Still not sure if online dating is right for you? Well, you won’t know until you try, and you’re missing out on a LOT of potential mates – 25 million, in fact! The online dating scene has gone mainstream, with more Americans than ever turning to the internet in search of love. Forget traditional matchmaking; new research suggests that online dating is the new way to hookup, second only to introductions through friends as a means of finding potential partners.
In the early 1990s less than 1 percent of Americans met dates online or through printed personals, compared to 37 percent in 2005. A study from Standford University also found that between 2007 and 2009, more than one in five straight couples met their current partner in online, and more than 60% for gay couples!
But even with all the success and popularity of online dating sites, researchers worry that daters may have unrealistic expectations.
“What we found is that online dating is a terrific and accepted addition to the ways people can meet,” said study lead author Eli Finkel, an associate professor of social psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “It helps all kinds of people get access to potential partners they might not otherwise have met. And it also tends to be particularly helpful to people who have idiosyncratic needs, such as same-sex partners or those who struggle with certain handicaps.”
On the other hand, Finkel added, “many of the online industry sites say that they have used science to figure out who is compatible with you. And they make a lot of money with those claims. But the reality is they have presented no evidence to back up their notion of a ‘special sauce’. And our review actually suggests that it’s almost impossible that what they claimed they’ve figured out actually works, or that there’s anything to it.”
Okay, so you might not be matched up with your soulmate based on scientific compatibility methods. But when you meet someone at the gym or when a friend introduces you to someone, there’s nothing scientific about that either!
So if you’re on the fence about jumping into the online dating scene, just do it! Join the millions of Americans looking for love online…just don’t expect a scientific match up!
