Modern love

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cowsmanaut
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Modern love

Post by cowsmanaut »

The the various connections across the world wide web.. and the ideas of so many. We are connecting to such a vast group of people, finding that certain someone seems to have become even more possible.

Case and point, my wife was located 5000 km or so away at the point I "met" her.. Though a silly app meant for amusrment, I and many others met their true love and married.. all through this app which had no intent to accomplish this.. People meeting and marrying in MMORPG space even! It's advanced beyond the dating website and is now like going to the mall to meet the opposite sex, like it was when I was a young teen. It's not going to the bar, where people can't speak because of the loud music, and are not so far out of their heads from booze that true meaningful conversations can be had.

There are detriments though.. there are those who prey on others hoping to find love. Either emptying their bank accounts.. or in at least one case, getting them to fly out and then robbing them and killing them on the spot..

I'm curious what all of you think of this.. do you think it's better to meet face to face? or do you enjoy the security of the net, where you need not share more than a screen name at first? Do you think something has been lost in this process? or is it mostly gain?.. and how about those dating sites.. are they as useful as they used to be? or are they somewhat pointless now..?
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Ameena
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Re: Modern love

Post by Ameena »

I dunno whether I have much to offer by way of contribution to this, as I've never been "looking" for someone and never had any interest in doing so (sitll don't...yet I "have" someone anyway, still not quite sure how that happened, lol). But if I was then I'd probably prefer to do it online since I'm much better at chatting to people via chat/e-mail/forum posts. I imagine it's easier to find people who share your interests as well - I mean, if I was the kind of person who only wanted to talk about fashion and what happened on Eastenders last night, I wouldn't really consider a forum like this to be a good place to look ;).
I can see that there are some dangers such as you say, people pretending to be one thing whilst actually being another because you can say what you like and post whatever photos you like and the person on the other end will only have your word that you're telling the truth. As far as I'm concerned, Rule One of the Internet is "never give out your personal details to anyone" - I don't get how so many peple are happy to have their real name as their username on a forum or whatever, especially if they include their actual location as well. It'd make you so easy to find if someone dodgy wanted to start looking. The other main rule of the Internet would be "don't arrange to meet anyone that you've met online", but that one's a bit more sort of...open. I mean, I'd say it's more specific to "don't arrange to meet anyone alone and without telling anyone", just to be safe. I've met people from the Net on numerous occasions - there were a few meet-ups for the EQ guild I was in, but on all those it was a planned thing across a forum where lots of people were going and lots of people knew that lots of people were going, and I didn't personally go alone because my dad was in the guild as well, so he always went, as did a friend of mine on one or two occasions (she was also in the guild), and my mum and my sister came along on a couple as well. I did once meet someone from the Net when I was by myself, but again that was part of a forum meet-up where I met the guy at Victoria station and we went from there to the main meet-up. It was some Canadian guy who said that London's streets must've been designed by following a pig running about ;).
Anyway, meet-ups of guildies/forum members are the only occasions when I've arranged to meet someone that I've previously only known from the Internet - I've never specifically gone looking for someone online so I could maybe get to know them in real life too. My brain seems to work differently to everyone else's and doesn't appear to experience any kind of romantic or physical desires for other people so I don't need to worry about getting into that kind of mess ;). Anyone else who decides to try out looking for a partner online should probably just use common sense and generally be careful and stuff, I suppose...
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