The Causes and Effects of Online Dating

Wali Haji
Mrs. Nguyen
English 1101
Date:
Online dating
Online dating is a system of dating whereby individuals meet and communicate over the internet with the aim of creating personal and romantic relationships (Mashable). The individuals provide their personal details such as name, age, gender, hobbies and their careers. They also provide the information of the kind of people they are interested in such as their age range and gender. They communicate with each other by sharing their pictures and videos. They also plan for physical dates such as dinner dates. Online dating is one of the trending issues in dating that has come as result of technological advancements. The aim of this paper is to try to identify the origin of online dating and why people would prefer online dating to other dating systems.
Online dating can be traced from the eighteenth century. This was after the modern newspaper was invented which paved way for the first matrimonial service (Brainz.org). Desperate single ladies and men ran their advertisements on these sites. The service was mostly used by single people who were past twenty one years. The act was perceived by the society as a desperate action and therefore it was rarely talked about despite the large number of people who found their matches this way. The newspapers provided advertisements for the singles and the interested people could communicate via telephones by messaging. Video dating was the next form of dating that relied on technology and it was brought by VHS (Brainz.org). From here the internet made online dating possible.
There are various and different people who sign up in to the online dating sites. Firstly, there are those people who sign up in the different online dating sites just for fun. These kind of people may never reply to text messages from people looking for love matches online and may also not comment to pictures posted by the users of these sites. Secondly, some people sign up in these sites for flirting and chatting purposes and are not willing to make any contacts.They mainly sign up to chat with people looking for love matches but they are not interested in dating any of these people. Thirdly, there are those who sign up in these sites to find sexual partners. Fourthly, there are those who sign up to find their matches, that is, people they would like to meet and start a romantic relationship with. This is the category that we will be more interested in in this paper.
There are various reasons that would make people result in finding their love matches on the online dating sites. The first reason may be due to desperation. As people approach their thi...