Those who have tried some online dating will know that a person is always less attractive and older looking in real life than what their profile pictures will suggest.
I believe many possible relationships have been canned in the first few minutes of an initial meeting due to this fact. Your initial disappointment of what you experience in those few moments can make or break the potential for something more.
This is in reality a contradiction. You are meeting because something about the persons persona, character or background fascinated you. Something they said or the way they said it got your attention. This means something about their intellect or the way they have about them was attractive to you but why then when the persons appearance does not appeal to you straight away do you want to throw out the baby with the dirty water?
Our media driven modern society have become so obsessed with appearance that it has reached a point of hysteria. We choose partners on their looks much more than on the way we could be compatible personalities.
We see the errors in our ways in the divorce statistics today, but in-spite of this we spend more and more money on designer labels and perfumes to try and impress our potential future partner.
Because of the great distances I am dating over, (no one that hails from Middelburg is really on dating sites
), I am spending more time with the people I met online during the initial dialogue phase before actually meeting them.
I use all possible mediums, Facebook, BBM, Telkom and Skype. To lazy for lenghty e-mails :
- Facebook, their is so much to explore on Facebook. Here you can also see the kind of friends this person have and what other things interest them. FB can of course be a very dangerous place to have a rouge dating site member on the loose. Be sure before adding anyone as friend especially if it is someone from a dating site.
- BBM, to be able to send messages at any time through the day when and where you are is possibly the best way to stay in constant contact and with BBM you don't even have to give out your phone number at the start. WhatsApp is also great if you prefer not to use a BB.
- Phone and especially Skype is also good means of spending endless evening ours just simply chatting away on arbitrary stuff like movie likes and shit. Just watch the bill and the bandwidth
.
What intrigues me most about the online dating scene is that I have the courage to approach just about anyone. I do not feel intimidated by someones status or the way the might look. I have met some real interesting and even some more famous South Africans on dating sites before. More often than not the initial dialogue does not last for long as one finds out that the other person is driven by very different things than yourself in life. Conversations is always friendly and polite though and more often than not you might have made a friend if only distance was not such a big issue.
But we all know why we are here for and friendship alone will simply not cut it so you carry on connecting with others in the hope you will make that special connection.
