A Rhetorician's Guide to Love: Online Dating Profiles as Remediated Commonplace Books

• Nation's leading online dating site, Match.com, is a commonplace book-conduct manual hybrid for identity performance.
• I offer an insider view of a virtual dating community via rhetorical analysis of my own dating profile.
• Match.com profiles copy Victorian commonplace books in focus on desired identities and as gender performance scripts.
• Virtual performances are scripted by template design and linguistic and visual commonplaces circulating in online dating.

This project considers ways online daters “write themselves” into the role of dater and offers grounding of this rhetorical work with direct comparisons to historic commonplace books. Despite the promise of interactive, dynamic online spaces to provide full and malleable online dating ads, Match.com profiles offer relatively little agency for identity creation and performance and are actually remarkably close to “old media” practices for writing identity. Paying particular attention to template design and linguistic and visual commonplaces that inform genre expectations for gendered identity performances in this space, this rhetorical analysis focuses on the author's online dating profile. The piece first situates commonplace books as textual identity production and then posits Match.com as a remediation of the gendered commonplace book practice wherein modern daters negotiate tensions between master narratives concerning gender performances and the desire to transcend limiting normative heterosexual gender roles. Specifically, when comparing these remediated dating commonplace books to their Victorian era predecessors, I consider dependence on limited, normative views of gender, the use of scripts and visual and linguistic commonplaces, the public nature of a privately crafted identity performance, and the focus on future, desired roles and identities rather than present identities. The piece offers an insider look at the Match.com community and focuses specifically on the power of Match.com design templates and site conventions to shape and limit daters’ identity representations via the use of pull-down menus and linguistic and visual cues reinforcing normative heterosexual gender roles for dating.