All my life I quite enjoyed being alone. I don’t know where it actually came from, but my friends are few and valued and I only had two deep relationships in all my life. The first one was with a girl I met as part of the gang I was hanging out with, the other is now my wife. Both relations started with old fashioned face-to-face attraction, long looks into each other’s eyes, butterflies in the belly, walks in the park, hand in hand, long talks on the telephone, where neither of us wanting to hang up etc. pp.
I can’t imagine that I could fall in love with someone I met online. To me it seems like picking someone from a shelf, labeled “Best Offer: Young, Fresh, Beautiful” and trying that person out. If this person doesn’t live up to the product description, I’ll go back and find someone further down the aisle. It feels to me like forcing things rather than having them fall into place.
Last year I attended an Emotional Intelligence Seminar. On one occasion the lecturer asked us what we think about online dating. I then made it pretty clear that I couldn’t imagine a relationship starting from dating somebody online. It was amazing to find that there were a lot of younger people there who thought online dating was the way to go. One almost took offence. She said that she actually knew a couple that met over Facebook and they are married today. That to her was convincing enough to entirely rely on online dating.
Still, reading the Pascoe report on Intimacy it's funny to find out that many teens today wouldn't start a relationship online. According to their ethics, 'it is appropriate to meet people offline and then pursue the relationship online.' (last paragraph, first chapter). I quite like that.
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