After re-watching 1998’s You’ve Got Mail starring the ever-charming Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, I pondered the consequences this movie has had on the hopes of North American singles everywhere, and how they may have been artificially filled with regard to the potential of finding love over the internet.
Chatrooms are basically extinct in the nucleus of contemporary online dating avenues, but dating websites use the same functions. I did a little research and was surprised to discover that Canadians spend more time on online dating sites than any other country—even more than the U.S. By 2005, over $500 million dollars were poured into the online dating industry, making it the second-largest industry behind pornography for “paid content” on the web. According to a study by JupiterResearch, the online dating market is expected to grow to $932 million by 2011.
What puzzles me about the immense popularity of online dating is the failure rate. 33% of online dating site users form a relationship—33% do not, and 33% give up. On top of that, 10% are scammers, 10% are sex offenders, and still only 10% leave within the first three months.
As I watched You’ve Got Mail, I became nostalgic for the (probably non-existent) days when chatrooms and emails were a spaceless place for exchanging ideas, advice and opinions from the mundane to the philosophical. Meg and Tom’s characters pour their most intimate (yet non-sexual) thoughts anonymously—with no profile, no webcam, no emoticons, nothing but screen names: Shopgirl and NY152. Virtual soul mates. The two are both in long-term relationships when they start emailing each other, and the movie promotes the idea that the things you can’t say to your spouse, you can say freely to an anonymous virtual friend and thus bear your unsatisfying real relationships. And when both characters eventually break up with their partners, it is not because of their cyber-infidelity, but because their discussions had opened up their eyes to the reality that they were not, in fact, in love with whom they were with.
The internet is idealized in that it allows strangers to connect and share with the possibility that time and space need not hinder relationships from forming. We can defy fate and take destiny into our own hands by seeking out our future-spouses online.
This has recently occurred to me as just one more way we are again messing with Mother Nature. Cupid needs to work mysteriously for us; we are not supposed to grab a bow and arrow and shoot each other and feel confident that we can aim the right shot ourselves. And what is even more ludicrous is paying corporations to “match” us up with strangers and thereby removing even the small amount of instinct and personal judgement chatrooms provided. Love can easily be half-constructed in the mind, so couples matched together by a professional site may meet and truly believe that the site worked. Yet with all the compatibility tests, shared interests and hobbies in common—how hard could it be to get along with somebody exactly like you? And when the relationship does not last in the long term, well, it wasn’t the online dating service or match making website’s fault. It simply did not work out with that particular compatible match. So, back to the site they go.
Isn’t it clear by now that anytime you have to pay for something, you have to keep paying for it? These sites make millions of dollars off of the most profound state of being that is now successfully commodified: love.
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