In 2020, after nearly 20 years of marriage, my now ex-wife and I divorced.   Some months afterwards, I decided to give online dating a shot.

Bear in mind, when I first got together with my ex, when we began dating, it was 1998.  So, meeting women in the virtual world has been a truly new experience for me.

And what an experience it has been!

Although I’ve only been involved with this for so many months, I already have much food for thought, and certainly enough to write several essays.  For the time being, though, I will focus only on writing this essay.  Given, then, the time and spatial constraints of doing so, I will limit my focus to select aspects of what I’ve discerned in this phenomenon, dimensions that I may develop at greater length in the future.

For starters, while online dating does indeed have its share of benefits, there can be no question that it fundamentally, intrinsically objectifies human beings.  The objectification of the person, whether man or woman, is built into the very cake of the whole system.  Subjects are reduced to things, to items on a digital menu that one can “swipe” at one’s leisure.

Of course, this historically unprecedented thing called “dating,” or the dating market, that emerged from the ruins of pre-arranged marriages has always, inescapably, made men and women into commodities in the marketplace, in the dating market.  There is, however, a significant difference between the pre-virtual dating market and the online market.

The objectification inherent in the pre-virtual dating market was mitigated, and considerably so, by the fact that, outside of blind dates, people largely met one another before they started dating.  What this means is that three dimensional, flesh-and-blood human beings interacted with one another, more or less spontaneously.  Only subsequently, based upon their interactions, would they decide to date or not.

The organic nature of their encounter almost insured, even if they may not have been consciously aware of this, that their attraction was not exclusively grounded in, say, raw physical attraction.  Through their live interaction people intuitively discerned subtleties of one another’s character that either accentuated that other’s physical attractiveness or compensated for what the person may have been perceived to have lacked in pure physical appearance.

These nuances are significantly more difficult to grasp when first encounters, occurring as they do virtually, are not organic, but mechanical.  As a man (!) I can say for certain that no small number of women, and perhaps the majority, have “liked” or messaged me based only upon having seen my pictures.  It was obvious that they hadn’t read my profile.  While it is certainly flattering to be found attractive, the unwillingness (inability?) to read a three or four paragraph profile reveals on the part of these women a crass consumerist mentality to which they themselves may very well be oblivious.

I can only imagine that, generally speaking, this experience of mine will not only resonate with women who are dating online, but compound exponentially.

There is, still, another problem inherent in online dating that is inseparable from its tendency to commodify human beings:

Online dating promotes a measure of self-delusion.  Ironically, those who ache most painfully to meet the person of their dreams are most susceptible to this self-delusion.  This is to say that they are most susceptible to sabotaging their own prospects for the life that they say they want to lead.

The reasoning here is not hard to grasp: The reduction of human beings to two dimensional items on a menu has two distinct, yet interrelated consequences.

First, it leads to the indulgence of an adolescent, Disney-type fantasy that there is an ideal, perfect person out there that, given enough time—enough swipes—one will eventually find.

Second, the belief that this ideal can and will be actualized prompts people to turn their list of specifications into demands that only clones of themselves could satisfy.  No one who doesn’t love the beach, hiking, working out, eating only rice and vegetables twice a day, scuba diving, whale gutting in the Artic, traveling the planet, and making annual pilgrimages to the moon need contact them about the possibility of chatting.

All of this is a recipe for perpetual singlehood.  As a result, people become more disenchanted, more depressed, and bitterer.  So, they either dig in further or else they drop out of the dating game altogether.

My advice:

Although one wouldn’t know it from reading this analysis, online dating is not without its value. I won’t go into that here.  But suffice it to say that its intrinsic limitations notwithstanding, the objective should not be to necessarily abandon it altogether but, rather, be aware of the subconscious habits of thought and action that it lulls one into forming.  Awareness can go a long way toward preventing one from sowing these habits.

And then, then, people should consider stopping themselves from searching for Mr. or Ms. Right.  In other words, they should relinquish their singular focus on the destination of finding their “perfect match” and, instead, focus on enjoying their journey.  They should consider availing themselves of every opportunity, however potentially negative, to learn more about themselves and what they do and do not want for their lives.

People, particularly middle aged, divorced people, who are rewriting this next phase of their lives via (among other things) online dating, should regard this as but another opportunity for both self-discovery and self-creation.

In the process, like anything else worthwhile, they just may find what they’ve wanted.

The alternative is to try to game the system.  But the system always wins: It will game you.