DATING APPS

[MUSIC] On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes, examine the forces that shape our culture and tell the stories that create the realities we share, and sometimes the realities we don't. I'm your host, Chalceweaver Smith, and this is American hysteria. Hundreds of thousands of happy endings got their start with us. You watched your video, they seen your photo, they read about you, they know whether you have like, "Opera, are you a hate baseball?" We've completed questionnaires, the computer, QP'd, get pregnant. I did go home thinking what have I done? I really didn't want to do this. I'm not having fun today. [MUSIC] It was the early 1990s when the World Wide Web started screaming out to a largely disinterested America, promising nonetheless to revolutionize the human experience in ways previously unimaginable. At the time, a new internet startup was about to get their first major TV interview, and their communications director was prepping their founder and spokesman, a dorky 30-year-old computer genius with a mess of brown hair crowned with a growing bald spot. She tried to lay down the law, all but demanding the eccentric, grateful dead fan, avoid wearing any colorful, complicated, dan flashy, and patterns, and to make sure he didn't say anything that could cause undue controversy. He arrived the next day, however, wearing a bright, tied-eye shirt, telling his team that the station would now be conducting the interview in his office, live from his multicolored beanbag chair. Once the camera started rolling, he channeled another band I'm going to assume that he loved The Beatles, telling the interviewer, quote, "Match.com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ." The communications director may as well have been struck dead on the spot, that is, until she realized that a man like this would attract a whole lot more attention than a Silicon Valley mannequin in a powder blue button up. Match.com's founder Gary Kremman, as many of his fellow computer obsessives, had had trouble finding love in the past, trying out newspaper, personal, video dating companies, traditional matchmakers, and even 900 number telephone services that cost a whopping 299 a minute to talk to another potential mate. But even more than love, he was interested in data, realizing that the next frontier of techno dating would have to utilize both. So he began to create a questionnaire that could be filled out by hopeful singles on his website, the answers of which would be processed through a computer algorithm that found matches based on what people were looking for and the things that they liked. Back in 1993, however, only about 5% of Americans had internet access in their home, with the more successful websites boasting only about 20,000 visits a week. But Gary Kremman knew that the world was on the precipice of a massive tech boom that few really saw coming. So he took out a $2,500 advance from one of his credit cards and bought several very simple domain names like jobs.com, autos.com, housing.com, sex.com, and of course, match.com. He was most interested in developing this kind of internet personal ads service. But there was a problem. Most of those who actually hung out online were dudes, 90% in fact, and the company had to figure out how to pie to piper some lovely ladies into their cyberspace. Because, as he put it, quote, "every woman would bring a hundred geeky guys." Interestingly, during the early stages of match, Gary Kremman had a girlfriend, and he was desperate enough to convince her to sign up just for the optics, which taught him the hard lesson that when a person is suddenly faced with a massive influx of romantic options, sometimes they find something they like better. And just like that, Kremman's Frankenstein's monster had stabbed his creator right through the digital heart. But there was no time to grieve a lost love. The true loss was that there was now one less woman on match.com. The whole team started to enlist their lady friends and family members to join. They digitally flired early message boards with posts praising match, and they even drew straws to figure out which woman on the team would be the sample profile for an upcoming Rolling Stone article. They used her real picture with a fake name, Sally, a working professional seeking a man 25 to 35 years old for a short term or long term romance that needed to include hiking and lots of fun. The Rolling Stone profile of match.com was a huge success, but Sally soon found out the true pitfalls of the apps when an alleged German man living in Brazil asked her to help him create a new generation of Nazi youths. The match team was also keenly aware of a much ignored but likely profitable target group, the Gays, the company's marketing consultant, a Georgia raised homosexual named Simon Glinsky, knew the struggle of finding his kind out in the wild and explained to Kremlin that the elves, the Gays, the bees, and the Tays had been pioneers on early message boards, creating their own matchmaking services without the aid of a website like his. So Glinsky showed up to a local gay computer club, which sounds adorable, and spread the word about match.com's gay new features. The company then posted up at a roller rink during Gays' gate night for their own promotional event, corralling Gays' skaters to their stand to learn about match. Really knowing their audience, the company had brought large digital cameras and offered to take their new dating profile pictures right then and there, blowing up each photo on a computer for all to see, which was actually pretty exciting technology at the time. By the late 90s, match.com was experiencing a meteoric rise, and as is often the case, competitors began to enter the chat, each becoming more and more specific, each trying to net their own niche. Consider yourself a gay dude, now you've got Grindr, or Scruff, consider yourself a lesbian, you've got her, black singles, you've