CMC and Dating

Recently a friend of mine (I will call him Mike) met someone he had met through Match.com. For those who do not have any online dating experience or knowledge, Match.com advertises itself as helping people to meet others who share similar interests, personality characteristics, and something else with the help of Dr. Phil all for the low, low fee of twenty-five dollars a month. Their advertisements claim, “Last year on Match.com, more than 400,000 people found someone to keep them warm at night. That's four large football stadium's filled with couples who've been walloped by love” (Match.com). With those figures, why should not everyone give this a try? Right?
My friend did. He met someone, a lady named Teresa, who had the highest point match with his his “portrait” based off of twenty-nine different questions. They began emailing back and forth to each other in December. In June they began talking with each other on the phone. Teresa decided that she wanted to visit Alaska and her “relationship” with Mike opened an opportunity to kill two fish with one whack of the gaffing hook. Teresa contacted Mike and they coordinated a twelve-day vacation in which he could show her the wilds of Alaska and they could see if their compatibility extended beyond emails.
Apparently they did not. Afterwards, I spoke with Mike and asked him what occurred. He said that she did present an accurate picture of herself online and through her emails. She did not make any outlandish claims that were insupportable. Regardless of their compatibility to write emails and talk on the telephone, FtF demonstrated their “real-life” incompatibility. The hyperpersonal interaction created by the limited interaction allowed for Mike and Teresa to idealized each other, creating a perfect persona, one that did not allow flaws or contrary human characteristics. Kevin Wright, discusses this tendency in his article “On-Line Relational Maintenance Strategies and Perceptions of Partners within Exclusively Internet-Based and Primarily Internet-Based Relationships” for the Journal of Communication Studies. Wright applies the theory of hyperpersonal interaction to predict “when cues are limited, and people do not have additional disconfirming data, they often develop idealized perceptions of their partner, even in cases when a partner is relatively a stranger. Perhaps the daily interaction with on-line acquaintances for people in the cues-limited EIB relationships developed skewed perceptions of attitude and background similarity based upon frequent, but incomplete information (due to the lack of cues that might disconfirm their perceptions).”
The failing of Mike and Teresa’s potential match, was not the fault of their misrepresenting themselves through emails or through their online identities. Nor was it Match.com’s method of identifying potential matches. The willingness of Mike and Teresa to view a hyperpersonal relationship does demonstrate compatible personality characteristics that could support a Computer maintained relationship. They had attempted to use the strategies outlined by Crispin Thurlow’s book Computer Mediated Communications to reinstate the “socio-emotional content in CMC” prior to their first face to face meeting. They used emoticons, they each had identity markers on their personal webpages, the bent the language rules, integrating computer-text acronyms and jargon, and they also went multi-model.
The factors that led to Mike and Teresa not being finding the compatibility implied by Match.Com developed from their spontaneous face-to-face behaviors and the removal of controlled textual interaction. CMC allowed for them to “engage in selective self-presentation, creating within their messages highly preferred personal and relational cues” (Wright, 2004). In other words, they got to present a representation of themselves that did not include their warts, bad habits, and annoying non-textual based communicative idiosyncrasies. They also got to choose when they communicated. With their relationship being ninety percent email based, they could chose when they wanted to respond and to what topics they wished to address. The delayed-time allowed for emotions to build or to recede depending upon the provocation, in which they could project numerous emotional responses that might or might not be accurate in regards to the other person, rather only represent how they wished the other person respond.
Prior to meeting Teresa, Mike decided to remove his profile from Match.com and the other dating sites he was a member of. When I asked him why he claimed that it was because that the women he met were not really real. That they were two-dimensional and if they became three-dimensional they often did not live up to the promises he imagined and/or they projected. Furthermore, the majority of the women he did meet lived outside of Sitka, (no surprise there), and while they may say they would consider moving, the reality of this island was often too much (even for us locals). He had made a number of FtF friends that he met through CMC, and he sees them when he is down in the states, so he had not completely wasted his time. And I do believe that one of the aspects he most enjoyed was answering the personal questions since it required him to become introspective and discover more about his own wants and dreams. This experience with online dating had not caused any negative repercussions, instead only positive. And in time, Mike might be able to have a better relationship with whomever he gets romantically involved with because of the emotional growth brought about by CMC.
In my personal opinion, I do believe that if a person lived in an area that would allow men or women to use computer-dating services to match, CMC could work. It would allow people to “weed out” the total losers, and to focus their attention on those who have a higher potential.



Works Cited

Match.com retrieved on September 9, 2007 from < http://www.match.com/howitworks/index.aspx>.
Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., Tomic A. (2006) Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet. Sage Productions: London.Wright, K.B. (2004) On-Line Relational Maintenance Strategies and Perceptions of Partners within Exclusively Internet-Based and Primarily Internet-Based Relationships [Electronic Version] Communication Studies, 55 (2). Retrieved on September 5, 2007 from questia.com