Dating on the internet is both impossible and absurdly easy. As Zetgeisty noted, it's the simplest way in the world to create the illusion of a social life for yourself. It's something that's fundamentally unfulfilling because it makes something unquantifiable fit into a query boxes. Even in the best of circumstances, there is always a vague sense of disappointment when you meet someone you've been talking to on a dating site.
All the time and energy spent exchanging emails and phone calls in the buildup to going on a date can be fun and alluring, but it's tantamount to shadowboxing. It's two strangers talking to themselves willfully consenting to let the other to use the vagaries of their lives as a psychic swank rag. When you finally get to meet in real life and realize that the magically sensitive and charming person who was such a delight in your inbox on Tuesday mornings has now become a slouching mouth-breather with just a few too many freckles, how can you not feel disappointed? I've accumulated some simple tactics you can use to stop delegating the ups and downs of your romantic life to relative strangers over the internet.
First, the most positive change you can make is to stop spending so much time and energy on the pre-date emailing sessions. Everyone starts over from scratch the very second they lay eyes on somebody for the first time. If you see someone you like in the papyrus scroll of names and faces, say hello. If they say hello back, ask them out. You don't have to hear about their grandparents, or their job, or the great summer they spent in India their junior year of college. You don't have to go out of your way to make the other person feel charmed or comfortable. It's enough to just say to someone that you find them interesting or attractive. If they feel the same about you, then great! Meet up in person and find out if there's something real to it. The worst thing you could do is spend a week emailing about nothing because you don't want to jump the gun and appear to eager or desperate.
Another huge trap to doing anything social on the internet is that it can become a surrogate way of living. You can get just as stuck living a fantasy life on a personals site as you can wasting hours on Facebook. If you don't have a specific reason to log on, don't. You don't need to see who's emailed you or winked at you everyday, especially if you're just going to ask them for coffee next anyway. The internet should enhance your life, not become an addicting distraction. Finally, for every internet date you have, go on a real one. This sounds harder than it is. You'll be much happier and satisfied in the long run if your time with internet dating is just something you do on the side, rather than the desperate obsession that becomes an umbilicum to the life you've always wanted to live.
Go live that life now. Try sending someone a friend request in real life. Send someone a wink in the coffee shop tomorrow morning. Say, "Hello, I think you've got cool hair," to someone's face. Don't think about your life in terms of rejection. Think about it in terms of having a good time with yourself. Go forth and amuse yourself, and don't apologize for doing it in the company of others. Some will be charmed and want to walk with you a while down the road, others won't. Fun is divinity, it's total honesty, and it's a kind of blind commitment to the people you're surrounded; it can be inordinately attractive. So go talk to someone in public that you're attracted to for whatever reason, and say something that is meant primarily for your own amusement. See if they play along. Most will. Then when you return home at the end of the day and see some random person in your inbox it might be easier to have a little perspective about it all. They're probably going to be ugly anyway.
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Celebrity Confession: In Which Kevin Spacey Bangs Ass
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Intimacy; or A Trip To The Dentist
Crying in Public: My Cubicle
The McCain Date