From Men’s Journal
How Technology is Affecting Our Relationships
By Taylor Kubota
There is no question that these days technology is inextricable from the way we date and mate. According to the Pew Research Center's Internet Project, 38 percent of singles have used online dating or mobile dating apps, that's about 11 percent of the total population. What we're not so sure about is whether technology is making our relationships better or hindering our ability to socialize and truly connect with others....
Part of the problem may be that online dating doesn't do enough to shake up the way we choose our dates. "Online dating is giving us the potential to interact with people who are so different from us and yet people are selecting people who are more similar to them," says Coye Cheshire, professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. While people may say they are willing to date people who are dissimilar to themselves, Cheshire says we generally end up choosing partners we feel we have a lot in common with. This may have us missing out on more successful alternatives. "There's lots of evidence that people who are dissimilar in a lot of ways can have higher relationship satisfaction," says Coye. He even says that some dating platforms — whether out in the open or not — may soon be experimenting with matching processes that make dissimilar people more likely to find each other....
The balance between becoming too dependent on technology versus missing out on its perks is one we have yet to figure out. Although many people use online dating, mobile dating apps, and all kinds of basic technologies in their relationships, the human love life happens to be extremely difficult to study. "It's not like the data is based on trialed experiments where we actually put people in a laboratory […] and pair them up and make them get married," says Cheshire....