A Few More Thoughts On Online Dating

Her is another installment in my series on online dating.  First, why do people do it?  Efficiency.  You can contact way more single people spending two hours on dating sites than you can by going to a bar to meet them.  Plus, you can drill down to get someone with characteristics that are closer to what you would like. 

Female friends of mine complain that 1) online dating takes a lot of time, and 2) they meet a lot of undesireables.  As to the first objection, every kind of dating/meeting people takes a lot of time.  If you have very little time available go to a speed dating event.  But these events aren’t as common, outside the very biggest cities. 

As for the second objection, meeting a lot of undesireable guys, my friends have a point.  If they’re at a bar they see the guys and can just give the undesireable ones the cold shoulder, but some manage to slip through online.  They might lie about their height or articulateness.   Or their less-than-stellar grooming might not come through in their online pic. 

But the women can just set up brief “coffee meetings” to evaluate the guys.  I blogged several days about about these meetings and how much they resembled job interviews.

And in any event, the drawbacks of online dating are vastly outweighed by its benefits.   There is no other place where you can inspect so many people, and drill down for exactly what you want.  If the woman wants a 6′2″ guy with an athletic build, brown hair, blue eyes, and who works in a particular field, and who makes above a certain threshold of income, she can search and turn some of these guys up in minutes.

My next installment on online dating will come next week.