My issue with online dating isn’t that it is fake, unromantic, or doomed – this is hardly exceptional to the form – but that the frame of reference is broken. My gut position is that the state of love itself is sick – as in wounded, ill, diseased – that online dating is like drinking to cure the hangover, and that it, sadly, only further defers the real conversation we should be having. In the harshest analogy I can make – online dating is to “traditional” dating as free needle programs are to heroin addiction. Less burdened, in the case of dating, by the exhaustion of searching for a compatible mate without OKCupid (in the free needle case, by HIV infection), but equally blind to the long game. I think we should think of the popularity of online dating as a symptom of modern love-sickness.

We all know that online dating is popularly (and properly) characterized as just another path to finding someone, one that may be more welcoming to and more efficient for people who have difficulty forming romantic relationships in the traditional, or let’s say pre-Internet, fashion (who doesn’t?), albeit one that reduces love to a series of formulaic interactions. Less frequently noted is the idea that online dating exacerbates the things we don’t like about dating which, in general, is prey to familiar ogres like sexism, racism, and general jerkiness. Relationships themselves, especially romantic ones, are, at their foundation, stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. For “traditional” relationships, love seems not something that we find, nurture, and shape to our true selves, but paradoxically something very minor to the relationship itself. Love is maybe the spark that starts the whole noxious engine of partnership running, one that eventually breaks down, become obsolete, or runs someone over. For online dating, it’s even worse, trapped as it is in a “lesser-than” narrative from the start. No bond formed out of loneliness and feelings of not cutting it in the “real world” could ever bode well for a long-term partnership. Finding someone just as desperately lonely won’t give you the opposite, and precisely because online dating carries particular stigma, any “love” it produces seems even more predestined for failure.

I do agree that there is a compelling, underemphasized and understudied public externality to online romance in its potential to offer escape from the often friend- and family-fraught medium of “traditional” dating. We can imagine that prejudice, racial or otherwise, inheres in collective environments. Someone’s ill formed prejudice may solidify in actuality only through group solidarity, mutual insecurities, habits (your favorite bar, your colleagues), etc. But online, individualized dating is a different landscape. Usually, a friend isn’t looking over your shoulder, seeing who you check out. Clicking on a profile or sending a message isn’t as loaded with repercussions as talking to someone who isn’t part of your set within earshot of people who are. Even beyond prejudice, the fact that part of the game is already played out – you’re both on the site and both of your statuses are “single” – can leap past the barriers that persist in our imaginings of how people who are not like us think about love. More clear are the benefits to non-hetero-identifying populations: the online world is a place to explore sexuality and secretly liaise when doing so in the high school cafeteria or among college buddies might feel truly impossible. Still, the point is that the Internet is an escape, a way out. To borrow another analogy, I think the public-funding of charter schools debate is apposite: just as the brokenness of the public school system is not necessarily a reason to divert tax dollars to charters, retreating online doesn’t address the very real problems associated with love.

The problem is that technology, in my opinion, is pushing us further away from where we want to be, love-wise. I can’t presume to know whether people are better off meeting in person or online, but I am able to imagine a better form in general. There is a lot that is great about being with someone, and a lot that is challenging and frustrating. I think it is often in the difficult parts that most relationships break down, and I think this is because all of us, as human beings, are poorly equipped to deal. I think this conversation is often avoided because love is such a private thing, and something that is considered almost arational – something you just know. But there is a lot we don’t know, and as young people we need to be more proactive about figuring it out.

We can throw a lot of words, emotions, and movie scripts at the problem. Something must be said for the persistence of monogamy throughout history, but also for the prevalence of divorce, infidelity, and generic unhappiness. Online dating could be a powerful medium by which we throw off the chains of love in order to make new ones, but in its current form, with its seductive efficiency, I think it’s a step removed from a productive step forward.

As the cyberpunks used to say, the world is made up of two dimensions: meatspace and cyberspace. The line between these two is clear: flesh and blood occupy meatspace, while all that is techy and sordid reigns free in cyberspace. In the “early days”, the two worlds were seen as distinct. You could reinvent yourself in cyberspace and keep your “real world” identity secret. You could be who you wanted to be, and generally do what you wanted without fear of consequences. And that could be subversive and fun (Matthew Broderick in Wargames), or chaotic and dangerous (all those anonymous group sex chats I used to receive on AOL back in 1996).

At least, that’s the Primordial Internet Soup narrative. Nowadays, thanks to Web 2.0 and the fact that everyone’s mother is on Facebook, the line between meatspace and cyberspace has blurred, and things have become a bit more ambiguous. Suddenly online friends can emerge from the computer and become real life friends – and, okay, it’s only sort of weird. The ups and downs of a marriage have now become a publicly announced Relationship Status. People go to parties they hear about on Meetup, advertise their resumes on LinkedIn, and keep an up-to-the-minute news coverage of themselves on Twitter. If you want, you can have multiple identities – that is, until everything is completely eaten up by the single-identity-Google-Facebook-uber-you Internet of tomorrow. But, most importantly, today your behaviors online often have real life consequences.

One big (and nice) consequence: finding a partner. As the cyber-meatspace border becomes more permeable, the taboo of admitting you met your partner online is slowly eroding. I know one couple that is shameless about having met in a chat room; another originally told me they met at an Electric Light Orchestra concert (which turned out to mean “on OkCupid”).

If the romance market is a matching game where players optimize their likelihood of finding an attractive mate, and the only problem is the lack of a traditional “Romance Market,” then as long as people are meeting one another and eventually creating a real human interaction, what is the issue? That would be an economist’s opinion. Dating sites like Match, eHarmony, and OkCupid create this market. Sign up and you are immediately confronted by the metaphorical sea of fish. You can be blunt about your preferences; you can specify the ages and genders you’re interested in, and how long you want them for (“short-term dating,” “casual sex”). You can be a discreet creeper: using a fake name, anonymously browsing profiles, revealing as much of yourself as you want. You can filter potential mates along all sorts of criteria, including the most inane. Did any PhD-level men under 35 near me mention “Philip Glass” or “post-modernism” or “Bill Murray movies” in their profiles? Bingo!

Yes, this reductionist romance does miss out on some very important steps on the path to “love.” You miss the initial, awkward and charged physical chemistry and you can gain the false sense of intimacy that a flurry of text-based flirting can create. You could exchange dozens of sparkling, witty messages with someone with awful halitosis. The horror!

Online dating sites can also create a false sense of abundance and activity: you spend hours browsing profile pictures in the seemingly crowded sea. But the leap between “rating” someone’s profile and messaging them is a large one; and the leap between a message and a date is even larger. Recognizing both spectrums of the debate, I found myself sucked into an apathetic limbo, and I saw it in other users as well. As one post-punk gentleman’s profile mentioned, online dating sites make it all too easy to reject someone based on a petty quibble. Does my ideal sex partner have to know the definition of an Oxford comma? Probably not. But a bit of poor grammar can snuff out that initial flicker of text-based interest.

Knowing thyself is the best ticket for success on the cyber meat market. Knowing what you want, when you want it, and for how long. Knowing when to transfer from text flirting to the first date (immediately after ascertaining they will not kill you with an axe, I’d say). And, of course, common sense stuff like setting up your dates in a public place, telling your friends where you’ll be, and asking whether they like horror movies (a big indicator of long-term compatibility, according to the wonderful OkCupid stats blog!). These pearls of wisdom probably look familiar. Indeed, maybe the only big change that happened when we shifted our bedroom eyes from the crowded bar to the crowded Internet was that nothing really changes – the medium may be different, but all that sticky flesh-and-bone stuff is much the same.