Online Dating: What's Your Choice On Today's Menu?
Swipe right for yes, swipe left for no. Hundreds of options, on your fingertips. How does this affect modern dating, especially during the pandemic?
Key takeaways:
As many as one in three people are currently dating online.
The majority of online dating service users claimed that it is somewhat easier to find people who they deemed attractive and shared common hobbies and interests.
Tinder says its users had 11% more swipes and 42% more matches in 2020, it’s busiest year ever.
70% of respondents on dating sites are open to video dates — and enjoying them, a stark comparison to a mere 6% in pre-pandemic levels.
People who reject more partner options during online dating are more likely to be less satisfied with the smaller options they accepted.
If You Were Given A Choice, Would You Still Choose Chef’s Salad?
In one of the most iconic films in modern film history, Chungking Express (if you haven’t watched it, you should give it a try), actor Tony Leung’s character, Cop 633 buys chef’s salad for his girlfriend every night after work at the express deli. One day, after the express deli owner offered him to fish and chips on the menu on top of the usual chef’s salad, he was surprised to find out that the chef’s salad he bought for his girlfriend every night wasn’t the thing she liked after all, and she actually preferred fish and chips all along. Since then, he never bought chef’s salad and was upsold with additional items on the menu by the very, very smart boss. In the boss’s own words: you never gave her a choice. If she were had the choice, she would’ve chosen otherwise.
This leads us to the million-dollar question of today’s topic: If you were offered someone better than your current partner, say richer, better looking, smarter, with a better job, would you still choose to be with your current partner? How sure are you that the person you chose would be the right person?
To dwell on the question, let us look into the main player in the influx of partner choices in today’s world: online dating.
Someone Around You Might Be Dating Online
Look around you, your classmates, your coworkers, or your boss that bitch about your work performance every 2 hours. Do you know that for every one of your classmates, coworkers, and annoying boss, there is a chance that one of them is an online dating app/site user? Who knows, you might have swiped right on your annoying boss last week!
According to a study by Pew Research, an online dating site/app user is most likely to be:
Male
Aged 18-29
Black
LGB
College-educated
Many people who date online are LGB persons, as it would be easier to connect with people with common sexual preferences online than they do physically. Young adults are also more likely to date online which might due to the fact that they are typically less settled down than people from older age groups who might have already been married/attached with a partner.
Interestingly, most users that date online are educated individuals, with 70% of them received at least some college education or more. This is a stark contrast with the population that received education from highs cool or lower at 22%.
The point here is, dating online is getting more common, and online dating app/site users are getting less scrutinized like they used to be. In fact, they could be anyone around you. In a near future, it would be very likely that dating online will evolve to be more common and popular than dating in conventional ways.
The Benefits of A Menu
Dating online has its biggest advantage: organized data and profiles. When the food items are organized on the menu, with their most attractive pictures show, it’s easier for people to eliminate what they don’t like, and what they prefer more. This saves time, and time is exactly what modern people are short of most of the time.
Let’s put it this way, imagine dating in a conventional way, a person would need to spend time and effort to gather more about a person’s educational background, income, or even their favorite music genre by getting to know each other physically, possibly over days or months. In the process, if one of the desirable traits is not present, or there simply wasn’t any chemistry, it simply would end up with nothing. From there, time is wasted and there would be zero returns in investment for the time and effort spent.
This is where online dating apps/websites are here to solve that pain point. Online dating services do their magic by asking users a few important personal details, such as their jobs, education, height, and their music preference prior to matching, which is then used to create dating profiles. These dating profiles are then matched with other similar dating profiles based on their location, education, or even music preferences. To make it simple, people are effectively grouped into profiles and they have the choice to filter out what they want and don’t, which saves up the time for physically extracting the relevant information. This makes them easier, and more time effective to find out a larger pool of ideal partner options than conventional dating would do.
