Have you ever met a really awesome chick or a super cool dude? I’m talking about someone who captures your imagination and truly stands out from all the other men or women online. Someone so intriguing that you just want to know everything about them.
A week ago, you were a normal, levelheaded person enjoying life. Now, your head is filled with thoughts about someone you don’t really know and who dosen’t know you. Still, you can’t stop thinking about them. You want to know where they are right now. You want to know what they are doing, who they are doing it with and even your friends are starting to call your behaviour “stalker-ish”. Yup, your obsessed.
The alluring promise of finding your perfect mate, your perfect girlfriend/boyfriend, your perfect one-night-stand can be overwhellming. You start thinking about what it would be like to spend a lot of time with them, what it would be like to date them, what it would be like to sleep with them. And you find that all these thoughts send a jolt of excitement through your body and you feel you have to make this happen. The next thing you know you’re spending all your free time and maybe even some of your work time online searching through profiles to find them.
We can easily get caught up in the fantasies in our heads. We predict (favorably) how someone will react to us as if it were fact and then add favorable circumstance after favorable circumstance until any resemblance to the actual person’s personality and situation is non-existent. But we think it’s real and then we act on this new reality and get upset when things don’t turn out like we wanted or expected.
Just like social media, internet dating has a darkside. We need to set some realistic expectations of what we will find. Here are three ways to keep your head and keep it real:
1) Go with your “gut”. If the other person seems in any way unreal, sketchy or makes you feel vulnerable, say “thanks, but no thanks”, no matter how great they seem “on paper”.
2) Don’t spend weeks chatting/e-mailing/IMing. You want to move offline as soon as reasonably possible. If you want your romantic fantasy to come true, you need to create it in person, not from behind your firewall.
3) Understand that no matter how much time you’ve spent romancing each other online, the first time you meet in person is really the first time you are meeting them. Respect it as such. It’s a whole new experience in 3D.
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