DOI: 10.36344/ccijhss.2020.v06i11.005

Pages: 155-171

Millions of single adults use dating websites like eHarmony, Anastasiadate.com, Match.com, Chemistry.com and technologies like the mobile dating app Tinder to seek out online partners. Some daters succeed, but most of them fail in the end and become dissatisfied. The online technology presents with many advantages such as easy access to multitudes of potential dates; however, the problematic is that, as a metanarrative of dating power, ICTs do not function in a virtual vacuum but are constructed by the social experience of people in love and sexuality, for example, in African indigenous and modern societies ǎ la longue durée. The online dating industry often disembeds this social experience from its services and this constitutes, paradoxically, its major flaw. Consequently, the industry is designed narrowly to rationalize romanticism as a scientific algorithm that follows particular rules and regulations instead of proposing the complex character of knowledge about dating to prospective daters and this constitutes a serious menace to its long term sustainability. These technodigital flaws have to do with the paradox of virtual rationalism, lack of commitment in online daters, who do not meet offline; shallowness and fatigue in the mindset of online singles, scamming, lies telling, identity theft and stalking, mismatching from algorithms between singles and so on. Drawing critical insights from the structuralist positionality of George Homans’ social exchange theory and from critiques of romance stories, the paper suggests that, in this age of the knowledge economy, e-dating should become a productive service that minimizes the artificiality of economic rationalism embedded in digital contacts, profile browsing, algorithmic matching, the reading of love by apps and tread lightly on all forms of economic determinism. e-Dating should prioritize tacit knowledge from critical literature narratives that can enable us to suggest new humanistic functionalities for skype, ch