I have a different take. I like it because if you pay attention, I think it really gives you an opportunity to learn about people and see what they're about before meeting them. You can tell things about a person by what pictures they choose to display, how many pictures, the things they write, their spelling/grammar, etc, etc. A lot more than you could learn about someone meeting them for the first time in a bar/ club/street/museum etc. Once you actually meet the person, it's like having met anywhere else, except you (hopefully) know a little something about each other first. What you do beyond the meeting stage is up to you.
That's just it with online dating, how much incentive with so many choices, do you actually have to meet someone and then pursue that person further? When you have so many choices, it is easier to write someone off, over the least thing because you can always just jump back into the inbox where you've got 20 other choices waiting for you.
I think online dating exacerbates this quick fix, easy come easy go society that we live in. I'm just old fashioned and I know that is just the way dating is now and I have to get with the program or be left behind.
I also think it reduces everything down to a laundry list and it's impersonal. It makes me become more judgemental. While that in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, there are some cons as well.
I'm not the best when it comes to spelling. I remember in college I took an English comp class with a math major who could barely write two sentences but he'd ace all of his higher level math courses. I mean he had math classes where there were two problems but the answer would take at least 5 pages to solve. He may not necessarily come off as the smartest or most articulate guy in writing something down, but that didn't make him dumb either.
I think online dating does have it's pros but the cons far outweigh the Pros. People can be anything they want to be online. Pictures often misrepresent and profiles don't really tell me much of anything. It's also deceptive in that people think they are actually dating when they've relegated most of their interactions using email, IM, text messages etc...
It's too disconnected and impersonal.
I did meet a few dates online and I also turned a few dates away. I just found that it wasn't fun for me and didn't fit my personality. I've also heard that on certain sites the ratio of women to men are about double so men get a plethora of women to choose from. It's like being a kid in a candy store... so many choices they end up probably not really choosing anyone and if they do, they're constantly distracted by the choices sitting in their inbox.
So after that initial meeting if there was something relatively minor and superficial that was "off" with that woman, they're already thinking ahead of "NEXT". because it's available for them. They never really delve deeper.
I've had guys I'd start a communication with, only to have them suddenly pull a Houdini. Who knew what they were doing? Were they really single? Maybe they were communicating with 20 other women at the same time? It almost seems like these guys were in it more for communicating pen/pal than for anything beyond that. It was a waste of my time (And I don't have too much of that to waste).
If a guy was a playa, internet dating was his super highway to play. It was like giving him a tool to take his playa games to a whole new level. I've heard stories of women who unknowingly got involved with married/separated ..still married...living with another woman men.
This is just my experience and to each his/her own. I think it's a numbers game too. Like the lotto the more you play maybe sooner or later you may just find "the one'. Still the chances of "winning" are far less than the chances of not winning. You have to weed through so much BS before you actually get to the meeting stage of a person that for me it's just takes the fun out of dating online.
Having tried online dating for a minute, I'm not interested and wouldn't be again. Nope, not for me. I'm a real flesh and blood woman and I'd just prefer to meet my man in real life not in cyberspace. I'd prefer 3 dimensional interactions not all one way.
