A few years ago there was an article featured in the New York Times featuring a woman named Susan Chang. Susan was a 28 year old newspaper editor living in Manhattan and has given up on finding her true love. As she described it as tempting fate, Susan placed an ad in the personals section of Yahoo.
Since Susan worked in the publishing field she was able to construct a poetically written ad, describing herself as ''I'm a young woman with an old soul; I like the hot sun and the city lights, the glamour of the ballroom and the silence of the bookshelf. I know the difference between anise and dill, among other things….”. Susan chose not to place a picture with her ad.
After receiving several unsatisfactory responses to her ad, she got one that intrigued her from a man named Randy who had many similarities to her and a writing style that paralleled the intellectualism her ad displayed. According to Ms. Chang, by her third email from him she fell in love. Although they did not discuss meeting in person and had not exchanged pictures, Susan secretly went to search for him at a evening class he told her he took and found him there. They fell in love and married less than a year later.
Many of McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors are apparent in this online romance. Susan and Randy were able to identify with each other as they self-disclosed their feelings of being discouraged about their love lives in New York City. They were able to connect to each other and share their similar needs of companionship in the big city of NY. Susan described her correspondence with Randy as being “so great to have someone to share all your thoughts with...and confide in behind a dark screen”. This leads to McKenna’s next factor: the removal of gating features. Since the gates of physical attractiveness (Susan and Randy chose not to send pictures of each other), and other gates that may cause social anxiety were removed, this allowed for relationship facilitation. A third of McKenna’s relationship facilitation factors present in Susan and Randy’s internet romance was “getting the goods”, the ability to get information about others prior to meeting. Since Randy had disclosed to Susan the fact that he took a course on Tivetan Buddhism in TriBeca gave her knowledge on his possible whereabouts. Although she had never seen a picture of him, he had told her his height, weight and eye color, and she was able to identify him when she went to search for him at his class.
Deception is not very apparent in this situation, which may have been the reason why this relationship worked out so well. The article does take note of the fact that Randy disclosed his height and weight to Susan. Lying about height is one of the most common deception strategies men use, but it is unknown the extent to which Randy told Susan his true height. The article does not mention if Susan had told Randy anything about her appearance, but it does mention that Randy was pleasantly surprised when he met her.
It was nice to read an article about an online dating situation that worked out so well. This can probably be attributed to the relationship facilitation factors mentioned above, and the low level of deception that occurred in this instance. If only all internet relationships could turn out to be so successful!
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E00E3D8163FF93BA15755C0A96E958260
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1 comment:
Skyler,
Interesting story and nice analysis. When I started this assignment, the idea didn't even enter my head to analyze a mediated relationship that had been successful. With all of the bad press that comes from online relationships, I agree that its nice to hear about one that didn't end up a horror story.
What I think makes this story most remarkable is the fact that it was successfully built entirely on conventional signals which could easily have been fake or at least embellished. I wonder how many times a situation like this has developed, only to have the relationship end abruptly when one, or both of the parties involved turn out to be someone completely different.
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