Rethinking E-dating Convergence in Robert Sternberg's Triadic Paradigm and African Romance Stories: Re-Embedding the Object and Subject-Oriented Database

This paper set out to respond to the challenge posed by scholars in postcolonial digital humanities, for
peripheral sexualities to converge with archival practices of digital dating, which is a mainly objectified and
technologized praxis. Drawing insights from Robert Sternberg"s triadic psychological theory based on the
consummation of passion, intimacy and commitment, as well as from African and oral romance stories, it came
up with the conclusions that, on the one hand, Sternberg"s structuralist paradigm cannot be optimized in
romance narratives for reasons of the complex and changing environmental conditions. African and oral
romance stories are very instructive about the deconstructive character of society when it comes to the
optimalization of the consummation of these components of love. Therefore with the techno-rationalist
determinism of e-dating that prioritizes efficiency over effectivity, the paper suggests that these diverging
insights of African and traditional philosophy about the consummation of love can be integrated into the
technological praxis in order to maximize its online educational potential, effectivity and reality. On the other
hand, from these findings, the paper suggests that an archival system that converges with insights from
Sternberg"s triadic psychological theory and African/oral romance stories, should not prioritize only objectoriented
database systems which were developed from the mid-1980s out of a need to incorporate applications
beyond data processing applications served by relational database systems. Therefore, it argues for an objectoriented
database that incorporates subject-oriented considerations for a greater convergence of the database
management system.