Online dating: You two met HOW?
June 16th, 2008 by Kim
Where did your parents meet? In college? At a concert? At work?
Online?
Odds are, if you’re my age or older, your parents probably didn’t meet and fall in love on the Internet. For many couples nowadays, however, that first romantic spark could have happened through an online social networking site, an online dating site, a chat room — even an online game.
Nowadays, there’s an online dating site for everybody. Through the wonders of Facebook and MySpace, it’s possible to connect with singles on your area according to specifics like musical interests and movie tastes. There is a site for single parents, and one for singles with disabilities. Several of my Jewish friends have met people through JDate, a site for Jewish singles that has about 700,000 members.
There is even one for pirates. It is called Pirates Passions.
“Ahoy, me Hearrrties!” the welcome message says. “If ye be seekin’ booty, ye be havin come t’ th’ right place. Pirates Passions be a 100% free social networrrkin’ an’ online datin’ site ferrr buccaneers an’ buccanneers at hearrrt.”
Despite its popularity, fears remain, like, is it really OK to meet a total stranger you’ve only spoken with in a chatroom? And what about the other stigma: that Internet dating is somehow reserved only for those who lack the social skills to meet people in real life?
How do couples who met online address this when talking to others about how they met? Would you tell your wedding guests? Your kids?
Is Internet dating still, in some ways, a taboo topic?
I’ve honestly never had the urge to try online dating. I admit it sort of scares me. I grew up in the Internet age, where the rule about never meeting online strangers in person was right up there next to the one about looking both ways before crossing the street.
I wonder if true love is possible via the Internet, though. Surely, meeting someone in a chat room lacks the romantic ring of traditional, in-person first-time encounters, like meeting on a blind date, or falling in love in college biology class — although I can think of many a thing more romantic than college biology class.
I expect that five or 10 years from now, meeting and falling in love on the Internet will become more commonplace, and maybe won’t have the same stigmas that some couples are now dealing with. In time, describing the first instant messages you exchanged could be as cute and romantic a story as any your parents ever told.
And if you met on Pirates Passions, wouldn’t THAT be a good story to tell. Arrrrrrrrr.
Cartoon: OnlineDatingMagazine.com
Tags: blogs and new media, online dating, relationships, the anti-dating blog
June 16th, 2008 at 3:36 am
I met my husband through one of the relationship sites. We will be married three years tomorrow. I know I would have never met him under normal circumstances. I am not sure how we would relate the story to our son. In the end, I think all that matters is how much you love someone and the commitment you make to each other. Since I don’t have any reservations telling other people how we met, I don’t think I would have any problems telling him how his father and I met.
June 16th, 2008 at 4:17 am
We met “on” BITNET - for those of you who are Internet boomers, it was the Internet of the late ’80s….many of the apps being used now (email, IM, Chat, IRC, MUD…) has it’s origin on BITNET. UH was a member school back then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BITNET
BITNET was a cooperative U.S. university network founded by IBM in 1979 under the aegis of Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman at Yale University. The first network link was between CUNY and Yale.
The requirements for a college or university to join BITNET were simple:
* Lease a data circuit (phone line) from a site to an existing BITNET node.
* Buy modems for each end of the data circuit, sending one to the connecting point site.
* Allow other institutions to connect to a site without chargeback.
From a technical point of view, BITNET differed from the Internet in that it was a point-to-point “store and forward” network. That is, e-mail messages and files were transmitted in their entirety from one server to the next until reaching their destination. From this perspective, BITNET was more like Usenet.
