Welcome to the new trend of ‘relationshopping’. This is a term coined by Dr. Nicole Ellison’s team for the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) who have done extensive research on dating and the Internet. Instead of ‘relationshipping’ where you find a mate and then acknowledge you have to work hard to keep it going, ‘relationshopping’ is a ‘numbers game’. The idea (encouraged by the dating industry) is that if you trawl through enough faces and you match up enough interests, you’ll find The Perfect One and live happily ever after. This blindingly impractical way of looking at love is helped along by the hyper-connectivity of today’s society. We can relationshop whenever and wherever we go, and keep in touch with our love-muffins 24-7. Our emails, text messages, Tweets, Facebookings, LinkedIn-ings and Skypings all come into our smartphones that we never switch off. We harangue each other all day whether we’re buzzing angrily in their handbags or pinging up on their computer screens. Then we spend our lives trying to be more contactable to more people. Together we constantly chip away at the notion of a private life. How can romance possibly survive in this overcrowded chaotic battlefield?
A MODEM Bel Trew Troubleshoots Our Relationship With Love And The Internet. It is estimated that over 5 million of us will go online this year to find love, which means that about third of the British single population are checking their emails on a daily basis to see if ‘The One’ has entered their cyberspace. These daily digital unions have contributed to the marvellous statistic that 15% of all married couples in the UK met their spouse online (youGov). And why not? When Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web back in the 80’s, it was specifically for social networking and knowledge sharing (admittedly on a more intellectual level). Why hang about in a bar drinking your liver into oblivion, when you can browse potentials in your pyjamas at two in the morning whilst simultaneously stalking your Ex on Facebook and BBM-ing your friends updates? Just think about it, from one laptop or smartphone you could feasibly access 5.2 million different matches across 1,400 Internet dating websites in the UK alone (HitWise and Mintel) . in 1
That doesn’t even include Internet chat rooms, online gaming, social networking sites, instant messaging and online telecommunications. There is nothing in your way, no distance too far, no social interaction too awkward. You don’t have to even get dressed. But with these incredible resources at our finger tips, why isn’t the dating scene more successful? Why do the stereotypes of Bridget Jones and the spinster-eating Alsatians still exist? There should be swarms of happily married couples falling over themselves like lovesick skittles in an enormous nationwide Nescafé advert. Why not? Because everyone is at home looking up their ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend on a friend of a friend’s profile or they’re mindlessly dismissing people’s pictures on a dating website. Essentially, we’ve become monsters of information and so have turned our backs on romance. We’ve murdered the magic ingredient of amour: the ‘je ne sais quoi’. Agreed, statistics prove that online dating is becoming more popular each year. The industry has grown fourfold since 2004 and this year is estimated to be worth an eye-watering £105m (Mintel) . Major players like Mysinglefriend.com put their success rate at around 25% but what types of relationships are these 1-in-4 experiencing? How is social media affecting our attitudes to finding love?
The problems begin during the process of creating the dating profile. The selectivity of self-presentation is what really separates ‘online’ dating from ‘offline’ interactions. Your profile has, in most cases (perhaps not for juggernaughty55 or popeyethesailorbangbang), been very mindfully constructed. A heavily edited photograph of yourself having fun nuzzles within reams of carefully woven literary excellence that nonchalantly highlight your diverse interests and your boundless intellect whilst preserving an ironic, carefree undertone throughout. We enter a realm of fantasy, where everything can be photoshopped and over exaggerated. This is ‘impression-management’ at its best. To be fair to us, the Internet dating websites don’t help. With the heady mess of drop-down options for activities, job descriptions and physical attributes it’s no wonder people get carried away and over-embellish. These ‘aspects of your personality’ are all aimed at crowbarring you into a social category to help the recipient make quick stereotypical assumptions about you that aren’t necessarily based on true character.
same time. Where is the romance in that? Even the date itself is complicated. No doubt the couple have read and re-read each other’s profile a hundred times. As 96% of all 18-35 year- olds are on social-networking sites, it is more than likely that both have looked each other up on the trusty voyeuristic encyclopaedias of Facebook and LinkedIn. The bewildering methods of investigation mean that by the time the happy couple meet, both have a detailed blueprint of every strategic PR initiative the other has set in place to convince the world that they are in fact interesting. So our female dater is now in the restaurant with Chris76. She thinks this man could very well be A Significant Other or maybe, even, The One. Little does she know that Chris76 is in the bathroom on his iPhone replying to an email from his next iDate. Ouch. This problem isn’t reserved solely for the singles. Social media has opened up Pandora’s Box for couples. Social networking sites connect you to millions of people from the secrecy of your own laptop. It offers up temptation whilst leaving a veritable trail of cookies, caches and browser-histories for any suspicious spouse to find. There is even a website dedicated to sniffing out Facebook infidelities called facebookcheating.com. It was set up by cuckolded computer technician Ken Savage.