got black people meet, putting Jesus first in your relationship, submit your profile to Christian Mingle. Looking for a nice Jewish spouse to bring home to mother, J-Date is the one for you. A polyamorous couple seeking new connections, let me introduce you to Field. Looking for a homesteading partner? Farmer's only is the one for you, and on, and on, and on. Now, more than 30 years after the introduction of match, it's estimated that 50% of new couples are meeting online. But the maddening apps we know today are actually part of a lineage of dating technologies and processes that have been used for more than 150 years to match up strangers hoping to find connections, love, and maybe even marriage. For this episode, we'll learn about the first craze of computer dating in the 1960s, the next craze of video dating in the 80s and 90s, and we'll learn about what may have been the start of it all, the quirky analog courtship practices of the Victorian era that share a lot of similarities with online dating. We'll of course circle right on back to explore the capitalistic manipulation and exploitation of the dating apps we know and love and hate, those that have seemed to grow into monsters themselves, monsters that their creators claim to be animated by an algorithmic spark of love. [music] Now the fun begins. Why? First of all, do you remember those movies from the 50s and the 60s where they showed all those fun loving kids dating to their hearts content when they're in high school? Well, a lot of us missed out on that. But you're not going to miss out on that now because adult dating is a lot more fun, especially. When you're going out with people who want to meet you, they've watched your video, they've seen your photo, they've read about you, they know whether you have kids or you smoke and you're like, "Opera, hey, baseball or anything, it's a mutual consent." There's no hard part, there's only a fun part and you've made a smart decision. Because you're going to start meeting people who are just like yourself, either they want to get married or they don't, they want to date lots of people or they don't. Because there's all kinds of people here right now and you're going to know up front by watching their video and reading their profile, looking at their photo, who's right for you and who wants to go out with you. It's a wonderful opportunity to get an understanding of each other's chemistry and fulfill your greatest expectations. Congratulations, you made a very smart move. If you walked into the boardroom of the great expectations headquarters in the early 1990s, right around the time of match.com's launch, you would see a painting of CEO Jeffrey Olman on the ceiling, depicting him as a classic cupid, the winged baby's original face replaced with an image of his own at six months old. Then you'd see him sitting there with heart-shaped cufflinks, the man who gave himself the kingly moniker of "The Love God," despite having three divorces under his belt. The LA Times, responding with an article that dubbed him "The Love God from Hell." You might hear him reminisce about the time he met with a banker to procure a loan for 300K, and he wore a see-through plastic tie of shredded dollar bills. Or about the time he went to a blood bank for fun with a secret blood capsule hidden in his cheek, biting into it and then screaming while the foamy blood poured out of his mouth. This was the eccentric man behind a new revolution of modern techno dating, a service that used VHS tapes to create matches between hopeful singles. By the early 1980s, people all over the country had received one or more of the almost one billion mailers sent to homes by great expectations, asking things like, "Where do you go to meet quality single people like yourself?" And all but promised, "No more uncomfortable blind dates, no more wasted time in singles bars, no more losers." As Jeff Olman once told a reporter, "I'm gonna marry America. Why not?" It was 1977 when the home video system made its debut in the United States, and VHS tapes and their requisite VCRs were the hot new technology. Olman was ahead of the curve, an ex hippie in his 20s heading toward a new yuppiedum, leaving behind the commune he had lived on with his first wife, and the anti-war Vietnam moratorium committee he headed at the University of Southern California. Just a year before the launch of great expectations, he was at a dinner party chatting with a friend of his, a woman who complained about how difficult it was to meet a good man. She hated blind dates and she was scared of the potentially unsafe men she met by chance out at bars or parties. Without thinking, Olman told her, "Well, advertise." And that's when it hit him. If we shop for everything else, why not shop for love? "I was still very apprehensive. I really didn't want to do this." "Well, maybe I should wait and take here this bill first." "I'll tell you, I'm out the bad. I was really, really nervous." "I did go home thinking what have I done?" "It was actually very terrifying in the beginning. Scared." "Yeah, I was kept a good one." "Oh, very excited." "And my loser, this means that I can't meet anybody in my life out there in the real world, but I have to join this way." "Any time you jump into something." Olman's new business plan worked like this. Eteromantic hopeful worked with great expectations to create a member profile, a flattering photo paired with a bio. There was the standard questionnaire that asked about things like weight, height, job, and religion, and then more open-ended sections where a user would try to showcase their personality. Things like, "Who am I? What I like to do and what I'm looking for." Then a rep from great expectations would conduct a filmed interview with each new member, which Olman believed. "Shote appearance, animation, personality charm, and all of the ambitions, desires, dreams, wants and needs which can be hidden in the ordinary social