A look at the Phenomenon of Online Dating I am a young professional who married young. I never got the chance to try online dating. I have always been interested in it. My husband and I are very happy but I alway wonder would we have been matched together if we were dating profiles on one of the various dating websites out there today. In a way I highly doubt it. We had a fairytale meeting and falling in love period. Many of my friends are married and some are even divorced. I want to see if how you meet your spouse matters at all in that equation of a happily ever after marriage.
I also would like to ee how many relationships started online will turn into marriages. I want to talk a little more about some personal experiences I have had with different marriages. Like I mentioned earlier many of my friends are married or even divorced, but of course some are still in the dating pool. I have a very dear friend who is female and 27 years old. She has never been married, but has started online dating. She uses several different sites to accomplish this but her most frequent site used is Match. com. She changes men she is dating almost weekly if not more often.
This leads me to wonder if the website is not matching her dequately or if people are not really looking for a long term relationship from these websites. People before the internet relied on happenstance to meet their future spouse or being introduced by a mutual friend. I do not believe people believe in happenstance anymore. They are too worried about things not going how they would like to go so they turn the ever present interweb to find a spouse. I admit it is hard to take the backseat and let nature takes its course when you are bombarded by ads for every website out there.
I know when I watch tv I can guarantee at least one ad for a online dating service will air. Online dating has grown significantly over the past few decades. Online dating sites are now a billion dollar industry. It used to be a little taboo that you met your other person online. It was looked at like what is wrong with you that no one around you wanted to be with you. Now about one third of marriages started out as an online relationship. (Cacioppo) To me that is a huge number. I know I personally would have thought that number to be lower.
It is absolutely astonishing that so many people are turning to the internet for love. It will be interesting to see how many people have met online and gotten married twenty years from now. If our number is one third right now where human interaction still rules, that number will climb exponentially. As the human race turn more to technology for its every need, its only natural that we will turn to it for love. Many people work from home now, they can order everything need from a website, there is no need to leave the comfort of their home.
But as this happens, so will more scams and other more dangerous crimes. There are people on the internet who will create many different fake profiles to scam people out of their hard earned money. When you do not see the person face to face it can be arder to discern if they are being truthful with you. Its brings to mind a saying my mother used to tell me, if it seems to good to be true it most like is. I feel if more people used this to help them while meeting people online it could save a lot of heartache. To go more with the scamming it seems to happen to elderly widows more than any other demographic.
They are attempting to find love and companionship, but because of their age, they are not hip to all different issue an online dating profile can cause them. Many may have been married for thirty plus years and only had the one spouse. They haven’t dated in s many years and a child or grandchild, or a close friend talks them into a online dating profile. Almost before they publish it, they have several message from handsome single men around their age. These men have flashy profiles with many pictures of them doing exotic things only people with money can do.
It turns out after they get these women hooked, they start to ask for money. Of course the women feel like they can trust him and give him all they have. Sadly the men turn out to be someone completely different than who they thought they were talking to. This has coined an entire new slang term called “Catfishing”. Catfishing is when you are talking to someone online and you think it is who you see in the picture, only to later be deceived and its someone else. Not all these catfishes are done for the purpose of hurting or gaining money from the other person.
It can be a person who just has low self-esteem and they feel the need to pretend to be someone else. This has happened so much that is has inspired a reality tv show on american television station MTV, called Catfish. A huge amount of people have complained of being catfished. Almost 90% of all online dating users have said they have felt the other person isrepresented their physical appearance. That number is very big. There are of course way more dangerous things that can happen when meeting someone online. There have been new stories of young women meeting someone they met online only to be assaulted or worse murdered.
That is why there are many articles out there about staying safe when meeting face to face. I know some police stations around the country have set up safe meeting spots in their parking lots, with cameras and lights that will be on all day everyday. I really loved seeing that a police station in the town next to mine has done this. Now that I have touched on all the bad stuff, I will touch on how nice it can be. I know back in the early 1800’s a person’s world was tiny. They could only meet a spouse from the the small amount of people in the town they lived in and the towns around them.
If a person was very wealthy they might have a larger pool to choose from. As time went on and travel became easier people had larger and larger worlds. Flash forward to the invention of internet and it becoming widespread. Now people have access to almost anyone in the world. It makes it easier to find someone you can click with and want to marry or just date. This makes most people happy. A downfall of having access to everyone with the internet, is feeling dissatisfied with the person you’re with. It can also lead to feeling of jealously.
A person who uses facebook a lot is more likely to monitor their partner’s use of facebook closely. (Reich). Use of facebook can also help one reconnect with old flames. That can lead to developing feeling for them again and cause emotional and or physical cheating on the current partner. That being said, a person can use facebook and never cheat or feel dissatisfied with a current partner. It is all about moderation. There are several main online dating sites all of which will try to tell you they are the best place to meet your future spouse.
Its really hard to choose between them. It also honestly depends on what you are looking for out the website. If you are wanting to find someone to marry I would stay away from fast casual dating websites that allow immediate contact. Each site has its own unique algorithm to match its members with potential mates. Each one will also tell you they are the best one for you. I think as a potential user you should like any other purchase do your research and read lots of reviews and get ersonal recommendations.
I would even personally try a few out to get a feel for the type of people who use them. Some studies show that the odds are against couples who meet this way. There are numerous studies showing that we can’t create meaningful relationships this way. Several studies also link online habits to the rise in divorces in recent years. That is not to say that couples who meet online will end up in a broken marriage leading to divorce. There will always be outliers who meet the love of their via online dating. Love does find a way to creep in in the most interesting of places.
