Online dating: Hookups for a moment or a marathon

Hookups, one-night stands or long-term relationships. Dating apps can deliver any of those. The mechanics of it all intrigued Hot 102.7 FM head of news Tara Penny with the outcome, an international award-winning radio series called The Beginner’s Guide to Online Dating. It’s now available as a podcast on the station’s website.

The programme earned the broadcaster a Bronze award at this year’s New York Festivals Radio Awards.  

The back story behind the series emerged from listener curiosity about which dating apps were most effective and secure. “Our listeners were asking about the better dating apps to get onto. What are the safe ones?” she said. But her curiosity was really piqued when a casual observation at work provided a bit of a mystery. “I walked into the kitchen, and somebody was actively busy on the app that I was looking into, and she turned around and she said to me, ‘Why are there so many men holding up pictures of varying sizes of fish on this app?'” It was the fish pic that did it for her, to figure out the significance behind them and what they represented in the context of online dating.

Penny sought out author Susan Ben Dory, a dating expert in the United States, who suggested that these fish pictures could be linked to a kind of prehistoric impulse. “She said it could be linked to an ingrained need to provide for women, and this is the quickest way for men to show that they are capable of hunting in a sort of prehistoric way,” Tara shared, though she admitted to being somewhat sceptical of this explanation.

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Driven by a blend of curiosity and journalistic investigative impulse, Penny formed a focus group at the station, interviewing single colleagues to understand their experiences and perceptions of online dating. She undertook the task of rewriting their dating profiles based on their responses to a series of personal questions to capture their true essence more accurately than they might themselves. “It’s very hard to write about yourself. It’s easier to write about somebody else,” she said.

The revised profiles led to some revealing and often amusing findings. One notable discovery involved a man on the opposite side of the app who was caught sending identical messages to multiple women in the focus group. She also uncovered discrepancies in how individuals portrayed their lifestyles versus reality. “One dating hopeful had a notable discrepancy in a photograph shared,” she said. “He would have a beautiful photograph of him living the Landrover life. But then in a reflection, you could see he was driving a Picanto,” she said. People go to considerable lengths to curate their online image.

Typically, South African nuances like loadshedding were also unexpectedly influencing dating decisions, with potential couples planning meetups around electricity availability. “They would literally check the schedule and decide ‘your place or mine’ based on Eskom,” she said.

Interestingly, she said, couples were also trolling dating sites. A surprising trend where couples seek threesome partners through the app. “Especially on a free app. A lot of married couples in Johannesburg were out looking for threesomes, so they were actively canvassing, looking for a third wheel,” a growing global trend with hidden dynamics that’s become obvious on platforms where you’d least expect it.

“There’s definitely a place for online dating because in today’s society you can’t expect Romeo to walk into your lounge while you are watching the 8pm movie,” she said of her findings. However, she questioned the mixed effectiveness of these platforms in forging lasting relationships. “Whether that translates into true love, marriage, kids, whatever. We’ll only know in ten years’ time. But some of our guinea pigs did find a few interesting people. It didn’t work out in the end, but to be fair, they only gave it three weeks to a month,” she added. Online encounters, when it moves beyond a one-night stand, could still be fleeting, it seems.

Through her series, now available as a podcast on the Hot 102.7 FM website brought home the complex, humorous, and sometimes sobering realities of seeking love online. Navigating love in the digital age can is a platform that inevitably reveals the quirky, surprising, and often left of center aspects of online dating culture.

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