contacts." The second phase saw the singles return to thumb through heavy three-ring binders that contained hundreds of other profiles. Taking in their first impressions. Once the members had chosen a few enticing strangers, they were brought to an area in front of a TV. The specific VHS tapes taken from their shelves and popped into the VCR, bringing the objects of their potential affection to life. "Hello. My name is Ellen. Some people call me sexy. Others say I'm sensuous." "Hi. My name's Mike. And if you're sitting there watching this tape smoking your cigarette, well, hit the fast forward button because I don't smoke and I don't like people who do smoke." "So when that's clean, be clean, you know? I keep my car very clean. I also like very meaty men." "I'm a 25-year subscriber to both Playboy and a New Yorker magazine." "That middle-er. I laugh hysterically at that middle-er. I'm looking for a romanticist. Spent time at a fireplace." "Are you the goddess? Who is the goddess? The goddess is the woman. Is A woman? Is any woman? Is all women?" "I do consider myself a refined valley dude." "But I'm doing right now. It's making a movie about World War II." "I'm currently involved in cleaning up toxic waste." "And my goal in life is to have my own religion." "I'm looking for. I'm not sure." "I'm not having fun to win this." "The popularity of great expectations began to grow and at the same time the media saw that video dating fascinated the general public, whether they used it or not." "The modern day showman Jeff Olman would appear on CNN, Hurraldo, Oprah, Phil Donahue, and Sally Jesse Raphael. And great expectations got right ups and Cosmo USA Today, new women ink among many others." When tonight show host Johnny Carson received a great expectations mailer to his house, he filled out their questionnaire live on air as a gag. All of this publicity helped the dating service grow into a multi-million dollar business. And Olman knew it was time to do the 80s thing and franchise out, citing the success of McDonald's. He told the reporter, "What Ray Croc did for hamburgers, I want to do for the heart." But Olman's temperament toward employees of his business, sometimes being mean enough to bring them to tears, actually led to a ban on him visiting his own franchises. In 1990, a local bank put out one of their cute monthly ads that said, simply, "We handle more zeros than a dating service." This enraged Olman, who staged a protest with more than 30 people, including a couple executives from competing dating services. He told the press, "Since Santa Monica Bank believes that single people are zeros, we are asking all people single and married to reduce their bank accounts to zero." But the offending financial institution was simply reflecting a commonly held belief about this type of dating, that it was something that losers used. People who didn't have what it took, the looks, the income, the personality needed to attract anyone in the real world. Because of this assumption, great expectations would be spoofed on comedy shows like The Simpsons. "What do I do here?" "Just tell us about yourself." "Well, I want to have a baby before it's too late. You're looking at a free lunch boys, come and get it." "Ugh!" "Back to the lock with you, Nessik!" And in a classic, I remember so well from Childhood, a series of segments on Mad TV. [Sings] Are you having trouble finding your ideal maid? How about any maid? Do you fear you'd be the last man or woman on earth still not getting any? Well, wake up sleeping, ugly. Because your only hope is lowered expectations. Our video library allows you to choose from thousands of chronically rejected singles just as hard up and pathetic as you. So good luck, you'll need it. There was a quiet sense of desperation around video dating, of course, a deep human desire for romance and partnership that could be easily exploited. By the mid-90s, with dozens of new franchises all over the country that served more than 150,000 love-lorn members, great expectations was making the annual equivalent of $150 million. At the height of the company's success, a membership cost a whopping $2,000 a year, or about $4,500 today. That's $375 a month. But Olman claimed it was worth every penny you had to shell out to shop for something this important, though of course there were no guarantees of finding a lasting match. He did love to claim that his company's work had resulted in more than 10,000 weddings, though no data was provided to prove this. At one point, a man named Larry Hash began speaking publicly about feeling taken advantage of by great expectations, so much so that he took to picketing their Encino headquarters, with a sign that said, "I got ripped off by great expectations." Olman's temper flared, and he actually punched the man in the face not once, but twice, defending himself later to authorities by claiming that Larry hit him with his sign first. In addition to his own PR, Olman was also hyper-focused on his rivals, video dating firms smaller than his own. But LA Times piece claimed that he would arrive at competitors' businesses to spy on them, while wearing a variety of disguises. When one of their competitors' video date had to close their doors, Olman showed up to their empty office to rip the company's nameplate from the door to keep as a souvenir. He would buy out dating services, and if they refused to pressure them to sell, attempting to create a monopoly of the whole video dating industry. But because the formula was starting to appeal to more and more Americans, new businesses continued to pop up all over the country like a game of whack-a-mole, and many of them were becoming more and more exploitative, some costing the equivalent of $9,000 a year today. As is often the case, governmental regulations had not yet caught up with the new technology, but finally, a nationwide crackdown was initiated, and regulators uncovered all kinds of unfair practices in the