"The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste...but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently"
I do agree with this bit. It's confusing to me that many of the online dating sites are trying to pair people based on how alike they are.
Is there any real research that this is somehow the key to marital bliss? Anecdotal, but most of the long married couples I know aren't very alike, and don't share the same interests...other than things like grandchildren, etc.
Remember that we're still talking about a life partner here, which is very different from, say, a roommate. As long as you and a roommate are respectful of each other's sleep, possessions, ability to host friends at least occasionally, and mutually agreed levels of general cleanliness, you'll probably get along just fine, even if you're different in almost every other way. You're two different people in different places in life with different goals and ideologies and you just happen to live with each other for now. It's perfunctory and emotionally cold, but that's OK, because that fits within both you and your roommate's expectations, given that the rent needs to be paid and you only have so much time to find someone to help you pay it.
Of course it's possible to be wonderful friends with your roommate, but the point to be made is that if that's your grand sum of what you expect out of a relationship, you're going to feel profoundly lonely, unsupported, and unloved. Fulfilling our emotional needs is also important, and dating sites that focus on finding people who are similar to each other are sites which understand that people will build that relationship of love, trust, and understanding on a foundation of what they have in common.
What the author is trying to remind us is that no matter who much in common we have with someone, and thus no matter who we marry, there will be areas in which we will differ from and disagree with our partners. As such, healthy dating requires you to find not only that base of similarity but also that ability to disagree without a sense of disappointment that you disagree with The One on something.
So the article isn't meant for people in healthy marriages. They already understand that. It's written for the serial daters who reject suitors for ultimately irrelevant reasons.
I logged in just to say that I think this is an excellent answer. But since I'm already here...
> It's written for the serial daters who reject suitors for ultimately irrelevant reasons.
Do you feel that dating sites help cultivate a mindset in people that predisposes them to doing this? I do - I think many dating sites (OKCupid in particular) swamp you with irrelevant information. In my experience, it seems like people are perfectly willing to use superficial reasons to say "no" to potential partners. I'm not talking things like political views or religious beliefs; I'm talking about things like weightlifting or liking Taylor Swift. Is it the perception that these sorts of things go hand in hand with other behaviors, or fit into a preconceived notion of "what kind" of people like this sort of thing? I'm inclined to believe so.
Just a mild rant. I liked this article a lot when it first came out and I'm happy to see it pop up again.
I've been much happier from the relationships I've found on Tindr (the current one is a few weeks shy of a year). AFAICT Tindr largely matches people at random, so I think there's some truth to what you're seeing. The other site I used was OKCupid which was just terrible, either their algorithm is flawed or I just never learned how to use it "correctly."
I'm with you - I like Tinder substantially more than OKCupid. I feel like Tinder gives you a much better shot at making a connection with a person based on their personality, rather than a big bullet list of trivia.
There's no benefit to dating sites to matching people who are truely compatible (assuming this concept even exists, and assuming they had some way to assess it).
All that would mean is they have lost two customers.
Much better, and easier, to match two people based on the superficial factors that we're wired as humans to look for - good looks (as good or better as ourselves), etc.
I do agree with this bit. It's confusing to me that many of the online dating sites are trying to pair people based on how alike they are.
Is there any real research that this is somehow the key to marital bliss? Anecdotal, but most of the long married couples I know aren't very alike, and don't share the same interests...other than things like grandchildren, etc.