Customer Reviews

Meeting, Mating, and Cheating: Sex, Love, and the New World of Online Dating (Financial Times (Prentice Hall))

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A pretty-much content-free collection of anecdotes: this person met a few total creepazoids online, this other person met the love of her life, this third person finds online dating to be a handy way to cheat on his wife, and this little piggy went to market. Is there a point? Are there any insights? Is there any real information to be found? Not that I could see.

Meeting, Mating and Cheating provides an honest and thought-provoking look at the world of online dating. By following her subjects over the course of a year, Orr gives her readers a sense of all the different people who opt for online dating -- the young and the old, gay and straight, the urban and the rural dwellers, those seeking spouses and others just looking for friendship. The personal stories were sometimes poignant and sometimes just plain funny. I will always remember the single mother of three who went on line in search of the whole package -- "sex, companionship and the handy guy around the house."

The book is well-researched and the prose is lively and accessible. Ms. Orr weaves the personal stories together with information about the business of online dating to create a book that is valuable for online daters as well as investors and others who follow business trends. I highly recommend this book.

A great read! Orr gives an overview of the people out there doing it, and the range of services offered, but more than that, she weaves in so many funny personal stories of the ups and downs of the process that I feel like I'm watching an episode of Sex and the City. The end result is that this book is entirely useful for anyone considering online dating, but you could also be happily married and enjoy reading it. It's a hoot!

A friend who has been prodding me to try online dating for over a year now gave this book to me as a way to show that everyone is doing it. She has been telling me this over and over again but I never could manage to take the leap. Then I read this book and I learned that that most singles today, and especially professional urban singles, are all socializing online. I had been missing out!

This book has so many cute and funny stories of people who met online. I had only read three chapters when I put the book down, sat down at my computer, and signed up for Match.com. I've met a great guy and we have our third date this week! Orr's book is insightful and entertaining and also gives you a lot of good ideas about how to present yourself online and how to wade through all the responses you receive.

what I liked about this book is that it's not a "how to" about internet dating, and it doesn't try and give advice. instead, this book gives you an overview of the whole online dating phenomenon, peppered with "fly on the wall" anecdotes from people whose experiences aren't always the most positive. a real-world view of online dating as told from a journalist's perspective.

Orr delineates one of the few surviving business models from the dot com time. She describes how Match, Yahoo Personals, Date, eHarmony and others have attracted many. In fact, Match having garnered over 8 million by the time of the book's writing in 03. The basic human urge to procreate has led to these sites being some of the few that could charge membership fees and get away with it.

She gives case studies of several people that she interviewed. Only some of these found what they were seeking, by the book's end. But that is real life, eh?

The book points out that the biggest problem faced by Match and Yahoo is that their most successful customers meet partners and leave the websites. No repeat business from them. Fundamentally different from eBay or Amazon. Plus, the major dating sites have no feedback on their members. Quite unlike the auction sites, where this is now regarded as standard and necessary. Yet anecdotally, the amount of exaggeration in a dating site's member's description of himself or herself is probably more so than a typical item description in eBay.

I don't think I could give it a more enthusiastic recommendation. I just read here that another reviewer compared it to an episode of Sex and The City, and that is very true. Like the TV show this book, has many hilarious and very moving stories of the ups and downs of the dating game that anyone can relate to. Unlike Sex and the City, it's not all about spoiled New York City girls. There are stories of people from the heartland looking for love, middle aged small town people who have been divorced three times before finding true love online, lonely grandmothers, even people in China. The book also manages to impart some useful advice about writing your online dating profile, and about which sites you might want to consider joining.

Orr skillfully weaves together stories and data into a poignant narrative about internet dating. Lonely-hearts, Middle America Moms and dating gurus populate this entertaining landscape of love hunters. And its windows onto the world of Muslim dating are fascinating. Highly recommended.

Interesting information, and a truthful look at online dating. I especially liked the chapter "I'm dysfunctional, you're dysfunctional," about all the strange experiences people have online that they probably would not experience offline. Plenty of success stories included as well.

Meeting, Mating, and Cheating by Andrea Orr is an fairly comprehensive overview of the world of Online Dating. There are some good interviews with people who have attempted to meet their significant others online. Orr remains non-biased by providing both positive and negative encounters with Online Dating.

As detailed as the encounters are, somehow the information that Orr provides is not anything groundbreaking. The savvy dater will be cautious by looking for key flags when corresponding with a prospective mate while those with irrealistic expectations will have similar feelings and results that have encountered with other resources. Before there was online dating, single people responded to personal ads in a variety of resources. Those people who placed such personal ads ran up against similar issues that today's singles find in the online world. Orr does not relate to how things used to be just five or ten years ago.

The difference today is that Online Dating is a fashionable and convenient approach for unattached people who have regular access to a computer. Orr gives us some good research into such Online Dating Sites as EHarmony, JDate, and Match.com. The information on EHarmony is particularly noteworthy as Orr uncovers that site's intensive psycholgical questioning and security oriented policies which are a big help to people who genuinely are looking to meet someone meaningful. Also interesting is the commentary as it relates to Muslim Online Dating. It is always interesting to learn about other cultures.

This book is somewhat worthy based on its good research. However, Orr could have made the effort more beneficial by pointing out how singles should continue to use the Internet to find fun activities where they can meet others. Some insight on those avenues such as Social Circles and the Blueprint would have made Orr's work more compelling. Unfortunately Orr chose to limit her focus just to Online Dating missing the big picture of the single scene today.

Therefore the overall effectiveness of Andrea Orr's work is good instead of outstanding. Some of those may be dissapointed with my comments but the truth is the book's focus is a little too narrow.