industry, including manipulative customer service, shady refund policies, false advertising, and a whole lot of unaddressed customer dissatisfaction. But just as video dating was in the hot seat with federal agencies, Match.com's Gary Cremen was already tinkering with what would one day become the modern dating app. Though online dating would soon become the main way that people met single strangers, it was, surprisingly, not the first time that entrepreneurs used computers as a tool to create a matchmaking craze. Before after this. And now back to the show. In December of 1964, a few friends at Harvard were participating in what their school newspaper referred to as a "bull session," one of those informal yet intense late-night group discussions that are a hallmark of college life. After a few drinks, the boys began bemoaning the state of dating at Harvard, which was not yet a co-ed institution. The main ways that they were able to meet eligible young ladies were through stodgy school-sanctioned mixers in gymnasiums, or worse, blind dates set up by family and friends, or worse yet setups through an official matchmaker or marriage bureau. Like many college students, bull sessioners, Jeffrey Tar and Vaughan Moral were into computers 30 years before they would become commonplace in America. In the 1960s, the machines were absolutely nothing like the ones we know today, and very few people had access to them, save for government employees and university students, and just one of them was the size of an entire room. They were mainly used for boring things like science, business, bookkeeping, and the military, but the boys saw their untapped potential for aiding in more exciting human pursuits. They came up with an idea to create a computer program for college students at the All Male Ivy League Universities and the All Female Seven Sisters Colleges of the Northeast. They reached out to local computer technicians, as well as an attorney, to see if they could actually pull off their vision, and they were told that, yes, it was feasible. Along with David Crump and Douglas Ginsburg, they formed Compatibility Research Inc and got to work on what they dubbed Operation Match, the sign on their new office door reading. Your business is our pleasure, your pleasure is our business. The Operation Match process started like this. Singles would fill out a questionnaire they received that contained 75 questions. Although the team did collaborate with the social relations department, a discipline that contained psychology, sociology, and anthropology, the questions were mainly based on what the boys wanted to know about their own potential dates. The survey asked respondents about how they looked, what their interests and dating habits were, what their family income was, their religious preference, their race, their SAT scores, whether they like to dance fast or slow, how often they drink alcohol, if they believed that romantic love was necessary for a successful marriage, and this controversial one. Do you consider yourself sexually experienced? After that, each person filled out a questionnaire about what they were looking for in a match, and originally there was a question about their ideal dates' boss size, but that was wisely cut from the final version. The hopefuls would then mail the surveys back to Compatibility Research Inc, along with the $3 fee, that's about $31 today, and the guys would transfer the questionnaire answers onto punch cards, and then run those cards through an IBM 1401, nicknamed "The Great God Computer." In three weeks' time, the customers would open up a piece of mail that contained the names and numbers of their six most compatible matches. Unfortunately, no pictures included. First in Operation Match started off slow, so the guys turned to the tried and true method of the publicity stunt. First, the very popular CBS game show, to tell the truth, chose Jeff Tar and Operation Match as their subject. The contestants were presented with three different people claiming to be Jeff, and then they had to guess who was the real one. If you would like to take the blindness out of your next blind date, one of these young men could help you. What is your name, please? My name is Jeff Tar. My name is Jeff Tar. My name is Jeff Tar. Only one of these young men is the real Jeff Tar, the other two are imposterous and will try to fool this panel. Number one, do the people tell the truth on these questionnaires? Well, we kind of improved on it, and most of the time, I'm sorry. No, most people don't tell the truth, and we had to make three questionnaires to catch up with the non-fabric. Well, as long as they've met slides, I guess that's all right. Number two, have there been any marriages? That was not, in fact, the real Jeff Tar. The second PR boost came in the form of Vicki Albright, a 20-year-old UCLA law student who had just appeared on the cover of Newsweek's 1965 edition about campus life. It was a simple portrait that showed her with an armful of books, eyes closed, head slightly caulked, standing in a gold sweater with flipped blonde hair. And for whatever reason, the cover caused a mini sensation across the college campuses of America. America. Suddenly, Vicki was receiving daily phone calls at her sorority and dozens of letters every day from all over the country, most of them random guys shooting their shots. One letter Vicki shared with the press went like this. "Dear Vicki, I can't think, I can't sleep, I can't study, and I can't think, if you won't let me die, will you." With Vicki's blessing, the boys advertised her as the newest single on Operation Match, leading to a huge batch of new Harvard applications flowing in. But college guys all over the nation were obsessed with Vicki, and there were complaints from other East Coast ivies that it wasn't fair that they couldn't apply. But, as David Crump said, "Jeff and Vaughan and I wanted to give ourselves a better chance." However, there