A Million First Dates

“First, the best marriages are probably unaffected. Happy couples won’t be hanging out on dating sites. Second, people who are in marriages that are either bad or average might be at increased risk of divorce, because of increased access to new partners. Third, it’s unknown whether that’s good or bad for society

It only changes the process of discovery

Indeed, the profit models of many online-dating sites are at cross-purposes with clients who are trying to develop long-term commitments.

nd confident in our ability to find someone else, usually someone better, monogamy and the old thinking about commitment will be challenged very harshly.”

It was sleeker, faster, more efficient. And the population of online daters in Portland seemed to have tripled. He’d never imagined that so many single people were out there.

“It was fairly incredible,” Jacob remembers. “I’m an average-looking guy. All of a sudden I was going out with one or two very pretty, ambitious women a week. At first I just thought it was some kind of weird lucky streak.

9 Tales from the Tinderverse

Unlike the robot yentas of yore (Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony), which out-competed one another with claims of compatibility algorithms and secret love formulas, the only promise Tinder makes is to show you the other users in your immediate vicinity.

The circularity here is intriguing: an absence of real-world community fuels a schematic, inorganic online ritual that spawns a network of online friendships that ultimately pushes back out into the real world.

was her first online date; they met for lunch and never really parted.

I check Greg's Friendster page compulsively

Those disillusioned with online dating will tell you that its promise of a no-muss relationship attracts people with intimacy and commitment problems

, a 45-year-old woman who says her husband is unable to perform sexually, has been using the personals for the past two years to find ''playmates'' to consort with during her husband's frequent business trips

think she'll be just a bit heavier than she looks in her pictures, since she did not list her weight anywhere. I think we will get along very quickly. It would be out of line to assume that we're going to have sex, but I think it's a definite possibility

r was the problem that, as a way of making conversation, she had mentioned a conflict she was having with a neighbor -- did the lawyer think she was grubbing for free legal advice? Or could it have been her personality? ''On a first date I laugh, I smile, but I don't crack jokes,'' she reflected. ''So I was thinking, Maybe he wanted someone who was fun immediately.'

For younger people, who grew up with instant-messaging programs, e-mail will often lead to an instant-message exchange (or several), followed by a meeting; those over 30 tend to prefer the phone.

al. Replies to messages came fast, and dates were set up more quickly

But for all the fibbing and fudging that go on, outright lying about who you are is generally regarded as uncool and self-defeating

Still, a fair number of people continue to feel a stigma about dating online, ranging from the waning belief that it's a dangerous refuge for the desperate and unsavory to the milder but still unappealing notion that it's a public bazaar for the sort of people who thrive on selling themselves. The shopping metaphor is apt; online dating involves browsing and choosing among a seemingly infinite array of possible mates. But those who see a transactional approach to coupling as something new and unseemly would do well to pick up a novel by Jane Austen, where characters are introduced alongside their incomes. There is nothing new about the idea of marriage as a business transaction. Serendipitous love is what's new, love borne of chance, love like what engulfed my grandparents after my grandfather, then a resident physician at a Chicago hospital emergency room, happened to remove my grandmother's appendix. Serendipitous love as a romantic ideal is a paean to cities and their dislocations, the unlikely collisions that result from thousands of strangers with discrete histories overlapping briefly in time and space. And online dating is not the opposite of this approach to love, but its radical extension; if cities erase people's histories and cram them together in space, online dating sites erase both cities and space, gathering people instead under the virtual rubric of a brand.

Americans spent $214.3 million on personals and dating sites -- almost triple what they spent in all of 2001.