a book originally published in French in 2019 by Éditions La Découverte. The text was translated by Bernard Cohen and substantially rewritten by the author for the English language edition. The translation was funded by INED and CNRS, GIS GENRE. Quotations from original untranslated French sources have been translated by the author and by Bernard Cohen for this edition.
The right of Marie Bergström to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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Acknowledgments
A great many people have contributed to this book in different ways.
I would first like to thank all the persons interviewed for this research who shared their experiences of online dating but to whom I cannot refer individually. I am truly grateful to Meetic Group for our cooperation, which allowed me to take an original and international approach to user behavior. Special thanks to Héloïse de Monstiers, Stéphane-Laure Bernelin, and Hélène Point for their trust and encouragements.
A big thank you to John Thompson at Polity, who made this publication possible and provided me with valuable advice, and to Wanda Romanowski, Eva Lelièvre, and Alain Blum at INED Éditions for their incredible support. Thanks also to Michel Bozon, who has played an important role in this research as my advisor, and to Eva Illouz for encouraging me to publish this book and helping me to do so. I was delighted to work with Bernard Cohen, who translated several chapters of this book, and Rébecca Lévy-Guillain, who conducted interviews for this project.
I am indebted to all the people who have commented on various chapters of this book, first of all Étienne Ollion, who helped me improve the text in a decisive way. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers at Polity and at INED Éditions, as well as to Florence Maillochon, Jan Bergström, and Louise Caron. I received valuable feedback on previous versions of this text by Annabelle Allouch, Milan Bouchet-Valat, Thomas Collas, Joseph Confavreux, Thomas Depecker, Claire-Lise Gaillard, Josué Gimel, Gwenaëlle Mainsant, Elise Marsicano, Camille Masclet, Marie Plessz, Clément Rivière, Mathieu Trachman, and Florian Vörös: I wish to thank all of you. My gratitude goes also to Arnaud Régnier-Loilier and Wilfried Rault, who introduced me to the EPIC survey team.
Finally, I would like to thank the institutions who funded this research: the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), the GIS Institut du Genre, the Oxford-Sciences Po Programme (OxPo), and the Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC) at SciencesPo Paris.
I feel incredibly fortunate with my loving and supportive family. After years of publishing in French, I am delighted to be able to share my research with those to whom I owe so much. This book is dedicated to Ulla, Hans, Jan, Linda, Ebba and Oskar Bergström.
Figures
1.1. Front page of The Matrimonial News and Special Advertiser (February 1877)
1.2. Newspaper publicity for the “computer dating” agency Compatibility (LIFE, August 1969)
1.3. Interface of the BBS Matchmaker
1.4. Interface of the Minitel messaging system ULLA
1.5. Interface of Match.com (year 2000)
1.6. Interface of Tinder (year 2012)
2.1. Homogeneity in dating app interfaces: from left to right, Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, happn, and Facebook Dating
2.2. Stereotypical branding between love and sex (Match and EasyFlirt)
3.1. Rate of use of online dating platforms in France, the United States, and Germany (%)
3.2. Ranking of meeting venues in the United States in 2019 and in Germany in 2020 (%)
4.1. Time between initial contact and first sexual intercourse among couples in France (%)
6.1. Percentage, by age group, of the women and men in the United States who have used a dating site or app at least once
6.2. Pyramid of ages, by gender, declared on four European dating platforms (%)
7.1. Share of female and male users initiating contact on dating platforms in six countries in 2019 (%)
Sources
Surveys
| ATP | The American Trends Panel wave 56, Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, 2019 (4,860 respondents). For more information, see Pew Research Center, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c. |
| Baromètre 2016 | Baromètre Santé 2016, Santé publique France, 2016 (15,216 respondents). For more information, see Bajos et al., 2018. |
| CSF |
Contexte de la sexualité
|
