Online Dating... The Breakdown

          Almost everyone that is online knows about online dating and most likely knows a few people personally who have met their significant other from either social media or an online dating website. The possibilities are endless and quite honestly frightening. For example, Tinder is an application for smartphones in which you can literally swipe "yes" or "no" on a user's profile picture to determine if you like them. Personally, this seems shallow and odd to judge someone on one or two pictures when you know absolutely nothing about them, but I digress. Also, there are applications where you can type in a preference for what kind of person you find attractive and up will pop hundreds of people that fit the bill, almost like "ordering" a potential lover. In this blog I will discuss the pros and cons of online dating, as well as many other factors that are thrown into this "digital pot" that we call online romance.

          In my personal opinion and experience, I find that online dating can be creepy as well as less meaningful than face-to-face meeting. This directly correlates to how we discussed in class that while CMC is sometimes more convenient and available, it can also cloak the non-verbal channels that are very important when it comes to building relationships. Not all social cues are available which can cause online relationships to be constricted in how deeply two people can get to know each other. However, online dating can become much more meaningful if you use it as a tool take the relationship from the computer to up close and personal. A recent study found that 1/3 of marriages in  2013 were formed online. This number is quite staggering considering that personal computers were almost non-exist twenty years ago. The most successful online relationships were taken from the online dating world to the real world. These relationships have the same amount of breadth, depth, and quality as relationships that started face-to-face.

          Online dating is quite a hot topic these days because of the positives and the dangers. A positive is that you could find the person that you will spend the rest of your life with, however, a negative is that you could be "catfished" by a 45 year old man pretending to be a pretty girl. Online dating is a crapshoot and in this article, 4 Reasons to Ditch Online Dating and Seek Out Romance the Old-School Way, it discusses the pros and cons of online dating. One of the main points that I took from this article is that online dating doesn't answer the real questions about someone. Sure a person can look like your type in their profile, but in real life you could absolutely despise them. A profile doesn't show people's innermost qualities and how they communicate and act on a day-to-day basis. It just shows a few things about them and has a few pictures. Also, this article discussed how these dating sites that are supposed to be "quick and easy" can sometimes be time consuming and in many cases a waste of time. Think about all of the time that it takes for you to fill out a long questionnaire on match.com or another site, along with all the time that you put into making your profile look appealing and then compound that with the time that you waste searching through hundreds of possible candidates and sometimes not even finding any. You would have been better off going to a social event or a bar or something of that sort, rather that sitting at your computer looking at less than stellar candidates for your next love interest.

          In conclusion, I wholeheartedly am opposed to online dating for many of the reasons that I have previously stated above. I believe that it is much more effective and meaningful to go out and do something and meet someone than to be at home alone on your computer searching for your next partner. While sometimes it can be effective to online date, more times than not it seems that people strike out.