would be no manipulating the great God computer, and the young man who was calculated to be the best match for Vicki was literature major Kevin Lewis. The hopeful new couple was presented during an Operation Match party at Harvard, where Vicki was crowned "Miss Operation Match," and David Crump's rock and roll band played an original number called "She's My IBM Baby." When Kevin was asked to come on stage and meet Vicki, he kissed her on the cheek to roaring applause and said to the crowd, "I can't speak for her, but as far as I'm concerned, the computer works." The Associated Press picked up photos of the new computer couple, and they were printed in papers all across the country. Almost immediately, Operation Match, now opened to singles from most colleges, received an influx of 8,000 applications, and within six months that number jumped to 70,000. The response is growing as compatibility research opened offices in New York, Boston, San Francisco, LA, and several cities in the Midwest. According to the boys, the IBM computer had made 24,000 perfect matches, whatever that means, and two of those matches were engaged. Many celebrity Jeff Tar soon appeared on the Johnny Carson show, sitting right next to Liza Manelli. Soon, words spread of this new version of "Techno Love" with the Boston Globe writing, "The Harvard Entrepreneurs have captured Cupid, or to be more exact, they have computerized Cupid." Operation Match, the journalist wrote, could quote, "analyze all the personality profiles and match the couples up scientifically, unless time then it takes to blow a kiss." In a relatable letter sent to the compatibility research ink PO Box, a Smith College sophomore wrote, "Diamist a computer, I set myself before the I-Eminence, and thou shouldest rain grace and good cheer upon my undeserving but very needy self." In the Philadelphia Daily News, columnist Polly Devlin wrote about her internal experience with Operation Match, in a way we can certainly still relate to today. Quote, "Filling out the questionnaire unnerved me, one should answer the question spontaneously, but if I did, I emerged as a cultured, honest, artful angel. If, on the other hand, I thought about them and answer them honestly, they showed me up to be a somewhat prejudiced dogmatic, dishonest paradox. What to do? Cheat a little and be classified as a nice attractive girl and meet another cheat? Or tell the truth and die a thousand deaths because the computer won't be able to find a comparable monster." The papers, of course, also loved to write about the negative experiences of Operation Matchers, including this shitty little students. The first was ugly, the second stupid, the third disagreed with me about politics, the next two were dogs, the sixth was perfect, but she's at Smith College and a three-hour drive is too much of a haul for pot luck. They also printed this excerpt of a complaint letter received by Compatibility Research Inc. "The girl you sent me didn't have much upstairs, but what a staircase." Another article reported that a girl who asked for a poet instead was matched with, quote, "bulging muscles in a pea brain." Like match.com would, three decades later, Operation Match also saw an incredibly untapped market, a market that was untapped because it was still extremely controversial. You know him, you love him, that degenerate, voracious, pre-Stonewall revolution, pre-Gay Wright's movement, homosexual man. If you couldn't tell, all the guys over at Compatibility Research Inc. were horrifically straight, so they reached out to gay activists Franklin Camini and asked him to head their new little side quest. But Franklin had strong political values, and it felt wrong to try to profit off the loneliness of his fellow queers. But the success of Operation Match was inspiring competitors by the late 1960s, and I was able to locate a pretty amazing ad for a computer dating service called Man to Man. How to meet Mr. Wright and stop trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. You can now meet the really right people, the safe, dignified, confidential way. It used to be difficult to meet people who share your interests. People with that just right personality, looks, tastes, and background. Space age computing science now makes it safer and easier for you to make the friend you've always wanted to make. The truly discreet way. Gay power has now made available an IBM 360 computer dating service, specially designed by gay people for the exclusive use of the homosexual community. Though Operation Match itself was a flash in the pan, and the boys moved on to other careers, they had proved the computer dating model, and the new industry spread beyond college campuses. The craze became popular enough to have 15 separate services in LA alone and dozens, if not hundreds, across the country, with names like Selectra Date, Commodat, and Icebreaker Inc. There were the cheap ones that ran $3 to $25 or $50 to $250 today, with simple questionnaires that people often lied on with no oversight. And then there were the expensive ones that claimed to vet their clientele to conduct extensive interviews that included character references and even provided a background check and a medical check. Those ran from $300 to $5,000. That's $2,800 to $47,000 today. This is unsurprisingly, as the services grew more and more popular, they also grew more and more predatory, complete with slimy salesmen now dispatched into people's homes. A journalist wrote about her own experience in a 1970 LA Times article in which the salesman promised her dates with IQs that would be 10 to 15 points higher than her own, and that she would be matched with millionaires and movie stars. He told her, "Don't reject the service after five dates, because it might be the sixth that you like. Don't quit after the tenth, because it might be the eleventh." Eventually, like video dating, several of these companies would be federally investigated for using