After my uncle’s recent divorce, he was eager to get back into the dating world and meet some new women. As a well-off man in his mid-50’s, he was a “catch” and therefore knew he would have no problem getting a date. In order to make his search process easier though, he went to match.com and met many women through it. He started talking to them and after speaking with them for a couple weeks, he picked three of the best ones to start dating. Although he had only been communicating through the Internet until this point, he was able to find out many things about these women beforehand so he felt extremely comfortable with them once they finally met in person. After a few dates with each other them, my uncle chose Anne, a warm, kind, intelligent woman, to date exclusively. They have now been together for about six months and are extremely happy with one another.
My uncle claims that although he thought the other women he started dating were perfectly nice, they weren’t completely true to what he initially thought they would be like based on their communication online. This shows that the Hyperpersonal model got in the way of his impression formation. Through the over-attribution process, he made assumptions about these women that turned out to be not true and were ultimately disappointments. Also, the women chose to selectively present themselves to only show their most positive qualities. After meeting these women though, my uncle saw that they were not as amazing as he had thought. The only one that held up to his assumptions and actually surpassed his expectations was Anne, who entertained him and used her warm tone and friendly manner to really attract him to her.
Therefore, in this case, the Internet meeting provided an advantage when the woman came off as even more impressive in Ftf. They did not communicate long enough online to really develop a complete relationship before meeting, which did not allow all the impressions to be formed accurately or fully. Since Anne portrayed herself in a way true to herself, however, it turned out to be a great advantage when finally meeting and my uncle realized her full beauty inside and out.
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2 comments:
Online dating sites are a really interesting paradigm to study because it is extremely hard to measure success rates. In many if not most cases, people will leave the space once they have found a successful partner so the website that consistently makes successful matches probably has a decreasing user base which is counterproductive to the website’s survival. There is also the notion of those who stay active in the online dating environment are generally more unsuccessful in their dating attempts which can be attributed to character flaws or other negative aspects. So in a way, dating websites must work to match people who will have a successful and enjoyable time but will choose not to stay together. This will let them eventually return to the dating site because they were happy about their experience but were still looking to meet other people. In your uncle’s case, his success comes at the expense of the dating site. You did a good job relating the Hyperpersonal model to the situation.
Hey Rachel, great post. I like that you chose to interpret someone else's experiences of modality switching. I find the online dating world to be very interesting because in the beginning everyone seemed to be so unsure about it but I really have heard so many success stories. I think this does fit in well with your discussion of the Hyperpersonal Model because of the over-attribution process, and I think it's interesting that this process worked for him on a comparative basis with three different women as opposed to just one. I also think this fits well with Ramirez and Wangs article in that their CMC interactions were quite short, which led to more positive impressions in a FtF setting because the impressions aren't fully formed yet and the people haven't over-attributed too much to a point beyond return. Overall great discussion, and I'm glad it all worked out for your uncle!
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