Online dating - Peter Varholak

On average every second of us on the world know person who dated someone else and these two people met throughout the internet. Dear Toastmaster, ladies and gentleman hands up if you know somebody like this.

Quite a lot of my friends started to use online dating applications. And they are really enthusiastic about it, whether they are using them for expanding possibilities of meeting new people, for fun or even for purposes of train themselves for real life oportunities. I am curious person and I wanted to find out if the effort is really worth it. I will try to answer basic questions which you may come across when you want to sign for an online site. Is there a site for you? Does it require effort to meet somebody from there? And does online dating work? First question comes to what are you looking for in online dating. There are different types of dating sites.

Basic groups are two. Is it paid or free? Difference is that on paid you have people that are likely to meet in person, they are more serious about it. Every third person that uses online dating pays for it. And it is a huge bussiness. In the USA online dating is a bigger business than pornography. On free sites you have more people but also more scammers. 1 out of 10 people are on the dating sites to scam you and usually these people are found on free services. Be also very careful about unhonest dating sites that specifically employ people like this, use bots to mislead you to believe that real persons are writing to you or store your credit card details and then pay for services you didn´t ordered.

Are you looking for friends, marriage, long term, short term dating, casual dating or sex pleasures only? Is religion crucially important to you? Do you like interracial relationships? Do you like specific age group or specific body type? For everything you can find man or woman of your dreams.

Are you looking for site you can respond quickly to and you don´t want to wait ages for message? Some sites have mobile applications that even send you notification when you receive new message or when somebody visited your profile. Some sites are really slow and don´t even support refresh, so you almost never know that you have new message.

Online dating negatives:

Imagine you are in local pub. And you can choose everyone and talk to. Yes it is that easy. Online dating is like virtual pub. At least it seems easy. Definitelly introduction of yourself is easy. But creating attraction, trust and comfort necessary for emotional connection is far more difficult. Do you remember how much of your impact of communication is actually done by words? 7%. And that´s it. Your influence throughout writing on dating site is exactly like this. Another thing is flakiness. You set up a date and chance that person will come is seven times lower than when you saw each other in real life before. Another interesting statistic is: 51% of all online dating people are in a relationship, 11% are married and only 21% are really single. Isn´t it disturbing? Also for men it is tougher a bit. Women on average receive 17 times more messages than men.

Online dating positives:

I am training myself to find positives everywhere I can. So here we are: around fifth of married couples met online. And separation rate is also lower for marriages like this.

People that use online dating had on average 5 dates throughout the year. My friend met couple of women throughout internet dating and now he has long term realtionship with one. My other friend met girl that become his best woman friend. And finally my housemates and good friends met throughout online dating and get married recently.

Conclusion:

In a conclusion I want to answer basic questions. It there a site for you? Definitelly. Does it require effort to meet somebody from there? Yes it requires time and patience and for better results also money. And does online dating work? Yes and also no. At least not better than real world.

Thank you