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Online daters may be prone to establishing serious relationships prematurely with others based on illusory perceptions related to anticipation of finding "the right one" - or soul mate. Thus, we examined whether individuals with intentions to use online matchmaking services had unrealistically optimistic expectations of finding a perfectly compatible partner. Two-hundred twenty-two individuals from a paid survey rated their behavioral intentions to use online dating and then indicated their expected frequency of "matches" across five hypothetical levels of compatibility. Participants had conservative estimates concerning the frequency of compatibility levels of their matches, and follow up analyses showed no appreciable or significant effects of behavioral intentions on these estimates. Results suggest that individuals with intentions to use online dating are not motivated by positive distortions or unrealistic optimism as measured by attitudinal indicators.
"Soul mate" can be defined as "One of two persons compatible with each other in disposition, point of view, or sensitivity" (American Heritage ,2000). The popularity of books such as Hoffman and Weiner's (2003) The Love Compatibility Book: The 12 Personality Traits That Can Lead You to Your Soulmate, and Finding a Husband After 35 Using What I learned at Harvard Business School (Greenwald, 2003) attests to the notion that many singles today seem to be asking themselves, "Will I ever meet my soul mate?" Although a familiar part of Western vernacular, the term "soul mate" is poetic rather than scientific. From our experience conducting focus groups with active users of online dating and matchmaking services, we have found that most people take it to mean romantic partners who are naturally and virtually "perfectly compatible" across a range of relationship expectations, attitudes and behaviors. This interpretation coincides with the basic findings from two unpublished doctoral dissertations on the soul mate concept (Bloomstein, 2001; Boyce, 2002).
Our conceptualization also implies a continuum of compatibility. That is, people appear to identify levels of compatibility when assessing potential partners. For example, a woman might find a particular man to be acceptably compatible with her in terms of his expectations, attitudes, and behaviors, but she might perceive another man with different levels of these attributes to be even more compatible with her. In this instance, the woman might categorize the first man as being "favorable," whereas...