Why is The Online World of College Dating Dangerous?

Online college dating is simple and easy. Except, it can be dangerous. Hollywood likes to talk about love. A lot. And Hollywood has taught us what to expect. Boy goes to college. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl get married. Boy and girl have kids. The cycle repeats. For today’s college students, however, finding a romantic partner while in college is a lot more challenging than the movies always said. Between internships, part time jobs, and demanding school schedules, most don’t have the time or energy to go looking for a romantic partner in person. Oh sure, some do, but quite a lot of the top students just don’t have that kind of time, or money.

Say you’re a college student whose down on his or her luck, romance-wise at the least. Where do you go? You won’t really find anyone you don’t already know at a party, and there is a kind of ‘no inter-club relationships’ vibe that hangs over every extracurricular you might pick up. You’ll probably end up at a dating website, since sites like DateMySchool tend to harass your .edu email with subject-lines like ‘We have hundreds of singles waiting to meet you!’ Therefore it isn’t a surprise that websites like DateMySchool and OKCupid have a bevy of recent college grads and current students flocking to them, trying to find that special someone. Or several not-so-special someones and, even friends.

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You could easily blame this new type of tech reliance on the 60-40 percent split between women and men on most Liberal Arts college campuses. Or you could just blame this on the internet and how technologically dependent today’s youth are. However, most of the site users that I’ve spoken to just feel that they have a better chance of finding someone they click with on a dating site than they do in person. The idea there being that they can message more people a lot more quickly with their interest, and then they can try and connect on an intellectual level before meeting. A lot of users averaged one date a week, which was a lot more than they’d managed otherwise. One OKCupid user claimed that online dating was much more efficient, while a DateMySchool subscriber claimed that it was a lot easier to talk to people online because there was an understanding that both parties were interested in one another.

The weirdest part, of course, is when you find out that two of your friends (who have never met each other before) find each other on OKCupid and you’re stuck there wondering what the hell ever happened with the normal way of doing things because otherwise you’ll be thinking of your two friends having cybersex and then everything is awkward. Because no one wants that.

With the normalization of dating websites – the ads are everywhere and even Martha Stewart used Match.Com – and the absolutely daunting prospect that is the traditional way of dating, it makes a lot of sense that the younger generations would flock to sites that catered to them – and cater many of those websites and apps do. DateMySchool caters to the academically inclined, limiting their users to college students and recent alums only. Campus Hook, University Love Connection, Student Love, and College Passions are all online dating services with the same model as Date My School. OKCupid offers a very popular free app for the iPhone, Android, and Windows. Ivy Connect even has its own IvyDate service that you must request admission to, and claims that it gives “introductions to inspiring singles.” Then there are the hook-up based apps like Grindr, Skout, and How About We, which are marketed to people with smart phones and the desire to use them for absolutely anything and everything. Which is pretty much the 35 and under crowd in a nutshell.