Fishing down the mainstream - online dating

July 11, 10:53 AMSacramento Divorce Recovery ExaminerTomi Tuel

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Friends love to set us up on blind dates. As good as their intentions are though, there is something to be said about anonymity when dating.

The thing about Internet dating is that you prescreen your date not your friends. But don’t be naive. What you see isn’t always what you get. How truthful are people when they post their profiles on the Internet? How can you be sure the self-proclaimed knockout blonde is a knockout, or a rich dude is really rich and is in fact a dude? The same caution that applies at a nightclub needs to be practiced online. People are just as likely to falsify their income, marital status, and employment, online as offline.

Internet dating is a pretty disposable way to weed through people. Before Internet dating, there were the personal ads, which always seemed to have a desperate connotation associated with them. I conducted a survey at various area Starbucks and online medium to see if people’s perceptions have changed over the years. Here’s what I found:

66% of people polled said they view people who do Internet dating as Adventurous.
33% of people polled said they view people who do Internet dating as Desperate.

Internet romance activities are much more mainstream than ever. According to a March 2006 study conducted by PEW/Internet’s they found that 31% of American adults say they know someone who has used a dating website and 15% of American adults – about 30 million people – say they know someone who has been in a long-term relationship or married someone he or she met online.

When meeting someone offline for the first time is it a good idea to practice some common sense rules of dating:
· Meet in a public place
· Do some background research on your date before you meet (even if it means paying for a background check)
· Ask for photos
· Ask for phone numbers
· Trust your gut instinct

Internet dating is still fairly new, and there are many success stories, but what we haven’t heard yet is how many of these marriages end in divorce?