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Internet dating can be hazardous to your love life!

Don't get me wrong. I know lots of people who have found love on the Internet, but I have also come across enough disaster stories to feel that a few words of caution are in order. Let me offer three reasons why anyone should be a little leery of dating web sites.

1. Deception is rampant. I should add that deception is fairly prevalent in dating as a whole, so this is not just an Internet problem. But the ease with which people can lie on the Internet makes this a much bigger problem for dating web sites.

2. Too much choice is not always a good thing. Research shows that when people are faced with too much choice, a variety of things start to happen. First, it becomes much more difficult to make any choice. Second, the criteria you use to make a choice become increasingly arbitrary. Third, you end up more dissatisfied with whatever choice you do eventually make. I talked to a number of Internet daters who experienced various levels of this, and many of them swore off Internet dating because of it.

3. The personality matching systems touted by the sites have not been shown to have any validity. That doesn't mean you won't like the people you meet, but it does mean that you will be subject to the same vagaries of chance you find in regular life. In fact, simply telling two people that they are similar (regardless of whether or not that is actually true) automatically increases the chance that they will be attracted to one another. And multiplying criteria is no help either. Mathematicians have show that with as few as six dimensions, it can become impossible to find any meaningful way to make sense of the data.

Here are a few stories from my own interviews of people in recovery from Internet dating: One woman admitted to me that, in an effort to cut down on her choices, she developed absurd physical criteria and even eliminated one man from consideration because “his ears were too far down on his head.” Another confessed to endless scanning of profiles and said, “With 10,000 page views to go, you feel like you can’t afford not to be choosy.” A man I interviewed dubbed his Internet dating compulsion the “curse of the composite.” Over time, he has developed a vision of his ideal woman based on the various qualities that he likes—only this composite is impossible to meet. He is taking a break from Internet dating because he believes it is eroding his ability to commit to a single woman.

So, caveat emptor! Internet dating does not offer any magical solution and may even cause a few problems of its own.

Andrew Trees, Decoding Love, Avery, Penguin Books