“It will never last,” She whispers during the vows, “You know they met online.” This scene plays out countless times a year at weddings all over the country. When did we become too busy to meet people in person? Why did internet dating become such a faux pas? Where are we supposed to meet the loves of our life?
Long gone are the days when every marriage was arranged, either by the families involved, or by the skillful matchmaker. Marriage was, by most modern ideals, less of a sacred affair and more one of business. If the wife’s family had two goats and a cow and the husband’s family had no goats but had a tent, they were soon wed.
Up to this point people met each other in person to person situations; school, neighborhood meetings, work, war. Then, in the 1960’s the first dating computer came online. A man would fill out a questionnaire of yes and no questions. A woman would do the same. The computer would tabulate the responses and direct the two toward each other. The applicants only had to answer “yes” or “no” to find the love of their life.
Internet dating was the next logical step. In the mid 1990s as the nation signed on to AOL they suddenly were able to go into the newly formed “dating chat rooms.” The sage computer stopped giving advice but instead acted as the medium with which to meet other people. The possibilities of the types of chat rooms to search through was seemingly endless. “Women Seeking Men” and “Men Seeking Women” were two generic examples but the possibilities could be as wild as “Dominate Florida Women Seeking Submissive Idahoan Men for Relocation.” Whatever kind of person you were, you could find someone else like you.
Darwin should be proud. With the ability to find a mate anywhere in the world man is able to pick the best possible candidate for his mate, Natural Selection at its best. Why then do we hate and belittle the practice?
During the Italian Renaissance, when a woman came of age to be wed, a pot of basil was placed on a shelf outside the window so that passing bachelors could see. If he liked the looks of the property or knew the family name or business, he would stop in and discuss the business of marriage with the father. If everyone was in agreement, the fate was sealed. Occasionally the bride was then introduced to her future husband, but often they met at the wedding. Is this example of early betrothal practice more likely to succeed than picking from a list of people online with similar interests and tastes?
Is it, perhaps, instead that when we look at internet dating we see only the bad publicity. The person on the other end may be a stalker, or child molester, or a murder, just trying to lure the romantically desperate into a trap. NBC has, on three separate occasions, aired a Dateline Report entitled “To Catch a Predator” on which Chris Hansen manages in one night to catch half a dozen potential child molesters trying to meet a 12 year old girl. This image burns quickly into our minds about the dangers of the internet.
There are other reasons we cannot seem to trust the internet for dating as well.
The scene plays out in the office:
A man and a woman are married. The man works in an office and has a secretary. The man has an affair with the secretary. The man and the woman are divorced. Shortly thereafter the man marries his secretary. She quits the firm to raise their child and the man hires a new secretary. The man and the new secretary have an affair.
If it was so easy for the bride whose wedding was being doubted to find her husband online, how can we expect her to resist the temptation to find the second husband online when number one is just not what she thought he would be? It is, generally speaking, easier for a spouse to sneak off to the home office in the middle of the night and browse a few profiles while his or her partner sleeps, or to check the secret email account at work when no one is looking, than it is to find excuses to go out to a bar or other meeting place alone.
In the end, it does not really matter with whom we fall in love and bring home to mother, she is not going to approve. Our parents and friends did not approve when we decided to marry out of love from the beginning. “How will you pay for things? He has no money!” It was all about business.
We can no longer meet the loves of our lives at bars without the assumption that only drunks go to bars. We can no longer hire a matchmaker to find us that special someone because only desperate people do that. We realize that elementary school is far too limiting. Church is not a great place to meet people either for two reasons, it is not the most romantic of places, and no one goes to church anymore. Mixing business and pleasure is often grounds to be fired. We have no venue left except the internet and the chance encounter.
Statistics show that nearly 1% of the country’s population gets divorced annually. Most new marriages do not last to the end of the first year. This number has increased with the use of internet dating. It has also simply become more acceptable to divorce. It would be difficult to ascertain the reasons for the divorce rate increase with certainty. It would also be difficult to determine if couples that met using online resources are less likely to survive.
I met my current partner using an online source. We have been together now four years. Regardless of whether or not we last as a couple is more for fate to decide than the internet. One thing is certain, regardless of what the pessimist thinks of unions based in cyber land, internet dating will last.