I have this friend Shari. Like my friend Darlene she is also twenty-six and she has also fell in love online. Sure there is a six year age difference (he is twenty) but at least it is working this time. (He is a very mature twenty years old and is not sitting around watching Star Trek or dropping E all day.)
As I mentioned in the last blog Darlene seemed to find her true love online right away. Shari is a much different story. The more she tries the trickier the men she meets get. In the past Shari has had some pretty bad luck when it comes to men (until this last one but we will see!)
Before Shari met Christopher, she did have a couple of bad experiences that would have soured me on the whole Internet thing. Not catastrophic or truly horrible, but kind of so-so. Depressing enough to send you down to the local meet market bar.
For instance, she was thrilled when one guy she wrote to finally sent her his picture. They agreed to meet in person at a local restaurant. Imagine her surprise when her date rolled up to the table in a wheelchair. I considered seeing him, but
Then I realized …this is not fair. He omitted this information in his email and I couldn’t tell this from the photo he sent me. So I had to tell him, gently, nicely, that this kind of dishonesty was not for me.
Shari also had a one-night stand with an out of work actor that she met on the net as well.
“First I met in him in a cafe. He was also quite a bit younger than me. The whole thing was quite fast and furious…he came over that night and made love. The next day when he tried to come over again, I had to tell him that it was just for sex. He wanted a relationship and I didn’t, so he had to go. It just didn’t click. He was heartbroken.”
Even though it is possible to find sex and even a husband on the Internet, cyber-dating is still a risky business — especially for women. According WHOA (Women Halting Online Harassment) “while men are certainly harassed online, 87% of our reported cases our female. Also 54% of the victims were in the 18 to 30 range. 53% of the victims who came to us had no previous contact with the correspondents. Email is the most common forum where harassment beings –39.5% were stalked or harassed by email and 15.5% began getting harassed after
meeting someone in a chat room.
So from what I am gathering so far, online romance is the most dangerous option for dating if you are single, white, female and under thirty but it might also be your best shot at meeting someone for real. The irony is that whether you end up having a stalker or a genuine soul mate showing up at your door you are probably still going to get that declaration of love you were longing to hear.