Only yesterday, I got a funny call from a guy I have never met. He said that he got my number online and would like us to date. Unfortunately (for him) I am married (and happily too), putting an end to that request. That got me thinking about a topic that keeps popping in and out of my head and sometimes comes up
in conversations. Is really a good idea to go online, primarily for dating purposes? With all the people we meet at school, at work, church/mosque, in the bus and so on, is it really that hard to meet new people? I wonder, if a person can’t meet new people any other way, I hope he/she has nothing to hide. You can call me old-school if you like, but the idea of someone I have never set my eyes on calling me out of the blues to ask for a date gives me the creeps. Why? Please continue reading.
1. Online interaction, or friendship blinds one to a fact we grew up hearing our mothers drill into our young minds, “A stranger is someone who is capable of harming you.” We equate acquaintance or any form of interaction with friendship, and it’s a big mistake. Most of our friends are people we grew up with, went to school with, colleagues, former colleagues and so on. This traditional method means that you know people who know your friend, and have an idea of the kind of person you are dealing with. But with online friends, you are dealing with a totally unknown entity.
2. In today’s fast paced, high tech world, meeting strange people online can be very risky. Think back to Cynthia, the Nigerian babe who was kidnapped, and later murdered by a guy she met online, and flew in to Lagos to meet. The poor girl had no idea that she was dealing with a fraudster, and murderer. The internet has become a free and easy highway for psychopaths and criminals to operate virtually without trace, especially in a porous environment like ours.
3. Online dating is unnatural because a major part of human communication is not only verbal communication (speech), but also includes things like tone of voice, body language and the like. Women are created with a natural sense of intuition that often protects us (and our loved ones) from danger, but dealing with someone without face-to-face , and other physical forms of interaction makes it harder to be intuitive. Online communication lacks this feature and makes it difficult, if not impossible to make value judgments for ourselves about the person you are dealing with.
4. It is hard to verify, ie do a background check on the person you are chatting with. In foreign climes, people are often warned, and given guidelines about dealing with strangers they meet online. Sometimes, as human beings our emotions blind us from seeing the truth before our very eyes, but with the evidence of other people, eyes are opened to the truth. For instance, in a regular relationship, a lady’s visit to a guy’s office, or home can lead to chance meeting with his friend who can inadvertently drop the truth that the guy is married yet conveniently forgot to tell his girlfriend, online relationships don’t accord nearly as much opportunity.
5. Many people have been found to give false information about themselves, some use photos of other people, and sometimes build false profile info. It is hard to continually lie to a person you see over a period of time without making a mistake, telling a mismatched lie and so on, even the body language of a liar can trigger suspicion in the person being lied to. With online communication, it is much harder to tell, sometimes, almost until it is too late.
Having said all the foregoing, I must agree that quite a number of relationships have been spawned by the internet, and led to marriage, but then again, it is still important to take care.
Culled from the Nation
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