To show how effective the system is, we could see from the same research by Pew Research Center, in which 71% of users agree that it is at least somewhat easy to find people that they find attractive, followed by 64% of users who find it easy to find people they would like to meet in person, with the same hobbies and interest.
From here, it’s clear that people are getting desirable results from using online dating services. It was simply easier to filter out people outside of their expectations and to be matched with people with the desirable traits and personalities. The menu does help, and it’s proven to be effective and desirable by people.
The Covid Boost for Dating Apps
Let’s face it, the Covid-19 pandemic is still the epicenter of a global healthcare crisis as of the date this article is written, and governments around the world are seemingly prolonging their lockdown measures with no end of sight. People are forced to stay at home, and the chance of meeting someone new in person is literally impossible.
More Swipes and Matches
This easily provides convenience for dating apps or sites to fill in the gap as people are still able to socialize and meet new people while being locked in their homes. In fact, Tinder reported that its users are experiencing 11% more swipes and 42% more matches just during 2020, making it the busiest year ever for the dating app. This push is largely due to people turning to dating apps like Tinder in exchange for in-person meet-ups, where users are more willing to swipe right to discover people they are interested in, compared to before the pandemic.
Longer Time Spent
People who turn to online dating services are also seemingly increasing their usage rate, with Singapore-based online dating service Paktor reporting a 10 fold increase in time spent on its platform, scoring a 70% higher overall usage rate compared to pre-pandemic levels. It seems that people who use online dating services are willingly investing more of their time to find a partner or meeting new people.
Higher Quality Connections
As the usage rate increases, the quality of connections between people from online dating services is seemingly positive as well. Tinder reported that conversations on its platform were 32% longer than they had been pre-pandemic while the matching rate has also shot up by 42% more. It is clear that people are investing more time in meaningful relationships with other users on dating sites as longer conversations are a sign of the higher quality exchange of information between each other.
To sum up this section, the key takeaway here is clear: people are embracing online dating sites as a means of discovering new people and build relationships, while also willingly investing more of their time in better quality connections with each other during the pandemic.
The New Normal in Online Dating
As far as we know, the pandemic has changed remote work forever, drive up health awareness, or even showed us the power of crypto investments. Online Dating follows suit with its new normal - Video Dates. The question is, in what extant did video dates grow as a trend?
It’s Unstoppable
According to dating site Match’s tenth annual “Singles in America” study released in October 2020, 70% of respondents on dating sites are keen to try out video dates or even enjoy them, compared to a mere 6% in pre-pandemic levels. The 3rd most popular dating app in the world, Bumble also reported a 70% increase in usage of its voice calls and video date feature since the beginning of the pandemic. The seemingly unstoppable trend of video dating further pushed Tinder’s decision to introduce its video date feature last October, years behind its competitors which had already introduced one form or another of the feature prior to 2020.
The Human Instinct
While online dating sites are betting all out on video dating features, the pandemic might not be the only reason people are welcoming the feature. According to the same study by Match, 56% of its respondents reported they felt a spark of chemistry on a video date, with an additional 50% of them reported that they fell in love over video!
As a matter of fact, this might be our biological instinct in work. When video dates are at work, people are able to see and hear what their dates actually look like (take that catfishes!), while also experiencing a wide range of facial expressions, body language, and changes in tone. These are the things that texting your matches couldn’t provide, and thus people might feel more connected with people when they date via video or voice calls.
To this point, you would have got the point already, online dating is actually the MAINSTREAM by now, with the help of technology that introduces video dates that mimic our real-life, in-person dating. This begs the next question, is online dating really that good? Could you find the right choice on the menu, given that you had access to all the best food available?
Everything Looks Tasty, But Which Item Should I Order On The Menu?
Picture this, you are in a McDonald’s drive-through. You are only given 3 minutes to think of what to eat, where there’s an unlimited choice of food on the drive-through menu with hundreds of attractive pictures on it. You are happy, there are lots of choices, however, you instantly descend into anxiety. You can’t seem to tell which one is the best to be ordered, everything is just, tasty. The next thing you do, you ordered a fish-o-fillet that catches your eyes the most on the billboard menu, as the 3 minutes mark is nearing an end. Now, you proceed to grab your order, and you started to think, the Big Mac was probably tastier, and you regretted ordering the fish-o-fillet.
