Welcome to the new trend of ‘relationshopping’. This is a termcoined by Dr. Nicole Ellison’s team for the Oxford InternetInstitute (OII) who have done extensive research on dating and the Internet. Instead of ‘relationshipping’ where you find a mate and then acknowledge you have to work hard to keep it going, ‘relationshopping’ is a ‘numbers game’. The idea (encouraged by the dating industry) is that if you trawl throughenough faces and you match up enough interests, you’ll findThe Perfect One and live happily ever after.

This blindingly impractical way of looking at love is helped along by the hyper-connectivity of today’s society. We can relationshopwhenever and wherever we go, and keep in touch with our love-muffins 24-7. Our emails, text messages, Tweets,Facebookings, LinkedIn-ings and Skypings all come into oursmartphones that we never switch off. We harangue each other all day whether we’re buzzing angrily in their handbags or pinging up on their computer screens. Then we spend our lives trying to be more contactable to more people. Together we constantly chip away at the notion of a private life. How can romancepossibly survive in this overcrowded chaotic battlefield?

The problems begin during the process of creating the datingprofile. The selectivity of self-presentation is what really separates‘online’ dating from ‘offline’ interactions. Your profile has, in most cases (perhaps not for juggernaughty55 orpopeyethesailorbangbang), been very mindfully constructed. A heavily edited photograph of yourself having fun nuzzles withinreams of carefully woven literary excellence that nonchalantlyhighlight your diverse interests and your boundless intellect whilstpreserving an ironic, carefree undertone throughout. We enter arealm of fantasy, where everything can be photoshopped and over exaggerated. This is ‘impression-management’ at its best.

To be fair to us, the Internet dating websites don’t help. With the heady mess of drop-down options for activities, jobdescriptions and physical attributes it’s no wonder people getcarried away and over-embellish. These ‘aspects of yourpersonality’ are all aimed at crowbarring you into a socialcategory to help the recipient make quick stereotypicalassumptions about you that aren’t necessarily based on true character.

Perhaps more damaging is the way this encourages usto think about love with a multiple-choice attitude tocompatibility. ‘He also loves reading The Guardian,cooking and Art’ so it must be fate. As if these verycommon shared interests would be the glue to hold arelationship together for a lifetime.

Thus, as the OII conclude, the online‘idealization process’ begins. We over-analyzeeach other’s profiles, chewing over every pieceof information given. Then we torture thesenuggets into outstandingly uncanny ‘connections’.Trapped in a virtual world, we have no real-life interaction to prove the contrary.

The ability to pick and chose our ‘mate’ from thethousands online also encourages us to make snapdecisions based on very little information. We spend hoursdismissing other daters, watching their hopeful little faces grinback at us from our laptop screens. Love me they say, for I amsurrounded by friends in my photo and have no blemishes tospeak of. Yeah right. Your hair is too big! We cackle, secure in our own omniscience and beauty.CLICK! Your eyes too close! CLICK! Your nose toobewildering (a real comment made by a friend ande-dater of mine)! Hah! CLICK!

After several hours of mocking the human race, wechoose our matches and message five people at the

same time. Where is the romance in that?

Even the date itself is complicated. No doubt the couple have read and re-read each other’s profile a hundred times. As 96% of all 18-35 year- olds are on social-networking sites, it is morethan likely that both have looked each other up on the trustyvoyeuristic encyclopaedias of Facebook and LinkedIn.

The bewildering methods of investigation mean that by the time thehappy couple meet, both have a detailed blueprint of everystrategic PR initiative the other has set in place to convince theworld that they are in fact interesting.

So our female dater is now in the restaurant with Chris76. Shethinks this man could very well be A Significant Other or maybe,even, The One. Little does she know that Chris76 is in the bathroomon his iPhone replying to an email from his next iDate. Ouch.

This problem isn’t reserved solely for the singles. Social media has opened up Pandora’s Box for couples. Social networkingsites connect you to millions of people from the secrecy of your own laptop. It offers up temptation whilst leaving a veritable trail of cookies, caches and browser-histories for any suspiciousspouse to find.

There is even a website dedicated to sniffing out Facebookinfidelities called facebookcheating.com. It was set up bycuckolded computer technician Ken Savage.

‘Beware when your partner suddenly stays

too long at work or becomes mysteriously

busy without verifiable explanation’

it warns dramatically. Next to this article is a link to acompany selling ‘spy equipment’. Charming.

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A MODEMBel Trew Troubleshoots Our Relationship

With Love And The Internet.

