Digital Romance: The Business of Online Dating

Library - Africa

Saturday, 11 June 2011 07:23

Written by Steven Barboza

Before Leigh Griffin (now Leigh Mosquera) – black, attractive, highly educated — found her husband online, she took a slight detour on the road to Love and Happiness, a rendezvous with a perfect stranger whose idea of a first date included driving up in a car containing a cache of weapons.

The stranger, who Leigh met on Match.com, claimed to be a federal agent. The two “clicked” online and on the phone, so they arranged to meet in a Burger King parking lot in Belleville, New Jersey. After saying hello, she sat in his car, leaving the passenger door ajar and her right foot planted firmly on the pavement. That’s when she noticed he had a bad case of the jitters.

Sitting behind the wheel, Mr. Agent revealed his gun, which she fully expected to see because they had planned a date at the firing range, even though she was a gun novice. But Mr. Agent was so jittery that she asked: “Are you getting ready to do something to me? Or are you just anxious about this whole situation?” He re-assured her that he was harmless, in spite of the weapons in his trunk, and showed her how to load the gun before driving off to the firing range.

There, the roar of gunfire drowned out their dating talk. “He’s standing behind me, very close, very intimate. He’s helping me hold the gun. I’m firing it. It was a great date.” Months later when she told her sister about the date, her sister freaked.

Even the most adventurous dating primers would characterize Leigh’s target-shooting date as risky business. But her manner of seeking Mr. Right was hardly wrong in these days of digital dating. As a global society, overtures for 21st century romance simply don’t resemble the kinds of foreplay couples once knew and loved.

Online dating is now the third most popular way for singles to meet, ranking behind the workplace and school (#1) and friends and family (#2), but ahead of bars, clubs and social events (#4), according to an eHarmony study. In all, some 113 million people visit dating sites each month, logging on to read and answer messages, flirt, fine-tune checklists for potential mates, arrange first dates and “shop” the open market.

A Pew study found that nearly three out of four Internet users who are single and seeking a mate have used the Web to find love; and many are succeeding. Online dating sites — there are nearly 1,500 of them — give rise to one in five relationships and one in six marriages. As a result, site founders and executives are fast becoming thought of as new millennium Cupids unrivaled in their ability to generate love anywhere on the planet.

Leigh ultimately dropped the gun-toting agent, and like millions of other Internet daters –  black, white or other-hued — she continued her quest for a mate from the comfort of her home, sitting at night in a bathrobe and slippers while scanning online slide shows of “prospects.”

Eventually she came across Jhon Mosquera’s photo on Match.com, read his bio (English wasn’t his first language; he was born in Colombia, but lived five miles from her) and sent him a note telling him he looked “interesting.” A year and a half later, she became Mrs. Mosquera, and afterward gave birth to a son.

Where Leigh has succeeded, many fail. Six out of 10 African Americans are unmarried, according to Packaged Facts, while according to the 2004 U.S. census, 42% of all black women have never been married. Such statistics make the black community a prime target for the online dating industry, which overall is expected to generate annual revenues of $1.7 billion by 2013.

Indeed, the African American market has some of the hottest dating sites and is considered among the fastest growing segments in the industry. Hitwise, BlackPeopleMeet.com, with perhaps 100,000 subscribers, was the 11th most visited dating site in March, reportedly reaching 4% of the total U.S. black population. Launched in 2002, the site is operated by People Media, which runs 27 targeted dating sites and has  255,000 subscribers, 4 million unique visitors per month and 550 million page views each month. The company was acquired by IAC and Match last July for $80 million in cash

Other sites targeting African Americans include BlackSingles.com, AfricaSingles.net, BlackPeopleLove.com and SoulSingles.com. These and other sites are thriving because African American online traffic is growing as the population of black eligibles multiplies.

Of course, digital daters have a variety of niche sites to choose from: some cater to gays, Jews, Christians, Catholics, Asians, or seniors. Speed-dating sites help daters use a Webcam to quickly whittle down the playing field. There are even sites geared toward cheating on a spouse; LonelyCheatingWives.com is the most popular of these, luring more than 2 million visitors per month.

Some 90% of online daters stick to the top 100 dating sites though, according to industry consultant Mark Brooks, who lives in Malta but visits dating site offices worldwide. Among the world’s top sites are PlentyofFish, Zoosk, Manhunt, eHarmony, BeNaughty, OKCupid, ChristianMingle, TRUE, and Badoo.

These sites offer relationship services that social networking sites like Facebook do not, Brooks pointed out. “Dating sites protect the name and identity of people until they’re ready to give it up. Facebook is a handy tool for researching people. Once you know their name, you can look them up on Facebook and see what kind of company they keep. So the two [types of sites] work hand in hand.”

{div width:300|height:250|float:left}{module Ads-300x250|none}{/div}How are Internet dating sites changing society? In a number of significant ways.

