Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating

by Dan Slater

“If online dating can blunt the emotional pain of separation, if adults can afford to be increasingly demanding about what they want from a relationship, the effect of online dating seems positive. But what if it’s also the case that the prospect of finding an ever more compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, a paradox of choice that keeps us chasing the illusive bunny around the dating track?”   It’s the mother of all search how to find a spouse, a mate, a date. The escalating marriage age and declin­ing marriage rate mean we’re spending a greater portion of our lives unattached, searching for love well into our thirties and forties. It’s no wonder that a third of America’s 90 million singles are turning to dating Web sites. Once considered the realm of the lonely and desperate, sites like eHarmony, Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish have been embraced by pretty much every demographic. Thanks to the increasingly efficient algorithms that power these sites, dating has been transformed from a daunting transaction based on scarcity to one in which the possibilities are almost endless. Now anyone—young, old, straight, gay, and even married—can search for exactly what they want, connect with more people, and get more information about those people than ever before. As journalist Dan Slater shows, online dating is changing society in more profound ways than we imagine. He explores how these new technologies, by altering our perception of what’s possible, are reconditioning our feelings about commitment and challenging the traditional paradigm of adult life. Like the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, the digital revolution is forcing us to ask new questions about what constitutes “normal”: Why should we settle for someone who falls short of our expectations if there are thousands of other options just a click away? Can commitment thrive in a world of unlimited choice? Can chemistry really be quantified by math geeks? As one of Slater’s subjects wonders, “What’s the etiquette here?” Blending history, psychology, and interviews with site creators and users, Slater takes readers behind the scenes of a fascinating business. Dating sites capitalize on our quest for love, but how do their creators’ ideas about profits, morality, and the nature of desire shape the virtual worlds they’ve created for us? Should we trust an industry whose revenue model benefits from our avoiding monogamy? Documenting the untold story of the online-dating industry’s rise from ignominy to ubiquity—beginning with its early days as “computer dating” at Harvard in 1965—Slater offers a lively, entertaining, and thought provoking account of how we have, for better and worse, embraced technology in the most intimate aspect of our lives.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Psychology, Love, Relationships, Science, Sociology

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 24, 2013

Reviews

[David Rubenstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since I participated once in online dating, and since I am very much interested in algorithms, I thought this book would be wonderful. It isn't. There is very little about algorithms. Actually, this is a history book; it goes into great detail about the history of various online dating sites. And, it goes into the psychology of dating and online dating. The psychology aspect is really the only part of the book that is even vaguely interesting. The book is also filled with many anecdotes about individuals and their encounters with online dating.

The author tries to be objective, but the book comes off, as a result, as a bore. There are no consistent themes. There is no structure. There must be better books on the subject. But for me--I doubt that I will read any more books on this subject.

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating. I can't imagine how this book doesn't have almost all 5 star reviews. It's a curious person's dream come true. From page one, the author throws history and interesting tidbits at the reader that show the underbelly of online dating algorithms. I suspect the people who gave it bad reviews didn't want to look behind the curtain of dating algorithms and find that the great and powerful Oz was just a man. Slater followed the history of matching algorithms from the earliest attempts to current dating site powerhouses such as OKCupid, eharmony, and Match.com. What looked to the online subscriber as a successful matching algorithm was often (most of the time) merely a best attempt. For example, despite how great an algorithm was, it could not predict long term dating success better than success of first date. In other words, if a couple had a great first date, that was a better predictor than the algorithm. That isn't to say algorithms are not getting better. They are. It was interesting to learn how programs learned to weight desired traits more heavily than others (e.g. religiosity/ atheism was significantly more important than hair color; and thus, all desired traits were not equal).

I wish I had time to write more highlights because there were so many great insights in this book. If you have read other books about algorithms, you will be well familiar with the assertion that Netflix knows you better than you know yourself. Well in this book, based on the answers you give, the people you contact, and other factors, your dating site is deciding how open you are to different sexual experiences (some ask outright but some build a profile based on non-direct information like Netflix does). Your dating sites are attempting to understand who you are as a person and it is scary, intriguing, and incredibly interesting to read about (some ethical concerns are rightfully discussed). This entire book was so fun to read!

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must have read a review somewhere that praised this, because I can't think of any other reason why I would have put it on my request list. The beginning of this book is interesting, in that it covers the start of computer-generated matches (much earlier than you'd expect) and mentions that the author's parents (now divorced) met this way.

But Slater makes it immediately clear that this book will not be about his parents, or about him, and the book suffers for it. By the time I'd hit the middle of the book, I was getting all the founders of various online dating companies mixed up and didn't much care who was doing what, when, or why.

Very little of the book seems to cover "how online dating shapes our relationship," and there are strange sections about "Alexis" and her online dating experience, without much introduction (is she real or a composite?) or conclusion (has she learned anything from this?). And frankly, she kind of sounds like a jerk.

If this book had really been about how online dating shapes our relationships, I would have enjoyed it. But there seem not to be enough studies or data yet to properly determine how online dating has affected relationships.

