Online Dating: Good Thing or Bad Thing?

Thanks to Max K. from Brooklyn, NY for suggesting this week’s topic:

Online dating, once a fringe and stigmatized activity, is now over a $2 billion industry. Over 40
million Americans have given online dating a try, and over a third of the American couples
married between 2005 and 2012 met online.
The first prominent online dating site was Match.com, which launched in 1995. eHarmony
started in 2000, OkCupid in 2004, and more recently, a wave of mobile people-swiping apps,
like Tinder and Hinge, have become wildly popular.

But is this a positive development or something to be concerned about? Is online dating making
the world better and dating more effective, or is something important being lost or sacrificed as a
result? The way the current trend is heading, what will dating be like in 2030, and will that be a
better or worse time to be on the dating market than 1995? Ideally, what would  dating look like
in 2030?
______

Tim’s Answer: I think this is a no-brainer positive development. The key thing is that it’s not
online dating—it’s online meeting people followed by in-person dating. I think the term “online
dating” is part of the problem and makes people who don’t know much about it think it refers to
people forming entire relationships online and only meeting in person much later.
Simply considered as online meeting people, it makes a ton of sense. I’ve already expressed my
argument for why in two posts: one on how critical it is to find the right life partner and how
seriously we should take that quest, and another on why going to bars is a terrible life
experience. The first step in ending up with the right person is meeting the right person, and for
something so important in our lives, we’ve had no real system for doing it efficiently and
intelligently. For socially weird or anxious or shy people, trying to meet a stranger in public is a
nightmare, and even for someone charming and outgoing, it’s a grueling task that requires a lot
of luck. The alternative that often happens is meeting someone through friends, which can work,
but it’s limiting yourself to single people your closest friends and family happen to know.
Effective dating definitely needs to take place in person, the same way your grandfather did it,
but I see no good reason why meeting people to date in the first place can’t be systematic and
efficient. Yes, there’s something special about the romance of meeting someone in public and
hitting it off right away, but that rarely happens—and for the most important mission in most of
our lives, it makes no sense to crush your ability to meet great people to try a first date with
because it’s not as good a story to have met them online. I have a friend that goes on two or three
first dates every week with people he already knows are potentially good personality and
physical matches for him—that’s how you find the right person, and good luck keeping up with
him meeting people the old-fashioned way. And for people who have no interest in serious
dating and just want to find people to hook up with? Online is a much better way to accomplish
that too.
As for the current online dating options—they strike me as a good first crack at this by humanity,
but the kind of thing we’ll significantly improve on to the point where the way it was done in
2014 will seem highly outdated in not too many years. Now that the stigma has diminished, you
know this industry is going to race ahead because there’s so much money to be made by whoever
can be innovative. So in 2030, I think we’ll be somewhere very different, and I think today’s
nine-year-olds will have really incredible ways of finding love when they’re 25. Maybe I’m a
future stubborn old man about dating being in-person, but I believe that needs to stay that way
and the innovation in this industry should hone in more and more on optimizing the process of
getting the exact right people on first dates with each other—that’s its job.