Editor’s note: Kara Alaimo, associate professor of communications at Fairleigh Dickinson University, writes about issues affecting women and social media. Her book, “Beyond influence: Why social media is harmful to women and girls — and how we can take it back. ” Published by Alcove Press on March 5, 2024. Instagram, Facebook and X. The opinions expressed in this comment are her own.read more opinions On CNN.
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A record number of Americans will be single this Valentine’s Day. Marriage rates in 2020 and 2021 were the lowest since the government began keeping statistics in 1867, a trend that was evident even before the pandemic. An unprecedented 25% of 40-year-olds are unmarried, according to a Pew Research Center study. Single people are much less likely to be living with a significant other than they were in 1990.
I argue for this paradoxical reason in my recent book, Dating Apps.
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that online dating has made it easier to meet people. While that may be true, very few of these matches lead to marriage or even meaningful relationships. In 2019, only 12% of Americans had formed a serious relationship with someone they met online.
In “Beyond Influence: Why Social Media Is Harmful to Women and Girls, and How to Take It Back,” I show that this is the case because dating apps aren’t working as advertised. I claim that there is. Its design encourages people to stay single and even encourages people to date less than they would if they didn’t think there were so many other options on dating apps. But there are ways you can use them more strategically.
First, many dating sites claim to ask users a number of questions and use their answers to match them with the right person. For example, OKCupid says it matches people based on their answers about their opinions on “everything from pineapple on pizza to voting rights.” This goes against decades of academic research. Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict whether people will be compatible based on their personalities.
Second, many other studies have found that when people are overwhelmed with options, their response is to choose none. Dating sites give people the impression that they have a lot of choice because there always seems to be someone to swipe through.
When people think they can easily find another romantic partner, they view that partner less positively, are less committed to it, and are more likely to break up. This may help explain why the women I interviewed for my book continued to complain that they were treated poorly by the men they matched with. These days, acts like ghosting and “situationships” have become a common part of the dating world. In “Nothing Personal: My Secret Life on the Dating App Inferno,” Nancy Jo Sales argues that the “destabilizing trends” women have faced in recent years are “ “An outrageous sense of entitlement and disrespect from the men she dated and had relationships with,” she wrote. she was having sex. ”
Another reason, of course, is that when people meet online, they may have less reason to care about their reputation. They may not have mutual friends or co-workers, they may think they’ll run into each other again if they keep dating, and they may even know each other’s last names. Otherwise, all this would serve as an incentive to do bad things.
Of course, people of both genders sometimes treat each other badly after matching online, but when strangers treat women cruelly or erratically, fears of sexual violence are often heightened even more. . The risk of sexual violence is not limited to encounters that take place online, but thanks to dating apps and other apps, strangers, including sex offenders, can connect and arrange to meet in person more than ever before. Now it’s easier. And, as I write about in my book, I worry that all the abuse women experience on social apps is normalizing the abuse of women offline.
And contrary to conventional wisdom, research shows that women are less interested in dating than men. According to the Pew Research Center, only 38% of single women are considering dating or a relationship, compared to 61% of single men. Many of the women I interviewed for my book said they were so fed up with the unfair treatment that they deleted the app altogether. In particular, many men attract women with endless conversations on these apps, but don’t seem to want to meet in person, or even if they do meet in person, pursue a date. They said they often seemed uninterested in things. relationship.
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What should a person looking for love do? Realize that dating apps won’t do the work for you. Invest your time in carefully reviewing and choosing the profiles of people you think are a good fit. If you want to build a committed relationship, make that clear in your profile and only pursue conversations and dates with people you think have the same goals. If you think it’s not serious, don’t take it personally, delete it and move on.
One woman I interviewed for my book said that after she started dating only men she had carefully selected online, she said, “While we weren’t necessarily compatible, we still had a good relationship when we dated.” It gave me hope that there is.” The men out there. ” Last year, she married one of them.
Dating apps aren’t as smart as their creators claim. Algorithms simply cannot set soulmates. And even if they could, app makers would have no incentive to match too many soulmates (they would lose users). But they manipulate the impression that finding a partner is easy, making people less likely to fall into a romantic relationship. This means that users looking for a romantic partner will have to make other efforts first. This means you have to carefully filter through a large number of profiles.