Online Dating Chapter Summaries

One of the major arguments of the book is that the dating world has changed with the evolution of technology. Technology has created more possibilities for connections and finding partners than ever. These partners can now be found further and further from an individual’s home town. Unlike before where it was common practice to marry someone close to home. Ansari discovered this fact doing some follow up research after interviewing the elderly in a retirement home in New York City: “One-third of the couples who got married had lived within a five-block radius of each other before they got married,” (p 15). When looking at the data from the 30’s, the majority of people live within at least a 20-block radius of the person they married (p 16).

Communicating with a screen, instead of in person, inhibits creating and finding a connection with a potential partner. Like Ansari says on page 57, “Unlike phone calls, which bind two people in real-time conversations that require at least some shared interpretation of the situation, communication by text has no predetermined temporal sequencing and lots of room for ambiguity.” This is something I also struggle with from day-to-day when talking to my friends. I am someone who relies a lot on body language and context. Context is always key to relating and understanding someone. It’s difficult to get yourself across in a likeable way if sarcasm only ever comes across as rudeness via text. I, myself, have tried to find potential romantic partners via online apps like OkCupid and Tindr. Often, you do not make real connection with the person you are “talking” to and the ones you do make connections with are often awkward fleeting things. It’s not that rare to start talking to someone for a few weeks and then never talk to them again. But I think Ansari says it best on page 45, “As a medium, it’s safe to say, texting facilitates flakiness and rudeness and many other personality traits that would not be expressed in a phone call or an in-person interaction.” People feel a whole lot less committed to you when they can’t feel or see the emotions that you express. The same principle can be applied to ourselves. How many times have we “ghosted” or “left people on read.” We feel outside the social convention because we aren’t seeing people in real