Love in the Time of Algorithms : What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating (9781101608258) by Slater Dan

Author:Slater, Dan [Slater, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Like Everyone, I’m Looking for My True Love

MARRIAGE AND MIRAGE IN THE INTERNATIONAL DATE-O-SPHERE

I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!

—OkCupid profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

The online-dating honchos in Europe and America are trying to free the date-o-sphere from its stigmatized roots. They want to expose the old encased world of online dating to the great wide open of social discovery, lose the pink hearts on the homepage, skirt the taboo, and make their product universal by conditioning the world that meeting new people online is amazing.

Neal Bryant, a British dating exec based in Moscow, is waging a branding battle that is similar and different. The site he represents, AnastasiaDate, specializes in connecting Western men with women in Russia, Ukraine, China, Africa, Latin America, and beyond.

The stigma here is mighty, well, stigmatizing. Always has been. Even in the Old West of nineteenth-century America, when pioneers would strike out for the Territories, and then, once settled, advertise for wives in newspapers back east, it was assumed that the mail-order bride industry relegated prostitutes, old maids, and hopeless spinsters to the nation’s grubby backcountry. As an Anastasia rep, it’s Bryant’s job to make over the mail-order bride industry, to convince the buying public that there’s nothing weird about this, nothing untoward. It’s just another way of meeting people.

It’s early fall in Russia, 2011. This afternoon Bryant spoke at iDate Moscow, an international online-dating conference organized by the same people who handle Miami. The conference was sponsored in part by Mamba.ru, a dating site for Russians seeking Russians. “Mamba,” states the corporate poster, “creates happy couples and families, makes people feel better, feel needed and important. Mamba is not just a business but, in a way, it’s a business that helps children to be born.” This local online-dating market is not substantially different from what goes on back home. I’ve come to Moscow, rather, to investigate this cross-border format in which the Russians specialize, to see whether it could really one day go mainstream, assuming it hasn’t already.

The business is certainly cash-positive. In 2012, The Daily, an iPad publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, reported that the international marriage brokering business had reached $2 billion, making it equal in size to the entire online-dating industry in the United States. Although numbers are hard to substantiate, Anastasia appears to be grossing something on the order of $1 million per day, perhaps substantially more. Its main competitor, A Foreign Affair, is owned by Americans and based in Arizona. Both companies are doing everything they can to get the word out. Times have changed, they say: You can find love at your local church, at work, in a pub, and now you can find it in the foreign country of your choice. This is the way of the world now.

“We don’t say mail-order brides!” Bryant told his audience of online-dating colleagues. “People say Anastasia is about mail-order brides, but you can’t order a bride by mail or the Internet.

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