Chapter 6 – Love and Relationships Online

Chapter Summary

Seeking Love Online

  • In recent times, looking for love online has become increasingly common and acceptable.

Meeting Online: Where, who, and why?

  • Now the most likely way for new couples to meet.
  • Use among young adults has grown substantially since the rise of mobile dating applications.

What Motivates People to Find Romance Online?

  • Multiple motivations include love, short-term sexual encounters, self-esteem or an ego boost, and entertainment.
  • Opening up a wider pool of potential partners.
  • Find similar others.

Experiences and Outcomes

  • The number of people trying dating online has increased, as has the number of people who make a date to meet offline.
  • Many daters, particularly women, people of colour, and lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, have experienced harassment or bullying.
  • Stigma has reduced over time.
  • The long-term effects of a relationship having started online are mixed, but similar to offline.

Online dating Profiles

  • The profile photograph is the most important element of a dating profile.
    • Photographs have a halo effect, where liking of a photograph influences the judgement of the profile.
    • Photographs validate claims made in the profile.

CMC and Its Effect on Online Romance

  • A lot is being communicated about a dater through the medium of text in the ‘about me’ section of the profile, and in initial messages.
  • Cues in the text may be interpreted by different online daters in a number of ways.
  • In online dating, the speed at which communication becomes intimate can be a lot faster than offline.
  • The hyperpersonal effect is evident in online dating communication through text.

Self-Presentation and Deception in Online Dating

  • Online daters strive to present themselves both accurately and positively, mediated by their desire to meet face-to-face.
  • Daters are considered in how they present themselves, analysing responses and others’ profiles, and adapting their own.
  • Deception is widespread, 70% of daters believe that others are being deceptive to make themselves more attractive.
  • When a dater perceives their partner to have been deceptive, romantic and social attraction, and intention to meet again are reduced significantly.

What Makes a Dating Profile Attractive?

  • Important qualities include physical attributes, shared similar interests and values, socio-economic status, personality, honesty, and age.
  • Homophily, where people tend to like people who are similar to themselves.
  • One area where daters prefer dissimilar others is attractiveness, where all daters prefer others more attractive than themselves.

Shifting Modalities: Moving Offline

  • Online dating moves quickly, as daters don’t want to waste time getting to know someone online before finding out if there is physical chemistry.
  • They want to ensure that the online persona matches the real person.
  • Extended online interactions result in more negative outcomes because hyperpersonal communication can cause idealised impressions to be created which are not met in the first face-to-face encounter.

Maintaining Relationships Online

  • Some couples find that technology allows them to feel closer to their partner.
  • The online disinhibition effect can make it easier for couples to open up and disclose intimate information.
  • Others feel that it introduces friction and conflict, particularly for younger couples.
  • Ignoring your partner in favour of interacting with others online can result in decreasing relationship satisfaction.

Jealousy, Surveillance, and Infidelity

  • The lack of cues online can lead to problems with misinterpretation of communications, resulting in jealousy.

Surveillance

  • People engage in surveillance of potential, current, and ex partners online, but few reach the point where they cause fear in their targets.
  • Partner surveillance through technology is not universally negative, if it is done without rumination and with positive self-talk.

Cyber-Stalking

  • Online surveillance is not always benign.
  • Cyber obsessional pursuit (COP) involves using technology-based stalking behaviours to harass someone or demand intimacy from them, becoming cyberstalking when the behaviour is repeated and severe and likely to cause fear in a reasonable person.
  • Those who engage in Facebook harassment are more likely to commit COP.

Infidelity and Cyber Cheating

  • Cyber infidelity can have serious emotional and other negative consequences for relationships, even when they have never moved beyond the virtual domain.

Breaking Up

  • 17% of people have broken up with someone by CMC, and 17% had it happen to them.
  • Ghosting, where all communication is cut off without any explanation, can be facilitated by technology and is an avoidance strategy for withdrawal from a relationship.

  • Chapter 6 – Useful Websites

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291083-6101
    The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. An open-access peer-reviewed journal with many articles on relationships and technology. 

    https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/internet-technology/lifestyle-relationships-online/online-dating/
    PEW internet research on finding love online.

  • Chapter 6 – Further Reading

    This paper reviews Joseph Walther’s theory of hyperpersonal communication in computer-mediated communication after 25 years. It looks at how the model applies to contemporary social media and demonstrates its application in deceptive online romance and romance scams.

    Walther, J. B., and Whitty, M. T. (2021). Language, psychology, and new media: The hyperpersonal model of mediated communication at twenty-five years. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 40(1), 120–135.
    https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0261927X20967703

    This chapter examines the factors in online dating that make it a less-than-enjoyable experience. The authors suggest that the primary reason that dating is not enjoyed, is that users feel they are unable to capitalize on the strongest perceived benefit of online dating, the bigger pool of potential partners.

    Zytko, D., Grandhi, S., and Jones, Q. (2018). The (un) enjoyable user experience of online dating systems. In M. Blythe & A. Monk (Eds.), Funology 2 (2nd ed.,61–75). Springer. http://dougzytko.com/research/FUNOLOGY_chapter-zytko_grandhi_joneswithdoi.pdf

    This paper explores the changing landscape of relationship formation, looking at how people meet and how this has changed over time.

    Rosenfeld, M. J., Thomas, R. J., and Hausen, S. (2019). Disintermediating your friends: How online dating in the United States displaces other ways of meeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(36), 17753–17758. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1908630116

    It is common for couples to meet through online dating, and this article explains the complexity of matchmaking algorithms and looks at how our relationship with online dating apps might evolve.

    Sharabi, L. L. (2022). Finding Love on a First Data: Matching Algorithms in Online Dating. Harvard Data Science Review, 4(1).

    https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.1b5c3b7b

  • Chapter 6 – Audio and Video links

    https://www.ted.com/talks/christina_wallace_how_to_stop_swiping_and_find_your_person_on_dating_apps?

    Christina Wallace’s TedTalk on rethinking the approach to online dating, and first dates in particular. Given that we know most first dates are not a success, this suggests a practical approach to increasing the chances of finding a match.

    https://www.ted.com/talks/philipp_hergovich_can_online_dating_lead_to_more_successful_marriages

    Philipp Hergovich asks if online dating can lead to more successful marriages. He researched and discussed marriages that started from online dating and how online marriages differ from their offline counterparts. 

    https://youtu.be/E-ws1Hxi320 A short clip of Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton, an online dating researcher, and Marcus Hunter-Neill a dating coach and podcaster on Ireland AM, an Irish morning television show. This segment is focused on safety while online dating.

  • Chapter 6 – Essay questions

    1. Online dating is both similar and different to offline dating. Drawing from psychological literature, describe the differences, with particular focus on the creation of online dating profiles.
    2. Explore how couples use uncertainty reduction strategies, from meeting a potential partner to terminating a relationship.
    3. Computer-mediated communication is different to face-to-face communication. Analyse the ways in which people utilise these differences in the various stages of their relationships, giving at least three examples with support from psychological literature. 
    4. Explore the motivations for engaging in online dating, both practical and psychological.
    5. Deception is widespread in online dating. Describe the prevelance and in what manner it manifests, and explore the motivations for deception in the online dating environment. 

Chapter 6 – Quiz

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