In lieu of that, the book would have been far more fascinating had Slater used his parents' relationship (or his own?) to explore this topic. I'm honestly not sure why he wrote this book. He doesn't seem too interested in the topic, and doesn't have much of a personal connection other than his parents.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two rules I live by: 1) I never talk more than 15 seconds about something that happened to me over 2 weeks ago and 2) I never say ‘when I was a kid things were better’ because they weren’t. Technology enables freedom for individuals to experience life with more choices. This book delves into how our social reality of meeting people (or dating, or marrying) has evolved because of the connections the internet has given us and as a whole how we are all better off for it.

Technology enables connections and makes us less alienated and isolated from others and allows for people to meet others who they might never have had met before. Those who want to MAGA (Make America Great Again) by stopping the clock and returning to what they think were better times just need to shut up and read a book like this. There’s no doubt that the in the aggregate meeting people the new fashioned way is better than the old fashioned way and even then the old fashioned way will still be available for those who want to use it.

There is a segmentation that the technology allows. For example, Gay Jewish Men can meet the same if they only find the appropriate dating site online, previously such an encounter by chance alone could have taken years. I had no idea that ‘Grinder’ meant Gay Finder until I read this book. Now a lot of allusions I’ve read in the past finally make some sense.

If I were the editor of the book, I would have told the author that he really didn’t need to make about 30 different references to variations on ‘butt sex’. It just seemed strange that he did that so many times within the book either by quoting others or explaining something (e.g. ‘on Gay websites we need to know top or bottom’, and so on) because overall the focus of the book is how society improvises, adapts and overcomes by using technology such as online dating sites thus empowering the individual to control their life just a little bit better.

I did want to learn more about the actual algorithms used by the ‘dating’ sites, but the book really wasn’t about the mathematics behind the platforms. There’s a whole lot of information that can be extracted from looking at the sites metadata such as the example provided in this book that the single most effective question to ask somebody in order to find out if they have sex on the first date is ‘do you like the taste of beer’.

The olden days sucked. For those who long for the way things used to be just consider the progress illustrated in this book. Heck, in the olden days I wouldn’t have been able to download this book in an audio format from Hoopla for free because I saw one of my Goodreads' friends highly recommend it (audio didn’t exist, Hoopla wasn’t there, Goodreads wasn’t either and so on). For those who disagree with me, I’ll start talking about something that happened to me more than 2 weeks ago for longer the 15 seconds and bore you to death. The old! Let them have their dystopia reality created by their fascist leader. They don’t need to MAGA. They just have to embrace the world around them today and stop longing for a past that never was! In the end, this book tells the old farts how the world and society are better because of online dating sites.

[Graeme Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

Love in the Time of Algorithms: How Online Dating Shapes Our Relationships bears many of the worst marks of books by journalists: shallowness, stories about people with no discernible expertise or authority, lack of a thesis to which arguments relate, and failure to consider the phenomenon (online dating in this case) at more than one level.

Perhaps people meet online for sex alone, but frequent, haphazard, momentary meeting of the genitals is reliably boring and unrewarding unless you have a personality disorder. Dan Slater quotes a few random statistics from so-called industry experts, sleazy men whom I would never trust alone with my dog, if I had one. The truth is, however, that lots of people are meeting online, engaging in longer term relationships, and getting married. The New York Times Wedding listings, formerly the province of heterosexual northeastern socialites, now cites the source of their introduction: "They met on OkCupid." Slater recognizes that people do want to find someone with whom they are compatible and exuberant, so that they can go on to marriage and put an end to loneliness. He never once mentions, however, that men and women often have very different goals and expectations in approaching romance. His sad little tales of women stalking their lovers' infidelities on Facebook and Google, then discussing the results with their girlfriends, suggests that nothing much has changed.

[Juliana · Rating 3 out of 5]

If nothing else, this book made me hug my partner a little harder and thank the stars I'm out of the dating pool.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is called "Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Mating and Dating." I mention this not because I'm about to launch into the world's most boring book report, but because I was a little dissapointed by how little I felt the book really got into this concept.

The book is really about the history of online dating, which is kind of interesting in and of itself, but not at all what I was hoping to read. Slater focuses a great deal on the founders of the current big dating websites (OKCupid, Match, eHarmony), and I kept wondering when it was going to get into the actual psychology behind online dating. There were, of course, snippets of this. But they seemed to me to represent only some small parts of the internet date-o-sphere. I personally questioned how relevant these anecdotes were to the dating world at large -- how many people are there that are actually using "premium international dating sites"? While the focus on one woman who moved from a music fan site to different dating sites was interesting, it also made me think.. is THIS person really representative of online dating site users?

There are, of course, short references to academic studies and research done -- if anything, the list of references struck me as very interesting, and I plan on reading many of the readings he cites. However, the fact that I feel I need to read these studies/books/additional materials to truly understand how online interaction affects "mating and dating"-- and the fact that they took up a full 25% of this book -- makes it very clear that Slater is just skimming the surface of the psychological aspect of how technology affects dating. I'd be fine with this, if the book didn't purport to address this question, and address it specifically.

[Reverenddave · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Perhaps I am biased as I recall reading all the articles on niche-dating sites that came out around 2005, but this book does a tremendous job of exploring the rapidly growing world of online dating. Its a fascinating topic but one that isnt necessarily easy to write about. The book nicely blends stories of individual experiences in online dating, with author's reporting on the business of online dating sites. It presents a fair and balanced view of a still oft-maligned industry without shying away from the difficult questions and issues online dating can raise. It was a tough book to put down.

