Chapter 1 Mixed Emojis Our Love/Hate Relationship with Online Dating Sinead: My app says we are a 94% match! Rosalyn: Mine too. Maybe our profiles should go out on a date while we just keep texting here The pictures are cute. The bio clever. The face that beams up at you from the open app on your phone seems to want all the same things you do. Someone somewhere, or maybe it was an algorithm, determined that you're 94 percent compatible--whatever that means. Your finger is poised to swipe right, with all the anticipation that they'll swipe right as well; I mean, 94 percent compatible, surely they noticed that too. You'll match, meet, and the rest will be history. If only it were so easy. Endless strings of texts, fleeting trysts, an online crush on the person you imagine will be the future love of your life--they all form the mainstays of the online dating experience. There is excitement, anticipation, and enthusiasm. There is also ennui, alienation, and just plain exhaustion. If there is one thing that can be said about online dating, it's that it's rife with contradictions. Even though it's my job to understand human behavior, I too have felt buffeted by the ups and downs of online dating. We can't help but embark on the journey with inflated expectations. We're promised a whirlwind of choices, a crowd of suitors, a wondrous wizard of technology pulling the strings behind the curtain. But knowing that the process can be a drag, we simultaneously brace ourselves for disappointment. It's a story of mismatched expectations, a journey rife with paradoxes. I once had a text exchange start like this: Me: Hi Mark Mark: Hello Mimi. Nice to connect with you Me: Likewise. Always fun to meet interesting people. Mark: I'll certainly try not to disappoint you. I led with "fun" and "interesting"; Mark countered with "disappoint." Right out of the gate, he called out this tendency that many of us share, to brace for disappointment in the face of hope. He did so in a facetious way, flirtatiously acknowledging that the hand was his to lose--explicitly calling a low-stakes game as he diminished my expectations. Still, Mark was pointing to a truth about romance: the most perilous aspect is certainly its uncertainty. We say that we "fall" in love because the process feels inherently out of control. One patient, after a nasty breakup, described to me her secret desire to "win at dating apps." While this is a nice fantasy, the reality is more akin to walking into a casino, where we might entertain ideas of life-changing jackpots, but it's the house that always wins. Online dating involves chance; players face unavoidable risk when they follow the usual advice to "put yourself out there." Bracing for disappointment may just be the price of admission for using the app. Because online dating involves technology, and technology has reduced friction in so much of our lives, from ordering a pizza to calling a cab, we expect, consciously or not, that dating apps should somehow spare us all this uncertainty. Once our expectations are permitted to soar, no outcome is likely to please. When I listen to people talk about their experiences with dating apps, I hear a litany of complaints: about conversations going nowhere, not getting second dates, ghosting, the notorious "bad algorithm." I also find a relentless pursuit of perfection, coupled with a lot of churn. "Men are like buses," said one of my patients. "There's another one every few minutes." Matches sound oddly disposable, rather than representations of actual human beings; chats are treated as transactional and fungible. People form an index of false assumptions, cognitive distortions, and puzzling conclusions. We are prisoners of the paradox. In this chapter, we'll dig into the contradictions that surround online dating, how they affect us, and the neuroscience behind them. We'll also discover how the app that sits in the palm of our hand can be used as our tool, and not the reverse. Along the way we'll look at real-life examples, showing how we can put our words to work for us. It is only once we've grappled with our mixed feelings about the medium that we can get to the messages. The Paradox of Familiarity What are we most attracted to, the familiar or the novel? Duncan: Hi there--loved your profile. It was very authentic! Duncan: Has London always been your home? Duncan: I really want to hear back from you! Sarah: Hey . . . Sarah: No, London has not always been my home, I'm originally from California Duncan: Ah, I lived in California for ten years. Loved it. Duncan: What are you up to tonight? Sarah: I'm going out. Having a few drinks with friends Duncan: well, I'd love to buy you a cocktail . . . Duncan: is it a girls night? Sarah: it is a girls night . . . Duncan: I'll be grabbing a lovely dinner at the Hawksmoor Sarah: Oh no, not a lovely dinner at Hawksmoor. At least the steak is good company Duncan: I'll be in Soho in