When thinking about synchronicity, it's natural to think of it as being connected with love. Every great love story or relationship has a point were we marvel at the coincidence involved, all the things that had to fall into place for these two people to meet, and how easily just a slight change in circumstances could have prevented them from crossing paths.
Everybody has those moments in their lives where a string of coincidences come together in a life changing way, and whether we realize it or not, we are talking about synchronicity when we discuss these events.
Virtual dating often provides users with the feel and characteristics of synchronicity. When look at it closer, virtual dating changes the way we think about synchronicity. The concept and characteristics about synchronicity were founded over 50 years ago, and thus change drastically when applied to the modern ways we interact.
The main idea about synchronicity was the aspect of coincidence: that the events that occurred seemed very unlikely, even once in a lifetime, and of course this adds a degree of specialness to our romantic encounters. With virtual matchmaking, however, we have to change our ideas about synchronicity in the context of relationships.
The virtual matchmaking world allows for a virtually endless amount of possibilities: people can literally browse possible partners, and their interests and the like. In the real world, encounters with strangers where one has a conversation long enough to learn their interests are extremely rare by comparison. When an online match is made, it's harder to marvel at the synchronicity of the connection, because there simply aren't many coincidences involved. With an online match, we don't think about how amazing it was that someone ran into someone at a certain place, or the chances that they'd both be in line at the same store etc. . . because most of the time matches are made by browsing other peoples' interests. About synchronicity, the only real coincidental element in most online matches is the fact that both people decided to use the service.
Virtual matchmaking undeniably provides people with more opportunities to meet others with similar interests, and it is often successful. What makes it different fundamentally from real-world matchmaking, however, is the level of synchronicity: dating becomes a process of selection, like many consumer actions in everyday life. This is not to say that meaningful and profound relationships cannot be found through virtual matchmaking, only that they are not thought of in the same way as beginning with a string of remarkable coincidences.
In real life matches, almost every happy couple has a unique story of the circumstances under which they met. In the world of online matchmaking, one very different from real world circumstances, this story of the meeting is often going to be simply that both partners were using the same online matchmaking service, and were interested in each other's personal user profiles.