Are they the authentic themselves in everyday life and just pretend to be others as flirting under alias through email?
Or is it that being under alias though being authentically themselves they detach from their mundane interests and conflicts and express their inner feelings, which reveal them as soul mates?
Conclusions are not easy when it comes to online romance.
The pub or the web?
Saturday night. At the club, the loud music coming from huge speakers makes a beer multiply by ten when it goes up straight to your head.
Bill, overseas student at a university in London , shout at my ear his adventures across online dating services and chat rooms and makes his point, it is impossible to have “a quite and nice talk” with a girl in a place like this.
Late at night in his room, he gets in touch with girls for friendly or spicy conversations and even one of them strip-danced for him, from many miles away.
As many of his friends, he has experienced cybersex. “You just need a webcam”, he says without any embarrassment.
Contrary to what happened a few time ago, online dating is considered today another way of building relationships, and people involved in it is not seen anymore as sad, weird or chronic cases of loneliness.
Years ago, back in Havana , I used to look every morning a graffiti on a wall, “Lina, Carlos is still looking for you.”
One day the wall was painted and the message disappeared. I never knew if Carlos found Lina, but I am sure that today’s advances in social and dating networks could have helped him.
A real dimension
Online dating became a platform for people that might not have gone looking for love to clubs or public spaces because of shyness or lack of time in their busy lives.
The American Online Dating Magazine estimates that more than 20 million people visit at least one online dating service a month, and that there are more than 120,000 marriages a year as a result of online dating.
According Jupiter Research, online dating industry had in 2006 profits of $649m and services like the French Meetic reached more than £6m.
In the UK , the trend has been stimulated by social networks like MySpace and Facebok, and there are more than 140 dating sites.
Criticism points at the commercial targets of this websites and the orientation of many of them to niche segments like explicit sex, exotic-racial views and “illicit encounters.”
But they are here to stay by getting people in touch. Not all the experiences are great, but the same happens in other areas of life and in other ways of relationships.
At the end, after the virtual encounter those who are lucky go through the most effective confirmation, the face-to-face, and eventually go on to the traditional skin-to-skin