the AM, if you are close we could grab a coffee Sarah: Ah, thank you, very kind but I have plans tomorrow. Duncan: I guess I'll just have a cosy Sunday at home then. Sarah: A cosy Sunday at home . . . how Sundays are meant to be spent. I'm a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and paper kinda girl. I look forward to it all week. Haha Sarah: Was just putting the kettle on Duncan: Are you making tea? Sarah: Um yes, I'm a 90 year old woman in a 32 year old body. Such a homebody. Love cooking, Love reading. Love listening to records. Love a hot drink. Duncan: So cute. I love electric blankets! It's the best when you wake up . . . and it's cold . . . then you turn on the blanket. Bliss! Sarah: This is killing me. I used to actually put an electric blanket under my mattress topper. So you could turn it on before getting into bed, and then get into a warm bed. That was bliss. Duncan: Same same! See, we both like to be cosy. Of course, cuddling is the #1 best warm feeling. Sarah: But. When life does not permit . . . an electric blanket and a cup of tea will do. Duncan: . . . lol, you're cute. So British Duncan and Sarah are off to a tepid start. Actually, they have quite a few degrees to go before reaching tepid. But with all the chat about electric blankets and hot tea, Sarah is slowly warming up. One does have the sense that had Sarah said she was a vegetarian, Duncan would have immediately let go of his steak house dinner plans and gushed instead about his love of zucchini. Nonetheless, she is reassured by their shared delights in the small things. Her texts suggest someone who values comfort over excitement. Everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum. On one end is what's known as novelty seeking; on the other is harm avoidance. The psychiatrist Robert Cloninger has elaborated on the subject. Those high in novelty seeking, he argues, will be consistently more attracted to the unfamiliar and less risk averse. At the extreme, their bucket lists might include skydiving, mountaineering, or even extreme sexual practices. More moderate novelty seekers will be satisfied with trying a new recipe or visiting a new store at the mall. Those high in harm avoidance, meanwhile, will seek security and familiarity, rarely roaming out of their comfort zone. In the next chapter we will explore how to identify where the person you are texting with falls within these categories, using only their text messages as clues. For now, let's consider a more adventurous pair. Brittany and Kevin, both in their twenties, get right into fantasy and risk taking in their initial text exchange. They both clearly prefer the excitement of the unknown to the quotidian and familiar. Brittany: Why do I feel like your fantasy is chloroforming unsuspecting women, only for them to find themselves handcuffed in your sex dungeon Brittany: If that's the case, the safe word is pamplemousse Kevin: You missed the important part where I was unknowingly given a ketamine injection and walk in, lose consciousness, and wake up tied to a 4 corner bed Kevin: Plot twist! Kevin: I hope that pamplemousse is still the safe word Familiarity comes in different flavors. So we vary in the way we're drawn to novelty. But how much do we even want to know about a stranger as we decide whether to embark upon the next step? Are we more likely to swipe right the more we know about a person? In other words, does information help or hurt our first impressions? One body of research indicates that the more we know about a person up front, the less likely we are to like them. Another says that familiarity leads to liking and attraction. How do we reconcile these contradictions? Michael Norton, a member of the Behavioral Insights Group at Harvard Business School, has spent his career finding answers to questions about our behavior as it concerns love, money, and happiness. He sought to understand whether knowing more about a person (or their dating profile) would lead to greater feelings of attraction. He and his colleagues Jeana Frost and Dan Ariely had noted that users' satisfaction and engagement with online dating as a whole plummeted quickly after an initial spike. They wanted to understand why. So they did what all curious researchers do: they designed a study. Norton and his colleagues showed hundreds of online daters a series of potential matches along with anywhere from one to ten personality traits that were randomly chosen from a list of two hundred typical profile traits--such as age, income, athleticism, or religion. The study participants then rated the profiles. Interestingly, the more traits the participants were shown, the lower they rated the profiles. In other words, the more they were told about a potential date, the less appealing that date became. Norton tells me his team wasn't particularly surprised by the results but that dating app users usually are. "We think that if we know