My parents had an arranged marriage. This always fascinated me. I am perpetually indecisive about even the most mundane things, and I couldn\u2019t imagine navigating such a huge life decision so quickly.<\/p>\n
I asked my dad about this experience, and here\u2019s how he described it: he told his parents he was ready to get married, so his family arranged meetings with three neighboring families. The first girl, he said, was \u201ca little too tall,\u201d and the second girl was \u201ca little too short.\u201d Then he met my mom. He quickly deduced that she was the appropriate height (finally!), and they talked for about 30 minutes. They decided it would work. A week later, they were married.<\/p>\n
And they still are, 35 years later. Happily so\u2014and probably more so than most people I know who had nonarranged marriages. That\u2019s how my dad decided on the person with whom he was going to spend the rest of his life.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s look at how I do things, maybe with a slightly less important decision, like the time I had to pick where to eat dinner in Seattle when I was on tour last year. First I texted four friends who travel and eat out a lot and whose judgment I trust. I checked the website Eater for its Heat Map, which includes new, tasty restaurants in the city. Then I checked Yelp. And GQ\u2019s online guide to Seattle. Finally I made my selection: Il Corvo, an Italian place that sounded amazing. Unfortunately, it was closed. (It only served lunch.) At that point I had run out of time because I had a show to do, so I ended up making a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich on the bus. The stunning fact remained: it was quicker for my dad to find a wife than it is for me to decide where to eat dinner.<\/p>\n
This kind of rigor goes into a lot of my decisionmaking. Whether it\u2019s where I\u2019m eating, where I\u2019m traveling or, God forbid, something I\u2019m buying, like a lot of people in my generation\u2014those in their 20s and 30s\u2014I feel compelled to do a ton of research to make sure I\u2019m getting every option and then making the best choice. If this mentality pervades our decision\u00admaking in so many realms, is it also affecting how we choose a romantic partner?<\/p>\n
The question nagged at me\u2014not least because of my own experiences watching promising relationships peter out over text message\u2014so I set out on a mission. I read dozens of studies about love, how people connect and why they do or don\u2019t stay together. I quizzed the crowds at my stand-up comedy shows about their own love lives. People even let me into the private world of their phones to read their romantic texts aloud onstage. I learned of the phenomenon of \u201cgood enough\u201d marriage, a term social anthropologists use to describe marriages that were less about finding the perfect match than a suitable candidate whom the family approved of for the couple to embark on adulthood together.<\/p>\n
And along with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, co-author of my new book, I conducted focus groups with hundreds of people across the country and around the world, grilling participants on the most intimate details of how they look for love and why they\u2019ve had trouble finding it. Eric and I weren\u2019t digging into \u00adsingledom\u2014we were trying to chip away at the changing state of love.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s generations are looking (exhaustively) for soul mates, whether we decide to hit the altar or not, and we have more opportunities than ever to find them. The biggest changes have been brought by the $2.4 billion online-\u00addating industry, which has exploded in the past few years with the arrival of dozens of mobile apps. Throw in the fact that people now get married later in life than ever before, turning their early 20s into a relentless hunt for more romantic options than previous generations could have ever imagined, and you have a recipe for romance gone haywire.<\/p>\n
In the course of our research, I also discovered something surprising: the winding road from the classified section of yore to Tinder has taken an unexpected turn. Our phones and texts and apps might just be bringing us full circle, back to an old-fashioned version of courting that is closer to what my own parents experienced than you might guess.<\/p>\n
Where Bozos Are Studs<\/strong><\/p>\n Today, if you own a smartphone, you\u2019re carrying a 24-7 singles bar in your pocket. As of this writing, 38% of Americans who describe themselves as \u201csingle and looking\u201d have used an online-\u00addating site. It\u2019s not just my \u00adgeneration\u2014boomers are as likely as college kids to give online dating a whirl. Almost a quarter of online daters find a spouse or long-term partner that way.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to see why online dating has taken off. It provides you with a seemingly endless supply of people who are single and looking to date. Let\u2019s say you\u2019re a woman who wants a 28-year-old man who\u2019s 5 ft. 10 in., has brown hair, lives in Brooklyn, is a member of the Baha\u2019i faith and loves the music of Naughty by Nature. Before online dating, this would have been a fruitless quest, but now, at any time of the day, no matter where you are, you are just a few screens away from sending a message to your very specific dream man.<\/p>\n There are downsides with online dating, of course. Throughout all our interviews\u2014and in research on the subject\u2014this is a consistent finding: in online dating, women get a ton more attention than men. Even a guy at the highest end of attractiveness barely receives the number of messages almost all women get. But that doesn\u2019t mean that men end up standing alone in the corner of the online bar. On the Internet, there are no lonely corners. Take Derek, a regular user of OkCupid who lives in New York City. What I\u2019m about to say is going to sound very mean, but Derek is a pretty boring guy. Medium height, thinning brown hair, nicely dressed and personable, but not immediately magnetic or charming. If he walked into a bar, you\u2019d probably go, \u201cOh, there\u2019s a white guy.