Being in love online - A Practical Guide

More and more people these days are finding love online be it due to time constraints, unsociable working hours or simply the death of the community, but one thing is for sure, this is the fastest growing way to meet potential partners, however it has it's pitfalls. 


Whilst online dating agencies may offer a quick way to meeting these partners, Instant Messaging using programs such as ICQ, MSN, or Odigo offer a lightning speed way of getting very intimate, very quickly. It is so quick because you can be just who you want to be when you are chatting online, no one will see you blush if you say something wrong and most importantly, it allows you to take risks that you would never dream of taking in the real world. 


The most powerful aspect of this all though is that we paint our own picture in our minds of what the other person is without all those non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and mannerisms that subconsciously in the real world tell us valuable things about the person. In short, with our own beautifully created perception of the person, fall for them. So why do we as intelligent human beings end up falling for people we have never even met before? The answer is simple, we want to be in love, we so want to tell ourselves that the searching for our soul mate is over and with that we picture our lives in a blissful sea of coupledom, sharing our lives together. Sadly it is this haste to end our single lives that can lead to disappointment as quickly as it started.

Meeting Your online love for the first time 

Sooner or later the question of actually meeting in person will come up and whilst many people would say it's better to take your time and let the online relationship develop, I strongly believe that the sooner you do it, the better. If you leave it too long, then the impression you have built up of this person will be so deep rooted that your expectations will be far too high and you will be set for disappointment. The other point is if you have been a lot more confident chatting than you would be in real life, how are you going to be able to keep up that persona? You may end up competing with yourself. 


So assuming that you are both happy with the length of time the romance has been going on for and you decide to meet, what will it be like? It will be quite strange to begin with. You may find that although you have been up most nights until 5 in the morning chatting, you find it hard to talk about things in the flesh. This is perfectly natural as the two of you are having to almost re-learn the parameters of the relationship and digest the visual cues that our mannerisms and facial expressions provide. It will be a nerve racking time as we have to decide there and then if these mannerisms and even physical odours are compatible with us. If you can pass that first test, then things get a lot easier. Do however be very careful if you are traveling abroad to meet someone because if things fail at this first hurdle, then you are totally stuck on your own in a foreign country.

Passed first base, what next? 

Having gone through this initial nerve racking first meeting, there is often a huge temptation to revert back to an 'online relationship' as it feels so much more comfortable, but I cannot stress enough to resist that temptation. Slip back into the old online chatting routine and the online persona won't die. The transition from online to offline relationship can be extremely difficult but at all costs, you must get to know the real person from a new offline perspective and kill off any false impressions you may have had about them online. Going back to the online chatting routine may make you feel all warm and fuzzy again, but it can be an unrealistic perception of who the person really is.

In Summary 

This all may seem a little negative and in some cases may not even apply, but overall, forewarned is forearmed. There are of course many people who have made a success of their relationship by Instant Messaging and some are even married now but it really pays to be aware of how feelings can be distorted by the shield of an anonymous nickname and a computer monitor. 


http://freethinkermatch.com/index.php?page=showarticle&articleid=2

Why Men Are Settling for Mrs. Good Enough

A new survey shows that men are surprisingly likely to say they’d commit to a person they’re not in love with. When did guys become so desperate to settle down? Jessica Bennett reports.

Two days after a devastating breakup, I had lunch with the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the person who probably knows more about the science of romance and long-term love than anyone else on the planet. Our meeting wasn’t a ploy for tips on how to win him back—though, did you know that sex kicks the attachment hormone into overdrive?—but to discuss her latest study. It was about singles in America, conducted in conjunction with match.com—and I was, begrudgingly, again part of this demographic.

But after nearly eight years off the market, it seemed I had a lot to learn about the dating scene in 2012. Fisher’s study unearthed some startling tidbits about sex, romance, and hooking up among the 6,000 men and women surveyed: among them, that Republicans, apparently, have more orgasms; that gay men are more romantic; and ambitious women turn men on. But the biggest surprise? Certain gender roles appear to have flipped since the days of “The Rules” and He’s Just Not That Into You.

Rather than living up to the stereotype of commitment-phobic bachelors, modern men reported that they fell in love just as often as women, were just as likely to believe that marriage is “forever,” and scarcely bit when asked whether they'd prefer to “just date a lot of people.” But most shocking was how many of the single men wanted to settle down—and how willing they were to lower their standards to make that happen. A whopping 31 percent of adult men said they’d commit to a person they were not in love with—as long as as she had all the other attributes they were looking for in a mate—and 21 percent said they'd commit under those same circumstances to somebody they weren't sexually attracted to. The equivalent numbers for women were far lower.

