Tag Archives: online dating

Love and mass transit in 2021

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Combine online dating and a love for mass transit and what do you get?

Photo by Charlotte May on Pexels.com

As a single person wandering through the world, it can be difficult to find someone who loves all the right things: parks, subways, bike lanes, human-scale buildings, high-density housing, debates over the ideal length of a city block. Even on a dating app, you can’t always tell from a profile who might be thinking, behind their smile, I hate cars.

But if this is exactly the sort of partner—or friend or fling—you’re looking for, there is a solution: Join the wildly popular Facebook meme group and leftist community NUMTOTs (“New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens,” which isn’t really just for teens) and request access to its private spin-off group, NUMTinder. With about 8,000 members living mostly in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, NUMTinder is a makeshift dating environment for those who consider liking public transportation to be a core part of their personality, or those for whom a lack of interest in urban planning is a deal breaker. Almost everyone in the group posts at least one selfie with a bike or a subway entrance, to demonstrate their commitment to the lifestyle, and when a new member introduces herself, it’s not uncommon for her to brag about the fact that she doesn’t have a driver’s license. (A second spin-off group, called NUMThots, is for sharing the spiciest seminudes that Facebook’s content moderation will allow. But transit-themed!)

The primary advantage to online dating is that it expands a person’s options beyond geography and their immediate social network to a much broader pool of people who can be filtered by particular traits. In this case, limit the pool to people who care about mass transit and those with that interest can search for partners.

While this may seem strange to the general public, is it really any different than numerous other likes people care about? Just as a comparison, plenty of people like cars or specific cars. At races, car events, clubs, and more, people with these interests could come together. Or, take people who regularly watch trains. Through different communities, these people could meet up and interact. The primary difference is that more Americans might like cars than mass transit.

A final thought: I imagine this group might be more useful in and around cities with a lot of mass transit. Of course, it could also be helpful in other places where few people even think about mass transit because it is not as present.

Mode, plurality, and “the most popular way”

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I recently stumbled across this headline from Stanford News: “Meeting online has become the most popular way U.S. couples connect, Stanford sociologist finds.” Would the average reader assume this means that more than 50% of couples meet online?

This is not what the headline or the story says. More details from the story:

Rosenfeld, a lead author on the research and a professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences, drew on a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults and found that about 39 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting their partner online, compared to 22 percent in 2009.

It appears 39% of couples meet online. According to the summary of the paper, the others ways couples meet are:

Traditional ways of meeting partners (through family, in church, in the neighborhood) have all been declining since World War II.

The 39% figure meets the definition of both the mode and a plurality, respectively (both definitions from Google):

the value that occurs most frequently in a given set of data.

the number of votes cast for a candidate who receives more than any other but does not receive an absolute majority.

Still, I suspect there might be some confusion. Online dating brings more Americans together than any other method but it is only responsible for a little less than forty percent of couples.

Aziz Ansari and sociologist Eric Klinenberg collaborate on modern romance

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Comedian Aziz Ansari is familiar with the work of Sherry Turkle and has done research with sociologist Eric Klinenberg:

While every other comedian — from Tina Fey to Amy Poehler — is writing a memoir, Ansari decided he’d team up with a sociologist to conduct studies on love in the age of technology for his first title. The comedian revealed his book cover exclusively to TIME and chatted about his research, his stand-up and the end of Parks and Rec…

I had been starting to do this stand-up about dating and realized that the current romantic landscape is way different. All these very modern problems — like, sitting and deciding what to write in a text — that’s a very new conundrum.

Then I randomly met a couple people who were in academic fields that did work that vaguely applied to this stuff. Like, this woman Sherry Turkle who had done all this research about texting and found that you say things over text you would never say to someone’s face. So the medium of communication we’re using is kind of making us sh—ttier people. And then I thought if you take that and put it toward romantic interactions, that’s why people are so f—ing rude…

It ended up being a sociology book that has my sense of humor, but it also has some academic heft to it. I wrote it with this sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, and he helped me design this huge research project that we did. We interviewed hundreds of people all across the world — we went to Tokyo and Paris and Wichita to really get a wide scope. We also interviewed all sorts of academics. The resulting book is really unique. I can’t think of any book I would really compare it to.

I wonder how the two worlds involved here – those who read books by comedians and sociologists – will react to this book:

1. Will the general public be interested in a comedian utilizing more academic data to tackle a a popular topic? Could a comedian reach people in a way that a book written by a sociologist alone could not? Or, will the public still not really trust the data and continue to rely on their own anecdotes of online love?

2. How will sociologists view Klinenberg’s contribution? Is this data really any good or it is too impressionistic? While sociologists talk about public sociology, popular pieces of writing are often derided for not being serious enough. Was Klinenberg secretly conducting an ethnographic project on the lives of modern comedians?

No matter the critical reception from either camp, I imagine this book will sot a lot more copies than the typical sociology monograph…