LAUSR

This paper begins with a discussion of the way in which industry has harnessed information technology to facilitate dating. I suggest that philosopher Alain Badiou and other theorists who have argued that online dating substitutes rationality for intuition in partner selection, and that online dating is detrimental to love, are mistaken in their views. I argue instead that information technology facilitates a combination of rational, or calculative, and intuitive means to initiating and developing relationships, which in significant ways are preferable to the means available in “real life.” I show how modern dating tools enable dating and love especially in forms that lack adequate support in society at large; accordingly, these tools might make the pursuit of intimacy and love fairer or more just. To help support this claim, I conduct a review of empirical studies that have assessed the risks and rewards associated with online dating and the distribution of these risks and rewards across different demographic groups. Finally I turn to the intersection of love and doubt, or uncertainty; with reference to cultural representations of love, or “love stories,” and in conversation with several theorists of love, I suggest that persistent uncertainty, and its continual alleviation, are constitutive of the condition of love in the contemporary Western imagination, and that this is the case regardless of the dating medium.