Here's Why Internet Dating Is Like Arranged Marriage

Most Westerners prefer to marry for love. At the same time, traditional arranged marriages are more typical for Eastern countries. Westerners cannot understand this tradition, since parents here do not need to make a choice for their children. This is not a common truth for them.

However, online dating has a lot in common with arranged marriages, according to Amitrajeet A. Batabyal, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

He noted that the use of dating sites, including dating for marriage, has recently become more popular in the United States. According to statistics, a third of American couples who got married met online.

Even if the dating sites' description does not say that dating is "arranged," these sites indeed work according to the general characteristics of traditional marriages. For example, when parents are looking for a partner for their daughter, they use a set of important criteria. Users do the same when they visit dating sites. They sort the list of possible partners and select who they think is the most suitable.

In other words, filling out profiles, passing personality type tests, and numerous questionnaires are all analogs of the criteria that parents used when choosing their child's future spouse.

Now, when choosing online dating, people trust their choice to algorithms, and forget that at first, they used to choose “by arrangement,” and only then came love.