Internet dating: simulation for a sales funnel

Love and sex in the post-reality era - pt I of n, where n is a currently unknown integer

Don’t be having ideas about sleeping with me, you monster [Credit: The Beguiling of Merlin by Edward Burne-Jones 1870-something]

Somewhat obsessive rumination on the absence of honesty in a complex advanced culture continues. The beginnings of it were here.

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But it only gets worse, with more scrutiny. Perhaps nowhere worse than in the world of online dating.

I've been dipping in and out of it again and noticing how banal most of the online commentary, opinion and reportage about it typically is (a function of ‘Google as conformity machine’ - another forthcoming piece I’m wrestling with).

Most of 'content' about internet dating drops into 3 inevitable categories of advice (how-to's), reviews (where-to's) and entertainment (real-life stories).

Do a Google search on the success rates for enduring relationships (perhaps not as good as you're led to believe) and you'll be greeted with endless intro lines about how online dating isn't for losers because so many people are doing it.

This is not one of those.

As a copious daily note writer I've amassed enough on the topic to publish a series here, exploring various facets of this approach to finding someone for something that I’ve not seen explored elsewhere. But this particular post is mostly personal  and explores why I've concluded that it's among the most pernicious deceptions engineered for financial gain in my lifetime.

Including when it gets results, which it consistently does for me. Goodness knows what it must be like for those who get nowhere with it.

As it is, my cynicism needle has run out of dial. And that cynicism is directed inwardly as much as anywhere.

Don't expect incel vibes. I do OK with it, so there's no moaning about it being hard to get laid or find companionship. There are other places for all that nonsense, like dating-related sub-Reddits filled with whinging, whining and horror stories, if you like that kind of thing.

                                                      [That offer runs out soon]

Let’s start with the core truth that every user knows ...

The moment you join a dating site you become a product, with a market value.

The product tiers range between clearance sale to premium.

I'm a lower mid-range product (late middle age, not earning much, own home, good health, no impressive assets, verbally articulate and I estimate between 5 and 7 in terms of physical appeal, depending on the day).

There is also a transaction process. You are in a marketing and sales funnel the whole time. This necessarily shapes every aspect of supposedly being you.

Many of the products come with a boilerplate description in the space on the page where we are invited to write the sales pitch.

Because it is essentially a commercial process, rather than the organically-derived moments of connection and spark that arise in the real world, these tend to be stultifying and flattening. A supposedly unique person must be formatted into an allotted space, rather than experienced as the energy we feel from another's presence.

To ship most conveniently, the products must be packaged as neatly as possible. No sharp edges or vulnerably soft parts can be exposed.

Consequently, these boilerplates seem mostly interchangeable, so that the only real way of categorising people as prospects or not is how they look.

In a characteristically smug and unkind way that I sometimes feel I could 'work on', I marvel at how people are 'equally at home' doing this or that, when 'this' and 'that' are as ubiquitous and unsurprising as gravity and breathing. And how people who like to fly places for a change of scene call it 'travel', to make it sound more dynamic than just going on holiday or visiting different places to look at different things.

[Aside: This is just the women. I cannot speak of how men present or interact. I've often wondered about creating a fake female persona, with an AI-generated image, to see what the parasocial phase of the customer journey is really like for women, but something in me balks at that.

Maybe part of that reluctance is that (as you'll already sense) internet dating brings out the worst in me without taking the active step of intentionally setting out to be a dick.

This 'worst in me' is a cool calculatedness and judgementalism that is fundamentally identical to that which I feel when choosing things on Amazon.]

I keep having to remind myself that there is an actual person behind the advert I just rolled my eyes at, with its string of cliches (a red flag fluttering breezily on the majority of offers) and the seemingly inevitable headshot framed across a restaurant table featuring someone poised to eat dessert (this by far the most common image women in my search bracket use somewhere in their ‘profile’ - and notably always the sweet course or a cocktail, never the mains, which I feel must be significant).

I am conscious of a certain fragility in my core humanity as I scan these shelves. It is a constant reminder to hold tight to compassion and warmth in the face of relentlessly uninteresting and unoriginal promotional materials and certain knowledge of the inevitable compromises inherent in a 'buy now, pay later' offer.

That moment in the film when the hero exclaims "Soylent Green is people!" comes to mind.

Internet dating is a reminder of how easily I could have been a genuinely awful person. Or am already, at some level.

But if that browsing phase is dehumanising, it only sets the scene for worse to come.

The marketing and parasocial interaction phase.