Online Dating Etiquette

Seeing as online dating is a relatively new phenomenon, what shape do you think etiquette will take? Will it be identical to face to face dating? Should it be? Or will a new language and behaviour all of its own come in?

I’ve been talking to a number of guys online for a while now and it’s certainly a mixed set of rules. Some prefer to take their time and build up a rapport. Some propose meeting up from practically the first email. Some ask for more photos of you outright and some hold back despite their obvious curiosity. And so on. Horses for course I guess.

But I find it amusing that technology has somewhat commandeered the order of things. If there is any kind of a pattern to this, I’d say it was thus: from emails to swapping MSN addresses, to swapping phone numbers, which leads to texting first and then talking, which finally, if you have the stamina to last this long, leads to a date. Sometimes you can get through all of these stages in a day, sometimes it can take weeks. It certainly means that you have a wealth of contact details for someone before you’ve even set eyes on them.

So how instructive are all of these tools of communication for getting to know someone? The old fashioned way of meeting someone in a pub or club took a little guts. Braving rejection, you went to talk to them and tried to find something in common as you bellowed at the top of your lungs to one another. But it was pretty brief by online dating standards. You got a number or a date within the hour and also had learned whether the individual had lived up to appearances.

The other thing about pub dating was that you were likely to have significantly fewer options than with online dating and maybe this should tell us something. The techno version allows you to chat to literally hundreds of people if you so wish. But exactly how many people can you keep track of? What do you find out or remember of anyone? We talk more but do we say more. Maybe there was something more intimate about meeting someone while out, and frankly that’s saying something.

So here I start to wonder whether the aforementioned etiquette is actually more habit. Have we fallen into a new routine hoping that love will somehow fall into place somewhere along the line? Somehow, I’m a little doubtful that this will happen if we don’t use this new method with more aim.

But there is one thing I do particularly like. Much as I rarely have found the contact through technology to be particularly revealing when it comes to the positive sides of someone’s character, I have found it has weeded out a few unsuitables. There are those who can talk eloquently via electronic means but I’ve been surprised to find over the phone that they lacked that special something. I guess that at least has saved me an evening.