- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 10
- 18
-
Sparkle (5)
Let it be known: I am not a big fan of online dating. Yes, at least one of my best friends found her fabulous fiancé online. And if you live in a small town, or fit a specific demographic (e.g., woman over 45, ultra-busy businessperson, sugar daddy, sneaking around your spouse), online dating may expand opportunities for you. But for the rest of us, we're much better off meeting real live humans eye-to-eye the way nature intended. Here are six reasons why:
1. It's easy to be fooled by inaccurate signals online.
Do you think you're beautiful? What most people call "beauty" is actually evolution's very thorough system of broadcasting our suitability as a mate. Clear skin, good posture, broad shoulders, sonorous voice, bright eyes, shiny hair, graceful movements, pleasant aroma, facial symmetry, articulate speech: evolution has engineered features such as these into us to signal health, fertility, strength and intelligence.
When you go online, instead of seeing a person up-close, hearing him speak and watching her move, what you get is a blurry, postage-stamp size series of static photos which cannot be heard, felt, or smelled. You also get a fair amount of a person's writing, which has had no part in the eons of evolution of mate selection.
Most important of the missing signals may very well be smell, which some scientists believe underlies most of male-female attraction -- what literally constitutes sexual chemistry. Studies show that we sense immune compatibility through smell -- one way in which evolution decides whether two people should have kids together or not. This compatibility is vital to the viability of offspring, so it's bypassed at our peril.
Photo by Garry Knight.
So when you go online, you're subverting a process that has worked just fine for propagating the human species for the past 3 million years. Add to that the fact that pictures can easily lie about age, complexion and physique, and you've got yourself a lot of inaccurate signals to go on. Which brings us to our second point.
2. You can waste a lot of time online chasing what you don't want.
Here's the timeline of a typical online courtship for a guy: He sees a profile of a woman he likes. He writes her. A day or two later, he gets a response. An online correspondence ensues. If she's receptive, the conversation moves to email after a few exchanges.
If her interest continues, they speak on the phone, and begin to plan a meeting. A week or two later, after anywhere from three to 10 or more points of online- and phone contact, they meet in person. And it turns out that she has bad skin (which didn't show in the flatteringly lit photos) or her butt is gigantic (which didn't show in her waist-up photos), or he's 6 inches shorter than advertised -- or some other insurmountable shortcoming that could have been ascertained in the first 30 milliseconds of an in-person encounter.
In an instant, all those hours spent on witty emails, all of that effort to be charming on the phone, learning all about him or impressing her go whoosh! down the toilet. And worst of all, you kinda feel like a fool for building it all up in your mind for naught.
You're never getting those two weeks back again. So save yourself some time, and meet people in person before you decide to pursue.
3. Online sites present an unhelpful excess of choice.
The central premise of Barry Schwartz's 2003 book The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More -- which everyone should read -- is that more choice does not make us happier. More choice actually makes us more miserable.
Why? First, it makes the selection process burdensome. Picking one jam out of three possible tasty choices is easy. Picking one out of 43 is well-nigh torture. Second, it causes us to second-guess any decision that we do render. I got the blue Prius, but should I have gotten the red one? Or maybe a Nissan Leaf instead?
Online dating sites are a classic case of too much choice. A search on a major site for matches in your city may yield thousands of results. So much possibility! Or so it may seem. So which ones do you pursue? The good-looking ones that, because everyone else is also pursuing, never respond (see section above on wasted time)?
If you're a good-looking woman online, you’re probably inundated by unwanted attention. Let's say you
