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.