Also, as a Phish fan, I was thoroughly entertained by the fact that so much of one of the main stories of individual experiences in online dating came through the internet prism of PhantasyTour.

(Full disclosure: I won this book through GoodReads giveaways. The hope of those giveaways is that winners will write reviews; however, I would not have written one if I hadn't genuinely found it excellent.)

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book. I even read all the footnotes!

It talks about the evolution of online dating, the different approaches taken by different sites, and its idiosyncrasies, with lots of data and humor. Some kindle highlights:

The online-dating industry may service thirty million of America’s ninety million single adults, but momentum is slowing. - location 118

[Plenty of Fish] is thought to attract a certain kind of customer, one who feels at home among grammar-free profiles comprised largely of text-speak and emoticons—a sizable population, as it turns out: Frind owns 20 percent of the world���s online-dating traffic. Yagan says Plenty of Fish, because of its unmanageable size, is infested with “romance scammers,” people who create fake dating profiles to wring money from the desperate. Frind dismisses Yagan’s OkCupid as a “niche site” with a limited following among “the writer-slash-hippie-slash-whatever crowd.” - location 125

That Frind and Yagan are two of the savviest entrepreneurs in an industry that markets human relationships is, to put it mildly, totally bizarre. Both are married. Neither has dated online. - location 135

With around 1.5 million paying subscribers, and many million more free users to fill out its database (more on that later), Match makes nearly $350 million a year in revenue. OkCupid makes less than $5 million. - location 246

Next up is offline matchmaker Julie Ferman, who wins for Best Matchmaker. Ferman remarks that the award—a long, arcing glass statuette—looks like a giant dildo, which it sort of does, and then proceeds to frog hop off the stage while pretending to ram the award into her rear end. - location 254

“The girl you sent me didn’t have much upstairs,” wrote a third, from Northwestern, “but what a staircase!” - location 338

“Back then I was going out with a girl from Wellesley,” he recalled four decades later. “I gave her a free questionnaire, because she helped me distribute in the dorms there. When we ran it through the computer, she and I matched. That was exciting! But I forgot that she also received five other matches, including a guy from Amherst, whom she later dumped me for.” - location 400

Radcliffe College’s Red Book, which furnished girls with the school’s rules of conduct, printed a list of approved restaurants in which they could dine with a young man. Some were acceptable only before 7:30 P.M.; others posed a threat to reputation. The etiquette expert Emily Post wondered why, even though “she may not lunch with him in a restaurant, she is sometimes (not always) allowed to go to a moving picture matinee with him! Why sitting in the dark in a moving picture theater is allowed, and the restaurant is tabu is very mysterious.” Miss Manners threw up her arms. - location 545

We are the most important search engine on the Web, not Google. The search for companionship is more important than the search for song lyrics. —Sam Yagan, chief executive officer, OkCupid - location 615

The problem, however, was that the site’s most satisfied customers were unlikely to spread the word. Meeting your mate online was like getting a nose job—you’d just as soon not tell anyone about it. “In those first few years at Match,” McDermott says, “people who met their partner or spouse on the site would lie about it. At one wedding, I watched a couple who met on Match stand up before their friends, relatives, and church community and lie about how they met. They felt it would cast a shadow over their marriage.” When successful Match users called the company with requests to have hard copies of their profiles mailed to them for posterity, they’d often request that the profiles be sent in blank envelopes. - location 806

Thombre’s “triangulation” algorithm considered the messaging habits of other men who tended to like the same women that Tom liked: Of the women Tom had winked at, other men who also liked those women had contacted Kelly as well. “The triangulation algorithm helps determine someone’s type,” explains Thombre. “It says, ‘The men who like the same women that you like also tend to like this other woman over here.’” - location 1169

The average thirty-year-old man spends as much time messaging eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds as he does messaging women his own age. - location 1628

Among gay people, 2 percent have 23 percent of the total reported gay sex, - location 1639

To determine whether you and your date have potential, see if you align on three questions: 1) Do you like horror movies? 2) Have you ever traveled around another country alone? 3) Wouldn’t it be fun to chuck it all and go live on a boat? One third of the couples that meet via OkCupid agree on all three questions, which, Rudder calculates, is 3.7 times the rate of simple coincidence. - location 1664

Frind set his sights lower: simple functionality. The key would be dispensing with all frills. No customer service, no employees, no user feedback taken into account. With its drab light-blue background, it looked as though it had been built by a retiree selling used auto parts out of an attic, circa 1995. The site’s hallmark was its distorted profile photos, squished or elongated, that required users to click through in order to get a sense of what a user actually looks like. This resulted in more page views and, consequently, more advertising revenue. - location 1809

“I would David Blaine her and keep on walking.” “‘David Blaine her’?” “A David Blaine is when you’re fucking somebody from the back, and, goddamn, you let your friend slide in without her knowing, and then you run around and bang on the window and wave at her ass. That’s called a David Blaine.” - location 2088

By 1986, one hundred mail-order bride agencies had blossomed in North America. The Philippines exported twenty thousand mail-order brides per year. - location 2130

In 2001, McDermott was instructed not to use the word “single” in press releases. Match’s research showed that “single” had a negative connotation; it was a temporary status that people wanted to shed. Later she was told not to use “marriage.” Match didn’t want to discourage those who weren’t looking to get hitched. - location 2154

