Love Should be an Easy Game...
With advances in modern technology and globalization allowing access to a wider selection of partners for singles everywhere, finding love should be easier than ever before. At the same time however, this freedom of choice means that we need to be even sharper and keener in our judgments of people's character if we are to filter out the duds and find our Mr. or Miss Right.
Exercising Good Judgement
Take online dating for example, which in theory should massively facilitate our quest for 'the one' by allowing us to come into contact with people we'd otherwise never hope to meet, the fact that we only ever get a snapshot view of someone from their profile immediately presents an obstacle to our forming an accurate assessment of someone. If we’re lucky, while the person we meet may differ slightly from the image of them we’ve inevitably created in our minds, we’ll find that overall, there are still some aspects of them that are recognizable from their online profiles.
However, many a time, we’ ll find that the person sitting in front of us is nothing like we imagined and that in worst case scenarios, the profiles they’ve posted up are completely fictitious. The most common complaint is of people posting up pictures of themselves that bear absolutely no resemblance to them. While it's understandable that we all want to present the best image of ourselves that we can, surely putting up a picture of what you looked like over fifteen years ago or putting a picture of someone entirely different altogether is somewhat misleading or in the latter case counts as some sort of identity theft? Besides the crashing disappointment of seeing your carefully built up image of someone crumble to pieces, needless to say, it can also be potentially dangerous to go out with someone who's background you have no way of vouching for. And while you may hope that getting to know someone online first would provide insight as to your compatibility and minimize the risk of the kind of heartache that might result from realizing that the person who caught your glance across a crowded room actually has as much in common with you as Tom the milkman, a lot of the time people act very differently online to how they do in real life.
Confusing Signals of Interest
Then there are the problems which modern day feminism poses. While in theory, the fact that women pursuing men is now socially acceptable should serve to open up many more channels of communication, very often this lends for a surprising amount of confusion. Magazines everywhere are inundated with articles titled along the lines of '10 signs she's picking you up' ‘How to get a girl to ask you out’ or 'Top tips to show a guy you're interested.' With these ‘signs’ that women supposedly give out commonly being along the benign lines of playing with her lovely locks, smiling or laughing, revealing personal information, behaviors which people engage in all the time in any normal form of social interaction anyway, it’s quite understandable that many people are left completely frustrated, questioning their sanity as to whether they are imagining things or not.
It’s this kind of dilemma that makes us nostalgic for the days when a man would pursue a woman who had caught his eye with concrete signs of interest such as offering to escort her home by presenting her with a card (after a formal introduction of course), and women would use gloves, parasols, and of course, the dropping of the handkerchief method to convey their own interest. No mind games there!
Is Online Dating All It's Cut Out to Be?
It’s not enough that we’re having to filter out potential criminals and compulsive liars from online dating websites and develop extrasensory perception to try and identify interested parties, singles are also subject to discrimination by an increasing number of dating websites targeted at certain types of people. These include websites for the ugly, fat, beautiful, the married, those seeking sugar daddies, to name just a few. While one might say this offers more freedom of choice and might in some way even make dating easier by knowing where to go to find what you want, one could argue that this is no different to discriminating against people because of their age, race or sex. Take the recent furor caused by a beautiful only website ejecting 30000 people out of its system after it emerged they’d only been accepted in the first place due to a glitch in the system, it’s easy to imagine what a blow to one’s self-esteem this must have dealt.
Apart from websites that are discriminatory, there are also some functions within dating websites themselves which while supposedly designed to help you in the selection procedure, can actually end up further bashing your self- confidence. For example, some dating websites such as e-harmony, give you the option of ‘archiving’ people which means that they will no longer be able to contact you. Not only that, the archived people actually receive a message telling them that they’ve been 'shelved,' so to speak. The fact that these people who are more often than not people you hardly talk to anyway have to be subject to a notification they’ve been archived, seems more like an unnecessary slap in the face than anything. Then there are other cruelties one can be subjected to such as on online speed dating websites which allow you to cut off contact mercilessly with some faceless stranger you’ve been talking to for the last 3-5 minutes without so much as a hi and bye, if they don’t capture your interest.
All in all, while the singles’ world today is more versatile and diverse than it has ever been, it is also more confusing than it has ever been. It is quite literally 'a jungle out there,' and if a successful path is to be navigated, it's important to keep a keen set of wits about you and have a very robust self-esteem!
Sources
- Rupert Neate, ‘Dating website for beautiful people dumps 30,000 members’ guardian.co.uk
- Oliver Jameson, ‘Top 10: Signs She's Flirting With You’ Askmen.com
- ‘Online dating 101,’ onlinedating tips.com
Joyin Chou - Hi my name is Joyin Chou and I graduated with a B.Sc. in Psychology before going on to pursue a Masters in Educational Research ...
