Dating Game

While I find the aspect of on-line dating odd, I have to admit that I am in a long term relationship with someone I meet on-line.
I got divorced after 21 years of marriage. I am older and the bar scene just didn’t appeal to me. I was fine being alone. Many of my friends and relatives were dating from places like match.com. My initial perspective was always the same, “How bad does it have to get to resort to meeting someone on the internet.”
The article Assessing Attractiveness in On-line Dating Profiles was interesting on how they assessed attractiveness from profiles given. They talk about the face-to- face being a rich medium. While you can meet interesting people on-line, face-to face cannot even compare. I met or more “reconnected” with old class mates and “connected” on a very intellectual level, but some that I finally did have a face-to-face meeting with would never have worked out on a romantic level. The multiple channels of communication were opened up when I finally met with them. Things like how they held themselves, their voice, body language and so on. Thees channels of communication were more revealing as far as a physical connection.
I eventually signed up for Face Book. While this article classifies this as a social networking Web site, I found that it was a good source for dating or meeting people. I had cousins suggest friends that they thought I was compatible with. I had read too many articles about on-line dating disasters or really scary situations. I knew that meeting someone that a friend suggested that it was like getting a personal referral rather then a complete stranger. While I never did find a date or meet up with any of these suggested friends, I did have some great conversations.
On Face Book it was obvious who was single. Their profiles were very detailed as well as pictures of themselves. The article talks about the importance of posting pictures to increase potential dates. I myself found it vain and sometimes funny. The person that I am with had no pictures of himself on FB. He had pictures of his kids, a car that he had rebuilt, and of different activities he enjoyed. I found that attractive because he came across as not being vain, which is my personal perspective of people who post hundreds of shots of themselves.
I don’t think that using on-line dating source is as odd as I use to. If something happened and I found myself single again, I still do not think I could do the match.com thing. I got lucky in a flukey sort of way through this internet phenomena.