Most of us have a great difficult time finding that someone to share our lives with. Devoting ourselves to our careers doesn’t leave us any time to waste on bars and clubs. Blind dates rarely lead to anything good, and so we’ve all given online dating a consideration. Online dating in theory is a perfect way to meet someone. It’s cheap, it saves time, you can do it in your pyjamas and even those of us who are shy have a fair chance in the dating arena. However in its current condition, online dating is a complete waste of time, money and energy. And here’s why:
Misrepresentation and Fake profiles
We’ve all heard the horror stories and the clichés of people lying about who they are on dating websites. From married people to con artists to ghost profiles, these sites are full of fake profiles because they focus on membership fees and on quantity instead of quality.
Many sites even intentionally create fake profiles to look busy and to attract unsuspecting singles to their gates where anonymity creates anarchy. Even honest people don’t mind bending the truth when they hide behind a computer screen and a nickname.
Meat Market Atmosphere
Another problem with online dating is the meat market atmosphere that presides there. Most of them (not all) are built in such a way that leads you to scan through thousands of pictures before you get to know anything about the person on the other side. How many potential partners have you missed doing this? Can you read them all? Have you been passed over by your soul mate because you didn’t have a good digital photograph at that moment?
Scanning through thousands of pictures creates a cheap, club like environment. It may be ok for some people but for those of us that are looking for something more than a one night stand it’s a waste of time.
Very Few Relevant Singles
Let’s face it. The kind of person you would ideally like to meet is not found on these dating sites. We’ll assume for a second that you’re a busy executive or a career oriented professional that is educated and established. I’m guessing that like most people you would like to find someone as educated and established as yourself. Online dating sites are full of unemployed, uneducated and uncivilized people. Looking for a likeminded partner on these sites would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, especially when needles stay away from these haystacks.
Privacy Risks and being a target for scams
When you sign up to an online dating service they make you sign a legal agreement, and the very fine print states that they are allowed to use your picture and information for advertising. So your most intimate information and private life could be potentially plastered all over the internet. In fact, most of the big players in the industry will use your picture on their homepage and make your profile searchable by Google. Would you want your clients, co workers, students or secretary stumbling across your profile accidentally? And let’s not forget the infamous Nigerian scam that targets North American singles. There are people whose full time job is to come to an office/internet cafe and try to con unsuspecting romantics out of their hard earned money. And why wouldn’t they do it? Anyone can sign up, dating sites don’t police the registrations and the worst thing that could happen to these con artists is a deletion of their fake profile.
What could the dating industry do to fix all that?
Imagine that online dating websites actually checked that people are who they say they are. If we eliminate anonymity we’ll eliminate anarchy. They could also enforce this by making them legally bound to be honest at the agreement stage. (Better than making singles sell their soul)
We could fix the privacy problem by making profiles private and showing them only to a few carefully selected and pre screened matches. A dating site would also have to devote a larger percentage of it’s income towards security.
How would we solve the needle in a haystack problem? How about, we only let needles in. We’ll make people apply to this hypothetical super site and accept only established and educated people.
How would we solve the meat market problem? One idea is to put more focus on the profile and personality by forcing people to read the profile before they get to the picture and voila no more scanning through pictures, and you’re not just another internet page.
Now it’s all very nice to imagine, but the big dating sites would NEVER shut their doors to a huge portion of the population it just wouldn’t be profitable.
But wait, this article in the national post titled “How to date a stockbroker who drives a jaguar” claims that there is a service like that. A virtual matchmaking for executives, with security features, privacy, who verify people’s identity and are oriented towards serious members.
How can they afford to stay operational? I guess they’ll have to resort to shameless self promotion on internet blogs. 
