Dating and the facebook

By The Economist

ON A lighter note this sombre morning, David Brooks' recent column on the baleful influence of communications technology on dating elicited a really beautiful response from Ezra Klein, recounting his own IM-enabled dating history, and another excellent response from Tim Carmody. Mr Carmody points out that nostalgia for a "Happy Days" dating era is nostalgia for a televised 1970s nostalgia programme, and that in reality, the late 1950s and early 1960s were marked by immense technological changes (pop music, adolescent car ownership, the Pill) that revolutionised pre-marital sexual relations.

If I had to respond to Mr Brooks's point, I would start by noting that the facebook had a profound influence on my dating life. Not Facebook, but the facebook—the annual book Harvard used to put out showing every undergraduate's picture, name, and (if I recall correctly) residential house and city of origin. (Facebook started out as an online version of the facebook.) Back when I was in college, if we caught sight of an attractive prospect of the opposite sex (perhaps whilst attending a fiery anti-British speech by Sam Adams, or a witch-burning), we would look her up in the facebook, avoiding the potentially embarrassing prospect of having to approach her, say something friendly and amusing, and ask her name. Finding her photo in the facebook necessitated a lot of page-turning and picture-gazing, which in turn led to the discovery of other possibly attractive women and was a pleasant way to while away the time. Having finally discovered her background information, we could then keep an ear open for other information about her and figure out how to approach her. This was pretty much exactly the same as what studies show current males spend most of their time on Facebook doing, and it was every bit as creepy. So I assume the existence of a Male Creepiness Constant until experimental evidence proves otherwise. (I am assured by some female classmates that they engaged in similar facebook perusal of male undergrads, but I generally assume the Female Creepiness Constant to be significantly lower.)

I may be more favourably disposed to technology's impact on dating because I've always been lousy at picking up women in person and much better at writing love letters; the advent of email was a godsend to me, and that was how I courted my wife. Mr Brooks concentrates on IM and SMS's, and how they allow people to more efficiently divvy up their evening plans between multiple possible partners. I can't speak to that, as I, like Mr Brooks I believe, have been happily out of the game for a long time. But I think Mr Brooks's attitude towards how "technology" has turned dating into a supermarket-style free-market economy would change if he concentrated on social-networking sites, rather than on messaging. Looking at social-networking sites, I actually think the current 2008-2009 moment in communications technology is more reserved, socially ambiguous and generally Jane Austen-like than things were in, say, 2001-2005. Back in the early-mid 'oughts, the way to use communications technology in dating was to put up a profile on an internet dating site. Generalised social-networking sites hadn't yet really taken off. And so my friends who did the internet dating thing had to be much more explicit and, basically, crude about what they were looking for. And while this worked very well for a lot of people, it really did turn dating into more of a supermarket experience rather than a strolling-around, window-shopping while enjoying the sunshine with friends experience.

My sense is that Facebook is reducing the salience of that phenomenon: your internet-dating profile is now just your general online profile, and people can friend you without specifically connoting that they want to sleep with you. Mr Brooks laments: "Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments. People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships." The ambiguity of these relationships seems to me more like potential romantic relationships in, say, a Henry James novel, not less. As for the "frictionless" issue, back when most people moved in small social circles and a few stable institutions, maintaining contact with a prospective partner was pretty frictionless. You lived in the same small town, you knew each others' families and places of work. As society became more mobile, complex and anonymous, maintaining such contact became hard; and so the initial step of the dating process became the quest by men to persuade women to give them their phone numbers. Facebook has dramatically reduced that friction by making people less anonymous. In that sense it makes society more like an old-fashioned small town, not less.

(Photo credit: AFP)