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Online dating sites have got to find the sweet spot to stay in business.
If they don't at least come close to delivering on their often extravagant promises to help users find an exact, perfect, will make life sweet and beautiful forever match they'd quickly go out of business. On the other hand, if they are too efficient, too good at what they do, they would also crash-and-burn.
Imagine a truly efficient dating site, one with algorithms so good at matching people users would require one or maybe two visits before leaving the site to trip the light fantastic with their ideal dream mate. Such a site couldn't last. They would always have to be finding new customers. It would be like a restaurant serving such nutritious food that you would never have to eat anything ever again. Such an impossible restaurant, like a truly efficient online dating site, would hardly be expected to have enough repeat customers to survive; in addition, the fees that would have to be charged to one-time-only customers would be way too high to ever work.
But business is booming; there are lots of sites finding that sweet spot. Online dating is increasingly becoming the norm for how to meet people who want to be met. In fact, in my practice when someone looking to meet someone doesn't at least try online dating I raise questions about unacknowledged ambivalence or anxiety about the connections and contact they say they seek. There is also lots of research documenting growing use and acceptance (for an excellent, general bibliography about online dating see Professor Azy Barak's online biblio).
Whether intuitively, by luck, or by design, these sites are really good at harnessing (exploiting?) our psychology as a way to find that sweet spot that keeps them in business. I actually think it's a combination of intuition and design; the people who run these sites are often smart, some even very, very smart (the monthly blog entries at "OkTrends: Dating Research from OkCupid" is an often fascinating read that shows just how smart the math guys who run OkCupid—a popular, ad-supported free dating site—really are).
I've had the sweet spot in mind the last few weeks while reviewing cases in which online dating was central to the therapy—its for a talk I'm giving next week at an academic conference next week titled "Dating, Mating, and Procreating in 21st Century America." What I've found so far are three features of our psychology that help make dating sites "sticky." It is by no means an exhaustive list.
Optimizing for optimizers
Dating sites clearly have a favorite in the battle between "only the best will do" and letting "good enough be good enough." They want some people who always want more no matter how much they have. Whether it's how sexy someone is or how much money they make, I've seen many patients get trapped in such a never ending search for somone newer, better, brighter (Mu-Li Yang and Wen-Bin Chiou in an April 2010 article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking use choice theory to research a similar point about "satisficers" vs. "maximizers).
The only way out is to give up the search and find satisfaction in what may be good-enough. One recent 20-something emigre to NYC from a small town found himself enthralled by choice: "so many women, so little time." No matter how much he enjoyed spending time with someone he met, he could never shake the thought that he'd be able to find someone better online. While the frequency and longevity of his use made him an ideal dating site customer, he was also the poster boy for the oft-voiced complaint among some women, "you meet a lot of jerks online."
So, if you're online dating be warned: some people are not looking for you, they are looking for someone better than you.
A safety valve for ambivalence
Struggling with the inevitable conflict between intimacy and independence—a struggle that includes defensively avoiding it alltogether—is often a right of passage for people launching lives and loves. Online dating sites happily offer themselves as arenas to work through these conflicts. Your ambivalence helps make their site sticky.
Consider a young woman I treated who oscillated between wanting love but fearing she would lose her self and her independence if she were ever to get married. During treatment she found herself in her first serious relationship. But as much as she felt she wanted it, she just never thought of herself as someone who would have someone just for her. Being a lonely searcher was built into her identity and was actually the focus of her therapy. So, when her boyfriend lovingly proposed in a picture perfect spot, she rode the cresting euphoria and accepted. But when that joyous wave crashed, she fell back into anxious uncertainty and, no surprise, re-activated her online dating profile. Until the night before her wedding, she managed her ambivalence by fielding repeated requests. She never said yes to coffee-dates or drinks because she was there to manage anxiety, not meet someone else. As long as she could keep "shopping" her ambivalence stayed controllable.
Was she cheating? And if so, on whom? Her fiance? The men she flirted with online? What made her stop? Would she tell her now husband? These are all questions for another time. For now what's important is that her ambivalence found a welcome home in online dating.
So, if you're online dating be warned: some people are not looking for you, they already have someone they like better than you.
Tweaking excitement
On one side: excitement, excess, stimulation, mystery. On the other: safety, security, comfort, familiarity. Sex, romance, intimacy—all the things promised by finding the right match on an online dating site—drink from both. And so does the very experience of online dating. On the one hand finding a match and getting a lovely email from someone with a hot picture and an intriguing profile provides only a squirt of exitement, however much you may think you want a torrent. But on the other, well, there's not a whole lot at risk. Sitting in your pj-s at your computer in the solitary comfort of your own home is pretty comfortable. You're able to get a charge that is worth it because you are not really put that much on the line.
Most online daters enjoy at least something in the experience of excitement getting tweaked. Some get trapped in it. And others take it to the extreme, like a patient I saw who crafted such a compelling online profile that he was able to launch several exciting connections with women he felt would never respond to who he actually was. In fact, the image he created on screen was so different from who he actually was that he never even considered trying to meet anyone in person. The relatively risk-free online connection gave enough excitement.
So, if you're online dating be warned: some people are not looking for you, they already have their simulation of you, which is all they really want.
