When I first put up my Match.com profile, I told myself that it painted a fairly accurate portrait of me. It seems like I was right.
At a downtown bar a couple of weekends into my online dating foray, a man approached me and asked if he knew me. "It's Megan, right?" he said.
Well, my photos were accurate enough to I.D. me in a bar. The man - we'll call him Kevin - and I had exchanged a couple of e-mails. Now here we were, sizing each other up.
This chance meeting, at a bar too lame to name, made me instantly more comfortable about potentially going on a date with Kevin. After all, he seemed personable, had a normal-looking entourage, and wasn't carrying a sub-machine gun. Surely my parents would approve?
As it turns out, seeing Kevin in person might have been a very good turning point in our fledgling online courtship.
"Something that our research has shown is just that there's something about live, face-to-face contact that's very different than any impression you get on someone's profile," says Paul Eastwick, Northwestern psychology Ph.D student who has studied speed dating.
Eastwick, who tried out Match for less than a week in 2002, says that when he and Professor Eli Finkel tried speed dating to gauge its use as a research tool, they found that they could get a good sense of a person during the four-minute interactions. Online dating, on the other hand, breaks a person into constituent parts like hobbies and hair color, which Eastwick says he has a hunch makes it harder to really get to know someone.
I get the chance to test Eastwick's theory when I meet Ray, the meringue-loving engineer, for coffee. In person, Ray and I don't really discuss dancing, which was featured heavily in his profile, or music videos, which I mention in mine. This seems to fit with what Eastwick told me. After all, I don't spend all my time talking about Spike Jonze's pet projects.
Ray won brownie points not only for listening patiently to why post-war Europe is so cool to study, but also because he quickly initiated the coffee date. While most of my interactions with potential matches stagnated thanks to stilted AOL Instant Messenger conversations, my interaction with Ray instantly became more three-dimensional.
2008 Woodie Awards
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