“Match,” Mastronuzzi recalls, “just wasn’t relevant for tons of communities. Take gays. We have our own unique concerns. Are you a top or a bottom? What’s your HIV status? A general dating site can’t get at that stuff.” - location 2167

Even more tricky would be developing sites that accommodated niche interests with which Williams was unfamiliar. Tattoo enthusiasts, swingers, fetishists—the list was mind-boggling. So he borrowed a marketing concept that had worked in other industries: white labeling….After building up a small membership base through a generic dating site called Singles365, Williams began partnering with affiliates who wanted to operate their own niche sites that would then tap into Williams’s mother database. To create an optimal dating site for South Africa, Williams would partner with a South African and let that person design and market the site locally. This would also solve the traffic problem: The local affiliates—the “storefronts”—funneled business to the “manufacturer,” and vice versa. The affiliate gets a cut of money for each subscriber he pulls into the network through his white-label site. - location 2194

But niche dating wasn’t just about creating culturally relevant dating communities for specific interests. It was also about branding interests and fetishes that might not be socially acceptable to acknowledge publicly, creating judgment-free zones where the like-minded can mingle freely and furtively through a friendly flashing portal that screams: See how many people are just like you? - location 2204

The UK is Grindr’s biggest market, with 1 in every 60 male Londoners using the app. Assuming a 10 percent rate of homosexuality, that’s 1 in 6 gay men. At the 2012 summer games, when the first Olympians arrived in London, Grindr melted down from overuse. - location 2292

One day, in her late forties, [cancer survivor] Brashier was at a restaurant when a friend asked her why she wasn’t dating. For the first time she told someone: “I can’t have sex.” “When I finally heard myself say it out loud,” she recalls, “I could imagine others in similar situations.” She researched the reasons why intercourse might not be possible: diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, the list went on. “It turns out that there are all kinds of reasons why people either don’t want to have sex or can’t have sex, yet still seek intimacy,” she says. “I suspected that the group of people out there, if I could find them, was large enough to warrant a dating site.” In 2011, Brashier introduced 2Date4Love, “a dating site that enables people who cannot engage in sexual intercourse to meet and experience love, companionship and intimacy at its deepest level.” - location 2296

In 2003, Biderman started Ashley Madison, naming the company after the two most popular names for baby girls. Ten years later, the site claims thirteen million members in seventeen countries. With slogans like “Monogamy is Monotony” and “Life is Short. Have an Affair,” Biderman’s advertising is often turned down, particularly for primetime television slots like the Super Bowl. So he compensates by going on TV talk shows, where he’s often booed. - location 2329

Another press release, quickly parroted by the media, announced that Washington, D.C., was Ashley Madison’s biggest market. - location 2350

People scoff at Biderman for promoting a pastime still generally regarded as immoral by most of the population. But his efforts don’t seem as outlandish when you think of the ways our views on relationships—from premarital sex, to divorce, to gay marriage—have progressed over the years. “As an entrepreneur, part of my responsibility to society is to help it evolve, the way an artist does,” Biderman says. - location 2353

I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women! —OkCupid profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange - location 2393

the international marriage brokering business had reached $2 billion, making it equal in size to the entire online-dating industry in the United States. Although numbers are hard to substantiate, [the company called] Anastasia appears to be grossing something on the order of $1 million per day, - location 2411

“If you don’t call it mail-order brides,” she asks Bryant, “what do you call it?” “We call it ‘premium international online dating,’” he says. - location 2425

In 2003, when Anastasia started its Web site, many Russian women flocked to their local “bridal agencies” to have their photos taken and uploaded into profiles to be seen on the other side of the world. - location 2437

“I was going to bring my Ferrari to Moscow,” Lopez says. “After racing it across the States.” “Why would you do that?” Bryant asks. “The women here are such gold diggers,” Lopez says. “It’s not like Sweden. If you go to Sweden, the women don’t care what you have, because everyone in Sweden has the same amount.” - location 2452

There are no monthly membership fees on these sites. Instead, male clients buy credits, which they dissipate in the sending and receiving of e-mail messages and instant chats. Bulk purchases bring the cost down: one thousand credits cost $399 ($.40 each), while twenty credits cost $15.99 ($.80 each). The service is “premium” in part because all communication requires a human translator. One e-mail or chat correspondence—a message sent, a message returned—can cost the client between one and two dollars. Anastasia claims to exchange 2.5 million letters per day through all of its sites combined. - location 2478

The reality of international online dating is complicated: For every Western man looking not for a wife but for quick sex abroad, there is a woman looking not for a relationship but for a free night out in her hometown, shopping for shoes at the mall, and eating at restaurants that she and her family could never afford. As for explicit scamming, it’s well-known among Web site users that the staffs of local bridal agencies will often pose as the women in the profiles, responding to incoming messages in order to keep the rubles rolling in. Nearly every man on the tour has a story of chatting up a beautiful woman online and then offering to fly down, only to be told, suddenly, that she’ll be out of town or busy working during those dates. Two of the romance tourists on this trip came specifically because they’d been corresponding with women they wanted to meet. In both cases, the men explained, with more pride than disappointment, the women were away doing a modeling tour and couldn’t meet up. - location 2582