‘Beware when your partner suddenly stays too long at work or becomes mysteriously busy without verifiable explanation’ it warns dramatically. Next to this article is a link to a company selling ‘spy equipment’. Charming.
Perhaps more damaging is the way this encourages us to think about love with a multiple-choice attitude to compatibility. ‘He also loves reading The Guardian, cooking and Art’ so it must be fate. As if these very common shared interests would be the glue to hold a relationship together for a lifetime. Thus, as the OII conclude, the online ‘idealization process’ begins. We over-analyze each other’s profiles, chewing over every piece of information given. Then we torture these nuggets into outstandingly uncanny ‘connections’. Trapped in a virtual world, we have no real-life interaction to prove the contrary. The ability to pick and chose our ‘mate’ from the thousands online also encourages us to make snap decisions based on very little information. We spend hours dismissing other daters, watching their hopeful little faces grin back at us from our laptop screens. Love me they say, for I am surrounded by friends in my photo and have no blemishes to speak of. Yeah right. Your hair is too big! We cackle, secure in our own omniscience and beauty. CLICK! Your eyes too close! CLICK! Your nose too bewildering (a real comment made by a friend and e-dater of mine)! Hah! CLICK! After several hours of mocking the human race, we choose our matches and message five people at the 2 in
Cheating using the Internet is growing as fast as the industry is. Grimly named website Divorceonline.co.uk published a study last month which found that Twitter has now become the preferred method of communication for those conducting illicit affairs. This social trend has been greeted with enthusiastic whoops by the divorce lawyers who now use Twitter as an excellent source of evidence in court. In fact in the USA 80% of divorce lawyers use social networking sites to help them with their cases (American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers). Where else can you find such juicy running commentaries on someone’s life? This is similar to the fact that 54% of people confess to stalking an ex online, as discovered by people-search engine Yasni. The true statistic is probably higher – we’ve all done it. When you have access to a real-time photomontage of your ex and their new love-interest, who isn’t going to have a look? The publicity of social networking sites even brings out the worst in happy couples. We’re urged by the me-me-me-society to bare our souls on a minute-by-minute basis genuinely believing that the poor sods who have to read this twaddle actually care. (Incidentally, Yasni also found out that 97% of us admit to Googling our own name). My Facebook ‘newsfeed’ is testament to this fact. If it’s not cluttered with ultrasounds of my friends’ uteruses or photographic odysseys of their wedding, then I get bludgeoned with insipid couple-chat. My all-time favourite being ‘TOM B is in bed with Melindy-Pops. Bliss☺’ I challenge any woman to describe a three-way spooning session with a laptop as, indeed, bliss. Having said that ‘Melindy-Pops’ apparently charmed by her boyfriend whipping out his laptop or smartphone mid-embrace, replied with a thumbs up ‘Mel likes this’. Am I the only person who thinks this is worrying? Even celebrities have cottoned on to it – they are positively marinating in their own self-importance. When the divorces start rolling out, we get tweetings from the likes of Kelsey Grammer, Cheryl Cole and Leann Rimes. If they have a domestic, it goes live: Peter Andre furiously tweets about Katie for JonBenét-ing their daughter, whilst Frost tweets out at Miller for cutting her child’s hair. Why do they think we care? So what does the future hold? The online dating industry is predicted to get bigger, growing by approximately 40% in four years (Mintel) . The industry is also diversifying with an increasing number of niche ways to match-make (‘Farmers Only’.com and Geek2Geek being two of the softer options). Social media companies will also fuse technologies, for example Twitter and dating websites will incorporate GPS. So you can pick up a pint of milk and a date on the way home and tell everyone in the vicinity what you’re doing. It is generally assumed across the board that more people will be online dating and social-networking, that we will spend an ever increasing amount of time on these websites and more of us will have smartphones, so we will be able to do all of the above, more frequently and in more places. In short, all you need is not love, it’s a WiFi connection. Words by Bel Trew in 3