- - - - - - -
She was an IT student at another university, initially seeking information about my university’s mainframe and campus life. We kept in contact for several years, she graduated, and then we lost touch with each other. About 8 years ago, out of the blue, I receive an email from her saying she now lives on the east coast and runs a successfull business. The only trouble is that I live on the left coast and gallivanting across the continent would be limited and expensive. I flew up to met her for the first time in the middle of winter, sight unseen, no photos of us as we both decided not to ….a real leap of faith in our exchange of words…”what if she was a 300lb WWF female wrestler” entered my mind more than once on the plane ride. She had thoughts of this serial killer/stalker person she was about to meet as she waited. She was everything she said she was, plus more. The only negative was the COLD and snow. I don’t mind skiing and snow boarding but living in it for months at a time, is not my idea of heaven. After her first visit here, she said why in the world would anyone want to live in a place that’s hotter than her oven during the summer. As you can guess, she is not a fan of the heat. ‘Houston, we have a problem’….we solved that by taking vacations in SF, Hawaii, San Diego, Michigan, Chicago, Atlanta, NY, Boston, Maine…this has worked out great as we were together and away from heat/snow/cold. My kids refer to us as ‘friends with benefits’…in a way they are right. No plans for marriage at this point and have no idea where this will take us but we both enjoy the relationship that we have as we are both able to just up and leave for a week to be together. LDR’s are hard to sustain as I’ve mentioned in your previous ‘Letting go of long-distance’ blog. It is definitely not for the faint of heart.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:07 am
My husband and I initally met online. He was living on the mainland, getting prepared to be stationed at Pearl Harbor. He did a search of AOL members for people who lived in Hawaii, and randomly came across my screenname. He IM’d me wanting to know more about the island. We chatted on AIM for about a year and a half. We didn’t want to meet because of the stigma that you spoke of. We weren’t trying to “hook up” or anything. Finally one day we decided to meet and see a movie, although neither of us thought of it as a “date”. We were just looking for friendship. Fast forward 5 years, we have been married for 3 years and are expecting our first baby next month! Initially we hesitated telling people how we met because it is strange, but now we think it’s pretty interesting. We were even featured in the Advertiser when they used to run “Love Stories”.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:14 am
Ech, online dating. How many freaks’n'geeks who dated do I know who met through Xanga?
June 16th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Society has changed and online dating is no longer a haven only for librarians with and men who play World of Worldcraft. That being said, online dating is also tough because you can hide behind a screen, lose out on the spontaneity of conversation and nonverbal language. People also tend to fill the gaps with daydreams instead of reality.
And Xanga is the best blog site in existence today!
(For the record, I met my wife the old fashioned way…at church, and not online.) Here is what I wrote about online dating a while ago:
http://www.xanga.com/franksabunch/622904406/item.html
June 16th, 2008 at 8:41 am
I met my wife through Matchdoctor.com which is absolutely free. We will be married 4 years soon. She is from Cebu, Philippines. The women from the Phils are the best and so loyal and loving. The best part is age doesn’t matter. There are thousands of marriages of teens to 60 even 70 year old men. My wife and I are only 10 years apart but the norm is 40 to 50 years difference.
June 16th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Ok, that description of the Phillipines makes me think it’s a sick twisted world. Anyway, my big sis in LA has been trying online dating for 1.5 years and has had no real luck. I’m glad I skirted, or at least didn’t succumb to the internet age. I met girls, get this…….face to face! I admit online dating has it’s place for people who are very busy and such, but it’s no substitute for actually meeting girls and guys the old fashioned way. Personally, I think it’s a sad statement on the country as a whole, and that list gets longer each day.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:30 am
1. I used to make my kids eyes rise to the heavens because I would even look both ways before crossing the street, so ingrained was that old rule.
2. I met my wife in as graduate class on Victorian Poetry. Not a bad place to meet someone, come to think of it, with anniversary #48 coming up in October. For those who love to read, literature is one of the best themes for a marriage I can think of. By extension, it means you end up going to a lot of plays, operas, and concerts,which adds to the EQ of the marriage (entertainment quotient).
3. I have two happily married nieces (after much frustration, travail and wondering if the right guy would ever come along in the dating scene) who met their husbands “artificially.” One put an ad in the paper and sifted through the responses. The other went to an 8-minute date Jewish singles event. Everybody went around and had an 8-minute date. Both are computer savvy, but are in their mid-thirties, which may explain why they are just a wee bit pre-online dating in their generations.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Self-correction: My kids were amused because I even looked both ways before crossing a ONE-WAY street.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Guest: Um …. that was just weird. Congrats to you and your wife, but seriously … the 40-50 years age difference you mention is just ridiculous.
