7 Reasons Face To Face Dating Is Better
Two decades into the ’00s, and with the new millennia now a score and some change behind us, shaking off the last vestiges of a draconian global lockdown thanks to Covid-19, and with the ever-increasing dependency on technology and social media platforms, the dating game has taken on an entirely new face.
If you are one of the billions who choose dating apps over face to face interaction, you might be setting yourself up for failure when it comes to finding your ideal healthy long-term partner.
Swiping left or right on Tinder or Grinder fixes your focus on physical attraction, but what happens when the potential someone has used filters or photoshop to alter their true appearance, and you sink days or months into getting to know them, only to discover that they are nothing like they presented themselves and there is no chemistry when you Facetime or Zoom them?
Perhaps you tried the eHarmony or RSVP dating apps that claimed to pair you up only with suitable candidates based on an algorithm, only to discover their matches were the antithesis of suitable or your type?
They claim they are saving you time and weeding out the weak links, but are they really?
With the emergence of internet dating and martial law lockdowns, singles today gravitate to their phone or computer in their bid to hook up or find love. Society has lost the ability to talk to each other when standing in front of them, shunning them in favour of their hand-held devices and screen time. What is the true cost of developing a dependency on technology when it cannot do the one fundamental thing meeting someone in person achieves? Is it really that helpful, or has it become harmful?
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of virtual dating versus face to face dating and why you need to physically connect with someone in real life to establish a genuine level of chemistry.
The 7 Reasons Of Face To Face Dating is better than Online Dating
1. Dishonesty VS Integrity
If you have never heard the term ‘Catfish,’ you either live in a cave sans technology or have never dated online. Multiple films, documentaries, and online scam busters have spent the last decade since 2010, when the term Catfish was coined to describe someone who, for nefarious reasons, creates a fake online account, and lures unsuspecting people into a rolling lie based around a financial or emotional trap that never ends well.
Who hasn’t heard horror stories of someone who was catfished by an obese trucker on his downtime posing as a gorgeous, nubile 18-year-old with the hots for—well, anyone who takes their bait candy?
Virtual dating and the online dating world highlight the deception that can occur in the online dating world. Most of us have been made aware of the potential dangers that internet dating poses and that it is a risky business and crapshoot.
Dishonesty is common, and even those who want to be truthful feel that it is acceptable to ‘stretch the truth’ when dating online. A solid 80 per cent of people who establish dating profiles, lie, and the range of lies can be as simple as adding an inch to their real height, dropping weight from their actual weight that leads to larger lies like selecting never married when they are or have been married, and likely haven’t divorced, nor do they plan to.
If you start any new relationship already having lied to land the person, where do you go from there? How can you look them in the eye and claim you are an honest person who has never lied to them? You have already started to build your potential relationship on a shoddy foundation. You can’t expect it to hold the full weight of a relationship over time and not come crashing down around you.
2. Overcrowded Dating Sites And Bots
The growing popularity of internet dating is good for increasing the number of potential matches in theory. However, it can also serve as a barrier to finding true love and there are BOTs out there designed to scam and defraud the lonely. Overcrowding can make internet dating exhausting and overwhelming. The sheer volume of potential profiles can completely block you from reaching the person who might have been your soulmate had you connected. It seems counterproductive to search for something you are not likely to find based on a numbers game and a secret algorithm that supposedly creates matches to your choices.
When faced with too many choices, we can be easily distracted or sidetracked from the original objective and venture down endless rabbit holes making regrettable choices. When blinded by the lights and sparkle the internet world offers, you are more likely to make impulsive or rash decisions that will come back to bite you on the butt.
3. Picky, Picky, Picky
A common mistake made when internet dating is people become too picky and focus on all the specific things they want while eliminating any potential for flexibility. In fact, the internet actively promotes asking you question after question, which they claim reduces the chances of ending up with the wrong person until you are left with a very long checklist, not even your twin flame soulmate could pass, or your candidate matches go from 1000 to 0 in an instant. Many singles end up limiting their search criteria so much that their perfect person stays on the outer edge, forever out of reach.
Pickiness is a dating problem that affects real life, but it is less amplified in real life. When you physically interact with another person’s energy field and they yours, you pick up on a ton of subliminal and unconscious signs your soul tunes into. Based on that gut reaction, a person can choose to either shut down the connection or see where it goes. With a limited online criterion, your pedantic, exacting fussiness becomes a major problem. What would have been great profiles and good matches for you slide past without a chance of being viewed by you? You effectively screwed the pooch.
4. Mystery And Intrigue
When meeting someone for the first time in person, there is an air of mystery and intrigue. Countless possibilities await. Nothing is more attractive than having something intangible before us. A mystery to solve or a thread to pull to reveal the surprise. Dating in person can be a heady and intoxicating experience that screen time will never be able to replicate.
Gradually getting to know someone is addictive, seductive, and enticing. The more layers you peel away, the more exciting they are to spend time with. Knowledge is power, but when it comes to relationships, mystery and intrigue with a hint of seduction keeps the romance alive.
Internet dating profiles provide the option for you to enter a large chunk of key information the person can learn about you before they have even reached out to say hello and introduce themselves… assuming they do reach out after reading the bio you laboured over for an hour.
Having information up front about a person allows you to make judgement calls based on incomplete or inaccurate information. Given we have already established the majority of people lie outright or exaggerate the truth in their bid to impress, you don’t have the ability to study them and learn to read the tells like a seasoned poker player.
