This picture shows the inaccuracy of online dating in a nutshell. With the advancement of technology everyday, people are finding new ways to deceive others. This morbidly obsess man on the computer is a prime example of deceiving others to believe that he looks like Brad Pit. According to Reuters, Herald News, PC World, Washington Post about online statistics men tend to lie more about Height, Income and age. Women, on the other hand, lie about weight, physical build and age. Obviously, all of these themes are key issues into how relationships are formed and/or broken. The study also found that 49% of people believe that physical characteristics matter. By deceiving others about your true identity leads others to create a fake relationship with this imaginary person instead of the persons true self, behind the keyboard. (http://www.statisticbrain.com/online-dating-statistics/)


But not all relationships go bad on the internet. With 40 million out of 54 million having used or are currently using an online dating site, there have also been a lot of success stories.  Jennifer Viegas  writes in her article "Online Dating: Despite flaws, a fruitful tool" talks about these successes. As mentioned in the title, online dating can be seen as a device to help out people. It is a way for individuals to meet another outside of their normal social circles. Couples are forming from online dating but the success rates are higher in short-term relationships than compared to long-term one's.  Like the other study though, they found that lying did occur on online dating. They compared the dating website profiles of the individuals to that of their drivers license to see what the discrepancies were. "About 52.6 percent of the men in the study lied about their height, as did 39 percent of the women. More women, on the other hand — 64.1 percent — lied about their weight. Age in profiles is also suspect, since 24.3 percent of the men and 13.1 percent of women were untruthful about their age. Despite such fibbing, the researchers were surprised that it wasn’t more rampant." (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/35304072/)


Many online dating sites though are advertising their success stories on our TV screens now. Couples are coming out and declaring their love for another and sharing their first dates with the world. Here are a few clips of the advertisements for the dating websites. You can judge for yourself if these couples are just giddy to be in the 'honeymoon' phase or are actually a long term couple.  Notice too that these women are talking without a significant other by their side and that they are all the same demographically- 30 year old white women? You can obviously see who they are trying to target here.