It would seem I am playing the online field. I had two replies from two men via the mystic romance portal. There is talk of meeting for coffee, which will possibly help to answer the question- is e-dating worth it and did/is the experiment ‘paying off’?
If I meet anyone for coffee I need to give out my phone number. I’m not adverse to giving out my phone number online, or meeting for coffee I arranged to once before; just picky about the intended audience. It moves the exchanges from the dating website on to private contact, like I said in the first post, you never know who you're giving your digits to. But aside from being stood up the first time, it's taken the effort out of meeting someone, and is certainly a more worthwhile experience than going to a bar, getting drunk and felt up by some alcohol sodden lothario. So who's to say that this is necessarily more or less safe or worthwhile?
Everyone has reasons for being on guard. At the moment it’s harmless fun, beyond that, beyond messages, texts and banter, it starts to become something else and the potential for people’s feelings becomes real. What happens when e-dating becomes dating?
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Coffee arranged for Thursday morning/afternoon. The guy seems very keen- responds very quickly and when I said I may be hungover (I wanted to be honest as it was a distinct possibility rather than flaking out) he replied, almost instantly, with “I will take a hangover coffee on Thursday, it's most definitely better then nothing”.
I'm not used to up front honesty. As much as I like to be chased and that seems to be the natural order of things it does seem that sometimes it gets out of hand. 'Better than nothing' isn't up front honesty, and after all we read and hear about men being turned off by ‘women who chase without realising’, how is it that men get to escape being told this?
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An impromptu call. An 'entity' who's built a bit of rapport, though the call was no less unexpected too. The gears of communication have truly shifted and this has left the province online. I thought that texting made it more real but it made it more informal. When you go from applying yourself to an hour’s worth of writing every other day, in response to a (very nice) essay you received from someone, to having a chat over the phone, no effort, no editing, no time consuming typing and spelling errors- you respond in one of a couple of ways. Flight or fight.
Your phone is ringing, you look at the screen. Panic! Wow! What can he possibly have to talk to you about? You’ve basically shared your life story with each other for the past fortnight. Okay, let it ring a couple more times- play. it. cool. The conversation begins, if a little awkward at first. This anonymous e-mailer is now a person on the end of a telephone, with a voice, a breathing pattern, accent, talking speed and most of all, intonation. Then you realise, you do too. Excitement mingles with a bit of fear. Fear that you are now going to have to rely on spontaneous wit, rather than re-reading and spell check. You’re ability to interact with humans is being assessed. You sense your voice being scanned for ugliness, so you attempt something of a Jessica Rabbit style huskiness, though you probably sound more like Danny DeVito.
So, this particular gent, is now in fact just that. A Gent. Someone of the human orientation and not just re-interpreted binary code. I wonder how long it will be before people feel that emailing is an intimate communication tool. I am part of a generation of people who have begun to fear face to face contact as we move ever more deeply in to the digital age. I still however, find emails to be fairly unobtrusive and distant as far as communicating goes. Texting holds hands with this theory. Which generation will start to feel about emails the same way we feel about phone calls? Is society regressing from physical and face to face contact? Will we begin to count our friends on facebook with more profound meaning than those in our physical realms? Or is that already happening?
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