Online Fish Dating make it Easy to Get Carried Away?
Bars and clubs have long been the stomping ground of beautiful, socially outstanding individuals. For the remaining 99.9999% of the population, these places have long been intimidating, awkward, and stuffed full of unsuitable prospects.
What would it mean to a lonely person to know that the next big love of their life could be just a few mouse-clicks away? Enter the online dating sites, with its anonymity, lists of potential dates, compatibility indicators, and virtually instant results. A guaranteed sellers market!
As if this wasn’t alluring enough, Online dating sites feature gushing testimony on their front pages along with lists of marriages for which they take full credit, thank you very much, and all of this good news is decorated with photos of happy, smiling couples.
That‘s all very effective. There are now so many online dating sites that specialization among them has become an art form: you don’t even have to be looking for a soul mate anymore – a casual fling to boost the ego is central to the services supplied by many dating sites. Anything you might want, you can find a dedicated online service that caters to it. Seriously. Anything.
One hundred years ago, a person’s entire social life was limited to a village, region, or area, a life long localization of activity defined by a lack of mobility, and perhaps in most cases, a lack of inclination – why move around when all you need is all around you? The stock of potential lovers was limited to the local singles. One fell in love, got married, celebrated ones seventeenth birthday (in that order), and went on to have children without ever considering that there might be greener grass elsewhere.
A fair number of online dating sites charge nothing for registration, either, and while some offer ‘gold’ services to customers who choose to pay, there are yet other sites which offer even their top-line services entirely for free; with a massive amount of web traffic moving through daily, online dating sites can command very respectable revenues from advertising featured on the site. Enough money, in fact, to give their original service away for nothing.
With so much convenience, success, hype, and ease attached to the rather exciting prospect of finding love online, it can be difficult to appreciate that a very good relationship is, for whatever reason, difficult to come by in this day and age. Compatibility tests can seriously help narrow the field, but there is a danger, in the relative anonymity of a chat-room or forum exchange, that a fantasized version of the person you’re talking to is taking shape in your mind. This fantasy is a form of indulgence borne of wishful thinking, hope, and anticipation. There have been many cases where face-to-face meetings have shattered the momentum and proved to be disappointing. This is big disappointment, too, a serious flattening of high-end emotions.
Even though it is the internet, even though it is exciting, and boasts some phenomenal results, users of online dating sites should adopt real-world attitudes toward the people they meet: take things one step at a time, and really get to know the other person. There are no guarantees, but there is a chance of finding love, and more than a chance of having fun while looking around.