History of Online Dating

In 1700, just a decade after the invention of the modern newspaper, the first matrimonial service was created. These amenities ran ads on behalf of single men and women who were desperate to find a good husband or wife.

At the time, being single past 21 carried with it a deep stigma and turning to a matrimonial service, for either sex, was seen as an act of desperation. Still, many matches developed from these services and many members of 18th-century society discovered love this way, even if it was something rarely talked about during its time.

The matrimonial services from that century were just the beginning of the pairing of technology and dating. Newspapers would also provide personal ads, which often trusted on the telephone to send/receive messages, VHS brought us video dating and, more recently, the Internet brought us online dating.

The eruption of the Internet in the mid-to-late 1990s produced a new context for personals, and by the end of the decade, they had become relatively acceptable. Even before the Web itself, bulletin boards and newsgroups held a variety of ways people could use technology to meet others with similar interests, including dating. Services such as America Online, Prodigy and eventually Craigslist offered chat rooms, forums and online classifieds of use to singles.

Though, from there, the market quickly exploded. By 1996 there existed 16 dating Web sites listed in Yahoo!, which was a directory at the time, and other powerhouses such as Friendfinder.com and OneandOnly.com had already started up.

By 2010, different dating sites were virtually in every city, sexual orientation, religion, race and almost every hobby, creating it easier to find exactly what we’re looking for and harder to stumble on someone who exists outside our pre-defined bubbles of identity.

In 2002, Wired Magazine predicted, “Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love won’t look for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because ‘the right books are found only by accident.’”

Online dating is the new model for introductions, substituting the role of traditional personals and in many cases, merging with the functions of social media. If we are going to progress the way people meet one another, we’re going to have to do so by questioning the existing paradigms of online dating and figuring out how to do it better.

References: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

http://brainz.org/