Social media: Latest online-dating trend
Social networks are becoming the new matchmakers
Scoping profiles to meet mates.
Teresa Dowell-Vest and Michelle Alexander fell in love through a status update.
The Washington, D.C., couple had gazed at photos of each other while commenting on Facebook updates of acquaintances. They added each other as friends. One day, DowellVest, 42, reminisced about her grade school T rapper Keeper folder.
Alexander pounced, finding a photo online of a similar folder. She posted it to the status update. DowellVest’s heart danced.
“And itwas all she wrote fromthere,” Alexander said.
They recently were married at Meridian Hill Park in Northwest Washington.
With studies showing that one-third of married couples started their relationships online, finding romance via URLs is no longer as novel— and creepy— as it seemed when dating sites launched in the mid-1990s.
But nowthe digital aisle to marriage is transforming, moving from dating sites to social networks, where couples say encounters are more revealing and, with witty tweets and thoughtful status updates, more like flirting in the analog world. And they’re free.
“You can follow someone over time and see consistency in character,” said Alexander, a 40-year-old writer and activist. “You can sit back and watch to see if it’s someone youwant to reach out to.”
Arecent study titled “First Comes Social Networking, Then Comes Marriage?” found that nearly 21 percent of people who discovered their spouses online and got married between 2005 and 2012 met through social networking sites, representing about the same amount of people who met offline through school.
“What’s amazing is that this has basically happened without anyone really noticing,” said JeffHall, a University of Kansas expert on flirting styles and the author of the study. “The idea that social networking, without anyone researching it, without anyone even paying attention to it, could be this important— I was very surprised.”
Many of the marriages in Hall’s study had their roots in early social networks such as Myspace and Classmates.com, before Facebook and Twitter’s rise. Friending, dating, cohabitating, proposing and finally getting married can take years, so Hall thinks social networking’s more recent hold on our daily lives means a bigwave of marriages is yet to come.
Analysts say it’s still too soon to know whether dating sites such as Match.com or OK Cupid should be worried. The U.S. dating industry, now dominated by online services, is expected to be worth $2.3 billion by 2016, meaning the market could be big enough for many players. And experts caution that there is some research showing that heavy social network use can lead to stress and jealousy in relationships.
But such is the seduction of social network love that Laurie Davis, the founder of eFlirt Expert, a prominent consulting company that helps singles write better dating website profiles, got married last month in Boston to aman she met on Twitter.
Their wedding was decorated with 4,000 little Twitter birds cut out of paper. Table names were hashtags such as #tweetheart displayed on iPads. Guests were encouraged to tweet, not put their phones away. “Our #lovestory began in 140 characters on Twitter with the flick of a retweet,” the couple wrote in an online compilation of the tweets.
“Beautiful night,” one guest tweeted. “Beautiful #wedding.”
As if theywere on a strip of bars in a college town, potential lovers are finding each other on just about every online gathering place. Searching Twitter for the phrase “found my boyfriend on (insert social network)” turns up stories of love found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tinder (which links people by location) and even Bitstrips (a social network where users draw themselves in comic strips).
What fascinates communication researchers is how social networks are able to connect potential lovers who circulate in similar worlds, with similar interests and backgrounds. Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms suggest that users add friends of friends or disparate members of organized groups, such as alumni organizations or sports groups.
After they met, Alexander and Dowell-Vest realized they had often been to the same events and parties.
“Had she just come over to the bar a little sooner,” said Dowell-Vest, a filmmaker and writer.
Laura Olin and James Hupp, both 32, met on Twitter. He’s a digital content strategist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She works in digital campaigns; most prominently, shewas the voice behind President Barack Obama’s Twitter account during the 2012 election. One day several years ago, Hupp tweeted that hewas looking for a good D.C. political movie that wasn’t “All the President’s Men.”
Olin replied, suggesting “The More the Merrier,” a comedy from1943.
He started following her. And they began exchanging tweets.
Their online courtship was long and halting. They bumped into each other at parties, but therewere no initial sparks. At one point, Olin unfollowed him and deleted many of her tweets as she began working on Obama’s campaign.
“I didn’t knowwhat to do,” Hupp said. “I really didn’t think therewas anything I could do.”
One day she followed him again. Their common friends, seeing love in their Twitter streams, encouraged them to get together. Finally, they began dating in March 2013.
Hupp had signed up for OK Cupid but never really did anything with it.
“Itwas too direct, like I’m just going to showup here and start dating someone,” he said. “It was weird.” With Twitter, “it just happens to be another place where you were gathering with other human beings, and so sometimes you meet someone. It’s because itwas an accident that it worked.”
Dating experts and communication researchers say social networks offer clues — shared news links that reveal interests, pictures from daily life, howpeople interact with friends— that dating profiles don’t typically expose. And activity there tends to be more honest. Some 54 percent of online daters suspect people have misrepresented themselves in profiles, according to a Pew study.
“Dating profiles are a one-time snapshot of what they want you to think of them,” said Alexander, who didn’t have any luck on dating sites because she “met crazy people on them — literally crazy people.”
And Hall, the University of Kansas researcher, said dating profiles have away of limiting choices.
“It’s like relationship shopping: Iwill have one of those and one of those,” he said. “You’re looking at very narrow criteria like physical appearance and age. You can diminish your quality of choices.
“Social networks weren’t designed thisway. As a consequence, you get to know people in a less contrived way. You get an accurate impression.”
Dowell-Vest and Alexander would agree.
Last year, an illness in Dowell-Vest’s family had them spending long hours at a hospital. Alexander impressed her partner’s family by packing enough food that nobody would have to leave the hospital room. Dowell-Vest was overwhelmed with love and ready to propose. She enlisted some of their friends to get candles and meet them that night at a park, where she took Alexander for a walk.
Alexander sawthe candles approaching but didn’t realize whatwas happening. Then she saw it was their friends.
Dowell-Vest got down on one knee and proposed, a moment captured on You Tube (of course). Alexander accepted.
“Itwas perfect,” she said.