Online Dating

I've used online dating for years, to varying degrees of success. Plenty of smart people I know, though, see online dating as an abomination of a sacred process.

Yeah, well, maybe it's okay to fuck with dating. Dating is an abomination of normal human interaction. I don't see how it can get weirder.

Still, these friends of mine probably picture a robot or a Martian meeting them at the coffee shop. Hey, she didn't have a third eye in her picture!

I believe that online dating is only slightly different from normal dating. In both cases, you barely know the person before the first date.

If you asked the person out in a coffee shop, you know what they look like but not much about their personality. If you asked them out online, you've likely had some promising correspondence, just as you've likely seen one grainy and ultimately useless picture of them.

Thus, the first date will be full of surprises, no matter how you initially met.

Sometimes people fall in love online before they meet in person. Once in a while, this holds up upon meeting, but often it doesn't.

Sometimes people fall in love "at first sight". The sex will probably be great for a few months, but it's not really something I'd want to base a relationship on.

I'd say, then, that no matter how you meet someone initially, you still have a lot of relating to do before you can figure out if you are soulmates. In that sense, it doesn't matter whether you initially connected on Match.com or at Starbucks.

Attaching a stigma to online dating cuts out a whole world of potential experiences and people that might have otherwise enriched your life.

Online, I've met long-term girlfriends, short-term girlfriends, girls who became lifelong friends, girls who were married with children, girls I was disappointed upon meeting, and girls who were disappointed upon meeting me.

These were all real girls, real people, in the flesh. There were no robots. Each of them had two eyes. Each offered at least a few hours of connecting with a new person, with the possibility of more if we clicked.

That said, online dating can also be a crutch if you are afraid of approaching people in real life. There's little incentive to ask someone out at Barnes and Noble if you can go home and get dates while hiding behind your computer screen.

The result, as I've said, will be the same - but if you are afraid to approach, you are cutting out a world of possibility, the same as my anti-online friends. Real-life approach is unbelievably hard at first, but it's also cheaper than online dating, with fewer steps involved before the first date.

If you are serious about dating, then, my advice is to become comfortable approaching people in both worlds. Don't use either realm as an excuse to hide from the other. And if you do end up on a date with a Martian, you can at least make a cool new friend out of the deal.