Dr. Marisa Cohen is a New York based relationship scientist and coach, and teaches psychology at the college level. She’s the author of From First Kiss to Forever: A Scientific Approach to Love, and the Psychology Today blog Finding Love: The Scientific Take. She’s also the co-founder of the Self-Awareness and Bonding Lab, a lab that examines love from a scientific perspective.
Join Dr. Marisa Cohen for a talk on The Science of Love in the Time of Online Dating on Tuesday, August 20th at Subject in the Lower East Side.
We spoke with Dr. Cohen about dating online vs. IRL, whether we can predict a relationship’s success and where to go on a first date in NYC!
Are we more likely to find love on a dating site or IRL? What are the advantages and disadvantages of finding someone via online dating vs in-person?
This is one of the questions that I receive most frequently, often from people who would rather meet a partner face-to-face and don’t want to wind up getting sucked into the world of online dating. It’s a difficult question to answer, because a lot of people who are seriously looking for a partner are both on online dating sites/apps and keeping their eyes open in the real world.
Basically, I tell people to use whichever approach they are more comfortable with. If you sign up for a website/app, but feel more comfortable meeting people in the real world, you won’t fully commit to using the app and certainly won’t enjoy the experience.
The advantages of online dating are that you are able to have access to many more matches, so you are more likely to find a person who shares the same interests, values, beliefs, etc. Also, if you have a very busy schedule, you are better able to peruse profiles at times that are convenient for you. The downside (which applies to both online dating and meeting someone in real life) is that you are never 100% sure of the other person’s intentions. You may wind up with an online pen pal, rather than a person that you can meet face-to-face. In addition, you can’t be certain that a person is accurately representing him/herself on his/her profile. Then again, we may still have questions about the other person, even when meeting face-to-face. Trust is something that takes time to develop no matter the medium.
The advantage to meeting a person in real life is that you are able to ascertain whether or not you two “click.” There is something above and beyond the matching algorithms that dating sites use that you can only suss out in person. However, if you limit your conversations on the apps and get to the face-to-face meeting early enough in the process, a real life meeting doesn’t have such a huge advantage over the sites/apps. The downsides are similar to online dating, in that you don’t know if a person is telling you the truth and you also don’t know his/her true intentions. We have to hope for the best.
All in all, online dating and meeting a person in real life don’t necessarily put you on different relationship trajectories; rather, they are offering you different access points to meeting your match.
Do you have any tips for creating a good online dating profile?
You should always include a picture with your profile. I understand that you may want to maintain your privacy, however profiles with pictures are more likely to get clicks. You should also make sure that the picture is up-to-date and accurately depicts who you are at the time you are meeting people.
In addition, you should try to represent who you are as a person. While it may be true that you “like to go out, but also like to stay in”, what does that really tell me about you as an individual? What sets you apart from the rest of the people online? Too often people are afraid of sharing too much and turning another person off, but you want someone who likes you for you. Share what it is that makes you tick.
Your area of focus is on our perceptions of first date success. How often do both people share the same perception of their first date’s success and what do you think is the cause for differing perceptions?
I am very interested in early dating experiences, specifically the first date, because it is a time in which a person tries to ascertain whether or not the individual he/she is on a date with is a good match. Additionally, the person is looking for cues as to how the other person feels about him/her. It is so much more than an exchange of introductory statements; rather, it is a carefully orchestrated conversational dance, in which we are sending signals and trying to interpret those being sent to us.
My research has focused on which behaviors people interpret as being indicative that the date is going well and convey that our partner is interested in pursuing us further. My results show clear gender differences, which I find fascinating. I love to discuss the full breakdown of my results during my talks. My findings demonstrate that the message we intend to convey is not necessarily what is being read by the other person. The information regarding cues (and our interpretations of them) can be generalized to other types of meetings (i.e. interviews), and as such is extremely important.
To what extent can we really predict the long-term success of any given relationship?
To a certain extent we can predict the success of relationship. The problem with definitively predicting success is that there are so many individual variables that can affect the relationship, both within the person (i.e., attachment style) and external to the couple (i.e., support available).
To answer this question, I will briefly touch on the work of Dr. John Gottman, who through his work with colleagues, has been successful at predicting whether or not a couple will get divorced. Through research focusing on conflict and communication within relationships, he identified what he refers to as “the four horsemen” which can indicate potential problems. The horsemen are criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. When these are used frequently during conflict, a couple is much more likely to get divorced. In fact, just by educating people as to what the four horsemen are, you can help improve their interactions with loved ones and friends.