Web of Love: Online Dating

More and more people are heading to the web to seek out love, romance and sex!! It is becoming a totally acceptable and legitimate form of dating. In an increasingly complex world, we simple creatures have to navigate new frontiers to find love, and like all new frontiers there are some dangers and some rewards to be found. It's certainly a positive for some to be able to avoid bars and clubs to meet potential partners, instead remaining in the comfort of their own home. All that's needed is a good connection, some speedy typing-fingers and a crash course in cyber talk!

I won’t bore you with the usual ‘Dangers of Internet Dating’ spiel. I think most people are fairly well educated about these. What I find interesting is the blank-slate quality that is inherent in internet dating. In many ways it mirrors the earliest form of therapeutic relationship developed by Freud. What Freud would do is get the person to lie down on a couch, and he would sit behind them; completely out of sight of the person. He did this so that the individual could freely project all their personal complexes onto him without their sense of him as a person getting in the way!!

The internet has this same potential – although not quite to the same extent because the person is responding. But even though you are interacting with someone, they are not sitting in front of you, you cannot see them, which means that you are losing all the signals you would normally get from their body language, their tone of voice, the way they are dressed etc, etc. The most obvious example is that someone can tell you they are a female when in fact they are a male, or someone can tell you they are 25 when in fact they are 45!!

The more subtle process here is that it is much easier to project onto someone the exact qualities we want to find – because there is so much less information with which to challenge it! We already have a tendency to focus on the positive qualities when we meet someone – this is endearingly referred to as the Romantic Phase of a relationship. We also call it a High Dream. When in a state of high-dreaming; everything seems perfect, we feel like nothing can go wrong, we believe all our needs will be satisfied by this one person or relationship. This is when we forget to notice the things that aren’t quite sitting right and overemphasize the things that we like - we cling to the high dream and ignore reality - and with an online relationship these tendencies to high dream are accentuated. On top of this, the internet can wrongly generate a safe feeling of anonymity, which can lead people to over-disclose rather quickly. What this means is that both parties can tend to reveal a lot more in a highly condensed time frame.

This is why, within 4 or 5 chats with someone, exchanging maybe only 1000 words, you can feel like you have found your tha answer to all your dreams. This is how powerful our human need to believe in the possibility of LOVE is; we all carry around these high dreams for romantic love. There is nothing wrong with that – but it can be like a gigantic spider’s web that is impossible to see and so we walk right into it – and then before we know it, we are captured!! Our emotions have already started to respond and they can be impossible to reign in. You have already told yourself you have found ‘The One’ and that’s a hard story to back out of!! Once emotions have begun to flood your system, confirming your sensation that you are in love, and well, this makes it very challenging to make sensible decisions based on reality. Essentially we have left reality far behind - and like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz - we are probably feeling overwhelmed and abuzz but not very grounded!! this means we might progress onwards ignoring all the big flashing signs they say GO BACK!! DANGER! or GO SLOW! NEED MORE INFORMATION!

If you are considering dating online or have already started, remember that until you meet someone in the flesh it is impossible to know if the relationship can work… For a start you need to find out if there is a physical attraction. Not to mention do you get along? Can you talk with each other? Do you share similar goals and lifestyles? Are you sexually compatible? Do you live in the same city? Etc etc. There are so many factors that contribute to a relationship success.

If you are conscious, you can use your online experience to discover what you are really hoping to find. What is the high dream you keep searching for? I call this using the high dream to float your boat! High dreams are never quite realistic, they are meant only to inspire, to pull us forward, to challenge us to grow. Now, when we meet someone, rather than convince ourselves they are perfect, we can use the high dream to see how closely do they match what we are looking for in a partner; where are the gaps and can we live with these? Of course no-one is perfect and seeing people for who they really are and how closely they fit our needs gives us a better (not worse) chance of creating a happy and sustainable relationship.

It is really important to be clear about your needs and wants from a date or a relationship? I suggest keeping these thoughts in your awareness, perhaps even writing them down, and then checking in honestly as you go along:

Does this person meet up to my expectations?

Do i genuinely enjoy their company and feel I can be myself with them?

Are my needs being met (right from date number one)?

Are there any doubts or reservations that I am holding back?

Are there any behaviours that I'm ignoring in order to stay invested in this person?

Would my most trusted friend see things differently?

Am I managing to keep my emotions in check?

Could I slow things down or are they rushing forward uncontrollably?

Use these questions to keep your head level, and keep pursuing your dreams. A sustainable partnership is about both dreams and reality.

You might also want to read my article 'Dating Done Differently'

Enjoy and be safe,

Michelle