To Internet Date, or To Not Date

To Internet date, or to not date?

Back in the day when You’ve Got Mail graced our screens, internet dating was an elusive indulgence of the desperately lonely. Though Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan’s tale was romantically portrayed to illuminate how getting to know someone anonymously can be more beneficial than meeting in real life; we don’t live in a Hollywood movie, and it’s not just the computers which have developed in the 16 years since Internet Dating begun.

Plugged in

It started as quite the taboo associated with pervertsand the socially inept, but now that the internet has become so ingrained in to our lives that our fingertips are living out a multitude of cyber lives on various different platforms, dating was the next obvious plateaux to tumble down the rabbit hole and dominate over real life experiences.

I.D’ing has soared as our lives have sped up. In this fast forward day and age, with little time, compartmentalisation of life activities, and established friendship circles – our immediate dating market is thin at best, making meeting someone organically unlikely.

 Shopping for love and lust

Most believe I.D’ing to be a subpar way of meeting someone due to the clinical approach of what can only be labelled as shopping. Becoming unnaturally selective is the most common condition of elongated exposure to dating online.

I can tell you that I have met none of my partners online, and that if I was now to come across them as a potential, I would undoubtedly disregard them for any number of trivial preferences. One for instance had terrible grammar, this drives me insane online. Another would undoubtedly have posted loads of Man-U related photos, which would have given me the fear of hell.And one of my exes was just plain ugly, but he made me laugh continually.

There is something incredibly dangerous about the instant accessibility that the internet offers. I can get my hands on absolutely anything I want at the touch of a button. But ticking the boxes to filter through the trawl of possible partners to find what I think to be my “dream man,” I am confronted with zero results. I think that says it all.

 Who are you anyway?

Though my search options were undoubtedly unrealistic, so are the representations of oneself that each person offers for consideration. You create a persona, consider a character and have the option to edit, delete and retouch our entire entity to pass the test.

No-one is going to put up the last 5 photos they were tagged in on Facebook, they’ll put up the best they have, even if they are 10 years old. In the same way that no-one will truthfully divulge anything that may make them seem less attractive to a prospective partner, like character flaws, excess hair, no hair, braces, children and current wives.

Men apparently lie most about their age, height and their income and we women lie about our age, build and weight. Three points for each of the genders which illuminate the lack of depth to the attributes of desire…

 Sex Appeal

As shallow as it sounds, you don’t approach someone in person whom you’re not attracted to in the hope that they have a great personality; it’s the dating dance. When you are inundated with an infinite array of partners to choose from, who are you going to talk to? It’s going to be whoever has the pictures you fancy the most!

This is why Tinder has become the latest dating phenomenon; it’s a hetro spin-off from the gay app Grinder. It simplifies Internet Dating to where it lays offline, attraction. By swiping left you disregard directly those who you don’t like the look of and by swiping right; you open the opportunity for discussion. Romance isn’t dead.

 Affiliation vs Attraction

As far as my research and personal preference allowed, I found this app to be a lot more direct and biological than spending hours filling out questionnaires about how you spend your free time, what you want from life and even how many times you masturbate, to ultimately be matched with someone that resembles your aunty Janet.

We are physically attracted to a lot less people than we enjoy the company of, hence why people tend to have a great deal more friends than they do partners. A lot of time can be wasted over analysing the affiliations of a prospective when attraction is instantaneous in the flesh. I.D’ing doesn’t allow you to make that distinction, you still have to meet.

It’s easy to get carried away fabricating an idealised version of a person when presented solely with heavily positive photos, facts and figures. You invest way too much time messaging back and forth idly in order to safely conclude that if you do meet, you won’t end up in a body bag. Then in the eventuality that you do meet, you are presented with something different to what you anticipated. Some of them are nice, some of them are really pretty weird and some of them bear absolutely no resemblance to their online persona whatsoever. (Hail to the documentary Catfish where the weirdest of the wonderful instances are filmed and to which I am now hooked!)

All the time and energy that you have to invest to get to this stage is then obliterated within 30 seconds of meeting them if you just don’t fancy them. These next few hours can then be pretty awkwardly spent trying to text SOS to your scape-goat mate under the table, or having a decent enough time with someone that you’d just never want to snog.

The real deal

Nothing compares to locking eyes with a stranger and the butterflies of anticipation you feel. Love and lust cannot be processed by check boxes and affinity matches, it’s chemistry, it’s animal instinct and it’s something that only meeting face to face can ensure.

That is not to suggest that you won’t find what you’re looking for online; after all, the way we cyber junkies are going, we might not have much choice down the line… But just to warn you that you better be prepared to spend a great deal of time weeding through the weird, the very weird and the psychotically terrifying to get to the wonderful. Good luck! I’m off to buy some cats.