Bart—who has chosen black dancing shoes, gray slacks, and a white tuxedo shirt open at the chest—is incredulous, his mouth open in giddy disbelief like a twelve-year-old being told about porn for the first time. - location 2600

So when Amo Latina tour clients praise “the beautiful simplicity of these women,” they are speaking really of grinding poverty, of the narrow aims and provincial ambitions imposed by a life that has never known anything beyond Medellin….Through this lens, one understands better how the eyes of a Colombiana could go bright at the sight of, say, Nick, a thirty-four-year-old machinist from small-town Indiana who says almost nothing, except when he’s high on painkillers, and then he says things like, “My brother’s married to a Jew, so he thinks he’s got to get everything half price and then sell it back to the family at three times what he paid for it.” - location 2671

Nearby, Juanita the translator has been facilitating a conversation between Bart and a Colombiana, which she describes as strange: “He said that for every child she has, he would give her one plastic surgery,” Juanita reports. “I don’t know if he was making a joke. I’ve never heard that one before. I just told her he said she was very pretty.” - location 2727

Until 2001, Match took a generous approach with its free users: If the free user received a message from a paying subscriber, he could open the message and respond to it without subscribing himself. He didn’t have to put down a credit card until he wanted to initiate contact with someone….[Eventually] Match instituted a new model called “pay-to-respond.” - location 3131

“Dating sites rely heavily on personalized e-mails—supposedly triggered by individual profile activity—to convert free registered users into paying members,” the report explains. “We say ‘supposedly’ because many in the industry suspect that some sites send non-genuine e-mails. For example, a new registered user may receive several e-mails from the site indicating women are interested in his profile, when no women actually have responded to the profile yet.” - location 3155

paid sites insisted on their superiority, defaulting to the female-friendly argument that willingness to purchase access to a dating database is a proxy for commitment. - location 3212

Using public information about eHarmony and Match, Rudder concluded: 1) 96 percent of eHarmony’s twenty million profiles are “dead”; 2) 6 percent of eHarmony’s users get married; 3) the odds that a Match profile is active are 7 percent; and 4) Match collects $137,000 in user fees for each marriage it produces. - location 3223

2011, OkCupid announced it was selling itself to Match for $90 million, an astounding figure for an advertising-based business that had good but not great traffic and brought in little more than $4 million per year in revenue. - location 3249

On the day the deal was announced, Yagan removed the piece from OkCupid’s site. When asked about the capitulation, he back treaded. “I chose to take that down,” he said. “Match didn’t ask.” - location 3257

These social-networking sites stole a significant chunk of online dating’s market. Between 1998 and 2005, the online-dating industry grew at an average rate of 9 percent a year by revenue. Over the following six years, from 2006 to 2011, year-on-year growth slowed to less than 3 percent. - location 3318

In 1986, when considering whether the Constitution protected sodomy, the Supreme Court laughed off the notion, concluding that a right to engage in such conduct was “facetious.” To hold otherwise, sneered Chief Justice Warren Burger in his concurring opinion, “would be to cast aside a millennia of moral teaching.” - location 3490

social scientists found that the average deception for weight in online dating is 5.5 percent of actual weight. They also found the average deception for height to be 2 percent of actual height, and the average deception for age to be 1.4 percent of actual age. - location 3915

As one twenty-seven-year-old OkCupid-ite put it: “You should message me if you enjoy shirts, and wearing them in photos.” - location 4540

On this issue of first-date sex—who’s likely to go for it, who’s not—more data exists. A free dating site in the UK, FreeDating.co.uk, correlated certain physical and nonphysical attributes with a willingness to knock mops on night one. As it turns out, women who are overweight and/or over five feet nine inches—obese and/or tall—are prime candidates for first-date sex. (Whether a man is overweight has no effect on first-date sex. Although men with athletic builds are most likely to be open to it.) Bizarrely, an interest in cars predicts a decreased likelihood of first-date sex in men, while in women the reverse is true. Meanwhile, women under twenty-five are most open to first-date sex, and their willingness decreases with age. Whereas the opposite is true for men: A man in his thirties is more open to first-date sex than a man in his early twenties. As for education, a man’s propensity for first-date sex increases with his education level, whereas the opposite is true for women. Reducing these principles to their core meaning, Free Dating advises: “The youngest, largest, most drunken woman is about as open to first-date sex as an average sixty-year-old guy.” - location 4545

Meet-An-Inmate, ConjugalHarmony, WomenBehindBars. WBB advertises thusly: Are you tired of wondering if she’s cheating on you? Do you love to leave the toilet seat up? Want to enjoy freedom on the weekend and watch a little football with your buddies, rather than work on your “honey do” list? Well, now you don’t have to worry about any of that with the latest craze in adult dating, dating and marrying inmates for conjugal visits. With a conjugal marriage, you will finally have a wife with the perfect amount of freedoms and rights, and more importantly, you will finally start enjoying your own. - location 4580

TrekPassions: “Feel like you are always wearing a red shirt in your relationships? In Pon Farr?” - location 4589

Colombia prizes the beauty of its women. In addition to the Miss Independence pageant and the Miss Colombia pageant, juries award many lesser titles: Miss Plantain; Miss Coal. Cellblocks in a Bogotá women’s prison have their own pageants. One town in northern Colombia puts makeup and wigs on its donkeys and parades them for the annual Miss Burro celebration. - location 4608

Any dating-site partner—whether advertiser or investor—must also be more risk-averse than the credit-card companies, which label all dating sites as “adult services.” For paid sites, this means that in “charge-back” situations—when a consumer contests a billing, arguing, for instance, that he thought he had canceled his subscription—the dating site is given no leverage, no credit, in the dispute. Charge backs are the bane of the dating business. Pretty much any charge can be disputed successfully by a customer. - location 4618

[L.J. Savage · Rating 3 out of 5]

VERY interesting look into the history of online dating (or dating in general, actually).

