A conversation with a friend a few months ago got me thinking about the dynamics of dating online. Here’s some of my thoughts:

A bigger pool of choices
When the bicycle was invented, men and women looking to marry were no longer restricted to their own village, but the next one. Dating dynamics changed with technology, as it allowed the pool of dating choices to widen. (Can you imagine how dreadful it was for Joe, the farmer’s boy, when Albert from the next village swept by on his bicycle and went off with Joe’s sole romantic hope, Zaza?) The bicycle allowed people who were restricted by location to widen their travels and to meet people who would normally be out of reach.

If the bicycle had the power to change marriage & dating dynamics, we can only begin to comprehend the possibilities the internet has started to give us. The internet gives us a very large pool of dating choices, if that’s what we choose to use it for.

Well, technically speaking: the internet presents to us a pool of people who are willing to engage with this kind of networking website (dating sites). Perhaps your ideal mate would shun a dating website. Of course, some people have met their mate whilst playing World of Warcraft — apparently group raiding is a bonding experience.

Representation
But on the other hand, perhaps it is understandable if your ideal mate would prefer not to bother with a social site that is, at bottom, a meat carnival of winks, pokes, and surfaces; and, at top, genuinely inefficient because your entire experience of a person is reduced to whether they appear attractive (photographs can lie) and whether they can put words together into a compelling sentence (they can get a friend to write the profile). Furthermore, the fact you have so much choice can also be distracting: most dating profiles tend to sound the same, and they reveal little about what a person is like.

The internet is, unlike a bicycle, not a means of travel, but of communication. The distance remains, and the question is how to try to overcome the distance by representation. How to represent yourself online? Self-construction is all too tempting, all too dangerous, and can completely mislead.

With regard to dating, I’ve concluded that the computer remains a barrier, and the only way around it is to get on a bicycle.