Lessons from the Online Dating Front

Like many people who use the Internet to communicate with friends and connect with people, I'm continually amazed at how rude and insincere humans sometimes behave when interacting on electronic devices--seemingly because you're not F2F in real life. Take Jennifer, she'd been corresponding with Mr. Online Dating Guy for several weeks and when they finally met, it was clear he lied about his age (she's 41, he said he was 48, he was actually 61). When he asked her the next day --via text-- if he scared her away, she said it concerned her that he lied because she values honesty. Apparently the dude went from gentleman to you-know-what in 0.5 seconds and proceeded to text her a series of nasty messages. The moral? Don't spend too much online time with strangers you want to meet, and certainly don't while away the hours conjuring up future fantasies about your potential love mate until you've actually met IRL! Clearly you want to see if there's chemistry, and you have to find out if they're really telling the truth... otherwise it can turn into a major time suck.