humiliation as some of my participants unfortunately did. Not only is this not cool, it also speaks to how gendered inequality gets transposed onto the interfaces we use, and how they in turn continue to shape us in decidedly unequal ways.
4. Let’s talk about sex -mostly because it is surprising how little online daters want to talk about it. Due in large part to the popular conceptualization of the Internet as a hot spot for sex predators and con artists, people who are using the Internet to find love want to distance themselves from talk that could be aligned with such unsavoury motivations. This is strange, however, because the majority of love relationships involve a physical component. That this physical component would be omitted in discussions about online dating speaks to the extent that people continue to negotiate the stigma of dating online. While most people I interviewed thought that the stigma was decreasing, they were similarly quick to say “of course I haven’t told my mother!”
5. And finally, where is the love? May I suggest, as my participants were so wont to do, that online dating opens doors to, and I quote: “people you wouldn’t have otherwise met.” While I stopped trying to get my single friends to online-date earlier in my doctoral program (for fear they would stop talking to me), I do want to take this opportunity to give you a sense of what you’re signing up for if you do choose to take the plunge into the “Interwebs.”
My advice is similar to your grandmother’s: Kiss a lot of frogs in order to find yourself possibly in love. And if not, hopefully with a whole lot more life experience and a handful of new friends. Vancouver is supposed to be a tough town to meet people, right? So why not get online to look for love? What have you got to lose? Okay, it’s true, you might lose some time and some money. But, I have to ask: How can we lament the loss of quality social interaction and not seek to engage in the world that the Internet opens up to us?
Jacqueline Schoemaker Holmes is a sessional lecturer and postodoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia. Her study, entitled ‘Doing Love’ Online: Performative Gender and the Urban Everyday, involves an investigation into the online dating practices of Vancouver’s urban professionals. This eight-month ethnographic study highlights the gendered and technologically-mediated nature of contemporary human lives and identities.
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