I picked this up as research for a novel I'm writing, and have not been disappointed. I'll definitely be able to get some good stories with this history!

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but dated

[Kevin Mentzer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not much in the way of algorithms. More of a brief history on online dating with vignettes interspersed. I had to work at finishing the book. Jumped around quite a bit and didn't feel like there was aver a real rhythm to it.

[Nicky Enriquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed "Love in the Time of Algorithms." It's kind of crazy how dated the book is after just five years. Still, I appreciated Slater's perspective, and his presentation of the data without bias. Very interesting - I wish I had read this before Aziz Ansari's "Modern Romance."

[Ang · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Thought there might be more insights. Frankly, nothing about this book was insightful. I don't even know if I really learned that much, which is horrible to realize.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Capitalism plunders the body of its sensuality."
- Terry Eagleton

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."
- Tom Robbins

I'm more than a little confused at the sub-par average of this book and the popular negative reviews, particularly the ones that say there's no unifying concept for the individual chapters. The link is fairly explicit: App developers are trying to put one of the most stubborn, difficult, ephemeral, joyous and most essential reasons for living in a box they can sell you. These early histories of dating and contemporary surveys online dating are a way of exploring why it's a hideously complex task, what it reveals about vanity, patriarchy, and shallowness in our cultural DNA, how convictions and social norms have slacked and tightened over the years, and why the whole thing is a rat race designed by silicon valley to dangle love in front of the yearning (or horny) masses. These companies do not love you, do not know anything about love, but so desperately want your money.

And people are willing to hand it over. I was stunned to hear at one point there were over 1000 online dating services in America that were generating over $2 Million in revenue. Whether this came from costly subscription services or major deals brokered selling YOUR data, "connecting people" has been extraordinarily lucrative and exploitative.

I don't want to come across as someone who thinks online dating partnerships and long lasting relationships are somehow lesser or invalid. Every collision between human souls is a dice roll, there's no correct formula to make any of this work. But I think this book paints a compelling argument for the thousands of minor tweaks and switches flipped that combine to form our modern dating culture-- which is probably making us worse people and inarguably more lonely.

Our constant access to other people and permanent online profiles have turned us into neurotic obsessives. Our algorithmic social media platforms have made it enticing to turn human connection into content. The meat market of abundance has made it too easy to treat people as disposable, always looking around for the next best thing, the better fit. Best summed up by my Tom Robbins quote at the top of this review-- we are now a culture preoccupied with finding diamonds in the rough to nourish us (speak nothing of if diamonds are even real) rather than cultivating a garden with someone, building a life together and weathering the storms of life.

The chapter on sex tourism and mail-order brides in Russia and the global south was particularly eye-opening. People who think there's a massive gulf between that sort of companionship search and modern online dating would do well to re-evaluate and do a bit of forecasting based on what we already observe. It reminds me of conversations surrounding the ethics of porn: Porn itself is not evil in any way, but its popularity directly drives things like sex trafficking. How can you possibly square that?

And even if you're the most unwavering romantic in the face of all of this and think that incredible things can happen when people meet (fair), you would be a grade-A sucker to put your love in the hands of these tech companies who know that you meeting your soulmate is bad for business. If you met your life partner through dating apps, it's probably closer to an accident or strategic plays by the app developer rather than a service working as intended. Either way, consider yourself lucky. You're on the last chopper out of 'Nam.

I considered taking off a star because the millennial-speak in this book from some of the internet forums are so cartoonish and awful it caused my body physical pain more than once just out of sheer cringe. But this was good enough to earn an extra, corrective star towards the rating.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought it was funny that some of the reviews of this book are low, because the book wasn’t the sort they thought it would be. The overview gives a description of what it is meant to be. I found the data aspect and theories fascinating. What I did not care for at all were the explicit verbatim strings included in the book. I really could have done without those, and because of them wouldn’t recommend the book. I was so disgusted (albeit, not surprised) at the dating websites for married people, encouraging them to cheat. I was fascinated (in a train wreck sort of way) at the Columbian mix for what sounded like rich, unattractive, middle-aged men having an open market to pair up with beautiful young women. They had to use an interpreter, of course (which was referred to as a “translator”). The behavior and complete lack of direction of so many of these dating folks was so sad to me. I really feel for them – especially having done online dating myself. It was also really sad how much awful behavior was justified by citing that changing times and technology make monogamy a relic of the past.

