Saturday, October 08, 2005
Public Service Announcement
A Small Case Against Online Dating is a brief article about a recent phenomenon that many of my acquaintances engage in. I would say that the writer of the piece and I are in about 70% agreement, which is to say that I don't think he's completely right, but he raises some great points. Certainly points which are worthwhile to discuss with your friends and family if you find yourself using an online service to match you up with someone. I predict that in the future we'll be hearing a lot about e-harmony divorces and the like. For now, it's important to remember that we only hear of the success stories because the money in online matchmaking is pretty good, and it's a market that has a lot to gain from it's participants not hearing the bad side. The tendency to jump into things too fast because of an artificial up-frontness has people getting married after only a short time. Also, just because a computer program says you have a match, does not mean that you do. It might be right, but people doubtlessly have some sort of gambler's fallacy mindset when looking for love on the net. Perhaps something like eharmonyfailedme.com for recovering online daters might be a good thing to start. This is purely my speculation about the e dating scene. One scary statistic mentioned in the article is that 1/5 of the people who are online daters are married men.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment