Dating Online is the New Normal

New data has come out (through 2021) on how couples meet. The big takeaway is for the first time in history, a majority of couples meet online (and the share is still growing rapidly)

During the 2000s and into the 2010s dating online was seen as risky. You were also a loser for doing it. Now it’s the dominant way we meet each other. Like this clip from the 2000s about a girl meeting someone from MySpace. Meeting a stranger from the internet was considered insane.

Dating is Different

As an older millennial I’ve seen a lot of social changes in my life. Getting in the back of a stranger’s Honda Civic was seen as crazy before Uber became an app. Renting out a random apartment in a foreign city would be seen as dangerous before AirBnb. Now all of those things are normal. People complain about how we lost social trust, but the success of those apps and interaction with strangers means that is not the case. While some local social trust has deteriorated it’s also increased in other domains.

But dating is different. There’s a deep lindy part of how we meet the opposite sex that affects other parts of life. If we’re moving dating to the online world it may become the only socially acceptable way to meet people going into the future. 20 years ago you were a loser meeting people online. Soon, the reverse could be true. You could be seen as crazy approaching someone in public or at a social event. It adjusts other dimensions of life.

If you look at the graph above, meeting people at work went from 20% to 10% in 20 years, and still dropping. A practice that was relatively common, the “office romance”, is now not a thing anymore. Today a company will fire you if they find out. You may be overstepping boundaries with another person. Work is not considered a place for dating, even though you’re around people your age doing similar things. If you want to date, go to the apps, not to work. That’s a social shift. It was often a plot point of '90s sitcoms.

There’s other social shifts that are even more worrisome. For example, why is meeting through family and meeting through friends ways down?

In the rest of this Newsletter I will cover:

1) The rise and fall of approaching strangers

2) How to optimize your dating profile

3) Why “met through friends” and “met through family” is declining

The Rise and Fall of Approaching Strangers

Traditionally, men and women were connected through family or through connections. The modern dating scene of approaching strangers for romance can be seen as a product of the cultural changes and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the emergence of new social spaces that made it easier for people to meet and connect with each other.

There was a period from 1962-2013 where you had to, as a man, learn how to approach women in real life or you would be alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFvoDDs0X

This usually happened at school or at some event or at a bar. Every guy had to learn these skills or else they would have to rely on friends to set them up. This was a critical school and if you weren’t taught it you would have to reach out to someone to give you tips. This wasn’t taught in school.

There was a lot of movies, shows and comedy based around this whole period. From the sentimental Before Sunrise Trilogy to a number of comedic films. Remember the concept of the wing man? 

While the contemporary dating market is a new phenomenon. In person-seduction has a long history. Ovid wrote a seduction manual called "Ars Amatoria," which translates to "The Art of Love." In "Ars Amatoria," Ovid provides guidance for both men and women on a wide range of topics related to love and courtship, including how to dress, how to use body language, and how to write love letters. The poem is written in a light and humorous tone and is full of witty aphorisms and playful language. Here is an excerpt on indirect approaches:

I guess all that seduction knowledge can come in handy if I ever want to go in sales.

Dating apps are efficient. We’re starting to see the efficiency has patterns in mate selection. Some patterns may be more controversial than others.

But efficiency comes at a price.

Chance encounters. If we remove the in-person dating environment we’re removing chance encounters, and surprise. Surprise enhances pleasure in humans. Notice how a song on the radio coming on randomly sounds better than the song on your Spotify playlist you program? This is because being surprised activates the pleasure centers in our brain and gives us a nice shot of dopamine, which makes experiences more enjoyable.

The ancient Greek saying that conveys the idea that surprises enhance pleasure is "τὸ αἰφνίδιον ἥδει" (to aiphnidion haidei), which can be translated as "sudden things are delightful." This idea was expressed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in his work "Rhetoric," in which he wrote: "Surprises are the most complete of pleasures because they involve both expectation and uncertainty. Suddenness and unexpectedness have an inherent power to elicit pleasure."

Do we know what we want? An axiom of economics is that we all have stable, known preferences. That’s not true. I don’t know now what I may think I want. We adapt our preferences on the basis of what we find. Take home buying for instance. Searching for a home online seems efficient because you know what you want. However, online property searches is a very bad way of buying a house. That’s because an online search merely shows you what you think you want. In decisions of this kind, the search process is highly recursive. We may think we want a McMansion in the outer suburbs but if we’re shown a pleasant smaller home in a small town we may revisit our assumptions. That’s the value of a realtor. They can show things we may not at the moment know we want.

This is why you should frequently make the effort to visit a bookshop, browse at a supermarket, or even talk to a real estate agent. Simply looking for what you already believe you want feels logical, but it’s also incomplete.

However, as most people get online to date. We must be able to adjust to this new environment or we get left behind.

How do we do that?

Optimizing your dating profile

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