“Give me a friend I get along with, have good sex with, and is willing to compromise, and I’ll build the love over time,” one man, a Colorado computer instructor, told me. It was as if he was echoeing the advice given to many-a-young-bride by the village matchmaker.

This man was in his 40s, but lest we write off these statistics as a symptom of the old (read: divorcees, or dudes with decreased sex drive), the percentage of men saying "yes" to imperfect committment was actually highest among men in their 20s, almost 40 percent of whom said they'd commit without love (compared with 22 percent of women). The gap narrowed as men and women entered their 30s, and widened again past 40. Yet regardless of age, men’s willingness to answer in the affirmative to both questions was significantly higher across the board.

Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers University, explains it this way. "We have a stereotype in this culture that it's men who are the ones who don't want to commit, who don't want to settle down, who are the scarce resources. But in fact, it's the opposite." As one married man in his 40s old her: "My wife isn’t perfect. She isn’t the best I’ve had in bed. But she’s a wonderful mother to our daughter, she’s very helpful in our business life, and we get along very well.’”

Getty Images

How very … utilitarian.

But more than simple utility, it's a stance that's reminiscent of the now-infamous argument for settling in Lori Gottlieb’s Atlantic article turned bestseller, Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. In it, Gottlieb counseled gals to forget the search for a soul mate and nab the next nice nebbish they could find (lest they end up, like Gottlieb herself, alone and regretful at 40). “Wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of ‘not Mr. Right’ while my marital value was at its peak?” Gottlieb wrote. “My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection … overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go.”

Though Gottlieb’s take was provocative, it was hardly new—“settling” is a trope that women have struggled with for ages. You know the old adage: a woman who can’t find a man is a spinster; a man who doesn’t want a wife is the envy of all his friends. Historically, of course, women needed marriage in a way that men simply didn’t: a woman without a husband wasn’t just lonely, she was broke, outcast, shunned. And so the modern marriage debates—the case for settling versus the case for singledom—have largely been written by and for women.

Until, perhaps, now. Modern marriage economics have catapulted women into the role of breadwinners in many households, and as more women have entered the workforce, financial freedom has meant independence in other spheres, as well. Women now have the ability to choose a mate for reasons other than his pocketbook; many are in fact choosing to reject having a mate at all. Where this leaves men? Well, as women’s independence has increased, it seems, romantic opportunity for men has suffered the opposite fate. "And that problem is bound to be worse for poorer men," says Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who runs the blog Family Inequality. “I don’t think there’s any way to avoid that."

But that also doesn't have to be a bad thing. “There’s this transformation going on,” says Tom Matlack, the cofounder of The Good Men Project, which aims to discuss and debunk modern male stereotypes. “It’s kind of like feminism on its head: for years, women were trying to earn the right to get out of the house, and here are all these men dying to get back into [it].”

But don’t take his word for it—listen to the chorus.

“We all marry our second or third or fourth best choice,” says one man. “It is just life.”

“At the end of the day, most of us just want someone who is supportive and sane enough to have a family with," a journalist friend tells me. "I think men have always been willing to settle."

Says Thomas Fant, a private health-care consultant in New York: "The idea of being alone in life can be so overwhelming. Soul crushing for some. Men certainly aren't immune to it.”

Or, as one middle-aged guy puts it: “We all marry our second or third or fourth best choice. It is just life." (Ouch.)

But perhaps there's a more realistic way to look at it: that single life for men can be just as challenging as it is for women. "When we are honest, when we rid ourselves of the fantasy, being a single guy is f--king horrible,” says Nick Soman, the 32-year-old founder of a social dating site called LikeBright. “People start looking at you and thinking, ‘You seem like a decent dude. Where’s the woman?’ You’ll go to these weddings, and you’ll be at the increasingly declining table of the singles. There’s, like, three guys and a girl. You’re all kind of looking at each other like, ‘Wow, these odds are pretty bad.’”

Soman doesn't need to worry: he's newly engaged. But it’s a sober reminder that life doesn't always resemble the bachelorette chasing bros of Wedding Crashers.

“Marriage is challenging,” says Matlack, of the Good Men Project. “Are you always madly in love with your spouse? No. But being a good husband and a good father is about trusting the other person, about being willing to deal with difficult stuff. I think it’s a sign of maturity on the part of men to admit that."

At the end of the day, he adds, “I don’t need the Victoria’s Secret model. I don’t need the infatuation that’s not going to last. I need a partner in life."

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Jessica Bennett is a senior writer and editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, covering social issues, gender, sex, and culture. She has won three Front Page Awards, and has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists, the New York Press Club, and GLAAD, among other organizations. She also edits the Newsweek Tumblr. Follow her on Tumblr.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast ateditorial@thedailybeast.com.