YOU HAD
ME @ LOL
dream of joining an online dating site, but carried out her latest
courtship through retweets, “follows,” “@ mentions” and even
continued onto a crowdfunding
website before finally meeting her
“Twitter crush” in person.
Or 28-year-old Danielle (a.k.a.
“WestVillageDanielle”), who would
sooner give up the internet than
online date, yet tried for weeks to
track down a man on MenuPages
who posted a witty review of a terrible Chinese restaurant.
And then there’s Rayco García,
28, and Nuria Sendra, 35, a Spanish couple who met on Instagram
following a sticker giveaway for
fans of the photo-sharing app.
Though the two had “never considered using websites for dating,”
García sent a message to Sendra
explaining why he deserved the
prize. She thought it was “funny”
and the two continued their correspondence. Lengthy Facebook
messaging sessions and video
chats on Apple’s FaceTime turned
into García trekking 1,200 miles
to visit Sendra in the south of
Spain. They’re now moving to
Barcelona together.
“Online dating to me is not
online dating anymore. It’s social
dating and it’s a social experi-
HUFFINGTON
10.14.12
ence,” says Julie Spira, author of
The Perils of Cyber-Dating and a
professional online dating coach.
The internet has become the
second most common way for
American couples to meet, just
after being introduced by friends,
according to a 2012 Stanford University study. But not all couples
who find each other online do so
through designated dating services and sites like Facebook,
Twitter and even LinkedIn are
increasingly doing double-duty
as both social networks and soul
mate networks. Of partners who
coupled up before 2000, less than
10 percent said they had met on
social networking sites. Five years
later, that number had doubled to
21 percent, a University of Oxford
paper reported last year.
Meanwhile, though online
dating sites have seen their
membership grow steadily over
the past several years, the share
of married couples who met
via an online dating service remained unchanged between
2007 and 2010 at 17 percent,
according to research commissioned by Match.com.
Of course, the web has been a
meat market since its inception,
fostering flirtations on message