Love in the Time of Algorithms

What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating

By: Dan Slater

Narrated by: Walter Dixon

"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 problems: 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 30s and 40s. 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.

©2013 Dan Slater (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

"From the hilariously awkward beginings of Harvard's computer-dating industry to the groovy Miami parties of the profession today, Slater expertly leads us through the biggest reshuffle in courtship in our lifetime (from here, the '60s and '70s look like Jane Austen). An astute investigation of the way technology may have remade the most important aspect of existence: love." (Vanessa Grigoriadis, contributing editor, New York Magazine)

Heavy on anecdotes, light on algorithms

Any additional comments?

I've been participating in the world of online dating recently. Subconsciously, I think I picked this one up as a self-help book, but it clearly isn't. I did learn valuable information, however, about the various websites and strategies out there. Included was a sort of history of dating, from the 20th to the 21st century. How the automobile and contraception changed things, etc. There is also a long chapter dedicated to the mail order bide phenomenon, and Colombian "premium foreign dating" or whatever it's called. That was kind of disturbing.

I mostly got the feeling that author was trying to report facts without too much bias. You know, journalism. Sometimes, though, Slater would focus on describing a person's look, or personality, instead of who they are and what they did. Creative license, I suppose, but also colorful bias.

I get thirsty for science when reading pop culture books like this. The title had the word "algorithms" on it, so I expected the book to cover some of that. It did give an overview of OK Cupid's system, which is fascinating, but I didn't learn anything new from it.