Online Dating Analysis

814 Words2 Pages

Love Virtually: the Uniqueness of Online Dating On the Searching Stage
In the movie Passengers, Chris Pratt stumbles across Jennifer Lawrence’s hibernation pod and watches her video profile. He falls for her and eventually decides to awaken her. The progress is a perfect parallel of online dating in terms of searching a future relationship. Online dating refers to the practice of searching for a romantic partner on the Internet, typically via a dedicated website. As the relationship starts online will eventually move offline and be a real-life relation, the uniqueness of online dating lies in the pre-dating stage. Despite having the same goal of finding a match, online dating is different from conventional offline dating, or real-life relations on the searching stage regarding the nature of …show more content…

The social contact in online dating is digital. For instance, as the paper Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the Perspective of Psychological Science has mentioned, the profile of a potential partner is a transformation from a three-dimensional person to two-dimensional information. Another evidence is the lack of physical contact. When people first meet in real life, they usually have physical contact like shaking hands to show their friendliness. Even if they just nod at each other, they can still smell each other. The touch and smell are what online dating cannot offer. Although there are online dating services enabling the users to have video dating, the users are still not able to touch the skin or smell the perfume or the aftershave. The untouchable contact then prompts the sense of unreality which can sometimes make the acquaintance intimate without the distraction of physical world as described by Meghan Daum in Virtual Love. In other words, the nature of communication of online dating is virtual compared with that in real-life relations which is more

Open Document