I have been working on a paper on dating for a while (hopefully ready for publication in summer), so I try to gather articles on the subject when they appear in the news I read. It so happened that the Economist published an article (Sex and Love: The modern Matchmakers) in its current edition (from 11 February 2012) reviewing a published journal article by Eli Finkel of Northwestern University. Finkel is assessing if online dating websites are as successful as they claim to be. Apparently she finds that there is no evidence for this.
After I consumed that article last weekend, I was stuck yesterday when another story on online dating appeared in the BBC online news – interestingly referring back to the same article by Finkel. And to make things worse, today the German edition of Spiegel Online published another article, again, refering to the same Finkel journal article. Continue reading