Is Online Dating Bad for Our Mental Health?

We’ve all seen those cheesy eHarmony commercials where two strangers find each other on their platform and fall in love. Despite its cheesiness, many of us now turn to online dating platforms like eHarmony, Tinder, Hinge, etc. in the hopes of telling our own cheesy stories about how we found “the one”.

Unfortunately, it’s just not that easy.

The dating world has changed significantly in the past couple of decades. According to Wikipedia’s online dating services timeline, the idea of matching strangers based on questionnaires that are run through computer algorithms has been around since the 1960s, but modern online dating services like Match.com didn’t launch until the late ‘90s.

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An article in the Psychological Science in the Public Interest (PSPI) journal found that despite the claims of many online dating sites, there is no strong evidence that mathematical algorithms employed by these sites are any better in terms of matching potential partners than more traditional means. Importantly, the researchers noted that:

“[…] encountering potential partners via online dating profiles reduces three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information, and these displays fail to capture those experiential aspects of social interaction that are essential to evaluating one’s compatibility with potential partners” — Eli Finkel, et. al., Online Dating: A Critical Analysis From the Perspective of Psychological Science

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