ABSTRACT
Through a focus on excitement, we use this chapter to counter representations of internet dating as about highly rationalised and commodified selection of partners requiring management of risk. Experiences of using internet dating to find relationships may in some ways be like shopping, but arguably in more enjoyable, sensory, embodied and emotional ways. We examine whether internet dating excites forms of heterosexual practice that might wander from, or even undermine, aspects of heteronormativity. We consider how emotional reflexivity can, under some circumstances, transform practices of intimately relating to others. The chapter disputes theoretical and empirical accounts of risk as feared by offering an alternative view of internet dating as exciting. It suggests that risk is not equivalent to fear or negative withdrawal from dating. Rather we note that other emotions which may or may not be linked to risk assessment, such as excitement, can prompt an emotional reflexivity capable of interrupting or even upsetting hierarchical relations to others. Thus, as in earlier chapters, we give examples of how heterosexual internet dating practices can sometimes diverge from, transgress and subvert the heteronorm. Here the analysis suggests that internet dating can, for example, emotionally excite heterosexuals to move beyond and undermine (inequitable) homogamy and monogamy, albeit not inevitably in radical ways.