misleading or flat out false statements in their advertising. Fifth Deputy Attorney Charles A. O'Brien told reporters, quote, "The worst part of this situation is that fraud in this field prays on people's loneliness and invades their privacy to an unusual degree." More after this. In March and its successors worked in large part because by the 1960s, casual dating had long outpast the earlier practice of highly supervised courtship with the specific goal of marriage. This was a slow change that took root in the mid-1800s due to the industrial revolution and the mass migration of people into urban areas from small rural towns. And suddenly, the options overflow with creating a staggering new sea of strangers from which to pick an appropriate mate. And so, an annual Dutch-inspired matchmaking event known as New Year's Day Calling became wildly popular with the white urban middle and upper classes, something I think holds a lot of similarities to online dating as we know it. Basically, young ladies would invite a slew of eligible bachelors to come and dine at their homes in quick intervals, overseen by their parents, of course. Hundreds upon hundreds of young women in each city would place advertisements in local newspapers for their calling receptions, listing their names, addresses, and the hours they would host, usually between 10am and 9pm. There were many rules of etiquette that shaped the calling process. According to the popular guide, Hills Manual of Social and Business Forms, the young women were expected to present themselves in full dress, and always have a welcoming fire burning in the fireplace. It was recommended that coffee and tea, but never alcohol, be prepared for each guest, along with foods such as pickled oysters, cold tongue, jelly chicken, ice cream fruits, nuts, and chocolate with whipped cream. When each new suitor arrived, the young woman of the house would look him up and down, and perhaps have a word or two before issuing her subtle judgment, her proto-left or right swipe. She would either ask him to take off his hat and coat, which meant that she wanted him to stay awhile, or she would offer him refreshments but not ask him to take off his hat and coat, which meant that he needed to work extra hard to impress her in a short amount of time. From there, the etiquette book said, quote, "The calls should not exceed 10 or 15 minutes, unless the callers are few, and it should be agreeable to prolong the stay." After the meeting, the young man was expected to leave his "calling" card, so that the lady could choose to be in touch if she felt like he could be a match. But soon, this quaint little romantic holiday took a turn for the worse. Once alcohol became a mainstay of New Year's Day calling, the tenor changed dramatically, and it became more like a rockest game than any genuine attempt at matchmaking. The guys would travel by horse-drawn carriage to as many homes as they could find printed in the paper, dipping into each simply to get a drink and then to slip out and onto the next. They were competing to see who could visit the most houses, while also getting as drunk and rowdy as possible. But the young women were not powerless victims of these Victorian fuck boys. They were complicit in the holidays degeneration. They would try to collect as many cards as possible to compete with their girlfriends, showing them off on the second of the year, known as "Ladies Day." Gossiping about who was hot and who was not. Eventually, they kind of bagged the whole thing, leaving the house to have their own fun on New Year's Day, and simply leaving a basket outside where the guys could drop off their calling cards, or not, who cares. By the 1870s, the formality of courtship was loosening further, with the younger crowd becoming more interested in what would eventually become casual dating. It was a dream of unsupervised co-mingling with more than just one, apparently approved young man or woman, leading to the term "dating," finally becoming popularized in the 1910s. But in polite society, marriage was still supposed to be the goal of opposite sex interactions, and formal introductions were still non-negotiable. One couldn't just go up to a beautiful young stranger and make a pass. But those seeking more low-pressure, casual introductions could partake in the new craze of what were called "acquaintance cards, escort cards, or flirtation cards," little novelty items that included poems, sayings, illustrations, and spaces on the cards to write one's name, the date, time, and the proposed location for a possible meeting. The cards only slightly larger than a matchbox to ensure discreet delivery would be filled out almost always by young men and then slipped into the hand or bag of a potential paramour without anyone taking notice. These mass-produced flirts were available in bundles of different styles, often 1,000 cards for a dollar 35, around $34 in today's money, making them one of the very first ways that people paid for a personalized way to get a casual date with a stranger. While the thirstiest among us could certainly swipe through a thousand dating profiles in a day, it's hard to imagine a young man in the 1800s finding a thousand ladies in real life at which to shoot his Victorian shot, but what the fuck do I know? Of course, one of the most stressful parts of online dating and dating in general is coming up with your opening line. But, acquaintance cards did the hard part for you. You just had to choose how you wanted to present yourself. Thanks to Ephemera Collector Alan Mays for archiving so many wonderful examples. Many of these were classically romantic. "May I see you home? Or will I have to sit on the fence and watch you me and her by?" "Other is a pure tame, but hell the little secret sauciness." The image beside the poem in that one shows a woman with an oversized bonnet in which she and her date are stealing a hidden kiss, the words yum yum written on the side of