With the world growing ever more
digital and pandemics keeping us inside most of the time, the world of dating
has changed forever. With a new paradigm come new advantages and disadvantages,
so it might be a good idea to see how the online world has changed dating for
people that are desperately trying to find their significant other.
PROS
CHAT IN YOUR PJS
Gone are the days of having to
spend hours choosing the right outfit when you’re going to meet someone. Modern
dating requires nothing of the sort, and you barely even have to be awake to
find a match these days. Just don’t fall asleep while chatting, that’s still
going to be awkward if the other person notices. As long as your profile
pictures are decent enough, you won’t need to play dress-up until so far down the
dating rabbit hole that odds are you’re going to have a really fun date.
CHOOSE YOUR PREFERENCE
A dating app is basically a huge
bar where you’ve told the bouncer that you’re only looking for people of a
certain shape, height, and age. And if they don’t match the criteria, they’re
just not coming inside. Real life sadly still doesn’t have these filtering
capabilities. It’s hard to deny that real life would benefit from this kind of
feature, pretty much in all aspects.
NO AWKWARD SILENCE
There’s no such thing as awkward
silences anymore! That’s the nice thing about online dating, you’re basically
taking it at your pace, and keeping the conversation going is a lot less high
maintenance. Just text them every once in a while until you can go on the next
date and keep the conversation going. Online communication doesn’t have that “I
need to reply instantly” quality that normal conversation has, which also
allows you to choose your words a bit more carefully if you’d like to.
GUILT-FREE DATING
Trying to find “the one” doesn’t
mean that you have to only talk to one person at a time. The good thing about
online dating is that you can stay in touch with a bunch of people without
needing to feel bad about it. Trust me, everyone’s doing it and so should you.
You can always stop the other conversations once you’re really sure about one
of them, right? Just remove the app once you’re dating seriously and no one
will ever know.
CONS
ONLINE COMMUNICATION
Trying to communicate with a
complete stranger in a text-based format is going to lead to at least a couple
of misunderstandings. Some people feel more confident talking behind a screen
and will turn out to be completely different in real life, or vice versa. It’s
a bit of a gamble to try and figure out how the online persona matches up with
the real person.
CATFISHING
Thankfully, most people are now
aware of catfishing and how to spot it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen
anymore. For those who don’t know: catfishing is when someone creates a fake
online dating profile to be dishonest about their intentions toward you. Often
these days it’s just spambots, but sometimes these can be people with malicious
intent. This is why it’s usually a good idea to get the conversation out of the
dating app as soon as possible. Catfishes can have fake Facebook profiles and
the like too, but at least that’s less likely to happen than fake profiles on
dating apps.
TOO MANY APPS
Perhaps the biggest problem in
online dating right now: which app do you really have to use? Well, much like
in the old day people didn’t know which bar would have the best chances of
netting you a partner, you kind of just skim over different apps and hope for
the best. And much like in bars, some people use dating apps mostly to have fun
and not really for anything serious. Tinder is probably the worst offender in
this regard, but even paid services have their fair share of people not willing
to settle anytime soon. And all those apps put you in contact with millions of
people that just want you for one or two nights, which means there’s probably a
lot more muck to go through.