June 16th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I don’t think that there is anything wrong with meeting people online. I view online dating sites as a tool to meet people. Why shut off a potential avenue to meet new people? I think that It gets harder and harder to meet people after you graduate college. Plus people live such busy lives today, it’s hard to find the time to meet new people.
Meeting people through your friends is best, but outside of that where do you meet people? Bars and Clubs, the gym, library, work?
June 16th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
It’s true I personally know of five couples that are in that age difference. My wife’s sister is one. Oh and if you count her other sisters in the Phils then it’s two more. That’s just in her family. I think for them it’s good that the older men are more stable and retired with a lot of retirement income. Their older hubbys won’t live so long so they will be free after about ten years I guess. I’m serious about that age difference and I find it icky also. But if you are an older man looking for a young wife, the Phillipines is the place to go.
June 16th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Or just go to Kam shopping center to find yourself a Phillipino wife!
June 16th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Alex923: I think that’s a big problem a lot of college grads have — where do you meet people when you suddenly find yourself not surrounded by hundreds of eligible singles, like you were in college. That’s led several of my friends to try to meet people online, and so far, there haven’t been any real success stories, but no real horror stories, either.
I wonder about the use of online dating sites in a place as small as Hawaii, though. It seems like dating is already a challenge here, and anyone you met online might be the friend of your brother’s classmate’s teammate’s cousin … or something.
Or maybe that’s not a bad thing.
June 16th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Internet dating is for people who feel the challenges they face when engaging in more traditional means of meeting people are far too great. Not a problem on first blush, right? Perhaps? However, the challenges tend in many cases to be extreme-whether the challenge is social ineptness to extreme psychological/mental disorders. My feeling is a single person ought to just go out and have fun with friends, groups, coworkers, and family. If you like golfing, join a golf club. That is the best way to find someone with whom you’re truly compatible. Guys who resort to using a service to find foreign brides 20-30 years their junior might as well shop for a blow up doll.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Where do you draw the line between online and traditional dating?
In today’s quarterlife society, it’s not uncommon to meet someone(in person!) and decide to become friends on FaceSpace. A wall comment leads to chatting leads to comfort leads to hanging out leads to friendship leads to dating. I know thousands(hyperbole) of people who get to know each other better through this process.
Aside from how you met, doesn’t that sound exactly the same as online dating? Does the initial face to face meeting make that much of a difference?
June 16th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Biology class has more attributes than you may think for finding a mate. If you subscribe to the idea that humans are part of the animal kingdom, biology class may be top 10.
Where there is attraction between genders, there are pheromones, eye contact, flirting, and a slew of other ritual behaviors that might need some explaining. You can pick up technical data from the teacher, and best of all you can see how smart your potential mate is by their grade in the class!
I haven’t checked, but a date from the opposite end of the planet could be considered… ummm… counter-evolutionary?
June 16th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Hi Kim: I’ve tried online dating, and I’m like your friends… I haven’t had any success yet, but no horror stories either. But what made me want to try it, was the success stories that I did hear from friends that have used them. Without using online sites, I probably wouldn’t have met the people that I did meet. I think online dating sites are great, because it takes out a lot of the guess work. You know they are single and you know that they are looking.
I agree that it’s hard to date here, if you do meet someone’s sister, cousin, teammate, or classmate online, maybe it might open their eye’s to the possibility of going out on a date. You never know who will be right for you, unless you give it a try…
June 16th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Haha interesting topic. My dad married my stepmom a few years ago via the Internet. Apparently they’d been “chatting” for a couple years. He went to visit her, she came to visit him, etc. Then they got married. IMHO it wasn’t a good idea. She later moved down here and it was like having a roommate stay over. And I was just about to grad from high school so it was kinda unnerving that someone I didn’t know at all was suddenly under the same roof as me, eating at the same table, using the same family computer, spending time with my father, etc.
