ONLINE DATING 

Online dating is when someone uses the internet to find a potential romantic or sexual partner. What first began as websites visited on a computer has become apps accessible everywhere. On these sites or apps, a person creates an account, provides information about themselves to be displayed to potential partners, and interact with other users in order to find a connection. Some well-known sites include Tinder, Match.com, Bumble, and Grindr. But even regular, non-dating social media sites can be breeding ground for digital romance, like Facebook or Instagram. Online dating has become increasingly popular the longer it’s been around. The amount of people who agree that using mobile dating sites can be a good way to meet others increased from 44% to 59% between the years of 2005 and 2015, showing a slow but steady positive shift in attitude towards online dating (Smith and Anderson, 2016). For young people it has caught on much more quickly, shown by the fact that the number of young people aged 18 through 24 who use dating sites went up by almost three times (10% to 27%) in only two years (2013-2015) (Smith and Anderson, 2016). 

Online dating has grown on young people (18-24) the fastest, but they aren’t the only demographic hopping on the digital dating bandwagon. Online dating for adults ages 55-64 has doubled from 6% to 12% in just two years (2013-2015), and overall 15% of American adults have used online dating (Smith and Anderson 2016) (That's 49,784,061 people!) . Age is not the only factor to consider when discussing what kind of people use dating apps. Variables like gender, personality characteristics, and sexual orientation can be mediators in whether a person uses online dating, as well as affect their motivations behind their use of a dating app (Sumter and Vandenbosch, 2018).

Online dating differs in ways that are critical in making it not only grow in popularity but also successful at generating romantic relationships. These differences are access, communication, and matching (Finkel et al, 2012). Access refers to who a user can connect with. When dating online other people become accessible to other users that they otherwise would have never known existed. Regular dating is limited by location; Who is here is who the options are. The access provided by mobile dating eliminates that obstacle. Communication refers to the use of computer mediated communication (talking through the technology) before talking someone face to face. This gives users the opportunity to gain information about potential partners that, if it were face to face, would take a few dates to learn. Matching refers to the dating app or sites’ algorithm used to select possible partners. This saves time in the dating process by raising the statistical probability that who you interact with on the app will be someone who has the characteristics that you look for in a partner. While access, communication, and matching make dating sites unique and do create long-lasting romantic connections, that doesn’t mean that online dating is more likely to have that result than typical dating is (Finkel et al 2012). 

To use dating sites, it is required to make a profile which takes the complicated dynamic person someone is and turns it into an advertisement on why someone should be interested in them. While that does help dating apps have the quick, accessible information that makes it so revolutionary, it does leave more of an opportunity for objectification and fixation on evaluating the quality of the profile (Finkel et al 2012). The messaging features help you strike up a conversation with a potential partner, but if you chat for too long online and not in person, it creates unfulfilled expectations for each other that can make the first date less likely to turn into a long-lasting romantic connection (Finkel et al 2012). Matching makes it easy to find like-minded people with similar interests, but the algorithm can’t take into consideration things that are only comprehended accurately through face-to-face conversation (Finkel et al 2012). Things like personality, spur-of-the-moment happenings that give you a glimpse of their character, and the information we gather from our nervous system’s reaction to the person are more heavily weighted variables than the ones that the matching algorithm can provide. Other issues include catfishing/dating deception, and ghosting, all things that weren’t issues in the dating realm until it moved online.