Online Dating: Can It Work?

Times have definitely changed. You used to be only be able to go out meet a guy, strike up a conversation and next thing you know he’s your boyfriend. Then the internet was born. You had sites like Black Planet, Myspace, and Facebook that were built to allow you to reconnect with old friends and keep up with current ones. You had online chat services like Yahoo and AOL where you could talk to people all over the world and then dating sites like Eharmony and Match.com were launched. These sites introduced another side of the internet, something beyond just talking. Then came Online Dating.

Now there are two types of Online Dating (there may be more but I’m only going to speak on 2 of them). There are guys you are introduced to online, meet up offline and then carry on a relationship after. These men usually live in the same area as you, share some of the same views and hobbies as you and you probably got to know him through a site like Eharmony.

Then there are the guys that you’ve chatted with over the internet for quite some time, yet you’ve never met him in person. You’ve been on Skype, you talk on the phone, you do everything under the sun as far as getting to know each other, you just have never met offline. Can relationships like this work?

I think that relationships like this can work, but they’re risky. I don’t think they’re taboo. Why? Because we’re in a different day in age. It’s not uncommon to meet people off of social networking sites anymore. These days we actually spend more time on social networking sites than in the social places where we would have normally met people. Meeting someone on Twitter and falling for them down the line isn’t out of the ordinary the way it would have been back in the day. The risky part is when emotions get too involved. Because you’ve spent so much time talking to someone it’s not hard to fall in love. You get into someone’s mind before the physical so you may fool yourself into thinking that everything is perfect. Fact is, although what they tell you may be perfect, you never truly know that person. They can SAY anything, but it doesn’t mean it is the truth. Sometimes you can’t properly read a person until you’re face to face.You won’t know he has a live in girlfriend until you visit his home. It’s hard enough to find out that the man you’re dating isn’t all he was cracked up to be, but when you mix in the fact that the majority of the time you were together you had never really met, the situation get’s awfully sticky. Although theres nothing wrong with courting online and getting to know someone, you should definitely make every effort to spend as much offline time with them as possible. Some things just can’t substitute for face to face socializing.