It's funny how it used to be that you should never get too personal with people you meet online. You could never be too sure if the person you were talking to was who they said they were, or if they were some scary, 60-year-old hermit with chains in their basement.
Now there are like 50 different online dating services. I always wonder how often they work out, aside from the couples they put in their TV commercials.
I only have one experience with the whole online dating thing, and it's not even mine. My friend L put an ad on Yahoo!Dating as a joke, and eventually some guy, S, responded. They emailed back and forth for a while and found out they had similar interests and lived in the same area (when L was home from college), but I don't know if they ever really planned on meeting.
One night L and her friend went to a bar in her hometown. They started joking with some guy who was wearing a referee shirt, mostly making fun of him for wearing a shirt like that at a bar. Ref Shirt's friend came back from the bathroom or something and started talking to L. When he found out her name, he kept asking things like "you're from City? and you play basketball? and you go to Wittenberg?" until L started to get freaked out, thinking he was a stalker or something.
Can you see where this was going? He wasn't a stalker. Oh, no. He was S, the guy she'd met through Yahoo, the guy she'd been corresponding with through email. They hit it off and started dating.
L is always embarrassed when someone tells this story, because they met online, but I think it's amazing. I always get chills when I hear it. Maybe one day they can be the poster children of Yahoo!Online Dating.
Oh yeah, and they're getting married next summer.
Wow.... thats awesome!! Give them my congrats!
ReplyDeleteThat's really cute! I like that story a lot.
ReplyDeleteMy own (sort of) story: when I was like 12 (yeah, scary age), I met this woman in a chat room and she kept telling me "You're just like my son, you're just like my son." Ok, so her son and I aren't dating, never have, probably never will, but ever since we were like 12 years old, we've been talking online to one another. Eight years later and we still talk like we're next-door neighbors instead of people who live 500 miles apart (and by the way, I have met him for real before).
So believe it or not, you can totally have good relationships (friendship or otherwise) that start off online...if you're not stupid about them.