A "Brave New World" of Relationships

Seems like there is a craze recently for online dating, meeting people, and networking. There seems to be tons of services ranging from Yahoo Personals, MSN Personals, Friendster , Google's Orkut, and Linked In.

Just within this two weeks, I 've gotten invites from friends to join all of these services. Seems like a interesting and fun way to meet people. And boy there are alot of people on these things. I felt like I was already behind on the times. Its really hard to believe that so many people are using these services to meet new friends, gf/bf, biz contact, etc etc etc.

I have a extreme skepticism toward these online services, especially online dating. I've always believed that there are no real people on these things...Especially the women. I always thought it was these nerdy perverted guys pretending to be women or just really ugly women on there. (this assumption was based on my cousin's online dating experience almost 10 years ago. I drove him to the mall to meet his online date who he described looked like Cindy Crawford, but she turned out to be a really really ugly girl who was not even close Cindy or even the mole on her face) .

So forward my thinking 10 years later...there seems to be thousands of single, attractive, beautiful women online looking for THE ONE. Can this really be true? I hardly believe there are so many bored nerdy guys still pretending to be women and besides, the pics posted now seems to be pretty authentic. What made me a believer is that a girl friend of mine recently posted herself onto a online dating site (She is a person who I consider on the beautiful side). So are we now in a brave new world of meeting people online?

How authentic are the relationships based on birth signs, physical descriptions, pictures, "love walks on the beach & traveling to exotic places" descriptions for hobbies, bulletin board chatting, and experiencing the digital "feeling"?

I guess in this day and age where the first and last thing I see in my day is my computer, its not surprising we're accepting meeting people like this. Who knows, I may find my soul mate for "walks on the beach and traveling to exotic places" on one of these services.

Sometimes I find it ironic that you see people typing away chatting on MSN with complete strangers, but cannot stop to even look at the person sitting next to you on the subway or the co-worker at the next cubicle.