[Anton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Referenced SKOUT, so that was fun. The rest wasn’t as relevant as I had hoped. Pretty interesting insight into the motivation behind sites like AnastasiaDate.com as they feel like mail order bride sites but that’s not the real intention. Those were probably the best parts for me, but the book was peppered with anecdotes following one woman as if she is the summation of how online dating is for everyone. This book could have done more to talk about the most successful paths of online dating and the least successful. I didn’t think there was enough about the different experiences each gender has, and, being released in 2013, the book is woefully out of date for the current scene of online dating as there is not a single mention of Tinder and how that changed the game. There are some interesting stories about the history of online dating so if that’s something that would hook you, give it a shot. Otherwise, probably not worth the time to read if you’re looking for a current state of online dating.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure how this got into my Audible list - best guess, it was on sale, and I mistakenly thought it was Christian Rudder's book about the analytics of OKCupid data. But it's not. It is somewhat interesting, but really just boils down to a history and catalog of online dating, past to present, interspersed with some anecdotes. There's very little actual analysis or psychology. So if a reasonably comprehensive catalog of the history of computer dating interests you, then go for this; if not, go for something like Rudder's book which has actual analysis.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those booked that offers a fascinating look at a subject most people haven't really thought about more than superficially. It's my favorite kind of book to stumble across. Like most of these books, ( Bottlemania, that one about orange juice, etc) if it were a hundred pages long it would get 5 stars. The description of how technology has always altered the way people meet and couple up was interesting. I just found myself bored by all the filler that surrounded the interesting stuff.

[Aleš Bednařík · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zaujímavo na písaná kniha. Spolu s majiteľmi, či správcami viacerých zoznamovacích online appiek, stránok, agentúr autor analyzuje pre a proti online zoznamovania z pohľadu agentúr aj klientov.
Píše o Match.com, e-harmony, OCupid, Pletny of Fish a mnohých iných aj úplne špecializovaných zoznamovacích službách.
Nie, že by tam boli zaujímavé dáta, skôr história vývoja online randenia od prvých inzerátov v novinách až po nedávne časy a potom aj rozhovory s majiteľmi, takže žiadna vedy, ale pohľad dovnútra v nejakej miere áno.
Kedže o tom teraz píšem knihu, tak to bolo veľmi zaujímavé čítanie.

[Jakub Sláma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some two thirds of the book contain some pretty interesting information, including a couple of pages of intriguing fun facts (weeeell, did you know that one in every seven straight men would like their partner to put a strap-on dildo inside them?), the rest is kind of boring (especially the intro and the other parts describing the meetings of random men who happen to be the CEOs of dating websites or whatever), and I didn't really like the way the book was written.

[Joey Acosta · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a previous user of online dating apps this book shared a sneak peek into the curious history of the back-end of the business - including fraud, mail-order partners, why people return to their deleted profiles over and over, etc.. overall gleaning that there is no science to love but always a science to making money.

[Flo Valiente · Rating 2 out of 5]

written pre-tinder in 2013; quite a nice look into what the world of online dating consisted pre-swiping. found that he focused more on what the sites were rather than diving into the psychology of things which is what I thought the book would be about.

[Betsy Mills · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun tour through the history of online dating. Describes the different platforms came to be, and why your happy marriage is bad for business. And oh yea, they know everything about you- better hope this information doesnt get into the wrong hands....oops too late!

[Cameron Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating look behind the curtain of how modern and historical dating sites work. The book came out in 2013 so Tinder would have only been a year old at the time of release but I think an updated version covering mobile dating could be a worthwhile addition. Something something diaper fetish.

[Arbooz Ibrah · Rating 3 out of 5]

good

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. It does exactly what it sets out to do. It explores the rise of online dating and the issues about it.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting history of how online dating got started and how some of the companies that create some of these apps and websites are incentivized to not make matches.

[Arjun · Rating 1 out of 5]

Love In The Time of Algorithms is the worst kind of nonfiction book – one that has no strongly discernible theme, thesis or consistent form – author Dan Slater has a blast flopping between first-person account, seemingly fiction-like narrative and even some interviews.

However, Slater manages to pass the Chris Dixon test for nonfiction and provide value beyond what already exists on Wikipedia (or at least he packages it in a way that would have been very difficult to find otherwise). For that alone, he gets a star.

The journey at an online dating conference in Florida. Given that much of the book reads like what appears to be Slater's conference notes, I wouldn't be surprised if Love In The Time Of Algorithms was written in a week.

The rise of "dating" itself is interesting – one that came with the advent of automobiles and increasing popularity of movies, which separated young people from parental oversight. The path to marriage in America after the World Wars was virtually indistinguishable from the route those took pre 1920s.

After the automobile and the popularity of the drive-in, the next big evolutionary leap in dating was "computerized dating," which started in the early sixties as colleges used computers to optimize meeting potential at dances. Unlike the far more sophisticated web interfaces we see now, matching was initially done through the distribution of questionnaires to large groups, of which responses were fed into an IBM machine that spat out potential matches.

These early services (of which Operation Match was the most popular – interesting 1965 piece on them in the Crimson) found great success, which began with tapping a huge network of single-sex schools along the Northeast shore.

Something I thought was interesting was how there was little stigma associated with these computer "matching" services – certainly nothing like the stigma online dating has now (though, with gamified products like Tinder and Grindr, one has to wonder if this is slowly shifting away). Slater notes:

... thirty years later online datig would encounter a strong stigma; to "date online" suggested an inability o meet people in real life. But in the sixties, when Jeff Tarr and David Dewan brought the first incarnations of computer dating to college kids, stigma didnt surround the medium as it later would.