their fabric shield. Now, this one is honestly kind of hot. "Come and see our new lamp. You can turn it down so low that there is scarcely any light at all. P.S. Our sofa just holds two." This one feels a little doucheier. "Would like to negotiate for the use of a parlor sofa tomorrow night. No lights required." This next guy seems like a real handful. "I have a feeling for you. But where are the fakes? I am the original wholesale and retail dealer in love, kisses, and up to date hugs a large stock on hand at all times. We'll be glad to demonstrate in a dark room. Come and examine my stock before dealing elsewhere. All business, confidential, consult me on spooning business." Special attention paid to other fellow's girls. As for this next one, there is nothing a woman finds more attractive than self-pity and references to a previous trist. So here's an emo card from a disaffected young man. "This noble youth so lean and want was once as proud as an a man. His generous heart so full of glee is smashed and full of misery. He bought her candy, nuts and clothes, took her to all the circus shows. He suffers much. Tell why who can? She ran away with another man." So ladies, go ahead and take your pick. After the card was slipped to the young woman, it was her opportunity to swipe left or right on the guy who passed her the card. Often there was an elementary school staple of circling yes or no to a date before returning the card, but other times the woman simply kept it if she did want to go on a date or return the card if she did not wish to make his acquaintance. Ice cold. It all seems very quaint now, but at the time these cards caused a whole lot of inflamed commentary on the improper and salacious behavior of these new hopeless romantics, those that were playing the field on their own without the supervision of the older generation. Before the advent of dating in the early 1900s, matches with strangers were made through personal ads and marriage bureaus, though couples were usually formed with the help of families, churches, and small communities. The idea that a pairing would be created around the feeling of romantic love was pretty unheard of. The purpose was for both parties to improve their financial standing, expand their land ownership, and create for their future families a better position in society. If they liked each other, great. If not, they can just go ahead and tolerate each other. But as romantic Victorian middle class sensibilities took root, we began seeking mates that gave us that very risky experience of romantic love and thus became incredibly vulnerable to predatory practices by massive corporations. In addition, over the last 50 years, hyper capitalism and unwocable sprawling cities have also eroded access to what are known as third spaces, free or low-cost spots like parks, community centers, malls, coffee shops, and bars that are either disappearing or becoming too expensive to linger in, making the apps feel absolutely necessary to meet a potential match at this point. And because of the social change that living life online has wrought, our anxiety in introducing ourselves to strangers in public has grown exponentially as we become more and more cut off from offline communities. Our alienation from those around us only growing stronger every day by design. Online dating, as we know it, began in the early 1990s with the launch of Match.com. But as more and more dating apps have hit the app store behind the scenes, more and more of those choices have come under control of what eventually became Match Group. With tie-dye creator Gary Kremon, long gone from the company, Match started swallowing up more and more dating apps by either making offers to buy them, threatening them with lawsuits if they refused and going through with the lawsuits if they still refused, all to pressure them into selling or folding. At this point, Tinder, hinge, plenty of fish, OK, cupid, and about 20 more fall under their Match Group corporate umbrella. Over the last 10 years, as I'm sure many of you have noticed, the price of these apps, which used to be free or very cheap, have skyrocketed. These companies may still offer free versions strangled by ads, but as anyone on the apps knows, these versions are virtually unusable, and you are pressured to buy premium subscriptions to actually unlock your compatible matches. Even if you do shell out for love, these companies don't actually want you to find a real connection, because once they are successful in the mission they claim to be undertaking, well, two of their users disappear, along with their monthly subscription money, and 98% of their revenue comes from those fees. And many people feel they have to use several apps at the same time to maximize their chances, paying $20, $30, $50 a month or more for each one. And yet, according to a 2025 Forbes Help Survey, 78% of those who responded reported that they felt emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by dating apps, and their lack of quality matches. One term for this is inshitification, which describes how dating apps and other online companies manipulate their user base. First, they present a free and high quality experience in order to build a large base of customers. And then, once they're able to dominate the market by swallowing more and more competitors, they no longer have to offer competitive pricing. From there, they slowly insidiously make their app fucking suck. That is, until users pay more and more to access the higher tiers. Like I said, they often hide our actual matches behind paywalls, and often hide them even when you shell out, creating scarcity that can lead you to subscribing to more apps that they own. They also charge different subscription rates based on who you are. For example, people over 50 are often charged more than those under 50. Back in 2019, the FTC came for match group because they had been utilizing fake profiles in order to bait people