Like any other major social movement, the phenomenon of on-line dating has both benefits and drawbacks. Here are some guidelines for maximizing the benefits and minimizing the potential problems.
PERILS OF ON-LINE DATING
By Bill Cottringer
Like any major social movement, the event itself can bring a mixture of good and bad consequences. Such is true with participation in the phenomenon of on-line dating services. On the good side, these services open the doors to new and broader sources for meeting a wider variety of people that aren’t available elsewhere. They also allow people to sensibly pre-screen possible relationship mates and offer a safe, neutral place to explore relationship possibilities before you get in over your head. But on the other hand, they pose some very real perils. A few of these to consider are:
- Electronic communication is very artificial and can easily camouflage basic truth, honesty, and love—especially as a person is developing the capacity to understand and express and communicate these things. There is very high potential for terrible misunderstanding and miscommunication that often doesn’t get a chance to get rectified and quickly turns into potentially destructive negative emotionality.
- This fast on-line medium plays right into a very fundamental flaw we all have today—instant need gratification. We all need love and want it now (especially if we don't have it), which really isn’t the way it works. But even if we just want a relationship, the same still applies. True love and loving relationships take precious time.
- On-line dating can easily perpetuate the real causes of past failed relationships and get similar circumstances going quicker than the electronic chemistry can fizzle.
- There are many people, both men and women, who participate in on-line dating and relationship building, who are not emotionally mature enough to deal with potential conflicts in the electronic communication medium or with the real differences that occur when the people finally meet in real time.
- All participants have a variety of motives for doing what they are doing, and whether they are unconscious or just plain mean and devious, the outcomes are still the same--harmful.
- It is way too easy to bail out of a potentially good, loving relationship in the making, when difficult conflicts arise and communication goes sideways. In the speed of things today our impatience creates premature deal-breakers, on-line or in real time.
- This format both encourages and facilitates wrong behavior—especially the very natural defense or attack tendencies we can quickly move into in response to the hurtful vulnerabilities we are so open to in this arena.
- The wide selection of potential appealing partners opens the flood gates to multiple dating games that never have a happy ending.
- Profiles are meant to be as appealing as the can be to attract more matches. Sometimes they are hard to see through.
- There is something inherently distasteful about picking someone out of a “lineup.”
Like to admit it or not, we are part of an age of failed relationships. Very few people are presently in healthy, loving, giving, long-term ones. Many of us are stuck in very unhappy relationships, and some of us are buried in the more quiet desperation of sensing there is something more out there but not knowing when or how to go for it. Maybe we don’t even know what we really want. Why is this? Simply because failed relationships are very contagious like an epidemic worse than the worry of Bird Flu. The lingering, collective negative emotionality from a series of failed relationship can confuse even the most rational person.
Why are failed relationships so contagious? Because two people are rarely at the point of personal and spiritual development to be able to communicate honesty and openly about what went wrong when it happens. Or they don’t get the opportunity because of the urgent need to flee the pain and agony of failure. Regardless, healthy and proper closure on the relationship is never reached, let alone communicated. So we just take this unresolved behavior, that we flatly deny or don’t understand, and allow it to fester, get hidden from view, and insidiously lead us toward other potential failures.
Maybe the real source of the problem is our very first love failure and our reaction to that event. Nobody feels good in losing love and being rejected, which is the usual cause for backing you into a corner with only two normal but both very destructive reactions—either backtracking in retreat and withdrawal (surrogate suicide), or moving forward in revenge and aggression (metaphorical murder). Either direction perpetuates the problem, which only love and understanding can cure, but aren’t give the opportunity to occur
It is very difficult to stop the proliferation of failed relationships, especially in this new on-line dating arena, because of all the obstacles and perils listed above. Maybe the only solution is to first go back and have an open and honest discussion with the person you first loved in your first relationship. An accurate and complete understanding of why that failure occurred may be the key to unlocking the emotional shackles that the misunderstanding created.
Then you may be able to see clearer and better navigate through the perils of on-line dating as a skilled ship captain, even through troubled waters. After all, you have to comprehend the subtleties and obscure dynamics of a past failure to turn it into a future success. The sad thing here is that some of us may never have that opportunity to set our first love right.
In the meantime, here are some common sense guidelines to consider.
- Understand the powerful effect your first failed relationship probably had in your life and try to figure out some positive lesson from it to apply in all future relationships.
- Be as honest as you can be in presenting yourself and your motives in any form of dating or relationship exploration activities; but do not expect honesty in return and learn to deal with your disappointment in a healthy, positive, productive way.
- Become aware of what you really want and need in a relationship and learn to communicate these wants and needs assertively and clearly. Also be aware that these wants and needs may change quicker than you know or can communciate.
- Fine tune your own sensitivity and discernment skills to know when another person is close to you in their own emotional and spiritual development, their openness and willingness to grow, and their ability to love and communicate all this with you.
- Focus more on the process of developing a good, healthy relationship and less on the expected and desired outcome. In other words, control the controllables and let go of the rest.
- Try to resist your impatience and natural tendency to "settle." But also be realistic with your own asset and liability blance sheet.
William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, The Bow-Wow Secrets, and Threading Your Needle With Life’s Rope. He can be reached at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net
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