Online Dating - Social Experimenting Gone Wrong

'Hey Man - so sorry to hear about you and your girl not working out, it was such a shame to hear - you looked so happy together...hey come to think of it, why don't you try online dating...?'

'Er....no.'

Online dating, in my opinion was brought into the world to enable people who were too busy to find their match or date someone - or quite simply those looking to 'link up with no strings' and get busy.

Only a few problems with that.

Human's by nature are attracted to looks and appeal - rather than more importantly a persons character and clearly this can't be measured online. So unless you have a six pack, have a photo of yourself on a beach in Tahiti and have a picture showing you holding a bottle of Grey Goose in some awful nightclub then you have no chance.

Then there's the chance of actually meeting someone. A girl friend of mine joined a site that shall not be named. The site upon completion asked her to load some images of herself which she did and within 5 minutes she had 64 messages! Bam!! She like so many of us were advised by friends to 'loosen up' and give online dating a go and when she did she got hit with so many messages it became a nightmare.

She called me up and decided to tell me about it - so I popped over to see if it was true.

By the time I arrived that evening her message count had risen to 354!



30% of them just said 'Hi' or  'How are you'
40% of them asked her for Sex
10% of them had no photo
20% of them started with a 'Hello Sara, Jackie, Lauren....' So in essence the wrong name.

and 98% of them didn't even know how to type.

And somehow in this pile of detritus my friend is meant to find her match, her one true love? So I decided to run a quick one week experiment. My friend and I created two female profiles. We of course asked our friends if we could use their photos and after a bottle of red the deal was done.

Guess what we found? The messages received by my friend, the exact same messages received were also sent to us. They had been copied and pasted rehashed and sent on. We then modified the preferences - blocked and deleted all the messages and guess what? No one passed the test. The inbox fell silent.

Then a few days later and thanks to some awful market research and the plugging of countless news reports I heard how the numbers of single men and women are on the rise. Usually this news is delivered between two horrific stories to add that extra punch. Is that a bad thing? Does that automatically mean that all you singletons are lonely and have to join a dating site to find your match?

How did our parents and grandparents do it? They met each other. They had a story to tell. They made time for one another. They fell in love. Romance blossomed and we were the result and most of us all love hearing about it, as it reminds us that perhaps the same could happen to us...

There are plenty of sites out there that prey on those who are looking for love, looking for someone and this capitalist world, you have to usually pay through the nose to get it. Several of these free dating sites ask you to pay a subscriptions and in my opinion this is wrong.

We do not need online dating sites to find love or romance or someone we want to be with - we just have to find the confidence within ourselves to talk to the girl we have always fancied, to compliment them on how fantastic they look and make them smile - let them see what a great guy you are and there and then ask her out for lunch or a quick drink.

Dating sites and those on it looking for love are in my opinion in a constant cycle of destruction - those who join it in my opinion are not looking for love, and when they find that diamond in the rough they are constantly reminded in the back of their mind that they have a 100 other people who have messaged them asking to meet up.

The constant desire to feel needed by the many not by the one is not the way we find our match.