I respect people who try to find love online but I would never do it. I mean I’m not a social person at all but even if I had a mask and an alias it wouldn’t help. In fact it just seems worse because the other person has a mask too! Both parties have this unavoidable veil and I consider that particularly harmful to forming a relationship. I use the internet/cellphone/IM/etc to keep in touch with people I already know, not to meet new people. Besides, I would never want to date someone who’s exactly like me.
BTW…@SmilinPat: I disagree (but that doesn’t mean I agree with online dating). It’s in the nature of humans to apply conscious thought to our actions, rather than merely following physiological needs. Harnessing technology is part ouf our nature, even if the technology is as complex as it is now. Conceptually internet dating is just another way to meet people using technology, even if we’ve evolved from the lighting of fires to attract a mate. =P
June 16th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Like some others here, my (soon-to-be) wife and I have met each other through the internet also. At the time we met, we were not looking for a new love but we just ‘accidently’ (call it coincidence because of the 12 hour time difference) got in touch with each other on the IRC chat of an online community where we both were members (the community itself, by the way, is not one meant to actually meet people and such, it is nothing like online dating sites, myspace or similar sites either).
Personally I don’t think online dating is for people with a lack of social skills, in the end you’ll still need to meet up if you want to bring it to a next level. And as for a taboo topic, I don’t think it is… We’ve always been open about it when people asked us how we met, it is more and more accepted these days.
It is, like others also said, not for the faint of heart but if you can maintain and keep up with the LDR, then I believe you’ll have a very steady relationship in the end because of all the troubles you had to overcome.
The whole LDR becomes even harder when you go overseas and found your online love on a complete different continent. You’ll need to travel far, you’ll have to overcome visa problems if you want to live together and so on. And what to think about leaving your family and friends behind in the land you grew up and lived all your life? Some people might say it is for the ‘weaker persons’ amongst us but I disagree on that one as it is clearly for the stronger ones, it takes very much time, effort and even courage to do something like this.
June 17th, 2008 at 1:05 am
gee- this post inspired me. Any ladies interested in a 28 year old male? -fit, successful and handsome-
June 17th, 2008 at 5:13 am
I have a question for those of you have met online and for those who haven’t. Is that person your soulmate? Is she/he, the person you’ve looked for your entire life? Are they like your best friend…the one person in the world who knows you better than anyone else? Is it someone that makes you a better person…actually they don’t make you a better person, you do that yourself….because they inspire you?
A soulmate is someone you carry with you forever….it’s the one person on the planet who knows you and accepted you…believed in you before anyone else did…or when no one else would. And no matter whatever happens…you will always love them…nothing can change that. Do you feel that way too with your SO?
June 17th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Have you tried Speed Dating?
http://urbanmixplate.honadvblogs.com/2008/04/15/speed-dating/
June 17th, 2008 at 11:05 am
@juh: Good point. If so much of our interaction is through the Internet anyway, where do you draw the line between “online dating” and real-life dating?
I actually had no idea that this post would draw so many comments from people who had had so much success with Internet dating!
June 17th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Melissa,
They held a speed dating session at my college once, and a couple of my friends participated. It was insane. I stood by the sidelines and was thoroughly amused. They got a few dates out of it and said it was a pretty fun overall experience.
If you don’t have a whole lot of time and want to meet a lot of different people at once, without the awkwardness that comes from having to break a conversation with a person you’re not really interested in…. then speed dating is actually a great idea.
Did you see the speed dating scene in “The 40-year-old Virgin”?
June 17th, 2008 at 11:14 am
We had a janitress at our office from the Philippines who married a much older American. They met through a dating service. She was in her 20’s, I believe, and he might have been close to 60. And it worked out well for both. She took care of him as he grew older and then died. She inherited his property and may marry again. Love? Tricky question, certainly not in the beginning, but I do believe they grew to love each other.
