Online Dating: Cupid or Creepy?

Is online dating the way forward? Columnist Steff Young thinks not.


Online dating has been rocketed into our consciousness in the last decade, and with one in four relationships now starting online, it’s not hard to see why. The other day, I asked my boss how she met her partner and she replied ‘online’. Then she laughed and said ‘did you actually believe me?’.

This got me thinking, is meeting your partner online still a taboo? Despite the plethora of sites and advertising attempting to persuade you that it is a normal, everyday occurrence (which it is, second only to meeting through friends, meeting online is the second most common way couples meet these days), one’s reaction to a couple who claim to have met online is notably different to those who have met through more ‘natural’ means.

I believe this is why: by explaining that you met online, you admit to actively looking for a relationship, which portrays a kind of assumed desperation on both parts. It destroys the romantic ideal of chance; two souls being unexpectedly thrown together at a perfect moment in time is reduced to a clinical equation of you want a relationship, I want a relationship, we both prefer dogs over cats, we must fall in love.

Which brings me to my next issue with online dating: the profiles. When you join a dating site, you’re asked to fill out basic information about yourself and what you’re looking for in a partner. There include generic things like ‘interests’, ‘hobbies’, and the slightly more ambiguous category of ‘values’ which include things like trust, loyalty, sincerity, respect and lots of other words that you get by looking up the word ‘honesty’ in a thesaurus. Let’s face it, is anyone going to put ‘money’ and ‘good in bed’ in the values section?

My main issue with these profiles though is that they require you to evaluate your own complex personality through a series of all-purpose multiple choice questions, then release it unto the world so people can decide if enjoying sky-diving and romantic meals makes you worthy to spend an evening with. There is a reason why the word ‘relate’ comprises the word relationship: being relationships are built on relation, not assessment and tick-boxes. Personality is fluid and can change not only with every person you meet, but throughout a single conversation.

Social media persuades us that who we are is manageable enough to be communicated via pictures, statuses and a list of our hopes and dreams. Charlie Brooker got it spot on in the first episode of ‘Black Mirror’: we found it disturbing because social media and technology recreated a dead person. What we’re actually scared of is the parts that social media can’t recreate, the parts that we actually will lose when we die, or that we lose and change over and over again throughout the course of our lives as we develop because we are people and that is what people do.

Online dating websites are static: they take away the excitement and animation of what it means to be human and to interact with other humans. I’m not going to date somebody because we have a shared interest in poetry and country walks, I’m going to date them because of the way they make me feel, and the only way I feel when someone I’ve never met asks me out on a date online, is creeped out.