THAT'S MEN:Choose carefully when online dating if you want to avoid a mismatch, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN.
ODD HOW the internet has made the unfashionable fashionable. Once upon a time, the lonely hearts columns of newspapers and magazines were seen as a last resort for people with no other way to meet a potential partner.
Then along came the internet and suddenly the new version of the lonely hearts columns – online dating websites – became fashionable. As a result, even the print versions of this phenomenon lost the “lonely hearts” image and became quite perky and sometimes naughty.
So today, if you’re a man looking for Ms Right, there is a good chance you have included online dating websites in your armoury and that you don’t particularly care who knows about it.
Research from the US suggests that men and women use online dating more or less equally and that the average age of users is 48 years. In middle age, perhaps following a divorce, many people cannot stomach a return to the joys of nightclubs and bars and turn to the internet.
The US research found internet dating to be more popular among more sociable people. It’s an interesting finding because I would have thought that shy people would regard the internet as a boon when it comes to finding a potential partner, but not so.
Within all this, there was an odd finding reported on the World of Psychology blog. It appears that people with high self-esteem who value relationships are more likely to use online dating that those with low self-esteem.
What’s odd is that people with low self-esteem who use online dating tend to place a lower value on relationships. It may be that those with low self-esteem who value relationships fear rejection and therefore avoid online dating. But if you don’t place a high value on relationships then the rejection doesn’t matter as much.
What that means, in turn, is that some of the people you meet through online dating may value relationships less than you do yourself – and if you’re drawn to picking people with low self-esteem, the chances that this will happen increase.
All of which points to the need for careful choices in the online world – but that, it turns out, is not what happens. Last year a research report in the Journal of Interactive Marketing told readers that online daters spend 12 hours a week on average searching for compatible partners online.
This activity results in less than two hours of offline dating per week. Twelve hours a week looks like a lot of time, yet researchers suggest that people dating online actually make superficial choices which increase the likelihood of a mismatch.
Why? We make superficial decisions in response to information overload. When you do a search on Google and it brings you 22 million results, you probably – if you’re the average surfer – scan no more than the first dozen or so.
Something similar seems to happen with online dating. You have a whole database of people to choose from so the choice you make is less careful than in the offline world. In the offline world, let’s face it, your range of choices at a given time might run to, well, one person.
Does this mean online dating is a no-no? Not at all. If I was in the market I would definitely give the online route a go. In my view, the research simply means that men seeking a partner on the internet need to choose carefully from among people whose interests make them compatible.
And maybe they should confine themselves to choosing from a relatively small number of prospective partners and not be surveying half the women on the planet – remember, the bigger the pool, the poorer the choice you’re likely to make.
- In a recent article I referred to the stories of people bereaved by suicide as told on the healthtalkonline.org website. Bob, one of the bereaved parents I quoted, asks that I mention the website of Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide which is at uk-sobs.org.uk. While this self-help, voluntary organisation is based in the UK, the website has much information which anybody bereaved by suicide would find helpful.
Padraig OMorain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Thats Men, the best of the Thats Men column from The Irish Times,is published by Veritas