Conference Paper
Impression Management Struggles in Online Dating
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Text/Conference Paper
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Date
2014
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Volume Title
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Abstract
Online dating systems are now widely used to search for romance and yet there is little research on how people use these systems to manage their impressions with potential romantic partners. To address this issue we conducted an interview study of 41 online dating users, revealing that-contrary to prior work-online daters largely do not want to intentionally deceive their online dating partners because they think such lies would quickly be discovered face-to-face. Nevertheless, bad first dates were a norm rather than an exception for this study's participants. In this paper we present various frustrations online daters associate with conveying and forming impressions of potential romantic partners before meeting face-to-face. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of online dating systems.