\u201d<\/p>\n At our focus group on online dating in Manhattan, Derek got on OkCupid and let us watch as he went through his options. These were women whom OkCupid had selected as potential matches for him based on his profile and the site\u2019s algorithm. The first woman he clicked on was very beautiful, with a witty profile page, a good job and lots of shared interests, including a love of sports. After looking the page over for a minute or so, Derek said, \u201cWell, she looks O.K. I\u2019m just gonna keep looking for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n I asked what was wrong, and he replied, \u201cShe likes the Red Sox.\u201d I was completely shocked. I couldn\u2019t believe how quickly he had moved on. Imagine the Derek of 20 years ago, finding out that this beautiful, charming woman was a real possibility for a date. If she were at a bar and smiled at him, Derek of 1993 would have melted. He wouldn\u2019t have walked up and said, \u201cOh, wait, you like the Red Sox?! No thank you!\u201d before putting his hand in her face and turning away. But Derek of 2013 simply clicked an X on a web-browser tab and deleted her without thinking twice. Watching him comb through those profiles, it became clear that online, every bozo could now be a stud.<\/p>\n But dealing with this new digital romantic world can be a lot of work. Answering messages, filtering profiles\u2014it\u2019s not always fun. Priya, 27, said she\u2019d recently deleted her Tinder and other online-\u00addating accounts. \u201cIt just takes too long to get to just the first date. I feel like it\u2019s way more effective utilizing your social groups,\u201d she said. \u201cI would rather put myself in those social situations than get exhausted.\u201d For Priya, as for so many of the online daters we met in different cities, the process had morphed from something fun and exciting into a source of stress and dread.<\/p>\n Even the technological advances of the past few years are pretty absurd. You can stand in line at the grocery store and swipe through 60 people\u2019s faces on Tinder while you wait to buy hamburger buns. (Note: The best hamburger buns are Martin\u2019s Potato Rolls. Trust me!) That\u2019s 20 times as many people as my dad met on his marriage journey. In the history of our species, no group has ever had as many romantic options as we have now.<\/p>\n Soul Mate vs. Laundry Detergent<\/strong><\/p>\n In theory, more options are better, right? Wrong. Psychology professor Barry Schwartz, famous for his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice, divided us into two types of people: \u201csatisficers\u201d (those who satisfy and then suffice) and \u201cmaximizers,\u201d who seek out the best.<\/p>\n Thanks to smartphones and the Internet, our options are unlimited, whether it\u2019s a retail item or a romantic possibility. We have all become maximizers. When I think back to that sad peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich I had in Seattle, this idea resonates with me. Besides gasoline, it\u2019s nearly impossible for me to think of anything I won\u2019t put in time for to find the best. I\u2019m a maximizer for just about everything. Tacos? You better believe. Candles? If you only knew how good the candles in my house smell.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to find and get the best, so why not do it? If you are in a big city or on an online-\u00addating site, you are now comparing your potential partners not just to other potential partners but rather to an idealized person to whom no one could \u00admeasure up.<\/p>\n But people don\u2019t always know what they\u2019re looking for in a soul mate, unlike when they\u2019re picking something easier, like laundry detergent.<\/p>\n While we may think we know what we want, we\u2019re often wrong. As recounted in Dan Slater\u2019s history of online dating, Love in the Time of Algorithms, the first online-\u00addating services tried to find matches for clients based almost exclusively on what clients said they wanted. But pretty soon they realized that the kind of partner people said they were looking for didn\u2019t match up with the kind of partner they were actually interested in.<\/p>\n Amarnath Thombre, Match.com\u2019s president, discovered this by analyzing the discrepancy between the characteristics people said they wanted in a romantic partner (age, religion, hair color and the like) and the characteristics of the people whom they contacted on the site. When you watched their actual browsing habits\u2014who they looked at and contacted\u2014they went way outside of what they said they wanted.<\/p>\n When I was writing stand-up about online dating, I filled out the forms for dummy accounts on several dating sites just to get a sense of the questions and what the process was like. The person I described was a little younger than me, small, with dark hair. My girlfriend now, whom I met through friends, is two years older, about my height\u2014O.K., slightly taller\u2014and blond. She wouldn\u2019t have made it through the filters I set up.<\/p>\n A big part of online dating is spent on this process, though\u2014setting your filters, sorting through profiles and going through a mandatory checklist of what you think you are looking for. People take these parameters very seriously. They declare that their mate \u201cmust love dogs\u201d or that their mate \u201cmust love the film Must Love Dogs,\u201d about a preschool teacher (Diane Lane) who tries online dating and specifies that her match \u201cmust love dogs.\u201d (I looked it up on Wikipedia.)<\/p>\n