June 17th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Add me to the list of success stories - I met my husband online! I had met people the traditional way, but I figured why not try the internet for meeting new people? I met some nice normal people who I wouldn’t have met otherwise - and I got along much better with them than I did any blind date because, for the most part, we already knew that we had a lot in common by the time we met (my friends, ack.. didn’t do such a good job in that respect!).
After you graduate from college, you may meet new people at work, through your friends, or at a club. But, they aren’t necessarily people you want to date. What makes meeting someone at a club any more acceptable than meeting someone online? And, sorry, maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but my local super market or book store wasn’t chock full of single males I was interested in! I played golf - yes, there are a lot of guys who play golf - but, since I played with other people, it was never easy to meet someone that way, let alone someone single!
Like you mentioned, however, the chances that you might end up meeting someone you are somehow connected to is pretty high in Hawaii. But, for me, those connections to my husband are part of what made me feel like we were supposed to meet. I did unknowingly correspond with people I had met before or had some other kind of connection to me that I wasn’t comfortable with… so, after finding out, it would be a little awkward!
June 17th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
@anklebiters: To answer your question in short: Yes. Yes I feel about my SO that way in all points you mentioned. And why not? True love has, imho, no limits or boundaries
June 18th, 2008 at 9:34 am
As with all forms of dating, online dating has its perks and drawbacks. Just gotta be careful. Read Online Dating for Dummies–great book with helpful hints.
I have a friend near her 50’s who remarried a guy she met online. Not a very well known site–one2onematch.com or something like that. It must’ve been luck because when I went on to that site, there were slim pickin’s.
I’ve met really interesting guys on yahoo from all walks of life. At least with online dating you have a pretty good chance of knowing that the people are single and looking for a relationship whereas in real life you really don’t know…(True there are the liars who want a one nighter…)
June 18th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
I think that online dating takes the romance out of everything. I also believe fate should have something to do with people meeting, not the internet. However if two people meet on the internet and fall in love, awesome for them… as for me I don’t think that I would ever be able to put myself out there on an internet dating site. Thanks
June 18th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Chris: Fate is “the element of chance in the affairs of life”; fate does have something to do with people meeting, it doesn’t limit where and how people meet. And romance is what you make of a relationship … e-mailing your new found friend (whom you meet through an Internet dating website) a sweet poem can be romantic in its own way.
Meeting people on the Internet is definitely not for everyone, you have to be open-minded about the idea of exposing yourself to complete strangers, and that you may be putting yourself at risk. Play it safe and be smart. To me, meeting people online is just like meeting people at a bar. They are strangers until you get to know them.
June 19th, 2008 at 3:39 am
…you can’t choose what you love….it chooses you…
June 19th, 2008 at 11:41 am
I was one who actually paid for subscriptions to eharmony and match.com, to only find that every guy I was matched with and met just wanted to hurry up and get married cause the website said we’re a match. I only met these guys at Starbucks during the day, so it wasn’t to “scary”.
When my subscriptions were up, I tried the free sties and found it more useful. I never posted my picture but was able to chat via email to many guys. Eventually I got onto Craigslist and posted my own ad. This is how I found my husband. We been married over a year and expecting out little princess in a few weeks. I guess I was just one of the lucky ones.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Hey nice site guys. Anyways thought de suggest some dating times. 1. When on your first date always start as friends, that you want get hurt if things dont work. 2. Smile and be happy. 3. Listen. Girls like to share so be an open ear. 4. Have a good laugh so that the first date is remember.
June 24th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
One way to keep a LDR alive…we’ve done this many times..
We watched the movie ‘The Lake House’ together, again…even thou we are 2,000+ miles away and 3 time zones away. We picked a time after 9pm, I called her (unlimited minutes after 9pm) , we both popped in the DVD and watched the movie together with our bluetooths on. The next best thing to being there…
August 5th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Is your website legal?
Take a serious look, and see if your website is breaking the law without you even knowing it. As far as the law is concerned…ignorance is no excuse. Avoid trouble…just take a minute and look!