by Carolyn Woodburn

Created on: May 05, 2010

Online daters are more real than some couples who met in a more traditional hit and miss methods.  How real is a couple who met in a bar who knows nothing about each other than what they look like?  Couples who meet online get to know a lot more about each other right from the start than just about any other method of making somebody's acquaintance.  Sure people can lie on their online profiles, in e-mails, and over the phone, but they are less likely to lie when they are paying to use an online dating site than when they are meeting people in bars.

Online dating is not just for socially unfit people.  Thousands of married couples nowadays met online.  Many of them are intelligent people who found that the best way to meet the right person was to eliminate the trial and error that you normally have in dating.  Online dating is probably the only way you can ask serious questions before you even meet to determine if you are compatible before seeing how you connect in person.  It’s not that hard to find someone you get along with well enough to date for a year.  It is much harder to find someone that you think you want to live with for the rest of your life.

The likelihood of divorce is no greater for people who met online than people who met elsewhere.  If anything, the divorce rate should be lower.  There are no real statistics showing a link between online dating and divorce rates, but statistics do show that the divorce rate is lower now than it has been for decades.  As long as the couple was honest with each other when they first met online, they should be highly compatible and possibly soul mates.  People who met online and later married did not fall in love over superficial things if they used online dating to their best advantage.

There are undoubtedly couples who did meet online that do not get married or got divorced.  While together, however, they were just as real of a couple as any.  They met with the intention of learning more about each other just like any other dating method.  Their break ups can hurt just as much as couples who met in more conventional ways.

Do not let scare stories discredit the validity of online dating.  It is real, and many feel it is a superior way of finding the right person.  Not everyone is lucky enough to meet the right person haphazardly.  There is nothing wrong with going straightforward to find your soul mate.

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