I met both my current boyfriend and my ex through online dating. This used to be fairly taboo to admit to, but it seems that the standards have shifted to apps like Tinder being cultural phenomena unto themselves. It seems that more people have tried internet mediated dating than not, making it a more “acceptable” method to meeting a mate, even if a lingering stigma can still be felt. Even though I can fall back upon the basis of pre-existing mutual friends and interests, a true connection was still forged first via the internet.

Statistic Brain, culling data from Reuters, Herald News, PC World and Washington Post has noted that online courtships before marriage are much shorter than offline, an average of 18 and a half months versus the more substantial 42 month average of those less technologically inclined. Impression Management is often stated to be an important task for online daters, similar to how self-censoring and selection drives the Hyperpersonal Model of digital communication. I would hypothesize that the shorter courtship is indicative of this sense of deeper understanding that many people describe the people that they connect with via online dating.

In one way that online dating does differ from this more hyperpersonal communication is through the casualty with which many users can approach it. Often described as a fear of missing out, many users admitted to pursuing relationships with multiple people at once online, testing the boundaries of what they can commit to while keeping options open. Choice of who to converse with is also artificially limited, by filters set by users on who they want to interact with (white straight women between 22-30, for instance), or by the apps themselves like Tinder that attempt to determine the most desirable profiles to display for each user. It seems that while relationships begun online tend to move faster and last longer/happier than those started solely offline, a self-selection bias can in this case be a benefit, rather than a detriment.

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