Possible Long-Term Effects of Internet Matching
Before the world wide web, the matching of couples by their own choice was determined by:
1. Limited choice of available possible partners.
Meeting people at school or work, at friend's or during leisure activities in the home area restricts the number of people to choose from. Social factors add to this by further restricting the scope of who is socially acceptable.
2. Starting situation of any new contact is perception of physical attributes as looks and smell, before knowing anything about the personality. This constellation enables the procreative instincts to influence the choice for the optimization of having healthy offspring while not providing or overriding any concern for long term happiness.
The consequences are devastating for many of such couples, who after some years become unhappy with each other.
Depending on the circumstances, they are either forced or coerced to stay together and suffer, maybe there is also cheating and violence. Or else it leads to divorce with all the suffering caused, also on the children.
The matching with the instrument of web sites has completely turned the two effects into their opposites:
1. The choice is limited only be the number of people with a common language, who are connected to the web. This not only gives average people a better chance to find a compatible match, it also gives people with any statistically rare wishes, habits, traits, needs a chance to find a suitable match. This could spare a lot of people to become the victims of such people, who due to lack of a consenting other impose or force their peculiarities on non-consenting partners. People with any eccentric hobby can find each other, as can childfree atheists.
2. By the process of communication on the web, reading profiles of others on dating-sites, reading dating advice, chatting, blogs, forums, people have a chance to learn more about themselves and gain more awareness about their own needs, and what is intolerable in a match. All this can help to prevent mistakes and avoid the hazards of premature personal encounters, with the risk of instincts taking momentarily control over reason, luring people into involvement with painful long-term consequences. It also helps people to find out, what they really want and need, before getting involved, without the painful process of learning this as the consequence of several failed relationships.
3. New contacts start mainly verbally, exploring the other mentally long before being subject to physical attractions during a personal encounter, where instincts jeopardizes to override all rational choice. Therefore there is a good chance that the sequence of
- choosing by a profile before initiating contact,
- emailing, messaging and chatting too and fro for quite a while,
- telephone calls,
people have well established a lot of similarity and compatibility before deciding to ever meeting in person.
Therefore there is a very good chance that those couples, who get together at the end of such a careful process, are much better matched for a long-term happiness than those, who follow their instincts.
As a consequence, some impact on society is there to be expected, but very different for two groups, and here are my speculative predictions:
1. For those actually stuck with wrong partners from matching in the pre-web way, during the years to come, the web will accelerate breaking up by facilitating all kind of disrupting behaviour. Thus, for some years, the divorce rate might well rise even higher than it is now, and there will be a lot of suffering due to the splitting of dysfunctional couples and until finding better matches on the web.
2. For those young people, who have grown up with online communication, choosing and matching online will become the standard method. Less of them will start coupled life involved with an incompatible person, so that there is a good chance for more long- lasting relationships and more long-term happiness.
The long-term effect could therefore be a considerable drop of the divorce rate, as soon as most of the pre-web mismatches are better rematched and most matching takes place on the web.