Using these sites, people are able to weed out people with show-stopping attributes and find a mate quickly by surfing through remaining candidates who live up to a dater’s checklist. Such lists include attributes that are most important to a dater like race, nationality, age, athleticism, height, weight, even eye color. Also, three out of four Internet daters see a well-developed sense of humor and a shared cultural background as essential to a successful relationship, followed by appearance (for 10% of respondents), education (7.3%) and financial state (6.8%), according to a different Pew study.

Second, Internet dating sites have leveled the playing field for men and women. Women are not penalized for making first moves, and they can shut down a potential suitor’s advances with the click of a mouse.

Third, as a research paper by Brooks points out, singles are becoming more picky precisely because online dating allows them to be more selective in larger pools of people and to extend these pools to far-flung places, though a majority of people still prefer to find a mate within 23 miles of home.

Finally, as other social trends change, so does dating. People are now single longer than ever before. By the time they’re in their 30s, many have exhausted their own pool of datable friends. In addition, as mobile technology lengthens the workday by allowing job tasks to invade leisure time, singles are busier than ever. As such many singles use the technology at hand to get hooked up — computers and mobile phones connected to dating sites.

“The nature of how we relate to one another is changing as a result of new technologies and new ways to connect with one another,” said Dr. Thomas Bradbury, eHarmony advisor, professor of psychology and founder of the Marriage and Family Development Lab at UCLA. “A lot of the trappings of relationships are changing, giving us new access to information we did not have, an ability to connect at a moment’s notice, perhaps even an ability to learn how to be a better partner. But I think the process of really connecting up with another person is not changing that much, nor are the elements of what makes people happy or committed or contented.”

The more some things change, however, the more others remain the same. Racial preferences are  thriving among online daters. A study conducted by the University of California, Irvine, found that African Americans are more likely to include white people as potential dates than vice versa, and that white males prefer to date Asian and Latina women over black women. According to Dan Ariely, an author who polled 28,000 online daters, 40% of black women date only African American men, but only 5% of black men exclusively date black women.

Online dating might be growing due to the recession and shrunken disposable incomes. A round figure of the cost of a decent first date is calculated at $100. Dating online saves the expense of blowing a dating budget on drinks in a bar or going out to dinner with someone who might not make the first cut of potential mates, at least according to an online dater’s initial checklist.

However, chemistry counts, and eventually daters must meet in person to develop a close relationship; and if a would-be mate has everything on a checklist but doesn’t set a dater’s heart on fire, hope for love is lost.

“Personally, I do not think we will ever take the mystery out of dating and intimate connection,” said Bradbury. “We are hard-wired to connect, and the daily challenges of creating, maintaining, and improving that connection are likely to be always just outside our grasp.”

Leigh would agree. “There was one guy I met [via Match.com] — we had so much in common,” she said. “We were avid cyclists and competitive as far as athletics. I had a Saab; he had a Saab — just so many little things in common, even our upbringing. [But] when I met him, he was such a total jerk: obnoxious, not somebody I would bring home to my parents.”

In all, Leigh dated eight men she met online. “I didn’t have any bad experiences with stalkers or weirdos,” she said, but admitted she had begun to doubt her own sanity as she drove to Burger King to meet Mr. Agent. The date turned out great, and resulted in a second date, at a jazz club, but the relationship petered out, and Leigh returned to Match.com to find her soulmate, Jhon.

Online dating differs in a distinctive way from other forms, Leigh offered. “At least when you meet somebody through a friend, you know that that friend knows the person so you can get a little history. With online dating, nobody else that you know or trust knows that person, so you have to develop a trust factor before you put yourself out there. Online dating is no different from meeting somebody in a bar or a restaurant or a park.”

Leigh didn’t meet Jhon until she had vetted him by phone for a week. Then they met in a bar. That same night, she took him to a friend’s restaurant, where he got along with people she knew. “He’s good; he’s a keeper,” Leigh’s friend said, reassuring her.

She found that the stigma once reserved for online dating has dissipated. “I think people are more like, ‘Oh, wow, that really works,’ as opposed to ‘Oh, my God, weren’t you scared? What kind of person did you think you would meet online?’” She noted that today more people are apt to say, “Oh well, that’s the way to meet people now.”

Online dating has a well-known downside, however. People online tend to lie about themselves. According to a study by OKCupid, men fib about their height, saying they’re two inches taller than they really are. Half of all daters lie about their weight, and most people inflate their salaries by about 20%.

A danger to avoid is a tendency to mask faults by creating the perfect date in the mind’s eye. “When you start talking to somebody and you really want them to be the perfect match for you and you really don’t know very much about them, you might start projecting qualities onto them that you would most desire, and that’s called the halo effect,” said Brooks.

“There’s a huge fantasy element to this, which is one reason why the virtual world sites are big,” he continued. “There’s obviously a mental need for this, for  fantasy — [for believing] that virtual worlds are better than the real world. That’s a rather dangerous mental zone to get into, especially when it comes to Internet dating. … A lot of Internet daters are disappointed because they cast ideals on the people that they’re looking for, and they think they can shop for somebody. And ultimately people need to get out on 20 dates before they ever make their choice. They need to go experience the real world [first].”