[MissT74]

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MissT:

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I will say that I met my first husband online. Dated for 3 years, married for 5, still friends now.

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I created this post because I do want to hear success stories. I am fascinated by psycho-social behavior. I do not want you to feel threatened by the content of this post. One of my original points was that there is much more bad press surrounding this than good press. I would like to think that there is a good counter-balance to the bad press.

I would like to ask you some questions:

What drove you to join an on-line site?

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I actually didn't join a dating on-line site, but rathered progressed from playing games on Yahoo! to entering their chat rooms, at that point I became so envolved and engrossed in the other chatters that I became addicted and realized that I could actually, possibly, meet someone this way. I had never done it before, nor heard much about it, (remember this was about 12 years ago) and so I was intrigued and started chatting it up.

I hung out in the Arizona room where we actually would meet up as a group 1-2 times a month and had parties. I got to meet a lot of different people, from all walks of life, and found it stimulating as I love conversing and I love meeting new people.

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I know that you expect me to think you were desperate, but that is not how I think on this. My first thinking is that you were not able to access men in your own life. I used to take classes where the M:F ratio was something like 1:20. Although I did get hit on often, I constantly deflected them, because I did not want a love life to interfere.

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I don't think I've ever thought of myself as "desperate". I worked for a medical office where the only male to female interaction would be between us girls and the delivery men. (There was one HOT medical supply guy that I got...dated him for 3 months) So I would say it was hard to meet guys, as even though I went out clubbing and met several men that way, I never thought I would or could find a "quality" man from a bar.

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How many attempts did you try before you found the satisfactory man?

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I met/dated about 20 men from online, a rough guestimate. However, I did NOT sleep with them all (I'll be honest and say I believe I slept with about 3-4 of them), the majority of them ended after the first date, even though we thought we would "connect so strongly" after our talking online. However, once we met, it went downhill either on his part or on my part.

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What was your first impression on meeting a man that you could not be sure matched the picture, or did you wing it and just pressed on a person with no pic?

[/ QUOTE ] Eh, I figured they 1. either lied or 2. take bad pictures or 3. gave me a 5+ year old picture. It never bothered me too much. If he didn't look ANYTHING like his picture, which I was attracted too, and I wasn't attracted to what he looked like when we met, then he would be one of the 20 that I never dated again (see above). I never met anyone online without a few pics and without talking/chatting online for at least 2-3 weeks regularly.

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Do you think that getting to know a person before you meet face-to-face creates stronger, inseperatable bonds?


[/ QUOTE ] Yes and No. Yes if both parties are really, truly being honest and up front and down to earth about everything and anything discussed. No if one or both of them aren't. I have played both parts. When I started chatting with my future husbans I was the first one and I found out he was too, which is why we lasted so long together, IMO.

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The fact that you said:

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it does cause me concern and make me pause when I know that my daughter has a My Space page and is meeting (ie talking too) people from all over the country/world. As a mother, YIKES!

As a grown female, I was/am cool with it, for myself.



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impresses me. It shows that you have an actual thinking brain. I would not think that you didn't, nor do I believe that all OL dater's are spaced out.

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We're honestly not, I truly think for the most part that we're just people who want to interact and meet other people without there being a bar involved (at first!) and the convenience of the internet, and being at home, just makes it easier and more accesible!

I've met many many more good people then strange people (I hate to say bad, I really never met a "bad-bad" person, but I've met plenty of "weird-strange" people)online and I absolutly believe that I have exchanged my poker forums for the Yahoo! chat room.....only this time it's not to find love as it has been in the past, but rather to simply converse.

Great questions, thanks for posing them!

T