“...And She Looked Nothing Like Her Profile”: Understanding the Navigation of Awkwardness Within Online Dating

This study explores awkwardness within an online dating context. Despite the pervasiveness of awkwardness in everyday life, scholar attention on the topic has remained limited. While attempting to expand to the academic research of awkwardness, the analysis of awkwardness within online dating spotlights its interactivity with offline and online settings. It is concerned with highlighting the underlying difficulties of building and establishing new relationships through an untraditional dating dynamic. Therefore, the navigation of awkwardness in online dating is addressed by investigating its conceptualisation, how it is dealt with among individuals. This study consists of a qualitative textual analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews. The results showed a strong presence of awkwardness throughout the stages of online dating. Participants were clearly driven by the desire to both conceal, and overcome an awkward situations for the sake of interaction as well as for the protection of the self. Differently to accounts of awkwardness as being a social experience, evidence inner-directed awkwardness showed how awkwardness was able to manifest itself through social interaction, or without it. With the collection of awkward online dating experiences, a typology of awkward social interactions from the connection of social mechanisms such as inauthenticity, uncertainty, blurring of gender roles, mismatches and rejection is suggested to also prevail in a wide range of social contexts.