more about someone, we will like them more," he says, "because all the people that we love in our life are people that we know a lot about. "But," Norton adds, "that's because there are a whole lot of people we never gave the chance to. We hand select the ones we like, and choose to get to know them better." Their study concluded that ambiguous or vague information about a person leads to interest, whereas, as the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. On average, the authors showed, the more you learn about any new random prospective partner, the less excited about them you will be. "There is nothing worse," said my friend Margaret, who has been on enough first dates to have co-authored this book with me, "than when a guy can't maintain some sense of mystery at the outset." I couldn't agree more. Consider my initial text exchange with Doug, where my interest quickly evaporated: Me: Where in WI are you from? Doug: Stevens point (in the middle) Me: How can a point be in the middle? Doug: Good question. It's the point where the Wisconsin river bends. Me: Ah, I lived in Minnesota during medical school. Followed my college boyfriend there. Doug: Nice--how's the online dating world treating you? Been single for awhile or recently may I ask Me: Well I was married for a long time. And now enjoying not being married. Why do you ask? Doug: Just inquisitive I guess. I find this process so much work. Doug's final text bubble is the romantic equivalent of moaning at a job interview about the fact that you had to shave that morning in order to look presentable. Even if it's true, that is not what's going to land you the job. Sprezzatura is an Italian word that means studied carelessness, or graceful nonchalance. Essentially, it means making it look easy. While it would not have occurred to me to put sprezzatura on a list of qualities I was looking for, if I'm honest with myself, I can say that without a bit of sprezzatura at the outset, there is no seduction. Learning about Doug was starting to feel like a chore. Why would knowing more about someone repel us from them? Norton and his colleagues found that people tend to latch on to something in a profile that they disagree with or find unappealing, and their interest plummets from there as expectations begin to sag under the weight of the accumulated information. With only vague information, we can still project imaginary qualities onto a person and maintain high expectations. Too much information only bursts our bubble of hope. They went a step further. In their next experiment, the researchers surveyed two groups of online daters. One group responded to questions about a future planned date, and a second group responded to questions about a date that had already taken place. Expectations far exceeded outcomes; pre-date scores were wildly higher than post-date scores. Imagining a future date was more satisfying than the date itself! Norton described another discouraging finding: "People who had been on more dates with online matches felt worse about their most recent date." So having more points of comparison--more experiences to think back on--made people more critical. The more options they'd had, the pickier they got. Paradoxically, Norton noted, these same people continued to be just as optimistic about their next date as they'd been at the start. They were souring on past dates, but they weren't learning to adjust their expectations for the future. So does familiarity in fact breed contempt? In real life, or IRL, probably not. Once people have passed our initial screening, Norton suggests, and we've decided we want to truly interact and get to know them, more interaction will encourage affinity and affection. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, looks at a different side of the relationship coin. He studies the factors that influence the frequency and closeness of our social ties, particularly how they can help predict intimacy, attachment, and emotional regulation. Among Reis and his colleagues' revelations is that having confidence that a person will respond to you, increased comfort during your interactions with them, and greater perceived knowledge about the other person (feeling that you are getting to know them) leads to liking and attraction. These factors may seem intuitive enough. For some of us, though, there is another paradox at play. Many of us find comfort in identifying flaws in the person we are chatting with. Perhaps we prefer to see a few faults at the beginning--an endearing tendency to misspell, a crooked facial feature in a profile picture--rather than thinking someone is perfect and having them let us down later. Bennet touches on this notion of imperfection in our initial conversation: Excerpted from Speaking in Thumbs: A Psychiatrist Decodes Your Relationship Texts So You Don't Have To by Mimi Winsberg All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