Online dating was part of a bigger trend in the postwar generation's need for security in an uncertain world, as evident in a slew of significant Supreme Court decisions – Griswold v. Connecticut, Loving v. Virginia and Eisenstadt v. Baird in '71 (which lay the groundwork for the most significant of 'em all – Roe v. Wade the following year). The biggest attitudinal change online dating brought was the shift away from thoughts of "scarcity" – no longer were young men or women limited to settling for the maximum of their local radii.

Initial computerized dating was a precursor to the sexual revolution of the late 60s and 70s (which saw the rise of the Pill, Playboy, The North American Swingers Club and "free love"), but never played a major role as the technology never properly spread beyond college campuses.

As personal computers and web access became more and more prevalent, the set of prospective mates did as well, as youth met in chatrooms and shoddily designed pages slowly started to replace classified ads in newspapers.

Slowly, the battle between paid subscription-based sites and free sites heat up and the proliferation of ultra-niche sites as massive verticalized sites like Plenty of Fish lost steam.

That's about when Slater starts to run out of material – the book turns into a profile of the background and history of the various Ivy League educated founders of modern dating services. There's little meaningful discussion about the sociological evolution of modern dating or any critical discussion of the repercussions of these services. There are a bunch of spread out choice anecdotes (particularly the experiences of a woman named Alexis) which are pretty poor.

The most interesting part of the book was Slater's discussion of his parents – students at Harvard and Mount Holyoke College – who met in the 60s through the CONTACT Personality and Preference Inventory, the first instance of a "computer dating service." A truly fascinating story, though Slater promises that the book "isn't about [him], or [his] parents" – it's about how online dating is changing the landscape and dynamics of modern relationships (it's not).

Ultimately not worth a read, barring a deep academic interest in the evolution of dating, in which case you should snag the bibliography.

[Matthew Hamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's some background information in this book that is entertaining, but, for my tastes, this book went way off course into the history of online dating and didn't provide enough discussion of the present. There is a lot of detail here about how Match.com, Plenty Of Fish, eHarmony, and OKCupid were formed, with elaborate histories tracing them back pre-inception, in some cases. Plenty Of Fish had its genesis when the founder was hired to work for LavaLife and found it to be incredibly boring work and thought he could create a better dating website. eHarmony was formed by a Neil Clark Warren who had parents who didn't match, and who barely had anything in common. Because his parents were so terrible together, Warren says he was bored to death growing up.

One of the main ideas in the book is that the rise in online dating will lead to a overall decrease in the level of commitment, where people will simply abandon a relationship that they would have stayed with pre-internet because they feel there is a more compatible person waiting for them online that they haven't met yet. This keeps the person perpetually on the serial dating treadmill, always pulling that lever, looking for the slot machine to payoff, living in a continual loop of "one more match and I'll be happy". The author feels that in the past, there used to be a more willingness for society to establish a connection with someone and then close the door, and stop looking. The internet enables that door to always be partially open, because it only takes a few seconds to log on a dating site and fire off a search for new singles in your area. If the door is always open, you're never really fully committed to the relationship you're currently in. And the author quickly points out that this approach to life makes money for the dating websites, and they are all too happy to embrace it.

Chapter Nine of the book is titled "Let's Keep This Fucker Coming Back". "Everyone knows that all personality profiling is bullshit," says Brian Bowman, who was formerly Match.com Vice President of product strategy. So if a former senior VP is saying that it's bullshit, why does Match.com aggressively sell the idea of personality profiling? The current leadership of Match doesn't answer the question. It's an interesting admission. He doesn't get paid by Match.com anymore, so now the truth can come out, apparently.

Where the book really fails is the sporadic sidetracking into the dating misadventures of a woman known only as "Alexis" who is 24, addicted to yoga, and lives in New York City. Alexis makes repellent dating choices (at one point in the book, she is dating a cocaine addict, who purchases her cocaine for Valentine's Day and draws a heart with the powder) but what is also telling about Alexis is that she keeps a dating profile on standby for moments when she is having low self esteem. She enables the profile to get men to e-mail her and gets a quick hit of self-esteem, confirming to herself that she is desirable, and then disables the profile and deletes the e-mails. This, to me, really should have been a chapter in the book by itself, which talks about people who put up hit-and-run profiles but aren't serious about dating. But the author chose to go in a different direction.

Another missed opportunity is where the book gets into cumbersome details about how Match.com, eHarmony, and other websites battle it out with their marketing strategies. I don't really care about Match's marketing strategy and to me these were wasted pages of the book that could have been spent better addressing something else.

Some people maintain that while dating profiles allow you to post text that describes yourself, few people actually read it. I thought for sure this would be discussed in the book, but there's no mention of it, other than a throwaway quote by Lloyd Price, a marketing executive at Badoo.com, who says, "There's not a lot of text, not a lot of substance. It's about appearance. And everything's very quick. Show me your photo, tell me how old you are, and let's connect."

Given the title, I was hoping the book would discuss in detail the algorithms that are used to match people, but there's not much information here. The title of the book really should have been "The origin of Match.com and eHarmony and their marketing strategies". But the publisher was clever enough to realize that title wouldn't sell any books.