Modern mating: How the internet has changed dating and the search for a partner

This Valentine’s Day our topic is how the internet has changed the search for love forever

According to his profile, he was a gentleman of about thirty years old. He had a good job, but had a hard time finding someone to settle down with. He wasn’t looking for just anyone, though. He wanted a nice young lady from a good family in his area. The year was 1695, and that was the very first personal ad ever placed in the media.

About thirty years later, a woman named Helen Morrison posted a notice in her local newspaper, the Manchester Weekly Journal, saying she wanted to find a nice gentleman. She did catch the eye of one prominent gentleman in the town: the mayor, who committed her to an asylum for a month, so crazy was the idea of seeking a romantic partner so openly.

We have come a long way in the three-hundred-odd years since then, but the most dramatic change to finding a romantic partner has come just in the last twenty years, with the advent of the internet, and later of the smartphone. And that is our topic this Valentine’s Day 2019—how the internet has forever changed the search for love.

Welcome to Plain English, episode number 129. I’m Jeff. The producer is JR. You can find a transcript of today’s program at PlainEnglish.com/129. Our transcripts always include instant translations of the hardest words and phrases from English to Italian, Japanese, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Just hover over the word and it tells you the translation right like that—no more pausing the audio, no more looking up words online. All for you, all for free, at PlainEnglish.com/129.

There are several ways for you to get in touch with us here at Plain English. First of all, the email. Go to PlainEnglish.com/mail and you will get a summary of every episode, links to English articles about the main topic, and an explanation of one other word or phrase from the episode. Over the course of a year, that adds up to 104 additional words and phrases you wouldn’t get just by listening. So head over to PlainEnglish.com/mail and enter your details. I’m also hearing from a lot of you on WhatsApp—and as you’ll hear later, I used that to help generate some ideas for this episode. If you’d like to be included in the occasional WhatsApp message, send me a note to +1 312 957 8757.

How the internet has changed the search for love

For most of human history, a person’s options for finding a husband or wife were limited to his or her immediate surroundings. Often, considerations of race, religion, socioeconomic class, and, importantly, the wishes of one’s parents, were primary limitations on who could couple up. When there were few options of who to marry, the decision was, ironically, much simpler than it is today—even if it was more unsatisfying.

Over the Twentieth Century, at least in the West, many of those barriers came down, as interracial marriages, interfaith marriages, and marriages across different socioeconomic classes became much more acceptable. In the Twentieth Century, too, people became more mobile: where once personal mobility was limited to a bicycle, the car and the airplane expanded people’s horizons. Then, of course, society experienced a big bang: the internet.

Dating on the internet is almost as old as the internet itself. Netscape Navigator, the first web browser, came out in 1995; just a year later, match.com, the first significant internet dating platform, came out. But it didn’t change things all at once. For a long time, there was a stigma to online dating—a sense that, if you had to use the internet to find a partner, there must be something wrong with you. You must not be able to find anyone “in real life.”

No more. Over 200 million people use online dating web sites and apps every month. In America today, a sixth of new marriages start via an online dating platform—either a web site or a mobile app—and at least that many start online through a non-dating app like Facebook or Instagram. When you hear wedding bells on a Saturday afternoon, in other words, there is a one-in-three chance that the relationship started online. Apart from meeting friends of friends, the internet is the most popular way to meet new people.

There is also growing acceptance that the internet can provide options to people who have unique trouble connecting with people in the offline world. People who live in very rural areas find the long distances and sparse population of farm country significant barriers to finding a mate. One site here in the US is called Farmers Only, and their tagline is “City folks just don’t get it.” There’s another site just for long-haul truckers.

Seniors are another group who have a hard time finding companionship. Some people grow old single; others find themselves divorced or widowed later in life, and without the desire to jump back into a more traditional dating scene. The internet can provide them a better way to connect than the local bingo hall.

For people in even smaller minorities, the internet has been an even bigger help. Jdate allows Jewish singles to find others who share their faith—or who are at least willing to convert. Over 70 percent of new same-sex couples in America start online.

Not every country and culture experiences online dating the same way. In India, where arranged marriages are common, the exact same offline process has moved online, which may not be a great thing for people hoping for more liberation. China’s biggest online dating platform is called Tantan. It boasts 20 million users, but men and women experience the site differently. Men express interest in 60 percent of the women they find on the site, but women do so only five percent of the time, leading to a huge imbalance between the sexes.

Are people who meet online happier? There is some evidence that they are. Some studies have shown that marriages that begin online last longer; couples that meet this way express higher degrees of happiness than those who met offline. When online dating first started, a lot of people worried this would ruin traditional love forever. In the United States, divorce rates were rising for a long time—only to begin falling again right around the time the internet gained popularity. So much for that theory.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some problems with the online way of finding a match. Many people find that having tens of thousands of options is just plain stressful, and find themselves in a cycle of finding new people for only shallow first dates before both parties resume the endless search. Others experience self-consciousness over their appearance, since online dating lends itself to split-second judgments based on looks alone. While the internet can help introverts connect with the world around them in a low-pressure way, it’s also possible that people can retreat from friends and in-person support networks that are still great ways to find a mate, even in today’s high-tech world.

This being the internet, there is also the worry about the power concentrated in the hands of just a few companies. Facebook, Match.com (which also owns Tinder), and a handful of other companies have the power to tweak code and affect the matches of millions of people. One thing I wonder about is this—yes, the internet allows us to connect with many different types of people. But it also lets you filter specifically for the exact type of person you think you want: highly educated, high income, same race, same religion, same language, whatever—and people might limit their choices. It would be a sad irony if a great tool to connect with many different kinds of people were instead used to connect with only the exact same type of person.

But don’t despair. The internet lets millions more people find the right match for them—something that will enhance not only their own happiness, but also that of their future children.

All right, this has been a long episode, and I got great feedback from my new friends on WhatsApp about this topic. I sent a message out on Friday asking for some thoughts on online dating and I got a lot of great feedback—and I want to share it all with you, since I got so many good thoughtful comments. But this episode is long, so I’m going to make the executive decision to do a third episode this week. Don’t get too used to it. This is just once. But check back in your podcast app tomorrow. I’ll talk about the feedback I got from all of you. It won’t be a full episode—no transcript or anything like that. But I do want to share some of this feedback since you guys were so thoughtful in sending me some good notes.

But there is one thing I want to say based on the WhatsApp feedback. I heard from two people—not one person, two people—who found their match on an English-language forum online. So they were online practicing English on a language forum, and found their match that way. I think that’s just great.

I do want to say hi to a few listeners. Mohamed, originally from Tunisia, is now living and working in Paris. He works in the insurance industry and has been assigned to a new team with German, British, and French team members—and he needs to use English in his multicultural meetings in the future—so thanks for being with us Mohamed. Finally, Rodrigo from Fortaleza, Brazil, wrote to introduce himself and also plug the music that’s popular in his part of Brazil called Forro. I asked him for a couple good artists from around there and he recommended Wesley Safadão, and I’ve been listening to his album called In Miami Beach, a concert, as I wrote this episode and it’s really good. Mind you, I don’t understand any of the words—it’s all in Portuguese, obviously. But it’s a lot of fun, and you know music can stimulate your creativity, so maybe this episode is better than normal because of the soundtrack I’ve had on in the background. Thanks Rodrigo!