to pay for a more expensive tier, and then made it exceedingly difficult to cancel their auto-renewing subscription. When Tinder gamified the dating world in 2012 by introducing the swipe feature within a couple years, they were claiming more than a billion swipes every day, leading to an alleged 12 million matches every day. In February of 2024, Clarkson Law Firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of match group customers that called out the practices I mentioned and more. Quote, "Harnessing powerful technologies and hidden algorithms match intentionally designs the platforms with addictive game-like design features, which lock users into a perpetual pay to play loop that prioritizes corporate profits over its marketing promises and customers' relationship goals." The suit goes on to explain their, quote, "Pattern of deceptive and coercive practices commonly deployed on gambling sites, algorithms that hide quality matches to incentivize premium upgrades, notifications that trigger compulsive app checking, artificial scarcity through daily swipe limits, and variable pricing schemes that charge users different amounts based on secretive algorithmic assessments." All of this, the plaintiffs argued, contradicts match groups stated mission and marketing, perhaps best exemplified by its subsidiary hinges, own tagline, designed to be deleted. As has always been the case, questionnaires are the most important part of dating apps because they, allegedly, are the best way to find compatibility with others. Make sense? That is, until you find out that these companies that love to pressure us to answer more and more questions are mining our intimate data, including private chats, to share with or even sell to other companies. And the once wonderful OKCupid, now under match group, was caught handing over users' photos to train AI facial recognition technology. Not to get conspiratorial, but that happened years ago and was only uncovered recently, so it seems reasonable to imagine that similar things could be happening now without our knowledge. And here's the icing on the cake. Match groups, new CEO, Spencer Raskoff, is a former board member of the Cosmically Evil Corporation, Peter Teel's Palantir, known for creating AI tech for ice, for mass domestic surveillance, and for weapons of war. As we know by now, these things are all connected in hidden ways that exploit the most vulnerable parts of us for the gain of a handful of the most powerful people. A 2026 Groundwork Collaborative Report titled Swipe Right to Pay, How Dating Apps Turned Love Into a Subscription Service, put it this way, quote, "Match groups market dominance means that the company doesn't merely participate in the dating industry. It sets the rules for how courtship gets commodified and those rules prioritize extortion over authentic connection." And this appears to be how it goes with techno dating, whether it be computer dating of the '60s, video dating of the '80s, or dating apps of the '90s and beyond, a slow slide from a decent idea by eccentric, if sometimes unsavory entrepreneurs into an exploitative final form swallowed whole by a massive corporation. In this country, a small handful of the mega-rich have worked to commodify even the ineffable, the precious human spark that makes this hard life they have also designed worth living. And now, with the ever rising cost of gas, of food, of housing, of health care, and of everything else, it feels like we're returning to a time when finding a partner was a kind of method of survival, a person who can help us deal with an economic reality that feels like it is actively trying to kill us. In the dating industry and so many others, vital to human existence, hyper capitalism, and its ugly-ass minions have transformed into vampires, trying to siphon every cent away from a desperate populace while dangling the most intimate and vulnerable of our desires, the promise of love and companionship, a better future, and maybe even a family, while they purposefully withhold all of it through a programmed deception. It's not about dating apps, it's about everything, the price that has been put on our very souls by these vile, heartless, pathetic, fucking losers who themselves cannot feel the full spectrum of love, who can only see us as bags of blood to drink from, to fulfill some bloodless dream of a boring immortality. It seems to me that they are always trying desperately to revive the walking death that they are, to stop themselves from shriveling into the dry inanimate husks that are their one true form. And when they lie down at the end of their lives, when they look up at the golden moon and the infinite pitch black sky out their window, and the pointless, blinking number of their horded wealth echoes in an empty white hospital hall, their audible beeping heartbeat will remind them that none of what they've done means anything at all. They've only made pain, only forsaken what it means to be human, and thus forsaken them. Those silves, those smirks we've seen on their smug faces will fall because they will understand that there is nothing left to win. And finally, they will envy those they have exploited, leaving this world without the spark of love. They try to steal from us like prometheus stealing fire from the gods, but this time they will see that we are the gods and forever the spark belongs to us. This was American hysteria. 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You can also leave us a message on the urban legends hotline about a tale that you remember from growing up or one you've heard recently and we might do an entire investigation about it. American hysteria is written, produced and hosted by me, Chelsea Weber-Smith. Our producer and editor is Miranda Zickler. Our associate producer and sound designer is Riley Swedeleus Smith and our voice actor is Will Rogers. Thanks as always for listening and today I wish you love in all forms. That's all. you