Modern Romance (9 page)

In addition to that, most of the clips I watched contained guys setting themselves up as enjoying “having fun” and looking for “someone to have fun with.” They also shared a little bit about themselves. “I like pizza,” said one gentleman. “No fatties, no alcoholics,” proclaimed another. “I’m currently cleaning up toxic waste” is how one man described his professional life, while another described himself as “an executive by day, a wild man by night,” and a third proclaimed, “I’m interested in all aspects of data processing.”

One gentleman declared no “Donna Juanitas,” which sounded like a horrifying racial slur against Hispanic women. However, I did some Internet research and found out it was actually the female equivalent of a Don Juan. Basically, he didn’t want a woman who was sleeping around. That said, if that’s the goal, shouldn’t the term be “Donna Juan” instead of “Donna Juanita”? Where does the “Juanita” come from? Why does her last name change? Seems like the person who came up with this term is under the impression that last names in Spanish have gender-specific conjugations. So a man named Jorge Lopez would be married to a woman named Ana Lopezita? My Spanish is horrible, but even I know that makes no sense. Okay, this was quite a tangent—look for my other book,
Donna Juan: The Etymology of
Racial Slurs
, sometime in 2023.
*

After each clip, the suitor’s stats would be flashed on the screen, like this:

In a way, I’m kind of bummed video dating died out, because the clips I explored were really great. Peep the dude above. One of his interests is “adventure”!

The failure of video dating did not scare off the entrepreneurs who recognized how another new technology, the Internet, might revolutionize matchmaking. And in the mid-1990s, when personal computers and modems that connected users to the Internet were becoming more popular, online dating began to take off.

Match.com launched in 1995, and it wasn’t just an updated version of computer dating services; it had one crucial innovation: Instead of matching up clients with an algorithm, Match.com let its clients select one another, in real time. Most people were skeptical that the service would change anything. But not Gary Kremen, who founded the company and served as its first CEO. During his first big television interview, Kremen wore a tie-dyed shirt, sat on a brightly colored beanbag chair, and boldly told the camera: “Match .com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ.”
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But first it required some tinkering. Initially Match.com was hampered by the same stigma that had kept people away from previous computer dating services. During the Internet boom of the late 1990s, though, people’s relationship to computers and online culture changed dramatically, and more and more people were getting comfortable using computers for basic tasks. Over time, e-mail, chat rooms, and ultimately social media would require people to develop online personas. And the idea of using a computer to find dates became completely acceptable. By 2005 Match.com had registered forty million people.

However, once it was clear that there was a market for online dating services, competing companies sprang up everywhere, seeking out new niches and also trying to chip away at Match .com’s client base. Each new site had its own distinctive branding—eHarmony was for people looking for serious relationships, Nerve was for hipsters, JDate for Jewish folks, and so forth.

But most sites shared a basic template: They presented a vast catalog of single people and offered a quasiscientific method of filtering through the options to find the people most likely to match. Whether these algorithms were more effective than the algorithms of the computer dating services is a matter of some controversy, but as computers became dazzlingly fast and sophisticated, people seemed more inclined to trust their matchmaking advice.

ONLINE DATING TODAY

I always knew online dating was popular,
but until recently I had no idea just how massive a force it is in today’s search for a romantic partner.

According to a study by the University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo (not to be confused with John Cacio e Pepe, a fat Italian guy who loves pasta with pecorino and black pepper), between 2005 and 2012 more than
one third
of couples who got married in the United States met through an online dating site. Online dating was
the
single biggest way people met their spouses. Bigger than work, friends, and school
combined.
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Cacioppo’s findings are so shocking that many pundits questioned their validity, or else argued that the researchers were biased because they were funded by an online dating company. But the truth is that the findings are largely consistent with those of Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, who has done more than anyone to document the rise of Internet dating and the decline of just about every other way of connecting.

His survey, “How Couples Meet and Stay Together,” is a nationally representative study of four thousand Americans, 75 percent married or in a romantic relationship and 25 percent single. It asked adults of all ages how they met their romantic partners, and since some of the respondents were older, the survey allows us to see how things varied among different periods.
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It’s especially instructive to compare things from 1940 to 1990, right before the rise of online dating, and then again from the 1990s until today.

First let’s look at the difference between 1940 and 1990—just before online dating arrived. In 1940 the most common way to meet a romantic partner was through the family, and 21 percent met them through friends. About 12 percent met through church or in the neighborhood, and roughly the same portion met in a bar or restaurant or at work. Just a handful, about 5 percent, met in college, for the simple reason that not many people had access to higher education.

Things were different in 1990. The family had become a far less influential matchmaker, pairing up only 15 percent of singles, as did the church, which had plummeted to 7 percent. The most popular route to romance was through friends, which is how nearly 40 percent of all couples met.

The portion of people who met in bars had also increased, going up to 20 percent. Meeting someone in college had gone up to 10 percent, while meeting in the neighborhood was just a bit less common than it had been in 1940.

Another popular way partners found each other in 1990 was when a man would yell something to the effect of “Hey, girl, come back here with that fine butt that’s in them fly-ass acid-washed jeans and let me take you to a Spin Doctors/Better Than Ezra concert.” The woman, flattered by the attention and the opportunity to see one of
the
preeminent musical acts of the era, would quickly oblige. This is how roughly 6 percent of couples formed. To be clear, this is just a guess on my part and has nothing to do with Mr. Rosenfeld’s research.

The advent of online dating sites has transformed the way we begin romantic relationships. In 2000, a mere five years after Match .com was invented, 10 percent of all people in relationships had met their partners on the Internet, and by 2010 nearly 25 percent had. No other way of establishing a romantic connection has ever increased so far, so fast.
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In 2010 only college and bars remained roughly as important as they had been in 1995. In contrast, the portion of people who met through friends had dropped precipitously, from 40 percent to 28 percent, and meeting through the family, work, or the neighborhood became even less common, each around 10 percent or well below. And churches went the way of the Spin Doctors and Better Than Ezra, all but totally out of the game.

Now online dating is almost a prerequisite for a modern single. As of this writing, 38 percent of Americans who describe themselves as “single and looking” have used an online dating site.
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ONLINE DATING AND THIN MARKETS

Internet dating has changed the game even more dramatically in what Rosenfeld calls “thin markets,” most notably people interested in same-sex relationships, but increasingly older and middle-aged straight people too.
The reason is pretty obvious: The smaller the pool of potential romantic partners, the lower the odds of finding romance face-to-face, whether through friends, in schools, or in public places. Sure, there are booming gay neighborhoods in some cities, but the people who live and hang out there see a lot of one another. After a while those who are single have moved through their options and they’re looking for something new. That’s one reason why today meeting in bars or in the neighborhood is far less common among LGBT couples than it used to be, and why nearly 70 percent of LGBT couples meet online. (BLT couples—bacon, lettuce, and tomato couples—are inanimate objects and are not engaging in romantic pursuits.)

Back to LGBT folks: Rosenfeld’s research shows that online dating is “dramatically more common among same-sex couples
than any
way of meeting has ever been for heterosexual or same-sex
couples in the past
.” (Emphasis ours.) And recent trends suggest that as more old people go online, Internet dating will start to dominate their world too.