I’m constantly fascinated by online dating sites. In some ways, they are a microcosm of all that is best about the web, and some things that are worst.
The thing I find interesting is that time and time again I hear people, particularly women, complain there are so many “freaks” on dating sites. I’ve always found that curious - why is there more freaks one dating sites than in real life? Of course there isn’t, people on dating sites live in the real world! I have one idea that may explain it.
Traditionally, people have met mostly through their social networks. Friends of friends, someone at work, etc. Implicit in this, there is a certain filtering. Your friend’s friends will, broadly speaking, come from a similar social background. Black or white. Working class or white collar. Rich, middle class or poor. Arty or sporty. All those things are important, although we would like to think otherwise. Frankly, the chances of me dating a black, working class, poor, sporty girl are slim. Not that there is anything wrong with any of those things, it’s just that humans naturally are attracted to those similar to themselves.
In the book Freakonomics, a study was done about dating sites. They looked at people who had said in their profile they were willing to date any race. Those with this who had then initiated contact with someone had in about 95% of cases (I don’t remember the exact number) done so with people of the same race. It’s just how we are. People say opposites attract and in a small number of ways that is true, but when it comes to backgrounds, like (generally) attracts like.
Online dating doesn’t have those filters. There isn’t a “I have a working class background” filter. David Weinberger blogged a few years ago about darkness defining relationships. What he means is that the things that really define relationships are very vague and messy. Being a “friend” isn’t a binary state, despite what MySpace would have you believe - there are many types of friends. The guy you chat with in the cafe, your work colleague, your neighbour, your partner, are all friends, but not only with different “levels” of friendship (best friend, casual friend, etc) but lots of types of friends. There’s one you talk mainly about sport with, one you discuss personal stuff, one who is mainly office gossip. The definition of “friend” has a lot of darkness in it. And that “darkness” is especially important in finding a life partner, the most important relationship in most people’s life. Yet how can a website hope to capture that? Traditional social networks have done a great job of filtering out people to pre-qualify a lot of those “dark” attributes, but a dating sites can’t (yet) compete with that.
Perhaps someone will come up with a way to make that happen, and allow people to pre-qualify. Or maybe it’s a good thing that it doesn’t happen - relationships which are viable but would never happen in real life can happen through dating sites. That’s another argument.
In the mean time, dating sites will remain full of freaks.