The New York Times Studies Dating Studies

You know you've made it when the New York Times writes a feature about you.

As anyone who has followed my writing knows, I love nothing more than dating studies. I don't know what it is about them, but I'm incapable of ignoring a new study, survey, or experiment about love, romance, relationships, sex, dating, and everything in between. Maybe it's the idea of trying to quantify something that seems so unquantifiable, of explaining something that seems impossible to explain. Maybe it makes me feel like I'm putting my psychology degree to good use. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for a colorful infographic.

Whatever it is, the New York Times has caught the bug too. "There are millions of Americans seeking love on the Internet," begins a Times article called Love, Lies and What They Learned. "Little do they know that teams of scientists are eagerly watching them trying to find it." Studies of online dating habits have covered just about everything, from what triggers attraction to the role that politics plays in choosing a potential mate. The explosion of online dating sites has opened up a brave new world for researchers trying to understand the mechanics of love and connection, and they've made some very interesting discoveries:

• Do people lie on dating sites? Absolutely. According to a study led by Catalina L. Toma, an assistant professor in the department of communication arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about 81% of daters misrepresent themselves online, but usually only by telling lies of the little and white variety. "Daters lie to meet the expectations of what they think their audience is," Toma explained, but their lies can't be too grand because they will eventually meet their date in person.

• Despite the variety available online, most people "stick to their own kind" when it comes to dating sites. "We are nowhere near the post-racial age," said Gerald A. Mendelsohn, a professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. His study found that even daters who stated that they were willing to date outside of their ethnicity didn't actually do it. Instead, he found that "white more than black, women more than men, and old more than young prefer a same-race partner."

• Politics are on almost everyone's mind as we approach the 2012 elections, but not on the minds of online daters. Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University, found that few singles are willing to express a political preference online for fear of attracting fewer dates. "I was personally really shocked," she said. "People were much more likely to say 'I'm fat' than 'I'm a conservative.'"

Are online dating studies the way of the scientific future? Yes, says Andrew T. Fiore, a former visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University. "Online dating provides an ecologically valid or true-to-life context for examining the risks, uncertainties and rewards of initiating real relationships with real people at an unprecedented scale," he told the Times. "As more and more of life happens online, it's less and less the case that online is a vacuum. It is life."