Looking for Love Online (Part 1 of 2)
Is the super-information highway still the road to nowhere when it comes to finding a life partner? Like most people, I used to think that the love-lorn who spent their long lonely hours hanging around in chat rooms, looking at message boards and peeling through thousands of so-called "love matches" on web personals were, well... losers.Only really desperate, ugly people who were perhaps also emotionally sick would have to resort to using a computer to find the love of their life. And if you did find someone, he or she couldn't possibly be serious ... married, lonely or perhaps even a stalker.
In the past year, however, I have had to revise my opinion somewhat, lest I offend two of my best friends, who both have found husbands as a result of surfing the Internet. Also it seems lately, that everybody knows somebody who has found a marriage partner by resorting to, what still seems to me, to be a drastic and also somewhat risky measure.
I couldn't find any reliable statistics about this relatively new phenomenon, about how many people are finding true love this way or how long the marriages last, but at this point, I have to believe my own eyes. Maybe the internet isn't such a bad matchmaker...
Even though it is possible to find sex and even a husband on the Internet, cyber-dating is still a risky business —especially for women.
According to WHOA (Women Halting Online Harassment) "while men are certainly harassed online, 87% of our reported cases are female." Also, "54% of the victims were in the 18 to 30 range. 53% of the victims who came to us had no previous contact with the correspondents."
Email is the most common forum for harassment —39.5% were stalked or harassed by email and 15.5% began getting harassed after meeting someone in a chat room. So if you want to be safe, rather than sorry, you are best to stay away from this kind cyber-love if you are a white female, under thirty years old. You might also want to avoid giving anyone your real email address. The result could be "unsolicited mail, being sent a computer virus or even having the culprit showing up at your door with an unwanted declaration of love."
Cyberflirts, a web based Internet dating guide, states: "If something seems to be good to be true, it is. That is one of the problems with the Internet. For every normal person you meet online, you will probably come across ten that have issues." Cyberflirts also warns against falling in love with a minor. There is nothing worse then getting to know someone online and then realizing that they have just turned 16." To get out of this, Cyberflirts advises trying to catch them in a lie... for instance, ask them what year they graduated from high school.
Some people think that sending... [Continued: Online Dating 2]