My current research is an analysis of Match.com dating profiles gathered over the past three years during a class project in my Marriages and Families class. Match.com is one of the largest online dating sites in the country with about 20 million users. The profiles represent a geographically diverse set of singles between the ages of 25 and 35.
If I’m one in a million, there are 310 of me in the United States The vast majority of Match.com users in my study indicated in some way that they were looking for someone “special.” The desire to find someone special is unsurprising given romantic norms that promote uniqueness and monogamy as central features of true love. What is surprising is how little variation (or uniqueness) there was among users. Rather than searching a “community of diverse singles anywhere, whenever you want, however you want,” the findings suggest that online services like Match.com have the effect of making the pool of potential partners much more similar to each other than they are different. This is a surprising effect given that these online dating sites are designed and pitched as an efficient, predictable, rational way to find a unique, special romantic partner. Instead, they tend to create vast seas of similar profiles in ways that are unlikely to ever occur in the irrational, messy, unpredictable, “offline” dating world.
Shaping your identity Another striking result is the prevalence of what I term “duality” in individual profiles. This is a kind of identity where individuals describe themselves with a seemingly opposite set of characteristics. Common pairings were people being laid back but outgoing, enjoying staying in but going out, having a sense of humor but being serious, and liking to travel but also stay home. In addition to these dualities, there was a tendency for users to explicitly indicate that they were normal. For men, the phrase “I’m just an average guy” appeared frequently both in profiles and in their dating headlines (the “title” sentence that appears next to their picture in search results). Clearly, something about navigating online space shapes how people present their identities. (It would hardly be commonplace for two people to meet in person and for one to begin the conversation by saying “I’m just an average guy/girl” and listing a series of contradictory preferences.) Indeed, many users stated in their profiles that expressing themselves in writing on the dating website was difficult and awkward. These difficulties are likely due to the newness of online dating as a social space. Unlike offline, there aren’t clearly established social norms of interaction or presentation of self. It’s www.naz.edu
Dr. Kim McGann and sociology major Dave Sanchez ’11 present the results of the online dating study at the Eastern Sociological Society Meeting in Boston, MA, last spring.
difficult to follow offline norms about modesty if you are posting a profile that is supposed to make you stand out in the romance equivalent of a line-up. The fact that men were much more apt than women to express difficulty/awkwardness in the process is likely a reflection of offline gender roles, where women learn and are expected to be more competent and expressive in matters relating to love.
Where do we go from here? My research captures only a small slice of the new unfolding social landscape that occurs online. As more social scientists turn their attention to online spaces, we will get more “answers” to how this new social space works while at the same time encountering more questions. Studying online dating isn’t important just because it tells us something about online dating; it’s a way to explore what characterizes contemporary social life in the “internet age.” How do norms about dating and gender that exist offline carry over (or not carry over) into online spaces? Does it make sense to think of offline as “reality” and online as somehow exempt, or are both equally real in their consequences? How do people use online spaces to construct and maintain their personal identity in ways that are different than offline strategies? These are just some of the questions that await the current cohort of future sociologists at Nazareth. For more information about Nazareth’s sociology program, visit www.naz.edu/sociology. Kimberly McGann, Ph.D, is an assistant professor of sociology at Nazareth. CONNECTIONS | SPRING 2011 27