You Had Me at A/S/L
Our world is being taken over by a parallel universe. It’s called cyberspace. Everything we once had to get up and move to do we can now do through the Internet. You can buy anything on E-Bay, you can chat, fall in love through an online dating service, work, and even attend worship services. If Jabba the Hutt were somehow transported into our world without his minions he would do just fine as long as he had a computer with Internet access.
To me the most surprising trend to come out of this Internet takeover is online dating. At first I didn’t see how it could be possible for two people to meet, get to know each other, and fall in love through an online dating service, and then have a successful marriage. But more and more I hear about relationships that started online and are still going strong years after the actual physical meeting. I’m still a skeptic, but I have to acknowledge that maybe there is something to this online dating service phenomenon.
Years ago, when you heard “online dating service” you thought of horror stories about psychos, pedophiles, and really ugly people who clip pictures out of magazines. But now it seems to be moving into the mainstream.
Modern online dating sites make online dating safe with features like background checks and marital status verification. Some even have options to do “virtual dating” so you can have video chats with people and see what they really look like.
What really makes me wonder are the claims these online dating services make about finding my perfect match through their personality and demographic questionnaires. I’m not sure I believe an online dating service can tell me who I should marry because we answered a few questions the same way. But if it cuts through the awkward, superficial opening stages of a relationship maybe there is something to it.
I must admit, some of these online dating sites get pretty in depth with their analysis tools. Heavenlymatched.com, for instance, has a compatibility profile that reveals your attachment style, personality type, romantic type, communication type, and values and attitude type (whatever that means). It compares you with potential matches and tells you about common ground, differences, friction points, and percentage matches in several areas.
I’m not ready to jump on the online dating service bandwagon just yet, but I will say that these services are getting better. What worries me is that they will get so scientific that it will take all the fun out of dating. Part of the magic of a good relationship is having a great story about how you met. My parents met on a blind date. He was a Catholic sailor from Detroit; she was a Mormon farm girl from Idaho. The main reason my mom went on the date was to spite her mother. Of course, most of these stories end up in an awkward break up, but that’s what makes the successes so good.
The bottom line is that I’m afraid too much of life is going to be sucked into cyberspace. I can see a future where every Myspace page I visit will compute our compatibility automatically. After a lengthy month-long courtship via IM, my online dating service affirmed “soul mate” and I will find a nice online preacher who accepts Pay Pal to marry us in a quiet tasteful ceremony surrounded by all of our friends in a private video chat room.
Mark Montie