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As a marriage counselor, I’ve seen many couples in recent years who met on-line. These couples have several commonalities:

Unrealistic expectations: The believe they will get along since they met their “soul-mate” and they had all these commonalities on the personality profiles on various web sites, such as EHarmony.com. We agree on all of these things so we should really get along. This is often not the case. This leads to the second problem:

They fight a lot. This seems counter intuitive: if we agree on all these issues and have similar views on all these important things, we should really be fine, right? This is not necessarily the case. Remember the common folk wisdom that if two people are too much alike they bump heads? We often say this about a parent and child who have similar personalities: “Oh, the reason they fight is because they are too much alike.” This folk wisdom is much more accurate than the notion of compatibility. I’m not sure where this idea of compatibility came from but it’s wrung havoc on our marriages. It creates the idea that if we don’t agree there must be something wrong. This is decidedly not the case: That we disagree is our strength. We agree on certain things and disagree on other things. It is good to disagree. You aren’t dumb. If you were, I wouldn’t have married you. I’m not dumb. If I was you wouldn’t’ have married me. Marriage is the pooling of wisdom so by definition we aren’t going to agree. So if two people meet arbitrarily on-line with the misconception that compatibility is the measure of marital success, they will soon be deluded by the number of arguments. Marital researchers have rejected personality theory and compatibility as a predictor of marital health 20-30 years ago. It didn’t hold water. Couples who enjoyed their marriages disagreed about the same number of things as couples who didn’t enjoy their marriages. What do you know? So researchers now are emphasizing how the couples interact. How a couple handles their disagreements predicts how they will end up, not how many things they agree on.

They don’t trust each other. This one isn’t so universal as the first two above, but it is at a very high rate, higher than the other couples I work with who met in more conventional methods. I’m not sure why this is more likely the case. Maybe it’s the same dynamic that is going on with co-habiting couples. A common theory of why cohabiting couples tend to break up at higher rates than married couples, is that they wouldn’t have cohabited in the first place unless they were more likely to be involved in risky behavior. If someone is willing to cohabit without marrying, they probably have lower regard to commitment in the first place, so when the going gets tough the cohabitor is more likely to go (not everyone agrees with this theory, but it does have some merit as a generalization. It may not be true for every cohabitor). Perhaps a person who looks for partners on-line may wonder about the integrity of someone else they meet online: if you had to meet me online, will you leave me if you find a better match? A surprising high number of people who meet online, keep surfing for other partners online even after they are engaged or married. Why? This kind of behavior can be addicting. It feels good to fantasize if so and so might make a match. Is there someone out there who is better? If they’ve done this behavior to make themselves feel better, it is an easy thing to go back to when they are feeling down.

Another theory I have is on this trust concern is that a very high percentage of the online couples I meet have had hurtful relationships in the past. Either they cheated on a previous partner, or a previous partner has cheated on them. It is difficult to trust someone a person loves now when they were hurt by someone else they loved before. How can they trust this new person when they’ve been hurt before? How can they trust themselves? “I thought things were fine and I was blindsided. If I keep them at a safe distance so they can’t hurt me.” It is also hard to have a meaningful relationship if you keep your spouse at a safe distance. It leads to one or both withdrawing or lashing out. Not good predictors of marital health.

Marriage counseling can help the couple learn to handle conflict and expectations and trust in more productive ways.