The Paradox of Choice
The drive-through scenario is actually a well-documented situation by psychologist Barry Schwartz. It’s a perfect illustration of the online dating scene: too many choices lead to dissatisfaction with our final choice.
From his proposed paradox of choice, he listed 4 main attributes when an abundance of choice arises, which I will explain in the context of online dating services.
The escalation of expectations
When a person starts adopting online dating services, they would first experience an escalation of expectations as there are simply way more partner options on the platforms than they do in real life. The availability of choices seemingly raises their expectations on the ideal partner when there are better-looking, more attractive, and always increasing partner options online.
The opportunity cost of what we could have had and what was good about other options.
Next, the user would start to evaluate the opportunity cost of what they could have experienced when dating one partner to another. They simply would think ‘wow! look at all these hot girls, Emily is fun to talk to, but she doesn’t like rock music; Lydia likes rock music, but she wasn’t that pretty compared to Emily. Should I continue searching for more options?’
This is when the paradox of choice kicks in. Users of online dating services would have difficulty evaluating the trade-off between each partner, and which partner would lead to a better overall dating experience. Users simply rejected more partner options when they date online than they do outside the online dating scene, thinking that they would get better options ahead.
In fact, according to this study by Tilburg University, women (but not men) became more likely to reject partner options when they date online. This is likely due to the fact that the opportunity cost of each new date for women would be higher compared to a man: they simply want to make sure that they don’t pick the wrong guy.
Regret and anticipated regret of the choice we made
‘I should have dated John, Chris is rich, but he wasn’t that interesting.’ This happened to a lot of users when they actually started to date. They regret. When they made a move, they are still lingering on the thoughts that they should have chosen the other person to date. The other choices seemed to be choices with lesser anticipated regret compared to the current partner option.
Self-blame when we think we are responsible for not doing as well as we could have
When people regret, self-blame follows. They blame themselves for their bad choices. They figure they could have chosen the other person earlier when they had the chance. When things go wrong, or out of their expectations, they have simply no one to blame but themselves.
In fact, that’s often not the real situation. Their current partner might actually turn out to be a fantastic choice, but they would still think they could have gotten more out of dating sites.
Ha! Who Asked You To Be Picky
The paradox of choice demonstrates to us the cold hard fact that dating sites might not necessarily lead us to bad choices, but it is the dissatisfaction of our choices due to an abundance of options that tricked our minds into negative feelings. Hence, if you’re more willing to accept the limited partner options you are currently shown to or lower down your expectations, you might actually feel better about your choice and have a better overall dating experience in the end.
This could be seen from the same study by Tilburg University: people who were more rejecting were more likely to be less satisfied with the smaller number of partner options they did accept compared to people who were overall more accepting in the end.
Conclusion: Fewer Choices, More Satisfaction
Online dating services are definitely doing more good than harm and are very very likely to stay. With the rise in popularity and the seemingly rising user penetration rate, it already is the norm for people to seek out their romantic partners and significant others.
As mentioned earlier, a menu of choices is good, till it’s getting harder to decide what’s best for you. We should always remember that the best way to know people, is to know people. Go out there and talk to people and meet more new friends. Online dating services might help you in connecting with more people, but it all boils down to your willingness in accepting fewer choices and lower down your high expectations (or knowing what you actually want) in order to achieve the best possible overall dating experience.
The next time you feel trapped by online dating services, do remember: A limited a-la-carte menu is always better than an unlimited choice of fast food.
Enough of all the gibberish. My choice on today’s menu is an Apple Pie with the Nasi Lemak McD. Thank you for reading. Like the Ted Talk? Be sure to subscribe now to get more similar toxic content.