Internet dating comes up a lot when I write these little confessions to the world. Maybe you haven't noticed it, but I have. Internet relationships have their pitfalls, and there is no shortage of horror stories about them going all wrong. Tread lightly, watch out for some of the warning signs, and you, too, can make internet dating work.
Pretenders
First and foremost, you have to watch out for underage kids, married adults, foreigners looking for a free ticket into the country, dirty old men pretending to be young girls, and classmates or co-workers looking to have some fun at your expense. All of the above will be pretending to be something they aren't and will be looking to take advantage of you in some way or another. There's no real way to know if anyone is being truthful with you over the internet, especially if you don't know them from your day-to-day life. If they are too eager to please you, or vague about how they got your information in the first place, it's a good indicator that something is amiss.
A friend of mine once told me about his younger brother and his forty-year-old internet girlfriend. In this case, we have not one, but two people pretending to be something they aren't. One is a 15 year old boy claiming to be 18, and the other is a married woman with three sons (all of which are older than the boy in question), pretending to be single. As you can see, this was a disaster waiting to do some serious damage. Luckily, a few days before the boy was supposed to meet this woman in a hotel room, he bragged about it to his uncle, who then went to his parents and made sure it never happened. Instead, the uncle met the lady at the hotel room and explained to her that she was about to commit statutory rape because of her carelessness on the internet. This is how the details about her having a husband and kids came to light. Imagine the damage that could have been done if they had met and gone through with their little encounter.
Photos
Swapping pictures of each other always seems like a good means of being sure the person is who they say they are. Remember those horror stories I was telling you about? Many of them revolve around pictures being different than the genuine article. It's easy to fake this sort of thing. Fakes can range from real pictures of the person when they were younger or thinner, pictures of the person's friends or family instead of themselves, or even just pictures they found on the internet. Ask for more than just a single picture, preferably ones with friends or family involved. It's a lot easier to fake a single picture than a family photo album. Short of a live webcam, though, it's going to be hard to be 100% certain, and even that can be faked if they are willing to put forth the effort. Doesn't hurt to do a quick Google image search for words they might have used to find the picture by the same method either.
I knew a guy once who thought he had hooked up with this hot redhead. He would talk about how great she was at length and eventually they started engaging in cyber sex. Next thing he knows, his cyber sexploits are posted all over a former friends blog about how he duped him into falling in love with a fake girl. Had he bothered to do a quick image search for "hot redhead," he would have found the exact picture he had fallen in love with.
Obsession
If you find yourself in a relationship and things are going well, the next thing you need to start looking out for is drastic changes to your daily routines. If you find yourself sitting in front of your computer for hours on end, just waiting for your other half to sign into instant messaging or reply to an e-mail, it's not a healthy thing to be doing. If your whole life turns into sitting in front of the computer, waiting for the next bit of interaction, no matter how small, you need to rethink what your life has become. If you're doing these things because the person on the other end demands it of you, then you definitely need to reevaluate the relationship.
A guy I met through an online college course fell into this trap, and it did some serious damage to his life. This guy was in his second semester of his first year of college, sitting pretty with a full-ride scholarship to a fancy state university. He met this girl in a chat room, a high school junior, and everything in his life changed.
Everyday when she got home from school, first thing she did was to sit down in front of her computer, do her homework, and chat with friends. This is where the problem started. The guy had a class that starts 5 minutes after she usually signs into instant messaging. It didn't take long for him to start blowing off the lecture except during tests, and soon he didn't even bother showing up for those. Before long, it spread to skipping his other evening class to spend more time online talking to her, and ignoring any homework or studying for his other classes. By the time the semester ended, she had broken up with him for some guy at her school, and he was looking at failing grades in all his courses. He lost his scholarship, and last I heard, has made a career of living in his mom's basement and flipping burgers, all because of some girl he barely knew.
In Conclusion
These are, in my opinion, the biggest dangers of internet dating. It can ruin lives if you're not careful. Like it or not, if you find yourself reading this and it sounds a little too familiar, you might want to take a closer look at how you're living your life. If you do you might be able to salvage something good before it's too late, or save yourself a lot of pain or humiliation down the road.
Until next time, braaiiins...
