-
sponsorship
As someone who spent a good swath of her 20s happily trolling online dating sites, I was intrigued by this post on OKTrends, the stats-tastic blog from the founders of romance-and-quizzes site OKCupid.
The founders—all math majors from Harvard—dipped into their dataset
and analyzed 7,000 profile pictures to figure out which images were the
most successful. Some of the most interesting tidbits ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
-
sponsorship
Hanna,
I am the product of the “simpler” '50s dating culture. My parents were
young, hot for each other, met their families' requirements of looks
(her) and potential earning capacity (him), and married at ages 19 and
20. Their union produced four children, lasted 20 years, and was a
nightmare for all concerned. So I do not share David Brooks’ nostalgia
for a time when dating had ‘guardrails.' I dated for decades in the
pre-cell phone era, and it wasn’t technology that gave me an ironic,
contingent feeling about my adventures. One of my male friends once
said to me, “Sometimes I think you deliberately go on bad dates just so
you have a story to tell” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
-
sponsorship
A new book by Arianne Cohen says that estrogen correlates to shortness.
Testosterone correlates to height. Though I spent my ‘tween years in a
steady hunch—the better to hear my wee male classmates—the idea of
taking hormonal treatments to squelch normal growth seems medieval ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
-
sponsorship
An interesting new study reported on by Science Daily suggests that evolutionary psychologists might be wrong to speculate that women are choosier than men about mates... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
-
sponsorship
Willa, you bring up a great point about the attempts and failures by movies and TV shows to capture courtship and romance as it actually exists in 2009, in all its technological glory. That Drew Barrymore speech from He's Just Not That Into You annoyed me, too, because it's Just Not That accurately getting at the issue. For me, the problem isn't fear of rejection via "different portals." When a conversation meanders from Facebook to e-mails to texts to phone calls, I'm not really all that conscious that the portal is shifting. The problem is that, because of all the portals, the bar for rejection has gone from pole vault to hurdle to metal beam lying on the ground. We've come to expect constant communication and instant responses, which means that five minutes of waiting for a reply from a guy (via whatever) can be agonizing. The other day, I actually instructed gchat never to show my boyfriend in my list of friends, because I couldn't handle seeing that green "available" ball next to his name without wondering why he wasn't responding to that e-mail I'd sent him a few hours earlier. (After a few minutes I realized I was being crazy. But you see my point.)
If these new movies and shows don't capture the way love has changed in the era of smartphones, are there better examples out there? Surely not the early attempts like You've Got Mail (does anyone actually read IMs aloud while typing them?). Quarterlife and Gossip Girl seem to understand how people actually use their computers and cell phones, but both treat all things social as if they are tied to a single Web presence, which isn't quite right either. The stars of One Tree Hill
are too incestuous to bother with dating sites and too up in one another's faces to need cell phones or e-mail. And on Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs they're still using pagers!
Has anyone actually seen a movie or TV show that does this well—shows people meeting and communicating online or by cell in a way that doesn't make you cringe? Accepting nominations in The Fray!
-
sponsorship
Does dating ever change? That's the question hovering around ABC's newest dramedy Cupid, about a man who's either the god of love or a delusional crazy who thinks he is. The show, which premieres tonight, stars Bobby Cannavale as Trevor, the maybe-god on a mission to match 100 couples, and Sarah Paulson as Claire, the supremely grounded love interest/celebrity shrink/court appointed guardian with whom he trades witty banter, heartfelt epiphanies and mixed drinks. The show's central tension isn't whether Trevor's really Cupid (he's probably Cupid), but whether Trevor's faith in the big romantic gesture and love at first sight is a better—more powerful, more helpful, more successful—approach to relationships than Claire's level-headed belief in mutual respect and taking it slow. In other words, does a guy schooled on love and dating 3,000 years ago know more about matchmaking than an MD schooled by the Ivy League and Oprah? The show's answer is usually yes: Claire really needs to lighten up.
But dating has changed—not just in, erhm, the last 3,000 years, but in the 11 years since Cupid first aired. Fourteen episodes of the series, with Jeremy Piven (so charming once!) and Paula Marshall in the lead roles were broadcast in 1998 (you can watch them here). Except for a new cast and a move from Chicago to New York, Cupid has weathered its hiatus more or less intact—and that's too bad, because this little thing called the Internet took off in the interim and it really shook up how lovelorn strangers meet and interact with one another.
In both the original and current series, Claire runs a singles group where Trevor finds the heartsick men and women he eventually pairs off. In the old series that was an acceptable narrative trick. Now it's implausible. If Cupid were a mortal he wouldn't be bothering with small-fry gatherings, he'd be running a dating site. Maybe one called something like... Okcupid.com?
The cloying speech Drew Barrymore gave in He's Just Not That Into You ("I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work so I called him at home and then he emailed me to my blackberry so I texted to his cell, so now you have to go around checking all these different portals to get rejected. It's exhausting") irked, but it was onto something. Technology has made dating, and the manners of dating, newly strange. Cupid gives all this fresh weirdness a pass because it's shackled to 1998, a not-so-distant past that's long gone. Cupid's not lacking all charm (it's made by the same guy who wrote Veronica Mars after all), but it's not nearly as interesting, or relevant, as it could be.
-
sponsorship
In a weekend New York Times op-ed on hook-up culture in high schools and colleges, Charles M. Blow writes as if casual sex instead of dating is a new-millennium thing: "Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay. ... When I first heard about hooking up years ago, I figured that it was a fad that would soon fizzle. I was wrong. It seems to be becoming the norm."
It's not so new, Mr. Blow. From the Vows column from this weekend's NYT, on a couple who met in 1975, married in 1985, divorced in 1995, and remarried on Nov. 29:
They first went "moon eyed" for each other in 1975, skipping past the dating phase, and, in the spirit of the times, jumping into a live-in relationship.
"People didn't date," remembered Ms. Kallir, 54. "You hung out and then you slept together."