It is estimated that over 5 million of us will

go online this year to find love, which

means that about third of the British single

population are checking their emails on a

daily basis to see if ‘The One’ has entered

their cyberspace. These daily digital

unions have contributed to the marvellous

statistic that 15% of all married couples in

the UK met their spouse online (youGov).

And why not? When Tim Berners-Lee developed the World WideWeb back in the 80’s, it was specifically for social networkingand knowledge sharing (admittedly on a more intellectual level). Why hang about in a bar drinking your liver into oblivion, when you can browse potentials in your pyjamas at two in the morningwhilst simultaneously stalking your Ex on Facebook and BBM-ing your friends updates?

Just think about it, from one laptop or smartphone you could feasibly access 5.2 million different matches across 1,400 Internet dating websites in the UK alone (HitWise and Mintel).

That doesn’t even include Internet chat rooms, online gaming, social networking sites, instant messaging and onlinetelecommunications. There is nothing in your way, no distance too far, no social interaction too awkward. You don’t have to even get dressed.

But with these incredible resources at our finger tips, why isn’t the dating scene more successful?Why do thestereotypes of Bridget Jones and the spinster-eating Alsatians still exist? There should be swarms of happily married couples falling over themselves like lovesick skittles in an enormousnationwide Nescafé advert. Why not? Because everyone is at home looking up their ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend on a friend of afriend’s profile or they’re mindlessly dismissing people’s pictures on a dating website. Essentially, we’ve become monsters ofinformation and so have turned our backs on romance. We’ve murdered the magic ingredient of amour: the ‘je ne sais quoi’.

Agreed, statistics prove that online dating is becoming more popular each year. The industry has grown fourfold since 2004and this year is estimated to be worth an eye-watering £105m(Mintel). Major players like Mysinglefriend.com put their successrate at around 25% but what types of relationships are these 1-in-4 experiencing? How is social media affecting our attitudes to finding love?

Words by Bel Trew

Cheating using theInternet is growing asfast as the industryis. Grimly namedwebsite Divorce-online.co.ukpublished a study lastmonth which found that

Twitter has now becomethe preferred method of

communication for thoseconducting illicit affairs.

This social trend has beengreeted with enthusiastic whoops

by the divorce lawyers who now use Twitter as an excellent source

of evidence in court. In fact in the USA 80% of divorce lawyersuse social networking sites to help them with their cases(American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers). Where else canyou find such juicy running commentaries on someone’s life?

This is similar to the fact that 54% of people confess to stalkingan ex online, as discovered by people-search engine Yasni.The true statistic is probably higher – we’ve all done it. When youhave access to a real-time photomontage of your ex and their newlove-interest, who isn’t going to have a look?

The publicity of social networking sites even brings out the worst inhappy couples. We’re urged by the me-me-me-society to bare oursouls on a minute-by-minute basis genuinely believing that the poorsods who have to read this twaddle actually care. (Incidentally,Yasni also found out that 97% of us admit to Googling ourown name).

My Facebook ‘newsfeed’ is testament to this fact. If it’s notcluttered with ultrasounds of my friends’ uteruses or photographicodysseys of their wedding, then I get bludgeoned with insipidcouple-chat. My all-time favourite being ‘TOM B is in bed withMelindy-Pops. Bliss☺’ I challenge any woman to describe athree-way spooning session with a laptop as, indeed, bliss. Having said that ‘Melindy-Pops’ apparently charmed by herboyfriend whipping out his laptop or smartphone mid-embrace,replied with a thumbs up ‘Mel likes this’. Am I the only personwho thinks this is worrying?

Even celebrities have cottoned on to it – they are positivelymarinating in their own self-importance. When the divorces start rolling out, we get tweetings from the likes of KelseyGrammer, Cheryl Cole and Leann Rimes. If they have adomestic, it goes live: Peter Andre furiously tweets about Katie for JonBenét-ing their daughter, whilst Frost tweets out at Miller for cutting her child’s hair. Why do they think we care?

So what does the future hold? The online dating industry ispredicted to get bigger, growing by approximately 40% in four years (Mintel). The industry is also diversifying with anincreasing number of niche ways to match-make (‘FarmersOnly’.com and Geek2Geek being two of the softer options).Social media companies will also fuse technologies, for example Twitter and dating websites will incorporate GPS. So you can pick up a pint of milk and a date on the way home and tell everyone in the vicinity what you’re doing.

It is generally assumed across the board that more people will be online dating and social-networking, that we will spend an ever increasing amount of time on these websitesand more of us will have smartphones, so we will be able todo all of the above, more frequently and in more places.

In short, all you need is not love, it’s a WiFi connection.

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