Chapter 1 opens up the archives, looking for the origins of online dating. Matching services have a long history in both Europe and the United States. The first matrimonial agencies and personal ads appeared in the nineteenth century, and forms of “computer dating” were experienced in the 1950s; the first network of matchmaking systems followed a few decades later. This genealogy establishes a strong filiation between earlier services and today’s digital platforms. It also reveals a common criticism that targeted them from the start: as early as in the nineteenth century, matchmaking services were accused of corrupting intimate relationships by introducing economic standards. The commodification of intimacy appears as a long-running fear of commercial intermediaries rather than as a feature of late capitalism.
Chapter 2 pursues this historical analysis by looking at the emergence of today’s online dating market. Drawing on interviews with the founders of a series of dating sites and apps, it shows the social and professional norms that inform these platforms and govern their creation. Whereas the features of dating platforms are commonly scrutinized for what they supposedly says about modern love, this chapter shows that the products primarily reflect economic concerns. The making of dating platforms obeys contemporary market phenomena, namely isomorphism, segmentation, and stereotyping.
Unlike older forms of mediated dating that never made it into the mainstream, online dating has become a common practice and an important meeting venue in the western world. However, the phenomenon has also been exaggerated, both in the press and by scientific scholars. Using national surveys from different countries, chapter 3 gives an overview of the number of users and the proportion of couples that meet online. It also provides a new explanation for the popularity of online dating – namely that online dating owes its success to the separation it operates between the sexual and the social sphere. This feature is fundamental to why and how people use online dating, although the reasons differ between young adults, people in their thirties, and separated individuals in mid-life.
Online dating is primarily casual dating. This common perception, largely conveyed by the media, is also a scientific fact. Chapter 4 shows that relationships initiated online rapidly become sexual and are often short-term; but it also challenges the common interpretations of this trend. Where authors often see a radical shift in norms, this book insists on a change in context. The sexual nature of online dating must, once again, be understood in the light of privatization; individuals more easily engage with and disengage from partners with whom they do not share a social setting. What is more, online dating does not hinder couple formation, nor does it imply some commitment phobia. In fact, the couple norm is as strong as ever, but the ways of committing are changing.
The second part of book looks at the inequalities in dating; we are not all equal before the laws of love. Online dating has not changed this, but it lays bare the discriminations, prejudices, and injustices that characterize the intimate sphere.
Chapter 5 investigates the mechanisms of assortative matching in online dating. The hyper-standardized platforms do not obstruct social differences in user behavior, nor do they prevent online relations from being homogamous. Users tend to interact with people from a social milieu similar to their own. This social selection is not due only to algorithms or predefined preference; it is rather the result of class dispositions and cultural prerequisites. Precisely because online dating takes away some of the most formal obstacles to social diversity, it reveals the strength and the modus operandi of today’s social hierarchies.
Although specifically designed to match people as partners, dating platforms have their winners and losers. Not everyone manages to initiate contacts, meet partners, or form a relationship. These inequalities are not only individual but follow strong regularities of gender and age. Chapter 6 shows that young men are often rejected by their female peers who seek contact with more mature men. At older ages, this sexual disqualification turns against female users who, after a separation, show interest in men of their own age, who then turn to younger women. Dating platforms reveal this machinery of matching and those excluded from the process.
The #MeToo movement gave a striking illustration both of the gender inequalities that characterize sexuality and of a change in attitudes that makes these inequalities less and less acceptable. Online dating bears witness to this complex nature of contemporary sexual norms. Dating services are a site for sexual exploration both for women and for men, but internet interactions are also profoundly gendered. This is clear from surveys, big data, and interviews that disclose a dual norm of male initiative and female sexual reserve. The last chapter looks at these traditional gender roles, which are reproduced online. It highlights the persistent double standard in sexual behavior and the different ways in which women and men are authorized to express desire. Although explicit consent is on the political agenda, the observation of actual dating behaviour shows that it is rarely expressed as such. On the contrary, sexual ambiguity remains the norm in heterosexual relations. The grey areas between consent and abuse are widening, especially online, where sexual desire is acted out but rarely pronounced.
The conclusion develops the main thesis of this book and puts it in a historical perspective. Online dating is both a cause and a consequence of a larger privatization of social life. As public socializing has decreased and, with it, also the opportunities for meeting new people, dating platforms attract users who wish to find partners outside their immediate surrounding. However, rather than installing a new public meeting venue – like the balls of the early twentieth century – online dating makes meeting partners more private than ever, turning it into a solitary and deeply personal matter.
1 The History of Matchmaking
There are thousands of marriageable men and women of all ages capable of making each other happy, who never have a chance of meeting… Therefore, the desirability of having some organ through which ladies and gentlemen aspiring to marriage can be honorably brought into communication is too obvious to need a demonstration.
The Matrimonial News and Special Advertiser, October 1877
Our mission is to create new connections and bring the world closer together and help people meet others they otherwise wouldn’t have met.
Tinder, February 2017
Today’s dating sites and apps were born with the internet, but they can trace their distant origins to personal advertisements and forms of marriage brokerage that developed in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. These early forms of commercial matchmaking have survived until today, but were supplemented in the 1980s by digital dating services such as the bulletin board systems (BBSs) in North America and the Minitel in France. Each of these services is a child of its time. They bear the mark of the sexual norms and matrimonial system they operated in, but also those of the economic and technical environment of their time. The spread is often tied to technological innovations, beginning with industrial printing, which made classified advertising popular, then moving on to early digital technologies, which spurred “computer dating” and the first online dating networks, and finally to the World Wide Web and mobile technology, with the websites and apps familiar to us today.
Many similarities can be found between these different types of dating services. The companies that operated in earlier forms of matchmaking were often the first to invest in new markets, hence features from older services have been passed on and adapted to new platforms. The filiation