Is online dating worth it? | The Tylt

At the Huffington Post, Beverly Jiang says "the sheer number of singles who use online dating services has already improved dating prospects. It’s a numbers game." 

Yes, people bitch about the hell of online dating—but maybe that's because dating itself is kind of hellish, not because it's taking place on the Internet.

But at Psychology Today, Martin Graff says online dating sites are ineffective because they actually overwhelm people with too many choices. Plus (as nearly everyone who's gone on an Internet date knows) people lie:

"People quite happily and readily misrepresent how they advertise themselves in online dating sites [and] misrepresent characteristics such as their appearance, age, weight, socio-economic status and interests."

Sure, online dating can suck. Scrolling through photos of people as if you're shopping in a catalog for a partner can feel demoralizing. Getting no responses to your messages (or being bombarded with foul ones) is depressing AF.  But people do connect online, and there are some good stories out there along with the hair-raising ones.

Comedian Aziz Ansari wrote an entire book entitled "Modern Romance," in which he does a deep dive on the existential nightmare that digital dating can become:

Dealing with this new digital romantic world can be a lot of work. Answering messages, filtering profiles—it’s not always fun...for so many of the online daters we met in different cities, the process had morphed from something fun and exciting into a source of stress and dread.

It seems clear that if you're going to date online, you need to brace yourself for some rough experiences.

But there are success stories amidst the carnage! And there are people who approach online dating with the spirit of fun and adventure, rather than a joyless scavenger hunt for a mate.