Love & the Media: How Do You Protect Yourself While Searching for Love Online?

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It’s the 21st century: that magical time of laptops and iPhones, tablets and Skype ring tones. Who needs face-to-face interaction when you have the best alternative: getting to know someone without ever leaving the comfort of your home – or should I say your “screen”? You make great connections on Facebook, meet lifelong virtual friends on Twitter and get all your business intel on LinkedIn. You’re really linked in and you love it. The 21st century is here, y’all, and we’re willing embraced it!

With all the fabulous things that this great technological age has brought, one is one step more fabulous: people are finding love online more than ever. Countless “How I Met Him” stories in our featured engagement sessions and real weddings provide more proof than we’ll ever need on that subject. Instead of limiting the pursuit of love, friendship and compatibility to immediate geographical locations, the internet has brought us all so much closer; Cupid no longer needs his trusty arrow: just a click will do.

As great as this development is, there’s a definite downside to it. How do you protect yourself while searching for love online? Let me explain! When we sit behind a computer screen, we can literally become whomever or whatever we want to be at any particular moment. We can be happy and friendly, or angry and brash. We can be reborn! The man on the other side of the screen presents himself as an adventurous and caring gentleman who’d love nothing more than to take you to the most amazing places and introduce you to new things. In actuality, he is a perpetually depressed person who has never really left his city. On the internet, he is a man reborn. Worse still, any person with sinister motives is able to hide his true evil nature much more easily by presenting himself as something he’s not via the internet.  It can get crazy out there!

Though the days of looking at those who find love on the internet as desperate are long gone and many can attest to the wisdom of reaching out to others online, the security concerns are still worthy of discussion. Who decides where the first meeting takes place? How and/or when do you decide to visit each other at home? Do you take special care to let friends and family members know exactly where you’re going on your first few dates with this person, or do you just assume that you know enough based on your online interactions with him? Do you ensure that you have friends or family members in the vicinity when you go on your first couple of dates for security reasons, or do you go for it alone (it is a date, after all)?

I have no clear answers to these questions, because, well, I assume that many criminals and con artists make great first impressions in person as well. However, they might be worth exploring the first time you go on a date with someone you meet online. I’m not asking you to re-enact a Girlfriends episode and turn into paranoid Mya (Remember that hilarious online dating episode? Watch it here and here). Who knows where love is waiting? I’m just saying you should think about it, if you decide that it’s worth mulling over.

So, ladies, what are your thoughts on this? For our male readers, would you feel offended or indifferent if a woman you met online took extra precautions when going on a date with you for the first time?

Please share your thoughts!

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