Without a face-to-face meeting, you can never unravel the true story behind the person you met via a dating website or app. Plenty of people have been the perfect match on paper only to discover when they meet they have zero physical or sexual attraction to the person they believed was the love of their life. You cannot fake or magically feel the chemistry, and even if you try to limp along for a while to make things work, they will eventually crash and burn, and you will be left only with regrets that could have been avoided.
5. Unrealistic Expectations
In the quest for love, some people allow their vivid imaginations to take flight and leave the land of reality. They begin to create their ideal person based on the limited information given to them. They can twist a person’s words intentionally or completely misunderstand something said that might have been ambiguous or a double entendre.
With the rise of AI, technology allows everyone to become an online stalker at the push of a few buttons. You might have reviewed their profile and studied their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram accounts, Google, Bing, Yahoo, or LinkedIn like a sociopath trying to learn as much as possible about them. By the time your date rolls around, you believe you have put together a large collage of information and have a clear picture of the kind of person you expect them to be. You finally meet, only to discover they are nothing like you imagined. You romanticised the entire thing and even managed to take the thing out of context.
Let me give you a hypothetical example between Pete and Lynn.
When Pete said in his bio that he owned a garage and enjoyed all things mechanical, Lynn found google images of a garage called Pete’s that happened to be in his area and assumed it was his. Even better, it was also a service station, so Pete must be rolling in cash, given the price of fuel these days!
Poor Pete, he wasn’t lying to Lynn. He told her the truth; he does own a garage. It is annexed to his house filled with car parts he and his boys are using to restore a muscle car they stripped down to bare metal and rebuilt. They are planning to show it at the next convention in town.
So, you see, unrealistic expectations can cause havoc for certain personality types when it comes to dating online. They build up the person to be something they are not and never claimed to be, only to be shot down and crash land in a huge way when the person fails to come close to meeting their unrealistic expectations based on assumptions and limited information.
6. Too Many Fish In The Ocean
With an unlimited number of lonely people on dating apps and the internet, there is little incentive to work things out if times get tough in a relationship. Research shows online daters are 28 per cent more likely to split from partners they found via a dating site within the first year if things get rocky. Ironically, most of those people choose to return to their preferred virtual dating platform and repeat the same process from scratch.
While no one should ever stay in an unhealthy relationship, calling off a healthy one because things get a little rocky and need work on both sides is nothing short of stupid. Alas, our world has become one of consumable products that are easily replaced with a newer, better version at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, a large section of society has resorted to treating people as a commodity and they treat relationships the same way. Instead of putting in the effort to overcome the obstacle and grow closer and stronger together, it seems too hard, so they hit the eject button on the relationship and find a replacement from the virtual ocean filled with all kinds of fish to whet their appetite.
With the plethora of VPNs and Incognito sites, the internet gives the user a level of anonymity. It has never been easier to browse the local talent or be unfaithful. Many internet daters can’t help but go back and drop a line into the ocean to see who they might have caught or might yet catch to play with on the side. The self-destructive temptation to cheat on a spouse or partner can be too much for some to resist. The adage: ‘There is always someone better’ was never intended to be used out of context, and yet with dating platforms, someone better might only be a click away … but so can someone truly horrendous in disguise!
7. Long Distance Relationships
With internet dating, the ability to meet and communicate with people on the opposite side of the world holds a ton of appeal to some. It might be that your preferences delivered a match who is geographically located on another continent.
You do not need to be a rocket scientist to know that long-distance relationships rarely work, and that is for a reason. You are not having a relationship with someone who is not sharing your space on a daily basis. To see how many marriages are destroyed by one partner being stationed at a distance, look to the military. No other vocation has higher divorce rates than the military services.
Research has repeatedly shown that proximity strongly predicts sustainability in any relationship. Some might argue that by dating the old-fashioned way, you limit yourself to only finding suitable partners in your local area. While true, being local means you can physically date, do things outdoors together, and hook up for frequent nights of Netflix and chill as your real relationship grows and transitions into something long-term.
Should you find yourself seriously considering a long-distance relationship, you need to stop and ask yourself, who is going to be the one to move to make your situation-ship a real relationship? Do you really want to uplift your life and move away from your family and friends to be closer to your perfect match, and how will that transition be enacted? The cost of moving long distances is not cheap. If you are moving to a country where you don’t speak the native language, you may find yourself making a huge mistake based on something that has never had the chance to exchange energy face-to-face due to being entirely online.
Rule of thumb: If you have never met them in person, you are not in a relationship. You are in a situation-ship.
Situation-ships are placeholders. They can be the spring pad into a real relationship, or somewhere someone who is cheating or catfishing keeps the fish they catch. Think of a situation-ship as a fishpond. If you are trapped in someone’s fishpond, you are not in a relationship with them. They are toying with you, so free yourself and get out into the real world and meet real people who have a real interest in having real relationships with you that go the distance.
If you are stuck and out of ways to meet real people, your friends are all married, or you are new to an area, try speed dating. You get the luxury of being able to meet and vet several people at one time, so it works for those who have limited time in their busy schedules. Check out our other blog topics, and let us introduce you to people you would not normally meet. Who knows, maybe your soulmate is one of the people you are destined to meet at one of our events. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.