“The Tipping Point” for Internet Dating: 9/11/2001
I finished Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” yesterday. I love Gladwell’s writing—I wrote about his newest “Blink” earlier. “Blink” is now #3 on the New York Times Bestsellers list, bumped out of first place by Jane Fonda. I’ve even scouted down Gladwell’s website and downloaded (for free) a bunch of his articles that were published in the New Yorker.
“The Tipping Point” does not have so much to say to singles looking for partners as “Blink” did, but it does have a few nuggets that apply. In “The Tipping Point,” Gladwell describes the process of how “ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” He writes about contagiousness, little things having big effects, and that change happens in a big dramatic moment.
“The Tipping Point” was published in 2000, but if Gladwell had been writing it in 2002, he might well have picked Internet dating as an example of an idea reaching the “tipping point,” when suddenly looking for love online moved into the mainstream.
After September 11, 2001, everyone seemed to want to be connected intimately. Friends, and more importantly family, became highly desirable. And Internet dating, which had been quietly growing in the corners of the web, became The Place to look for a life partner.
The ease of connecting with eligible singles online was an extremely contagious method of meeting whose time in history had come. And while the necessary “little thing” was a very big thing—the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon—the happenings did provide the “dramatic moment” the upcoming online dating epidemic needed.
Suddenly advertising for love no longer seems rather sleazy. Instead, putting your picture and profile on the Internet is a very smart thing to do.
From Your Romance Coach, Kathryn Lord
