How well online dating works, according to someone who has been studying it for years
A couple of months ago, I was sitting at a bar minding my own business when the woman next to me did something strange. Surrounded by potential partners, she pulled out her phone, hid it coyly beneath the counter, and opened the online dating app Tinder. On her screen, images of men appeared and then disappeared to the left and right, depending on the direction in which she wiped.
I felt a deep sense a rejection — not personally, but on behalf of everyone at the bar. Instead of interacting with the people around her, she chose to search for a companion elsewhere online.
Of course, others have worried about these sorts of questions before. But the fear that online dating is changing us, collectively, that it’s creating unhealthy habits and preferences that aren’t in our best interests, is being driven more by paranoia than it is by actual facts.
«There are a lot of theories out there about how online dating is bad for us,» Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford who has been conducting a long-running study of online dating, told me the other day. «And mostly they’re pretty unfounded.»
They are important today — roughly one of every four straight couples now meet on the Internet. (For gay couples, it’s more like two out of every three). The apps have been surprisingly successful — and in ways many people would not expect.
