Facebook and Dating

No PictureI remem­ber when my brother and some of my Cru­sade friends encour­aged me (almost urged me) to join the Face­book so that they might add me as one of their friends. When I started dat­ing Stephanie (my ex-girlfriend) she pushed the issue. So, alas I gave in and signed up. What’s the harm right? Well, there is some harm to this system.

First, I real­ized the immense amount of time oth­ers were putting into this site (I’ve sto­ries up wards of sev­eral hours a day), and I myself was sucked in. I soon real­ized the amount of time I was wast­ing in this site, but more real­iza­tions were yet to come.

I once was at work and decided to check the site (because I’m so busy as a gov­ern­ment employee), and our fire­wall blocks cer­tain sites and when I went there it brought up a warn­ing page that said it was under the “Dat­ing” cat­e­gory. Dat­ing? How is the Face­book a dat­ing site? Well, after more and more thought I real­ized that is exactly what the site is. Let me explain more of how this is.

You first spend end­less amounts of time get­ting the pic­ture right. It has to look a cer­tain way to impress the would-be view­ers. After all, who would want to put up a pic­ture that wouldn’t attract peo­ple? You often find peo­ple change their pic­ture often when­ever they get a bet­ter pic­ture. It is an essen­tial part of a dat­ing site to have a per­fect pic­ture, and I’m sure that if the Face­book allowed more than one pic­ture most would have more than one. Of course then you have to make sure you have lots of friends. You can’t just have a hand­ful, you have to keep up with every­one else. In fact, I rarely see a pro­file (unless it’s new) that has less than 50 friends listed! You can add friends to your list from all across the coun­try to show (1) how pop­u­lar you are and (2) how var­ied your friends are.

The Face­book then pro­vides essen­tial infor­ma­tion to a dat­ing site: birth­day, major, e-mail, when you became a mem­ber, inter­ests, and jobs/clubs. You can even add infor­ma­tion like your cell phone num­ber, address, screen­name, per­sonal web­site, another e-mail address, and even your polit­i­cal stance (to make sure you agree with the “would-be” date). The pro­files then con­tain your favorite music, movies, and quotes (which, when clicked will bring up other users with the same artist). I see many pro­files who use this space as the oppor­tu­nity to show how “eclec­tic” they are. I look at some of those pro­files, and it’s quite obvi­ous it doesn’t fit with that person.

You can then cre­ate groups which help to put peo­ple into groups of com­mon inter­est to see if this per­son is a poten­tial. There are groups span­ning from “WSU Chris­tians” to “Alco­hol Has Caused Me Legal Prob­lems and/or Injuries” to “I Have Friends On Face­book I’ve Never Met B4..” It’s amaz­ing how many dif­fer­ent vari­eties of groups there are.

The most obvi­ous place where it par­al­lels a dat­ing site is the “Rela­tion­ship Sta­tus” sec­tion. You can put on there that you’re sin­gle, mar­ried, in a rela­tion­ship, or in an open rela­tion­ship (what­ever that means). You can choose whether you’re inter­ested in men or women, and you can say whether you’re look­ing for Friend­ship, Dat­ing, A Rela­tion­ship, Ran­dom Play, or What­ever I can get. (Some­one please explain to me what is the dif­fer­ence between “Dat­ing” and “A Relationship.”)

Then the all impor­tant search fea­ture which is essen­tial to every dat­ing web­site. You can search glob­ally (that is among all the col­leges in Face­book) or locally. You can spec­ify if you’re look­ing for a man/women, single/dating, what they’re look­ing for (i.e. a rela­tion­ship), and even polit­i­cal view. I real­ized when see­ing this that the Face­book is indeed a dat­ing site! This site just seems to be a socially accept­able ver­sion of a dat­ing site for col­lege stu­dents. In fact, my ex was asked out sev­eral times by peo­ple she’d never met through that site. Amazing.

The Face­book is also never talked about in the midst of peo­ple. It’s become a taboo to talk about it in pub­lic. Why? Because it’s a dat­ing site! No one wants to admit that they’re a part of a dat­ing site! I have met some inter­est­ing peo­ple through it, but I have never met them in per­son! In fact, for all I know they could not even be the per­son that’s on the pro­file (com­mon on the Inter­net). Now, should I stay in or leave the site? Hmmm.…