Many men and women now spend the decades of their twenties and thirties sampling each other’s sexual wares and engaging in fits of serial out-of-wedlock domesticity, never finding a marriageable partner.
But how, then, do people find out about each other? Few self-possessed people with an Internet connection could resist answering that question with one word: Google. “To google”—now an acceptable if ill-begotten verb—is the practice of typing a person’s name into an Internet search engine to find out what the world knows and says about him or her. As one writer confessed in the New York Observer, after meeting an attractive man at a midtown bar: “Like many of my twentysomething peers in New York’s dating jungle, I have begun to use Google.com, as well as other online search engines, to perform secret background checks on potential mates. It’s not perfect, but it’s a discreet way of obtaining important, useless and sometimes bizarre information about people in Manhattan—and it’s proven to be as reliable as the scurrilous gossip you get from friends.”
In sum, transparency does not guarantee trust. It can, in fact, prove effective at eroding it—especially when the expectation of transparency and the available technological tools nudge the suspicious to engage in more invasive forms of investigation or surveillance.
The other destructive tendency our technologies encourage is over-sharing—that is, revealing too much, too quickly, in the hope of connecting to another person. The opportunities for instant communication are so ubiquitous—e-mail, instant messaging, chatrooms, cell phones, Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, and the like—that the notion of making ourselves unavailable to anyone is unheard of, and constant access a near-requirement.
The inevitable result is a repeal of the reticence necessary for fostering successful relationships in the long term. Information about another person is best revealed a bit at a time, in a give-and-take exchange, not in a rush of overexposed feeling.
Today we catalog the influence of hormones, pheromones, dopamine, and serotonin in human attraction, and map our own brains to discover which synapses trigger laughter, lying, or orgasm. Evolutionary psychology explains our desire for symmetrical faces and fertile-looking forms, even as it has little to tell us about the extremes to which we are taking its directives with plastic surgery. Scientific study of our communication patterns and techniques explains why it is we talk the way we do. Even the activities of the bedroom are thoroughly analyzed and professionalized, as women today take instruction from a class of professionals whose arts used to be less esteemed. Prostitutes now run sex seminars, for example, and a recent episode of Oprah featured exotic pole dancers who teach suburban housewives how to titillate their husbands by turning the basement rec room into a simulacrum of a Vegas showgirl venue.
Science continues to turn sex (and, by association, love and romance) into something quantifiable and open to manipulation and solution. Science and technology offer us pharmaceuticals to enhance libido and erectile function, and popular culture responds by rigorously ranking and discussing all matters sexual
“Communications technologies indeed multiply options,” says Huyke. “An increase in options, however, does not imply or even serve an advance in communications.”
But we have been “test driving” something: a new, technological method of courtship. And although it is too soon to deliver a final verdict, it is clear that it is a method prone to serious problems. The efficiency of our new techniques and their tendency to focus on people as products leaves us at risk of understanding ourselves this way, too—like products with certain malfunctioning parts and particular assets. But products must be constantly improved upon and marketed.
Ironically, the Internet, which offers many opportunities to meet and communicate with new people, robs us of the ability to deploy one of our greatest charms—nonverbal communication. The emoticon is a weak substitute for a coy gesture or a lusty wink. More fundamentally, our technologies encourage a misunderstanding of what courtship should be. Real courtship is about persuasion, not marketing, and the techniques of the laboratory cannot help us translate the motivations of the heart.
Romance in the Information Age
By Christine Rosen
