Don't get me wrong. I know lots of people who have found love on the Internet, but I have also come across enough disaster stories to feel that a word or two of caution are in order. Let me offer three reasons why anyone should be a little leery of dating web sites.
1. Deception is rampant. Now, I should also say that deception is fairly prevalent in dating as a whole, so this is not just an Internet problem. But the ease with which people can lie on the Internet makes this a much bigger problem for dating web sites.
2. Too much choice is not always a good thing. Research shows that when people are faced with too much choice, a variety of things start to happen. First, it becomes much more difficult to make any choice. Second, the criteria you use to make a choice become increasingly arbitrary. Third, you end up more dissatisfied with whatever choice you do eventually make. I talked to several Internet daters who experienced various levels of this, and some of them swore off Internet dating because of it.
3. The personality matching systems touted by the sites have not been shown to have any validity. That doesn't mean you won't like the people you meet, but it does mean that you will be subject to the same vagaries of chance you find in regular life. In fact, simply telling two people that they are similar (regardless of whether or not that is actually true) automatically increases the chance that they will be attracted to one another.
So, caveat emptor! There is nothing wrong with Internet dating as long as you realize that it does not offer any magical solution.
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