Online Dating

I think that especially in this day and age, we’re only going to increase our use of online dating. Society doesn’t operate how it did fifty years ago in terms of meeting new people and establishing any type of relationship after meeting. Though I sometimes wish we did live in a time without internet or computer mediated communication, how we interact with one another nowadays is going to continually become technologically dependent.

In regards to online dating, it’s becoming a norm. When my parents and their friends discuss if they would have ever used online dating sites when they were dating, the answer is always a collective ‘no.’ Yet today, single adults are becoming more and more accustomed to the whole idea. I think that this has a lot to do with the pace that our society is going and the fact that people are always running around from one job to the next and half of the time they barely have down time to actually meet someone new and take the time to go out on a date.

  Online dating definitely has its perks but there are few downsides to it as well, just as face to face dating. When people are making their online profiles, they can either tell the entire truth about themselves and take the risk of putting themselves out there or go to the complete opposite side of the spectrum and lie about who they are and what they're interested in. Especially when we were looking at the different online profiles earlier, I found it really interesting and scary at the same time, what people are not only willing to put out there about themselves, but what they'll believe from complete strangers as well. For our fake profile, we found a random picture of a girl in a bikini and just because that seemed appealing to most of the men on the site, 3 different people messaged us and believed that we were who we said we were.

 Though sometimes not everyone will take it to that extreme and use a completely different picture than who they really are, some will still pretend to be someone they're not just because they can when hiding behind a computer screen. Online dating does allow people to develop relationships from shared interests and for some fully express themselves. But for those who aren't completely telling the truth, where do they really think those relationships are going to wind up? Maybe I'm too skeptical of the whole idea, but I don't think I could ever see myself using or making an online dating profile because even though the freedom to fully express myself before I even meet someone is there, the truth from others plays a big factor. I don't think I could trust everything someone says without meeting them in person. Online dating should be used for small initial introductions but I think "relationships" that may be developed online for multiple months isn't really a true relationship.