Is the super-information highway still the road to nowhere when it comes to finding a life partner? Like most people, I used to think that the love-lorn who spent their long lonely hours hanging around in chat rooms, looking at message boards and peeling through thousands of so-called love matches on web personals were … well… losers.
Only really desperate, ugly people who were perhaps also emotionally sick would have to resort to using a computer to find the love of their life. And if you did find someone, he or she couldn’t possibly be serious … they must married, lonely or perhaps even a stalker.
In the past year, however, I have had to revise my opinion somewhat, lest I offend one of my best friends, who both have found husbands as a result of surfing the Internet. Also it seems lately, that everybody knows somebody who has found a marriage partner by resorting to, what still seems to me, to be a drastic and also somewhat risky measure. I couldn’t find any statistics anywhere about these relatively new phenomena, about how many people are finding true love
this way or how long the marriages last, but at this point, I have to believe my own eyes.
Maybe the Internet is not such a bad matchmaker.
I was shocked when my friend Darlene, a 26 year old psychiatric nurse who works nights shifts in a local mental hospital, called me up this year to tell me that she had gotten married to a French Canadian guy she met on the web.
How did that happen? Darlene told me after fifteen years of working night shifts and meeting only really crazy people on her job she realized she was never going out. It was really hard to meet guys during the day. Plus she felt the old biological clock ticking and felt like she had to do something efficient to meet a male.
She swears they are in love and that when they did meet it was love at first sight. However I had to wonder what her strict and religious father thought about it all.
Darlene had to admit to me that she had quaint a bit of trouble getting her parents and some of her friends to accept that this online relationship is real.
I too was a bit suspicious of the guy, although why it seems unreasonable in retrospect to have been any more suspicious of him than anyone else. Still I kept thinking he was some kind of cad until I met him and realized that he did truly care for Darlene and that this was a relationship that was going to work. Not only was she pregnant and beaming but she had an expensive wedding ring on her left finger, her own new car and a brand new home on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. She can now also go to cottage north of Hull, Quebec.
Maybe I will stop trying to meet men in bars and get online more often.